That’s the front page of today’s Guangzhou Daily newspaper. Nevermind the Olympic story. The story at the top of the right column says “The next two days it will be as cold as 5 degrees Celsius”. That’s the equivalent of 41 degrees Fahrenheit, which has been about the high here in the Triangle for the last two weeks. The story goes on to say that the city of Guangzhou has issued a cold weather warning. The forecasted high there the next few days is about 50, and this is front-page news like the DC snowstorm is here in the U.S.! What I won’t give for 50-degree weather right now.

I’ve never played World of Warcraft and have never really been into that style of games, but this one might get me to change my mind: There’s a new WoW-style Star Trek game on the way, and it’s in open beta testing right now, which means you can play it for free. The screenshots from the game, named “Star Trek Online” look pretty nice (don’t they always, though?).

And here’s the best part: The game is set in the “real” Star Trek timeline, not the alternate timeline set up by last year’s “Star Trek: 90210″ piece-of-crap movie. It’s set in the year 2409, 31 years after the end of the Voyager saga. The destruction of Romulus — which set in motion the events in the most recent movie — does occur in this timeline, but instead of jumping to that alternate timeline, we stay in the “prime” Trek universe. The mere fact that the game’s Web site has a page and a timeline specifically about this, along with a whole section of “historical logs” explaining how we got to the circumstances in which the game is set shows me that the game apparently cares a lot more about continuity than the movie ever did. That is quintessential Trek-level nerdiness and a good sign for the game.

Having watched my beloved Tar Heels play their first 11 games, I’ve reached this conclusion: This team is smaller than it looks on paper.

Coming into the season, the thing that everybody raved about when they mentioned the Tar Heels was their size. They had six guys in the regular rotation who were 6-foot-9 or taller. However, what the early part of the season has shown me is that this team clearly plays smaller than its height might suggest.

Against lesser opponents — teams that don’t have anywhere near the height to match up with the Tar Heels — UNC can dominate inside. However, when it goes up against one of the top teams, and teams that likely have their own share of big guys, UNC runs into trouble because most, if not all, of their big guys tend to get pushed around inside on the defensive end. It happened against Syracuse, Kentucky, and Texas, and not surprisingly, those are UNC’s three losses thus far. Ed Davis is way too slender to hold his own and gets backed in too far under the basket. Tyler Zeller, at 7-foot, can cause some trouble for opposing big guys but can’t move or jump with the more athletic ones. Jon Henson has the face of a 15-year-old and the frame of a 12-year-old. I really like the Wear brothers’ fundamentals, and they actually probably do a better job boxing out than anybody else on the team, but they still lack the experience to go up against talented big men on good teams. Deon Thompson is probably the only big man on the team that plays with some power, but even he is more of a finesse guy. Compared that to last year, when you weren’t going to push Tyler Hansbrough out of the way without a whole lot of shoving and likely getting whistled for an offensive foul.

I’m not too worried about the Heels’ inside game on offense, since they’ve shown they can score from the post. However, even on this end of the court, you can see them playing smaller than they are. One of the patterns that has emerged early this season has been the Tar Heels’ big men playing volleyball on the offensive glass — getting two or three offensive rebounds but failing to capitalize on them as they just seem to throw the ball back up wildly rather than going up strong to either put it in the basket or get fouled.

I’m really hoping the inside guys pull it together soon and start playing stronger. With basically one solid ballhandler in the regular rotation, UNC is already weak in the turnovers department. They really can’t afford to let opposing big men keep muscling them out of the way.

Don’t worry, Google. I’m still a loyal user of Google Maps and have no plans to switch, but I do find the Bird’s Eye View in Bing Maps very helpful in gaining a better sense of what’s in a particular area, and that’s where its usefulness for me comes in. We’ve been planning a trip to England, and so I’ve been conducting reconnaissance of the locations that we’re thinking about staying in through Bing Maps. For instance, Google Maps gives me walking directions from a hotel to an attraction, which is great, but it always comes with the “This route might be missing sidewalks” disclaimer, which of course leaves me wondering if these directions are taking me across a six-lane interstate. With Bing Maps’ Bird’s Eye View, I can actually see enough details to determine whether there are sidewalks along the route, how wide the roads are, etc. It also gives me a better sense of how far a walk it is (whether that 15-minute estimate in the directions actually seems reasonable). Also, if I’m looking for something specific — say, a rental car location — I can actually see what the building looks like, making it easier for me to spot it when I’m actually there looking for it.

