More observations from China

Randy and I chatted tonight on Skype, so I felt a little less lonely than earlier tonight. One of his coworkers is a Chinese national that he described tonight as "a well educated, english speaking well rounded person."
Then Randy went on to relay this story from yesterday:

He wanted to look at my china history book to assure it was okay and not biased - he did approve it , but we had a conversation...the conversation had to do with japanese using chinese kanji characters. Tom said there are many similarities between the two peoples. when i commented that "but for a taiphoon, they would be one people" he had no idea what i was talking about...he had never heard of kublai khans attempt to conquer japan during his wars of expansion and the prevention of that by loss of the entire invasion force in a taiphoon. claimed it didn't really happen...what makes this very interesting at the moment is tonight at 9:00 there is a program on discovery channel about this very thing. I wonder if it will be blocked?

Now what Randy was talking about, of course, was Kublai Khan and the taiphoon was THE Kamikaze.
What Randy means by blocked is that sometimes, like when he is watching CNN, the commercials are censored, and all you see are chinese characters on the screen and they play bad music. The other day he experienced an entire program being blocked, again on CNN, and replaced with--get this--an International Edition of THE DAILY SHOW. Yeah. Ans so tonight, when he prepares to watch a show on the Discovery Channel about something Chinese history says never existed, I wonder what he will get to watch. Maybe Daily Show again.
Coming up this next week: a scorecard of how fast or slow certain websites load in China.