Thursday, April 19, 2007

Spring is sprung...

the grass is rizz
I wonder where the birdies is!*

What a difference a week makes.

Liaoyang - early April:

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Liaoyang today:

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*there's a blackly comic story behind that. In the 1950's, during the great leap forward, it was decided that peasants should take actions against "The Four Harms", lice, rats, flies and sparrows. The party agriculturalists calculated that each sparrow ate 4.5 kg of the People's grain each year, so peasants were dispatched into the fields to bang pots and pans, frightening the sparrows away from landing, until they dropped dead from exhaustion. One province alone apparently killed 2.8 million of them. The next year's crop was huge, and everybody celebrated the wisdom of the great helmsman. What wasn't taken into account however, was the fact that, along with grain, sparrows eat insects. Including Locusts. No sparrows = Locust happyfuntime. A year or two later, and China was in the midst of the greatest famine in history, in which 30 million people died.

Anyway, to this day, you see very few birds in Chinese cities.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I just quoted this story to one of the girls in the office who was freaking out about spiders

Geekiness +10
Ability to attract members of the opposite sex -42