Now if only there were a fireplace, family, a gingerbread house...

But the snow is lovely, sifting down to frost the huge pines outside my window. Already the students have built 2 huge snowmen, says Joseph, who went out this morning. Me, I'm still in my jammies and memories of home.

December 22, 2004 Beijing weather report:





Chinese soldiers remove snow at Tiananmen Square in China's capital Beijing after the city was hit by a heavy snowstorm December 22, 2004. REUTERS/Reinhard Krause

This comes on the heels of official news that China is toughening its laws against piracy of intellectual property.

"U.S. officials and businesses have complained that so far it has been too difficult to prosecute violators, and successful cases have almost always resulted in modest fines that do little to resolve the problem.

Violations are widespread, with DVDs of the latest Hollywood blockbusters selling on the streets for less than $1.

Chinese copyright violations alone cost U.S. companies up to $3.8 billion a year, according to a report issued recently by the office of U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick."

Garfield wins battle against Chinese publisher pirate

from the Khaleej Times (via AFP) 21 December 2004

BEIJING - The mischievous and always savvy cartoon cat Garfield has outsmarted Chinese pirates, winning a court battle against a Chinese publishing house for violating the copyright on him.

The Beijing No 2 Intermediate People’s Court ordered Monday a publishing house in northern Shanxi province to compensate Paws Incorporated, the copyright owner of Garfield, 213,800 yuan (25,000 dollars) for copyright infringement, the China Daily newspaper said on Tuesday.

The Taiyuan city-based Hope Press was also ordered not to publish any further Garfield series.

Hope Press claimed it had signed an agreement with Paws through its agent in 1998 giving it the right to publish Garfield stories in Chinese, but Paws categorically denied this, the report said.

It published a series of Garfield stories in Chinese in 1999, including 11 books.

Liu Zhijun, the lawyer representing the publishing house, told the China Daily the company had not yet decided whether to appeal the case.

Paws representative Tang Zhaozhi was quoted saying he was satisfied with the judgment.

"Although the figure is less than our initial appeal of 772,200 yuan (93,000 US dollars), the result is acceptable," Tang said.

Foreign companies suing intellectual property rights violators in China have occasionally won cases, but the compensation is usually small. Other countries have complained the government does not impose stiff enough fines to discourage violations.

More battles await Garfield however as China’s large number of copyright violators have already bombarded consumers with pirated versions of his film debut Garfield: The Movie which opened on the country’s big screen Friday.

The daily comic strip on Garfield was first produced 26 years ago and is syndicated in 2,600 newspapers worldwide and read by some 260 million people.

HOLLYWOOD (Reuters) - They really said it -- notable quotes from the news:

"This was not a marriage made in heaven."

--Prosecutor Shellie Samuels during opening statements of the trial of tough guy actor Robert Blake, accused of murdering his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley.

World celebrates made-in-China Christmas

Mon Dec 20,11:37 PM ET Business - AFP

SHENZHEN, China (AFP) - Father Christmas's grotto is not an icy cave in Lapland but the economic heart of southern China, where almost two-thirds of the world's Christmas trees and decorations are made.

In factories staffed by predominantly Buddhist workers who have scarcely any idea of the meaning of Christmas, the baubles, Santas, lights and tinsel that mark the West's biggest festival are churned out at a relentless pace.

...snip

According to Customs figures, China exported 1.6 billion US dollars worth of Christmas products in 2003, of which more than half went to the United States -- including seven artificial trees erected in the White House.

China's export of Christmas-related goods in the first nine months of 2004 amounted to 850 million US dollars.

...snip

Starting his own business only three years ago, [Cheng, a Chinese manufacturer] said one of the most difficult things about making Christmas decorations in a non-Christian country is to understand Western culture and meet its requirements.

"They have different perceptions of colours. They like white trees, which is supposed to be a funeral colour here and doesn't seem appropriate in this happy season," he said.

Despite the hi-tech fibre-optic trees his company makes, Cheng said the old-fashioned, green-needle ones are still the most popular.

Cheng's turnover this year has doubled to six million US dollars, but he says rising prices for plastic, the raw material of Christmas, along with increasing salaries, are cutting into profits.

"I should start thinking about developing products for other Western festivals, like the Valentine's Day or Halloween."

