Awflasher, of IfGoGo fame, has just developed a Beijing Olympics Facebook app! It’s a cute countdown clock to the big 8-8-08!

If you are going out on your own to the Beijing Olympics, you might want to download this free Beijing Olympic Games 2008 Ebook Guide. This electronic guide gives you the locations and schedule (specific dates) of various Beijing 2008 events. A rundown on the hotels, restuarants and places of attraction which are near to the competition venues is also available. Information on Beijing’s transportation and attractions can be found at the end of this informative 184-page colour guide.

I’m always telling my students not to rely on spellcheck, but I guess I should also tell them not to rely on search and replace.

The original article about Olympic hopeful Tyson Gay looks like this:

Tyson Gay easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday.

His wind-aided 9.85 seconds was a fairly cut-and-dry performance compared to what happened a day earlier. On Saturday, Gay misjudged the finish in his opening heat and had to scramble to finish fourth, then in his quarterfinal a couple of hours later, ran 9.77 to break the American record that had stood since 1999.

But OneNewsNow, a Christian news source, uses an autoreplace to change all instances of “gay” to “homosexual”, resulting in this:

Like the poor guy didn’t get teased enough in grade school!

Original article via OneNewsNow, thanks to Cynical-C for the screenshot and tip.

Any foreigner living in China now will tell you that something weird is going on. Our fellow foreigners are disappearing in great numbers. It as if wild animals are picking them off on their smoggy bike rides to work. Increasingly we feel like Mexicans just inside the American border: looked upon suspicuously, regardless of the legitimacy of our legal status. Perhaps that overstating things, but a lot of people are moving away.

Visas are not being renewed for perpetual tourist and business folks. Some of these de-facto expulsions”are legitimate, like people who hang out in China, teaching in a semi-legal status. Others, like business people who are frequent visitors to China, are wrong-headed. The most peculiar trend, and a prominent one at that, is it appears anyone born 1984 or later gets an automatic rejection on new work visas.

Keep reading…

It’s really rough for teachers whose schools have promised to handle the visas. I’ve been on a round of goodbye dinners for friends who recently learned their jobs weren’t quite as legal or a stable as they’d been told. Vistors have also told me they’ve gotten only a 30-day tourist visa instead of the old 90-day one.

I don’t think these new regulations will keep the Olympics athletes out, but I fear that average people who want to see the Olympics and have a Beijing vacation, will be kept away.

Via Cup Of Cha

We’ve already written about the Coke Olympics song and the Beijing Olympics soda cans. Now you can visit MyCoke.com, enter, and check out the cute flash toys at Beijing 2008.

Thanks to How About Orange? for tipping me off.

The mutant seaweed which has formed along the coastlines of Qingdao, the sailing venue of the Beijing Olympics, may become obstacles to the competition’s windsurfers if it is not cleared by August. Instead of fishing, the fishermen of Eastern China fish on the seaweed now, before we have Seaweed Sailing.

The seaweed is another blow to the Chinese organisers, who boasted recently of the technological advances they were introducing to the sailing venue to combat the meteorological challenges at Qingdao. These include China’s first vehicle-borne “doppler” radar, used in police speed guns, which will provide information on wind speed and the direction of the tides.

I honestly think by August, everything will be as clear as the water.

Image & Via: Times Online

This acupuncturist shows his Olympic spirit in a creative way!

Wei, a 60 year-old Chinese acupuncturist from Guangxi province, showed his patriotism for the upcoming Olympics by piercing his head, face, chest, and arms with 2008 decorative needles in five different colors.

The event broke his previous Guinness Record of 1790 needles set in 2004. Wei also hopes to share more about the history of acupuncture to the world.

Initially inspired after reading about a Canadian who had set a record for inserting 420 needles in his arm, Wei felt that it was “not much compared to our centuries-old acupuncture,” and began experimenting with piercing his own body with needles.

On January 13, 2007, Wei had also paraded through town with 800 needles in his forehead and even put on skates and skated around the streets to show he was not in pain and alright.

I wonder if he went out with the Olympics tattoo guy afterwards!

Via Weird Asia News, who got it from this Chinese language site.

Chinese President, Hu Jintao, rode a China Railways High-speed (CRH) train to test if the Beijing metro system is up to the mark for the Beijing Olympic Games on Wednesday.

The inter-city shuttle will transport Olympic spectators, athletes and other passengers during the Games. Some football preliminary matches will be held in Tianjin.

And at Beijing Capital International Airport, President Hu reminded waitresses in the spanking new, Norman Foster-designed terminal 3 to maintain the excellent service as the airport is “first gate of the country” that visitors and foreigners will gawk.

Via Xinhua

Coca-Cola has a Beijing Olympic theme song called 红遍全球 (can be translated to “Become Famous All Over the World”) and is performed by Taiwanese popular female group - S.H.E (Selina, Hebe, Ella), Wilber Pan (潘玮柏, Pan Wei Bo) and Hong Kong singing legend, Jacky Cheung (张学友, Zhang Xue You).

This is rather a catchy tune with the Bird Nest being highlighted a few times and an easy-to-do action and cheering sequence.

A 5-star Chinese hotel in Beijing has been dishing out cold, hard cash or yuan to reporters in return for positive media coverage on the hotel. Gehua New Century Hotel, formerly known as the Huabei Hotel, may not be the only hotel doing this PR stunt.

The handout in Chinese on headed notepaper given by staff to the media after a Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) news conference at the hotel on Friday promised 100 yuan for a mention of the Gehua in reports.

Once verified by the public relations department, the document said, media can claim 500 yuan for a “positive” article on the hotel of 100 to 500 words in length and 1,000 yuan for an article of between 500 and 1,000 words.

Paying to write good stuff on you, what’s your view?

Via Reuters