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Fake Mickey Mouse Joins the Olympics
Forget those athletes, Japanese media has been going heavy on the appearance of fake Mickey Mouse at the Olympics.
Classic denial translated by Pink Tentacle from the Yomiuri:
When asked about the resemblance to Mickey, a spokesperson replied, “They have square holes in their ears. They are not copies.”
The spokesperson suggested the statues are unique because they incorporate the themes of old Chinese coins (the square holes), the year of the rat, the Olympics and the financial district into the design.
However, children passing by the statues were seen pointing and saying, “Look! It’s Mickey!
Video coverage of the developing story here.
Last year Japanese media reports on China’s fake Disneyland prompted Beijing’s Shijingshan Amusement Park to come clean, for a little while anyways.
H/T to Pandapassport
Amusing Coverage of Opening Ceremony
The Globe and Mail ran the above amusing cartoon while, elsewhere in Canada, the Edmonton Sun’s Terry Jones could not praise the opening ceremony highly enough. Wonder if even the China Daily had a lead this strong.
Olympic opening ceremonies the best ever
By Terry Jones, Edmonton Sun
BEIJING – If any future Olympic Games is ever credited with a more awesome, brilliant, inspired, powerful or original opening ceremonies it might have to be because everybody on the planet developed amnesia.
The spectacular show which China produced to welcome the world to the XXIX Olympic Games and welcome themselves to the world was almost certainly the greatest show in the history of the greatest show in sport.
With Canada earning one of the loudest welcoming responses in the parade of athletes, it was a night of many story lines.
Lest you think him too uncritical, Jones did find fault with the ceremony:
If there was a criticism at all, at least beyond the fact it took more than four hours, it might be that the opening ceremonies were so overwhelmingly awesome that the one thing they lacked was a light, delightful, bubbly touch. In that way, the ceremonies might end up being a microcosm of the next 16 days – awesome but not that much fun.
Pat Forde at ESPN.com had a suggestion for Brits:
The only people who didn’t enjoy the awe-inspiring Opening Ceremony of the XXIX Olympic Summer Games had to be the folks with the London Olympic organizing committee. They host the 2012 Summer Games, meaning they have to follow the greatest show on Earth — and, for my yuan, the greatest show in Opening Ceremony history.
If I were the Brits, I’d punt and go with Monty Python reruns. Unless they can top a gold medalist elevating and running on air around the entire circumference of National Stadium to light the torch.
Hat tip to Boris for the cartoon.
Cross-postings to Danwei from this blog
This e-mail just arrived:
Hi - I recently discovered your blog and enjoy your way of doing things. However, since you’re now also posting on Danwei, I find it redundant because I follow both blogs with rss feeds. I just thought I’d let you know I’m on the verge of quitting your rss feed, as I’m sure this info is useful to you and most people who leave will probably just quit without telling you.
I’m actually a bit curious why you chose to start this arrangement with Danwei. My guess is you thought it might get you a few more subscribers from their audience? Or something else? Is it succeeding?
Dear Reader,
First, thanks for reading my postings and taking the time to write. I very much appreciate the feedback.
When I started blogging for the first time as a guest of my friend Joi Ito, I faced the same issue as I do now when blogging in French with my friend Loic Le Meur and on Danwei.
My policy then and now is to cross-post when there is something of interest to the relevant community.
For Danwei, this means China/urban life/media/advertising related issues. On Loic’s blog I tend to write about France-related issues as well as technology. During the Olympic period, there has - indeed - been heavy overlap between Danwei’s focus and that of my blog. That overlap will slack as the Olympics draw to a close.
Does blogging on Danwei drive traffic?
Posting to Danwei drives traffic moderately, but since I put up full postings, it is not excessive. What I appreciate more than traffic are the conversations that take place. That is why I like to the cross-post effect. Conversations about a topic on Loic’s blog in French are often very different from those in Danwei or on my blog.
In pure traffic terms, my blog is getting bombarded by Google searches for “Olympic P * rn”, “Olympic S x” and similar landing on this posting. (Are these hits from frustrated athletes in the Olympic Village or from fans dreaming back home?)
