Solar Eclipse

But only for the delight of Africa & Asia.

The path of the eclipse began in Africa — passing through Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Kenya and Somalia before crossing the Indian Ocean, where it reached its peak, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration website.

Hopefully this gave Ugandans a big enough distraction that they forgot about trying to kill all the demonic gays.

Dicks, Tofu & Silkworms

We were mesmerized tonight by a program on the Travel Channel by Andrew.

I would love to visit Vietnam. I love the look of the cities -- very Cuban but without the politics. But the food.... yum.

I may be gay, but the idea of making a meal out of testicles and penises does not entice me. Nor does a munch on scorpions or silkworms.

But since 9% of the population of the country is Buddhist, I'm quite sure there's vegetarian cuisine buried in there somewhere, with all of the other lovely herbs and spices which infuse that country.

Hanoi must rock. Sorry but in deference to Toast I shall not post any stupid music videos of Hanoi Rocks.

Python Devours 11 Hounds

How could I not post about a python making a meal out of 11 guard dogs?

Villagers did not harm the snake, which was tied to a tree then handed to wildlife officials, the paper said on Friday.

How refreshing. Had this happened in the United States I'm quite confident the snake would have been butchered. Because we just don't like it when the animal kingdom does what comes naturally.

It's Raining Men

What is it with the Chinese infatuation with male babies?

China will have 30 million more men of marriageable age than women in less than 15 years as a gender imbalance resulting in part from the country's tough one-child policy becomes more pronounced, state media reported Friday. Traditional preferences for sons has led to the widespread - but illegal - practice of women aborting babies if an early term sonogram shows it is a girl.

[...]

"Discrimination against the female sex remains the primary cause of China's growing gender imbalance," Liu Bohong, vice director of the women studies institute under the All-China Women's Federation, was quoted as saying in a report from the State Population and Family Planning Commission.

Tsunami Survivers Continue to Face Challenges

That shouldn't come as a surprise given the problems we've seen with Katrina relief right here in our own country.

Two years after the devastating tsunami, life in Banda Aceh is far from normal.

All across the ravaged cityscape, scraped bare by the waves, thousands of tiny, toy-box houses have sprung up in recent months as a program of rebuilding gains momentum. But many of the new houses are empty because they lack water, sanitation and electricity and because there are no schools, clinics or commercial activity nearby.

Billions of dollars in aid were pledged. I recall making a contribution myself. Now I seriously wonder just how much of my $125 donation actually helped those in need as opposed to those handling the money bags.

But by some estimates only one-third of the promised aid has been distributed to affected countries, and much of that has been lost to corruption, mismanagement, political squabbles and bureaucratic dead ends.

Hundreds of thousands of people still have no permanent homes or jobs, and it seems that many will live out their lives as refugees of the tsunami.

In India, the British aid group Oxfam estimates that 70 percent of affected people still live in temporary shelters. In Sri Lanka the revival of a civil war has made life even more precarious for survivors.

I cannot even begin to fathom the logistics of an international relief effort of this magnitude. But am I wrong for expecting those who are involved, and their governments, to think this through to a logical conclusion? What a waste and a missed opportunity for creating new jobs and training for those people.

“We are constantly overwhelmed by the massive task confronting us,” said the director of the Indonesian government’s reconstruction agency, Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, at a conference of donors in New York in November.

One of the poorest provinces in Indonesia, Aceh cannot easily absorb the $7.1 billion in international aid that has been pledged, Mr. Kuntoro said, and does not have the capacity to carry out the quantity of rebuilding that is needed. Some projects have been put off, he told reporters here, because the province has only nine asphalt plants and cannot meet the demand.

Senate Approves Nuclear Deal with India

By a vote of 85-12:

The Senate gave overwhelming approval late Thursday to President Bush’s deal for nuclear cooperation with India, a vote expressing that a goal of nurturing India as an ally outweighed concerns over the risks of spreading nuclear skills and bomb-making materials.

To me, this seems ill-timed when we're having unresolved nuclear proliferation issues with both Iran and North Korea.

Opponents of the measure also warned that the deal would allow India to build more bombs with its limited stockpile of radioactive material, and could spur a regional nuclear arms race with Pakistan and China.

See a list of the votes here.

Forget Gay Marriage; Afterlife Marriages Are All the Rage

This was a bizarre story in today's New York Times about a custom in a remote area of China in which families offer up tokens to ancestors who might need a little helping hand in the afterlife, such as money. Some are extending the concept to include a post mortem marriage.

...here in the parched canyons along the Yellow River known as the Loess Plateau, some parents with dead bachelor sons will go a step further. To ensure a son’s contentment in the afterlife, some grieving parents will search for a dead woman to be his bride and, once a corpse is obtained, bury the pair together as a married couple.

The rural folk custom, startling to Western sensibilities, is known as minghun, or afterlife marriage. Scholars who have studied it say it is rooted in the Chinese form of ancestor worship, which holds that people continue to exist after death and that the living are obligated to tend to their wants — or risk the consequences. Traditional Chinese beliefs also hold that an unmarried life is incomplete, which is why some parents worry that an unmarried dead son may be an unhappy one.

Pity the gay & lesbian ancestors who are getting stuck in an unwanted heterosexual port mortem marriage. It gets worse:

“For girls, it doesn’t matter about their minds, whether they are an idiot or not. They are still wanted as brides.”

“There are girls who have drowned in the river down there. When their bodies have washed up, their families could get a couple of thousand yuan for them.”

Eewwwww.

Crossposted at B3

China bans South Korean film

Chinese officials have banned a South Korean film "The King and the Clown" because the movie implies a homosexual theme.

Directed by JUN-IK LEE, The King And The Clown has taken a huge $85 million from 12 million cinema admissions. But because homosexuality is still highly controversial in China, where being gay is considered a mental defect, the film has been forbidden from theatres.

It's amazing how much our American fundamentalist movement is so similar in ideals to totalitarian regimes.