I learned my first Chinese “slang” character, for lack of a better term.  Apparently, this is around a year or two old.  Amazingly, it’s already part of my input method on my PC at work (it’s not on my Mac).  Anyway, the character is “Jiong” (tone 3).  It means something of a cross between unhappy and embarrassed.  Notice the character below.  All of the strokes are “legal”, for lack of a better term, Chinese strokes used for writing the script.

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(above) Miss Li will make you feel “jiong”.

(above) I thought one of Apple’s latest ads going after the heavy advertising spending for Vista was pretty funny.  In the US, we’re used to seeing advertisements like this where one company goes after another in a healthy competitive spirit.  Other than this one on youtube, it’s been quite a while since I’ve seen a legit ad produced in the US, so the ones that usually come to mind when I think of “competitive advertising” are the car commercials a la “Ford doesn’t have it!  Chevy doesn’t have it!”

(above) Hypothetical 7‘s “Crazy Willie” pokes fun (inspired by a video we did back one summer).

Well, though I often enjoy teasing colleagues back in the US of the various ironic ways that China is more free than the US, I did learn that this sort of adversarial advertising is illegal in China.  In fact, you cannot say or mention the name of another company or their product in your advertising.  You can’t suggest the name or product that you compete with in your advertising.  If you do, you’re ripe for a big lawsuit.  Why?  Because, so I’ve been told, the Chinese government doesn’t want to encourage bickering or rancor between companies.  They imagine that because the capitalist competition is so fierce that the volume will be so bad as to be unbearable.  That level of free speech just conjures up all sorts of bugaboos.  It sort of reminds me of watching movies in the theater here in China.  I just saw “Wanted” in the theater at Wang Xiang Cheng (Mix City).  It was blatantly obviously when sections were cut out.  One string of scenes, the “training scenes” was so pockmarked with cuts that it was almost like advancing chapters on a DVD one after the other.  I picked up the DVD a couple of days later and saw they’d cut out Angelina Jolie’s brief backside nude moment and several of the more graphically violent training scenes around it.  Well, it’s still come a long way from the days of the Cultural Revolution scenes that The Red Violin depicts.