It’s funny. I knew Chinese President Hu Jintao could sing but I never knew he could play ping pong. Guy’s a table tennis machine. Look at the way he holds his paddle Chinese-style (I guess that makes sense) and takes on not one but two opponents. George Bush claimed in an interview Tuesday that he gave up playing golf in order to show solidarity with those soldiers fighting in Iraq. He told Politico’s Mike Allen, “I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf.” I wonder if Hu’s going to rest his racket on the table during China’s earthquake recovery. Or will he stroke that ping pong ball to show his people that China will not be distracted or derailed from taking over the world. With all the horrifying pictures and videos slowly trickling out of China this week, this video brought a smile to my face.

Compared to the chaos that gripped Seoul over the weekend as the cursed Olympic torch came to town, South Korea’s neighbor to the north executed its torch ceremonies without a hitch — no shouting, no fighting and surely no pro-Tibet protest. In North Korea, where political dissent is as rare as an Internet connection, the world got a taste of how China had envisioned the torch procession at all of its stops — quiet, calm and Communist.

It’s important to start in Seoul, where on Sunday a North Korean defector tried to disrupt the torch run by, well, setting himself on fire. While the Tibet freedom movement has inspired torch run opponents in Paris, London and France, in Seoul the Tibet issue took a back seat to protest over the plight of North Korean refugees in China. Signs and banners lining the torch relay in Seoul depicted the horrific treatment of North Korean defectors in China, who are routinely hunted down, arrested and returned to North Korea by Chinese authorities. According to an Associated Press story Monday, Son Jong Hoon, the North Korean who attempted to immolate himself, had spearheaded a failed public campaign to save his brother, one of the North Korean defectors, from execution when he was found and returned to North Korea.

Distinct from those perpetrating violence on the other legs of the torch relay, in Seoul, it was pro-China, pro-Olympics protesters who triggered the majority of the demonstrations. According to the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo, over 6,500 Chinese residents in Seoul, mostly students, swarmed Seoul’s Olympic park determined to drown out the anti-China sentiment that has marred the torch run thus far. Chinese loyalists wrapped in China’s flag threw objects at anti-Olympics demonstrators, inadvertently striking a journalist in the head with a rock. And interestingly, the pro-China soldiers in Seoul were armed by none other than the Chinese government. From a Chosun report Monday:

Chinese students studying here seemed well organized in their efforts to guard the Olympic torch. Messages calling for concerted action began to appear in an online club of Chinese students in Korea two weeks ago. A 22-year-old Chinese student who said he studies at Korea University of Technology and Education said 30,000 Beijing Olympic T-shirts and 30,000 Chinese flags were sent to the demonstrators from China the day before the relay. Kim Seong-yong, 71, from Seoul, who witnessed the event, said he had “never seen so many Chinese flags waving in central Seoul, not even during the Korean War.”

It seems China is now not merely keeping its torch runners safe, it’s now actively supporting pro-China mobs during the relay.

For those visual learners, this is what the torch relay looked like in Seoul this weekend:

And here is what it looked liked in Pyongyang, North Korea. The only word that comes to mind is “swell.”

When the Chinese government was dreaming up the 2008 torch relay, it was Monday’s stop in North Korea they saw in their mind’s eye: Beautiful women in traditional hanboks, waving flags, smiling, singing, extolling China, North Korea and their Communist camaraderie. Olympic organizers were saying on Monday, “Why couldn’t the Parisians, Londoners and San Franciscans be more like the North Koreans?”

A headline on a story praising the torch festivities in Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, read “‘Lucky Cloud’ floats over Pyongyang.” The only “lucky cloud” floating over Pyongyang would be one carrying a wireless Internet signal.

China’s ambassador to North Korea exclaimed Monday, “It’s a bright and colorful day for everybody in the city. The flame brings friendship, best wishes and passion to Pyongyang.” Anything can bring friendship, best wishes and passion to Pyongyang if Kim Jong Il says it does.

The polar experiences of the torch relay in Seoul and Pyongyang symbolize the utter disparity between North and South Korea and how they each relate to China. The South remains torn between the democracy, freedoms and value system of the West and its geography, nestled between North Korea and Communist China. Meanwhile, North Korea is as beholden as ever to China, it’s Communist big brother, a nation to whom it looks for economic, political and moral leadership.

