液體蛋 (Liquid Egg Product)

China appreciates their disabled citizens

China’s policies for hiring disabled people must be very progressive.

The town of Bujia needed a bridge built, so they go get it designed, and search for a contractor to get the construction done. They end up hiring a contractor without verifying his credentials.

They later discover the contractor is blind.

The contractor took it upon himself to change the final design of the bridge, and “carried out the work only using a roughly drawn draft of the plan.” Which could mean he drew a sketch on a napkin while eating breakfast, and thought that would be good enough.

The parties involved were fortunate that when the bridge collapsed it was still in the construction stage, and the 12 casualities were injuries, not deaths.

Reuters: Two jailed after bridge built by blind man collapses

June 12th, 2007 1 comment
Posted by Donnie Filed under In the News

Grab bag: news style

Butts charged with stealing toilet paper: The headline says it all.

Nigerian police raid 419′ers (video): 419 is a section of Nigerian law that deals with fraud. Like those e-mails you get from Nigerian princes asking for your bank account number. They don’t get such royal treatment here…

New security fixes from Microsoft: Apparently, your computer can be attacked by simply visiting certain websites infected with code. No, you don’t have to worry about this one.

A beta version of Apple’s Safari available for Windows: I tried it today at work, and compared to Firefox, Opera, or IE, I hated using it. You can’t even press the backspace key to go back! To be fair, it’s still in beta…

June 12th, 2007 1 comment
Posted by Donnie Filed under In the News, Science/Technology

Unfortunately named

One of the US presidential hopefuls is named Barack Hussein Obama. Not the best name to run on, considering the names of a couple American foils, but I haven’t seen too many people make the obvious derisions.

More poignant is the case of one Osama Al-Najjar. He started to have problems in high school after people started mocking him for his name, which needless to say, generated a lot of uncomfortability* in the classroom. As an added bonus, it was his teachers who would make the jokes, while he never got any grief from fellow students.

Here’s an example of what he went through:

“This one time in gym I was sitting and it was the beginning of the semester and [the teacher] said, ‘Where’s Osama?’ and I said, ‘Right here.’ And he goes, ‘I thought you’d be in back of a cave somewhere.”

(For some reason, I laughed at that one, but it’s not even that good.)

*Liquid Egg Product recognizes that “uncomfortability” is not a real word, and that the proper rendering of the term in English is “discomfort”. He** uses the term for his own personal amusement.

**Liquid Egg Product also recognizes that referring to one’s self in the third person is a characteristic of arrogant monarchs and megalomaniacs. So be it.

June 12th, 2007 4 comments
Posted by Donnie Filed under Uncomfortability

Shoba does not have the most understanding parents

Meet Shoba. Shoba is 20 year old devadasi–a slave to some goddess of fertility. As you might guess, a large part of her service involves being some sort of “sanctified” prostitute (note: India made this practice illegal about 50 years ago)

What’s extra twisted is that it’s the devadasi’s parents who give her up when she’s young. For all practical purposes, she’s been bound to service for life with no say in the matter. No one will be willing to marry her, and she won’t have a decent way to make a living. Not only that, any money she earns goes straight to the parents.

Her mother’s response? “Someone had to continue the tradition. It had to be my daughters. Because Shoba earns so much money she has been able to build us a house, and she bought these fields. So what’s the big deal?”

I don’t know, maybe it’s that you’re living comfortably off your daughter’s hopeless, miserable life? Most people would consider that a big deal.

BBC: Slaves to the goddess of fertility

June 12th, 2007 no comments
Posted by Donnie Filed under In the News, Religion, Weaksauce Losers

When a friend becomes slightly famous

During high school, a couple of my neighbors were Howard and Caroline Chen (bro and sis). Now, about a decade after graduating HS, Howard’s a suave sports reporter. Caroline’s a wacky acupuncturist.

Anyway, thanks to Caroline for pointing out this link to one of Howard’s TV spots. It’s completely surreal to see an old friend on TV, just because…I know him. Maybe it’s just that we don’t expect to see people we know in that role. Dunno.

I would advise Howard to bug the web guys to see if they can modify initial still frame of the video. It’s not the most flattering.