I'm Not a Doctor, But I Play One Illegally on TV

Recently eaten: allergy medication
Recent annoyance: the never-ending pile of papers on my desk

Maybe Chinese tv doctors need to have some better onset advice. I think ER and House have created a generation of hypochondriacs. Maybe it is possible that some tiny work burrowed into my leg and the symptoms only seem like epilepsy. You and I and House know the truth about Mr. Wormy.

Cracking down on TV fake medical experts (via Yahoo)
China has banned actors and other "non-accredited personnel" from playing medical experts in advertisements for drugs after an Internet-led witch-hunt exposed a number of bogus experts, state media reported on Monday.

A Chinese Internet user late last month exposed 12 fake experts selling medicine under various guises and names on television stations in eastern Shandong province, sparking an online uproar over false endorsements.

China's fair trade watchdog, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC) vowed punishments after local hospitals and universities queued up to deny any affiliation to the "experts," local media reported.

Hungry Like the Wolf Poster

Recently eaten: roast chicken
Recent annoyance: static

I've got wonder if this post is a hoax. It's a pretty damn good one if it is. Heck, maybe the shepherd could pull a Ferris Bueller and just stick a dummy holding a wolf poster on a wheel barrow with a tape recording of his voice.

Shepherd controls flock with wolf poster (via Ananova)
"After visiting Qinling Wild Animal Park, on the way home I saw a group of sheep walking along the road with a man holding a picture following behind them," he said.

Du said he burst out laughing when he realised it was a picture of a wolf.

"The man was using the wolf picture to scare the sheep and drive them ahead - it was a really funny scene," he said.

"Andale, muchachos."

Kill Or Killer Bee Killed

Recently eaten: tandoori chicken skewers
Recent annoyance:

This is like one of those terrible campy killer bee movies from the 70's coming to life. As I recall, the only way to beat them to is carry around a giant flamethrower or to drive really fast in a brown El Camino. Maybe all the honeybees in North America went to China and got angry...

Bee swarm kills six in car smash and sting (via YahooNews)
Three people were stung to death after a truck carrying dozens of bee hives overturned in northeast China and three more were killed on the road as they tried to steer clear of the swarm, newspapers said on Thursday.

The bee-hive truck collided with a farm vehicle on Wednesday and overturned near Changchun, the capital of Jilin province, the China Daily said.

" I am so helpful and seductive with my accent. I am the Nasonex bee!"

Barbarians!

Recently eaten: chopped salad
Recent annoyance: the gooey white-out booger on the end of the brush before you get to the usable stuff

The Brits have gone to great lengths to discredit the Beijing Olympics. They've got a lot to live up to, but the latest expose from China really has the Brits fuming. Long a tolerant nation of crooked teeth, yellow enamel, and generally horrifying orthodontia, the British take personal offense to the story revealed below. This is clearly a toothist country.

Olympic: Child singer revealed as fake (Guardian)
When nine-year-old Lin Miaoke launched into Ode to the Motherland at the Olympic opening ceremony, she became an instant star.

"Tiny singer wins heart of nation," China Daily sighed; "Little girl sings, impresses the world," gushed another headline, perhaps in reference to Lin's appearance on the front of the New York Times. Countless articles lauded the girl in the red dress who "lent her voice" to the occasion.

But now it emerges that Lin lent someone else's voice, following high-level discussions - which included a member of the Politburo - on the relative photogenicity of small children.

The recording to which Lin mouthed along on Friday was by the even younger Yang Peiyi. It seems that Yang's uneven teeth, while unremarkable in a seven-year-old, were considered potentially damaging to China's international image.

Somebody get the girl a retainer!

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

Recently eaten: meatballs
Recent annoyance: that distinct feeling at 2 AM that you've accidentally slept through the next day

The Chinese know how to get free peanuts and drinks.

Passengers sleep on plane after flight cancelled (Yahoo News)
Fifty-two passengers on a Chinese airliner whose flight was cancelled due to bad weather refused to disembark and instead spent the night onboard before finally leaving to their destination, local media said on Friday. The passengers boarded for their 8 p.m. (1:00 a.m. EDT) flight from Beijing to the eastern coastal city of Yantai, but after more than three hours of sitting on the tarmac, the airline cancelled the flight, the Beijing Morning Post said.

