Here's an interesting and funny post from Rebecca MacKinnon on some puns circulating around the Chinese Internet as means of avoiding some of the shotgun keyword filtering and scrutiny that is used to manage undesirable content. Further proof that a little ingenuity goes a long way and that Chinese may be the best language on earth for puns:

In China these days, if your website gets blocked, your blog-hosting service takes down a politically edgy post you wrote, or your ISP deletes your site completely, you say: "I've been harmonized."   The word for harmony, harmonized, or harmonious (all the same word in Chinese) is pronounced "he xie" in Chinese and is written like this: 和谐.    For those without Chinese fonts on their browser.

However, there's a slight problem, which is that since this phrase is so often used sarcastically on Chinese blogs and forums, it has been flagged as a sensitive keyword by many of the blog and forum hosting platforms, increasing the chances that a post using this phrase could itself get "harmonized." So bloggers and chatroom denizens have switched the characters to another phrase, 河蟹, also pronounced "he xie" (with slightly different tonation)  which means "river crab".

Thus, when bloggers seem to be writing nonsensically about "river crab," they're actually talking about censorship. 

Funny and serious at the same time.

On a similar note, thanks to the Harmonious Society and China being the most populated nation on earth, "harmony" is now in serious danger of being the most overused word on the planet.

On a dissimilar note, apologies for light posting over the past week. It's been a bit crazy again.

 Harmonious high speed trains.