The Reluctant Whore

Today In Extraordinarily Odd

In their quest for internationally recognized cleanliness in the lead up to the Beijing Olympics and the World Expo, the Chinese government seems to be walking a tightrope between managing bad press about oh, the amount of dog and child being eaten in secret cult restaurants underground or whatever, and publicly being seen as proactive in cleaning up and raising the standards of the city. Seeing as the government of China has a hand in the health system, the Chinese journalist who snuck into a hospital and gave a urine sample to the doctor he saw and was then prescribed medication – except he actually gave the doctor green tea rather than urine – was seen as an embarrassment and was reprimanded for making the hospital look stupid…and corrupt. A Health Department spokesman said, "If people keep bringing liquids like beers and sauce as urine specimens for medical tests, hospitals must add a new procedure to test whether the specimen is actually urine, which complicates the simple medical procedures." Well sure, but green tea is often, well, essentially green. Is green urine a sign of chronic health?[source]

A group of humorless crustacean activists have just spent over three thousand dollars buying 300 lobsters so they can re-release them back into the waters near where they were in line to be boiled alive, chopped up and stuffed into a croissant only sold for 25 dollars (you can probably get about 4 lobster rolls per lobster). While it seems rather ill-conceived to dump a bunch of lobsters directly back into the waters they were originally caught in, so they can re-negotiate the traps that lay in wait, coming up with a fool proof plan isn’t really the point when you’re a god-complex stricken university student or bored housewife running blindly towards any old cause that will give you a reason to get out of bed. One activist was quoted as saying 'We just want them to have a chance before they get caught again”. Oh yeah. Great tactic from the bleeding heart permissives. Those lobsters were obviously problem lobsters from the time their parents divorced. They were bad seeds and that’s why they were caught – lurking around the areas they were told not to go near as children. What good is another chance when they are clearly directionless, lazy and they probably smoke pot and graffiti walls too. [source]

Just because what could be more fun that being dragged through a theme park where the theme is actually based on a relentlessly depressing, mud soaked, gray, disease riddled critical commentary on social class and injustice in England around the 19th Century, an investor in the UK is putting together a theme park based on the characters from novels by Charles Dickens. All the joy of overwhelming, cripplingly poverty, endless cold and grotesque characters are sure to brighten the family up this summer – why not stay buy a week long pass! Actually, when you think of it, it’s probably the perfect place to take that insufferably self absorbed emo niece who won’t smile at anything [source]