Spitting on a Vancouver sidewalk is a crime punishable by a fine of up to $110, as several people of both sexes have lately found out, greatly to their surprise. Our Chinatown is large and busy and very, very Chinese, so to discover that something so iconically Chinese is actually banned is a bit of a culture shock to many. It looks like a Chinatown. It smells like a Chinatown. But, according to the new policy of enforcement, the goal is that it won't feel quite so much like a Chinatown anymore when you walk around in sandals.

Thank god.

"Paved with open oysters" was Dickens' verdict on the sidewalks of New York, for much the same reason. Just today I saw two men and one woman blowing their noses onto the sidewalk (quite a trick and, while I appreciate the dexterity and practice it must take to master, punishable by an equally stiff fine praise be to god). And not a cop in sight! That's $330 lost to our public coffers. I'm thinking of working up a business model based on ratting out the snotlings, but am not sure if it should be commission-based per incident or if we could work out some sort of pay-by-volume-of-bust deal, like with drug informers.

I could be the Huggy Bear of mucus!

In the meantime, the Chinese goverment at least is trying to teach its people that carrying certain Beijingoist qualities overseas, particularly to snotty old Singapore, is not the greatest make friends tactic the world has ever seen. Much like the website set up to teach Americans how to behave abroad, there's a new initiative to teach the previously-isolationist Chinese how not to be loathed when travelling. I mean, when travel abroad was punishable by death, it stands to reason not many people were able to avail themselves of the opportunity, so we've got a billion newbies hawking away on planes and smoking up a storm in oxygen tents worldwide, to say nothing of trying to scam the other tourists.

The daily reported that Wong and Sum cautioned Fan, who possessed an identification showing he was ordained as a monk, that Malaysia was not a place for bogus monks to deceive the public for donations and his act had tarnished the image of Buddhist monks.

Naturally, the government realizes that there will be lots of tourists coming to Beijing for the Olympics, and they're prefer if the Chinese weren't as Chinese for that either, so the government is training the actual residents of the city to behave as if they were travelling abroad. Easier than explaining your culture to a mob of foreigners, I guess, at least in countries where they're already conditioned to obey stupid, culture-eviscerating orders on a daily basis.

There will be a black market in spittoons, mark my words!

Beijing has launched a campaign to make its citizens more "civil" in the run-up to hosting the 2008 Olympics. Games organizers have repeatedly said the city needs to teach its people to stand in line, stop spitting and littering and generally be better mannered.

I just hope there's a section in there about bears and cellphone cameras…