Record breaker's wife aided success with carrots

As Adili Wuxor gave his final high wire performance above the Bird's Nest, his wife, Yiba Guli, acted out her own role of calm supporter in front of the media. Inside, she was burning with anxiety.

"If he says he wants to take part in another endurance event, I will definitely oppose it," she said, in reference to problems Adili felt during his successful record attempt.

Adili, a renowned wire-walking performer from Xinjiang, concluded his 60-day stay above the national stadium at 10:42 am on Friday, smashing several Guinness records. In particular, he set a record for the longest distance walked on a steel wire and the longest time spent at an elevated height.

During her 60-day stay in Beijing as his "biggest supporter", Guli went to watch her husband twice a day, regardless of rain or sun. She said the first thing she did after waking was to send him a text message with the number of days left.

As the performer's health worsened, Guli found herself making more than 10 calls a day to remind him of his courageous spirit. "He is a hero and an artist," she said. "The main reason he has done all this is to raise awareness of our culture and prove that Xinjiang people are brave."

But she was not only there to offer emotional support. As a wife, she wanted to give her partner a sense of their home, so she prepared all his favorite recipes.

Trouble struck though when Adili was advised by doctors to eat more carrots as a form of food therapy. Guli said she had to "strain her brain" to smuggle the foodstuff into his meals, dodging his massive aversion to the root vegetable.

"I also peeled and sliced his fruits," she said, noting that he would turn them down in any other form.

Guli is more than just a wife, she is Adili's promotion team manager, with responsibilities that include making costumes and running the group's daily activities. However, despite being a hardworking promoter and a trickster in the kitchen, she still suffers from intense nervousness when watching her husband walk the wire.

"When he hit 39, he was suddenly not as strong as before," Guli said, adding that she has been secretly trying to persuade her husband to end his career.

For Adili though, his lofted position allows him to view his next horizon with ease - a possible walk cross the Taiwan straits, to take place sometime next year.

Forgotten folks need love and support from children

There is nothing so natural as children leaving the nest when they find a job or get a place at university, but that doesn't make it any easier for the parents.

Far from concerns about their children's safety is a much more pressing matter - intense loneliness felt by mom and dad, sadly labeled as the "empty nesters".

An empty nester chats with a nurse at the Songtang Hospice in the capital.

"I am so lonely. My wife passed away seven years ago and my daughter, who now lives in the United States, can only come back twice a year. I feel forgotten," said Wang Zhong, 62, a retired college teacher living in Changying in Chaoyang district.

Wang said life was more tolerable when he was working, but retirement brought it to a grinding halt.

"The sudden change was hard to accept," he said.

Wang is among an estimated 500,000 "empty nesters" in Beijing.

A recent survey by several Beijing-based medias on 5,000 people in a similar situation in the capital revealed that more than 60 percent described themselves as "lonely".

"The rapidly expanding number of elderly people will become a major social issue," said Wu Shimin, director of the Beijing Aging Committee.

Statistics from the committee showed the annual increase in the elderly was 2.5 percent in the 1980s.

More than 20 years of accelerated growth in the city however has accumulated about 2.5 million people aged over 60, accounting for some 17 percent of the total population.

That figure will continue to climb, to 3.5 million by 2020 and then 6.5 million by 2050.

Giving encouragement to the elderly is necessary, but quite a challenge.

And with the increase will be a spur in "empty nesters", made likely by improved living conditions and higher salaries that encourage young people to leave home and move into their own apartments.

"The elderly will really need help from society; not just financial but also psychological assistance from professionals and family members," said Yang Ping, a doctor from Beijing Psychological Center for Elderly People.

The center set up a hotline in April 2007, to provide a free and daily consultation service to elderly people. It receives about 3,000 calls annually and also arranges face-to-face meetings in communities.

"Our operators are trained by medical professionals. However, while they are skilled in providing advice, we still believe that the best way to counter depression is when the family takes an active role," Yang said.

She said most senior citizens' feelings of insecurity could not be resolved by the hotline. Instead, a loving attitude from children, sometimes even just a phone call, can make a dramatic difference.

"They should also get outside and take part in social activities," said a retired worker surnamed Zhang in Huilongguan, Changping district.

He leads an elderly people's modeling club. They hold regular training programs on the weekends and also give occasional performances of fashion shows.

