Madam Miaow on BBC World Service TV: China and Copenhagen Opening Day

Anna Chen in the studio for the BBC World Service "World Have Your Say" programme on the first day of the Copenhagen climate conference, Monday 7th December 2009.

Posted at YouTube in three parts.

World Have Your Say: Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAMXCfnju6c



World Have Your Say: Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJVdKb5N-o8


World Have Your Say: Part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNeA8WZ6TyY


Read Madam Miaow on China, Copenhagen and climate change

UPDATE: Anna Chen on BBC World TV on the final day of the Copenhagen summit

Madam Miaow on BBC World Service TV: China and Copenhagen

Anna Chen in the studio for the BBC World Service "World Have Your Say" programme on the first day of the Copenhagen climate conference, Monday 7th December 2009.

Posted at YouTube in three parts.

World Have Your Say: Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAMXCfnju6c



World Have Your Say: Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJVdKb5N-o8


World Have Your Say: Part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNeA8WZ6TyY


Read Madam Miaow on China, Copenhagen and climate change

UPDATE: Anna Chen on BBC World TV on the final day of the Copenhagen summit

X Factor fans claim Chinese Ambassador among them

Holy ai caramba! First Gordon Brown and now China. My late communist Dad must be spinning at the news that UK Chinese ambassador Madam Fu Ying has declared herself a fan of The X Factor. Never mind China and human rights, what about Simon Cowell's crimes against humanity?

According to The Independent report:

'She praised twins John and Edward's "determination and spirit in the face of a lot of criticism", and wrote that Stacey had been "brave". The ambassador added that she thought Jamie's "sincere and energetic voice and dance really get the crowd going". She reserved praise for finalists Danyl and Olly, who were "great showmen", while Lloyd and Joe had "a lot of potential" and Lucie had a "lovely voice".'

I think I speak for many of us when I say, "Hunh?"

Is Madam Fu the new Ninotchka? Does she secretly wear Silk Stockings while studying the texts of Marx and Milton Friedman? Old-school communists regarded such frivolity as counter-revolutionary prolefeed churned out by machines for the pleasure of the human cogs in the capitalist machine but times they are a-changin'.

Here's what the spookily prescient George Orwell had to say about culture and social engineering in his novel 1984:

"And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section — Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak — engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at."

Whether this is a PR stunt to offset the row over the noisy fans camped outside the wannabe stars house next door to the ambassador's official residence in North London we'll never know, but populist much?

Other showbiz news — China's black pop idol Lou Jing.

X Factor fans claim Chinese Ambassador among them

Holy ai caramba! First Gordon Brown and now China. My late communist Dad must be spinning at the news that UK Chinese ambassador Madam Fu Ying has declared herself a fan of The X Factor. Never mind China and human rights, what about Simon Cowell's crimes against humanity?

According to The Independent report:

'She praised twins John and Edward's "determination and spirit in the face of a lot of criticism", and wrote that Stacey had been "brave". The ambassador added that she thought Jamie's "sincere and energetic voice and dance really get the crowd going". She reserved praise for finalists Danyl and Olly, who were "great showmen", while Lloyd and Joe had "a lot of potential" and Lucie had a "lovely voice".'

I think I speak for many of us when I say, "Hunh?"

Is Madam Fu the new Ninotchka? Does she secretly wear Silk Stockings while studying the texts of Marx and Milton Friedman? Old-school communists regarded such frivolity as counter-revolutionary prolefeed churned out by machines for the pleasure of the human cogs in the capitalist machine but times they are a-changin'.

Here's what the spookily prescient George Orwell had to say about culture and social engineering in his novel 1984:

"And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section — Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak — engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at."

Whether this is a PR stunt to offset the row over the noisy fans camped outside the wannabe stars house next door to the ambassador's official residence in North London we'll never know, but populist much?

Other showbiz news — China's black pop idol Lou Jing.

Airbrushing life: HSBC cormorant fishing advertisement

Just a small thing that's been bugging me. That HSBC ad with the old Chinese guy and his cormorant fishing aid.

Note the bird. Its instincts are to dive for fish ... and eat the catch. The ingenious Chinese, when harnessing its fishing skills, realised that you need to find a way to stop it eating the fruits of its own labours. Know how they do it? They sensibly tie a tether around its neck to stop it swallowing.

