Look at the expression on the pearl ox and then ask yourself, where is the girl's right hand?

 

Because an ox figurine made with 130,000 pearls that conspicuously invokes the Wall Street "bull" statue doesn't seem, you know, vulgar or anything on the eve of a walloping recession. (By the way, the recession will be a real test of China's recently promulgated employment law.) In case you're wondering, the Wall Street bull statue is not gelded, although judging from the photo above the pearl one might not be so lucky.

The bug-eyes actually seem like something of an afterthought. Some poor jewelry craftsman laboriously applied 130,000 pearls to an ox maquette for a year in a plywood shed full of lead fumes and then took it to his boss, who said, "FanTAStic. But can we make the eyes look a little bit more like Cookie Monster from Sesame Street if he had terminal liver failure?" Next year is the ox/cow/general bovine year on the Chinese calendar, so I guess there will be more golden calves etc. in the coming months. Insert the symbolic, apocalyptic interpretation of your choice here.

That was the most interesting thing I found on Xinhua today, which may say as much about my newsreading habits as it does about Xinhua. In other rural news, the second most interesting thing was this:

Hu Jintao visits county to promote ideological campaign

BEIJING, Nov. 17 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Hu Jintao recently made a site tour in Ansai County, Shaanxi Province, to publicize a campaign for the Scientific Concept of Development.

It's an ideology with the same principles of the previous Party leaders' theories known as Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory and the Important Thought of "Three Represents". The theories all say the CPC has always represented the most advanced productivity and culture in China, as well as the most fundamental interests of the majority of the Chinese people.

No word on when that visit actually took place. The President is in Costa Rica today, so that story may have been in the can a while. But no matter. I've always enjoyed the rigid protocol attached to the ordering of the major political philosophies in state news coverage (really). No matter how chaotic the rest of my life gets in these straitened times, I know it's always Mao Zedong Thought first, the Scientific Concept of Development last, and Deng and Jiang in the middle. Comforting, in its own modest way.

Thanks for the land reform, Mr. President. But what I really want is a pearl ox!