{"id":3267,"date":"2013-06-30T13:40:08","date_gmt":"2013-06-30T18:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/china\/?p=3267"},"modified":"2019-02-05T21:35:18","modified_gmt":"2019-02-05T21:35:18","slug":"pigs-in-the-news-and-in-wikipedia-or-lipstick-on-a-frog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2013\/06\/pigs-in-the-news-and-in-wikipedia-or-lipstick-on-a-frog\/","title":{"rendered":"Pigs in the News and In Wikipedia: Or, Lipstick on a Frog"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vladimir Putin is on a roll. He has been having a fine time poking the US in the eye over the Edward Snowden kerfuffle,  but at a news conference he declined to comment: “In any case, I’d rather not deal with such questions, because anyway it’s like shearing a pig \u2013 lots of screams but little wool<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

That reminded me that it’s been too long since we talked about pigs. Just because we\u2019re Frog in a Well<\/em> doesn\u2019t mean that we can only talk about frogs \u2013 in fact, pigs are our, well… bread and butter. I will modestly call attention to my piece, “Pigs, Shit, and Chinese History, or, Happy Year of the Pig!<\/a>” Frog In a Well  (January 27 2007). You can find several more by clicking the “Pigs” link on the right hand column of this page.<\/p>\n

Putin seems to be using one of the many, many colorful pig sayings. My father, who grew up on a farm, had a bunch of them, mostly unprintable. Wikipedia is good at accumulating this sort of thing. A succession of people edited the article \u201cLipstick on a Pig,”<\/a>  which gives examples of usage going back decades, but the Wikipedia article  \u201cPig in a Poke<\/a>\u201d is even better. Many languages have a rough equivalent. It turns out that in  Latvia you say \u201cBuy a cat in a sack.\u201d Who knew? Wikipedia \u201cPigs in Popular Culture<\/a>\u201d has an extensive section of pig-related idioms.<\/p>\n

Right. But what about China?<\/p>\n

Wikipedia has many faults. It is a great grab bag, not an encyclopedia. But, as the computer software people like to say, “that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” China and pigs is a good example. If you want to have some idiotic fun, go to Wikipedia, any page, and in the upper right hand corner you will find a “Search” box. Enter “~Pigs + China<\/a>” (without the quotation marks). The tilde (~) means that you don’t want articles with this word in the title, but all  Wikipedia pages with the following words in it.<\/p>\n

Amazing. I got 7,259 hits. Of course, this includes duplicates, off the wall irrelevances<\/a>, rock songs<\/a>, and pig iron, but also a fascinating variety of things you would not have thought to look up: “Coprophagia”, <\/a>“Dutch Pacification Campaign on Formosa,<\/a>” as well as straightforward finds such as “Science and technology of the Song Dynasty.<\/a>“And that’s less than a dozen of the hits, leaving more than 7,000 to go.<\/p>\n

This search, random though it may be, is a dramatic way to see the central role that pigs played in Chinese history.<\/p>\n

And oh, young people today just don’t know the classics — the Muppets’ “Pigs in Space<\/a>.” Vladimir Putin’s soft power sneers can’t compare. YouTube has tons of them: Pigs in Space at YouTube<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vladimir Putin is on a roll. He has been having a fine time poking the US in the eye over the Edward Snowden kerfuffle,  but at a news conference he declined to comment: “In any case, I’d rather not deal with such questions, because anyway it’s like shearing a pig \u2013 lots of screams but…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[165,119,63,265,151,86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-english","category-japan","category-pigs","category-public-history","category-wikipedia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-QH","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3267"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7456,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3267\/revisions\/7456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}