Spammers ordered to pay $1 billion

Judgment thought to be largest ever

DAVENPORT, Iowa (AP) -- A federal judge has awarded an Internet service provider more than $1 billion in what is believed to be the largest judgment ever against spammers.

Read the rest at CNN

I loved this post via Boing Boing but I can't get to the MP3, can you?

MP3 of Ukrainian pro-democracy zeitgeist
BoingBoing reader Kristiyan in Varna, Bulgaria says:
You can really feel the people of Ukraine, they want democracy! This is an mp3 file, amateour journalism recording of audio experience. The situation is the city of Lutsk - an Ukrainian city. The recording shows a walk of a fellow there, people screaming, "Yushchenko!" The music of the gathering party, the crowds, the street traffic. The students, the people of Ukraine demanding their democracy. A non-CNN, non-CBS, non-BBC, citizen report.
Link

Stainless Steel Rat: "We are the rats in the wainscoting of society -- we operate outside of their barriers and outside of their rules."

A fascinating story in the Washington Post.

A Trip Through China's Twilight Zone

One Woman's Quest for Truth In the Authoritarian Maze

By Philip P. Pan, Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, December 18, 2004; Page A01

BEIJING -
Liu Di, known as the Stainless Steel Rat in cyberspace, still does not know the true identity of the man who presented himself as a fan and friend but who she now suspects was a police spy.

It had been two years since police arrested Liu Di, 24, on charges of subversion, and a year since international appeals and an outpouring of support from China's Internet users prompted the government to release her. At the time, Liu was a college senior, and her many fans believed she had been jailed for writing essays that poked fun at the ruling Communist Party and posting them on the Web.

But Liu wasn't so sure. Two questions gnawed at her: Could one of her friends have been an informer for the government? Had he set her up?

Do read the rest

The grayish disk of the moon Dione is set against the pastel clouds of Saturn in this image, captured by the Cassini spacecraft.

..."This week has been the tale of two moons," imaging scientist Carolyn Porco said. "One of them has been like out of a Lewis Carroll story and gets curiouser and curiouser the more we look at it and the closer we get, and the other turns out to be gloriously clear and has given us what I consider to be one of our most surprising results so far."

LOS ANGELES - The Cassini spacecraft's close flyby of Saturn's mysterious moon Titan this week revealed clouds that will give clues to its weather, but the pass left scientists still puzzled about its surface.

A flyby of another of the ringed planet's many moons, Dione, produced more immediate rewards: It revealed that wispy features long thought to be ice deposits are actually tectonic fractures that have left ice cliffs.

read the rest at MSNBC

Somewhere out there beneath the pale moonlight
Someone's thinking of me and loving me tonight

Somewhere out there someone's saying a prayer
That we'll find one another in that big somewhere out there

And even though I know how very far apart we are
It helps to think we might be wishing on the same bright star

And when the night wind starts to sing a lonesome lullaby
It helps to think we're sleeping underneath the same big sky

Somewhere out there if love can see us through
Then we'll be together somewhere out there
Out where dreams come true

And even though I know how very far apart we are
It helps to think we might be wishing on the same bright star

And when the night wind starts to sing a lonesome lullaby
It helps to think we're sleeping underneath the same big sky

Somewhere out there if love can see us through
Then we'll be together somewhere out there
Out where dreams come true
...James Horner, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil

From Time Magazine's Year in Pictures, Time/Asia

Guess we'll have to make our own sex talk these cold winter nights. Not that we would have understood the Chinese sex talk, anyway. But it would have been nice to know that it was there. (smile)

China Pulls Plug on TV Sex Talk Show

Tue Dec 14, 9:28 AM ET Oddly Enough - Reuters

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has pulled the plug on a new late-night television show about sex two weeks before the first episode was scheduled to air. "The Masks," China's first nationally televised sex talk show in which everyone was to wear a mask to hide their embarrassment, was scheduled for a Jan. 1 debut on more than 50 provincial and city channels.

...snip

"[the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television] should fully realize the importance of keeping correct direction in every minute of TV or radio programs," the statement said.

The show is one of a few media products to get the red flag from Beijing this month. Last week, the administration banned a Nike ad in which NBA star LeBron James defeats a kung fu master and other traditional Chinese characters on charges of offending "national feelings." It outlawed a computer sports game that classified Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Tibet as separate countries.