How did this arrangement happen?
Jeremy Goldkorn, Danwei Grand Poobah, emailed me one day to ask if I’d like to cross-post onto the site. Only interaction we’ve had since then is an occasional email helping me when I messed up formatting. I’d like to buy him a drink, but haven’t met up with him for almost half a year now.
Hope this answers your questions and convinces you not to drop either Danwei’s RSS or that of my blog!
Tom
Athlete-Bloggers at Beijing Olympics - Updated List
To follow the Olympics via the participants, I have been searching for Olympic bloggers and have found a few sources, largely thanks to help from the ever-lively crowd on Twitter at #080808.
US Rowing - Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal’s China Blog has 2 Olympian Bloggers so far, both from the US Rowing Team: Jason Read and Chris Liwski. I could not readily find a blog outside of the journal for either one.
US Track and Field Vlogger
ArethaThrows is a YouTube channel of a US track and field team posting occasional videos, including this tour of the US track and field training facility in Dalian.
Team Canada blogger-athletes
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is hosting slews of athlete blogs. You can learn what Olympic Rower Adam Kreek ate for his 2 breakfasts on June 23:
First breakfast: Pint of Smoothie (blueberries, pear, banana, pineapple, yoghurt, flax seed oil, carrot juice, rice milk, powdered greens, whey protein, creatine, glutamine, Green/yerba mate tea
Second breakfast: 3 eggs with cheese and veggies (onions, broccoli, mushrooms, peppers, snow peas), 3 pieces of 12-grain bread, 2 pints of orange juice
- Adam Kreek — Rowing
- Alexandra Orlando — Rhythmic Gymnastics
- Anna Rice — Badminton
- Christine Sinclair — Soccer
- Colin Jenkins — Triathlon
- Hugh Macdonald — Archery
- Kevin Sullivan — Athletics
- Kyle Shewfelt — Gymnastics
- Mark Heese — Beach Volleyball
- Sherraine Schalm — Fencing
Lenovo aggregates Athlete-Bloggers
One of the main Olympic sponsors, Lenovo, has made a foray into social media by aggregating 100 athlete-bloggers. The site is painfully corporate, but if you struggle back to the original blogs, many are great, such as Australian sailor Ian Murray’s improbably upbeat description of trying to sail through Qingdao’s outbreak of algae in June.
You could almost be forgiven for thinking I’d changed from a water-based sport and moved into track and field – the surface of the course in Qingdao is covered with some sort of green spongy algae!
You can see in this picture below, the surface almost looks like a bowling green…it certainly makes for interesting sailing!
Lenovo gave the bloggers equipment, but not money, David Churbuck, VP of web marketing for Lenovo, told me via a Twitter exchange.
I laud the Lenovo concept, but have a number of critiques on execution:
- The aggregation site looks way too corporate. So corporate, in fact, that I fled the site until Churbuck told me that the company does not censor the athletes.
- The site prevents direct access to the bloggers themselves. It first sends you to a pop-up page with a text summary of the blogger’s latest posting. This slows the process of getting to the source material. One the most important aspect of blogs is the self-presentation of the bloggers. I want to see how they present themselves.
- The @lenovo2008 Twitter feed accompanying the blog seems to be written by a robot that only has access to a TV and schedule of when events take place. They should highlight the best quotes, complaints, victories written by the athletes themselves, not tell me who is playing next or “Its half time, watching the Beijing Dream Girls”.
Anyone find other athlete-bloggers? What about athlete-Twitterers?
2 Parent Policy for Chinese Olympic Athlete
Funny story by Geoffrey Fowler in the Wall Street Journal revealing an official Olympic sponsor with advertisements that are not entirely truthful (Cue: sounds of pained shock and horror).
Turns out that the “parents” pictured here with hurdler and gold-medal hopeful Liu Xiang’s are fake.
The ad, for the milk drink Satine, reads: “A delicacy among dairy products, Satine is my choice.”
While his parents have said in past interviews that their son grew up drinking milk, the people in the picture are actors.
