Gross news from around China: netizens and health officials have been in an uproar over a recent post from a farmer in Chengdu who used blood plasma taken from a local hospital to water his fields. Upon visiting a friend in the hospital, the man found a packet of blood plasma discarded in the trash, so he took it home and proudly posted pictures of himself on the internet mixing the plasma with water and claiming that the protein inside will help his crops grow. The Chengdu Health Ministry said it was aware of the situation, and would do its best to find those at fault for improperly disposing of perfectly good plasma. Click the link for disturbing pictures!

Aw shucks. Metro Line 7, which was supposed to open sometime this month, will likely have its debut delayed since seven out of the line's 28 stations are still under construction. Metro officials said yesterday that they couldn't “rush to a completion,” but promised that it would be running by Expo time. Line 7 will go from Pudong to Baoshan District and is expected to carry about one million passengers a year.

Much like China's ongoing efforts against actual piracy, it seems that the government has been taking steps to curb piracy of the intellectual variety. Shifting from targeting individual sellers to wholesalers and manufacturers, Shanghai's "Cultural Inspection Team" has apparently confiscated over 20,000 pirated cds and 5,000 books in 246 "significant" busts in preparation for the Expo. If you do the math, though, that's about 100 cds/books per bust, which doesn't seem that significant to us. As it seems the goods aren't even made in Shanghai, we're not altogether too impressed.

Shanghaiist recently caught on to Forestry University’s attempts to clean up its campus’ ‘lovebird problem', but by what standards does this smooch patrol hold itself? Well, by employing hall monitors whose job is to ruin the mood (in high school we would have been so good at this job), the Communist Youth League has unloaded a heavy task on student volunteers- as if their classmates didn’t hate them enough already - to curb any public kissing, hugging, or even sitting that seems to suggest anything other than “Let’s just study together until we get married ”. However, rather than openly chastising couples and causing everyone involved to lose face, the monitors are instructed to ‘stare silently’ at the canoodling students until they regain their sense of public decency. According to Shanghai Daily “patrol members had been assaulted, either verbally or physically.” Perhaps that’s because couples mistook the monitor’s silent gaze as voyeurism.