If you live in China, you will probably come to the conclusion quite quickly that Disneyland is too far away to visit. But you need not despair any more because now you can visit Beijing’s Shijingshan Amusement Park, a state-run amusement park that has a replica of the Magic Kingdom, right down to Mickey, Donald and a host of other Disney characters. Before you say “hey, isn’t that infringing on Disney’s copyrights?”, rest assured that the characters are not, in fact, the beloved mouse, duck et al. The character that coincidentally looks like Mickey is a cat with big ears. At some point, someone will point out that in an infinite universe like ours anything is possible, regardless of how improbable it may be. So, it’s entirely possible that the creator of cat-with-big-ears came up with his character having never seen or heard of Mickey Mouse. (But I think that’s highly improbable.)

You can judge for yourself on the Japan Probe website.

As you may have heard, China is firewalling sites on the Internet they feel do not conform to their content standards. There’s a website called Great Firewall of China (greatfirewallofchina.org) which allows you to test whether a website is available from inside China. According to that site, my blog is not available from China, which is a bit puzzling. According to something I found on the WordPress dashboard, there are other WordPress-based blogs that appear to be inaccessible. The Great Firewall of China website also says that there could be “technical reasons” why their service can’t confirm a website, rather than Chinese policy blocking access to my blog.

I know some people heading to China in a few weeks. I’ll have to see if one of them can access it from inside China.

Trashy mentioned a blog entry with a short movie about a Canadian goalie who also plays baseball. Enjoy!

I came across this article at The Register that has pictures from Google Earth of a cruise missle (maybe) caught in flight over Utah. If you have Google Earth installed, you can view it yourself using this KMZ file.

Comments in the article seem to be divided as to whether it’s a cruise missle or an MD-90 passenger jet.  Either way, it’s still neat.

Found this on the ‘net…

Recently, Darin gained a certain amount of celebrity because his custom license plate was stolen and recently found because the perpetrators posted a picture of themselves on the Internet, which he found by accident. His advice of not posting pictures of yourself doing something illegal is good advice, something these guys could use.

If you’re particularly bored, you might want to check out SMSpeeping.com. I came across it while looking at the widgets you can add to a customized Google page. Basically, people sending SMS messages using programs, rather than an actual cell phone, can have their messages available to the world. The website says that the messages are posted on the site with the permission of the senders, but I wonder how many people really know that the programs are doing this.

Update (31 Dec 2007): I noticed the website is now just a domain squatter so I’ve removed the link.