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August 30, 2005

Much Ado About Muffin

CHIANG MAI, NORTHERN THAILAND -- While the US media have obsessed about some hurricane, it's easy to miss some of the great stories one reads only when he's on an airplane.

1) You'll just have to take a F**king picture. The city of Fucking, Austria, has erected (no pun intended) theft-proof signs after British tourists kept stealing their Fucking signs. Instead of screwable metal signs (again no pun intended), the new signs are rock-hard. Read all about it.

2) Much Ado About Muffin. Bill Safire has come to the rescue of TH and me, who were recently discussing girls who wear tight low-rider jeans but are a bit too flabby, resulting in some gut hanging over the belt.

When the wearer's abdomen is flat, a display of flesh above and well below the bellybutton produces an eye-catching picture of what The Scotsman in Britain has called "the Britney belly-flash." However, when the wearer's midriff is flabby, a vivid culinary metaphor is used: muffin-top. ...

"Muffin-Top Mayhem!" was the headline in The New York Daily News this summer, atop a picture of a woman whose midriff was overhanging her belt. The unfortunate loser of this battle of the bulge was said by the writer, Mark Ellwood, to be called a muffin-top. He defined the display as "the unsightly roll of flesh that spills over the waist of a pair of too-tight pants." The locution is not sexist: a male actor, usually characterized as a "screen hunk," photographed in such a state is called a stud-muffin-top. (I am indebted to Ann Wort of Washington for this citation.)

Rarely can slang lexicographers find "first use" of such a phrase, but blogging helps: coinage is claimed by a Netizen named Dyske Suematsu, who proudly informs the Internet set of having sent the compound noun to www.pseudodictionary.com in May 2003.

Safire goes on to note that "muffin top" is distinct from "love handles," which occur only on the sides of the body.

3) Only one's face turns green. The NYTimes also has a story on Beijing's attempts to clean itself up before the Olympics. As I noted last week during a live-blog from Beijing, the air quality there is so poor that several members of our group complained of burning eyes and throats, and a thick haze hangs over the city, thicker than any I've ever seen. Here is the NYT's analysis in an article called "Beijing's Quest for 2008: To Become Simply Livable."

"Bad planning over the past decades has already become a point of embarrassment for the city," said Wang Jun, whose best-selling book, "The Story of a City," documented the demolition of many of the city's old "hutong" neighborhoods, the ancient, densely populated enclaves of narrow, winding streets and crumbling courtyard homes.

Mr. Wang said Beijing never recovered from the 1950's, when Liang Sicheng, the country's pre-eminent architectural historian, warned that destroying the hutongs would lead to traffic and pollution and urged Mao to preserve Beijing's ancient city walls. Instead, Mao demolished them as a symbol of Chinese feudalism.

More recently, the hutongs have been steadily demolished, dislocating untold thousands of people, to make room for the thousands of development projects swallowing the city.

"Now, his predictions have come true," Mr. Wang said of the pollution and traffic.

I discussed the plight of the hutong here in 2003. Read the whole NYT story.

4) Guess the milk isn't free. China Daily recently reported that a man nearly paid money to have sex with his wife. He went to a Chinese brothel to procure a prostitute and discovered his wife working there. The wife apparently took up the profession to earn money because the man squandered the family's money on hookers. This will be an interesting divorce.

Posted by adrianjo at August 30, 2005 09:03 AM