While the Pyongyang leg of the torch relay may represent a visual paradigm for the Chinese, for the rest of the world, it should serve to remind us of the oppression that still prevails in North Korea.

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfeld, the activist ice cream makers known as Ben and Jerry, may give the Chinese government a bellyache when the Olympic torch passes through San Francisco next week. The guys who brought us Chunky Monkey and Cherry Garcia are now bringing attention to the Chinese government’s role in the Darfur genocide. According to a Canadian Press story this week:

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the founders of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc., dispatched a three-vehicle convoy to San Francisco on Wednesday carrying messages such as “China’s Disgrace, playing games in Darfur.”

The cross-country convoy, which will stop at college campuses and Ben & Jerry’s stores, is due to arrive in San Francisco by April 9, in time to greet the Olympic torch, which makes its only United States stop there en route to Beijing for the Summer Olympics in August.

One of the drivers is a former Sudanese “lost boy” now living in San Francisco, another is a Dutch physician who has worked for years in Sudanese refugee camps.

Mamer Ajak, 26, the Sudan native, says the procession will help draw attention to mass killings in Darfur. He spent 13 years in a refugee camp before coming to the U.S. seven years ago.

The April 9th torch relay stop in San Francisco is the only stop in the United States.

The first photos from inside the new Yankee Stadium hit the web yesterday. And it looks pretty amazing. The new stadium, which some have dubbed “The House the A-Rod Built” (dry heave) is set to open in 2009 and offers season tickets from $100 a seat in the upper deck to the highly coveted $700-a-pop indoor/outdoor Club suites with food, beer, waiter service, HD broadcasts, private bathrooms, fully-stocked bars, pretty much anything you could possibly desire short of tug and rubs. Check out pics from inside the new stadium here.

State media in China called Tuesday’s torch-lighting ceremony in Olympia, Greece “a perfect start on the road to gold.” If by “perfect start,” they meant utter chaos, then yeah, great start guys. Or maybe the “road to gold” is some hellish unpaved pathway that leads off a cliff into a canyon of fire. But the lighting of the torch was marred (or made more interesting) by a pro-Tibet protester who ran behind the president of Beijing Organizing Committee and waved a black flag that called for a boycott of the Games. The ceremony marked the commencement of the 130-day, 85,100-mile torch relay through 5 continents and up Mount Everest that ends August 8th in Beijing, the first day of the Games. So pretty much, if the next 130 days are as “perfect” as the first, we’re looking at a 130-day, 85,100-mile tour of unabated humiliation for China through 5 continents and up Mount Everest. With “perfect” little pro-Tibet protesters at every stop. Not in the video below is the Tibetan woman who, after the flag incident, doused herself in red paint and lay in the road blocking the torch relay. How perfect.

Good news swept through China on Tuesday as the State Department released its controversial annual list of the worlds biggest human rights abusers. To everyone’s surprise, for the first time in three years, the Middle Kingdom didn’t grace the top ten violator list. The 2007 top ten worst countries on human rights were North Korea, Myanmar, Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Eritrea and Sudan, which begs the question, where the hell is Eritrea. Although the state department did cite extrajudicial killings, torture and coerced confessions of prisoners, and the use of forced labor in the PRC, an AFP story suggested that China’s resumption of death penalty review power might have done the trick. Human rights groups slammed the report accusing the Bush administration of pandering to its Communist ally and avoiding friction with this year’s Olympic host country. If the U.S. has given up on being China’s moral superior, it symbolizes officially that the balance of power between these two nations has shifted to China. Beijing controls US banks, U.S. dollars, U.S. automakers, the U.S. food supply and most importantly, the U.S. labor force. And for once, it controls American loyalty. You know deep down, China belongs on that list somewhere.