"Most of the about 200 passengers disembarked to complete flight transfer procedures, but a Mrs. Shi was one of 52 passengers who refused to get off," the newspaper said.

"I'll have the fish"

Oh, The Shame

Recently eaten: satay skewers
Recent annoyance:

This is embarrassing for all of us. Chinese cuisine is one of the great world cuisines and they have boiled it down to kung pao chicken? Will they also have their mascot General Tso running around?

China makes kung pao chicken official for Olympics (Yahoo News)
It's official. Hungry foreign hordes craving a fix of diced chicken fried with chili and peanuts during the Beijing Olympics will be able to shout "kung pao chicken!" and have some hope of getting just that.

As it readies for an influx of visitors for the August Games, the Chinese capital has offered restaurants an official English translation of local dishes whose exotic names and alarming translations can leave foreign visitors frustrated and famished.

General Tso says "my face burns with shame."

Piglight

Recently eaten: oatmeal...bleh
Recent annoyance: the constant state of gravy in which my cholesterol can be found

If China thought the Olympics might be a PR nightmare, isn't this flourescent pig a close second? As if the Chinese aren't already zodiac crazy, now we're touting the glow-in-the-dark pig family? They're just going to be made into some tasty glowing dish anyway.

China rings out year of flourescent green pig
A fluorescent green Chinese pig has given birth to two piglets which share their mother's transgenic characteristic after she mated with an ordinary pig, state media said.

The mother sow is one of the three fluorescent green pigs successfully bred by a research team in December 2006 after they injected fluorescent green protein into pig embryos.

"The mouths, trotters and tongues of the two piglets glow green under ultraviolet light, which indicates the technology to breed transgenic pigs via cell nuclear transfer is mature," Liu Zhonghua, a professor at Northeast Agricultural University in Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province, was quoted as saying.

She produced 11 piglets on Monday but so far only two of them had inherited the fluorescent feature.

"This technology promises to breed excellent transgenic pigs and even raise special pigs to provide organs for human transplant operations in the future," Liu was quoted as saying.

Chinese scientists bred the pigs using somatic cell nuclear transfer technology following similar successes in the United States, South Korea and Japan.

China celebrates the start of the Year of the Rat in February, drawing a close to the Year of the Pig.

In Coal Blood

Recently eaten: sour cream blueberry muffin
Recent annoyance: I think my eyelashes are falling out

I'm going to skip around my China trip since I can only remember certain things now. they must have given me that "memory-killing" serum before I left the country.

On the day before we left we visited the China Coal Museum in Taiyuan. I was skeptical. From what i had seen, the government and our tour guide was more interested in glossing over the rather bothersome consequences of coal mining in the country including environmental destruction, mining accidents, and pollution. As we walked into the rather office-looking building, I noticed that the parking lot proudly proclaimed that it was solar-powered and there were a couple of sad-looking solar panels (probably hooked up to a desk lamp in the guard's booth) next to the exit.

Inside, we walked to the third floor, since the rest of the building looked like an abandoned student center. The beginning of the exhibit showed on an interactive map where the largest concentrations of coal mines are in the world and zooming in on china's coal veins. Scattered around the hall were giant statues and carved figures made of coal (or carbon, as some called it). Apparently, this type pf coal is very rare now because it is so hard. Below is some crazy cat made of coal. (The pics are blurry because I was trying t get around the "no pictures" rule)
The next room looked like a storage room from Jurassic Park. There are giant replicas of prehistoric vegetation and animatronic dinosaurs. Yes, animatronic dinosaurs.
I guess this was supposed to explain how coal is formed (from millions of years of pressure on decomposing plant matter). However, if the robot dinosaurs weren't convincing enough, we were led into a small theater and given 3-D glasses. This was no ordinary 3-D movie, this is what they call 4-D where spurts of water came out of tubes in front of our faces, the seats rocked back and forth and gusts of wind blew over our heads as the movie illustrated what the climate must have been like in China millions of years ago. I am surprised they didn't blow coal dust directly into our lungs.

