Tiger lovers, beware. What you are about to read will make you sick.
One of the ways that China’s nouveau riche get their kicks is to watch an endangered tiger being slaughtered before dining on its fresh meat. It’s part of a big industry in China that includes the sale of tiger bones, eyeballs and other body parts, which are prized for making medicines, liquor and aphrodisiacs.
Police in Guangdong Province recently raided a party of wealthy businessman and government officials who were preparing to feast on the remains of a freshly killed tiger. But, according to published reports, attempts to crack down on the practice have been largely ineffective.
Wild tigers are almost extinct in China and they’re fast disappearing from India, which has the world’s largest population of the big cats. China does raise thousands of the animals in captivity, but most are slaughtered for precious parts that are used to make delicacies like tiger penis soup and tiger bone wine.
I’m not a hunter, but in this case I’m in favor of an open season – on rich people who consume endangered animals for pleasure.
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My colleague Jennifer sent me this gem from a student’s speech about travel:
In a word, travel dose benefit us both mentally and physically. We can benefit from travel in more than one way. It is worth spending time. So boys and girls … don’t do curtilage male or curtilage female, let’s travel together.
Curtilage, which comes from Middle English, is an enclosed area of land adjacent to a house. What that has to do with travel or the male-female thing, neither Jennifer nor I can fathom.
What probably happened was that the student used a Chinese-English dictionary that gave a nonsensical literal translation. It happens all the time. A student types Chinese characters into a mobile phone app and out comes an English translation that has nothing to do with the original word or phrase. In many instances, Chinese and English simply aren’t compatible, which is why we see signs in China like “Fuck Vegetables’’ and “Beware of Missing Foot.’’
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I recently wrote about a satirical brochure that made fun of the propensity for mangled translations in China. The subject of the spoof was the “Brilliant Beijing Hotel.’’
In an odd twist, I just read about a Chinese billionaire who was killed in a helicopter crash in France just after buying a Bordeaux winery. Lam Kok was a hotel magnate whose company is called the Brilliant Group.
Yes, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
