In Shanghai on the Bund BY RYAN POLLACK
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In Shanghai there are a couple of early week shows that are worth checking out. Tonight, Too Dumb to Die, a bohemian group of gypsy vaudeville musicians who have rode their oddly tall bikes from Istanbul will take the stage out at Yuyintang. Sound interesting? Well, Shanghaiist thinks so, and can't wait to see them perform. While tomorrow, Yuyintang will host German hardcore punk band, No Opinion. Shanghaiist had the chance to catch No Opinion... more ›

Shanghaiist has just touched down in Beijing. And just as we were wondering if it was just us, or if the air in the Jing was really that much worse *cough*cough*, this is what we read:
• Birth defects in Chinese infants have soared nearly 40 percent since 2001
• There is one Chinese baby born with birth defects every 30 seconds
• In Beijing, the incidence of breast cancer has increased 23 percent in 10 years, with about 45 women out of every 100,000 diagnosed with the disease, says the Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention. In Shanghai, the figures are even worse, at 55 out of 100,000, up 31 percent in the past decade.

Who is Yacht ? more ›

Gosh. With the third allegation of hacking by the Chinese military into government computers in Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom surfacing within two weeks, the guys at the Foreign Ministry have been kept busy! Fons Tuinstra points to past cases of bored teenagers who have successfully hacked into other governments and surmised that the German government could not have said that they had an issue with millions of bored Chinese teenagers! Richard Spencer made the erudite argument that if the "US and other western governments are busy infiltrating the computer systems of foreign governments... it is disingenuous to complain too vigorously when those same foreign governments become good at doing it back". Hmm... more ›

to embroil a listed company this year. more ›

The China Daily recently reported that we are soon to see the opening of The Absolut Icebar, billed as Asia's first ice bar. The concept is that there's a lot of ice and ice sculptures, and it's really cold inside. Absolut says that the ice being used isn't just any old ice, but the pure stuff from the Torne River in Sweden. more ›

It was reported this weekend that the much ballyhooed 25-minutes-from-Shanghai-to-Hangzhou maglev train, which was supposed to be fully operational around 2010, has been delayed. Indefinitely. Which makes us ask, how much longer are we going to have to wait to be ushered into the sci-fi utopia of the 21st century that we spent most of the 20th century dreaming about? more ›

One of the nice features on Google Calendar is the ability to add the lunar calendar on top of the western one, which helped us verify that today, Thursday, is indeed the third day of the third month of the lunar calendar. more ›

So a writer from The Gazette, a popular Montreal newspaper, was in China recently. And he was awed by the same things that most writers who haven't been to China recently are awed by: the shiny skyscrapers, the intoxicating energy, the pirated DVDs. But the writer's trip to China also coincided with the "most exciting Quebec election in decades," and he desperately wanted to follow the news from back home. And thanks to this thing called "the internet" he was able to ... in Beijing. In Shanghai, he claims, it was a different story. Here is a snippet from the story, entitled "Don't try reading The Gazette online in fashionable, ultra-modern Shanghai": more ›

We have finally woken from the slumber brought on by watching the Super Bowl (the Prince halftime show was much better than the game itself). If you were tuned in to ESPN Asia this morning like we were, you saw, over and over again, the same Allen Iverson "I'm not a gangster" commercial they've been playing for two years now — we love AI as much as the next guy, but would have preferred these. You also heard the announcers, over and over, talk about the "one billion viewers" that were tuning in to the game, and, almost as often, you saw them promote this August's "China Bowl" NFL preseason game in Beijing, featuring the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks, on August 8. Here are the details of that game — not much has changed since we last told you about it in September, except now they have a logo (pictured). more ›

Shanghaiist was browsing around on SHExpat Forums yesterday, and came across a thread discussing the loss of one of Shanghai's renowned cheap eating establishments — Turk's. more ›

There's a definitely a buzz for fans of Chinese cinema with the release of Jia Zhangke's new film Still Life 《三峡好人》. In Shanghai and probably the rest of China, the film's theatrical release comes on December 14, the same day that Zhang Yimou's new film Curse of the Golden Flower. And while from the standpoint of the box office returns, it seems pretty clear who the winner will be, Jia doesn't at all seem flustered by the lackluster box office performance that his film has seen in the limited screenings that have happened over the last few weeks. more ›

