At around 5 pm today, a mentally deranged man from Yishui, Shandong province fatally stabbed two people outside Chaoyang Joy City shopping mall in Beijing. He is currently in custody.
Among the dead is a foreigner. No other details are currently known.
Occasionally in showbusiness or sports, the odds against a performer's success are so stacked that the audience chooses, out of the goodness of human compassion, to root against probability. It's why we pull for Celtic FC when they face Barcelona, or Susan Boyle. I hadn't planned to cheer for the pageant contestants of Miss World China on Sunday at Galaxy SOHO -- hadn't not planned to cheer, as planning these things one way or another would be odd -- but a realization dawned upon me sometime between the rain and the fake applause piped in through the sound system: these girls are all underdogs in their own spotlight. They deserve better.
If you're into beauty pageants -- and I say this knowing no one is, really -- there's a big one happening tonight, the finals of Miss World China, at Galaxy SOHO. Our friends at That's Beijing are running a very easy contest to get you in the event -- that includes a special invite-only afterparty that commences at 10 pm -- so if you want to rub elbows with the peachy, the yutzy, the beautiful though probably boxy, the sclerotic and robotic -- p-fucking-s, FREE DRINKS -- answer this question in an email to bjeditor@urbanatomy.com with "Miss World" in the subject line:
Here's the thing about teaching English in China: it's a way in. "The people who come for the experience, I feel, are the most valuable people you can have in a place like Beijing because they're learning about themselves, and you never know what somebody might be able to do until they arrive in a place like this," says Matt Jones, an English teacher who's using his years of experience -- teaching "communication" and "culture" as much as anything else, as he puts it -- to start his own school. "If the ticket is English teaching, why not use that ticket?"
That's one hell of a picture. It was taken from inside a bus that had hit a man falling from the sky (technically, overpass) on Wednesday morning in Beijing's Chaoyang District.
We desperately don't want this to be true, but Tsinghua's famous three-year-old cat, who had been adopted as the university's unofficial mascot, may have been brutally killed last week.
This is bad.
A young woman got into a fight with subway security last Friday at Beijing Subway’s Changping Line. According to the video description, the scuffle began when she refused to put her bag through the X-ray machine, reportedly saying, “My bag costs twenty-fucking-thousand bucks, can you afford to touch it?” She then began cursing the poor security guards, with her male companion joining in.
The summer heat -- and it's been damn hot in Beijing -- is getting to people. Here, two female passengers on Bus 680 get into a bit of an entanglement. We commend the conductress who tries to break things up, and even picks up a dropped item (pearls?) and asks who it belongs to.
And the guy filming -- good job to you as well. Your video has 203,000 views on Youku.
Here’s the latest from the chronicles of bad places to relieve yourself. Last week, one Cao Liping spied about a dozen tourists peeing on a vine-covered wall near the 17 Arches Bridge in Beijing’s Summer Palace. Angered, he snapped the above photo and posted it to Sina Weibo, where it predictably triggered uproar. CCTV and People’s Daily... Read more »
A woman jumped in front of a train at Guomao Subway Station on Line 1 in Beijing yesterday and lived to tell about it. When she emerged from between carriages, pulling herself onto the platform from the tracks, she cried over and over, "Impossible..."
