This was yesterday’s picture of the day on Telegraph.co.uk, taken at Crab Island, a beach resort area near Beijing.  Who is this guy?  He is my new hero.

There is a cute row of sculpted plant people engaging in various Olympic sports on display near Baishiqiao.  The artists behind the installations must have run out of time or funds by the time they decided to furnish these green creatures with actual sports equipment, to quite an amusing effect:

The tennis and badminton players each have a ball and birdie respectively dangling sadly by a wire from their rackets.  I’d guess the tennis player is not actually supposed to be holding a tennis racket; he’d look much more comfortable with a kendo sword in his hands.  And I think the rifleman is aiming with something that might have been picked off a construction site across the street.

Relatively new errant signage in the Dongzhimen subway station.  I don’t know how this one managed to slip though.  Translating “fragile” into “crumbly” I can understand, but translating “North” into “South?”  Come on, China, you can do better than that.

Update: Ah, they fixed it!  How boring.

This bus is parked in the alley outside my window. It’s filled with fruit, and I don’t think it can move. When I moved in, the wall behind it enclosed a field of rubble. Maybe there were houses there before. A couple of months ago work crews came and started drilling the ground and digging a pit, and shipping out truckful after truckful of dirt. There is now such a massive deep pit behind the wall that I can’t see the bottom of it from my window. But the wall is still there and the bus is still parked beside the wall, as though there were no menacing gaping chasm behind it. I imagine some big yellow metal arm of a crane or digging machine reaching up out of the pit, chomping down on the bus and snatching it back over the wall.

I took this video maybe a month ago now. Took me a while to get around to putting it together. These were just some clips I took during a really nice weekend visit to Beihai Park.

Today I visited a park I hadn’t gone to before. There were lots of people skating around on chairs. I took a video. These things are too cute. You can also hear the Chinese music playing in the first clip. That’s how you know I’m in China.

I’ve been reading hundreds of articles on bird flu from various Chinese media for work.  The point is basically to look at changes in media openness through a particular case study.  For the most part it’s mind-numbingly dull, as the reports are just page after page of government boosterism, but occasionally I find an amusing article here and there.  My favorite was this picture from CCTV’s Focus, showing the effective measures the government took to prevent spread of the disease:

I wish you could get a 360 degree view of the scene.  I think this guy in a white plastic suit is just standing by himself in the middle of nowhere waiting for trucks to come by.  Also key is the disinfecting sprayer he’s using, which is the same model I bought for use on Kite Runner.  We filled it with a mixture of water and glue and used it to stick shredded paper on trees.  It broke after a day.