By XI MEI
Western Media Correspondent

The sight that greeted NYT staff Thursday

SHANGHAI (China Daily Show) – It was a day of mourning at the China offices of the New York Times today, after its ace reporter Chase Ketterman was discovered buried alive beneath a gigantic mound of paperwork.

The paper’s redoubtable 47-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning Shanghai bureau chief had reportedly been spending long hours at night, tracking down information pertaining to possible tax loopholes enjoyed by the family members of Premier Li Keqiang.

However, it seems Ketterman’s obsessional pursuit of documentary evidence proving possible financial chicanery by Chinese leaders had grown out of control, even by Times standards.

The fatal stack of papers is said to have included tax records, spooling faxes, share certificates, old news clippings, public documents, probate letters, bus tickets, business cards, taxi receipts, restaurant fapiao, jotted notes on paper napkins, random doodles, school textbooks, a hardback edition of The Complete Speeches of Zhu Rongji (Volume 6: 1982-87), several copies of the last will and testament of Jiang Zemin, and a stack of empty pizza boxes.

There is no question of any fiscal impropriety involving Premier Li, the Times admitted.

“We didn’t want to give false hope to the family by saying that he was found buried alive,” Sanlitun police chief Zhao Bing later explained at a press conference. “But technically, Ketterman was buried alive,’ inasmuch as he was dead when we later found him.”

A crusader for the truth, NYT assistant Mai Huang has some important news she must tell Ketterman’s wife

Forensic tests suggest that Ketterman’s dogged pursuit of the mile-long paper trail became a one-way ticket to tragedy at around 11pm Monday, when the veteran journalist reached for a folder of redacted tax returns from underneath a squashed carton of stale baozi, and triggered an avalanche of accounting.

“When I came into the office, Chase was up to his eyeballs in incriminating clerical documents and had asphyxiated on half a steamed bun,” sobbed impressionable 22-year-old news assistant Mai Huang (pictured, left) who found the body.

“Do you think I should tell his wife about us now?”

His family has announced that they intend to respect Ketterman’s wishes by not disturbing his papery grave.

“At the moment, we’re simply going to leave him there, as per his will’s precise instructions in case of emergency,” a family spokesman said. “It’s how he would’ve wanted to go.”

Meanwhile, the Smithsonian Institute in the US has already expressed an interest in purchasing the mausoleum.

The museum issued a statement saying that the Shanghai-based tomb was a “historical landmark of journalism,” remarking that, “there can be no greater legacy for any Times reporter… than to have his final resting place marked by a vast heap of dry reading material.”

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The Smithsonian has eagerly released plans for the proposed Ketterman mausoleum

By HUO YUEYUE
Society Correspondent

Chen, pictured in her prime, was sliced into 57 pieces trying to get on the cover of Chinese 'Vogue'

FOSHAN (China Daily Show) – A blind pensioner whose selfless actions saved the lives of three children has been condemned as a “money-grubbing fame whore” by netizens.

Chen Ming, 86, was carrying a large boulder when she heard cries from a nearby threshing machine in an agricultural market in Foshan, South China.

Dropping her livelihood, Chen rushed to the nearby machine, into which the three had apparently fallen while playing. After several hours, Chen single-handedly succeeded in helping them escape, even as hundreds of onlookers failed to offer any assistance.

Tragically, however, Chen failed to save herself: the short-sighted senior was unable to find a way out and died when owner Qi Gang wandered over and, apparently ignoring the screams from inside, turned the machine on.

After being admonished by police, Qi offered 4,000 yuan in compensation to Chen’s family and promised to pay more attention to public safety in future.

But the payout – and subsequent publicity – has led many to suggest Chen was not the Good Samaritan she appears to be.

“Chen is quite clearly a shameless publicity hound,” read one Weibo post that has since been approvingly re-shared thousands of times. “I bet she’s loving all this.”

“Poking her nose in other people’s business and being rewarded: what’s wrong with this country today?” asked blogger Lao Feng on redrants.com, a popular Maoist website.

