Ioan sent me a link to The Onion that had me in hysterics today. The headline was “Citing Poor Conditions, China Refuses To Send Delegation To Olympics”.

“I shall regret this for the rest of my life, but I think the current conditions Beijing are currently worse than the ones I encounter in my polluted, petroleum-fume-choked home town,” said Rockets center Yao Ming, easily the team’s most prominent athlete. “Which is Beijing. Things have gotten even worse since I moved.”

Things often really do go full circle. I have been really tired of watching all those “Our foreign correspondent in Beijing”s on the telly, measuring God knows what other sulphite or particulate with a little white plastic electronic gadget.

A little poem, the result of a quick Wikipedia glance:

2008 pollution
2004 construction
2000 Ozzys
1996 Izzy
1994 Barcelona
1992 California