The official explanation given to Fowler:
“The parents were shy,” says Tom Doctoroff, the north Asia chief executive of WPP Group’s JWT, which made the Satine ad for the brand’s parent company, Yili. “But they approved the concept.”
While companies are keen to capitalize on China’s reverence of family, Fowler points out that the use of actors as parental stand-ins carries the risk of backlash.
Best way to follow the Olympics
In case you are not already doing so, Twitter has been a great way to follow (and participate in) Olympics coverage.
For the opening ceremony a large group of us wrote 140 character postings with the agreed tag #080808.
Lonnie Hodge - who also Twitted - blogged about the outcome:
And yesterday’s hash mash (a way to view aggregated info on a single topic) during the Olympic Opening Ceremonies was just straight-up fun! David Feng, the hardest working tweeter in the business, did a better job at translations, and commentary than did any of the newscasters on CCTV or Pearl (HK).
Kaiser Kuo, Paul Denlinger, Thomas Cramption, China Buzz (from the news center), Rebecca MacKinnon, Papa John, Siok Siok Tan, Marc (from inside the stadium), Frank, and a host of others joined the creators, like Flypig, of a phenomenon that was and is by turns funny, wonderfully irreverent, informative and better at fashion critiques and obscure celebrity sightings than (insert the dubious catch of Canadian language geek DaShan walking with the Canuck team) is Perez Hilton’s army of snitches. And they do this while character-cuffed to 140 (133 if you count the hash tag) keyboard ticks a tweet.
I think having to compress thoughts quickly and concisely forces you to write free of your normal subjective shorthand and makes for unusual candor and sometimes great comedy: Cyber-Haiku.
UBS Economist: Olympics “No Big Deal”
Jonathan Anderson, an economist at UBS, today released a study using Olympic history and population to assess likely economic impact of the Beijing Olympics on China’s economy.
His conclusion: The Olympics are “no big deal”.
We published this chart twice before in our Asian economics coverage - but with the continued flood of interest around the opening of the 2008 Olympic Games and the seemingly endless questions about what they mean for Chinese growth, we thought this would make an ideal initiation for our EM Daily Chart series.
What we’ve done in the chart is to take the host cities for every summer Olympics, beginning with Munich in 1972 and ending with London in 2012, and show the ratio of the metropolitan area population as a share of national population for the country in question. This is a good minimum proxy indicator for the relative size of the city economy in national GDP (minimum, since urban incomes are almost universally higher than rural incomes).
Look at Athens in 2004, Seoul in 1988, Sydney in 2000; these Olympic games were clearly a “big deal” for the countries in question, since the host cities accounted for 20% to 40% of national population and almost certainly an even higher share of national income.
Now look at Beijing 2008. As it turns out, Beijing comprises a total of 1.1% of the Chinese population and around 2.5% of Chinese GDP - the lowest ratio for any Olympic games in the past 30 years and likely the lowest ratio for any Olympic games in modern recorded history.
The only other instance that even came close was Atlanta in 1996, and as best we can measure the Atlanta Olympics were emphatically not a “big deal” for the US economy in that year. Sure enough, our estimates for China put the impact of the 2008 Olympics far behind the decimal point in terms of growth impact as well.
Jewish Shanghai Worth the Visit
I highly recommend Dvir Bar-Gal’s entertaining and informative walking tours of Jewish Shanghai. You will see a side of Shanghai that most people don’t know exists and gain a greater understanding of the city’s past. Dvir is working to preserve old parts of Shanghai, something that interests too few people.
Old Maps: Paul French, a journalist and director of Access Asia, has reproduced a lovely 1935 map of Shanghai produced by adman Carl Crow. (About whom Paul wrote a biography). To get a copy - if he still has any left - contact Paul on +86-21-6374-5679 or paul at accessasia.co.uk.
