Black and White Cat

I love this diagram in so many ways that I shamelessly stole it from Farley Katz at the New Yorker. It’s part of a “Cartoon-off” with Randall Munroe.

Katz draws the Internet, as envisioned by the elderly.

(Message to my Dad: Don’t read any more of this. There are rude bits.)

Speaking of young people on the internet, here’s one of the many things that some of them in China are pretending to be “shocked” about:

The name of this Shanghai brand of sanitary towel, Da Chang Jin, means “big long towel.” It differs by only one character and sounds exactly the same as the popular Korean historical drama series Jewel in the Palace (Korean name: Dae Jang Geum).

(Message to my Dad: stop reading this now!)

Here’s another brand, this one made in Quanzhou, Fujian:

Why are these young people on the internets “shocked” by this? Because B is the standard internet way of writing cunt (bi) in China. And, as Sun Bin rightly points out in the comments below, I originally failed to address the character 爽 inside the big B. In this context B and 爽 together could be translated as “cunt is fresh and dry,” or “cunt is comfortable” - Comfy Cunt.

And that, I suppose, gives me the excuse I wanted to post a picture of what may be the most photographed car in the country:

SB being short for shabi, meaning stupid cunt, and reinforced by the 250 which (for some reason) means idiot.

Eric Abrahamsen wrote an excellent exposition on the difficulty of translating niubi (literally, the cow’s cunt). And Jeremy Goldkorn translated a defense of the word bi (and cao) by Wang Xiaofeng.

I, on the other hand, dislike this word because it has made it impossible for me to say the Chinese word for pen - same sound, different tone. No matter how many times I learned which one was first tone and which one was third, each time I actually needed to say “pen” things would go wrong. The last time I tried was seven or eight years ago, when I went into a shop and thought I’d asked if they’d got any pens. The mixture of confusion and horror on the female shop assistants’ faces told me that, yet again, this was not what I had actually said. From that day onwards I decided to just point at pens and say “that” or “those.”