the Beijinger

The net is abuzz with chat about The Beijinger’s Annual Restaurant Award results which were officially published yesterday morning – here’s a roundup of online reactions.

IRIVER STORY

Screen size: 6-inch
Resolution: 800 x 600
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Weight: 284g

With its elegant matte white case, the Story is an appealing homage to the Kindle. In addition to its built-in 2GB storage, Story has an SD card slot that supports up to 32GB external storage, meaning you can carry over 25,000 books. The Story also has a built-in speaker, voice recorder, 3.5mm headphone socket, and calendar and memo features. Besides using the formats that other e-book readers support, such as ePub, TXT, MS Office and PDF, Story can read and display JPEG images in a zip file, which makes it ideal for reading comic books.

www.iriver.com.cn

RMB 2,249

Available at the officially authorized Taobao store: http://iriver.mall.taobao.com

APPLE IPAD

Not to get Nietzschean on everyone, but life is a series of senseless motions, random happenstances and chance encounters, requiring someone special to parse into moments that matter and those that don’t. That’s the artist’s gift to us. Attending Julie Doiron’s songwriting workshop this Friday (March 19) won’t necessarily give you this power overnight, but it certainly won’t hurt.

"My brother Andrew lives in Beijing and I am excited to visit him again!"
- Brandon Curtis

Before conducting this interview with The Secret Machines (www.myspace.com/secretmachines), I went through all their albums – days later, the psychedelic thunderstorm of “First Wave Intact” and the innocent love story in “Alone, Jealous & Stoned” are still living in my head. As the band prepares to tour Beijing (Mar 19) and Shanghai (Mar 20), we talked to Brandon Curtis, vocalist/keyboardist/bassist, about the music that brought them to this point.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to everyone who’s actually Irish. For everyone else, it’s just a normal Wednesday and you should be hard at work and not thinking at all about going out on a school night. Not without a good excuse anyway. What's that you say? Your dog's Irish? That'll do, let's go and get smashed. If you’re out to celebrate the land that gave the world the likes of Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Roy Keane, Bono, B*Witched and Colin Farrell, here’s what’s going on in Beijing tonight:

Following our breaking of the news that Beijing’s Show of Peace had been postponed last week, the Global Times managed to obtain some additional comment from organizer Rick Garson, published in today’s paper.

Mao Mao Chong has settled swiftly following its relocation from Wudaoying Hutong.

Yesterday (March 16) saw the best of Beijing’s culinary talent gather at Joy Luck for the Beijinger’s 7th Annual Reader Restaurant Awards, the capital’s oldest and most credible dining awards. 191 Beijing restaurants were nominated across 35 categories, and over 5,000 votes were collated to come up with this year’s results. Hosted by the wonderful Dominic Johnson-Hill of Plastered 8 T-shirts and Beijing personality Ai Wan, the awards attracted a diverse crowd of revelers as they rolled on through the afternoon.

So, without further ado, the winners are…

Tickets are now on sale for the Sanyuan Foods China Open 2010. That’s snooker for the uninitiated. Tickets are priced at RMB 20-2,010 and available by clicking here. To have a look at the schedules and find out when you might see Ronnie O’Sullivan click here.

There’s been more fall-out from the Winter Olympics. Gold medal winner Zhou Yang has come under fire for thanking her parents when everyone knows that you should thank your country above all. To remind her of this was State Sports General Administration deputy director Yu Zaiqing who said “Thanking your parents is not a problem, but should thank the country first. Must put the country first, don’t just thank your parents and that’s it.”