I know this because I, and every other tourist to Guilin, have marveled at this co-operation between human and nature and observed the nifty neckwear.

And yet, in the ads, the glossed up avian star sports a bare throat. Some smart cutting going on?

HSBC, formerly the Midland. "We brought you opium. Now we bring you respect."

More on animals. Watching scientists dissecting a giraffe on TV and wondering why they're wearing bright orange gitmo suits.

Airbrushing life: HSBC cormorant fishing advertisement

Just a small thing that's been bugging me. That HSBC ad with the old Chinese guy and his cormorant fishing aid.

Note the bird. Its instincts are to dive for fish ... and eat the catch. The ingenious Chinese, when harnessing its fishing skills, realised that you need to find a way to stop it eating the fruits of its own labours. Know how they do it? They sensibly tie a tether around its neck to stop it swallowing.

I know this because I, and every other tourist to Guilin, have marveled at this co-operation between human and nature and observed the nifty neckwear.

And yet, in the ads, the glossed up avian star sports a bare throat. Some smart cutting going on?

HSBC, formerly the Midland. "We brought you opium. Now we bring you respect."

More on animals. Watching scientists dissecting a giraffe on TV and wondering why they're wearing bright orange gitmo suits.

Bad taste, bad timing

Just saw this as I was flicking through the cable channels. How's that for an unfortunate juxtaposition?

Bad taste, bad timing

Just saw this as I was flicking through the cable channels. How's that for an unfortunate juxtaposition?

Dr Wh(ed)o(n) strikes again: Dr Who Christmas special

Faster, faster. More, more! Raise voices to fever pitch then take it even higher.

Chuck in Restaurant At The End Of The Universe; Kylie as Ripley in Aliens slugging it out in a robotic exoskeleton and saying everything but "Get away from her, you bitch!"; Kylie as Ripley in Aliens Three, giving it large with the sacrifice as she plunges Christlike to a fiery doom (because Russell T Davies likes his "homages"); and an entire cast in relentless boggle-eyed hysteria. Just what we want after Xmas day with the relatives.

With one eye on the computer game, let's stick our heroes on a rickety bridge playing junkyard cricket with murderous cyborg angels and their lethal Odd-Job/Goldfinger stylee halo-blades.

Jeopardy, survival, fury, sentiment. These broadest of brushstrokes are apparently the only ones available to writer and series helmsman Davies, and he can no more vary these than he can the volume of the action which is all VERY LOUD.

The Dr Who Christmas special was high in production values but signified very little as we are getting used to to by now. Lord knows we were all fed up with the plodding Brit (non) drama of old and someone was bound to borrow the surface characteristics of the far more exciting American shows sooner or later, especially after Whedon lit the shining path for all us believers. But, sadly, such emulation proved skin deep. How can you care about characters with only one unvarying dimensionless objective: survival. And for over an hour. Yeech!

I see from the Torchwood trailer they have recruited James Marsters (Spike from Buffy) to add some much-needed class to this sorry dog of a series. Davies has played in Joss Whedon's toybox for long enough, he may as well be up front about it. If we didn't get the greatness by association message via Anthony Head (Giles from Buffy) in Dr Who, he'll hammer it into us now til it bleeds.

Thanks to Louise for kicking off.

More pix of James Marsters here .

Dr Wh(ed)o(n) strikes again: Dr Who Christmas special

Faster, faster. More, more! Raise voices to fever pitch then take it even higher.

Chuck in Restaurant At The End Of The Universe; Kylie as Ripley in Aliens slugging it out in a robotic exoskeleton and saying everything but "Get away from her, you bitch!"; Kylie as Ripley in Aliens Three, giving it large with the sacrifice as she plunges Christlike to a fiery doom (because Russell T Davies likes his "homages"); and an entire cast in relentless boggle-eyed hysteria. Just what we want after Xmas day with the relatives.

With one eye on the computer game, let's stick our heroes on a rickety bridge playing junkyard cricket with murderous cyborg angels and their lethal Odd-Job/Goldfinger stylee halo-blades.

Jeopardy, survival, fury, sentiment. These broadest of brushstrokes are apparently the only ones available to writer and series helmsman Davies, and he can no more vary these than he can the volume of the action which is all VERY LOUD.

