X-Radiation

While at the Ding Cong museum in Fengjing the other day I noticed these trash and recycling containers with weird english translations on them.

I think the one on the left which says “yet recovery” is for recyclables while the one on the right which says “should not recover” is for trash.

I’m not certain if  “old and useless cell” refers to batteries, cell phones or dandruff flakes.

The Chinese Mountain Dew label looks way cooler than the English language version. Something abut the shape just totally works. On a similar topic, I love Japanese “genki drinks” and had sort of hoped there would be a Chinese version of these vitamin fortified turtle blood and caffiene laden bombs but so far I’ve had no luck finding any super powerful Chinese energy drinks. One convenience store did have a couple of warm bottles of Lipovitan-D but I can get that state side.  Anybody got ideas on this? I was hoping to bring some samples back to the lab.

This corn drink I saw in a supermarket near the hotel looks interesting. I really liked the corn flavored kit-cat from Japan so I’m really wondering what this corn drink tastes like. It only came in large 1 litre bottles. If there was a small one I would check it out for sure. I wonder if there’s any of that fake margarine flavor in there?

Ding Cong's portrait of Honoré de Balzac

This is Ding Cong’s portrait of Honoré de Balzac. I never realized how much he looks like American porn icon Ron Jeremy. I tried to download an image of Ron Jeremy to put side by side with this photo I took at the Ding Cong museum but I was thwarted in my search by the Great Firewall of China and I’m feeling too lazy to attempt to tunnel my way under just to  snag a headshot of Ron Jeremy looking surley. I will update this post later with that image.

Update: A concerned reader sent me ta snapshot of Mr. Ron Jeremy for inclusion in this article. Thanks Jeff!

Today a group of us including a couple of comic book artists from Portugal and G. Scott Owen, the President of ACM SIGGRAPH, took a field trip to the home of renound Chinese cartoonist Ding Cong. Along the way I got to wondering just what in Odin’s name an Ewok is doing standing guard over this Taoist temple in Fengjing?

Pie For Breakfast

Who knew they served pie for breakfast in Shanghai? I don’t know how to read Chinese, so at first I guessed  that the asterisk looking symbol divided into eight wedge shaped slices was the character for “pie” but as it turns out that’s actually the character for “rice”.