View From a Height

Welcome, Corner readers, and thanks to Andrew Stuttaford for the kind link.

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China's formally unveiled the obligatory Cute Little Olympic Mascots for the 2008 Peking Olympics. They're called - seriously - the "Five Friendlies," and here they are:

No jokes about "huanhuan" being the temporary guest worker they brought in, only with his name misspelled. Frankly, given China's human rights regime, I'm surprised one of them isn't named "Sing-Sing."

The warm, fuzzy Leninists over at the Games also have little pictures of the Friendlies playing various Olympic sports:

Although to be honest, in the wrestling picture, HuanHuan looks more like he's smuggling JingJing across the border than like he's wrestling, and YingYing seems to be dodging a tear gas canister.

Anyway, not all the sports are represented yet, and I thought I'd help out with some designs for the demonstration sports the Chinese were planning on introducing in '08:

For those of you who don't know Mandarin, yes, those are the real traditional Chinese characters, brought to you by Babelfish.

And for those of you / without a sense of humor, yes, American copyright law does make exceptions for obvious cases of parody or satire. If these aren't obviously satirical enough for you, perhaps you need to rethink your political system.

UPDATE: The Skwib has another new demonstration sport being introduced. Harsh Mark, very harsh.