The Ever-Perplexing Chinese Internet

The net here is such a feckin' crap shoot I'm not asking why anymore, but I will try to remember to light a couple incense sticks for whatever Daoist god covers firewall tunnelling.

Two days ago when I got to Lijiang, a high plains tourist trap in northern Yunnan not too far from the fabled Shangrila, I could neither open Google, Gmail, nor make any posts on this blog. It was a massive WTF if there ever was one. Google.com would not come up at all - Google!! - which is not only seems sort of like an Internet apocalypse, but it also had me wondering what the hell they were compromising their morals for if their site was blocked by some router for podunk Yunnan? Gmail would also not come up, and Gmail.cn was an imitation or a scam, and I eventually found that Google.cn would come up, but not the English version. Yahoo!, incidentally, came up fine, tho it had an ad-banner sidebar with pictures of naked women that linked to a site for a Peoples Liberation Army hospital for diabetes?! And the biggest pain in the ass, when I logged into Blogger (a Google subsidiary), I got this message (attenuated here):

WARNING
This blog has been locked by Blogger's spam-prevention robots.....

Your blog is locked
Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?)

The link telling me what a spam blog is wouldn't come up, though Chainsmoker, who I was MSNing with, guessed it may have something to do with my posting from China, land of the hacker gangs.

Aparently Blogger had to manually verify that my blog was real, which took two days. Now I'm again "whitelisted." I've got one newspaper article to write first, then I'll finish up on the tour.