“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!” – Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being ~
"It's not just children who like it. The core value of the rubber duck is to bring back childlike innocence to all of us, especially weary adults." – Zeng Hui, head of the Beijing Design Week Organizing Committee
The Hunan-based Sanxiang Metropolis Daily brings us this picture of a 5.1-kilogram, 90-centimeter-long (nearly a meter!) rat that you just might be seeing in your nightmares.
There's a horror movie in here somewhere -- or at least an unnecessary flashback to Thomas J's death in My Girl.
At least 18 people have died from wasp attacks in Angkang, Shaanxi province in recent months, according to the Guardian, citing city health official Zhou Yuanhong, who says more than 100 people in the area have been stung.
Typhoon Usagi, with winds of up to 110 mph, began lashing southern China over the weekend, leaving at least 25 people dead in Guangdong province. At least one hippopotamus also finds itself stranded.
That rubber duck -- you know the one -- looked pretty sad in its new environs of Beijing last week. Check out these photos via AP, and the accompanying story via Reuters:
Giant panda Mei Xiang of Washington DC's National Zoo gave birth to twin cubs on Friday and Saturday. It was her third and fourth births, all of them in DC. Sadly, the latter was a stillborn:
If you live in Dafeng, Jiangsu province, do yourself a favor and seal up your rice bags and biscuit jars, because at least one million cockroaches are on the loose and coming for you.
A zoo in Henan recently put a Tibetan mastiff in its lion pen, which had no lion.
We have no doubt they did this as a joke, perhaps to see which zoo-goers, followed by news outlets, would take them seriously. But we wonder -- is this "trolling"? Is this "satire"? Is this actually a political statement about the Chinese zoo itself, forcing us -- by caging a household pet -- to see the metal bars which render animals as objects of amusement and belittlement?
This is quite the tragic story. On August 9 at about 4 pm, a young man, reportedly 26, went to Kudi Pet Park in Beijing's Chaoyang Park with his wife and two dogs. Only his wife would walk out alive.
"This used to be a dog amusement park, now it's a park of horrors," an eyewitness tells a Beijing TV reporter in the above video.
"The pet park is for dogs to go swimming," another eyewitness says. "We all raise our dogs like they're our children, and then this happens!"
Ever since we found out that Florentijn Hofman's famous Rubber Duck was coming to Beijing, the question has been: where will it be placed? Houhai? The National Center for the Performing Arts ("The Egg")? Zhang Xin's personal swimming pool?
As WSJ's China Realtime Report noticed, you can now watch pandas all day, every day, with the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding's 24-hour live feed. It's a screenwriter's dream.
Geese are apparently being used to help law enforcement officers in Xinjiang, according to People's Daily. We're tempted to make a chengguan joke here, but we'll refrain.
The Telegraph has the full report for you, which you should read here. We're going to isolate the quotes from the article, because taken together, they provide a lesson in ridiculousness.
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.
