Cankersores are the worst. The worst. The bane of conversation when it falls on the tongue. The only upside is it keeps you from saying something stupid, perhaps about links. ...

How bad must a car dealership be to drive someone to demonstrably obliterate his own car? Outside the 12th Qingdao International Auto Show yesterday, three men, apparently driven to the brink by customer service (we've all been, yeah?), took sledgehammers and systematically ruined a Maserati (we've not done this). ...

Hong Kong University’s China Media Project already has an awesome service in WeiboScope, which preserves deleted Sina Weibo messages deemed too "sensitive." Apparently determined to bring those messages to a wider audience, CMP is now translating some of them into English with its newest service, WeiboSuite. ...

The 16.5-meter inflatable duck in Hong Kong's Victoria Bay remains entertaining. Look at the above. Just look at it. It was due to air leakage, says Sina. It lasted 12 days, as of yesterday. Pity the duck. Pity us all. ...

This had me laughing, too. It's unclear whether this video will have any appeal to non-baseball fans out there -- perhaps let us know in the comments -- but if you know Manny, you'll appreciate this. Yahoo's Big League Stew blog would like to remind us, however: ...

The disturbing story surfaced yesterday: six girls from a Hainan province elementary school went missing on May 8, with four found on the 9th and the other two found a day later. "They seemed dazed, some girls have bruise on hand and neck," reported Free More News, which is generally a reliable source even though it never cites where it gets its info. "Doctors found lower body injury on all six students. Fr ...

What does a false start and a censor's curse get you? An opening that is kind of terrible. Django Unchained, after its premiere was unceremoniously pulled and indefinitely delayed last month, returned to mainland theaters on Sunday, five days after it was supposed to. It earned 3.7 million yuan. Not US dollars... yuan. ...

Beijing expats may as well have been brought up in a magnificent castle, driven thence into this wonderland of partying and booze. Like all who emerge from relative privilege into physical decadence and spiritual morass, we are a self-centered lot, and so it is that we need a bar and club awards to tell us what we really want to know: where can we hang out with the kind who share our patois? what should we ...

Slowly. With bricks. After a chase. This, too, is part of China. The video description says the bandit was wielding a knife. ...

Belated Mother's Day wishes. Links follow. ...

We talk about censors as if they weren't real, but SCMP serves us this useful reminder that the people deleting your videos, expurgating articles, handcuffing artists, destroying the TV and entertainment industry, and -- the of course of "of courses" -- blocking porn, are made of flesh and blood, with intellectual capacities, however stunted, and human desires. Well, some used to have human desires, before ...

Amulet Mok, you cheeky bastard. If that is your real name! You ever have that very moment when every single cell of your body was aroused and your body was open for anything? Oh dear. ...

Surveillance footage has surfaced purportedly showing 22-year-old Yuan Liya entering Jingwen Mall in south Beijing on the night of May 2. She would fall to her death several hours later -- not seen on tape -- in what police have ruled was a suicide. Authorities reportedly blocked Yuan's family from seeing this footage last week, which was one of the reasons cited for an unusually large protest in front of J ...

Guijie, the prominent dining street on Dongzhimen Inner Street in Beijing, was the scene of a terrifying brawl on Sunday around 5:30 pm, according to the description on the above video, recently uploaded by Ai Weiwei. There are scant details, but the description also says the fight was between Han Chinese and Tibetan street peddlers/stall-keepers. There are lots of projectiles. ...

May 6 - May 12 ...

Welcome to Three Shots with Beijing Cream, where local personalities get drunk with us for some reason. Produced and directed by Gabriel Clermont and Anthony Tao. Our guest this week is the loquacious and smoky-eyed Nestor Santana, a longtime expat with the expat's trove of stories -- many of them we can't tell here. It doesn't mean we can't ask about them though. Nestor is the Asia manager for an ad and ma ...

We can't say we'll always be with you, but we'll be here tomorrow. Till then, keep it real, party people. ...

Quite the links edition today. Also, I just realized Wednesday was Fibonacci Day. Cheers to that! ...

On top of everything else, Ai Weiwei is a barber. A good one? Hm. Maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's start here: exactly what kind of haircuts does he give? “The kind that will make you want to cry," he said. “Just don’t make it boring,” I told him. “It won’t be boring.” ~ We were sitting on outdoor benches on Wednesday evening at the restaurant Fodder Factory in Caochangdi, a tiny urban enclave ...

The headline says it all, but here's the story: The Beijing police say they have arrested a woman for spreading online rumors in connection with the death of a migrant worker that touched off a rare protest in the Chinese capital on Wednesday. A 28-year-old Beijing woman surnamed Ma was arrested Thursday for writing on Sina Weibo, China’s largest Twitter-like microblog service, that the dead woman had been ...