Mentioning the highly successful Infernal Affairs (無間道), Peter Tsi, a Hong Kong film fest guy says, says: "To be screened on the mainland, Hong Kong films have to pass stringent censors and the Chinese government will have the right to remove sections they deem offensive or 'politically incorrect,' he said.

Taboo subjects such as supernatural or superstitious beliefs, explicit sex scenes, politics and homosexual love stories are hard to get past the censors.

Infernal Affairs -- co-produced with a state-owned studio -- was shot with two different endings. In Hong Kong, the bad guy gets away with murders under the nose of the befuddled police. In the mainland version, the bad guy's cover is blown and is promptly arrested."

Friday's Joke - New jokes every weekday from Sick and Twisted Jokes: "A man goes into a bar and says 'Give me two doubles.'
The bartender says, 'Wow, You must really be thirsty!'
The man says, 'No, I'm celebrating my first blowjob.'
The bartender replies,'Well, in that case, they're on the house!'
The man smiles, 'I just hope it's enough to get the taste out of my mouth!' "

ugly baby joke -- Jokes for the week 03/08/04:

A woman gets on a bus and immediately becomes involved in an argument with the driver after he calls her baby ugly.

She pays her fare and storms off to get a seat.

A man asks, "what's the matter love?"

"It's that bloody driver, I've never been so insulted in all my life", she replies.

"Okay" says the man, "you go down there and sort him out and I’ll look after the monkey."

This Chinese homestyle cooking site has nice pics. I guess it's mostly pay, though.

Arrest of Journalists Seen as Payback for A Bold Voice in China cites Wang Jianmin, a journalist at Asia Week (that apparently means Yazhou zhoukan 亞洲週刊)

called the journalists' arrests on embezzlement charges "the newest method to persecute Chinese intellectuals."

For Wang and others, Cheng's case has become an example of the frequent gap between liberalizing reforms announced by national leaders in Beijing and day-to-day experiences of people who deal with provincial, municipal and rural officials. As the Southern Metropolis News case went forward, for instance, the Chinese government published a white paper in Beijing hailing 2003 as a landmark year for progress in human rights, including freedom of the press.

"Although the central government wants to rule the country in a legal way, the provincial and municipal governments still have a lot of power," said Chen Feng, an editor who formerly worked under Cheng at the Southern Metropolis News. "Whether you break the law depends on what the local leaders believe, and not the law."

According to an anonymous journalist quoted by Arnold Zeitlin at The Jamestown Foundation:

'The thing that angered the government and the police is the coverage of Sun Zhigang, the college graduate who was beaten to death by some police last year,' said the journalist.

'The Sun Zhigang affair is very, very important to the Guangzhou police department. When the incident happened, the head of the police department had a chance to be promoted to the head of the police department of Guangdong province. So, Mr. Zhu, then the head of the Guangzhou police went to the Southern Metropolitan to ask the newspaper with tears not to report it. But they did. The report crashed the political future of Mr. Zhu and other police officers. The SARS report didn't. So, at the trial after the beating incident, one guilty police officer told another police officer, 'I will kill you if you don't manage to crackdown on the Southern Metropolitan'. Yes, that time has come.'

Not to long ago something finally possesed me to read Henry James' The Turn of the Screw; I've always found James pretty unreadable, and though this was a hard slog, it wasn't as bad as I was afraid. But I still couldn't see what the fuss was about. Yesterday we saw The Innocents (1961), which I hadn't realized from the blurb was based on the James story, and the movie seemed to be pretty much the same as what I remembered of the story, but I still don't get what the fuss is all about. Anyway, nifty summary and discussion of the story here.

Ananova - Man cuts off penis and testicles

A man who cut off his penis and testicles, was found running naked down a Canadian city street screaming 'Repent, repent, fornicators.'

I was looking to see whether "repent" was usually used in a religious context.

Bush Administration Shows More Support of Free Trade:

The Bush administration, still sparring with Senator John Kerry over the issue of trade, said the practice of exporting work overseas had little to do with the loss of jobs in the United States.

John W. Snow, the Treasury secretary, said in an interview with The Cincinnati Enquirer that the practice of moving American jobs to low-cost countries 'is part of trade' and that 'there can't be any doubt about the fact that trade makes the economy stronger.'

It sounds like Bush wants my vote after all. I wonder if he'll lose the election now.