Never did I realize when I sipped my Chilean wine with the spaghetti and meatballs dinner I cooked for my Italian stallion husband in our apartment in Beijing, that I had the Chinese to thank for the libation. And I do.

Did China make the world's first wine, 9,000 years ago?

by Susan Jakes | Time/Asia - BEIJING

9,000-year-old bottles and shards were unearthed in Jiahu, China

Monday, Dec. 13, 2004
China has long prided itself on having come up with many of the world's most important inventions. Now the country that gave us gunpowder, paper money and the noodle can claim responsibility for another of human civilization's highest achievements: we have the Chinese, or at least their distant ancestors, to thank for cocktails. According to a report released last week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S., residents of the Neolithic village of Jiahu in Henan province were raising toasts with fruit wines and rice spirits in 7000 B.C.usurping Iran's first place in the tipple timeline by at least a thousand years.

...snip

Chinese probably concocted the drinks, using rice, hawthorn fruits, wild grapes and honey, for religious libations. According to Zhang Juzhong, an archeologist at the University of Science and Technology of China, who discovered the shards, Jiahu's residents,who also made the world's earliest known musical instruments,"probably drank the wine to numb their minds and to help them commune with the divine." And given Chinese ingenuity, that probably wasn't all.

The uproar over Ukranian elections has taken another nasty twist with the revelation that the (U.S. backed) opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin (presumably by his political opponents) at some point before the contested presidential election.[Russians suspected-see update at the end of this post. Ed.] The Ukraine is the second largest country in Europe (a distant second--Russia being the first) and its democratization will most certainly reverberate in neighboring states south of the Black Sea where governance seems destined for reform in the coming decade. I wish the Ukranians well with their rerun of the election on December 26th. I deeply respect by their courage and success in challenging the results of the first election.

Sometimes poetry says it best:

A Time of Rehearsals

Our every love is more stifling and close
death's needle embroiders this linen and smoke
return the moon so it will fall on a familiar face
make it tremble like an artist      cry like a murderer over him

this is the season of rehearsals      trees appear on stage
the blood of an old actor flows November November
o naive spectator you believe this death is invented
it is always invented      so the theatre says

descend on the now dying orchard reborn in spring
onto the bare withered shoulders of an old mountain
and a familiar face that turned pale before you
art puts on its wide underscored make-up

this is the time of rehearsals     the text of a great drama
the overworked lips of the prompter blaze in the dark
let the roles we choose not be cursed
we are like late blooming trees ready for winter

--Natalka Bilotserkivets
Translated from the Ukrainian by Michael M. Naydan & Dzvinia Orlowsky

Democracy occurs when free elections decide the composition of the government and the extent of their power, "free" being the operative concept and "elections" being the means. When elections are compromised, the electorate, having become attached to the concept of having an influence on their government, tends to erupt in protest. "The idea triumphant is on display right now in Ukraine -- as it was in Poland and Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European countries these last 15 years."-- Richard Reeves from The Issue of the Year is Democracy . He goes on to say:

Again and again, democracy has shown the power to prevent the meanest and bloodiest of wars, civil wars. It has also demonstrated its non-political benefits more often than not -- witness the decline of the Soviet Union under communism, or compare the wealth and future of democratic India and authoritarian Pakistan.

I still believe the U.S. 2000 election was compromised, but I don't believe that election error or malfeasance occurred to a decisive extent in 2004. And yet, U.S. democracy is under pressure from those unhappy with the results. Are these complaints--which come from elements with which I tend to empathasize--about elections being too free? The people have spoken but they are stupid?

Stupid people deserve stupid leaders, but what about the rest of us? The majority of Americans are stupid? Reeves gets into this last question in his op/ed, which I encourage you to read.

You bet I don't like President Bush claiming that he has political capital to spend with a margin of only 3 million votes. You bet I don't like the gleeful conservatives planning a rampage of social security reforms. You bet I don't like the shrinking separation of church and state in this "value-driven" administration. But democracy itself will address these issues over time. That is its nature. Even when wounded, democracy, with a life of its own, eventually and sooner rather than later, tends to ameliorate even vile differences. It'll take a lot of work, but we've got our sleeves rolled up.

I like this, again, it's from Reeve's essay:

Democracy, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, is still the worst form of government -- except for all the others that have been tried.

