It's easy to get excited about Dunkin' Donuts and the arrival of another Best Buy will at least offer us a more customer-friendly electronics shopping experience, but can Shanghai really handle the full frontal in-your-face Americana that is Dippin' Dots? For the uninitiated, Dippin Dots are little balls of liquid nitrogen-enhanced ice cream that look like smallpox, feel like Styrofoam, and taste like redneck. Fine, maybe they don't taste like a redneck (they taste like......

Photograph of investigation at Times Square recruiting center by kerfuffle & zeitgeist on Flickr Gothamist found that an explosive set off outside the Times Square army recruiting center may be similar to five past bombings in New York City.Seattlest worried when severed right feet and bottles of rat poison started washing up on local beaches.Shanghaiist was surprised by Bjork's rooting for Tibetan independence at her concert (see video), and the political fallout has only......

The last time an anchor from our favourite TV channel made it to the news, he created such a brouhaha that culminated in the eviction of one coffee company from the Forbidden City. In the news this time is New Zealand-born anchor Edwin Maher who for many years before arriving in China was a weatherman with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The Los Angeles Times published a profile of Maher that started it all off. It......

We finally made it out to Tian Jia, the superlative Japanese restaurant famous for serving only one kind of fish: toro, meat from the fatty belly of the bluefin tuna. Our first trip was right before we left for vacation three weeks ago, and our second was the first night we got back. Yes, we craved it the whole time we were gone. For those of you who were like us and never made a......

What Crossing the Line - a documentary by VeryMuchSo Productions with Koryo Tours Synopsis Witness the stories of four US army defectors who abandoned their homeland to seek out a new life in communist North Korea in this fascinating documentary from filmmaker Daniel Gordon. It was August of 1962 that Private First Class James Joseph Dresnok crossed the heavily fortified border from South Korea into the North. Now, more than forty-years later, the last......

It seems like, all across the network, folks were up to no good. Maybe it was all the green beer from last weekend... Gothamist spent the week writing about New Yorkers behaving badly: at the post office, at the Garden, and at the fertility clinic. Calvin Klein may not be misbehaving, but he's just a little dirty, and in a completely different way than some NYC kitchens. SFist had its share of misbehave-rs, too, like......

Which reminds us — we need to go to the gym. Cold Stone Creamery — the fast-growing American chain of ice cream shops featuring servers who, on top of a (you guessed it) cold stone, mix just about anything you want into your serving and, unfortunately, sing while doing so — will open its first Mainland China shop in the basement of Shanghai's Raffles City mall near People's Square on April 23. We have been......

Great 80s party last night. Photos and stories coming soon. But first ... this is where we will be this afternoon: It's a beautiful day (although really damn hot) so why not come on over to the flea market? They have ice cream. Like last month, Shanghaiist will have a table: Peijin will be selling his photos and we will be watching Peijin sell his photos while pretending to sell Shanghaiist T-shirts. We just got......

This may be old news (in fact, according to this link, it's almost three-year-old news) but we just learned over the weekend that McDonald's delivers in Shanghai, so we thought perhaps it would be new to some of you, too. We're not sure if every McDonald's in town delivers, but the one we were at in Yu Yuan (don't ask) does. The sign says they deliver between 9 am and 9 pm and require a......

Shanghai cuisine is set to be "improved", so that a menu can be created for Expo visitors, and they're hoping that "Shanghai snacks in the 2010 Expo will enjoy such worldwide fame as sushi, hotdog, and ice cream." The competition to create new snacks is open to the public, and they say that people can participate via Sohu.You can also contribute your thoughts about the layout and other details of the Expo by taking part......

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang on doing business in China: "We have to think of a way in which the internet phenomenon can continue to grow and reach more users and at the same time comply with local laws. In places like China and other places that have different political regimes I think you'll see them trying to react and potentially regulate these kinds of activities. But our observation is that it is inevitable that things......

Xinmin Evening News tells us (article in Chinese) that although a bowl of wonton usually costs several yuan, Mr. Shao paid over 3000 -- in fact 3103.18 RMB. On the 18th of August 2005, Mr. Shao and his delightful family skipped along to Lucky Wonton, their local eatery, and ordered up two bowls of wonton. Mr. Shao was of the opinion that the bowls had a "weird smell", a gesticulatory argument ensued -- in Shanghai?......

The “Five Friendlies” themselves have received a warm welcome (meaning that people spent far too much money on them when they first came out) but no one seems to like that they're called "The Five Friendlies". Although in Chinese their names spell out “Beijing Welcomes You,” (Bei bei+Jing jing+Huan huan+Ying ying+Ni ni=Beijing huan ying ni) nothing quite so “clever” is done with their English name, which to Shanghaiist bears too much connection to a place......

That's a phrase all men yearn to hear. Wish granted! ... thanks to some brilliant minds in -- you guessed it -- Guangdong province. According to a very vague Xinhua photo caption, a condom-in-a-can (or, if you prefer, it's sexed-up official name: "Nanometer-silver Cryptomorphic Condom") has been approved by Guangdong's "drug administration," and somehow that means it can now be sold throughout China. The man pictured is the proud owner of a spray condom in......

China's internet thugs are are it again, this time attempting to block popular internet telephony services, namely Shanghaiist favorite Skype: China Telecom, the nation's biggest fixed-line telephony provider, is working to shut down computer-to-telephone call services, to force people to pay for its much more expensive offering, state press said. China Telecom is presently experimenting with blocking computer-to-telephone and computer-to-computer services in the major urban centers of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, Beijing Business Today......

If every single person in China’s population of over 1.3 billion people tossed 34 yuan in, let’s say, Shanghaiist's pocket, that would equal around 5.5 billion US dollars. That is the amount on money being wasted on disposable hotel supplies including toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, shampoo, slippers and combs. China is becoming wary of this situation as well as its strain on the country’s finances. Similar problems can be found in the many high-level meetings and......

It's time for moon cakes again. The mid-autumn festival isn’t until September 18 -- and should thus be called the late-summer festival -- but this isn’t the first time people tried to get a head start on a holiday. Tradition has it that moon cakes were first used to carry messages to help the Chinese throw off the Mongols in the 14th century. That would explain why we still find strange things in moon cakes,......

In an announcement that should come as no surprise to anyone who has tasted the stuff, China's General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine has confirmed that Chinese-made ice cream is bad ... really bad ... and potentially harmful to your health. A muddled China Daily story about the report says that Chinese ice cream has an approval rating of 52.6 percent -- not very good, but still about 10 points better than President......

That's China Daily's headline for this story, which they copied and pasted from its original source, U.S. News & World Report. The story, originally titled "The Shanghai High Life," is annoying and vapid and tells the story of Lily Wang, a "typical Shanghai yuppie." Or perhaps the author was trying to show that the life of a typical Shanghai yuppie is annoying and vapid? We learn that Ms. Wang, 28, wears high heels and a......