David Brooks is coming out with more cultural criticism:

...if you are driving across the northern band of the country -- especially in Vermont, Massachusetts, Wisconsin or Oregon -- you are likely to stumble across a crunchy suburb. These are places with meat-free food co-ops, pottery galleries, sandal shops (because people with progressive politics have a strange penchant for toe exhibitionism). Not many people in these places know much about the for-profit sector of the economy, but they do build wonderful all-wood playgrounds for their kids, who tend to have names like Milo and Mandela. You know you're in a crunchy suburb because you see the anti-lawns, which declare just how fervently crunchy suburbanites reject the soul-destroying standards of conventional success. Anti-lawns look like regular lawns with eating disorders. Some are bare patches of dirt, others are scraggly spreads of ragged, weedlike vegetation, the horticultural version of a grunge rocker's face.

Then a few miles away, you might find yourself in an entirely different cultural zone, in an upscale suburban town center packed with restaurants -- one of those communities that perform the neat trick of being clearly suburban while still making it nearly impossible to park. The people here tend to be lawyers, doctors and professors, and they drive around in Volvos, Audis and Saabs because it is socially acceptable to buy a luxury car as long as it comes from a country hostile to U.S. foreign policy.

Here you can find your Trader Joe's grocery stores, where all the cashiers look as if they are on loan from Amnesty International and all the snack food is especially designed for kids who come home from school screaming, ''Mom, I want a snack that will prevent colorectal cancer!'' Here you've got newly renovated Arts and Crafts seven-bedroom homes whose owners have developed views on beveled granite; no dinner party in this clique has gone all the way to dessert without a conversational phase on the merits and demerits of Corian countertops. Bathroom tile is their cocaine: instead of white powder, they blow their life savings on handcrafted Italian wall covering from Waterworks.

You travel a few miles from these upscale enclaves, and suddenly you're in yet another cultural milieu. You're in one of the suburban light-industry zones, and you start noting small Asian groceries offering live tilapia fish and premade bibimbap dishes. You see Indian video rental outlets with movies straight from Bollywood. You notice a Japanese bookstore, newspaper boxes offering The Korea Central Daily News and hair salons offering DynaSky phone cards to Peru.

One out of every nine people in America was born in a foreign country. Immigrants used to settle in cities and then migrate out, but now many head straight for suburbia, so today you see little Taiwanese girls in the figure skating clinics, Ukrainian boys learning to pitch and hints of cholo culture spreading across Nevada. People here develop their own customs and patterns that grow up largely unnoticed by the general culture. You go to a scraggly playing field on a Saturday morning, and there is a crowd of Nigerians playing soccer. You show up the next day and it is all Mexicans kicking a ball around. No lifestyle magazine is geared to the people who live in these immigrant-heavy wholesale warehouse zones...

Suburban America is a bourgeois place, but unlike some other bourgeois places, it is also a transcendent place infused with everyday utopianism. That's why you meet so many boring-looking people who see themselves on some technological frontier, dreaming of this innovation or that management technique that will elevate the world -- and half the time their enthusiasms, crazes and fads seem ludicrous to others and even to them, in retrospect.

Sure it's partly crap, but there's even more when the leftist critics complain about American culture.

Vancouver Journal: Chinese Prosper in Canada, and Eagerly Read About It:

Leaving the mainstream media out of the political dialogue is not unusual anymore in a city whose Chinese population has exploded from a tiny minority to 30 percent of all residents in just one generation. By making his pitch directly to the 40 percent of his district's voters who are ethnic Chinese, Mr. Chan was giving a nod to Vancouver's parallel worlds.

The Chinese population in Canada has doubled in the last two decades to 1.1 million, or more than 3 percent of all residents. But nowhere is its presence felt more than in this metropolitan area of 1.8 million, of which 342,665, or 19 percent, are ethnic Chinese, according to the 2001 census.

The rise in the ethnic Chinese population has stimulated meteoric growth in the Chinese media and made them an influential player on the Canadian political landscape. Their influence is even beginning to be felt back in Asia, particularly after their aggressive reporting on the SARS epidemic, which reached into Canada last year.

Just as there are shiny new malls here that operate entirely in Cantonese and Mandarin, there is a commerce of ideas, news and entertainment in the local media that is beyond the comprehension of a shrinking majority.

