Extra! Extra! Earwax, bad movies and Google corporate culture

• The Shanghai suicide that no one knows about. He was an official at the Japanese consulate and he may have been "intimidated by a Chinese intelligence operative."
• Is your earwax wet or dry? A new study shows that Asian are more likely to have "dry, flaky earwax" while those of African and European descent have the "gooey, stinky type." Based on our observations of taxi drivers in Shanghai, the dry stuff is best removed with a long, yellow pinky fingernail.
• Employees at Google in China enjoy a "ubiquitous availability of snacks and toys in the office, at all times, the lack of a minimum workload requirement for each individual employee" But this blogger doesn't think Chinese workers are ready for such corporate flexibility.
• Angry Chinese Blogger writes about Brokeback Mountain, and contends that the reasons it will never play in Chinese theaters are not only about hot guy-on-guy action: "[S]ome observers have suggested that Chinese censors might have found cause for concern in the fact that Brokeback Mountain depicts America as having strong agrarian roots, rather than the industrial and commercial roots that many Chinese believe are the source of America's modern day wealth, and which Beijing is currently promoting as the 'only way forward', and the fact that it clearly shows that many of America's rural poor of the 1960s and 70s had a higher quality of life than much of China's modern rural population."
• Finally, ESWN translates a Southern Metroplis Daily story entitled "How Memoirs of a Geisha Became 'Sensitive'."

Image from yeungstuff.com.