The Dr Who Christmas special was high in production values but signified very little as we are getting used to to by now. Lord knows we were all fed up with the plodding Brit (non) drama of old and someone was bound to borrow the surface characteristics of the far more exciting American shows sooner or later, especially after Whedon lit the shining path for all us believers. But, sadly, such emulation proved skin deep. How can you care about characters with only one unvarying dimensionless objective: survival. And for over an hour. Yeech!

I see from the Torchwood trailer they have recruited James Marsters (Spike from Buffy) to add some much-needed class to this sorry dog of a series. Davies has played in Joss Whedon's toybox for long enough, he may as well be up front about it. If we didn't get the greatness by association message via Anthony Head (Giles from Buffy) in Dr Who, he'll hammer it into us now til it bleeds.

Thanks to Louise for kicking off.

More pix of James Marsters here .

Bush must go!

No, not that Bush. The other one!

Waiting for the third season DVD of Battlestar Galactica to drop in price, I'm filling in with Rome, the plush HBO double season box set telling the epic story of Julius Caesar's rise to power.

Boy! There's a lot of pre-Christian debauchery we only saw alluded to in I, Claudius, including lashings of lashings, pervy sex (you know, with the woman on top) and gore galore.

It's educational, as well. Did you know that the Brazilian wax was invented in ancient Rome? Funny (or furry), as even into the 1970s women sported magnificent unshorn thatches you could knit into a sweater until the men's mags gave us something else to be neurotic about. But in Rome the women have the sweetest little zebra-stripe landing-strips of fuzz. We know this from the mandatory full-frontal bonkathon in every episode.

Guy-talk transcends time: Roman geezers discuss women and we learn that in those days skinny = unattractive. Yet here are the women all looking like supermodels in their size zero frames. I reckon the vomitorium got a good work-out for this series. It's not even as if the lads could pop out for a quick one with big healthy women as the brothel workers (ooh, doggy style) all look like they moonlight for Pan's People.

Fat birds with big bushes. Heaven forfend! Even the famously sophisticated HBO audiences may not be quite ready for that.

Kenneth Cranham gives it some class as Pompey Magnus much as Peter O'Toole and Helen Mirren did in Bob Guccione's Caligula, starring a pop-eyed Malcolm McDowell. The 1970s audiences were pop-eyed, too, what with all the porny bits Bobby spliced into the movie when the talent wasn't looking. However, a deft cut spares Cranham the indignity of grunting over the teenage Octavia, foisted on him by her evil mother who is, aiming high but falling short thus far, not a patch on Sian Phillips's Livia.

Brutus is played as an upper class twit from the nobility who is destined to land the first regicidal blow in the defence of his class, while all the other characters are merging into mush at the moment.

I'm waiting to see if Mark Anthony's funeral speech is sullied for me by Splintered Sunrise's audacious despoilage and whether I shall be seeing in my mind's eye the chief antagonists of Reespect and Respect Renewal.

Bush must go!

No, not that Bush. The other one!

Waiting for the third season DVD of Battlestar Galactica to drop in price, I'm filling in with Rome, the plush HBO double season box set telling the epic story of Julius Caesar's rise to power.

Boy! There's a lot of pre-Christian debauchery we only saw alluded to in I, Claudius, including lashings of lashings, pervy sex (you know, with the woman on top) and gore galore.

It's educational, as well. Did you know that the Brazilian wax was invented in ancient Rome? Funny (or furry), as even into the 1970s women sported magnificent unshorn thatches you could knit into a sweater until the men's mags gave us something else to be neurotic about. But in Rome the women have the sweetest little zebra-stripe landing-strips of fuzz. We know this from the mandatory full-frontal bonkathon in every episode.

Guy-talk transcends time: Roman geezers discuss women and we learn that in those days skinny = unattractive. Yet here are the women all looking like supermodels in their size zero frames. I reckon the vomitorium got a good work-out for this series. It's not even as if the lads could pop out for a quick one with big healthy women as the brothel workers (ooh, doggy style) all look like they moonlight for Pan's People.

Fat birds with big bushes. Heaven forfend! Even the famously sophisticated HBO audiences may not be quite ready for that.