The Municipal Council’s map, issued for visitors to Shanghai in 1935, shows a city that had grown up in the previous 20 years — by 1935 the Bund was formed pretty much as we know it today and the International Concession reached out past the race course, now People’s Square. One interesting thing to note is that when supposed old hands in Shanghai tell you Pudong was nothing but fields and farms when they came here you’ll know they are bullshitting — the map shows how Pudong was a thriving factory area then around what is now Lujiazui.
Graham Earnshaw also has a nice collection of Shanghai maps online.
A list of some famous Shanghai Jews by Ron Gluckman:
The Kadoories - Family made its fortune in Shanghai and Hong Kong real estate, utilities and their Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotel chain (which includes the famed Peninsula).
The Sassoons - One-time opium traders who went big-time into trading and property.
Morris Cohen - Known by his nickname Two-Gun Cohen, he served as bodyguard and aide-de-camp to Sun Yat-sen, eventually becoming a Chinese general.
Dr. Jakob Rosenfeld - An Austrian who spent nine years overseeing health care for the Communist army.
Michael Medavoy - Lived in Shanghai until age 7, he went onto a career as Hollywood mogul at Columbia, Orion and TriStar Pictures.
Peter Max - Influential American pop artist born in Germany, but spent 10 years in Shanghai.
Mike Blumenthal - U.S. Treasury Secretary.
Eric Halpern - Co-founder of the Far Eastern Economic Review and first editor.
(h/t to the Shanghaiist for the Paul French quote.)
Shanghai To Cruise Ships: Duck
Matthew Crabbe’s Access Asia newsletter reports a rather unfortunate piece of planning in Shanghai.
It appears that cruise ships headed for Shanghai’s much vaunted new cruise terminal first need to duck under a low bridge. Not good news in the era of super-sized cruise ships.
There has been much reporting lately of the new Beijing T3 terminal, and how only China could do something so grand so quickly without all that bothersome consultation. But, in Shanghai, there lies a little-reported story that suggests a bit more consultation might help.
Stand on the Bund, and look towards the North Bund development in Hongkou, and you’ll see one of the best bits of post-modern architecture in Shanghai - the new and gleaming 130,000 sq m international cruise terminal, built by Shanghai International Port Group. A marvellous glass bubble on stilts to welcome passengers, as Shanghai aims to relive the glory days of its past as a cruise ship destination, and is due to fully open for business this month.
Fantastic!
Then gaze further down river, and you will spy the red towers of a massive bridge in the lower reaches of the Huangpu, the Yangpu, which opened in 1993 providing a much needed additional river crossing.
Again, fantastic!
However, there’s a problem. Ships larger than 87,000 gt cannot pass beyond the bridge, and progress upriver to the terminal. Right now, there are about 276 cruise ships operating globally - nearly 100 of these are in excess of 87,000 gross tons, and so cannot berth at the terminal. OK, so with the business still young in China, most ships using the terminal are just shy of the limit. Royal Caribbean, one of the biggest cruise ship operators, sent its 1997-built, 78,491 gt Rhapsody of the Seas to Shanghai with beds for 2,400 people.
But the industry is changing fast, and cruise ships being built and commissioned now are well in excess of 87,000 gt, while the smaller ones are being gradually de-commissioned. For instance, Royal Caribbean’s latest ship, Genesis, can accommodate 5,400 guests and weighs 220,000 gt. That’s the future.
So anything larger than 87,000 gt will not get to the sparkling new terminal, thanks to the low bridge, and will have to berth at the scenic and relaxing roll on/roll off terminal in Waigaoqiao, which, in rush hour, can be close to an hour’s bus ride from the Hongkou terminal. At best, Waigaoqiao can handle four cruise ships at any one time. More than 100 international cruise ships are expected to stop by Shanghai this year. The terminal will be home to a plethora of luxury goods shops and several hotels have sprung up nearby - if only there was no Yangpu bridge.
That’s what no consultation gets you.
Enjoy this story? Here’s some of the tantalizing reports from the Access Asia website:
Cosmetics & Toiletries in China 2008: A Market Analysis
Eggs in China 2008: A Market Analysis
Sugar in China 2008: A Market Analysis
Sounds like a feast ‘o fun!
Newspaper Writings:
French Blogging:
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