Bird’s Eye View of an intersection in Bath, UK.

The college basketball season is here, and already there’s a surprise: The Daily Tar Heel came out with a list of the top 10 all-time UNC men’s basketball players, and Ed Cota is No. 10 on the list, which looks like this:

1. Phil Ford (1974-1978)
2. James Worthy (1979-1982)
3. Michael Jordan (1981-1984)
4. Tyler Hansborough (2005-2009)
5. Lennie Rosenbluth (1954-1957)
6. Antawn Jamison (1995-1998)
7. George Glamack (1938-1941)
8. Charlie Scott (1967-1970)
9. Sam Perkins (1980-1984)
10. Ed Cota (1996-2000)

I grew up watching those great UNC teams in the late 90s with Cota, Jamison, and Vince Carter. Cota was a terrific passer, but there’s no way he’s one of the 10 best players in UNC history, not by a long shot. His defense was suspect, his quickness questionable, and his shot unreliable. As long as he had Jamison, Carter, and the other pieces of those great UNC teams around, he could hide his flaws and just do what he was so amazing at — pass the ball. When those guys left, however, and the subsequent teams needed more from him than just fancy passing, he just didn’t provide enough. I’m not saying that he wasn’t a good point guard overall, but the guy has no business being among the top 10 best UNC players, not when the likes of Billy Cunningham and Jerry Stackhouse aren’t on the list.

I wish James Fallows of The Atlantic is still blogging from China. He always has such terrific and interesting insights. Even though he’s no longer in China, he has a nice blog post tipping off readers that China is planning something grandiose and frighteningly synchronized for October 1, the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Of course, as Fallows notes,

I can’t emphasize enough how much this is not the way most Chinese life seems most of the time. The main mental pictures I recall are people doing their own thing, in their own way, with only reluctant and enforced attention to the “rules.” But, as with the Olympics, it is certainly the face that official China wants to present — even if the effect is to make foreigners unrealistically alarmed about a big, single-minded, perfectly-organized Rising China emerging to crush all in its path. Since so many of the people working in unison on October 1 will be actual soldiers carrying weapons, the international fluster effect will be all the greater.

You know, part of me can’t help but wish that this is a prank by the Chinese politburo, as in “We really do want to co-exist peacefully with our friends in the West, but let’s mess with their minds and put on this amazing display of power and make them think that we want to march all over their soil with our ginormous army. There will be panic in their streets. They’ll hide their women and children and coward under their dinner tables.” Oh, if only they had the sense of humor to really do that.

We’ve kept mostly to the neighborhoods and are staying off the main roads until we shake off the rust (I hadn’t ridden a bike since high school). I’m loving it. We aren’t exactly racing or anything, and most likely never will, but it’s good exercise, and the time just seems to fly by, whereas when I ride an exercise bike, I’m literally counting the minutes. I guess I’m just not much for indoor, simulated exercises. In addition to the workout I’ve been getting, I’ve also really enjoyed checking out the different neighborhoods near us, some of which I had never really explored. We do need to go get a gel seat soon though. Ouch.

Some pictures of us tooling around on the bikes:

The Washington Post has a gorgeous photo gallery of the Jane Austen Ball in Alexandria. Why did we not receive invitations?!! Oh well, I guess we’ll have to make up for it by going to Austen Fest in England.

From the article:

“I asked him what his name was and he said, ‘Bob Dylan,’ Buble said. “Now, I’ve seen pictures of Bob Dylan from a long time ago and he didn’t look like Bob Dylan to me at all. He was wearing black sweatpants tucked into black rain boots, and two raincoats with the hood pulled down over his head.

“So I said, ‘OK Bob, what are you doing in Long Branch?’ He said he was touring the country with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp. So now I’m really a little fishy about his story. I did not know what to believe or where he was coming from, or even who he was.

