Spam, spam, spam, delicious spam, spam, spam, wonderful spam, spam, spam, spam — and with that — a la Chinese characteristics. The telco mandarins (at least China Mobile and China Unicom) for Beijing have declared that you may send up to a trillion short messages (or something like that) over Spring Festival — yes, the kind we have all come to grow to love to hate (too many "to"s here!).

Your Beijingologist has just permitted himself to unleash a massive rant upon those totally impersonal Spring Festival short messages. First, they're just about the same for everyone. Just pick your imagination (or lack of it), compose a generic SMS, and fire it off to every last soul in your Address Book — mom and pizza shop included — and watch the fireworks over the wires.

The absolute worst text message last year was this — if your Beijingologist may with a British accent (inherited at a Sculpting in Time café with someone speaking in a loud British accent) — this total ßø!!*¢k$ about "Happy 牛 Year". That character is "niu" (as you pronounce it) and sounds eerily similar to "new" in English. Your Beijingologist is drafting his Last Will at this moment should he get half a message going "Happy 虎 Year" (虎 = tiger in Chinese)... he just can't stand this.

Meanwhile, the SMS limits were put into place to avoid SMS spam — that's 200 messages per hour maximum (500 during holidays) and 1,000 per day (2,000 for holidays). If you're familiar with Twitter, which has been happily harmonized here, you'd have guessed that similar limits exist as well.

Microbloggers in China, always one to ruin face-to-face communications in the "real world", promptly reacted — and the telcos kind of relented. In the true holiday season... You are now officially free to send as many SMS messages as you like around Spring Festival — the telcos are of the opinion that if it's a plain-vanilla greeting, it's probably not spam...

...or is it?