Don’t know if something like this existed before, but I was watching the news as I ate my breakfast danbing this morning and thought it would be fun to list the stories you see on the news.
Here’s what I saw in the 5 minutes it took to eat my breakfast this morning:
A Macao tourist(??- I think it said 澳客…May have been 奧客- Austrian Tourist. I didn’t pay close enough attention and it seems unlikely that it was an Austrian…although maybe 澳客 refers to an Australian…I’m SO CONFUSED!..I couldn’t hear the audio so I was relying on the headlines.) was riding on the MRT when he decided to press the intercom to the MRT driver and tell him to go faster. Translation: EVIL FOREIGNERS!
A 正妹 (hot girl!) got a job with NASA! Translation: Wow, girls that are pretty can get jobs normally associated with intelligent ugly nerds!
Dangit…there was one other report that was laughable as well, but it slipped my mind.
Think 澳客 means troublseome guest. I only know through watching 王偉忠’s show when he interview airs hostesses and they said it was code for trouble makers. May be wrong though.
Is that just because of the inherent pun or would that be the way they tend to write those terms in the first place? When I saw “澳客”, my mind immediately assumed it was referring to a passenger or tourist from Macau or Australia.
I can do one better: Taipei zoo penguins move house
[quote]o you know how penguins in zoos move to another pen? Interestingly, they need to be ordered based on their personalities!
These King penguins in Taipei Zoo are moving to a new enclosure so the Penguin House air-conditioning system and brine pipeline can be renovated.
Although the distance was only about 0.01 miles or less than three minutes, thorough preparation was needed, including a barrier-free road.
King penguins tend to move together following the “lead penguin,” so choosing the right leader was vital. It must have these three basic characteristics:
•Stays calm, and doesn’t get easily agitated.
•Experience moving between different rooms
•A good understanding of the babysitter’s thoughts
…
However, the group of penguins wasn’t ready yet. So they had to come back and do it all over again.
[/quote]
[quote=“Taiwanguy”]Don’t know if something like this existed before, but I was watching the news as I ate my breakfast danbing this morning and thought it would be fun to list the stories you see on the news.
Here’s what I saw in the 5 minutes it took to eat my breakfast this morning:
A Macao tourist(??- I think it said 澳客…May have been 奧客- Austrian Tourist. I didn’t pay close enough attention and it seems unlikely that it was an Austrian…although maybe 澳客 refers to an Australian…I’m SO CONFUSED!..I couldn’t hear the audio so I was relying on the headlines.) was riding on the MRT when he decided to press the intercom to the MRT driver and tell him to go faster. Translation: EVIL FOREIGNERS!
A 正妹 (hot girl!) got a job with NASA! Translation: Wow, girls that are pretty can get jobs normally associated with intelligent ugly nerds!
Dangit…there was one other report that was laughable as well, but it slipped my mind.[/quote]
That was me … last night I bought some hot sauce and it was getting cold … :ohreally:
On TV right now: Taxi driver gets into 47 accidents in 4 years to get NT$360,000 out of his insurance co.
This is followed by: convenience store employee finds someone’s car keys on floor, identifies car and goes for a joyride all while on the clock
And then the story that started this thread: Man on MRT gets fed up with low speed at night, tells driver to go faster
On one hand, I am happy to live in Taiwan where the news reel reads like that and not like: 2 killed in the south -knife used, 3 killed in the north -shots fired, family killed in midnight house break in, thieves stop bus and rob all with 4 killed, 3 year old raped, siblings 5 and 6 raped and killed, etc. one after the other, as in the old country.
But then there is a limit to the nonsense… like, relevance wise. sigh I have been tempted to make a list of news at key hours and compare among stations -basically, same news, maybe different order, but most of the time you switch channels… same thing is playing, same order. And not just Apple and ERA.
OTOH, was the guy arrested? Misuse of intercom is supposed to land you a fine, at least.
But then there is a limit to the nonsense… like, relevance wise. sigh I have been tempted to make a list of news at key hours and compare among stations -basically, same news, maybe different order, but most of the time you switch channels… same thing is playing, same order. And not just Apple and ERA.
