Opening Festivities

Last night was a riot.  We ended up at a club which was full of Olympic visitors, many from Russia and Brazil, and stayed there until they shut the place down around 5:30.  The we migrated to Cheers, a bar whose motto is if there’s one person buying drinks they’ll stay open.  There were a bunch of Olympic types in there from Australia and, if I recall, Belarus. 

I got some great video on my camera of a Chinese police car. I’ll have to get it up on YouTube as soon as I can.

Of course, while I was out having a great time, this happened.

A Chinese man killed a relative of a U.S. men’s volleyball coach and injured another family member in a stabbing at a popular tourist spot in Beijing on Saturday.

The dead man was a U.S. citizen and the injured victim was an American woman, police said, adding the attacker jumped to his death after the killing. The murder cast a shadow over the first day of sporting action at the Olympic Games.

“While at the Drum Tower in central Beijing, the two family members were stabbed during an attack by what local law enforcement authorities have indicated was a lone assailant. One of the family members was killed and the other seriously injured,” the U.S. Olympic Committee said in a statement.

A Chinese tour guide was also injured in the attack carried out by a Chinese man just after midday. Assaults on foreigners are rare in Beijing, site of the 2008 Olympic Games.

Tang Yongming, 47, from the eastern city of Hangzhou, jumped to his death from the second storey of tourist site the Drum Tower after the attack, police said in a statement.

“We need further investigation to find out the motive since the man has killed himself. We have no more information to provide for the moment,” a spokesman for the Beijing Public Security Bureau said.

Honestly, this is rare here.  There are barfights and stuff, but this guy was at the Drum and Bell Tower.  A murder suicide?  In Beijing?  At that location?  Very odd indeed, poor bastard.

Suicide or “threw his murdering ass off the building”?

This story has been getting huge play here in the Twin Cities, as the victim was the CEO of the biggest floral company in Minnesota, and lived in a Minneapolis suburb.  At least his wife seems like she’ll recover.

What a bastard (oh, woe is me...my 2nd wife left me two years ago, and my son was arrested a year ago, but I’ll wait until now to snap).  Fucker should have jumped off the Drum Tower first, and if he survived, then tried to kill Bachman.

The odd thing is that I bet in terms of the amount of street crime, this sort of thing was statistically FAR more likely to happens in Minneapolis than in Beijing.  Seriously, other than the occasional barfight there is virtually NO street crime here. 

When news of the murder started going around all the foreigners were like, what, a murder, here?  At the fucking Drum Tower???

It’d be like living your whole life in California, then coming to China and dying in an earthquake.