The Great Chinese Internet Gray-out

Looks like I can manage to publish now what I wrote about the late-December earthquake a week ago.

I was mindin' my own humble translator's business yesterday (Dec. 27), finishing up the last order and getting ready to finally set up a Livejournal community for our student-teacher creativity gig. My head as usual these days was mildly spinning for the lack of sleep and the abundance of things to do, so I didn't really notice the slight movement of the chair under me, writing it off on the need to rest. But the shaking of the ground became more consistent, demanding my attention with every gentle wave of the curtain and beckoning of the headphone cord hanging down from the table lamp. I listened in, trying to hope it was still me perceiving the world in a weird way rather then the reality knocking on the door of my private universe.

After some sober assessments it turned out it was the house that was actually shaking. Hoping for the better but preparing for the worst I bravely pulled on the pants, getting ready to leave my 5th floor at the first sign of a more dangerous event, but the translator’s conscience made me finish off the job, and by that time the surreal spinning of the reality stopped. Though the image of myself stumbling into my socks, hardly managing to slip them on, and the thought about my probable inability to coordinate my survival actions should the need be, made me wonder how far set back our daily routine is in the face of an emergency which - God forbid - may happen at the time unknown. Something to think about.

In the morning the next day I performed my early-bird's routine, which usually concludes with quenching my curiosity as to what the mailboxes contain. But not this time. All the desired sites refused to load, though the connection existed, teasing me with the headers of the pages I was so eager to observe, but the Chinese sites happily jumped onto the screen. The bright thought about connecting those two events appeared immediately but as immediately was discarded ... And as it turned out, wrongly so. The suddenly valuable news that managed to squeeze through clearly stated that the earthquake south of Taiwan shook the ocean floor shifting some relevant slabs over the fiber-glass thoroughfares of information exchange between the Mainland and the world. The director of the centralized Chinese internet office or whatever it is called said that they are trying to reconnect China with the rest of the world, but it is not known when the success of such an operation may even dawn on the horizon of our hopes. Now the so familiar means of communication gave in, and in their ebb there rose a long-shooed impending thought whispering that all the cable-dependant gizmos are nothing but a toy compared with the raw physical power, - on inactivity of which all those gadgets actually depend. It's good there are still people around who remember how to live without the internet, and even those who know other people who remember how to live without the telephone.

On the other hand, could a country really depend on only one path of information transfer? I am a simple-minded man, and here is just a simple thought - it's all actually a good cover to cut off unwanted traffic. Of course this not being the case now.