A concerned and observent reader notes the following:
If it was really blocked by China's great censorwall how could you write this? By vivalamuerte, # 28. September 2007, 00:21:48 Bill writes:
I use a couple different proxy programs that are able to update blog sites. The fact is that not only is Opera.com blocked in the PRC but that the school I work and live at now has abysmal DSL service and the connection is non-existent or so slow I have to surrender the desire to work hard on the site (and a couple others I began). Sometimes I am lucky and can add a comment like this, but usually it will not let me. I cannot open necessary sites to download new pictures and research topics. I cannot even open images that are 50 or 100 KB in size. My connection freezes up and times out. A site like this depends on fresh images as well as researched information from places lke Wikipedia (which is also banned in the PRC).The truth is that Opera.com is completely banned in China along with a host of other blog and general net sites and the list grows all the time. But there are ways around that, but there seems no way around my poor connection since I cannot use an outside service on the school grounds. I need a special ID card that monitors my IP address constantly to use a public Internet Cafe and the card is only issued to Chinese Nationals. Some places have temp cards for foreigners, but not near me and there are less and less as the government here cracks down more and more on free speech and zombie movies. Ultimately the problems bloggers face here are not due to the poor connections or repressive Internet Cafe regualtions which are taking overly rather quickly, but to the need of the PRC to censor public opinion and free thought. My site is not political and is lowbrow actually, but individal sites are not blocked, rather entire hosts and blog types are banned in one fell swoop and kept on the other side of the infamous Greatfire Wall of China. Sigh. I may try to shift the theme to MSN My Spaces soon as it is sort of more reliable. Once I shift sites (after I have exhausted all means to continue here)I will announce itsaddress in a future post. Good and logical question.
A CRITICAL BULLETIN FROM THE STAFF OF THE URANIUM CAFE There have not been many new updates added to the Café in a while and some posted there now have been left unfinished. Why you may be wondering? Well we here at the home office have been busy beginning a new project over at Rotten Tomatoes we call The Son of The Uranium Café. It has taken some time to get the project's look and feel up to our standards. As well it has been difficult getting the feel of how the site works and what is able to be done and what cannot be done. The purpose of the new site is to focus on movie reviews exclusively and for our chief reviewer to hone up his skills in a site that will have no other purposes or distractions than commenting on films. The Café is a multi-themed site and as we have said before the problem lies not with what to put in but what to leave out.
There has been talk as well around the office lately of a philosophy based site. The word is that a site has been activated but that the look is too generic for our philosophy section to gain inspiration from. There is some development in the works however and that project may get off the ground here shortly. Yes, some of us here at the staff are concerned with ontologial and existential matters as well as 50 foot radioactive insects
While the Café has birthed a new movie site we will continue to post movie reviews here as well. The Café affords more space and graphic capabilities than what is possible at Rotten Tomatoes and reviews will be shared and linked between the two sites. So while things here are slow do not fear there is more to come in no time. It is also necessary for our archive department to go back several pages, even to the 1st page it seems, and finish posts and make corrections or adjustments in the graphics. It was discovered that the essay on Ambient Music was never completed back when we were doing extensive posting on Robert Fripp. There are other glitches that need tending to and they will be taken care of and we apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you or for increases in psycotropic medications. We hope we are not responsible for the sharp rise in group suicides in Japan though some of the data coming in from our Tokyo office seems to point towards that awful conclusion. Before another group of distraught school kids in Nagoya hurl themselves in front of a speeding subway train clutching their copies of The Suicide Manual we will get the Café up and running again. You have our word. The link to our new movie related site at Rotten Tomatoes is: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/vine/journal_view.php?journalid=428636
WE WILL PERSEVERE AND OVERCOME. NO ONE, YES NO ONE ON GOD'S GREEN EARTH, WILL STOP US FROM TEACHING THE WORLD ABOUT FEMALE PRISON MOVIES OR SUPPRESS OPEN DEBATES ON EXACTLY WHO THE GREATEST CATWOMAN OF ALL TIME WAS.WE WILL NOT GIVE UP THE GOOD FIGHT!