Kenneth Cranham gives it some class as Pompey Magnus much as Peter O'Toole and Helen Mirren did in Bob Guccione's Caligula, starring a pop-eyed Malcolm McDowell. The 1970s audiences were pop-eyed, too, what with all the porny bits Bobby spliced into the movie when the talent wasn't looking. However, a deft cut spares Cranham the indignity of grunting over the teenage Octavia, foisted on him by her evil mother who is, aiming high but falling short thus far, not a patch on Sian Phillips's Livia.

Brutus is played as an upper class twit from the nobility who is destined to land the first regicidal blow in the defence of his class, while all the other characters are merging into mush at the moment.

I'm waiting to see if Mark Anthony's funeral speech is sullied for me by Splintered Sunrise's audacious despoilage and whether I shall be seeing in my mind's eye the chief antagonists of Reespect and Respect Renewal.

Biff World _ to hell in a handbag

Welcome to my world. Broken, bleak and busted as it is, I aim to inject a bit of joy and illumination into the time you spend with me, even if it is a bit like getting made up by candle-light. Being the first of many blogs to come, thought I'd kick off with my current bete noire.

I can't possibly be the only person to despise The Apprentice, Dragon's Den, gladiatorial reality shows, the swathe of telly pulp celebrating abusive chefs, property porn and body dysfunction, in fact all the drek naturalising the disorder of things where you have to go begging for crumbs from a malign band of arrogant power-loving saddos who seem to have crawled out from under a giant stone in recent years in some post-apocalyptic catastrophe involving radiation.

Doling out humiliation and disdain like ennui-ridden doms in a Billingham bondage bar (apologies to Billingham), gleefully wrecking strangers' livelihoods and shaking their moneymakers in your face as they wave goodbye ... they are FUGLY!

Do up your house, do up yourself. Make yourself a more effective commodity. Compete, compete, compete. Sell, sell, sell.

Who commissions this crap?!!! And why is the BBC going along with it?

It's horrible, it's like the moneychangers in the Temple. It's like that scene in It's A Wonderful Life when James Stewart's character sees the world as it would have been without him and it all looks like Thatcher's wet dream with everything and everyone up for sale.

It's all turned into Biff-World in Back To The Future but with an unctious Evan Davis instead of the infinitely more honest Biff. At least you knew Biff was shafting you. At least Biff had the courtesy not to smile while he was ripping out the guts of the culture. At least he wouldn't have had to grease himself up with oily charm to fist you.

We're all Eloi being herded into the cattle pens by the Morloks. Don't let them kid you ... THIS IS NOT NORMAL. REBOOT. WAKE UP AND REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE.

I mean it.

X

Biff World _ to hell in a handbag

Welcome to my world. Broken, bleak and busted as it is, I aim to inject a bit of joy and illumination into the time you spend with me, even if it is a bit like getting made up by candle-light. Being the first of many blogs to come, thought I'd kick off with my current bete noire.

I can't possibly be the only person to despise The Apprentice, Dragon's Den, gladiatorial reality shows, the swathe of telly pulp celebrating abusive chefs, property porn and body dysfunction, in fact all the drek naturalising the disorder of things where you have to go begging for crumbs from a malign band of arrogant power-loving saddos who seem to have crawled out from under a giant stone in recent years in some post-apocalyptic catastrophe involving radiation.

Doling out humiliation and disdain like ennui-ridden doms in a Billingham bondage bar (apologies to Billingham), gleefully wrecking strangers' livelihoods and shaking their moneymakers in your face as they wave goodbye ... they are FUGLY!

Do up your house, do up yourself. Make yourself a more effective commodity. Compete, compete, compete. Sell, sell, sell.

Who commissions this crap?!!! And why is the BBC going along with it?

It's horrible, it's like the moneychangers in the Temple. It's like that scene in It's A Wonderful Life when James Stewart's character sees the world as it would have been without him and it all looks like Thatcher's wet dream with everything and everyone up for sale.

It's all turned into Biff-World in Back To The Future but with an unctious Evan Davis instead of the infinitely more honest Biff. At least you knew Biff was shafting you. At least Biff had the courtesy not to smile while he was ripping out the guts of the culture. At least he wouldn't have had to grease himself up with oily charm to fist you.

We're all Eloi being herded into the cattle pens by the Morloks. Don't let them kid you ... THIS IS NOT NORMAL. REBOOT. WAKE UP AND REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE.

I mean it.

X