"My advice is to do whatever makes you happy. The best way to end loneliness is to replace it with something else, perhaps a hobby," he said.

The municipal government and the Beijing Aging Committee launched a joint project last year to improve the lives of the elderly. More than 40,000 elderly residents were given emergency response buttons, linked directly to neighboring clinics.

Beijing has about 300 nursing homes and 2,300 senior citizens' activities centers.

And Dongzhimen went one step further by opening a special street for the elderly on June 29. Restaurants, hairdressers and dry cleaners were just some of the shops intended to make life easier for local seniors.

"All 12 stores will provide special services to seniors, at discount prices. The clinics can provide traditional Chinese treatment," said Zhao Chenjie, an official from the Dongzhimen neighborhood office.

But it is not just access to material goods that will benefit them.

Zhu Lin, a doctor at Beijing-based Songtang Hospice, said giving encouragement to the elderly is necessary, but quite a challenge.

Songtang Hospice, which cares for both the elderly and terminally ill patients, has access to hundreds of volunteers.

"However, it is really hard to provoke a positive attitude among the elderly unless the helper has professional training," he said.

Zhu said that while the volunteers might not help the elderly much in psychological issues, it is usually an eye opener for their own lives.

Follow your instincts, not a list of requirements

Our male cat started to get fidgety after he turned one year old.

In order for him to enjoy a family life as well, my boyfriend and I decided to get our cat a girlfriend.

A couple of days ago, we contacted the dealer we bought our cat from last year and visited his home again, where he kept more than 50 purebred cats.

We wanted a female and felt she should be the same breed as ours - Scottish shorthair and blue in color, about one year old and with straight ears, since our first cat has folded ears.

It turned out that only a few cats met our needs, and they were way too expensive: all above 4,000 yuan, which was more than twice the price we paid for our first cat.

But there was one, the right age, right gender and at a suitable price - but she had the wrong face. She didn't look good and was very aggressive to us both.

We didn't take a cat home with us that day, after long consideration.

The next day, I met an old college classmate who I hadn't seen for a long time. We were both so delighted and began to catch up immediately. During the conversation, the single girl whined to me about how hard it was to find a boyfriend.

She wanted a man who was older than her, but not too old. Someone with career ambitions, his own apartment and car. Someone who was sweet, caring, smart, humorous, romantic and loyal.

As she kept on listing her requirements, I started to wonder whether she was asking for too much?

And then it hit me that the same thing happened when I was looking for a cat - way too many criteria.

I remember when we bought our cat last year, there was no expectation at all. We went to the dealer's just for fun and it just happened that we fell in love with the adorable Scottish "boy" and spent all the money we had on getting him. This time, it turned out to be so hard to find satisfaction because of all the criteria we had in mind.

Once you start to have criterions, the price goes straight up.

Worse still, I realized that we were even more demanding than we expected to be. In addition to price, look and temperament also turned out to be issues - otherwise we would have taken the not good looking one.

And people are not just like that about cats and relationships. We're the same with jobs, apartments, food, friends and so on.

We have formed certain likes and dislikes of our own and began to make demands with everything we come across. And the older we are, the longer we wait, the pickier we become.

I couldn't help but wonder: are our criteria making things more complicated and our life harder? Are we trapped by our own requirements?

Maybe life would be much more fun if we live it with less expectation and more curiosity.

Your requirements toward anything could be easily destroyed as things change. Just keep the most important ones in mind and for the rest, let nature decide.

Perhaps you should forget about your plans and judgments and just choose the man you cannot help but want to kiss.

Our male cat ended up getting a young girlfriend. After we found out how expensive female cats of the same breed were, we bought a beautiful "girl" that was less than two months old. She was reasonably priced and fulfilled all the important factors that we valued; only apparently, our male cat needs much more patience now.

You just never get it all.

If you're shy male

Modest? Shy? Reluctant to tell everyone how brilliant you are? If you're male, you can probably add 'single' to that list.

Instead, cocky types are more likely to win their hearts, with Simon Cowell's arrogant attitude more appealing than Hugh Grant's bumbling on-screen behaviour.

　

The three female researchers showed more than 200 people videotapes of a man and a woman applying for a job as a computer lab manager.

The volunteers were asked to rate them for modesty, likeability and a range of other factors. Despite the actors being equally qualified for the job, the man was liked less than the woman.

