Lost (Season 4) in Beijing
Occasionally, in the interest of better understanding our readers, that's Beijing will organize for a research company to conduct surveys that attempt to reveal the habits and interests of the city's English-magazine-reading public. One of the rather depressing, but unsurprising, results of a recent survey into how readers spend their leisure time revealed that Beijing's foreign population enjoys nothing more than veging out in front of the TV watching a DVD. Given the price of DVDs and boxed sets of popular American TV shows, not to mention that a lot of the films available are yet to be released in a lot of countries, this is not a particularly surprising result. Add sub-zero temperatures and a traditional festival that a lot of foreigners have difficulty connecting to (The Spring Festival TV Gala anyone?), to the equation and we're guessing that any expats remaining in Beijing over the holidays will be spending a large chunk of their time wallowing in the warm glow of the TV or computer screen.
Given this fact, and in spite of our strong recommendation to all to get out amongst it all (see this week's issue of 7 Days for some ideas of what to do), we're cautiously going to announce that the fourth season of the popular American TV series Lost has just started screening in the States.
For those fortunate enough not to have wasted precious hours of their lives in marathon Lost sessions, always having to watch "just one more episode", the show's producers have done a good job of distilling the plot highlights of the first three seasons into one 8.14 min promo clip (we're sure these numbers mean something!) – you can take a look at it here. The first episode of the fourth season went to air on Jan 31.
Given the fact that ABC's website only allows episode downloads to be seen by viewers in the USA, for details on how to view the show in Beijing, we recommend that you take a look at the answers.com pages that discuss Bit Torrent and Mininova.
Alternatively, you can also take a look at some of China's Youtube equivalents, which despite recent reports of them being more strictly monitored come Jan 31, seem to still be operating like they have in the past. Tudou and Youku are two of the most popular.
Links and Sources:
ABC: Official Lost Page
ABC: Full Episode Player (doesn't work in China)
Youtube: LOST in 8:15 (Official Recap S1-S3)
NYTimes: Tropical Teaser: ‘Lost’ Clues Decoded
Answers.com: Bit Torrent
Answers.com: Mininova
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