Hmm, the last line sounds a little paranoid.

Study: Asian Suicide Rate Higher in Women, and it's not just China:

In a study this week in The Lancet medical journal, researchers give the first picture of suicide among young people in India. In a region near Vellore in southern India, more than twice as many young women aged 10 to 19 committed suicide as men in the same age group...

"Almost everything we know about suicide comes from Western countries, particularly Europe. So far, we had not looked into other cultures," said Dr. Jose Bertolote, who heads the mental and brain disorders division at the World Health Organization and was not involved with the study.

I sympathize with this guy:

Mount Olivet United Methodist Church in Arlington had been playing its new chimes for only a few days before a disheveled man burst into the clergy office and stood at the front desk, breathing hard and wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a sleeveless undershirt.

"He was going crazy. He said it was disturbing his peace," recalled church secretary Tina Marcus. "He wanted to explain his deep, deep concern over the bells ringing."

I couldn't read the end of the article. It's got to make a Poe joke.

Nicholas Kristof

With Democrats on the warpath over trade, there's pressure for tougher international labor standards that would try to put Abakr Adoud out of work.

Abakr lives with his family in the desert near this oasis in eastern Chad. He has never been to school and roams the desert all day with his brothers, searching for sticks that can be made into doors for mud huts. He is 10 years old.

It's appalling that Abakr, like tens of millions of other children abroad, is working instead of attending school. But prohibiting child labor wouldn't do him any good, for there's no school in the area for him to attend. If child labor hawks manage to keep Abakr from working, without giving him a school to attend, he and his family will simply be poorer than ever.

And that's the problem when Americans get on their high horses about child labor, without understanding the cruel third world economics that cause it. The push by Democrats like John Kerry for international labor standards is well intentioned, but it is also oblivious to third world realities.

Look, I feel like Scrooge when I speak out against bans on sweatshops or on child labor. In the West, it's hard to find anyone outside a university economics department who agrees with me. But the basic Western attitude — particularly among Democrats and warm-and-fuzzy humanitarians — sometimes ends up making things worse. Consider the results of two major American efforts to ban imports produced by child labor:

In 1993, when Congress proposed the U.S. Child Labor Deterrence Act, which would have blocked imports made by children (if it had passed), garment factories in Bangladesh fired 50,000 children. Many ended up in worse jobs, like prostitution.

Then there was the hue and cry beginning in 1996 against soccer balls stitched by children in their homes (mostly after school) in Sialkot, Pakistan. As a result, the balls are now stitched by adults, often in factories under international monitoring.

But many women are worse off. Conservative Pakistanis believe that women shouldn't work outside the home, so stitching soccer balls is now off limits for many of them. Moreover, bad publicity about Pakistan led China to grab market share with machine-stitched balls: over the next two years, Pakistan's share of the U.S. soccer ball market dropped to 45 percent from 65 percent.

So poor Pakistani families who depended on earnings from women or children who stitched soccer balls are now further impoverished.

I'm not arguing that child labor is a good thing. It isn't. But as Jagdish Bhagwati, the eminent trade economist, notes in his new book, "In Defense of Globalization," thundering against child labor doesn't address the poverty that causes it.

In the village of Toukoultoukouli in Chad, I visited the 17 girls and 31 boys in the two-room school. Many children, especially girls, never attend school, which ends after the fourth grade.

So a 12-year-old boy working in Toukoultoukouli has gotten all the education he can. Instead of keeping him from working, Westerners should channel their indignation into getting all children into school for at least those four years — and there is one way that could perhaps be achieved.

It's bribery. The U.N. World Food Program runs a model foreign aid effort called the school feeding program. It offers free meals to children in poor schools (and an extra bribe of grain for girl students to take home to their families). Almost everywhere, providing food raises school attendance, particularly for girls. "If there were meals here, parents would send their kids," said Muhammad Adam, a teacher in Toukoultoukouli.

School feeding costs just 19 cents per day per child.

So here's my challenge to university students: Instead of spending your energy boycotting Nike or pressing for barriers against child labor, why not sponsor school meals in places like Toukoultoukouli?

I spoke with officials at the World Food Program, and they'd be thrilled to have private groups or individuals help sponsor school feedings. (See www.nytimes.com/kristofresponds for details.) Children in Africa will be much better off with a hot meal and an education than with your self-righteous indignation.

Erguotou, Chinese Drink, Heads Stateside. Even if it's "a superior blend", I don't think it'll become that popular. But what do I know. The theory goes:

Primate ancestors of homo sapiens were highly dependent on fruit, and so, the new theory goes, they developed a strong attraction to the ethanol that naturally spikes lusciously ripe and overripe fruits. This predilection was then passed on to humans.

But they can't find any drunken monkeys. According to Katharine Milton, a primatologist

"in apes, there's nothing like human consciousness", so why should they drink? "Humans might be the only animals that wish to escape from their own consciousness," she said.

Ah, let's hear it for relinquishing control over ourselves. Slavery, anyone?

Chinese Capital Scraps Bullfights

Organizers have scrapped plans to hold bullfights in Beijing after complaints that the event would be cruel to animals, Chinese media reported Friday.


The first bullfight was to have taken place May 1 in a new 6,400-seat bullring billed as the biggest in Asia.

But members of the Beijing city council complained that the fights would be inhumane and have 'the potential to tarnish Beijing's and China's image,' China Radio International reported. They called such events 'uncultured in Chinese tradition.'

Yeah, killing and torturing people is more the Chinese tradition.

Last week we saw Le Colonel Chabert (1994), which was pretty good. I've gotten a little tired of Gerard Depardieu's tendency towards scenery-chewing, but he was more restrained here. Then last night we saw Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). I'm not sure I would have recognized Albert Finney if I hadn't seen his name in the credits--we'd just seen him in The Dresser (1983) last week, when he looked pretty old, and awhile ago in A Man of No Importance (1994). It was very reminiscent of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), another Tony Richardson/Alan Sillitoe story, and of Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey.

Kerry, Candidate and Catholic, Creates Uneasiness for Church: "Mr. Kerry is the first Roman Catholic to run for president on a major party ticket in 44 years, but the obstacles for Catholic politicians have turned inside out since 1960, when John F. Kennedy became the first Catholic to win the White House.

"President Kennedy had to overcome accusations from non-Catholics that he would follow the bidding of the pope. Now, Mr. Kerry faces accusations from some within his own church that he is not following the pope's bidding closely enough."

Times change. Another thing: Kerry "learned only last year that his paternal grandfather was a Czech Jew named Fritz Kohn, who changed his name and converted to Catholicism before emigrating to Boston." So he's a Jew? But Jewish ancestry comes from the mother's side, right? And she's a Boston Brahmin, and they're WASPs. I also find that her family, the Forbes, supposedly derived their wealth from dealing opium in China. Even if he did, so what? Have we ever been able to prove how harmful opium is?

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Fossil Illuminates Evolution of Limbs from Fins: "compared with the anatomy of other tetrapods of the same age there is a large space for chest muscle attachment, the scientists report. This added brawn would have enabled a motion similar to a benchpress or push-up. "

Wecht probe shows leader of Taiwan was shot

Taiwanese president Chen Shui-ban was indeed shot, but his assailant is unlikely ever to be found because he used a homemade gun and homemade ammunition and it is impossible to pinpoint precisely when Chen and his vice president were wounded, Allegheny County Coroner Dr. Cyril Wecht said yesterday.

Report: China Jails Woman Over Web Post By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN

A woman who posted an article on the Internet criticizing the way China's government handles public complaints has been sentenced to 18 months in a labor camp, a human rights group said Thursday.

Ma Yalian used several Chinese legal affairs Web sites to post the article documenting her fruitless efforts to petition over the destruction of her Shanghai home, New York-based Human Rights in China, or HRIC, said in a statement.

Ma described police violence and harassment of her and other petitioners, the group said. She said some protested by committing suicide outside government offices.

HRIC said Ma was sentenced on March 16 by Shanghai's Re-education Through Labor Management Committee. It said the committee accused her of 'falsely accusing Shanghai authorities of causing her physical injury,' and having 'turned petitioning into pestering.'

Shanghai police said they had no information about Ma, and the phone number for the Re-education Through Labor Management Committee was not listed.

Chinese law permits such committees to sentence people to up to three years in labor camps without trial. Intended to punish minor criminals, prostitutes and drug addicts, the system is also frequently used to quiet political and religious dissenters.

Critics call the system unconstitutional, but officials say it's needed to maintain order across the huge nation.