Professor Laurie Rudman, of Rutgers University in New Jersey, said: 'Our findings demonstrate that men encounter prejudice when they behave modestly. 'They also raise the possibility that men may avoid behaving modestly because they risk backlash when they do.

The sexiest World Cup players are exposed

Footballing hunks across the globe are getting ready to put on the show of their lives – for us ladies at home. The sexiest World Cup players are exposed.

England's Frank Lampard

Plays for: Chelsea

Best bits: Frank has chiselled good looks and nice legs, but he’s also a big softie. His goal celebration consists of pointing to the sky, a tribute to his mum Pat, who died in 2008. Frank also has an IQ of 154, which puts him in the ‘Very Superior Intelligence’ bracket. No excuse for him saying, ‘We woz robbed’ and such like, then.

Earnings: Frank’s on 135,000 pounds a week

Love life: Has two kids with Elen Rives, and is now dating Christine Bleakley.

Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo, 25

Plays for: Real Madrid

Best bits: Firm, tanned torso when he strips off his shirt (every five minutes)， that cheeky wink (OK, it got him into trouble/hate mail, but we still like it)

Earnings: Second only to David Beckham when it comes to cash, pulling in more than 20 million pounds a year in wages and endorsements, like that Armani ad. You know, the one that makes us feel funny.

Love life: He’s hot single property, being linked to Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton.

Ivory Coast's Didier Drogba, 32

Plays for: Chelsea

Best bits: Africa’s biggest footballing star is gorge and brave. He saved his country from war by falling to his knees on live TV and begged warring factions to make peace. So they did. Try that Rooney!

Earnings: He’s worth about 16m pounds

Love life: He and wife Alla have three sons. Can’t wait for them to grow up.

France's William Gallas, 32

Plays for: Arsenal

Best bits: He’s a hunkaspunk, all brooding looks and big guns. Never mind the footie, we want tickets to THAT gun show

Earnings: Earns 80,000 pounds a week. But he’s in a contract wrangle with Arsenal, so may not be earning that for much longer

Love life: Married exotic stunner Nadege. They met as teens and got hitched last year. He has an eight-year-old daughter, Lea, from a previous relationship.

Brazil's Kaka, 28

Plays for: Real Madrid

Best bits: His name might make you giggle (his baby bro named him that because he couldn’t pronounce ‘Ricardo’) but he’s still tall, dark and handsome with a killer smile

Earnings: Sponsorship with Adidas and modelling for Armani boosts his yearly earning well over the ?20 million mark

Love life: Kaka is very religious and married Caroline Celico at Christmas 2005 in S?o Paulo. Their first child, Luca Celico Leite, was born in 2008.

Expo-goers were found to be faking disabilities

Visitors to the Saudi Arabian pavilion of Shanghai's World Expo might be spending more time there than they bargained for if you include waits of up to nine hours.

While the opening weeks at Expo saw surprisingly low attendance, Saudi Arabia's pavilion has emerged as among the most popular, according to a report in Shanghai's Liberation Daily. Thousands of expo-goers, the elderly among them, have braved Shanghai's humidity for a chance to see the 'moon boat,' a nickname for the country's 6000-square-meter pavilion complete with date palm trees planted on the structure's roof.

'In the very beginning, few people paid attention to Saudi Arabia,' said Terrence Ou, CEO and founder of The Great Wall Adventure Club, which specializes in trips to the Expo. 'It's an Arabian country and people thought they know what it looks like by looking at the TV or whatever.'

That changed, however, when word spread of the Saudi pavilion and its 1,600-square-meter movie screen, among the world's largest. France may have duty-free perfume to sell, while Australia has Ugg boots and China a dose of patriotism, but no one seems to have tapped visitors' desire to glimpse the future quite like the Saudis.

That doesn't mean all Expo-goers are patiently waiting their turn. Saudi Arabia, along with several other countries, recently closed down express handicapped access to the pavilion after visitors were found to be faking disabilities, according to a report in the Shanghai Daily.

Saudi Arabia and Sweden, which reported 4,000 people each day faked disabilities at its pavilion, shut down special handicapped access, the newspaper reported, while Germany began requiring visitors with disabilities to make reservations in advance.

Yan Linhong, a spokeswoman for the Swedish pavilion, said, 'We once saw one elderly person accompanied by nine adults, trying to force an entry through the express lane.'

A state-run legal news website even weighed in, running an editorial under the headline, 'Don't let the 'falsely disabled' be the humiliation of mankind.'

