Dave’s Wagon

Tattoos and earrings tend to look sleazy, while big bottoms could stick out too much, state media reported Friday, quoting officials selecting candidates for medal ceremonies and other protocol activities

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“We don’t want anyone who looks in any way sleazy because that could really put athletes off,” said Li Ning, principal of Beijing Institute of Protocol, who is heading the selection process.

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“Bone structure and height should be uniform,” she said. “For example, we don’t want any wide bottoms.”

The tiny ad in the lower right corner of page 14 of the Chengdu Evening News on Monday night, read: “Paying tribute to the strong(-willed) mothers of June 4 victims”.

…Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post said a young woman on the Chengdu Evening News classified section had allowed the ad to be published because she’d never heard of the June 4 crackdown.

MySpace, which already has more than 100 million users worldwide, is backed by News Corporation, one of the world’s largest media groups. The company formally announced MySpace China yesterday, and the site went live shortly after midnight in China, with a layout which mimics that of its main global site - with a few key differences.

Discussion forums on subjects like religion and politics are nowhere to be found on the new Chinese MySpace site, even though these are popular topics on other international MySpace sites. Instead, users are only offered safer topics for conversation, such as humor, sport and movies.

Users are told to click a button if they spot any ‘misconduct’ by other users. This ‘misconduct’ includes actions such as ‘endangering national security, leaking state secrets, subverting the government, undermining national unity, spreading rumors or disturbing the social order’ – according to the site’s terms and conditions…[more]

Costing just over $1 apiece, the pirated DVDs appear to be of the actual movie, complete with a picture of the hero in a new, black spider suit which he wears for some of the film.

There is even a warning on the back, printed in Chinese, against pirating the product.

But put the one bought on Tuesday in the machine, and it does not work — a common problem with Chinese-made DVDs, which are often made with poor equipment in dingy backrooms.