Perhaps this "going to Beijing for a year to work on my Mandarin" idea has some problems.

[randomness]

Leaving aside the fact that the Chinese internet authorities appear to have banned access to LJ, there's this, from http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/beijing_olympics_countdown_air.php:


"View to the south, July 26, 8:30am, from apartment building in the Chaoyang Park neighborhood of Beijing. The obscured buildings in the "distance" are perhaps 100 yards away."

Yecch.

Thanks to quezz, who made me think of this problem in a post of her own.

Comments

[cityratbuddy.livejournal.com]

>the Chinese internet authorities appear to have banned access to LJ,

I was following the LJ of someone teaching English in China, and then she disappeared. It should have been obvious why, but it wasn't til now.

[ketzl.livejournal.com]

Ran across this today:
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/2007/07/chinese-river-runs-red-with-rust.html

I don't like it!

[esmerel.livejournal.com]

Wow, that makes LA look like the garden of Eden. Ew.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Funny you should mention LA:

"Randy Wilber is an air pollution connoisseur. Senior sport physiologist for the US Olympic Committee, he has made five trips to Beijing since March 2006, lugging an air-quality monitor to all 31 Olympic venues. The city's atmosphere, he says tactfully, is "significantly worse" than that of Los Angeles, the US standard for big-city pollution. Then there's the heat. In August, Wilber recorded daytime temperatures consistently in the 90s, with relative humidity approaching 95 percent. "For endurance events," he says, "that's borderline hazardous." His overall assessment: "Not good.""

(From http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/15-08/ff_pollution?currentPage=2.)

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

I think the distance is a bit off, that's got to be more than 300 feet. As far as LiveJournal is concerned, I bet SSH tunnels will still work.

But, perhaps going to another city might be a better idea.

Oh, yeah. 8:30AM. How much fog do you think Beijing gets?

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

As far as LiveJournal is concerned, I bet SSH tunnels will still work.

As a matter of fact, the journal I linked to says this:

Therefore, I can only connect to my lj via anonymouse, which is annoying as I can't stay logged in.

I personally would use an actual SSH tunnel, which would make it possible for me to stay logged in.

Oh, yeah. 8:30AM. How much fog do you think Beijing gets?

Infinitely more than it used to before all the particulates got belched into the air. What you're looking at there is smog.

Here's more on the subject from http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/15-08/ff_pollution:

"The air isn't always so awful: Sometimes the wind sweeps through, revealing a blue canopy overhead. But on a bad day — come August, say, when temperatures approach 100 degrees — the atmosphere around Beijing becomes a photochemical bouillabaisse of coal smog, steel-mill spume, and tailpipe crud, mingled with concrete dust and baked in the oven formed by the surrounding hills."

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can bet in the summer it's going to suck donkey eggs.

Usually smog is of a more orange or brown tint, that picture is more of a foggy grey. I think I'm just saying that that particular picture is perhaps a poor example of portraying Beijing in the poorest light. If that makes sense.

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

Gah. Asthmatics beware!

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

This can only make the Olympics less popular, and encourage people not to go.

And that's good.

[bedfull-o-books.livejournal.com]

I think that the US should boycott the Beijing Olympics as being too dangerous for the athletes.

It won't happen though. Ghod forbid we hurt their feelings and damage trade relations.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

The Chinese government has a weird way of reacting to anything and everything they don't like as if it were a personal and intolerable insult.

It seems like a brilliantly effective tactic, but it really does my head in.

[evilbunnymayhem.livejournal.com]

is this the annual "haze" that monkeygod has told me so much about? Where the burning of forrest fires pushes smoke across China and the whole region?
Or is this just specifically Beijing?

[amelia-g.livejournal.com]

Yow