Have you ever wondered if there was more to life, other than being really, really, ridiculously good looking?
According to Guangzhou Daily, the world’s largest tumor, weighting 45kg, was removed from a patient in Guangzhou. The tumor, in addition to being the largest ever recorded, was actually heavier than the patient itself…
Ananova offers some more information on this story.
A recent article on Shanghai Daily, titled City Surgeons Come in Handy, reports on a Jiangsu native with the largest hand in the world (with a 26cm left thumb…).
To view the original article, which contains a very shocking picture, and not recommended for the faint hearted (seriously, you don’t want to see this), click here.
Wuhan has once again found its way into the China Daily’s “Odd News” section:
A school in Wuhan, Hubei Province, has sparked controversy after it requested more than 30 students to undergo cosmetic surgery before graduation.
The surgery was for double-fold eyelids, breast enlargement and the removal of moles.
It was to make the students, most of them girls, more attractive and therefore stand a better chance of gaining employment.
Many of the students want to be airline cabin attendants after graduation.
Residents complained the school was focusing too much on the appearance of students instead of improving the quality of its teachers. But the school said it was important to improve the appearance of students when considering the tough employment market.
This school was only playing the game like everyone else. I’d bet many of the students would have had the surgery done anyway, for the same reasons.
Today my girlfriend received an SMS from a friend, a grad student at one of China’s top universities here in Beijing:
最近少出去少在外面吃东西！一伙新疆感染爱滋病毒的人在全国部分城市通过竹签挑破自己皮肤沾血来传染给他人。把血滴到食物里！事情被证实是真的。已有部分大学生感染，不管怎样小心吧！尽量不要外出！最好用自己的碗筷，预防为好！
Roughly translated:
Avoid going out and eating outside in the next few days! A man with AIDS from Xinjiang has been going around to cities all over the country and spreading the disease by pricking himself with a bamboo stick and then dripping blood into other people’s food! This is not a hoax. Some university students have already been infected, so please be careful! Don’t go out unless you have to, and if you eat out, bring your own eating utensils!
Apparently Xinjiangers, already widely maligned as the “Thieves of China“, aren’t satisfied with just pickpocketing anymore. Now at least one is traveling across the country and dropping his AIDS into the food of unsuspecting students–mostly Han students, no doubt.
I didn’t know that one could get AIDS from eating a drop or two of AIDS-infected blood–unless it’s super AIDS, in which case all bets are off. At least we now know that bringing your own sanitized bowl and chopsticks will kill the super AIDS, though.
The reputation of Chinese food and product safety has experienced a slight setback the past several months. There have been well-publicized cases of exports involving tainted seafood, lead paint- and GHB-coated toys and even the mysterious death of a Korean diplomat in Beijing linked to unsafe food. At first, the Chinese government definatly insisted that food and product safety issues are isolated, exaggerated by the paranoid and biased international media or even trumped up due to trade protectionism.
Well, it turns out there may have been something to the international outcry over product safety. The New York Times (via Xinhua) reports today that the government announced it demolished 2,800 rural food facilities, closed down 47,000 illegal food factories and shut down over 300 drug and medical equipment factories. Not so isolated, by my measure.
According to the Times article, new legislation is in the works that will inflict the death penalty on those responsible for products that harm or kill large numbers of people. Presumably, this means the executives of companies that knowingly sell shoddy products. They did not need to wait for the new legislation to punish Cao Wenzhuang, the former head of the pharmaceutical registration department of the State Food and Drug Administration. He was sentenced to death in July for accepting bribes from drug companies for fast-tracking approval of their drugs.
Latest health news from Wuhan:
Doctors in China admit they are baffled after a man began to perspire green sweat. Cheng Shunguo, 52, of Wuhan city, says his sweat turned green in the middle of November. “I noticed that my underwear and bed sheets were all green, and even the water in the shower,” he told.
Cheng says he feels no discomfort, but went to hospital because he was worried about his condition. Doctors thoroughly cleaned his armpits but it took only 10 minutes for his sweat to turn a piece of white gauze green again.
They have carried out blood tests on Cheng, but found everything to be normal. “We can’t find the cause,” admitted a spokesman for the hospital which reported the case to the media in the hope of finding a solution.
The Beijing Olympics organizing committee has begun the search for medal presenters for next summer’s Olympic games and has decided that presenters need to meet certain minimum criteria, namely that they be female, tall and skinny. Oh yes, and pretty. And educated. Unbeknownst to me, book smarts are essential to the complicated task of medal-awarding. The ceremonial positions are open to female university students between the ages of 18 and 25 years old and between 5 feet 6 inches and 5 feet 10 inches tall. While there is no official weight requirement, according to a Washington Post interview with the director of the cultural activities department of the Beijing Olympics organizing committee:
“we do have requirements for their height and the figure, because we have to make clothes for them, and we have technical guidance for that…”
Let’s call that a weight requirement, shall we?
What will the hostesses wear? According to the China Daily, it’s a “hot” controversy.
I have been having a sore neck for a couple days now but this morning while I was taking a shower, suddenly the pain spiked and it was so severe that I almost vomited.
I was dragging myself out of the shower to get ready for work as my Aiyi asked me what is wrong with me. I told her my neck really hurts, she took a split second look and proclaimed:
Ni shou feng le — you have received wind.
My sources tell me that if you’ve got a single eyelids and want doubles, the hospital at Capital Normal University is the place to go. They’ll double you up for 300-400 RMB.
If you’re a guy, though, you might want to hold off on the surgery. Many of the current crop of Korean studs that Chinese girls are going gaga over are monolidded, and their Chinese counterparts are being seen in a better light because of it.