TOP FIVE: Wine labels

Allow me to introduce a new running segment that we will feature sporadically at The DeeWeeDee Shop: Top Five. They will usually be translation errors, ranging from peoples' English names to t-shirt labels and store names. The first installment is labels from Yunnan wines that we found in Zhongdian (also known as Shangrila). Without further ado:

#5 - Occasionally drinking this wine is good to your health.

#4 - Snow area beauty naked barley red wine

#3 - Tasting best and delicious production, Elaborate brewing and classical making. The wine was made of best grapes in world, and with internal advanced techics. It is clarity and has full-bodied fruit-smell, vinosity and long aftertaste.

#2 - Constantly drinking this wine is good to your health.

#1 - It is a good wine from heaven and souls. That can read our happiness and sadness, like a bosom friend bringing up warmth. It lets the cheers burst out of our minds.

Olympic Gold

For those of you that were unaware, Chinese media coverage is generally biased, and that is especially true now that the Olympics are on. They weight the coverage towards events that Chinese do well in and the commentary is always completely one-sided. You would never, for example, see Badminton or Women's team Archery on during primetime in the US. Today, though, they reached a new level of absurdity. There are four channels in China that are airing the Olympics. This morning, at one moment, they were showing a THIRD replay of the Women's 10m Air Pistol event, which was won by a Chinese woman, on one channel, a replay of the medal ceremony on a second channel, and an interview with the gold medalist on a third channel. A full 75% of the Olympic coverage at that point in time was dedicated to an event that I had never even heard of until today.

We'll be bringing you more on the Olympics in the coming weeks; it's all pretty ridiculous on this end.

Beep Beep

Sam's stalling a bit on his latest post, so I thought I would put a couple short ones up for all the fans out there. His post will tell about the camping portion of our trip, but this is the harrowing account of our bus ride back from Lugu Lake. It's a fairly mountainous area and the roads are usually slow and windy, and this one was no exception. The constant changing of direction makes reading difficult, at least for me, and my iPod was dead after 18 days on the road, so I mostly entertained myself by staring out the window or straining to catch a bit of Tha Carter III from Sam's headphones.
This was fine for a while, but halfway through the seven hour trip a small box on the dashboard beeped for about five seconds then went off. We debated what it was (possibly a radar detector) but couldn't come to a consensus. It soon started beeping again, this time for longer. The driver looked frustrated and whacked it a couple of times to no avail before hitting a button on the side and stopping the beeping. This only appeared to be a delay switch of some kind, because the noise kept coming back, more and more frequently and for longer periods of time. The driver was content to ignore it for a few minutes, hoping it would go away, but his anger would build to the point where he would hit it again (this never did anything), mash a few other buttons and eventually submit to the only apparent solution: the delay button. This bought us only a minute or two each time. Sam and our friend Seth both had music players to drown out the beeping, and I did my best to ignore it, but a prolonged, high-pitched sound can only be ignored for so long.
After forty minutes or so of this, I went and looked at the box for some sort of power cord that could be unplugged. The driver informed me that it was impossible to unplug or turn off the device. I tried to point out that this was impossible, that anything electronic can be turned off somehow, but he was adamant. My quick investigation seemed to confirm this fact and I'd left my hammer at home, so I resigned myself to my fate. Soon after this, Sam kindly lent me his iPod to help maintain my sanity, and as the soothing bars of "Got Money" drifted to my ears, the beeping promptly stopped. I didn't understand what the driver said when I asked him what it was. I'd like to think that it had no function at all other than to drive me crazy. If so, it was well on its way to accomplishing that goal. By the time the bus stopped for construction 15 minutes later, my ears were still ringing.

The rest of the trip was blissfully beep-free.

One activity, two interpretations