More f*ckin' regulations

It seems that Beijing isn't the only city trying to become more "civilized" in a jiffy. Shanghai lawmakers have been working on regulations governing public behavior, most notably, the use of foul language, in Shanghai.

The report, in Chinese gives us a brief glimpse of a bunch of new regulations called, in Chinese, 《上海市民公共行为条例》, or something like "Shanghai citizens' public behavior regulations." The million dollar question is whether or not this thing has any teeth, or put in more everyday terms, how much will we have to fork over if we are caught doing something "bad"?

The point of these new regulations is to improve the system that used to be in place—which was mostly moral exhortation, and in which the legal basis of each infraction was found in different areas of laws. Now, however, all the naughty behaviors in the regulations are going to be the domain of one department. While that sort of answers the question of 'who' it leaves unanswered the 'how' of the whole business, but some people are floating the possibility that people will receive monetary fines for infractions, though how they would manage to quantify this is beyond us.

For example, being from New Jersey, our two favorite curses to hurl at Shanghai drivers that don't stop before making right turns (thus potentially hitting people in two streams of traffic) are "Fuck YOU, assHOLE (accent on the "hole", typical enunciation in north Jersey) and "Fuck you, ya fuckin' fuck!" (said like Joe Pesci with a baseball bat). Hopefully, they will only fine for Chinese epithets.

If you're going to fine for cursing, we propose that any insults involving mothers be punished the most severely. Call us what you will, but leave our mothers out of it.

Government officials believe that people in society are getting too rowdy, cursing and fighting over small things. We have to admit, though, that we always liked watching fights break out in the street—great entertainment, and no cover charge. And it beats gazing around at ads for stuff that you could never afford promising beauty you can never attain.