UPDATE: Suspicions Cast on Russia After Poisoning

...Associates of Yushchenko speculate that Russian or former KGB agents may have been involved in poisoning the candidate. Yushchenko fell ill in September and has campaigned with his face disfigured by what doctors who treated him in Austria said last week was poisoning by dioxin.

...snip

Supporters say Yushchenko's opponents wanted to kill him or sideline him from the race against Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who was backed by outgoing President Leonid Kuchma and the Kremlin, which holds great influence in the former Soviet republic...

As China rises to become an international player in the global economy, its internal affairs take on a new resonance. The economy is booming, perhaps even overheating, and hundreds of millions of people have enough money to live a good life, which in any politic is an important freedom. (It's only fraction of the population, but a significant enough number to attract enormous foreign investment.) But absent freedom of expression is it enough to provide long-term stability? On the low end of the scale, the peasants are increasingly protesting their poor conditions, injustices by corrupt local leaders and industrialists (the latter producing goods at the behest of foreign investment) and a spate of Chinese mining disasters in the last few weeks. I alluded to Beijing's recent crackdown on "intellectuals" (in China this seems to mean anyone in media or education who has a coherent criticism of the party) in an earlier post and today's news adds two more names to the list of dissidents under pressure.

This, from the Washington post:

China Detains Two Dissident Writers

Action Could Represent Warning to Liberal Intellectuals

By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 13, 2004; 5:05 PM

BEIJING, Dec. 13 -- Chinese police detained two prominent dissident writers Monday night in an apparent campaign by the government to reassert authority over liberal intellectuals who have been increasingly outspoken in their criticism of the governing Communist Party, friends and family members said.

...snip

The party's propaganda authorities ... recently ordered state media to limit reporting about independent-minded scholars and activists who have been willing to criticize the government, journalists said. The directive, the latest in a series tightening controls on state media, also barred the use of the increasingly popular phrase "public intellectuals" to describe these individuals.

"The notion calls up the idea of independence -- but intellectuals are not independent, they belong to the working class, are part of the people and are a group under the leadership of the Communist Party," the People's Daily, the party's flagship newspaper, said in an editorial last month. "All this talk about intellectuals speaking up for the downtrodden is ridiculous..."

Read the rest, which also reports how this has affected one of the jailed dissident's wife and her poignant comments.

UPDATE: These two dissidents were released the next day, worldwide press coverage probably had an effect on that. But the message was clear.

There's nothing new about symbology in advertising. Ancient relics and architecture as well as modern monuments and art of Europe, such as the Roman Coluseum, the Eiffel tower and the Mona Lisa are often used in advertising, as are Egyptian wall paintings, etc., sometimes even as punch lines. Everybody seems to understand that recognizable objects are semaphores for the ideas they represent and that in advertising, you get a bit of the stretch factor. When Chinese icons are used, however, it's a different horse. The Chinese are so serious about their culture; their symbols are woven into how they think of themselves.

It could be argued that the Chinese take themselves too seriously, but the fact is this is how they feel and they have no compunction about defending it. It is their long-standing privilege, as the oldest extant civilization on the planet, to do so. However, as they become a major player in the globalized market, this mentality might well be at cross purposes for peaceful coexistence in the commercial world.

China offended by Nike advertisement

from ITV
7.50AM, Tue Dec 7 2004

China has voiced its anger over a Nike advertisement in which a US basketball star fights off a series of ancient Chinese characters.

In the ad, LeBron James, 19, who plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers, fights and wins when confronted by a white-haired cartoon kung fu master and some dragons.

Yesterday, China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television ordered national TV stations to stop broadcasts of the ad dubbed "LeBron James in Chamber of Fear".
It said it had sparked anger and claims of offending "national feelings."

A statement on the state administration's website said: "The ad has aroused strong public indignation."

It violated rules that stipulated "all ads broadcast on television should protect national dignity and interests and respect the motherland's traditional culture".

Last year, many Chinese took offence at an ad campaign that portrayed stone lions - traditional Chinese symbols of authority - saluting a Toyota Prado car.

The Japanese car maker ended up withdrawing the advertisements and issuing an apology through its Chinese website.