“Time was when minding other people’s business was a patriotic duty for reporting anti-revolutionary activities. Now it has become just another capitalist plot,” Feng concluded in disgust.

A Foshan tourist official denied meanwhile that the incident reflected badly on Chinese society.

“We know Chen was blind,” he pointed out. “It’s quite possible that everyone else who failed to intervene was blind too – or deaf. Or mute. Or possibly all three.”

Shao Guanxianshi contributed to this story

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By JONAS WHALE
Environment Correspondent

Mermaids are traditionally open about baring their breasts but this little tease happens to be shy

DALIAN (China Daily Show) — There was an unexpected extra in Liu Xinpeng’s fishing net last week. A long day’s trawl off the coast of Dalian accidentally landed the unsuspecting skipper with the solution to one of mankind’s most abiding myths: the mermaid.

Along with the usual haul of mackerel, Li and his crew were amazed to find the stunned — but still alive — creature thrashing about at the bottom. The mythical half-woman, half-fish had apparently been snared unawares while relaxing in the warm tropical waters.

“She was dazed, and in her confusion dropped a mother-of-pearl comb, which later fetched a very decent price at market,” Liu told a China Daily Show reporter. “We were amazed by her large, naked breasts. Later, much later in fact, we noticed she had a long, silvery fishtail.

“I knew immediately there was enough food on her to last a month.”

After exchanging a few sentences with the mermaid, which apparently included the information that her name was Krill, and she was the 3,600-year-old last descendant of her kind, Li’s crew set about gutting and butchering the semi-piscine creature, long considered extinct.

Naturalists expressed amazement at the find.

“If the story is true, this is possibly one of the biggest upsets in recent scientific history and will completely rewrite our understanding of evolution, as well as provide research grants and new funding for hundreds of important biological endeavors,” Yale University’s Marine Biology Professor Davis Williams, who was unaware of the mermaid’s fate, told China Daily Show.

“As a side-effect, it might even encourage a new understanding of the importance of ecological protection laws.” Such laws may have prevented the discovery, last year, of Bigfoot on a Chinese menu.

“Anyone was says mermaids aren’t real can ask my wife and daughter,” chuckled Liu, as he chewed thoughtfully on a mer-rib. “They’ve been dining on one for the last week!”

Liu said he plans to sell the mermaid’s remains to a local museum, which will make a plaster cast of the skeleton and cover it with a plastic mould, before painting and displaying the result, and disposing of the bones in a nourishing medicinal soup.

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By HUAI SHASHOU
Crime Correspondent

BEIJING (China Daily Show) — A top-secret government car killed 32 people Saturday after realizing it could get away with anything.

The experimental Audi A6, code-named ‘Kai Te,’ was performing routine crackdown simulations along Chang’an Street when a crowd of peasants started congregating uncivilly.

“The car started honking loudly,” said Li Hongyun, a 53-year-old Gansu Province pig farmer, who was visiting the capital with her husband and three daughters. “It then made several attempts to deftly maneuver around us before it finally screeched its wheels angrily and took out my husband.”

The car’s sole occupant, a young intern surnamed Tiao — who denies any responsibility for what ensued and has since been detained by police — was described by witnesses as “pounding frantically” on the car’s windows, before being unceremoniously ejected “several meters into the air, legs kicking” from the newly autonomous Kai Te.

According to witnesses, the car then killed 11 souls as police stood by, realized it had a “taste for blood,” and changed course for Nanluoguxiang, a dangerously un-pedestrianized hutong popular among Chinese hipsters and foreign tourists.

“My life flashed before my eyes,” said Liu Beibei, 22-year-old owner of Thongs & Things. “I jumped out of the way and watched as the car moved forward and backward over a group of six fair but helpless students from the Central Academy of Drama before turning its wheels up-road.”

“It was like a shooting gallery,” said Lao Zugong, 81, a Chinese civil war veteran and long-time resident of the narrow, over-rated retirement community-cum-shopping district, who managed to escape the carnage.

The car went on to plow down 17 more Chinese visitors until it came face to face with Michael Knecht, 58, from Berlin, Germany, where it met its timely demise.