OTOH, was the guy arrested? Misuse of intercom is supposed to land you a fine, at least.[/quote]
It’s the same, repeated every 15 minutes, the same video used 6x in the same report, for 24 h … that’s why they call it ‘24 hours’ (no)news channels.
A group of guys were waterproofing the roof of an 11-story building without any safety precautions at all.
This segment was a personal favorite of mine- Began with video of a computer screen displaying what looked like a PTT chat in which someone was complaining about the service at a local chicken-on-rice street vendor. Someone on PTT is whining? SEND A REPORTER! Cut to reporter interviewing the old lady that runs the booth in which the lady says she doesn’t recall an incident like that. Cut to reporter interviewing random customer:
REPORTER: How was the service here today?
CUSTOMER: Alright, I guess. Nothing really special.
I work in a news room and I promise you: the average Taiwanese reporter sits on the computer all day and gets a good portion of the day’s “news” from PTT, Facebook, and people’s internet replies to other stuff. If you carefully read any single Apple Daily report, it nearly always says “Ma Ying-jeou said blahblahblah. 網友 responded with…”
I have told my coworkers that I won’t allow any story with “netizens” to go past my desk because you could replace the word netizen with “some random guy waiting for a bus.” There is nothing representative about some kind on the internet. If you want to do man-on-the-street interviews, get out there and do them, and do them well. Otherwise just stfu. Thanks.
Is that just because of the inherent pun or would that be the way they tend to write those terms in the first place? When I saw “澳客”, my mind immediately assumed it was referring to a passenger or tourist from Macau or Australia.[/quote]
It’s a homophones pun thing that they love to do, especially for headlines. For example, if team Taiwan wins a silver medal by winning a game, they’d sometimes write it as 台灣"銀"了, instead of 台灣贏了. If they won gold they’d sometimes write it as 台灣"金"棒 instead of 台灣真棒.
Not really. Western media didn’t do a very responsible job reporting on China’s pun ban (surprise, surprise). The original text can be found here: sarft.gov.cn/articles/2014/1 … 80126.html
“Notification about regulations on using common national language and writing in broadcast television programs and advertisements”
It mentions concern over “language and writing that does not conform to standards” (语言文字不规范的问题), citing as examples arbitrary tampering with words (随意篡改), misuse of chengyu (乱用成语) – giving specicifc cases including a medicine add that changed “brooking no delay” (刻不容缓) into “brooking no extended cough” 咳不容缓. No mention of “puns” is made in the entire list.
But TV operators are cautioned against violating “the spirit of the exceptional traditional culture of China” (中华优秀传统文化的精神). The only requirements are: 1: Gain a “complete understanding” of national language standards; 2: Use chengyu only when they are necessary; 3: use Chinese (putonghua) characters strictly according to their proper use; 4: improve censoring of inappropriate use of language.
In essence, yes you could call it a ban on puns, but it is actually much more arbitrary and broad than that because it focuses on “non-standard” uses of any phrase, be it a pun or otherwise.
[quote=“Icon”]I can do one better: Taipei zoo penguins move house
[quote]o you know how penguins in zoos move to another pen? Interestingly, they need to be ordered based on their personalities!
These King penguins in Taipei Zoo are moving to a new enclosure so the Penguin House air-conditioning system and brine pipeline can be renovated.
Although the distance was only about 0.01 miles or less than three minutes, thorough preparation was needed, including a barrier-free road.
King penguins tend to move together following the “lead penguin,” so choosing the right leader was vital. It must have these three basic characteristics:
•Stays calm, and doesn’t get easily agitated.
•Experience moving between different rooms
•A good understanding of the babysitter’s thoughts
…
However, the group of penguins wasn’t ready yet. So they had to come back and do it all over again.
[/quote][/quote]
12 years of education from 7.00AM to 9.00PM, not including Bushiban, but including weekend classes and classes during your winter and summer vacations, doesn’t give you good skills with people and animals.
I used to have cable before MOD, and the cable news channel my partner watched had frequent news stories devoted to babies laughing on YouTube. I would sometimes ask why I was seeing the same babies as they’d shown months earlier, and my partner would explain that they’re reviewing the previous ones before showing the new one. Laughing babies on YouTube. A regular news story.
If memory serves (and it was some years ago, plus I’m a forgetful sort anyway, so I could well be mistaken) the news channel was appropriately named TVBS…?