A Beijing Cream Special: An Evening Of Heroic Fails: The Best Of The Worst From The 2012 CBA All-Star Game

Via Beijing Cream:

Just a reminder: all our efforts are here

Beijing Cream.

Wow that's a lot of red

I just check out China Now Magazine and feel like I got punched in the eyeballs.

Here if you have the necessary eye equipment on.

Time Out Beijing featured our quiz today

An excerpt:

This increasingly popular quiz is, unsurprisingly given the restaurant’s clientele, quite heavily American-biased, although enough questions based on China and a few other countries are thrown in to mean that non-Americans needn’t completely sink. The popularity of the quiz does mean that arriving early is a must, and if you’re clever you’ll be there soon enough to order a giant pizza and salads to share between you – it’s extremely unlikely that you will under order.

All publicity is good. Thanks to Time Out.

Kro's Nest Trivia, 35 Xiao Yun Lu, every Thurday -- 8:15 pm.

The best English-language CBA preview in the world

Jon Pastuszek of NiuBBall was gracious enough to offer Beijing Cream a CBA playoffs preview, which is what you should read if you're interested in Chinese basketball.

Hopefully the postseason will feature a better brand of roundball than this display from the All-Star game:

I originally made the above video with Hanggai's "Five Heroes," which got promptly taken down on YouTube. The original appears on Deadspin.

It's begun

Beijing Cream got linked to by Deadspin today. Wait, you ask. Beijing Cream?

Yes. You should go check it out. It's going to be great.

James Fallows on Jeremy Lin, in which he links to my Stephon Marbury video from 2010

I'm of the opinion that James Fallows is still one of the best China correspondents out there, even though he's been off the China beat for a while (I might be biased -- he does, after all, have his own tag on this blog). This comes slightly belated (from last Wednesday):

But let's go to the videos! It happens that there is a test case available: the millions of actual Asian people who play basketball -- it's very popular throughout the region -- and the thousands who have played in professional or semi-pro leagues in China itself. These are real living-in-Asia Asians, without the diluting effect the immigrant experience might have brought to their "philosophical heritage." Overall do they play ball in a way the sociologists might predict?

Unt-uh. Here's one video, of the Dongguan Leopards playing at Shanxi Zhongyu, in a Chinese league. This features Stephon Marbury playing for Shanxi, one of a steady trickle of NBA stars who extend their careers with a contract in China. The first minute or so is the local equivalent of dancing Laker-girls. Some of the rest features crowd agitation, yelling at refs, general tumult, and some basketball. Virtually none of it fits with treatises on Asian "philosophical heritage" -- even though nearly every person you see on screen (apart from Marbury and a few other foreign players) is theoretically part of this tradition.

Here's the video from a couple years back:

Fallows then found himself in an email spat with the Hidden Harmonies blog's melektaus, who -- I think it's safe to say -- isn't a fan.

Is the person in this video Japanese?

The one getting his ass kicked by the chalkboard figure. Anyone know?

Via Beijing Cream

Something nears an end; something nears a beginning

Very soon we will be launching a new website that you will want to look at. For the time being, please excuse the sporadic postings here. It's the beginning of a phase-out in favor of this new thing.

Here's video of Jeremy Lin's game-winner

We should point out he had 8 turnovers in the Knicks' 90-87 win over the Raptors in Toronto, but he also tallied 27 points and 11 assists. His last three points are shown below.

The Knicks, incredibly, are now 14-15, after standing at 8-15 two weeks ago.

Comment of the moment, from this ESPN thread:

Well, this is going a bit overboard

He's now leading his team from double-digit deficits and hitting three-pointers with less a second remaining to give his team the win, to the approval of the opposing team's fans.

Oh, and this:

H/T: Maggie Rauch

Be my VaLINtine

MSG Network just ran an ad that said that, according to Maggie Rauch, who may have been the first person in the world to see the ad in New York and then tell a friend in Beijing, who then told me.

Screenshot of the ad is not yet online. This post will be updated when it is.

CORRECTION, 1:49 am: It may have been "Happy VaLINtine's Day." Something like that. Still waiting on the picture.

UPDATE: Here.

"Lin + Intifada = Lintifada!"

The Jeremy Lin Word Generator, presented in all its glory. H/T Rob Hogg.

Xi Jinping vs. Jeremy Lin, and other juxtapositioning

Your Xi Jinping article of the week: "It was here in the village of Liangjiahe that Xi Jinping (pronounced shee jin ping) spent seven of his most formative years after being sent into the countryside at the age of 15 along with millions of other students during Chairman Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. // And it was here, while digging ditches and extracting methane from pig waste, that he made the decision to pursue a political career—despite the persecution of his own father, Xi Zhongxun, a revolutionary hero purged and imprisoned by Chairman Mao.... Elsewhere, however, a handful of Mr. Xi's family friends were willing to discuss his past, on condition of anonymity, and they all pointed to his time in the countryside as a turning point in his life—and the origin of his political ambitions." [Wall Street Journal]

Your Jeremy Lin story of the day, properly placed beneath Xi Jingping: "Most fans appear to have readily claimed Lin as Chinese, though some have taken note of the fact that he is American-born, with parents from the breakaway island of Taiwan. As one commentator put it: 'Do Africans jump up to claim Kobe as one of their countrymen?'" [Evan Osnos]

In case you forgot, some media organizations made huge asses of themselves recently by reporting on a ridiculous tweet. "Jaundiced irony is hardly a monopoly of the Western press when covering North Korea, but some of the analysis of the Kim Jong-un rumors was, frankly, a little embarrassing. Gawker, Huffington Post and Reuters, all weighed in, sometimes inexplicably relying on unedited Google translations. Apparently content with the 'Babel,' no one bothered to check or cite the North Korean state organ, the Rodong Sinmun (the newspaper does, after all, have a website). On the day he was supposedly killed, Kim Jong-un was on the website’s front page – he had received a gift from Kuwait – although there was no clear evidence he was actually there for the event." [Adam Cathcart, The Diplomat]

Chinese students in America. "While it has been a few weeks since Dan at CLB posted his article (and I posted my response) about commonly held stereotypes held by American students of their Chinese cohorts on campus, I thought I would post a part two as I cam across a couple of interesting articles that offered more insights into the complexity of the issue.. as well as the Chinese student perspective." [All Roads Lead to China]

Eric Abrahamsen, master translator. "Jackie Chan’s unfortunate 2009 statement that “Chinese people need to be controlled” sounds a little different when you consider that in Chinese he used the term guǎn rather than the word for “control” (控制, kòngzhì). Instead of advocating a police state, he was implying that the Chinese people need to be told what to do because they don’t know what’s best for them. Only marginally less distasteful a comment, perhaps; still, the distinction is worth making." [Latitude, International Herald Tribune]

A proper Whitney Houston tribute:

Corollary: The Wall Street Journal has info about the kid.

China Debate reminds us that Elizabeth C. Economy is good at what she does. Liz's blog here. [China Debate]