I really like these creative symbols made up of characters and pictures, at Dalian Library. The one on the left is 烟 yān, which means smoke, and they’ve used a cigarette to draw part of the fire radical. In the picture on the right they've combined the character 静 jìng (part of the word 安静 ānjìng – quiet) with a picture of a phone. Below it is 嘘 xū, which represents the “Shh!" sound, with a hushed mouth to replace the mouth radical. Very clever.

Parting words from Brendan O’Kane

Brendan O'Kane will be a familiar name to many of you. He is a long time Beijing resident, accomplished translator, and "accidental pedagogue" at Popup Chinese and IES. Next month he leaves China to do an MA at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on classical China, and is sticking around for a PhD which means, presumably, indefinitely. As he has far too much good sense to write a "Why I'm Leaving China" post on his own, I roped him into doing a Q&A instead, so I could ask about his experiences here over the last dozen years, his thoughts on Chinese literature, and more.

Hanging out with Weibo's most famous cretin

B Ge (B哥), or "Brother B", has 103636 followers on Weibo, China's Twitter. He posts silly videos of him goofing around, such as pretending to down a bottle of cooking oil on the Beijing subway, or blowing up a condom into a balloon in the supermarket. Today he posted his newest video – featuring, to my everlasting and unerasable embarrassment, yours truly.

When giving cars Chinese names, many brands opt for 马 (mǎ), the character for horse, such as the well-known 宝马 (bǎomǎ – BMW or "treasure horse"), Mazda (马自达 – mǎzìdá), whose use of 马 seems to be phonetic, and Aston Martin 阿斯顿·马丁 (āsīdùn·mǎdīng). 马 also appears as a meaning radical in the second character of the name for Mercedes Benz, 奔驰 (bēnchí) – which is, appropriately, a word meaning “to run quickly, speed, or gallop”.