WATCH OUT. People who are not vegetarians “easily cheat, tell lies, they forget promises, they are dishonest and tell bad words, steal, fight and turn to violence and commit sex crimes”, according to a new school textbook.
This is a LIE. We do not comment sex crimes. Often.
It gets worse. New Healthway, a book given to school children in India, also explains that meat-eaters are “lazy, sluggish and short-lived”. So how do we get the time and energy to steal, fight, commit sex crimes, etc?
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I met with a veggie friend for lunch to discuss this and she said the textbook allegations were “actually pretty accurate” in her “humble opinion”.
She said the vast majority of murderers were meat-eaters. “Your sort commit a type of murder every time you have a meal,” she said, pointing to my sausage, as if I had hunted it down in cold blood and tortured it to death.
She was so annoying I wanted to stab her with my steak knife. Maybe the book IS right.
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But school textbooks in Asia actually perform a really useful service: they bluntly reveal what communities REALLY think of each other.
A sample sentence in my first Chinese language textbook, printed in Hong Kong, said: “Foreign children fight in the playground but Chinese children do not fight in the playground.”
I thought about filing a complaint but I was too busy fighting in the playground.
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The night before writing this, I was sitting in a room with a European and a Chinese person when a TV trailer came onto the screen to loudly tell us about the launch of “Asia’s Next Top Model”, an Eastern version of a hit Western reality show about catty women.
All three of us immediately shook our heads. “It’ll never work in Asia,” I said.
The European agreed: “Definitely not. Asians just aren’t bitchy enough.”
Hmm. Unless we all become meat-eaters, of course.
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It’s really amazing what Asian publishers come up with. China’s top newspaper, The People’s Daily, last week published a 55-page online picture spread of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, after taking seriously an Onion comedy report saying he had been named “the sexiest man alive”.
Yes, this is the same Chinese newspaper that recently said the New York Times was a pile of crap. Fifty-five pages! I bet the Times wouldn’t have given such a report more than 50.
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Anyway, here’s good news for anyone who has to suffer Asian media of dubious quality.
Scientists have invented a television you can turn off with your tongue. You just stick your tongue out and a sensor detects it, said boffins from Ngee Ann Polytechnic in Singapore last week.
The device was designed for disabled people but it’s clearly perfect for viewers’ instinctive response to on-screen appearances of government officials.
On the downside, we need to all remember not to drool at ultra-sexy people like Lily Collins, Leela from Futurama, and, er, Kim Jong-un, otherwise…. Click!
Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s lunchtime. I’ve got just one hour to eat a large amount of meat before going out to lie, cheat, steal and commit sex crimes.
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STILL AT Theatre @, convention centre, Hong Kong, all day today.. come and say hello…