The rest of the museum was pretty boring after that: the invention of the steam engine, plastics, coal mining is safe...the same old shpiel. BUT WAIT! There's more. They took us downstairs into their modal coal mine shafts. We rode in a rickety and tiny coal tram into the tunnel and were given miners hats.
We navigated through about 1/2 a mile of fake tunnels beneath the museum and were subjected to creepy looking mannequins "mining coal." I'll admit, i almost called Amnesty International to save those dummies and oput them in a nice-paying storefront window job. They were supposed to be showing us the wonders of modern mining, but it all came off like bad propaganda. At least we could buy some cool stuff made of coal at the end. It made up for the black lung.

Stateside

Recently eaten: pork meat cake
Recent annoyance: my browser still thinks I am in China

All right, I admit blogging about my trip was way more labor-intensive than I thought it would be. And taking my camera out at every meal just wasn't going to be possible especially when I am hungry. When my family sits down to eat, it's best not to put any fingers or valuables in jeopardy. So I'll slowly leak the remainder of the details of my trip now that I am back Stateside. I do have some things I am thankful for now that I am home:

1. Real toilets
2. Personal space
3. Walkable sidewalks
4. Relatively coal-dust free air
5. Mattresses
6. Other kinds of people who aren't Chinese
   

Rollerball for Midgets

Recently eaten: xiao long bao (meat-filled buns well-known from Shanghai serves with vinegar and ginger)
Recent annoyance: the one english language channel here in HK playing "America's Got Talent" season 1

Just for fun, I am jumping ahead of my China posts to this video of some schoolchildren engaged in some sort of roller derby outside of the Twin Pagoda Temple in Taiyuan.

Not Old For Da Earth

Recently eaten: tapioca with fresh fruit
Recent annoyance:

To recap my recent excursion to China, our first full day started at the Ancient City of Pingyao. We took little tuk-tuks from our hotel into the city because reguklar cars and buses are too wide to fit into the narrow streets. My little video of the city itself didn't come out, but here we are on the way into the city.

While we were eating breakfast, I noticed a group of people being commanded by a uniformed officer outside of the hotel. They were split between men and women and each group was set up in rows. The began with a quick jog around the hotel twice. They lined back up and began executing some complicated routine of turns, steps and repositioning of the rows. I asked my Mom what they were doing. Apparently, they were just hotel workers. In China, many workers mix physical exercise with repetitive mantras about their jobs and work principles each morning. My Mom said the Chinese learned this militaristic style of training and morale building from the Japanese. It was a very strange sight to see maids, drivers, porters, front desk workers all marching around and ordered around by just another hotel worker in a very fancy uniform.

Anyway, I won't bore you with all the details of the city itself once we got in. You can check out my photos on flickr for that. What really amazed me about the city is that people still live there. In the narrow streets, with some running water, and thousands of tourists. I asked my Mom what she thought the people thought about all these tourists. She said they probably like it because they bring in money. But I wondered, as someone who lives in a tourist city, if the citizens of Pingyao were happy about their 1997 designation as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Clearly, lots and lots of Chinese tourists come to see one of the first financial centers established in the world.

After we left the city, I experienced what would be a running theme throughout the trip: wacky traffic. Lane markers mean nothing in this part of China. Our driver honked and weaved his way through a net of coal trucks chugging along in the fast lane, the passing lane, the shoulder, wherever they could fit. Just as we got on the ramp to the expressway, we hit a wall of stopped trucks. FOG. The ever present shroud of fog had closed the road and we were stuck. There was no other road (at least a passable one) that we could take to our next stop. The highway itself had been built by the provincial government for tourists and for the coal to keep moving out of the province. Since this sort of stoppage is a regular occurrence, many of the drivers just slept at the wheel, or came out to socialize with other drivers. Then the vendors descended. A line of entrepreneurs came selling tangerines, hot noodles, buns and eggs.

We were stuck at the roadblock for 4 agonizing hours before we were let through. Le sigh.

Coking Coal-a

Recently eaten: rice congee
Recent annoyance: the mosquitoes have returned to haunt me

I just returned from an 8 day excursion to China and I'm just happy to be near sanitary plumbing again. We flew into Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province. It was cold, and smokey as soon as we got off the plane. We were going to be traveling around the coal capital of China. Let the respiratory problems begin.

