Members Only: WingWang for the YinYang

As I wrote last week, the Chinese government has taken dog meat off the menus at the 112 or so officially-sanctioned Olympic hotels and at other Olympic-related venues and restaurants during the course of the upcoming games. However, you can still get Okay. I’ve eaten some unusual things in my day, or things that some people might find unusual. I mean, some folks are just simple meat and potatoes types, and wouldn’t dream of nibbling on gator tails, escargot, shark steaks, baby octopus, fried squid, moose steaks, deer roasts, or flying fish eggs on sushi. But despite having once tried Rocky Mountain Oysters (breaded & fried bull testicles) even I have to draw the line at the fare served at a restaurant called Guolizhuang. Situated in an elegantly restored house beside Beijing's West Lake, it is China's first speciality penis restaurant. Yeah; you read that right. Penis.


The locals refer to it as a petrol station for men and a beauty parlor for women, so devoutly do they believe in the health-giving properties of animal genitals. The Guolizhuang penis restaurant, which has now expanded to five franchises after opening in the capital three years ago, offers such delights as lobster with donkey penis, horse penis and testicles with chili dip, and the rather expensive Canadian seal penis, which costs over $500.00 and has to be ordered in advance. Banquets can cost from 2000 yuan to 100,000 yuan for tables of 10-12 diners, ($293.00 to $14,600.00) but set menus featuring penis hotpot and several other dishes start from just 200 yuan per person ($30.00).

Reports I’ve read from Western tourists who have eaten there have said that most of the dishes were somewhat bland and chewy, made more edible by the accompanying sauces. I myself would rather just have the lobster and the chili dip. As the owner of a penis, I just can’t bring myself to want to eat one. And I’m saddened enough by seals being clubbed to death for their skins and then left to rot, so I’m not all that cool with killing one just to emasculate it for Saturday’s supper. And yes, I’m a hypocrite because I’m okay with people killing pigs, cows, chickens, etc for my meals. And while I admittedly once ate bull testicles, at least it still was left alive and with something to pee through.

A booking at Guolizhuang comes with a trained waitress and a nutritionist to explain the menu and its medicinal virtues and health benefits and which dishes are best avoided by female diners due to testosterone levels. And as with so many things in Chinese medicine that costs animals their genitalia, like tigers and cobras, nutritionist Zhu Yan said the clients were mainly men eager to improve their yang, or virility. A little wang for the yang, I guess.

Sorry, guys. I’ll just stick to my General Tso’s Chicken and some Crab Rangoons, thanks. No penis shall pass my lips; I’ll have to pass on the peckers.

Cavalcade of Dumbness

Lots of dumb crap in the news the past couple weeks, kids. I’ve just been too busy to poke it with a stick & see what sort of ichor oozed out. Each story is dumber than the one before it, and you’re left not quite knowing whether to laugh, cry, or climb a bell tower with a burp gun.

First there’s the supposed controversy surrounding an ad that FoodTV/talk show host Rachael Ray did for Dunkin Donuts. The Powers That Be at Dunkinz pulled the ad over fears that they’d be boycotted after columnist Michelle Malkin and other conservative observers thought the scarf looked too much like a kaffiyeh, what Malkin describes as "the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad." I’ve seen the ad, and it looks like Ray is wearing….GASP!!!! A scarf. I’ve seen kaffiyehs and this, friends, is not a kaffiyeh. You might be able to confuse Ray with The Joker, but not an operative for Hezbollah. I think I saw Ellen Degeneres wearing a red & white scarf on her show today so is she a jihadist too? (Please…she’s a lesbo, not a Hezbo.)

Then you have the polygamist cult disguised as Mormons at the Yearning for Zion Ranch, or as I call it, the Texas Harem For Teen Mothers. After authorities stepped in and took 400-odd kids (with about only 5 sets of DNA branchings) from their parents as part of an investigation into underaged brides being used as concubines for cult leaders, the news feeds were full of freakishly plain zombie women in pastel gunnysacks taken from the set of Little House on the Prairie. They make the Amish look positively chic. Each woman would dodge questions in a Stepford-like monotone with a pre-scripted speech and say they just wanted their babies back. They make regular Mormons look bad. I've never seen anything even remotely like this in any of the Mormon friends I've had over the years.

Somehow I thought judges in Texas were smarter than this, but after a few weeks in foster care their Supreme Court ordered the kids returned to their families, just in time for the traditional June wedding season. The lesson in this is that it’s cool to force 13-year olds to marry 50-year olds, so long as you disguise it as “religion”. Cult leaders have said they’ll stop marrying underaged girls, but said nothing about pumping them full of babies out of wedlock.

And over across the pond in Myanmar, or what everyone except Myanmar calls Burma, a huge hurricane tore through the nation and killed tens of thousands. The world rushed to offer aid, and the military government, perhaps the most corrupt in the world, pretty much said no. They felt that they could handle the situation themselves, and handled it by stealing the few supplies that they allowed in for themselves while thousands more died.

Well, today we finally pulled anchor on the ships that we had offshore waiting to airlift relief supplies to the countryside after the country’s “leaders” claimed that they feared we were going to invade Myanmar to steal their oil deposits. C’mon, guys. Be for real. If we were gonna invade your back-assward Fourth World Cesspit, we’d send in wave after wave of stealth aircraft to bomb you to powder first. We wouldn’t send in a destroyer, an oiler, and a couple of “gator freighters” with 23 helicopters and 4 landing craft.

And finally, today the world celebrated the 19th anniversary of the uprising in China’s Tiananmen Square by continuing to reward China’s abysmal human rights record by getting ready for the Olympics. I mean, hell, China has enough to worry about with the earthquakes & stuff to give them any crap over it now, right? And that dude had it coming anyways. He shouldn’t have climbed on that tank with that big bad briefcase.