HANG ON …

Yes, I’ve considered it. But on a low-profile site like this the odd comment on an old post isn’t any great burden. As a general rule I’d rather leave comments open and give people who find my entries via search engines the chance to contribute. (The one exception to that rule is, of course, the infamous Oprah post.) If the level of comment spam rose to the point where I was having to spend too much time deleting comments on old posts then I’d reconsider, but (touch wood) for now MT-Blacklist has done a pretty good job of stemming the tide. (It helps to be a pretty low-profile, low-volume weblog. I completely understand why the authors of busier weblogs than mine have adopted a different policy.)

It makes you wonder what odd beliefs East Asians have about our eating habits…

It sounds very much as if on the one hand we’ve got an artist from a culture where the taboos about cadaver material are, as you noted, significantly different to those in the west. As the Snopes article pointed out, with reference to rumours of fried fetus being on the menu:

Our knowledge of the existence of cultural differences (even if we don’t know exactly what those differences are) helps prepare the soil for wild rumors like this one to sprout in, because this tidbit of “information” seems to fit so well with what we think we know about a deeply mistrusted foreign culture. One could not successfully kite the same tale about Canada, for instance, because folks would immediately reject it as wholly false. But set it in China, and it begins to sound if not plausible, at least possible. The Chinese treat bodies of executed wrongdoers as piles of recyclable parts lying there for the taking; why wouldn’t they view aborted fetuses as something that could be added to a lunch menu?

Throw in a TV channel with a documentary to promote (not to mention a desire to regain a reputation for being ‘edgy’ and ‘out there’) and a bunch of reactionary tabloid newspapers and you have all the ingredients for a good three-day wonder in the media.

Incidentally, I didn’t get to see the documentary. Did it shed any new light on the topic? I have to admit that I was dividing my attention between working at my PC and watching the pretty explosions in the last half hour of Independence Day. If they ever make a sequel to Independence Day their first task should be to explain how exactly civilisation on Earth survived given that a) several major cities had a 15-mile spaceship fall on them, and b) the destruction of a mothership that size should have had pretty much the same effect on Earth as the Ewok Holocaust did on Endor.

I did see the earlier programme on Mao’s Children, which turned out pretty much exactly as I’d expected: people who are doing very nicely thank you claiming that “politics isn’t important” and they’re as free as they could wish to be, or suddenly going very vague when asked about topics like internet censorship, whilst the government does its’ best to ensure that foreign journalists don’t see the prostitutes or the political prisoners or the poor bastards working in factories without the benefit of union representation. Mind you, I did note that the fashion designer who was interviewed near the start of the programme was apparently choosing her words carefully: if the subtitles were an accurate translation, she said something to the effect that she’d never been stopped from doing anything she wanted “in her business.” Was this her way of pointing out that her life outside the business was another matter?

It certainly sounds like a case of Channel 4 working overtime to generate publicity for their China Season. Which is a pity, since it looks to be pretty worthwhile anyway.

Come to think of it, perhaps it’s not too late. If they’ll do a “celebrity enema” reality TV show, is “Widdicaged” really beyond them…?