Our tour guide assured us that the "fog" is perfectly normal in the winter. Although I am pretty sure it might have something to do with all the coal plants spewing black smoke into the air. It was only about 6:30 and it was darker than midnight. That was something I didn't quite understand either: no timezones in China. The entire country is on one timezone. Strange.

One last note on day one of the China trip: more hard prison beds. I must be a soft twinkie, because every bed I sleep in here feels like a board they pulled off the Mayflower and threw some sheets on. Maybe this will realign my spine.

I'll Have Some Food With My Rice, Please

Recently eaten: duck
Recent annoyance: no internet

So the Mom assures me that where we are going in China has no internet. I am not entirely sure about that, but still worried I might suffer the same fate as some Chinese blogger.

Last night all of my Mom's 6 brothers and sisters came from all over for a big dinner. I must have seemed like some poor unfortunate outlander with no knowledge of Hong Kong culture. Had my cousins not been placing food morsels in my bowl, I might not have gotten anything to eat. Having grown up with just 4 in our nuclear family here, the 17 people sitting around the table all jockeying for control of the lazy susan holding the dishes was a little overwhelming.

One cousin noticed my poor shrimp peeling abilities (I kept quirting the brains everywhere when removing the head) and peeled a small mountain for me. another cousin noticed my chopsticks weren't fast enough or adept enough to pick up the food I wanted before it whizzed by to the other side of the table. And the ultimate humiliation, my Mom still had to remove the bones from my fish for me like a baby. I am pretty sure that this is rite of passage is like a Chinese barmitzvah. Once a young person is able to eat whole fish and remove the bones without choking on them, only then are they able to say "Today, I am a man." Even my youngest cousins stared at me like I was some backwards country bumpkin that had never seen the right side of a piece of duck before.

So expect radio silence for the next 7 days. I'll be in the wilds of an internet-free China.

Rock the Goat

Recently eaten: burrito
Recent annoyance: my completely uninterested ants

Pickings are slim during the summer for silly news items. I mean, at least for the news items that aren't silly in a sadly ironic way like disgraced Congressman, or things and people getting blowed up. So, in the meantime, here is a six horned goat from China which I am sure is a sign of their impending nuclear catastrophe.

At Least He Loves Animals

Recently eaten: beets
Recent annoyance: those poor misguided Greenpeace, WashPIRG and Save the Children street fundraisers

There's a lot going on at this wedding. First, he's almost 8 feet tall. Check. Second, she's not even close to that. Check. AND, they are getting married at Kublai Khan's tomb. Awesome. Getting married on 7/07/07 was the latest wedding craze, I think getting hitched at famous mausoleums should be the next great fad. Although you might want to leave Tomb of the Unknown Soldier off your list.

Tallest man marries 'tiny' woman
he world's tallest man married a woman who's two-thirds his height and half his age, holding a traditional Mongolian ceremony Thursday with great fanfare at the tomb of Kublai Khan.

Bao Xishun, a 7-foot-9 herdsman from Inner Mongolia, met his bride earlier this year after searching high and low, sending advertisements around the world. It turns out he didn't have to look far -- 5-foot-6 saleswoman Xia Shujian hails from his hometown of Chifeng.

Bao wore a specially designed light blue gown topped with a gold vest, and rode to his bride's camp in front of the tomb in a cart pulled by two camels, AP Television News reported. A limo followed the cart.

In keeping with Mongolian tradition, the bride's attendants tried to "stop" Bao from getting into the camp. But they relented after the giant groom's sincere appeals, and he was offered tea by the bride's relatives, symbolizing that he had been accepted into her family.

He did not kowtow to his parents and in-laws because of his extraordinary height and arthritis in his knees, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Bao, 56, and Xia, 28, married in a civil ceremony in March. This time, more than 2,000 people turned out for the ceremonial nuptials, including relatives, locals and a large crowd of journalists.

Bao was confirmed last year by Guinness World Records as the world's tallest person. Xinhua said his growth was normal until age 16, when a growth spurt shot him up to his current height within seven years.

He was in the news in December after he used his long arms to save two dolphins by pulling plastic out of their stomachs.

The dolphins got sick after nibbling on plastic from the edge of their pool at an aquarium in Liaoning province. Attempts to use surgical instruments to remove the plastic failed because the dolphins' stomachs contracted in response to the instruments, Chinese media reported.

