Results tagged “goodnews”

By Kenneth Tan and David Feng

Here is a piece of good news (for all you live music lovers out there) to help quench your thirst while you wait out the events drought that inevitably hits during every Chinese New Year. End of March there is a promising new live music venue (no cover bands!) opening up. Unfortunately, we have been sworn to secrecy on location (hint: former sports bar somewhere on Huaihai Road) but can tell you it will hold 250 comfortably (Yuyintang holds around 100) and will offer cheap drinks and entrance fees.

In part of China's ongoing Olympic makeover, Chinese airlines will face harsh penalties for delays and cancellations . New restrictions will set a cap on the daily number of flights and prevent airlines from overbooking flights. Certain airports will also keep an airplane on reserve in the event of mechanical problems. If problems persist, offending airlines could lose their domestic service or face two-year restrictions on further expansion.

By JFK Miller

For a second straight week Shanghaiist has missed our Friday deadline, oops. The good news is that Saturday is when all the really good stuff happens.

Heres' a public service announcement to (illegal) satellite TV users from Shanghaiist: Don't put stuff on top of your satellite receiver box. We had gotten in the habit of placing the occasional DVD or DVD sleeve on top of our satellite box, which is covered by a bunch of small vents. Not long ago, while working at our computer (surprise, surprise) at around 1 am, we heard a popping noise coming from near the TV...

CARMEN RESTAURANT: Carmen Restaurant recently materialised on Xikang Lu, near the even newer Steak and Eggs. Passing by, what caught our eye was their blackboard promotion for all you can drink: 50RMB for chicks and 80RMB for blokes. Went inside and discovered the deal was just for draught beer (Carlsberg) and cocktails. OK, could be acceptable, but decided we'd better try their cocktails first before committing to an all-out drink fest. Winopete chose a G&T that was actually quite decent. A friend opted for vodka and tonic which was also quite satisfactory. What was not so good was being hurried into deciding did we want the all-u-can-drink deal or single drinks, and also being asked to pay before a sip of alcohol had passed our lips. Furthermore, this night a bunch of rowdy German card players to descended around us which led to the staff cranking up the music to a very conversation-unfriendly level. The timing of both these events led to us upping and leaving. The mouldy-looking furniture for a brand new venue is never going to earn brownie points with me, but a decent all-you-can-drink deal grabs our attention, especially given the dwindling reputation of Bon Bon. The bottom line is we'll try Carmen again.

There is no end in sight to the good news. Not only is Youtube blocked, but Blogspot is also back behind the Great Firewall, now that the 17th Party Congress is over. Nobody has to put up with this sh*te really. Grab your VPN now, and enjoy the Internet as it was meant to be.

Attracting celebrities, dignitaries, and mass media coverage, the Opening Ceremonies are a highlight of the Games, showcasing the spirit of Special Olympics and the athlete's achievements through the theme I know I can.

This group of women in Guangxi Province's Nanning (南宁) have just completed their state-sponsored training and received their certification as trained maternity matrons (月嫂), who according to our favourite English-Chinese dictionary, are maids -- usually married women who already have their own kids -- that are hired to take care of mothers and their newborns ("Chinese women traditionally are confined indoors for a month after delivering a baby on the grounds that they are particularly susceptible to various gynecological diseases in this period."). Apparently even the recruiting companies have all come waiting like vultures at the certification ceremony, and are paying as much as RMB2,800 per month for a mid-level maternity matron and RMB4,800 for a senior-level maternity matron. That's more than some white collar workers get!

Whenever there is a crisis or a natural calamity, there are the people who lose money and then there are the entrepreneurs. It seems enterprising businessmen have decided to cash in on an outbreak of rodents in the Dongting Lake area in Hunan province which saw an estimated 2 billion mice on the run from the flooded Yangtse River by taking the matter into their own hands - literally.

Newly crowded A3 cup winners Shanghai Shenhua get back down to domestic business tomorrow night in their first home fixture in five weeks when Tianjin come to town.

If you are a text message addict like us — 10 fens do add up fast, we have some good news for you. For a limited time, China Mobile (all you 134-139, 158, 159 people) is offering free SMS service with just one string attached: download its new instant messenger client, 飞信/Feixin/Fetion (Chinese for “flymail”). The IM, at least in its current incarnation is nothing to crow about, but it does have one ass kicking feature you won’t find in MSN, Gtalk or QQ: Free SMS within the China Mobile network, PC to mobile, mobile to PC, and of course mobile to mobile. Download the PC client here, and mobile client here (under your cell phone’s brand and model number). Mac fanboys need not despair, pop in a virtualization/emulation software and you can get in on the free loving too.

