Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

Apologies for the administrivia. I just discovered that a couple folks who rsvp-d for the Nov 17 event were stuck in spam filters of one sort or another.

If you have responded but not heard back from me, please write again (bjshengr -AT- gmail -DOT- com). If you’re still not getting through, you can always leave a comment. BTW, it’s never too late to respond!

Thanks and look forward to meeting you all

On Beijing Sounds’ first birthday, the year’s stats, wasting time, and the fastest recitation of 千字文 ever recorded
Read the rest of this entry »

As the Beijing Sounds (BJS) studios approach the one year birthday in October 2008, you might not be wondering about the various characters known to congregate here. You might not have any interest in what they do outside the studios or how they relate to each other. Don’t worry, you wouldn’t be the only one. No one, in fact, has ever asked for this synopsis. Nevertheless, here it is: roughly in order of frequency of appearance and in reverse order of importance to the enterprise’s operations. Read the rest of this entry »

Princess and Mrs. Beijing Sounds sent text as soon as the wheels touched ground at PEK last night. By 10:30, they’d entered the Beijing Sounds studios in Shàngdì (上地 in northwest Beijing) and managed to include your editor (who they’d left holed up in Minnesota) in most of the evening rituals: the book-reading, the talk about instant noodles for dinner — pretty much like home.

No, separation isn’t what it used to be. How quick you forget the days of shouted greetings over dollar-a-minute phone calls. You can hardly even recall anymore what it’s like to wait for mail.

All the same, today you still have to disconnect, eventually . And then you listen to the refrigerator hum, uninterrupted. You start feeling sorry for yourself and dig up whatever annoying sound clip you can find.

一个老头上厕所
yīgè lǎotóur shàng cèsuǒ
An old man goes to the bathroom

一摸兜儿，没带纸
yī mō dōur, méi dài zhǐ
feels his pocket — didn’t bring paper

擦完屁股一手屎
cāwán pìgu yī shǒu shǐ
after wiping his bottom, one hand of poop*

“Yeah,” you think, “that’s me — the hand of poop.”

C’mon! Pull out of it already. Get yourself together. What do you need? A beer? No, some bon-bons then, maybe? Still not right? Well what, then?! Oh sure, of course — I mean, who wouldn’t need to prop themselves up by scouring every last corner of the internet for some sign that you’re cool? Sure, here you go, critical acclaim: your very own refrigerator, fully decorated.

–

* Maybe someone can do better with that translation? Inelegant, to say the least.

[Update 8/1/08: Yes, indeed there was a better translation -- yet another sound clip I found in which PBS (princess beijing sounds, age 5 at the time) translates the work herself. The existence of the recording only further documents my continued and inexplicable fascination with child culture, especially of the potty-humor variety.

]

Briefly, since there are no Beijing Sounds in this at all. The boilerplate WARNING in the blog sidebar has sufficed to keep most of the lawyers out of the messy back yard here at BJS, where we do indulge in full-monty writing behavior that would get us banned from any reputable venue.

But since the warning occasionally gets some attention in its own right, I thought others might be interested in Mark Liberman’s recent post on Language Log, which analyzes more scientific approaches to the question of whether “singular them” actually slows people down when they’re reading.

Good stuff. Much more satisfying than prohibition by intuition and prejudice. A scientific approach is unlikely to solve any debate, as the core questions — is it important that a particular kind of usage slows readers down? … and what kind of readers? — will probably never get agreed upon. Still, I’ve always got hope in my heart for logic, even when experience has proved time and again that it has no bearing on the course of any argument.

Meta — sometimes you gotta

For those who prefer old-fashioned email notification about posts, Beijing Sounds finally has an option for that again. This is not to imply that the technical team has returned from the 3-month-old strike over management insults, as this is the subject of continued and tense negotiations, with rumors of sabotage and impending shutdown.

Seriously, if any of you eight readers does try this out and find it inadequate, please let me know.

With crossed fingers, prayers to the gods, some rushed meditation, and the sacrifice of a small animal, Beijing Sounds hereby fires up the servers and commences production in a new facility (dreamhost) with an entirely new production staff (the chief editor had to go, and the scabs seemed about as good as the striking copy writers and technical support people anyway).

