The New Yorker, 2008-09-15

[fiefoe]

Cartoon: One shark with a hand out of his mouth to another - "I'm trying to eat more locals." (BEK)

"The Home Team" / Peter Hessler

• Village conversations had a way of veering off suddenly, like a hawk that catches some invisible air current, but inevitably they returned to settle on certain topics: food, weather, money.
• In China, chess is a sport: the Chinese Xiangqi Association is administered by the All-China Sports Federation, just like the Chinese Cycling Association and the Chinese Basketball Association. The federation also handles bridge, Go, darts, and the Chinese Tug-of-War Association.
• And Chinese chess truly feels like a sport, as does chess-watching. It even has set positions. There’s always at least one observer who gives advice before a move is made. Another onlooker waits until the move is finished before he offers his comments. This is the pairs event for spectators—the coach and the critic—and you would expect it to drive players to violence. But all aggression is directed at the board. Near the Lama Temple, Old Zhang and Little Zhang slammed the wooden pieces as hard as they could with every move.
  “I’m giving your horse something to eat!”
  Thwack!
  “I need a gate! I need a gate!”
  “Right, right! That’s the right move!”
  Thwack!
  “I’m giving it to you cheap!”
  
• The chapter about Liu Xiang, China’s great hurdler, made you wish that the book had been issued with some wood to knock:
  Liu Xiang is healthy, and while training and racing he rarely gets injured, which is hard for an athlete.
• The first thing we saw was a woman handing out cheap plastic ponchos. It was like that at every event—the organizers knew their crowd.
• In a sense, China had reached the perfect stage for hosting the Games: workers were cheap, political accountability was minimal, and the rising middle and upper classes could attend and take pride in the competition.

"The Long Dig" / Burkhard Bilger

• Herrenknecht,.. believes that few places can't be improved by a good-sized hole. .. At any given moment, close to a thousand Herrenknecht worms are burrowing under mountains, rivers, and cities on almost every continent.
• (Their father used to tell them that when he was growing up his family had only five pairs of wooden shoes for twelve children; those who woke up last went barefoot.)
• For almost two thousand years, nothing in Europe had equalled the mile-long passage that the Romans dug from Naples to Pozzuoli, heating the volcanic rock with bonfires and dousing it with cold water to crack it.
• (The Thames tunnel:) "Imagine working in this vile hole, showered in sewage, with jets of flames coming out,"

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