Absurdity, Allegory and China

The following photo strip is from the distant backgrounds of four photos I shot early Saturday morning (May 30, 2009) along the Xinkai River in Tianjin. I was shooting something else entirely, and which turned out to be of little interest except for the small fragment in each one where these four came from, taken [...]

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A trip between Beijing and Tianjin on the Beijing–Tianjin Intercity Rail is one that gets quite a lot of Twitter attention, especially on the weekends. The trip from Beijing South Railway Station to Tianjin Railway Station (aka Tianjin East) on the Hai He (River) in the city center takes 30 minutes. A recent samplings of [...]

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Someone’s blowing things up close to my home, 3:45 on a Thursday afternoon, an odd time of both the day and the week, even in Tianjin. Not sure why, though I am not curious enough to go find out the reason. But for a moment I just flashed on 2003 when SARS founds its way [...]

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This one almost got by me. (Thanks to MMG for bringing it to my attention.) Rem Koolhaas was featured in the Wall Street Journal last month in a piece entitled The Sky’s No Longer the Limit, concerning architecture and the the end of this latest golden age as major building projects throughout the world have [...]

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Newt Gingrich, one of a long line of publicly shamed Republicans and a contender for a spot on the 2012 GOP presidential ticket, has an opinion piece in the Washington Examiner entitled Lets NOT meet the Uighurs, which will, no doubt, make the Zhongnanhai boys happy. So the Obama administration has decided to set the [...]

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Zaha Hadid’s under-construction new opera house in Guangzhou was the scene of a fire early this past Saturday morning, May 9th according to the Architect’s Journal. Though the fire was extinguished in an hour, the photo that accompanies this piece shows a good deal of smoke pouring out of one side of the building. I’ve [...]

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Many have been questioning the morbid over-reporting of the swine flu alert (as well as the insane reactions to the news reports by Chinese officials regarding Mexican and Canadian nationals who have come to visit China). As usual, Hans Rosling has something to tell us about it. If you do not follow Hans Rosling at [...]

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Early morning Tianjin, May 5, 2009. Fisherman and the curious, watching. This is one of my favorite photos. So many hands behind so many backs, watching guys gut fish. This is Tianjin: men with fish and others watching beside the river. There is a story here in the shadows of the Jingang Bridge, though it [...]

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The May 5, 2009 Boston Globe’s editorial A talk with the Dalai Lama comments on a meeting between the Dalai Lama and “100 scholars from China” at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge organized by Lobsang Sangay of the Harvard Law School. By this account it sounds as if a civil time was had by all. [...]

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