The Durex 2005 Global Sex Survey has been published, Curzon at Coming Anarchy examines the results.:

* Greeks do it the most, followed by Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria.

* Malaysians like to do it in the toilet and their parent’s bedroom

* Thais like to use porn.

* Indians are late to start and faithful at it.

* South Africans risk their lives doing it (which may explain a lot) as do women from New Zealand.

* The Chinese are least happy (22%!) with it.

* The Japanese do it the least, again (just 45 times a year); Singaporeans rank second to last (at 73 times a year).

* Canadian women like it more than Canadian men.

* Australians are average.

Also note,Taiwanese are the most likely (47%) to use vibrators as a sex aid;

Technorati Tags: asia, china, east asia, japan, northeast asia

Arsonists have attempted to burn down Ayah Pin’s giant teapot, the architectural centerpiece of his interfaith ‘Sky Kingdom’ sect.   Based in Malaysia’s strongly Islamic state of Terangganu, devotees of the teapot’s purifying infusion have previously been arrested (as noted earlier on Asiapundit). 

Meanwhile, striking tea-plantation labourers in Bangladesh and India are starting to settle their bitterly-protacted pay negotiations, but Nepalese tea-labourers associated with the Maoist insurrection have forced the closures of 21 tea estates. 

And Texans newly introduced to green tea smoothies seem to think that green tea has no caffeine, and that once fat-filled artery-clogging smoothies have green tea added to them, that they are healthy. 

Global Voices has been redesigned and relaunched.

From Xiamen, Andrea says she doesn’t like: "Caucasians who cut the queue in a bank with a clear number queueing system." She asks "We all take a number and wait, why the hell on God’s green earth shouldn’t you?" Answer: Because we all look like Dashan.

Richard spots another ominous article on how the CPC is using the internet to control thought in China. Rebecca offers all of that and more.

CSR Asia reports that Japan and Korea have started investigating whether or not Chinese brewers are using formaldehyde .

Coca Cola’s former CEO David Daft once remarked that the company’s main competitor was not Pepsi, but water. They may be aggressively trying to squeeze out the competition. Tak at the Old Revolution notes that Daft’s former company may sue an Indian artist.

"Mr. Sharad Haksar, a photographer in India, faces a possible lawsuit for a billboard he has displayed in Chennai in an effort to bring attention to the severe water shortage caused by the company’s bottling plants."

Ampontan at Japundit discusses the cultural significance of Godzilla.

China is opening a memorial to martyred journalists. No monument for jailed journalists is expected.

There’s trouble at the boardroom of KFC Malaysia, the Colonel would never have tolerated such shenanigans.

Gloria Aroyo is willing to leave, but wants to set her own terms of exit.

Japan is diversifying away from China, Glenzo says everyone else should too,

Happy Birthday mr brown.

Via the Avian Flu Blog, FuturePundit offers a deluxe to-do list on how to prepare for the Avian flu pandemic.:

• Stockpile about 50 or 100 times more Tamiflu than you or your family could use. You can use it to barter if food and other distribution systems break down. Or you can use it to help every friend, acquaintance, and business associate you have. Want to get great deals from a supplier? Give him some Tamiflu and save his life. He’ll remember.
• Stockpile thousands of 3M N100 and P100 face masks. Again, they will make valuable barter material. Or you can give them away to people who do work for you.
• Stockpile a couple of years of dried and canned food in a dry cool place. I’d also suggest a couple hundred pounds of salmon filets so you can eat healthy even as the supermarkets go empty.
• Buy a house in the country so that you can avoid contact with other people.
• The country house should be self sufficient. That means it should have a well, two or three electric generators, and enough fuel to run the electric generators for several months. Photovoltaics in the roof and/or a windmill for electric power would be prudent.
• If you have to stay in the suburbs make sure you have an extremely well sealed house and high quality filters on air brought in from outside. Though the odds are pretty low you’ll get sick from a neighbor’s cough.
• Whether in the country or suburbs make sure your house can function without maintenance for years.
• Stock your house with whatever else you might need for 2 or 3 years (e.g. seeds and fertilizer for the garden).
• Be extremely ready to drop everything and isolate yourself with less than a single day’s notice. Avoidance of exposure is the best defense. The news says an outbreak is ripping through Tokyo or Shanghai or Calcutta? Time to quit going to work and head for the country or at least stay in your suburban home.
• If you need to travel to get to a hideaway best to have a lot of gasoline in a small towed trailer to make the trip since you won’t want to fly and even exposure at a gasoline station is best avoided (and under panic conditions you can’t count on finding gasoline to buy anyway).

