The Original Gold Digger

If Kanye West was chillin in China around 1893, he would have met the original gold digger -- Empress Dowager Cixi (check out her nails designed for gold digging) who married the emperor, embezzled state funds set aside for expanding the navy, teamed up with a bunch of conniving eunuchs and used the money to build....a marble ship!

Get down girl, go 'head get down
Get down Dowager, go 'head get down
Get down Cixi, go 'head get down

Inscrutable Massages, Food etc. in China

A few years ago, in China, we came across an inscrutable sign that said : BLIND MASSAGE

Setting ourselves the task of decoding it's meaning, we reasoned that it could mean one of two things:

1. If you are blind, you can go here to get a massage

2. You get a massage by a blind person

Given that it was a printed sign, we reckoned it could not be 1) as that sign would need to be Braille or something. We were about to move on when a sudden, horrifyingly ridiculous third alternative emerged:

3. You get to massage a blind person

Could that even be possible? What would the blind person get out of it? What would you get out of it? The mind boggled.

Sounds ridiculous, but then look at this sign:



If one can have:
- The hand grasps the beef
- Steamed rolling wish oats flavor
- Domestic life soil beans a round mass if
- Syrup long chinese yam,
- Pingyao bowl gets wet bare
- Sour picked cababe with mound
- Burn the eggplant
- Bum [*nb- our favorite: short, sweet and insanely ridiculous]
- Burn the egggplant [*nb - That's right eggplant, burn! burn!!]
- The red flour rubs mound fights
- Orchid Zhou knife cut face
- Powder vegetables if water
etc...

then anything should be possible, even option 3!

ps - we never checked out the massage, but it turns out that option 2 was correct.

The developing world is full of animal-shaped trash cans!

Here is a giant rabbit (India) a voracious penguin (Vietnam), an anthropomorphic monkey (India) and a shark (Israel). Who decided to place these abominations in public view?





A similar effort to place a giant green rabbit trash can in the UK was cut down by public opinion. Poor Paul Smith.

Trash cans are trash cans, especially in the developing world where they tend to become stained & overfull. Animal trash cans are not cute, unless they look like something you would buy on etsy.com for your kids

If you *really* want a trash can to be more than a garbage receptacle,then look no further than China.


The 'Do not litter' sign on this monument in the Forbidden City translates to:

"A single act of carelessness leads to the eternal loss of beauty"

Wow. Now THAT will make you stop before you drop or litter...

ps- Apologies for the blurred shot [Does anybody have one better?]