Par hasard je suis tombé sur cette nouvelle publicité virale réalisée pour nul autre que l’Hôpital du Sacré-Cœur de Montréal, un hôpital du CHUM ! En haut à droite, le nom de la » station de télé «, c’est 也不上哪, qui veut dire (je pense) que ça ne sortira nulle part. Façon originale de spoofer les médias chinois au Québec !

***

This is an advertisement for recruitment at the Sacré-Cœur Montreal hospital that I found by chance while surfing on a local Montreal news portal. Featuring a former baseball commentator and two professional hockey players, you would probably pick up pretty quickly that this is not real news. The Chinese characters on the top right corner 也不上哪 (ye bu shang na) mean that “it won’t be broadcast anywhere”. Interesting and original way to spoof mainland Chinese media in Quebec!

Les parlementeries is a mid-late-90s comedy show that marked my youth growing up in Quebec. Two dozens of stand-up comedians would play the roles of fictional politicians in a parliament context, often based on their own trademark character.

The “Parlementeries” title is itself a play on word, being a portmanteau of “parliament” and “lying” in French.

One of the YouTube videos I found featured an insult match between both “black” and “white” parties and their representatives, all pretty much household fictional characters impersonated by the best comedians of the time, many of which are still active today.

After a ten-year hiatus since 1997-98, Les parlementeries came back to the theatre in 2008, although received a bit of lukewarm welcome from reviewers. You can find many clips over on YouTube.

Hong Kong: 東宮西宮 East Wing West Wing

A little by chance, I saw this bus stop advertisement at Central Piers on 東宮西宮. After figuring out the characters and googling, I realized that this was in fact their ninth edition already!

This is a trailer made for their next show coming in late September. The advert is a spoof of Inception, but I don’t know what the show will contain. The title for this edition is 十大九官. Literally it means the ten big nine officials. But apparently the two last characters 九官 (nine officials) is the name for mockingbird in Chinese!

The big difference between 東宮西宮 East Wing West Wing and Les parlementeries is that the former involves real-life politicians from the executive council. Hong Kong might not have universal suffrage, but it can poke fun at its top politicians! Perhaps because of that, the focus is perhaps a little more political and focused on real-issues (rather than being of death matches between comedians on general-interest topics).

You will find lots of videos of this comedy show on the Internet. The ubiquitous figure with the bow-tie is Donald Tsang.

In previous years, real-life progressive legislative council member Tanya Chan even participated in the play. You can think of her as the darling of social liberals. She played a leading role in the play in September 2009.

東宮西宮 East Wing West Wing also has a Facebook page.

I was walking down on Ste-Catherine last Saturday, and saw this kid just sitting there, apparently waiting for his parents to catch up or something.

The Chinese squat is a comfortable sitting position perfected notably by certain people, such as the Chinese… You see that a lot more in mainland China, at lunchtime near construction sites, or at bus and train stations at any time of the day. In Hong Kong, not so much.

People in Hong Kong love their dogs…

But if you live on Lamma Island, you might start encountering more unsavory species, such as giant spiders (crawling through your 3rd floor window), or gravity-defying mosquitoes.

Edited 2010-02-16: Later that week when I wrote this post, I found a gecko in my sink, after letting the window open during the day…

Sur la rue principale de Lachute, alors que je faisais un tour en voiture dans la région ce mercredi, je suis passé devant l’enseigne de ce buffet chinois. Utilisant l’effroyable police de caractère asiatiques, l’enseigne pend visiblement au-dessus du trottoir.

6/4, aka the Tiananmen Events, here in the West, is certainly no laughing matter. When Donald Tsang, Chief Executive of Hong Kong, said that he represented the views of the Hong Kong people by saying during question-and-answer period that the incidents happened years ago and that the territory’s a lot more prosperous today, well, it caused a wave of reactions. (see YouTube, in Cantonese)

After question period, after 23 pan-democrats walked out of LegCo, Tsang disappeared and reappeared after 30 minutes to offer an apology and recognize that what he said was wrong.

A day later (it was May 14), My Little Airport releases “Donald Tsang, Please Die” and rhymes “Die” with “Kai”, as in “Ngo Tei Sat Seung Kai” (We’re taking the streets for sure). “Tung Chee Hwa might’ve been bad, but at least he’s got a good conscience.”

Download the MP3 here:
Donald Tsang, Please Die

That’s after writing this other song last month to demand that the salary of Stephen Lam (Secretary for Mainland and Constitutional Affairs), namely a monthly 300,000 HKD (43,000 CAD), be split. Who said that the Chinese didn’t have a sense of humour?

From Rivercool, via Hecaitou’s blog, via EastSouthWestNorth.

Comme les Chinois typically tries not to just re-post news published somewhere else, but this is just too good to keep for myself. There has been talk about the fake singing, the sequences that would’ve been added in case of rain, but the geek in me (and IT specialist by trade), insists that this is the best part of the opening ceremony to pick on.

Yes, what you see on the picture, as torchbearer Li Ning is flying in, is Microsoft’s signature blue screen of death!

Seen in Beijing, April 2008.

This seemingly innocuous slogan means nothing to the English ear, but to Cantonese speakers, it’s a well-known homonym for “xxxx your mother” (see Google). It was recently popularized by fashion chain Goods of Desire, and I got this mug from them.

J’ai toujours beaucoup aimé La Fin du Monde est à Sept Heures, émission diffusée quotidiennement par TQS à ses beaux jours. Dans la dernière édition de leur nouvelle émission de nouvelles farciales, 3600 secondes d’extase (diffusée à la télé de Radio-Canada), Marc Labrèche et Paul Houde nous font l’historique hilarant, désinformatif du fameux Poulet Général Tao…

Portion #2 de l’émission du 26 janvier 2008