Don't Quit Your Day Job

Recently eaten: tunafish sandwich
Recent annoyance: doctors who miss their own appointments

Every so often I wonder what will become of me when I retire from this rat race. I suppose if I play my cards right, I could end up like this lady. There's a niche for everyone.

Woman Seeks Fame as Face of Chairman Mao
Chen Yan waves at a crowd of onlookers bemused at seeing China's late helmsman, Mao Zedong, brought back to life by a middle-aged woman.

Chen, 51, from Mianyang, in China's southwestern province of Sichuan, has been dressing up as Mao since she was discovered on a local TV show in 2005 impersonating another actor who had played Mao in movies.

"I was impersonating (the actor) when the beautician saw some similarities between me and Mao," Chen said, as make-up artists fussed over her in a Mianyang hair salon.

The beautician saw a dollar to be made in Chen's prominent cheekbones and imperious demeanor, and invited her for a make-over, she said.

Suited up in a grey, button-up waistcoat, Chen looks similar to the man who ruled China with an iron grip for decades, and is happy to ham it up for the cameras.

But the effortless poses belie fastidious preparations behind the scenes.

Chen spends up to 800 yuan on make-up and styling to create Mao's famous receding hairline.

"I need to wear a pair of specially designed shoes to increase my height to 1.80 meters (5 ft 11 in) since I am only 1.55 meters. Then I dress up in Sun Yat-sen suits which Mao also likes, and hold a cigarette without the filter," Chen said.

The financial hardships had forced her to call the media for a public photo shoot to "gain support and understanding from the public."

"My family are against me doing this," Chen said. "They don't think it's a good thing for a woman to impersonate a man."

Chen, however, is determined to make a living from impersonating Mao, even to the point where she is cagey about revealing details about her former occupations.

"I'm not telling anyone anything until I become famous," she said.

Well, Well, Guess Who Was Right?

Recently eaten: salmon, rice pilaf, pudding cup
Recent annoyance: little kids who can't sit still on the bus

Have the Chinese not learned from their protein-packed and dairy-fed bretheren on the other side of the Pacific? Chinese-Americans could have told you that to brawl with the best of them you need a balanced diet of red meat and whole milk. How else could we have infiltrated the highest ranks of business, technology, and medicine? Just don't ask me why there are practically no Asians in professional sports except Yao.

Chinese need more beef to tackle Westerners
Chinese footballers need to eat beef and drink milk if they are to play, and fight, with Westerners on a level playing field, according to a member of the advisory body to China's parliament.

Last month's brawl between China's under-21 team and English club Queens Park Rangers proved that Chinese athletes did not have enough brawn, according to Zhang Xinshi, a biology researcher from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"You can't just say you aren't used to eating beef and drinking milk and leave it at that," Zhang said during a discussion of Chinese agriculture at this week's meeting of the advisory body CPPCC.

"Our football can't reach a higher level. We are only good at skillful sports. Running for two 45 minute halves on such a large pitch at speeds like 100m, how can (our) bodies do that?

"We all saw the recent fight in England and they (the players) were beaten to a pulp.

"Sounds tragic? But if you are as strong as a buffalo how can they beat you up? Therefore I don't think we should advocate the Chinese grain-eating tradition."

Chinese defender Zheng Tao was taken to hospital with a fractured jaw after the 30-man fight during an ill-tempered friendly at QPR's training ground, which provoked a media storm in China.

WE DID IT!

Recently eaten: healthy choice entree
Recent annoyance: extremely hot office temperature (77 according to the thermostat)

Well, the Chinese have done it, they have figured out how to control pigeons with microchips in their brains. Although the scary thought I had was: maybe we've been controlling them all along!! Bwaaaah! Now, everyone lay down your weapons because you will be powerless against our flying army of winged rats.

Chinese scientists command pigeons via remote control
"Scientists in eastern China say they have succeeded in controlling the flight of pigeons with micro electrodes planted in their brains, state media reported on Tuesday.

Scientists at the Robot Engineering Technology Research Centre at Shandong University of Science and Technology said their electrodes could command them to fly right or left or up or down, Xinhua news agency said.

