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Regular readers will recall that Imagethief became a father earlier this year. Having a child requires new parents to undertake many unfamiliar responsibilities. These include the obvious, such as the care and feeding of an infant, and some things that you really just don't think much about in advance. Among those are the bureaucratic hoops that ...

These two have been patrolling my housing complex for the past week. I haven't seen them make any collars yet, but I've been surfing much less sm*t than usual, just in case:   Note: Don't know who Jingjing and Chacha are? Click here. Or, to see them in action, here.  

Imagethief likes the Mid-Autumn Festival. I like it because even though it actually comes in late summer, it reminds me of autumn, and autumn is famously the nicest time of year in Beijing. In any year devoid of Olympic rigging, late summer in Beijing is intolerably hot, muggy and polluted. This year it was merely hot. Over the years many people ...

Like a giant kid who's been holding a fart in during a three week elevator ride, Beijing has apparently relaxed its many industrial sphincters and let a big one rip. That's the only way I can explain the lighting-fast deterioration in air quality. In the space of about 36 hours the skies have transformed from the Olympic blue we all got perhaps ...

From the ''you couldn't make it up'' department here in Imagethief Towers, an old-school China Daily gem:City gets tough on foreign jaywalkersBy Zhan Lisheng (China Daily)The southern Chinese city of Guangzhou is taking stern action against foreigners who break traffic rules, the public security bureau said Tuesday.It follows tough measures ...

Imagethief realizes that he and much of the journalistic and blogging community have been doing a grave disservice to our readers who don't live in Beijing. We beg your forgiveness. Living in Beijing is such an all-consuming experience that we sometimes forget there is a world beyond the fifth ring road. Although we are, of course, tangentially ...

I've been looking at this message for the past four years: ''You are liable for any misuse of the contents of the advice''. Some of you may recognize this as the warning that all Chinese ATMs give you if you have the temerity to ask for a printed transaction record. It's also printed on the backs of the transaction slips themselves. There is a ...

There is no such thing as a dull year in China. 2008 is well underway and already looks like another whopper. We're only a month in and we've already had the biggest storms in half a century. The Olympics, the mother of all China events, is now a scant seven months off. God only knows what will happen in between. But before we get too far into ...

I pinch-hit for Kaiser on the back page of That's Beijing's January issue. Thanks to my stint in Shanghai it's the first time in nearly a year that I've written something for them. Fittingly, I wrote about moving back to Beijing from Shanghai. The column is finally online:Ich Bin Ein Beijinger: Beijing Reloaded''You’re going to hate it,” said one ...

A few days ago Imagethief, in maximum Grinch mode, wrote a long rant on the miserable office ritual of ''secret santa'' gift programs. In that post I agonized about how awful I am at buying cheap presents for people I don't know. It seems I'm not the only one. I missed the office Christmas party on Friday as I was flying back from Tokyo (where a ...