Knecht issued a statement upon being released from hospital claiming to have a 'preternatural connection' with Kai Te

According to Knecht’s wife, Du Du, 23, her husband “leapt out in front of the car,” somewhere near the north entrance of Nanluoguxiang, “on its way toward Houhai, probably,” said Du.

‘“Are you drunking?’ I shouted to him. ‘Look at the plate of government. Get out of the hell way!’” said Du. “But the ghost car suddenly stopped when it saw Michael.”

Surveillance footage from a nearby ATM shows Knecht, clutching a white KFC sack, repeatedly standing in the way of the car’s attempts to move around him.

“What are you doing here?” witnesses described Knecht as reasoning with the car. “Go home. This is a good hutong.”

Kai Te then suffered “an apparent attack of conscience,” said an emotional Gui Zidong, lead engineer in the experimental military program, “and self-destructed.”

Knecht sustained a light concussion from the impact of fragments of the car’s tri-helical plasteel molecular bonded shell but is otherwise expected to make a full recovery.

“I’m no hero,” Knect told reporters upon being released from hospital. “I just did what any other foreigner would do.”

Gui has offered his own theory on Kai Te’s demise.

“The cognitive dissonance between the pleasure of killing Chinese citizens versus the fear of creating an international incident with a random white guy  overloaded Kai Te’s Alpha Circuit, resulting in the autocide.”

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By TIANTIAN XIANGSHANG
Education Correspondent

The English teacher's attempt to emulate the Robin Williams character quite literally backfired

SHENZHEN (China Daily Show) — An English teacher’s decision to stage an act of individuality in front of his creative writing class Tuesday resulted in 14 maimed students and one dead poetry teacher.

Students at No. 2 Dongguan Polytechnic arrived for class expecting a colorless continuation of Monday’s lecture on iambic pentameter, only to discover that their teacher, William Carlos Wallace, 27, of Lancaster, Massachusetts, had spent all night arranging a pyre of firewood beneath the whiteboard, upon which he had drawn in large letters “CARPE DIAN”  (“Seize the Electricity”) in Latin and Chinese.

“He was upset that the university had cut the electric in his dormitory,” said English major Li Song, 21, who happened to be with Wallace when his power stopped working.

In an interview with China Daily Show,  Li said the two had been watching Wallace’s favorite movie, Dead Poets Society, which stars Robin Williams as a literature teacher who encourages his class of New England students to carpe diem or “seize the day,” rather than follow the staid orthodoxies of the traditional educational establishment, when the juice suddenly failed.

“It was at that moment that he decided to show his power against the school,” said Li.

The next morning, Wallace welcomed his students, locked the door, stood atop the pyre and lit a torch he had constructed and labeled “Prometheus.” He then called administrators on his mobile and was quoted as  saying, “To thee misguided nanny state Confucians, desist and cease your human rights abuses. Restore the use of nightly lumination, else face the wrath of fiery retribution.”

When administrators failed to understand Wallace’s English, they called  police, who arrived moments later and promptly tear-gassed the classroom.

These are the facts:

Administrators have employed grievance counselors to help students come to grips with the teacher’s senseless act of Western ignorance, and have recharged the late pedagogue’s electricity meter, which had inexplicably run out of credit four months ahead of schedule.

The 14 injured students from Wallace’s class are currently lying in the burn victim’s ward at Shenzhen’s Last Hope Memorial Hospital.

In lieu of flowers, their parents have asked mourners to donate a steady supply of traditional, status quo-promoting examples of Chinese cinema.

William Carlos Wallace boldly and independently soared head-first out of this six-story window

By RANDY MAJORS
Environment Correspondent

Bigfoot was said to be popular with local men for allegedly possessing aphrodisiac qualities

KUNMING (China Daily Show) – It’s a mystery that’s puzzled naturalists and fascinated the public for thousands of years.

But this weekend, the riddle of Bigfoot – known in China as ‘Yeti,” ‘Wild Hairy Man” or ‘Abominable Snowman” – came to a heartbreakingly mundane conclusion, after a chance visit to a Chinese hotpot restaurant found the legendary ape-man an apparent staple on the menu.

