John Pasden from Sinosplice is a designer as well as a blogger. Every once in a while he comes out with a new t-shirt design related to China or the Chinese language. Wear 'em around town and you'll have even more Chinese striking up conversations with you. Visit the Sinosplice Store for more designs.
This recent CNN report on Chinese-learning in the US is 真可笑 (zhēn kĕ xiào), or very ridiculous and laughable. Yes, it's good that CNN is realizing Mandarin education is a growing trend, but the network could have gotten a better informed news team.
Apparently the Bush administration wants kids to learn "little-known languages such as Arabic and Chinese", so they grow up to forge better foreign relations. ("Little known" only to people that don't know Chinese is spoken by a fifth of the world's population.) The reporter also thinks you need to learn 500 characters to read a newspaper; the reality is closer to 3,000 or 4,000 characters. And being a sensationalistic network, they had to relate kids studying Chinese to "securing a nation in a post-9/11 world".