“We see a lot of people on our beat, and I wasn’t sure if he came from one of our hospitals or something,” Buble said.

Read the whole story, with a lot more details, at ABC News.

Now that I think about it, Dylan wasn’t exactly kind to the police force in the New Jersey town 50-some miles to the north of Long Branch in one of his songs:

Meanwhile, far away in another part of town
Rubin Carter and a couple of friends are drivin’ around.
Number one contender for the middleweight crown
Had no idea what kinda shit was about to go down
When a cop pulled him over to the side of the road
Just like the time before and the time before that.
In Paterson that’s just the way things go.
If you’re black you might as well not show up on the street
‘Less you wanna draw the heat.

Wonder what he’ll have to say about this little episode. The man did write “When the Ship Comes In” after being denied a hotel room because of his appearance. Of course, that was 40-some years ago.

There was just one slight problem, as John Robinson, the paper’s editor, pointed out on Twitter:

Cringe-inducing moment: we used a Fender Strat to illustrate Les Paul’s death.

In the paper’s defense, that’s kind of a tough one to catch unless you had someone who knew a Fender Strat from a Les Paul working on your design or copy desk. Heck, I play guitar a little bit, and I would’ve looked right past the promo and not noticed it. To the paper’s credit, they didn’t try to hide the error, since Robinson’s tweet is how I found out about it. And one of the good things about working at a newspaper is that you may have screwed up today, but you get to start with a clean slate tomorrow (and a chance to make all new screwups).

I was literally left speechless. I shudder to think about how this abomination wrecks Dylan’s other masterpieces. Seriously, clowns humping exercise balls? And I love how literal their interpretation of the song was. There’s a line in there about clowns? Let’s put in a troupe of dancing clowns. The song is called “Like a Rolling Stone”? Let’s roll some big exercise balls around. This is the antithesis of Dylan. Ironically, this performance would’ve made an amazing satire of a bad interpretation of a Dylan song, like something you might see on Saturday Night Live. The critics agreed on this butchering of the bard’s work. Well, all except for Rosie O’Donnell and the studio audience on The View, who burst into thunderous applause at the end of the clip above, punctuated by a “Wow!” from Rosie. Wow indeed. I think this response from Craig Ferguson sums it up pretty well:

Sexy Speed Dating in Beijing from Sexy Beijing TV on Vimeo.

Times are tough in the newspaper industry, and even The Onion is not immune. The paper’s 141-year-old owner has sold it to a Chinese company that “is dedicated to harvesting the ocean’s great aquatic bounty to bring residual fish and fish-related nourishment and substances to honorable consumers across the globe.” Here’s an NPR interview with the paper’s editor about the sale. Of course, as is always the case in these situations, we don’t expect the change in ownership to have any impact on the paper’s editorial content.

The Herald-Sum has a story today about the effects of the recession on the South Square area in Durham. I remember when we first moved to Durham in 1990, South Square was the main shopping area for us, but it’s been in decline since Southpoint Mall opened in 2002. They did open a Sam’s Club and a Target where South Square Mall used to be, but I’ve noticed quite a few businesses in that area closing lately. I was pretty upset that the Boston Market closed down, and we never got a chance to try Starlu before it went out of business. And the closing of the Shannon Road post office was really inconvenient as we no longer have a post office near where we live. Sam’s Club and China Buffet are about the only two reasons I go to South Square anymore.

I heard this story on NPR on my drive home last Friday. It’s about a litter of kittens they found in the bushes in front of the state capitol in Raleigh. The agency helping with the adoption, Independent Animal Rescue, is the same one where we got our cat Bingley from last year. Cute story for cat-lovers.

I don’t usually tell people to check out videos of annual meetings, but this one is an exception, thanks to the Gannett stock-holding gentleman in this screencap. He takes the mike around the time indicated in the screencap, and he comes back for an encore in the second half of the video. It’s made even better by the face of stone on the guy behind him (to the right, in the tan suit).

GotoWeb20

I stumbled across this site while searching for online apps. It’s a nice listing of a wide array of Web 2.0 applications.