Adrian Hamilton, 33, had been tracking Bigfoot rumors in China for the last decade and was on the verge of concluding a critical sponsorship deal that would have allowed him to launch a comprehensive study into the existence of the mythical creature, when he decided to pay a visit to “an unassuming and rather bland” Yunnan eatery for lunch.

“I walked in and they were casually chopping up a six-foot, hirsute biped,” a stunned Hamilton told China Daily Show. “After recovering from the initial shock, I started asking questions. All they could tell me was that it was the last one they had, and that it had already been pre-sold for a hotpot feast that evening.”

Restaurant owner, Wu Shen, 65, told China Daily Show that Bigfoot had proven a popular dish over the last six weeks when locals hunters discovered a family of the legendary beasts living in a cave, subsisting on harmless wild berries.

“Man Face Gorilla Explode Over the Rice was ever our bestseller,” said Wu. “You do not know how sad I am now to see it is gone.

“That doesn’t really matter anymore,” added Wu, “because we definitely sold the last one.” Bigfoot meat, says Wu, helps replenish the spleen, revitalize the kidney, and is “especially good for men.”

Not to worry, say local hunters, who are currently following a trail of Siberian tiger tracks, whose muscular tail is rumored by old wives to make women feel like virgins.

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By RANDY MAJORS
Environment Correspondent

Al Jolson impersonators had been bussed in to boost morale

HEYUAN, SHAANXI (China Daily Show) – It was the moment the world had been awaiting for nearly half a year.

In the early hours of this morning, government rescue workers, toiling to bring the remains of dozens of coal miners killed in a gas explosion in a local coal mine to the surface, finally broke through a final barrier of fallen masonry; the first corpse was brought out, unblinking, into the dawn sunlight minutes later.

As crowds of onlookers cheered and waved banners, bloodstained cadavers, clad in their overalls,  some still clinging to tools, were carried aloft by soot-smeared rescue workers and piled onto a nearby slag heap to be reunited later with their families.

A new shout went up each time the blank face of one of the late miners, described as “weary and decomposed” by crew foreman Wang Liquan, appeared at the mouth of the tunnel, the focus of widespread media attention for almost six months after the unquestionable deaths of every worker in the Heyuan shaft.

The rescue has brought a nation together, cost millions of yuan, and seen the army mobilized to lend a hand, providing show-stopping song-and-dance numbers in praise of mining,  sacrifice, and the daredevil nature of China’s primary industry in general.

Wang spoke to reporters while being hosed down after a sixteen-hour shift on the front line of the dig. “When we heard that the poison-gas explosion had killed everyone down there, choking to death those that weren’t crushed, we almost lost hope,” he told assembled media.

“Then surveys reported that most of the corpses were located towards the front of the pit. It was then we knew we had a chance to bring these dead men home in triumph. And now we have done that, apart from a few still at the back.

“Finding that many people dead down there was the best news the country could possibly hope for,” he added.

A small tube was drilled through to the chamber in which the late workers were trapped for their last agonizing moments of life, allowing food, drink and medical supplies to be needlessly winched down.

“We even got a small television set down there so they could stare with sightless eyes at their favourite shows,” said Wang. “They would have especially enjoyed live coverage of the Asian Games opening ceremonies, had they lived.”

The epic effort saw messages of support flood in from all over China. “Add oil, coal dig heroics,” read one touching letter from the Beijing Institute of Advanced English Studies, signed by students and faculty.

Other messages were scrawled on banners held by loved ones keen for a reunion in order to clear up legal questions and ensure the smooth transfer of property.

“Come home for your funeral soon, Daddy,” read one heartbreaking placard held up by a small girl. This crowd surged forward when news of the breakthrough came.

“It’s a sign of the times,” observed mine owner Wai Waiwai. “In the old days, we’d have just waited until the next bunch broke through to the death-pit, then let them clear the bodies out. Now, with nationwide help, we can bring these wonderful, brave and lifeless men to the surface.

