Random Links - 13

What’s in a name?
Ask the lady whose classmate took her name to make porn. A Houston-area woman has filed a lawsuit against porn star, Lara Madden, who made X-rated movies under the stage name Syvette Wimberly, claiming she stole her name. The real Syvette Wimberly was Madden's classmate in the 9th grade!

Not cool, I agree...but at least she does not live in Iran, where they want to execute porn stars!

Question: So, is Wang a pornstar-y name? Don't tell that to the Chinese authorities who are worried about what to do with the 93 million Wangs in China! (Chinese authorities are considering moves to address the current situation of a billion-plus people sharing just 100 surnames! Serious - this news is not from the Onion!)

No Good job, Brownie?
China executed the former State Food and Drug Administration director Zheng Xiaoyu for approving untested medicine in exchange for cash, the strongest signal yet from Beijing that it is serious about tackling its product safety crisis. During Zheng's tenure from 1998 to 2005, his agency approved six medicines that turned out to be fake, and the drug-makers used falsified documents to apply for approvals.

No news is good news
Cut out the bad news and all you are left with is advertising.

Make love, not war

A US military proposal to create a ‘Gay bomb’ to turn enemy soldiers into homosexual heathens more interested in sex than fighting!

Dream yourself a dream come true (thanks, Aerosmith)
Not via a Durex poll - A study suggests men and women dream about sex in equal measure.

Tall tales - Not sure how this could be relevant in any sense to the world at large but thought I'll throw it in here...random news from here and there, after all :)

The world's current tallest man (as recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records; various other unverified claims have been made by other tall men), who once saved dolphins by using his long arms to reach into their stomachs and pull out dangerous plastic shards (reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where George Costanza, showing off to a woman as marine biologist, saves a whale by taking a golf ball out of his blowhole; a golf ball that arguably got there because of Kramer hitting old golf balls into the ocean), is now married to a woman who is nearly half his age (he is 55) and more than 2 feet shorter than him. Bao Xishun, at 7' 9", is more than a foot shorter than the tallest ever recorded human - Robert Wadlow, who at 8 ft 11 inches, was literally a giant among men! He died, unfortunately, at age 22. At the opposite (shorter?) end of the stick, Gul Mohammed of India, is the shortest man ever verifiably recorded at 57 cm (1 foot 10.5 inches).

Update - Seems Bao met the world's shortest man, He Pingping, coincidentally also a Chinese, recently. Looks like China is setting all kinds of records recently - they engineer this one too?

Update to an update: Reading the source article at the above link, I learn that Pingping at 73cms tall is not the shortest. The current holder of the title is....yes...yet another Chinese (er...from Taiwan - don't want to raise a political rucus here!)- Lin Yih-Chih, who measures 67.5cm.

That said... sorry for giving more coverage to this kind of tabloidic fervor on the height of people - making it a PT Barnum freak show of sorts!

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Note: I have posted some of the above snippets of news at Linkastic earlier today.