Apologies again for all the blogging about blogging recently. I really prefer to stay on topic. But what can I say:

Meta? Sometimes you gotta.

To make up for it, I’ve got a guest post coming up that carries on where tāngr and tāng left off. Hope at least three of our eight readers make it back for the event.

…then the technical integration team has somehow — in defiance of past experience and common knowledge about their ineffable incompetence — managed to connect you to the new hosting service with Wordpress. Welcome, thanks for your patience, and we’ll try to put all this technical crap behind us asap.

Warning and plea for patience: I’m changing my hosting.

I guess it’s not really moving — we’ll still be here at bjshengr.com. But porting all the content over has left my mouse-hand contorted in carpal tunnel pain. Not entirely unlike a real-life house moving…

What I’m really attempting to do is use Wordpress in the background instead of the insidious Quick Blogcast service from GoDaddy that I had been using. Should be a good thing.

For any normal blogger, the move is probably easier than 你好, but I’ve never done it before and have been credited (by Mrs. Beijing Sounds, among others) with an uncanny ability create complexity out of the simplest task. If Beijing Sounds runs out of material some day, I’ll devote a post to why my smoke detector still hangs by a wire from the basement ceiling…

Amidst the uncertainty, we can be pretty sure that:
1. RSS subscribers will have to resubscribe
2. Email subscribers will be out of luck, unless I can figure out a function for that on wordpress. Apologies to you email subscribers: my current service doesn’t even allow me to see what your address is, so I hope you find a way to come back.
3. The color scheme (and I use the term loosely) and readability of the new site will not be worse. [I like to set the bar low]

Again, all my advance apologies and feel free to send advice my way — bjshengr *at* g m a i l . com

Apologies for the even-worse-than-usual color scheme and layout here at Beijing Sounds. Attempts to make the style easier-to-read have been thwarted. Although the head of operations has resigned under duress and there is mutiny brewing in the lower ranks, the blame falls most heavily on the long-ago upper management decision to use GoDaddy’s “Quick Blogcast” technology. While the rumors of collusion and backroom payoffs are totally unfounded, the water cooler innuendo about management’s “profound technological ignorance” are probably not without merit.

Thanks, all, for the feedback this week. Between huffing virus-laden recirculated toxic fumes (aka flying) and battling a drooling-in-meetings case of jet lag, I’ve only had time for a few responses up until now.

It’s kind of shocking what happens to email/comment volume when well-trafficked blogs give you a plug. Special thanks to recently unmasked Jeremiah of the inimitable Granite Studio for mentioning Beijing Sounds. That mention was picked up by Jeremy of blogosphere stalwart Danwei, whose “Beijing-obsessed” line was spot on. So the feedback floodgates were opened, at least by Beijing Sounds standards.

I’m particularly smitten with two categories of comment that go to prove some people are even more obsessed with běijīnghuà than I am.

1. Deeper Thinking

To R or not to R? Apparently, some people have thought pretty hard about érhuàyīn 儿化音:

Sima wrote a treatise to get you started on the semantics of it all, with an especially good observation about fànguǎnr 饭馆儿 versus túshūguǎn 图书馆 — this is how linguistic meaning gets created. Elisa responded with another example, which my closest Beijinger informant tells me is not just běijīnghuà, but old-timer běijīnghuà at that. Then Brendan (of bokane.org fame) topped it off with a link to the best “bèir 倍儿” ever uttered in the history of cinema.

What do you call Mandarin butchered by non-native speakers?

I’d nominated then pleonastically defended “mandarish” but now I’m kicking myself for not thinking of Shaan’s approach of coining a Mandarin word for the task — it’s certainly a better parallel to “Chinglish”, which is fundamentally a combination of English syllables.

2. Corrections

I appreciate everyone who’s sent in a correction, by email or by comment. Apparently Beijing Sounds is a target-rich environment. My typesetter’s on notice that any more slacking will result in suspension without pay.

For the most part, I just make a note and correct the entry, but William had the observation that the mistake in this entry

一减一加五等于无

gives “the result of the calculation as 无 wu2 nothing instead of 五 wu3 five”. Amusing.