It's a disgusting world out there

Two stories have made me think that my encounter with dirty plasticware may be the least of my worries.

I'll have mine from the bottle, thanks

Hungarian builders who drank their way to the bottom of a huge barrel of rum while renovating a house got a nasty surprise when a pickled corpse tumbled out of the empty barrel, a police magazine website reported.

According to online magazine www.zsaru.hu, workers in Szeged in the south of Hungary tried to move the barrel after they had drained it, only to find it was surprisingly heavy and were shocked when the body of a naked man fell out.

Link

News-wise, we seem to be scraping the bottom of... the...

I'm sorry, but I can't say it. That would be cheap.

Even for me.

Note: Bret rightly points out that this article sounds suspiciously like an urban legend that has been documented over on Snopes.com. I'm not sure which I find funnier: the possibility that the Hungarian story is true, or the possibility that some fact checker at Reuters got snookered.

黏 液*

Beijing has launched a campaign to make its citizens more "civil" in the run-up to hosting the 2008 Olympics. Games organizers have repeatedly said the city needs to teach its people to stand in line, stop spitting and littering and generally be better mannered.

Past efforts to stamp out the spitting habit, like a 2003 campaign to help curb the spread of SARS, have not been very effective, partly because many people believe clearing the lungs and firing away is good for your health.

Link

This ties in to Bret's recent posting, over on Random Walk. Frankly, I think China's just positioning itself to sell a lot of rain ponchos during the Beijing Olympics.

* The Chinese characters for "mucus".

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