Welcome to Three Shots with Beijing Cream, where local personalities show off their drinking prowess at bars you should patronize. Produced and directed by Gabriel Clermont and Anthony Tao.
You've likely bumped into him at one of the city's bars, if you're the bar-going kind. Otherwise, you might know his work from The Atlantic, the New York Times, TIME, CNN, Huffington Post, and a variety of other publications. Our guest this week is Mitch Moxley, former China Daily copy editor, author of the forthcoming Apologies to My Censor about being a white man in China.
“Is it a sin to work for Global Times?” asks the headline to a recent SCMP blog by Amy Li that launches into an account of a recent, unpleasant and viral Weibo exchange between a reporter from the English version of GT, Zhang Zhilong, and a scribe for a more liberal paper, China Business News, Wang Wai. Zhang had contacted Wang under the unspoken “we’re all journalists together” pact in hopes of getting more police information about a taxi accident involving his parents and doing a story about it.
It’s not shameful to seek a companion to calm the exigencies of the heart, which swell like waves and retreat as quickly to beach sorrow on the shores of our body.
But this woman — Liang Yali — is a swindler and sham. We think. Because what kind of slick snake salesperson would take advantage of another person’s loneliness to charge these prices — as reported by SCMP — for something called the Seek-a-Husband Training Programme?
Back when I was teaching in China, two of my colleagues and I ran a business English program on behalf of our school at a local factory. The company, Siwei, a mining equipment manufacturer, was apparently in talks with a German company to set up a joint venture, and they wanted to train up the business English of their future managers. The students, most of them recent college graduates, were very enthusiastic learners, and I think they appreciated their company investing in them. Unlike a lot of on-site business English courses, which tend to be a low priority for students who often have much more important things on their plate, the course had great attendance and we made a lot of progress over the course of six months. Also, the training manager, who I named Hank, was a walking stereotype of the shady, adulterous, face-collecting Chinese businessman. He quite excitedly explained his reason for having two phones: “Nokia is for wife, but iPhone is for my girlfriend.” Fucking Hank. After six months, the program ended, we went out for dinner and got wasted at KTV and I never heard from them again.
Around 2 pm yesterday in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, a brother and sister duo rode a motorcycle off the roof of a building, both of them dying in the fall.
Preliminary reports have ruled it an accident. The siblings were practicing how to ride when the driver is said to have lost control.
An ostrich escaped from a zoo in Zhangzhou, Fujian province recently and proceeded to run, ostrich-like, against traffic. It knocked over a motorcyclist before twice being hit by cars. Each time, it picked itself up, shook off the cobwebs, and continued running, because it's an ostrich.
The cop interviewed in the above video says they enlisted the help of the zoo to catch this bird, because "we're inexperienced, we don't know how to catch it."
The Daily Telegraph reports that Baby 59, the resilient newborn who survived being flushed down a squat toilet, has been released from the hospital:
On Thursday morning, a hospital official who declined to be named, told The Daily Telegraph the child had now been released. "We just know that the family came yesterday, accompanied by county public security officers, and took away the baby," he said.
But here's where it gets complicated.
If you knew only these facts:
1. A racing pigeon called "Bolt" (after Olympian Usain) was sold by a Belgian breeder to a businessman for 310,000 euros ($400,000), and
2. It's a fucking pigeon,
You would have to guess, would you not, that the businessman who bought it was Chinese? Because who else anywhere would have 100 K short of a half million to throw at a fucking pigeon?