"The implants stimulate different areas of the pigeon's brain, according to signals sent by the scientists via computer and force the bird to comply with their commands," Xinhua said.

"It's the first such successful experiment on a pigeon in the world," Xinhua quoted the center's chief scientist, Su Xuecheng, as saying.

Su and his colleagues, who Xinhua said had had similar success with mice in 2005, were improving the devices used in the experiment and hoped that the technology could be put into practical use in future.

The report did not specify what practical uses the scientists saw for the remote-controlled pigeons. "

Mountains Out Of Anthills?

Recently eaten: chicken marsala
Recent annoyance: that nagging feeling that one day a piano is going to fall on my head

Jesu, I hope I get 3 billion yuan for Chinese NEw Year this year. Having recently acquired an ant farm myself, I am beginning to wonder if there isn't more to these little buggy workers than I ahd first realized. I have been keeping them for motivational purposes on my desk. I applaud Wang Zhendong for venturing into the scary world of entrepeneurship and, dare I say it, capitalism! Let us not forget the silent victims in all this: the ants.

China Death Sentence For Ant Scam
A Chinese man has been sentenced to death for conning people out of 3 billion yuan ($387 million) in a giant scam to breed ants, local media said on Thursday.

Wang Zhendong, from the northeastern province of Liaoning, fabricated a business purported to be making wine, tea and medical elixirs using mature ants, the Beijing News said.

In parts of China, black ants are sold by the bagful to be steeped in tea or soaked in liquor as a natural remedy for ailments such as arthritis.

Wang sold packages of ants to the investors for up to as much as 10,000 yuan ($1,290) when they were only worth 200 yuan, China Central Television reported.

More than 10,000 people, lured by the promise of returns of up to 60 percent, signed 100,000 contracts with Wang's bogus company before the case came under investigation in June 2005.

Investigators could only recover 10 million yuan of the money raised by Wang, the Beijing News said. One investor was so distraught at losing his money he killed himself, the newspaper said.

Fifteen managers of the company were jailed for between five and 10 years and fined between 100,000 and 500,000 yuan, Xinhua news agency said.

In his defense, Wang said he did not know the first thing about raising ants and was "quite unclear" about the costs, the Beijing News said.

Wang spent 798 million yuan on himself, paying off personal debts and lending money to other people, it added.

Always A Bridesmaid, Never A Ghost Bride

Recently eaten: chicken parm, banana bread
Recent annoyance: all you cold-phobes...you had your unbearable summer so just shut your cake-holes

When I visited mainland China with my aunt, uncle and cousin back in the day, I thought they were being paranoid when they wouldn't let me go to the bathroom by myself at the local mall. "Sometimes, " they warned, "girls go in and never come out." Holy hat, they weren't kidding. Maybe in Bangkok, or North Korea, but I would assume I could keep all my limbs and organs in China unless I tried to steal a panda or something. Remind me not to sell myself into an arranged marriage that next time I am hard up for some cash.

China arrests men for murdering ghost brides
"Chinese police have arrested three men for killing two young women to sell their corpses as "ghost brides" for dead single men, a Chinese newspaper reported, warning the dark custom might have claimed many other victims.

Yang Donghai, a 35-year-old farmer in western China's Shaanxi province, confessed to killing a woman bought from a poor family for 12,000 yuan ($1,545) last year.

She thought she was being sold into an arranged marriage, but Yang killed her in a gully and sold her corpse for 16,000 yuan, the Legal Daily reported on Thursday. He and two accomplices then killed a prostitute and sold her for 8,000 yuan before police caught them.

"I did it for the money; it was a quick buck," Yang said, according to the paper. "If I hadn't slipped up early, I planned to do a few more."

The women were victims of an old belief, still alive in the yellow-earth highlands of western China, that young men who die unmarried should go to their graves accompanied by deceased women who will be their wives in the afterlife. Often these women die natural deaths.

Police in Yanan, the poor and dusty corner of Shaanxi where Chairman Mao Zedong nurtured his Communist revolution, said the dark trade went beyond these cases.

"The actual number is far from just these," the paper said.

Yang and two helpers sold the bodies to Li Longsheng, an undertaker who police said specialized in buying and selling the dead women for "ghost weddings." It was unclear what happened to Li."

Baby, you were worth every yuan