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August 2007 - Posts

How not to give a sympathetic quote

Posted Monday, August 27, 2007 6:06 AM by will
Imagethief was leafing through today's International Herald Tribune when he stumbled across an article on how corporate jets are now competing with commercial flights for air lanes, landing slots and other over-stretched civil aviation resources. In that Read More...
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Work-o-rama

Posted Sunday, August 26, 2007 5:48 AM by will
Sorry for the silence over the last few days. Imagethief has been in a spell of rather intense work the last few days, including over the weekend. This week will be hectic too. Many ideas have accumulated. Regular posting will resume at the earliest opportunity. Read More...
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Today's Bank of China box score

Posted Monday, August 20, 2007 8:16 AM by will
Today's results just in: My place in the lineup: 297 Batting when I went on deck: 204 Time on deck: 75 minutes Time at the plate: 45 minutes Total game time: 2 hours Autographs signed: 10 Transactions swung at: US dollars to reminbi conversion, renminbi Read More...
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Run

Posted Sunday, August 19, 2007 7:44 AM by will
I like to run. It wasn’t always this way. Eight or nine years ago I was a lot heavier, and regular exercise wasn’t really part of my routine. My girlfriend was significantly fitter and more energetic, and she took me on as something of a restoration project. Read More...
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Can you point to the one who stole your purse, ma'am?

Posted Friday, August 17, 2007 12:33 AM by will
It was the short one in the dark suit in the middle, officer. I'm sure of it! Don't they look excited to be having their picture taken? From this story on the communique from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit. Pulse-pounding stuff as usual Read More...
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Attack of the space peppers! Run!

Posted Thursday, August 16, 2007 8:05 AM by will
I once wrote that the only thing stopping Beijing from being a great world city was a giant monster of its own . Could it be that humble Gansu province is "germinating" Beijing's future monster? Could a devasting "space chili" be the beast that rumbles Read More...
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ESPN goes "outside the rings" and reports on China's interior

Posted Thursday, August 16, 2007 7:19 AM by will
Via China Law Blog and Shanghaiist , this is a very interesting story from ESPN Magazine . It's interesting not just for the writing, but because of the focus. This is an Olympic themed article that is devoted to showing readers the China that BOCOG "doesn't Read More...
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Jim Yardley on the Olympics and politics

Posted Tuesday, August 14, 2007 7:17 AM by will
Jim Yardley, of the New York Times and International Herald Tribune , sums up the situation facing Beijing nicely in a " Letter from China " column in the IHT: [If] anything was evident last week when Beijing staged a one-year countdown to the 2008 Games, Read More...
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Drove my Chevy to the levy and painted it with angry slogans

Posted Monday, August 13, 2007 9:09 PM by will
I'm told those were Don McLean's original lyrics for "American Pie", but that "but the levy was dry" was suggested by his producer as both rhyming better with "pie" and "rye" and working better over a 4/4 rock and roll time signature. Fortunately the Read More...
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Last week in China PR and communication: August 13

Posted Sunday, August 12, 2007 10:11 PM by will
Interesting China PR, communication and media-related stories from the past week: Murdoch gets the Journal The board of Dow Jones has, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, approved the sale of the company to Rupert Murdoch. That means that Murdoch Read More...
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Video: Imagethief and the man-eating otter of Changbaishan

Posted Sunday, August 12, 2007 7:03 AM by will
I've posted to YouTube a video of the trip I took to Changhbaishan last summer with Mrs. Imagethief and my father. It took me the better part of a year to get around to editing it, but here it is. Changbaishan is the rugged mountain range that divides Read More...
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Imagethief discusses "Incorruptible Warrior" on BBC Radio

Posted Tuesday, August 07, 2007 11:44 PM by will
On Monday night Imagethief did an interview with Chris Vallance of the BBC Radio Five show " Pods and Blogs " discussing the computer game "Incorruptible Warrior". The game was recently released by the Ningbo city government as a means of getting anti-corruption Read More...
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Bang! China shoots its own Olympic PR in the foot

Posted Tuesday, August 07, 2007 6:01 AM by will
Imagethief, who has bid for something on the order of RMB12,000 worth of Olympic tickets, is trying resolutely to remain optimistic about the Games. Unfortunately, it's proving harder as time goes by. Tomorrow marks the one-year-remaining milestone. This Read More...
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Does BOCOG need to raise China's Olympic PR game?

Posted Monday, August 06, 2007 6:32 AM by will
Rumblings from the Beijing foreign correspondent community are that BOCOG is not the world's sharpest organization when it comes to PR. Sluggish, bureaucratic and drip-feeding dull information are some of the kinder things that have been said about it. Read More...
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Last week in China PR and communication...

Posted Sunday, August 05, 2007 8:58 PM by will
There is a lot going on now that I want to write about but I've found myself a bit busy to go in-depth on anything. To compensate I'm going to point out a few communication and issue-related articles from the last week that caught my eye, with some brief Read More...
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China 3G: Stuck in the backwaters

Posted Thursday, August 02, 2007 7:38 AM by will
Here is my quarterly tech column for China Economic Review . In this installment, Imagethief joins the chorus of people wailing about miserable state of China's next-generation telephony. Bitch, bitch, bitch: Stuck in the backwaters China’s infatuation Read More...
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...and sometimes they blow up in the faces of PR risk-takers

Posted Thursday, August 02, 2007 3:06 AM by will
A few days ago I wrote a post about how Mattel appeared to have seized the opportunity to generate some good PR for itself out of the China product situation. I framed it as a PR risk vs. reward equation, and thought that Mattel had done a very good job Read More...
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