If You Act Now, You Can Be The Proud Owner Of One Of 10,000 Luxury Homes Abandoned By Officials Too Rich To Care

Luxury house
Are you interested in property with garish golden columns and statues of boys urinating, Hello Kitty doorbells and fluffy pink wallpaper? Now’s your chance: the fire sale of all fire sales in now on! As The Telegraph reports: Luxury properties are being dumped on the market in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou for anyone able to... Read more » Read more »

Watch As 45 Passersby Ignore An 87-Year-Old Man Who Falls And Can’t Get Up

Wang samaritan featured image
Recently in Chongqing, an 87-year-old man surnamed Wang stumbled and fell outside his building in a residential community. He laid there for a full five minutes before a security guard helped him up. A surveillance camera recorded 45 people, reportedly, ignore him. Near the end of Wang's ordeal, a group of people surrounded him and rubbernecked as if he were a car accident. Finally, two security guards helped him back to his apartment. Read more »

Guess who hated Obama’s inaugural address more than American Reaganists

The East is Read
President Barack Obama has drawn basically positive reviews for his second inaugural address yesterday, but at least one person was not impressed. (Note: probably tens of millions were not impressed, but you can read the comments section to Hot Air and other sites devoted to the corpse of Ronald Reagan if you’re interested.) We’re talking... Read more » Read more »

The Schmidts write about their North Korea trip

Via SCMP
Like most visitors of North Korea, Sophie Schmidt, daughter of Google chairman Eric Schmidt, thought the country “weird.” It’s her that everyone is quoting today, specifically this write-up on Google Sites: It’s impossible to know how much we can extrapolate from what we saw in Pyongyang to what the DPRK is really like.  Our trip... Read more » Read more »

Top-of-the-Week Links: Japan threatens to fire at Chinese aircraft, Southern Weekly honors censored stories, and Liao Yiwu’s book about prison

Ai Weiwei overlooks parade route
President Barack Obama's public inauguration begins soon, and lookey who overlooks his parade route (above, via The Atlantic). If you're in Beijing and would like to watch, the place to go is Brussels (or so TimeOut tells us), which also showed live coverage of the US presidential election. For everyone else, links. Read more »

Rotting dogs, assailed nostrils, withered roses… just a story about gutter oil here

The East is Read
This is a frightening lede. It is frightening indeed. More so if you knew this frightening read is about the food you eat. It’s from Caixin Online. It’s oil with an extra something, but there’s nothing virgin-like about it.   Um. Pumped from sewers outside of restaurants, or pressed from trash, the oil is born... Read more » Read more »

Watch Furious Pete Take On Beijing Noodles, Rickshaws, And “Poo” In This Rib-Tickling Travel Video

Furious Pete in Beijing
In the latest episode of Furious World Tour, the adventurous Pete hits up Beijing's hotspots with his characteristic Canadian suave. Along the way, accompanied by the Beijinger's Marilyn Mai, he samples some multiple bowls of hand-pulled noodles, applewood-roasted duck, "pizza," spiders, scorpions of different sizes, smelly starfish (he's not a fan), and curry chicken from the infamous House of Poo Poo Read more »

The Worst Basketball Refereeing Ever (And Of Course Tracy McGrady Happens To Be Involved)

Tracy McGrady vs Tianjin 2
I'm not sure how, but Tracy McGrady has a way of attracting refereeing debacles. (As a Beijing fan, I'm not just talking about Wednesday night's avian contest between the Ducks and Double Star Eagles in Qingdao, though that was massively craptacular too, with the home team benefitting from so many calls that I wondered aloud whether the CBA was publicly making amends with T-Mac for suspending him.) The worst -- absolute no doubt worst bar none -- happened yesterday. Read more »