From the New York Times, which is apparently pulling out all the stops in its peri-Olympic lifestyle coverage, comes this article about a woman who offers pole dancing classes for fitness here in Beijing. It has possibly the best lede/quote combination I've seen in a Times China story ever:

BEIJING — Clad in knee-high leather boots, spandex shorts and a sports bra, Xiao Yan struck a pose two feet off the ground, her head glistening with sweat and her arms straining as she suspended herself from a vertical pole.

“Keeping your grip is the hardest part,” she said. “It’s really easy to slide downward.”

And how.

In fact, the whole story is a quote gold mine. It's also calculated to set the hearts of every yellow-fever fantasist* who reads the Times racing. As is the accompanying photograph. Pole dancing + virginal Chinese women (which is to say, not professiona pole dancers). That's newsprint gold.

It also really makes me wish that my gym would revamp its exercise classes. They could, for instance, get rid of the obnoxious spinning class, which comes with music so loud that it drowns out every other sound in the gym, including my own headphones. It doesn't help that they refuse to close the studio door during the classes.

But, hey, for pole dancing class I reckon I could forgive a little loud music. Not sure how much exercise I'd get through, though.

*Imagethief may once have suffered from this problem, but thirteen years in Asia and ten years and a baby with an Asian wife has totally reversed my perspective. I now take Asian women for granted but fetishize Western women as impossibly remote and mysterious.