Dance Bill Robinson! Dance! We have reason to celebrate! God Bless Apple Pie and The Uranium Cafe! Our greatest fears here at The Uranium Cafe have come true and we suddenly find ourselves the target of a vast and complicated Communist conspiracy to prevent the dissemination of valuable life altering information to the needy public. Yes, that is correct. Senator Joe McCarthy was right all along. We have found ourselves not only behind the Bamboo Curtain but our valuable cyber tramissions to the freeworld are being blocked by the Great Fire Wall of Red China. Let me be clear on this matter. The people of the PRC are a proud and noble and hardworking people and we at the Cafe acknowledge this. They have only been supportive of our efforts here to get out our message and under torture have revealed none of the whereabouts of our staff, but now we are all victims of an insidious and sophisticated Marxist technology. But by my blood we will not give up. Until they pry this mouse from my cold, lifeless hand we will continue in our efforts to bring to the world the truth about truly great men, true voices of freedom, such as Roger Corman, who brought us The Man With X-Ray Eyes and Big Bad Mamma, and Ed Wood Jr who starred in as well as wrote and directed one of the 1st great film classics about transvestitism, Glenn or Glenda. And we will not be slack in praising great film gems such as Ted V. Mikel's The Corpse Grinders or Russ Meyer's ode to the violence in women Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!. Dance little soldier girl. Dance! More grindhouse exploitation film trailers on the way. Be happy! And let us not forget to remind you we will do our best to bring you high quality images of Jungle Girls in Bondage comic book covers as well as US GIs in WWII roasting Imperial Japanese jungle fighters with flame thrower covers... these are the images that resonate the true American spirit and by Mark Twain's moustache we will not lay down and surrender. They will try to silence us, but until they put me in front of a firing squad (or just raise their voices rather loudly and glare at me in a rude way) you can always come here and find slimy Men's Magazines scans and southern USA drive in movie culture as well as sexy Bettie Page pictures and info on underground Japanese cinema. You can find all that and more but you can also find long winded pompous essays on art rock bands like Yes and King Crimson. Will we have to compromise quality and quantity? Perhaps, yes, perhaps. But we will not forget the motto on the placemats of a fine Beijing eatery: Better Read Than Dead! God Bless the USA and Shirley Temple! Dance Bill Robinson! Dance! DON'T YOU BE TRICKED INTO TRADING YOUR TREASURED FREEDOM FOR ANOTHER "ISM" Can I help, you ask? Is there some way that I, John Q.Public, can assist my fellow countrymen living in nice apartments and eating at great restuarants every night in a repressive regime spread the message of low brow western culture? Yes, as a matter of fact you can. I will sit up a link to a Swiss bank account under a false identity soon and you can contribute money, preferably in the five digit range, to there and it will help tremendously I assure you. I prefer American dollars, British pounds or Euros and if you want to give me your account number and PIN to expedite transactions that will help too. All funds will go directly to maintaining this site and helping me to travel around the world and stay in lavish hotels and nothing else I promise. Together we can move mountains! Don't worry comrade, no need to be angry. That promised post on flesh eating zombie films will be here soon. Celebrate the good tomorrow!
Due to a glitch in our vast and complicated operating system here at The Uranium Cafe (a subsidiary of Miasma Inc.)we have found it necessary to redo most of the first three pages of the Cafe. This operation will take a week or so for our highly trained technical crew to correct and so new updates and completion of current essays (i.e. the much anticipated explanation of Frippertronics) will be slightly delayed.
We see this problem, a minor set back when compared to the mass extictions of entire species that have occurred in the past, as in fact a good thing. The look and feel of the Cafe has evolved over the last year and we here at the central office see this as an opportuniy to upgrade the look of the first few pages somewhat to stay in balance with what is happening now. You may want to go back in a week or so to those early pages and see if something new has been added or edited. Some new additions include, among other things, a video clip of Yvonne Craig riding her Batcycle to the tune of the original Batgirl theme song. So see, our time is not being wasted here.
We are proud of the the new look and direction of the Cafe and as we approach post number 100 we want to thank our millions of supporters worldwide who have made this venture the success that it is. It is time to renew or mission statement and stay true to it, and that is "to provide the public with finely crafted glimpses into the classic, cool, campy, cheesy, corny and often crappy worlds of cult cinema, off beat music, comic books, and whatever is laying around on the coffee table that day." So stay tuned curious one, there is more to come.
WIDGETIZE