So those who plan to visit Beijing over the next few months might notice, while passing through the capital city’s famous hutongs, something different about China’s capital city. You might find yourself stopping on the street suddenly and saying to your companion, “Wait, weren’t there more cats here the last time I was here?” That assumes that the traveler had been to P.O.C. Beijing (pre-Olympic cleansing), a Beijing that has since and forever been replaced by the sterile, safe and smogless city that will host the Summer Games. But back to the cats. As part of turning the old Beijing into the new Beijing, the Chinese government has launched an offensive not on vandals or vagrants (they’re already gone), but on stray cats. Yes, cats. According to a Daily Mail story Monday, secretive government employees are rounding up all the forsaken feline friends and well, brutally killing them. As the Daily Mail reports:

Hundreds of cats a day are being rounded and crammed into cages so small they cannot even turn around. Then they are trucked to what animal welfare groups describe as death camps on the edges of the city. The cull comes in the wake of a government campaign warning of the diseases cats carry and ordering residents to help clear the streets of them.

China’s leaders are convinced that the cats in Beijing are diseased and can transmit sickness to humans, and in particular, those humans who have purchased tickets to the Olympics. Reports claim the cats are beaten to death with sticks or left to starve in cages so confining, the kitties can’t turn around. While animal activists in China recognize the need to remove the city’s stray cats ahead of the Games, they have criticized the inhumane methods of killing the cats. Perhaps Chinese cat lovers would prefer the cat collectors to treat the animals as they would human undesirables in China and shoot them in the back of head at close range.

Photo: Daily Mail

This is the most upset a human being has ever, in the history of mankind, gotten over a women’s basketball game. And who still says “dog gone?” Try to understand one dog gone point this guy makes. Something about offensive rebounds?

Anyone who has ever found those Wilford Brimley diabetes commercials funny will appreciate this.

Like a car wreck or a thong peeking out of a waistline, I absolutely had to look when NBC’s newest show Quarterlife premiered on network television tonight. For numerous reasons. First, it’s the first ever online series to make the leap to normal TV. Granted, I’ve been in China for the last 2 years (see first 600 posts), but I had no idea there was such a thing as an online series. Second, it’s about a blogger. And by “blogger”, I don’t mean a person who “blogs”, I mean a person who satisfies every hackneyed cultural, political, visual, economic, linguistic, habilatory, and sexual stereotype for an educated 25-year-old in 2008. Which brings me to the third reason. I wanted to see how mainstream media, or in this case semi-mainstream media, portrays “bloggers.”

The two creators of the show, Marshall Herskovitz, 56, and Edward Zwick, 55, are in their third-quarter lives, though have proven, with My So-Called Life and Thirtysomething, that they are able to tap into ultra-marketable age brackets. Like eccentric artistic high schoolers in the mid-90s or a bunch of yuppies approaching middle age in the late 80s, respectively. Well, with Quarterlife, Herskovitz and Zwick play with the fascination of the 20-something in this new selfish, career-driven, youth-oriented wired world. You know these 20-somethings. Or sorry, “quarterlifers.” And if you are not familiar with them, let me describe.

They all have Macs. From what I understand, it’s impossible to blog on a PC. They all listen to obscure music, preferably music that sounds like stuff we’ve heard before, but isn’t something we’ve ever heard before. None of them listen to classic rock or alternative or rap, because it’s too proven and easy to find. They’re nowhere close to being married, even though they should be because being lonely is interesting and it gives them something to blog about. And forget about cable. Who has time to watch TV with all that blogging to do? Not only do they not have cable, but they never miss an opportunity to tell people that they don’t have cable. Glasses are all thick-rimmed, because they just are. Work always sucks, hence the blogging, and money’s always tight, despite the fact their parents have lots. They either live in New York, Los Angeles or as in Quarterlife, Chicago, where they can easily pursue something artistic and find other like-minded twentysomethings with whom they can talk about how difficult it is to be a twentysomething.

Because that’s the backwards essence of this quarterlife phenomenon. If you like being in your twenties, or if you don’t document your life on a blog, preferably a video blog, well then, you aren’t living twentysomething life to the fullest. Who the hell has a video blog anyway? Watching Quarterlife didn’t make me connect with the angst I feel being in my twenties or put me in touch with a dormant “quarterlife crisis.” It merely made me realize how much I miss Seinfeld.