Bullitt list -- 04.12.10

Today's category: Enter the Dragon

Listen, I get that China is the up-and-coming superpower. We Yanks have had our day in the sun. But now the strains of having it too good for too long, along with the desire to have it all for free have made us a few steps slow and short of breath.

The Chinese, on the other hand, still have what Survivor called the Eye of the Tiger. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to live there or anything, and I'll take the relative freedom of the USA to the Chines censorship and state social control. But there can be little doubt that the Day of the Dragon is near.

They just need to iron out a few things. Because they have some fucked up shit going on that is unbecoming of a world superpower

• You remember this gal from a month or two ago? Chick is growing devil horns. When you say you want your girls to be horny, this isn't what you have in mind. Chinese doctors say the growths on Zhang Gouzheng's forehead are "cutaneous horns," made up of compacted keratin, which is the same protein we have in our hair and nails, and forms horns, wool and feathers in animals.
  
  They say that, while rare, they tend to show up in fair-skinned elderly adults who have history of significant sun exposure, and in demon spawn.


• Kudos to the federal judge that awarded several Virginia families $2.6 million in damages from a Chinese manufacturer of drywall. It seems the Chinese thought it would be a good idea to make drywall (you know, the stuff the walls in your house/apartment are made of out of?) from the waste materials of scrubbers on coal-fired power plants.
  
  Big surprise, that cheap Chinese-made drywall emits sulfuric acid gas into you home. Bummer. It causes extensive damage to wiring, heating and air conditioning, floors, closets, kitchen cabinets -- not to mention YOUR LUNGS!!!
  
  So, yeah. China, as you make the ascendancy into superpowerdom, you might want to figure out how to build houses that don't kill your own people.


• Another Chinese medical oddity that may or may not be related to sulfuric acid emitting drywall is the case of a boy who was born with 16 toes and 15 fingers. There are many advantages of having so many digits -- it's a new world record, you can easily count to 31, you have multiple options for flipping the bird.
  
  Still, doctors opted to do surgery on the polydactyl boy to make him more normal. Of course as we've seen, 'normal' in China has a whole different definition.
  


• The Chinese are taking misogyny to a whole new level. You know what happens when you take the communist's one-child-per-family policy and mix in a culture that values men over women?
  
  You get a badly imbalanced gender ratio for one thing. By some estimates, China will have 30 million more men of marriageable age than women within the next 10 years. Thirty million! That's more than the population of Texas. Can you imagine the state of Texas being nothing by dudes? Gives me the heebie-jeebies.
  
  I don't know what they're going to do. Import a lot of foreign women? Some kind of war to "cull" the surplus men? Promote the use of X-box, Cheetos, Mr. Pibb and Internet porn as a means to keep all these maniacs in check?
  
  All I know is that this kind of gender imbalance is unprecedented (to the best of my knowledge) and could end up causing the downfall of the Chinese superpower just as it gets going.

tagged: Bullitt, China, polydactyly, Zhang Gouzheng, cutaneous horns, drywall, sulfuric acid, misogyny , gender ratio imbalance