Local birds did not understand the foreign language

You couldn't make this up.

Duh! OF COURSE Chinese birds speak Chinese.

Runway Scarecrow Machine Lost in Translation

Wed Mar 23,10:24 AM ET Oddly Enough - Reuters

BEIJING (Reuters) - China imported a U.S.-made scream machine to scare away the birds at Beijing airport -- except they didn't recognize the noises and refused to budge.

The bird-dispersing equipment had recorded the screams of American birds or the sounds of the birds' natural enemies, the Beijing Evening News said.

"Local birds did not understand the foreign language," the newspaper said.

..not much more, but it's here.

And speaking of incompatibilities, I finally downloaded and installed the Firefox browser to see what the ballyhoo was all about, only to find that Crackpot Chronicles doesn't display very well in it. Maybe it doesn't like my CSS. On my maiden voyage I also ran into other glitchy stuff, which would probably take some fiddling to make work, like auto addressing in Yahoo mail. So much for that.

We have a lot of trouble with Blogger 404-ing often when attempting to compose or edit posts, and the Blogger support folks, after blaming it on the heavily filtered Chinese internet, said to try Firefox, that perhaps its browser-related. Its not. We pooh-poohed the China theory, but now I think that may be at least part of the reason.

Blogger now has a Chinese language interface, but apparently it's not hosted locally in China, which might help. However, that's not likely or at least not in the forseeable future, given the an ongoing crackdown on Chinese internet communication, the latest being the lockdown of several major university chatrooms, which now exclude any connections from outside the universities' internet systems. Some chat rooms have been shut down entirely, blogging has been curtailed, ISPs have been warned they will be held responsible for any politically sensitive or otherwise objectionable content of public posts. There have been some campus and a lot of online protest, which has occupied the local and China savvy blog buzz-osphere most of the last week. Much of it originating in China and in the Chinese language gets censored. But the local birds do not understand the foreign language very well.