Little joke in Big China... I think it was the Strayins!


Posted On: Monday - November 6th 2017 7:02PM MST
In Topics:   Music  Humor  China

This has really nothing to do with anything written recently but is humorous nonetheless and gives me a reason to feature more music from a certain nation down-under. I came to thing of this just from mentioning t-shirts in the previous post - white t-shirts. I want to state right now that, because I normally like to have some type of image to go along with each post, and this one would have been great, I do not have one, as I'll explain.

The thing about clothing in China is, you can't seem to get t-shirts with Chinese characters. Yeah, I wanted something clever in Chinese, that I could explain to people like, say, "I went all the way to China, and you people can't even read this shirt"... well, maybe something better than that, but you get the idea. Sure, it's a stupid way to have a written language, but when in Rome... uhh, buy a shirt? Anyway, in China they don't really like t-shirts with their own characters on it. I could not find one for myself. They like English letters and usually English-language words on their shirts- whether they make a whole lot of sense or none is immaterial - they sell pretty well.

Now to the Strayins, oh, it's spelled Australians (how would you know?): They seem to have the kind of sense of humor to pull this off, that's just a guess here, and they are a whole lot closer to China than Englishmen and Americans. We were walking on a bridge across the river in a suburb of Canton in old Cathay ("Guangzhou in China", for you 'tards out there living kick-ass lives) one sunny hot-as-blazes afternoon. Oh, crap, now another aside is necessary [see, the Chinese have learned English in school since the early 1980's from personal accounts. That, however, is like our few years of French or Spanish - it just gets you through school, but secondly, languages are a real use-it-or-lose-it type of knowledge. So, the average Chinaman, especially over 40 y/o or so will not actually know a lick of English.].

There are THOUSANDS of people around in any public space in China, and that's how it was on the sidewalk of this bridge. Here came a 40-50 year-old (who knows, right?) Chinaman alongside his middle-aged wife, wearing a t-shirt in English that said "What I really need right now is a beer, some coke, and a fucking blow job". "Hey! Did you seen that guy's shirt?", I asked the young lady I was with. Her English was good, but not good enough, and it was just too crowded to go back there for a picture. Rats! I'd have put it all over the net, in the hopes that the perpetrators of this cruel, funny-as-all-hell joke could feel some real pride in accomplishment. Kudos, guys!

It's the kind of prank that can be funny to just think about later. Imagine the guys that made the shirts and got them sold for extra cheap for quick sale themselves imagining JUST ONE of these guys making it to Shanghai or somewhere there were enough westerners around, proudly wearing the shirt he got a primo deal on. "What?" he'll ask, when he gets a chance to ask someone to translate. "Why were people laughing?" "Oh, that kind of humor just doesn't translate very well. Don't worry - it's a nice shirt."

Because of the slight Australian angle, I wanted to put Australian music up. As much as AC-DC would rock, I will put a song from band this is unfortunately mostly known from their disco-era days, a while after most of their best music. This one, Massachusetts, is from 1968 off their album Horizontal. That is almost a decade before the disco-Bee Gees, It wasn't that all their disco songs were even bad, but it was so popular, that it encouraged the band to come out with some real high-pitched crap. Luckily this whole era was terminated with extreme prejudice by rockers like this guy.

Comments:
Moderator
Friday - October 19th 2018 6:58PM MST
PS: [Edit:] That'd be Woody Guthrie ... or maybe his GrandDad.
Moderator
Friday - October 19th 2018 6:44PM MST
PS: I agree. "Album" covers any format, including my latest bakelite 78 rpm collection of 2 Arlo Guthrie songs.

Thanks for writing in, TwToT. Sorry for the year-late reply.
Typing While Texting on Telephone
Saturday - November 11th 2017 11:53PM MST
PS And FFS, don't forget Foreigner, such a great first album. And yes, it's correct to say "album", since an album is a collection of music, in ANY f&c*(ng format! Aren't all those folks that have been saying "latest CD" for the last 15 or 20 gonna feel silly as that format dies a slow death. They may as well switch on back to "latest album" now, like us cool people have already.

TWT
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