HiPiHi新闻联播2期横空出"事"

It strikes me that the following may seem culturally insensitive. I'm not trying to say Chinese people or things are inherently alien or weird or exotic or anything. I'm a huge fan of the Chinese people. Their movies are awesome, they are pioneers in the arena of bootlegging cool shit so I can get it for free, their lead-filled toys have never injured me, personally. Best of all, they keep their delicious Americanized restaurants open on Christmas Eve, so I can hook up some spicy Cheng-Pi Beef even though the rest of the world has come to a dead stop, eagerly awaiting the arrival of an obese, gift-bearing hermit.

So, having made that possibly-more-offensive pre-apology, allow me to say this...The following commercial for the Chinese version of "Second Life" is the most insane, creepiest thing I have ever seen. I wonder...would an American commercial for our version of "Second Life" look this weird to a Chinese person?



It probably helps that I don't understand what anyone is saying, but still...this would be weird even if it were coherent.

After some opening titles featuring a globe with non-Earth-like continents, we cut to the inside of some kind of temple, where a man with a bear claw for an arm and a firecracker strapped to his back speaks with what I can only guess is a rabbit. Oh, and the rabbit has a plunger floating just above its head. And they might be hosting some kind of show, rather than speaking to one another. I can't tell.

The weirdest part about this sequence is that the dialogue sounds like it is extremely mundane. Like they're discussing Grain Futures or something. This is supposed to sell me on whatever the hell this thing is called? So far, it looks like a crack baby's nightmare.

Then we cut to virtual news footage from what looks like an event of some sort, though I can't imagine what it would be and there aren't any people around. There's a lot of weird close-ups of crowns. Is it a beauty pageant? Could anything sound more inane than an avatar beauty pageant? I'm thinking it's probably inversely proportional anyway - the uglier you are in real life, the hotter your alternate self. You meet the Second Life Evangeline Lilly, that's probably a 400-pound guy permanently melded to his computer chair.

Then, the news show's "host" stands in front of a freaky black room containing what looks like a large perfume bottle and...I don't know...some kind of sparkly white thing. Perhaps a portal between our world and this Realm of Mystery and Polygons.

Anyway, you get the idea. Second China is frightening. It's like if someone made an Inland Empire tie-in game or something. No thanks...