Odds and ends (零碎东西)?

The Chinese characters mean either “odds and ends” or “remnant fragment East West,” not sure which.

“Mental mistakes” in Chinese: Watching Game 6 of the NBA Finals on CCTV, as usual, I couldn’t decipher much of the Chinese commentators’ rapid-fire analysis. But at one point, I could have sworn I heard the words “mental mistake” after a Miami turnover. Nah, couldn’t be. A few minutes later, there, I heard it again.

“Mental mistake” is evidently Chinese for “mental mistake.”

It was great seeing Dirk Nowitzki, Jason Kidd and the Dallas Mavericks win their first title, but enough with the Nowitzki-Bird comparisons, please. As the Mavs were clinching the title, they juxtaposed Dirk shots with footage of Larry Bird in Game 6 of the Celtics’ victory over Houston in the 1986 Finals, when Bird put up 29 points, 11 rebounds, 12 assists and three steals. Dirk finished with 12 assists for the entire series. He couldn’t touch Bird’s passing genius.

For that matter, let’s call a moratorium on Kobe-Jordan comparisons, Lebron-MJ, Lebron-anyone at this point. Stop it. Just stop it.

Upstaged on the bus, for once: One sweltering afternoon, I’m sitting in the bus, waiting for it to leave the Jianghai College lot, when on steps a man with a basket of large, gray, squawking birds. They looked sort of like a cross between gray geese and pelicans, or gray geese and egrets, or … I don’t know, they were gray.*

From that point on, no one noticed the Westerner aboard. Which was fine. Did I mention it was hot? About halfway along the 20-minute trip, it was impossible not to notice that the odor was getting stronger. (Having given up my seat, I was standing nearer the birds by that time.)

Then, I looked down and noticed a puddle of yellow fluid, like a thin, watery yolk, slowly emanating from the basket. I mean, like, what? Do these things lay fried eggs? Do birds take a piss? I’m sorry, I’m not exactly an ornithologist here.

I began to feel weak-kneed and got off at the next stop, where I immediately became the subject of stares again. Almost wish the birds had gotten off with me. Almost.

Trouble redefining a label, let alone a life: Heard from an long-lost friend awhile back. After a warm exchange of niceties, as proof you can pick up a conversation wherever you left off 30 or so years ago, he acidly noted in one missive: “Hey, brainiac, you are not an ‘out-of-work’ journalist, as your blog subhead reads. If you get paid at the university, which I assume you do, then you’re working.”

Good point. I changed it to “laid-off” journalist. Thanks, Mark. (I had already changed “sportswriter” to “journalist” because I didn’t want to be defined only by sports. As long as I’m consumed by what to call myself, I may never actually have to decide what to do next.)

The origin of The Rog-ect: Meant to explain this eons ago. It goes way back to an inside joke among sportswriters at The News & Observer that I liked to assign impossible projects, i.e., “Hey, can you give me something on the history of sports by 5? And I really think you can keep it under 20 inches.”

I’m not sure I was ever that bad. OK, maybe.

*Upon further reflection, I’m guessing those birds were cormorants, which have been used to fish in Chinese rivers for hundreds of years. Trained and tethered by the throat, which prevents them  from swallowing larger fish, the birds are capable of diving deep for their catches. When I saw this done on CCTV, a light went on. It’s being done now more for tourists.

Things that can go wrong with a quiz

All part of the learning process:

• You start grading and realize that one task — choose the correct sentence — doesn’t work because, grammatically, all of them are correct.
• You have to throw out another question because it refers to an activity that was done in a different class.
• You agree to give two late students a chance to take it around lunchtime, and moments after handing them the quizzes, a shaken bottle of Pepsi blows up all over you.

What’s the point of giving a written quiz in an oral English class? My semester plan for all classes had to include at least one quiz, and time would not permit individual oral tests. Instead, I concocted questions from what we had covered, and also from a couple of persistent pronunciation issues, such as the inappropriate use of “s” at the end of a singular noun.

A fill-in-the-blank task proved most difficult in all classes: My friend really loves basketball. He’s a _______ of Kobe Bryant.

a. fen
b. fans
c. phan
d. fan

Most of those who had the wrong answer chose b. (Kobe Bryant is huge in China, by the way.)

Oh, and a note for fellow ESL teaching rookies: You might not think this would be required at the college level, but it’s a good idea to remind students not to use their cell phones to look up the answers, to check a friend’s answers before changing theirs, or to discuss possible answers with other students. After writing these rules on the blackboard, I saw two students talking and checking each other’s quizzes, put a stop to it, saw them doing it again. And then one more time. After seeing me make a little mark on their sheets to remind myself, they begged me to forgive them.

NBA on TN … er, CCTV

A friend showed up early Wednesday morning to catch the season-opening double-header on the Chinese national sports television network, which picks up the U.S. feed but has its own announcers calling the game. The first game, Miami at Boston, started at 7:30 a.m. here.

As stated in a previous post, David Stern’s vision of selling basketball, or lán qiú (篮球), in China appears to be paying off big. The NBA is huge here. The good news for expatriates: regular game coverage on CCTV5. So what if the play-by-play is Chinese? I might even learn something.

(Click on the TV listings on CCTV5’s site to find at least the week’s upcoming broadcast schedule. As for the site’s NBA news, my Google translation tool produced such headlines this morning as: “Bosh completely lost the opening game witch taught him how to do the Big Three pivot” and “Big Three gorgeous debut mistakes coach Wade was forced to make way for him to the emperor.”)

At Jianghai College, in addition to the obvious interest in Kobe (sounds more like “Koo-be” here), LeBron and, of course, Yao Ming, the evidence of the basketball craze can be seen in pickup games at night on courts with no lights. (Reality show tip: A televised slam-dunk competition works best with players who can actually dunk. The show I saw, the competitors were, like, a combined 4 for 60.)

In the next room, my friend is glued to the Yao-Kobe matchup in the opener between the Lakers and Houston, having just suffered through LeBron’s loss to the Celtics. Which team does he favor most?

“I like the three groups,” he says.

Need to turn him on to the Knicks, a difficult task in any country.

UPDATE: OMG, is there a Chinese expression for “Heidi game”?! With 12.4 seconds left and the Rockets trailing the Lakers by two, CCTV5 switched to a Korea-China women’s volleyball match.