It would appear that the Chinese Government yesterday opened up an official homepage in English.

Gov.cn, the official web portal of the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China, opened on a trial basis Tuesday its English version, English.gov.cn.

The site has a lot of information and exciting topics such as: "The First Group Of Tourist Areas Listed As Grade 4A."

For attaining permanent residence status, it has this advice:

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German man drank too much, wet his bed and set fire to his apartment while trying to dry his bedding, police in the western town of Muelheim said Monday.

"He was too drunk to go to the toilet," said a police spokesman. "The next morning he put a switched-on hairdryer on the bed to dry it and left the apartment." When the 60-year-old returned, his home and belongings were in flames.

Firemen eventually put out the blaze.

 link

Some people will do anything for a smoke these days...  Smoker tried to open plane door A French woman has admitted attempting to open an aeroplane door mid-flight so that she could smoke a cigarette. The woman was arrested when the plane landed in Australia

Sandrine Helene Sellies, 34, who has a fear of flying, had drunk alcohol and taken sleeping tablets ahead of the flight from Hong Kong to Brisbane.

Gallery of funny and bizarre street signs:

http://www.swanksigns.org/index.asp

Is it just that I find Chinese news more interesting, so I look at more Chinese news than other news?  Or is that that there's a strange number of strange incidents?  Tonight one of my fellow diners related the story of a man and a woman whose only child had drowned in an accident.  The wife had undergone tubal occlusion, so they discussed and decided that the husband would find another woman and have a child with her, so that the family line could go on. The child was born. The wife paid the (younger) woman 100,000 RMB, and everything was happy... Until the younger woman had another child, and it became evident that the man had fallen for her. Well at some point, the story ended with the wife killing the younger woman by strangling her and slitting her throat with a razor.

Google has incorporated street maps for some cities in China into its cool scrolling and zooming "Google Maps" interface.

This version of Google Local covers big cities (Kunming and Dali are in it, but Lijiang is not), and the information comes from mapabc.com.  Unfortunately, it's only in Chinese.

It's named, appropriately enough: http://bendi.google.com/

Two pretty interesting articles on the Economist about China.  This well-written but unfortunately titled article about Bush's visit to China this weekend gives a good overview of the background to the meeting.  This got a chuckle out of me:

Mr Bush isn’t short of opinions on China’s rise either. In Kyoto this week, on the first leg of his Asian tour, he said: “As China reforms its economy, its leaders are finding that once the door to freedom is opened even a crack, it cannot be closed.” He went on to heap lavish praise on Taiwan’s democracy, in a move sure to irritate his hosts in China, who consider the island to be a renegade province.

And this other one is about a rogue copper trader who has put China in debt 100,000-200,000 tons of copper -- copper which the country seemingly doesn't have available to deliver.  The trader (one Mr. Liu) has disappeared, and some sources say his company denied that a Mr Liu even worked there.

Found a new proxy server today, useful for accessing blocked sites.

http://wubi.org/px/nph-index.cgi/000000A/http/www.google.com/

A company in Beijing (the Beijing Lunar Village Aeronautics Science and Technology Co, Ltd) started selling land on the moon for 298 yuan per acre on October 19.  Not surprisingly, it's been shut down by the government for profiteering.

The CEO said he would cooperate the industrial and commercial authorities' investigation and expected to reopen his business when policies permit.

Perhaps the strangest part of the story is that the company has 10 million yuan in capital (and has only made 100,000 in profit)

The quote at the end of the news article:

"It's ridiculous! The moon belongs to all mankind, so how can acompany sell it?" said a man surnamed Xu

is also humorous. 

Average Male Heights (20-25)

1 Shandong 175.44 cm
2 Beijing 175.32 cm
3 Heilongjiang 175.24 cm
4 Liaoning 174.88 cm
5 Inner Mongolia 174.58 cm
6 Hebei 174.49 cm
7 Ningxia 173.98 cm
8 Shanghai 173.78 cm
9 Jilin 172.83 cm
10 Tianjin 172.80 cm
11 Taiwan 172.75 cm
12 Shanxi 172.73 cm
13 Xinjiang 172.72 cm
14 Shaanxi 172.72 cm
15 Macau 171.79 cm
16 Gansu 171.67 cm
17 Jiangsu 171.54cm
18 Henan 171.49 cm
19 Qinghai 170.95 cm
20 Anhui 170.93 cm
21 Zhejiang 170.90 cm
22 Fujian 170.90 cm
23 Hong Kong 170.89 cm
24 Sichuan 170.86 cm
25 Guangdong 169.78 cm
26 Chongqing 169.71 cm
27 Tibet 169.68 cm
28 Jiangxi 169.63 cm
29 Hainan 169.60 cm
30 Hubei 169.54 cm
31 Guizhou 169.35 cm
32 Yunnan 169.24 cm
33 Hunan 168.99 cm
34 Guangxi 168.96 cm