While we were wondering why neither ESPN Asia nor Star Sports on our satellite system was showing the Dallas Mavericks-Golden State Warriors game this morning, we noticed a clip on ESPN video that talked about NBA commissioner David Stern expressing interest in setting up a joint venture hoops league in China. We stopped going to Shanghai Sharks games a few years ago because the team didn't seem to care too much about its fans, so we think this has to be good news:

We are happy to report that we are wearing shorts. It's a beautiful day — 23 degrees Celsius (73 F) and sunny according to the little sun icon above the Shanghaiist logo over on the left. And by Friday, it's supposed to be 28 C (82 F). Since it is finally bearing good news, we thought today would be a good day to remind you about the Shanghaiist Weather Page, which you can access by clicking on that weather icon above our logo, or by following this URL:

So, we're trying to get a license for our new dog. They don't make this process easy, of course. But why would they? It's not like our dog's life depends on it. Oh wait ...

We don't know how you felt upon reading the title of this post, but we're sure it would have been better (or more appropriate) if you had first dropped some acid.

Photo by captainvideo taken from the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site.

From The Search Engine Journal we discovered that Baidu won an intellectual copyright infringement case against some major music companies. From Interfax:

This morning we came across two pieces of news, both about sex and sexuality in China, one interesting, the other depressing.

It's good news for those of you who stand accused of one of the nearly 70 offenses that are punishable by death in China. Under legislation enacted on Tuesday, as of January 1, all death sentences handed out by provincial courts must be reviewed and ratified by China's Supreme People's Court. This reverses a 1983 law which gave such powers to the provincial courts in an effort to crack down on rising crime and corruption that occurred early under the reforms implemented under Deng Xiaoping. However, such liberal use of the death penalty in the world's most populous country and in a poor legal environment led predictably to large numbers of death sentences, many of them carried out on innocent people. Last year, a woman in Hunan reappeared 16 years after her accused killer had been executed for her murder.

Last night, we separately witnessed two of the best gigs we’ve seen in a long, long time -- and the good news is that they’re both playing again.

As the convential wisdom goes, China will not respect other's intellectual property rights (IPR) until its own IPR needs protection. If this is true, then IPR in China recently took a significant step forward as the Financial Times is reporting that a litigious Shenzhen USB flash drive manufacturer Netac has hired Morgan Lewis & Bockius to sue New Jersey computer hardware manufacturer PNY Technologies for infringing upon Netac's patent for USB flash memory drives, or key drives (that's US Patent #6,829,672 for you IP boffins out there).

The video clip about Tong's case was "useful in helping us protect state secrets,'' the Sichuan Population and Family Planning Commission said in a July 31 statement on its Web site.

It’s been a week of uncertainties, at least as far as JZ is concerned. Was JR dropped? Is Coco back? When will we see more of Alec and The All-Stars (pictured above)? Did you all find the bank card we lost there on Wednesday? We’d love answers (especially for that last one -- ICBC wants us to go all the way out to Yangpu to get a new one).

Q: How many locals does it take to fill a sidewalk?

Sure seems like it lately. Scientists have called the Yangtze River (heard of it?) "cancerous." This is not good news. The Yangtze is China's longest river. It is also Shanghai's main source of drinking water. Pop Quiz: How many tons of wastewater flowed into the Yangtze in 2004? If you guessed 16.75 billion, you win! Fifty kuai for a bottle of Evian doesn't sound so bad now, does it? And if you think this story is just propaganda dreamed up by the evil Western press, think again. It looks like it was first reported on by Xinhua. Does this make Shanghai a really big "cancer village"?

There's been more good news for all you censorship lovers out there this month. We are sure that you are equally as thankful as we are for that evil foreign site Wikipedia to have been blocked, and are quite content at knowing that you just don't need to know so many things about the world (Answers.com notwithstanding). Baidu.com has gone one better, and released Baidupedia, a site containing all the news that's fit to tell us, and none that's not.

Now take a wild guess: Which occupation is the most dangerous in Shanghai? According to this report (in Chinese) by the Shanghai Evening Post, journalists, corporate managers and scientific researchers are the top ones in danger now.

Amongst the technical jargon on the Technology Marketing Coorporation's article, this part brought us out in a cold sweat: