Welcome to the second edition of “Weird Wednesdays in China“, a wacky bi-weekly roundup of strange news in China. For those of you paying attention — sorry about missing last week.
This week we deal with panda proxies, panda poop, Grimm porn and boy stuck in a tough spot.
This art is a piece of shit, high-priced panda shit
A group of nine Chengdu students and their instructor are 300,000 RMB richer, having sold a sculpture of the Venus de Milo made from giant panda excrement. The buyer is Swiss-born Uli Sigg, a collector and fan of Chinese contemporary art. According to the news report, Sigg found the work “full of creativity and innovation” — I was expecting bamboo or possibly a bit of tourist.
Boy trapped inside washing machine
Three-year-old Chaofan required the help of the local rescue services when a game of hide-and-seek with his mother went terribly wrong. The Taiyuan, Shanxi, boy was stuck in the family’s washing machine for more than an hour before firefighters freed him using a massive circular saw. I’m a little bit impressed that this 3-year-old was able to get up on the thing in the first place. Also impressed that people in Taiyuan have washing machines.
Conservationists dress in Panda suits to introduce panda cubs to the wild and monitor them
Apparently it’s panda week around here. So, evidently, panda cubs that are released into the wild after having been raised by humans are being rejected by their feral kin. To get around this, conservationists are dressing up in panda costumes when having to perform checkups on released pandas in hopes that this doesn’t disturb the panda population as much as it does me.
I wonder if the pandas have as much urge to junk-kick people in these types of suits as I do. But then, I guess if you’re so lazy that you can’t even be bothered to propagate your genes and save your species, you’re unlikely to mess with kind-hearted weirdos in polyester Halloween costumes.
China publishers mistakenly translate erotic Grimm tales
Anyone that’s been in China for more than 5 minutes has likely seen some terribly misguided chinglish translations. And if you’re like me you’ve stopped and asked yourself if it is really that expensive to just get it translated correctly? Well, I’m sure it’s a mistake a couple of Chinese publishers will think long and hard (ahem) about next time. China Friendship Publishing Company and China Media Time have hastily yanked (ahem) a collection of Brothers Grimm fairy tales from the children’s section of book stores after having mistakenly translated a Japanese pornographic reinterpretation of the tales.
They reportedly used the services of a recent grad to translate the classic tales, but when they couldn’t find the originals and so translated them from what they thought were Japanese versions of the stories. Instead what they got included (among others) a version of the classic tale (tail?) of Snow White in which the heroine has sexual relations with her father and the seven dwarves, and then after dying, a necrophiliac prince falls in love with her body. The kid that translated the stories must either be laughing his (fired) ass off, or have truly believed the loose-moral anti-Western kool-aid fed to him to not have raised issue over the content with the books’ publishers. And crap translations/translators are one thing, but surely another set of eyes read this before it went to print. Surely.
hehe, nice addition to LL Ryan, keep ’em coming.