The Japanese want to sell a lot of Toyotas in China, so they concede here, knowing full well, as any even neophyte Asia-watcher does, that this was more about lingering resentment over the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930's. What will Nike do?

UPDATE:
Ohio News Network ran a story on this incident, citing Nike's "edgy" ad's appeal to teens, their target market, which was picked up by AP. Read it here. And yes, they did pull the ad, with apologies.

While Nike quickly backtracked, issuing an apology for the ads from its headquarters here in Oregon, the manufacturer has a long history of edgy sales messages - a strategy that has helped endear Nike to youth by positioning the company as a corporate rebel.

...snip

"It could be an ignorant mistake. Or a marketing misfire," said Bruce Newman, professor of marketing at DePaul University in Chicago. "But it could also be a case of knowing that if they can connect with a young audience - which I'm guessing is in the hundreds of millions, there could be a swelling of demand such that they could care less about what the government says."

Well put, I'd say. From my two years experience teaching Chinese university students, that's a fair appraisal.

Musings on a sleepless night...

Gizmo wizards have invented technology that lets you view programming provided by your own cable TV subscription, in other words, your shows, on a laptop from anywhere -- from another room in your house, while on vacation -- anywhere you can get a cable, wi-fi or any other fast internet connection. Although content and service providers are having fits about it, it seems destined to come to market as a vast success.

My brother, tech journalist Ken Sander, covered an independently developed version in the October issue of Sound & Vision magazine and it's just hit the international big-time media this week.

Ken Sander wrote:

The TV2me signal can’t be distributed to other Internet users because it’s encrypted and point-to-point, not point-to multipoint. In legal terms, it’s the equivalent of time-shifting, but [inventor Ken] Schaffer calls it space-shifting ... similar to sending a signal to your bedroom except your bedroom can be anywhere in the world.

TV2me isn’t a commercial product that’s being mass produced yet. Sales have been limited to a few systems Schaffer has sold to friends and acquaintances for $6,500 each. He says that legal questions prevent him from saying who has bought them, but judging from the pictures on his wall, his friends are rock & rollers and movie stars like Sting, Rod Stewart, Dennis Hopper and Mick Jagger.

I met TV2me's inventor, Ken Schaffer in New York amidst the rock scene in the sixties. He invented a wireless microphone and guitar pickup system used by major rock bands and brought Russian Rock and Roll to the states as one of his first Russo-American ventures. As the N.Y. Times' story relates:

I Want My Moscow TV
By SETH SCHIESEL - Published: December 2, 2004

...in 1981, after detouring to invent a wireless microphone, travel with the Rolling Stones and make guitars for John Lennon, Mr. Schaffer installed a satellite dish atop his Midtown Manhattan apartment building and was soon pulling in broadcasts from the Soviet Union.

"I wasn't interested in HBO and free Showtime," he said. "...I was watching Russian feeds from Moscow to Cuba - and what they used to do after they finished the feed is, the Russians would send porno to Havana, or American films. And this was before Gorbachev and all that kind of stuff."

The story goes on to tell a lot more about this quirky inventor and about TV2me, which Scheaffer uses to monitor his TV from both his New York and his Moscow apartment.

The story in the Moscow Times (archived and unlinkable) reports:

For Rock Stars, A Satellite TV to Go
By Carl Schreck Thursday, December 2, 2004

"A New Yorker visiting Prague can watch his favorite 'Seinfeld' reruns or select from the more than 200 channels offered by his cable company," Schaffer said. "Or a Russian businessman can watch 66 channels of Moscow cable live from his midtown Manhattan hotel room."

I'm particularly cheered to read about TV2me today, because I was beginning to feel as if a vise was closing in on independent thought in media, education and science worldwide after reading for the past few days about the government's recent condemnation (or worse) of "public intellectuals" in China, where I'm living now and a drastic budget cut to scientific development in my home country, the U.S. It reminded me that the flow of information, thanks in great measure to the internet (such as it is becoming) and TV (such as it has become), persists in puncturing obstruction even as it reports it. Seems like a reasonable bargain.

I've been reading a lot about the recent and startling resurgence in the "greylisting" of intellectuals in China on internet news and commentary sites but the ever-scabrous Beijing media blog Danwei.org has a concise and biting summary with links.

