I enjoy seeing what people are passionate or mad about through the Internet. In China, even though they have the Great Firewall to protect them from the outside culture, they still manage to find ways around it as all good computer enemies of the state have been doing for years. So we are still able to hear that digital despair on the other side of the world.

The Chinese are getting upset about lame excuses it seems. A recent riot over the death of a teenage girl caused the police to issue a statement that has turned into one of those indecipherable and so popular phrases that non-Internet people ponder over, sort of like "All your base are belong to us."

The official police explanation goes like this. “The girl got into a quarrel with one of her male classmates who was with her at the river bank. Later, she seemed to calm down a little bit, so the boy began doing push-ups next to her. As he finished the third push-up, the girl suddenly jumped into the river…”

So  now the net is full of people talking about “doing push-ups” when they craft a joke based on a ridiculous or nonsensical explanation. This is merging with yet another hot phrase based on a lame excuse when a reporter asked about a government response to a recent scandal and got back the reply of “It has nothing to do with me at all! I’m just out to get some soy sauce!”

So recently a popular MSN status message was “I’m just out to get some soy sauce.” The newer Chinese phrase is is now “I’m not here to buy some soy sauce; I’m here to do some push-ups!” I'm waiting for the English version which might go something like "All your push-ups are belong to us!"