[via AsiaPundit]

It appears as though Stephen Colbert devoted an entire episode last night to the upcoming Chinese New Year.

In the episode, Stephen -- the neologist -- talks about China the "frenemy," answers questions about China, has a rather Jon Stewart-ish interview -- meaning, much fewer interuptions and jokes -- with Sheryl Wudunn, and introduces America's new eight-child policy.

Not that anyone necessarily holds Stephen up as a pillar of precision when it comes to the facts -- seeing as he constantly talks about his attraction to "factoids" and the creation reality on Wikipedia -- but I decided to look up some of the things he said.

Right off, I had already read about the oft-repeated misconception about the relation between the word "danger" and "opportunity" in Chinese.

I looked up the stuff about the tiger/panda penises, and it seems to be at least somewhat true. Even here in Taiwan, killing tigers for, among other things, their penises was at some point a problem. I found nothing about panda penises.

The episode was overall not the funniest I've ever seen, but I figured I'd share it because there might be some sort inside jokes that I didn't understand because I don't speak Chinese yet -- for example, does "dao dao yen" really mean something, or was he just blurting something that sounded Chinese. I called my resident Chinese expert, Fanfan, and she said dao yen means "movie director" but she doesn't know what dao dao yen would mean.

By the way, these videos expire on March 13th, but by then they'll be on youtube, I'm sure. If you have any problems viewing -- which is likely, because Comedy Central's Motherload is miserable -- wait a couple of days, and search youtube for it.