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.
A 23-year-old gorilla named Jiaku became famous at Tianshan Wildlife Zoo in Xinjiang for being a "heavy smoker." He was known to perform tricks -- doing handstands, turning in circles, clapping his hands, even performing ballet moves -- to get visitors to throw him a smoke, and would sometimes get desperate without his nicotine fix.
His trainer, however, out of concern for his health, has recently tried to wean him off cigarettes. The method has been to lace his ciggies with chili pepper and to apply an ointment on the end.
Talk about a publicity and soft power machine for China. On Saturday, June 22, a female panda named Haizi gave birth to twins at a conservation center in Wolong, and everyone is talking about it, from BBC to AP to the Telegraph, which reports:
The rubber duck is coming to Beijing Design Week in September. Dutch creator Florentijn Hofman apparently made the announcement at a press conference in Beijing on Saturday, saying, “The Rubber Duck knows no frontiers, it doesn't discriminate people and doesn't have a political connotation. The friendly, floating Rubber Duck has healing properties: it can relieve mondial tensions as well as define them. The rubber duck is soft, friendly and suitable for all ages!”
Look at these douchenozzles.
A dolphin was found stranded in a swimming zone of Dadong Sea in Sanya, Hainan province on June 16, and while waiting for animal rescues to arrive, a few swimmers decided to lug the poor creature out of the water for photos.