Torontoist has some awesome, cutting edge news: A movie is being made about a gay hockey player - filmmakers even got approval from the NHL and the Toronto Maple Leafs! Also awesome: Toronto's "Do the Sneeze Sleeve Campaign". And most awesome is this dreamy photograph of Toronto's skyline in fog. more ›

Photo by 2dogs 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. more ›

No, Shanghaiist isn't talking about xanadu or China's “rediscovered” Shangri-La. And, we are definitely not referring to the Tongren Lu establishment that just opened (no offense, but Tongren sucks!). Anyone who reads Danwei (or China Daily) knows that "lala" is a synonym for lesbians. So, welcome to the long-awaited post on Shanghai’s lala land. more ›

Photo from theshanghaieye. more ›

• Officials in Beijing deny ing rumors that 1 million migrants would be expelled from the capital during the Olympics. However, as we mentioned earlier, 50 of the 239 schools for migrant workers have been closed down recently -- in some cases by the police, en masse. On the brighter side, those that get to remain in Beijing will have a spiffy new light-rail system by 2008 to whisk them around from place to place!
• The 8th Yunnan province Minority Games has been kinda of a mess: male athletes using wigs to dress up as women, people fighting, and athletes that only speak with donbei (northeastern) accents.
• After a recent BBC undercover investigation into illegal organ transplants in a Tianjin hospital, Chinese officials replied by sayingthere was no such thing happening.

This morning, via Micah's blog, we learned of this posting on Rockself.com: more ›

There is a catch of course, 40 RMB to get in to La Fabrique and drinks only stay cheap till 11 pm, but, that's a better deal than just about anywhere else for those not in the city on expense accounts, and, once you've sunk a few cheap ones, you can get on down and enjoy one of the few nights in Shanghai where the music being played is not the usual cover band guff, commercial hip-hop or other cheesy shite pervading the scene here. more ›

We are loving the blue skies. They make the happiest city in China even happier. They just have a way of making things seem better. When traveling through China, our perceptions of a place are often influenced heavily by the blueness of the sky -- how else can we explain not hating Lanzhou? more ›

Since "Beijingist the website" won't be happening anytime soon, we figured we'd welcome our neighbors to the north, ever so slightly, into the Shanghaiist fold. Hence, today we unveil "Beijingist the irregular feature," news and views as seen through a Beijing resident's teary-because-there-is-so-much-damn-dust-and-sand-in-the-polluted-air eyes. Occasionally, like today, we'll even allow these posts to be written in the first person -- because it's a little weird having a Beijinger refer to himself as "Shanghaiist." more ›

Luigi Di Serio is an "entrepreneur" who does "ad hoc writing, website development and theorizing." He also has a degree in Urban Planning, which, we suppose, makes him vaguely qualified to rank the world's top skylines. Regardless, his list can serve as a good conversation starter. Four of his top 18 (and two of his top three) are in China: more ›

We suppose no kind of intellectual property theft should surprise us anymore, but we must admit to being a little taken aback when we discovered that a Berkeley, California hot dog chain with just six locations had gotten the royal treatment right on People's Square. We learned of this transgression from Slums of Shaolin (blocked in China), a blog about Shanghai. Top Dog, according to a Shanghaiist contributor who did his undergrad work at Cal-Berkeley, is an "East Bay institution." Basically, that means lots of students get drunk or high and eat Top Dog hot dogs late at night (one location is open until 3 am). In Shanghai, across from Fuzhou Lu, we have Mac Dog, and while the silly name is different, the logo is exactly the same. (They all kind of look like Mr. Hanky to us.) If you are still not convinced that Mac Dog is a rip-off of Top Dog, check this out: more ›

Michael Ohlsson is a DJ in Shanghai -- we recently interviewed him -- and he is also a blogger. His site called Weird Meat is about his experiences eating ... well ... weird meats. His latest culinary challenge (other than eating Shanghainese food -- which he hates)? Drunken shrimp: more ›