Have you ever been to a Chinese public pool? They're usually crowded, the water's inevitably dirty, and young children should probably never be allowed near. So what do you do when your kid is desperate for a dip?
An email has been going around among Shanghai expats, and it's worth a look for those who aren't already too cynical. The full thing is over at Shanghaiist, but here's the money graf:
Did you know there are 14,694 people per square kilometer in Beijing, and five million people own cars as of January? Furthermore, did you know that the area inside Second Ring Road, just 62.5 square kilometers, makes up 6 percent of Beijing's total area yet accounts for 30 percent of all traffic? Or that within Second Ring Road, government compounds take up an incredible 58 percent of space, with the implication that the government's transportation needs -- think private cars, probably Audis -- does more to cripple the traffic grid than anything else?
How quickly fortunes change. On Tuesday in Urumqi, a blast of lightning struck and killed 173 sheep, inflicting up to 200,000 yuan of economic loss for the owners. (Technically, 143 died instantly, 30 more were swept away by rains.) This story comes on the heels of another sorry tale of lightning mishap: on July 6,... Read more »
Two months ago, there was a post in this space called Chinese People With Unfortunate Anus Problems: A Compendium, wherein I linked to a story about a chef who died after his pals punked him by shoving a live eel up his anus. (“Medics said the eel had devoured his bowels.”) “Bad prank, or worst prank... Read more »
Tigers aren’t so wonderful things sometimes. (Go ahead and skip this story if you’re an animal lover.) On Monday morning at Xixiakou Wild Animal Preserve in Weihai, Shandong province, visitors to the tiger preserve were horrified to find three year-old bengals playing “aggressively” (zoo’s word) with a seven-month-old white tiger. When the above picture first surfaced... Read more »
The National Basketball League (NBL) is a semi-pro basketball league managed by the same suits who control the top-tier Chinese Basketball Association (CBA). The NBL's playoffs are currently happening, but they're not happening very well. As Jon Pastuszek of NiuBBall reports, "I invite you to keep an eye on the NBL playoffs, where not one, but two all-out brawls went down inside of three days last Friday and Sunday."
Feng Jianmei, who was forcibly aborted last month, and her husband Deng Jiyuan, who went missing for a while but has since resurfaced, have signed a settlement with their local government, reports Xinhua: The family of a young Chinese woman forced to have a late-term abortion has agreed to settle the case out of court after... Read more »
Via China Whisper: “July 11, Wuhan maximum temperature was over 35 degrees, Giant Panda ‘Weiwei’ was laying on the ice blocks to get rid of heat.” Smart panda. Update, 1:40 pm:
![Chinese State Media’s People’s Daily Reports Kim Jong-Un Was Named “The Onion’s Sexiest Man Alive” [UPDATE]](http://beijingcream.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Peoples-Daily-Kim-Jong-Un-The-Onion-150x150.png "Chinese State Media’s People’s Daily Reports Kim Jong-Un Was Named “The Onion’s Sexiest Man Alive” [UPDATE]")