UPDATE: I won’t be posting much new linkage for a short while due to the TypePad blackout. But on the bird flu, Thank you CCP.

As the resumption of six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program seems increasingly likely, the Bush administration is preparing itself mentally. This New York Times item shows they have the right idea. It’s never good to go into a negotiation with overly high expectations. (below summary via OneFreeKorea):

I’m really not at all surprised by DiTrani’s comment, in light of what I’ll just call "other information." The real issues here are: (1) North Korea isn’t serious about disarming (2) because it has no fear that there will be consequences if it does not disarm, and because (3) its greatest fear is the openness and transparency that are essential to verifying any disarmament agreement. They’re right, in other words, so the question of security guarantees is probably irrelevant anyway. Transparency is the key to both disarmament and human rights, and there isn’t going to be transparency unless we persuade North Korea that opacity and mendacity will have serious consequences. Threats of war won’t do that, because they know (or worse yet, may miscalculate) we won’t follow through. Threats of bankruptcy and instability will.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has announced the winners of the first Freedom Blog Awards. As RSF’s site is difficult to access in China, this news comes from Singabloodypore.

The East Asian winner, Jeff Ooi’s Screenshots:

An extremely popular blog that takes an independent approach to Malaysian politics and society. Its editor, Jeff Ooi, was threatened with imprisonment, at the beginning of October 2004, because he allowed on his blog a comment “insulting Islam”.

Macroblog has a fine roundup of coverage on China’s deal with Europe on textile quotas.  The most interesting point for me is a paragraph from the WSJ on whether the Bush administration would be willing to sacrifice pet-project Cafta (Central American Free Trade Agreement) for China.

The EU deal comes at a delicate time for President Bush, whose push for trade liberalization with Central America has run into unexpectedly strong opposition in Congress. Opposition to the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which is considered Mr. Bush’s top trade priority for 2005, has been fueled by worry about the treaty’s effect on U.S. sugar producers and textile makers, who will face greater foreign competition, and broader concern about Beijing’s economic clout. The import curbs slapped on Chinese-made textiles by Mr. Bush this spring helped to dilute opposition from U.S. textile manufacturers to Cafta.

Here’s a question.  If you were in charge, would you risk Cafta to make the Chinese happier?  Or would you calculate that the relationship with Beijing swamps any gain from trying to maintain the momentum for hemispheric free trade agreements?   (No fair assuming that Congress will give you both — the political equivalent of a free lunch.)

Cathartidae 2.0 translates an item from South Korea’s Sports Hankook’s Erotic Blog recalling another (now broken) world record set by a Singaporean, Ms Anabelle Chong.:

For example, why do porno actors place so much emphasis on the frequency of sex? In Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, a documentary about the famous porno star, we learn that Chong had sex with 251 men at one time. She explained her actions as being consistent with the logic of the woman’s movement. But in reality, it was nothing more than an event designed to attract attention.
For proof, even afterwards, such events went on. A porno star named Houston continued the record-breaking by having sex with 500 men. As a millennium event, one Italian porn star had sex with 2,000 women, though it wasn’t officially recognized as a new record.

Via Red Star News, a bit of analysis that - if true - leaves me feeling a little warmer towards Europe:

Yesterday saw an interesting broadcast on arte about EU’s arms politics. Guillaume DASQUIE, expert on geopolitics and member of the IRIS ( INSTITUT DE RELATIONS
INTERNATIONALES ET STRATEGIQUES) had an enlightening comment on the EU arms embargo towards China. He said that the proposition of some EU members like France and Germany to lift the embargo has to do with European and American military industrie’s competion. The USA closed it’s market (the biggest and only one where you can realy make profits) to arms from the EU almost entierly. So now the proposition to lift the arms embargo was a hint to the US: If you don’t open your market again and don’t stop to preassure European governments to buy your arms we will find somebody else to do buisness with.
I think this is called Realpolitik.

ESNW has a great post explaining why Shapelle Corby would have likely recieved the same treatment in the US as she has in Indonesia. Also explained, why some Chinese restaurants suck:

If you are a successful wholesale drug distributor, you can make millions of dollars a month.  But you can’t take that bag of cash and deposit it at your local bank.  You need to launder the money to make it legitimate.
… one of New York City Chinatown’s most famous drug distributors, who had the nerve to buy three restaurants in the heart of the New York City Chinatown (around Mott Street and Bayard Street), but operate them with staffs which produced lousy food and held bad attitudes.  Within weeks, everybody in Chinatown knew that these were money-laundering operations, because there was no other way to explain lousy food and bad service!

Tuesday Global Blog Roundup is online. Read and bookmark/RSS… very grober blogage summary. And thanks for the link.