“But it’s knowing that we’ll still make a profit from this largely undamaged seam of coal when we reopen under a different name in three weeks that is the best tribute to these men’s pointless deaths,” he added, fighting back tears.

China’s leaders also expressed their joy. Hu Jintao is said to have taken time out from combat training in the Matrix to declare National Dead Workers Day and later promised that each corpse would “receive a State pension for the rest of their natural lives so they need never work again  (not including funeral expenses).”

Rescue workers bellowed encouragement as they wheeled out the bodies of the long-dead

Experts from the China Bureau of General Expertise have warned that the miners may have been changed by their six-month ordeal. “Six months underground can have a huge effect,” said psychologist Pang Jiabin. “Families may find their loved ones stiffer than they remember.”

Others worry about the effect of fame on the cadavers, who will appear in a parade in Beijing next month to celebrate their rescue.   “What they need is some quiet reflection,” said Ministry of Health spokesman Zhang Lei. “These men lived and died underground, and that is now, more than ever, where they belong.”

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By JONAS WHALE
Entertainment Correspondent

The Beard family’s anguish is evident in this picture, released to media this morning. Both female Beards are receiving medical attention

SAINT PAUL (China Daily Show) – A Minnesota family returned to the US yesterday after enduring a ten-hour quarantine, during which all five were allegedly forced to watch the English-language channel CCTV-9 without pause.

But reports indicated the family’s ordeal could fetch hundred of thousands of dollars in media deals, after officials at the Guinness Book of Records confirmed that the viewing marathon broke all previous known records.

The Beard family nightmare began last Wednesday, according to patriarch Nathan Beard, 46, speaking at a brief press conference organized by legal representatives.

“We were wandering through the conference room at our Marriott Chongqing hotel when my wife began sneezing. She has a dust allergy and I don’t think anyone had cleaned the place for weeks,” Beard told reporters.

Within minutes of the sneezing outbreak, hotel staff had quarantined the family, apparently under the belief that they were potential avian-flu sufferers.

“‘You have the bird sick, so sorry,’” one of them allegedly said.

“After about an hour, two members of staff wearing surgical masks came in with a tray of sandwiches, turned the television onto CCTV-9 and left. They were very polite but refused to answer our questions,” Beard explained.

“After they left, we heard numerous sounds that indicated locks, chains and filing cabinets were being piled up outside  the door to prevent our escape,” Beard recalled. “But worse was still to come – we realized that they’d also taken the remote and the TV controls were out of reach.

“After about ten minutes, they started broadcasting Dialogue and Tian Wei’s face appeared on the screen. It was at that point that I began to panic.”

Beard’s voice quavered as he went onto describe a scarcely-believable schedule of televisual banality, that included the same piece of news footage about a bombing in Yemen broadcast six times within a single hour and an advert for the Port of Dandong which Beard described as being “like a zombie. That sucker wouldn’t die.”

Following a Chinese-language programme presented by Canadian TV personality, and alleged visa-dodger, Mark Roswell, aka Dashan, Beard claims his wife Sheryl, 39, begun complaining of a headache.

Three hours into the scheduled programming, 29-year-old son Phillip’s eyeballs “rolled back inside his skull and he began convulsing.”

Medical experts have repeatedly warned foreigners in the past of the dangers of excessive CCTV-watching, with symptoms including “frothing at the mouth, finger-pointing, unnatural optimism about the Shanghai Expo and the unshakeable conviction that the world outside China’s borders is borderline anarchy,” according to NYU psychology professor Ebert Wai.

Sheryl and Jessica Beard, both seven, are said to be in a stable condition in a psychiatric hospital.

And in an unexpectedly positive development to the case, Guinness officials have let it be known they wish to verify the Beards’ claims.

The previous record for watching the state media channel uninterrupted is three hours, held by Maine State Hospital for the Mentally Disturbed resident Ellis MacBain, 43.

Chongqing hotel staff yesterday refused to comment on the allegations. “We have never spoken to the Beards and we are not even hotel,” said Marriott representative Li Hu.

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