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.