Here's a snip from The N.Y. Times story on the $105 million NSF budget cuts:

Congress Trims Money for Science Agency
By ROBERT PEAR Published: November 30, 2004

"I am astonished that we would make this decision at a time when other nations continue to surpass our students in math and science and consistently increase their funding of basic research," said Mr. Ehlers, a former physics professor who is chairman of a technology subcommittee. "The National Science Foundation supports technological innovation that is crucial to the sustained economic prosperity that America has enjoyed for several decades."

but the best analysis of the research funding cuts is in this Berkshire Eagle editorial:

Dumbing Down America

The decision of Congress to cut the budget for the National Science Foundation indicates that Washington's faith-based and fear-based antipathy to science is well on the way to becoming institutionalized. It is bad for the country economically and beyond that it represents another step backwards for a nation that used to pride itself for being on the cutting edge of scientific research and technology.

[...snip]

Intel is opening laboratories in China, in part because it doesn't have to pay workers as much but in part because China encourages scientific research with subsidies and doesn't bind it with petty restrictions. European and Asian nations are also putting more money into scientific and mathematical programs at their universities, while America is doing the exact opposite. It's not surprising then, that fewer foreign students are coming to American universities which are no longer at the forefront of education and research.

Well... besides the fact that the State Department has made it increasingly difficult for foreign students to get U.S. visas. Dumb! [Ed.]

The congressional Republicans who drew up the legislation cutting the NSF budget claimed they did so to hold the line on domestic spending,but ...that argument is transparently false. The cuts are in reality a symptom of the anti-intellectualism rampant in America, a country where too many residents are poorly informed and proud of it. This attitude will weaken America severely in terms of its economy, but there is no price tag on how much it weakens the psyche of a nation that at one time prided itself on its thinkers, its inventors, its scientists, and its open-minded approach to new thoughts and ideas.

Even the nattering conservatives say they're feeling an intellectual pinch in academia, as the ever-pompous William F. Buckley, Jr. asserts in this Op/Ed:

Dumb Bright Guys
[...snip] a national survey of more than 1,000 academics, shows that Democratic professors outnumber Republicans by at least 7-to-1 in the humanities and social sciences. "That ratio," we are told, "is more than twice as lopsided as it was three decades ago, and it seems quite likely to keep increasing, because the younger faculty members are more consistently Democratic than the ones nearing retirement."

As a shrewd observer of the scene, David Horowitz, points out, "Right now, conservative students are discouraged from pursuing scholarly careers, because they see very clearly that their professors consider Republicans to be the enemy."

Another faculty study found a 9-to-1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans on the faculties of Berkeley and Stanford. That study included the hard sciences and engineering (where good sense is reputed to prevail). The ratio was especially lopsided among younger professors of assistant or associate rank: 183 Democrats vs. 6 (loony?) Republicans.

I'm tempted to say that sounds like good news to me, but professors should be impartial and I hope they are. I'd hate to think education has devolved to dogma vs. dogma in America's finest universities, but I'd be a fool not to expect the ideological divisiveness apparent in the aftermath of the U.S. presidential campaign and election results to overflow in the coming four years. It may well be a necessary process; breakthrough thrives on conflict and resistance.

There's always somewhere to go with a good new idea. Scientists have had to border-hop for centuries. The truth seems to have a life of its own, regardless of suppression or how difficult it might be to accept. Often, it takes time. It seems to be a law of nature. After all, The Sun May Have Captured Asteroids from Afar.

Remember them all.

Godzilla turned 50 with a new movie, Godzilla Final Wars, said to be the last because (s)he gets whacked, and a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. 50 years ago (s)he made his/her Japanese B-movie debut. "

"Godzilla should thank you for this historical and monumental star," Godzilla Final Wars producer Shogo Tomiyama said ... "But unfortunately, he cannot speak English."




EOnline interviewed Godzilla who responded as follows about a common sobriquet.

E: Do you mind if I call you 'Zilla?

Godzilla: I prefer God, to tell you the truth. [Laughs.] But seriously, Godzilla is the Americanization of my Japanese nickname, Gojira, and I never cared for it.

Godzilla might want to be more careful in his/her advanced age, remembering all the headaches a similar answer caused John Lennon in 1966. The fundies are even more appoplectic these days.

The scandalous interview also addreses what I punctuate above as Godzilla's gender ambiguity.