Things are only about to get more hectic at the Expo, Ou said, because Chinese schools are just letting out for the summer and the event is likely to grow as a family favorite. It was tough for him to venture a guess, however, at what might be the summer's next craze.

'Anything with the Expo right now is unpredictable,' he said.

Africa, World Cup and neo-colonialism

The four-year wait is over. The debates may continue, though. Hosts South Africa kick off the World Cup against Mexico today. France and Uruguay, former champions both, battle it out later in the evening. Without the artistry of Zinedine Zidane, even French fans know, it will be impossible for France to reach the quarterfinals.

But if eternal favorites Brazil fail, their fans will forever think, what if their coach Dunga had been a bit more practical. What if he was a believer in joga bonito (the beautiful game)? What if he had picked Ronaldinho the brillante? Things, however, would be different if Kaka outshines his Real Madrid teammate Ronaldo in Brazil's game against Portugal and leads his team to World Cup glory in the end.

Things would be different, too, if the Maradona-Messi magic casts a spell in South Africa and they fly back home to Argentina with their third Cup. Or, if England win their second. Or, the Netherlands lift their first. Or, Fernando Torres, David Villa, the Xavis and Cesc Fabregas strike gold for Spain.

The World Cup, for decades, has been mouthwatering stuff. Seeing the best of the very best in football in action gives fans the adrenaline rush. Football fans, and there billions of them across the world, will for a month forget almost everything. And since this has been touted as Africa's World Cup, Africans will perhaps be the most excited of the lot.

But will the World Cup break the colonial myth that Africa is an "inherently impaired darker section" of the human race? Will it release the post-colonial Western stranglehold on the continent? Will it stop the pillage of Africa, which began in the 16th century and continues to this day? Will it restore Africa to its pristine environmental past?

The world loves football. It's a beautiful game. But it's not beautiful because of the Di Stefanos, Puskases, Peles, Bests, Cruyffs, Maradonas and the Ronaldinhos and Messis. Football is a beautiful game because it can be played by anyone anywhere (except the Arctic and Antarctica, perhaps). It does not necessarily need proper kits or the lush green of artificial grass or even a goalpost. It just needs a football, made of leather or rubber, or even rags rolled into a ball and some players - the way it is still played by millions of children in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Football's roots have been traced to China. But modern football, like so many other games, was born in England and institutionalized in Europe. And that is perhaps where the problem of football and hegemony lies. The Latin Americans may be masters at joga bonito, but the real masters of the game (its rules and regulations) are the Europeans. Since it's these masters of the game that have carried the World Cup to Africa (South Africa, to be precise), it is not expected to help Africans break the myth of being "inherently impaired". Unfortunately, even the first president of free Senegal, the great poet Leopold Sedar Senghor, fell prey to the corollary myth of the supremacy of Western civilization vis--vis all other civilizations, no matter how ancient or knowledgeable they are. Even a cultural theorist like him asked Africans to stop denouncing colonialism and Europe, for he considered the deaths, pains, sufferings, humiliation and rampant destruction of resources and the ways of life under colonialism to be the birth pangs of African nations.

Of course, Julius Nyrere and Kwame Nkrumah and other African intellectuals differed, condemning the colonizers for raping their land and turning them into slaves. But despite the Nyreres, Nkrumahs, Aime Cesaires, Jomo Kenyattas, Patrice Lumumbas and even the Senghors, most of Africa is still run by Anglophones or Francophones, who have now colonized their own land. The pillage continues, only that it is now carried by Africans themselves for the benefit of their former colonizers.

Still, most of the stories coming out of Africa are about famines, wars, genocides, rapes and ethnic cleansing. (After all, the World Cup is a once in a while event.) This, as Chinua Achebe says, has its roots in 400 years of abusive writing on Africa "developed into a tradition with a vast storehouse of lurid images to which writers went again and again to draw 'material' for their books". Writers like (Achebe and) Wole Soyinka have tried to reverse that. Soyinka's play, Death and the King's Horseman, was conceived while he was a fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, in the 1970s. He has said that every day he came down the college staircase he would pass a bust of Winston Churchill, "that old bulldog of British colonialism". And every day he had an overwhelming desire to "push it and watch it crash".

But then the Achebes, Soyinkas and the Sembene Ousmanes can change society only that much, for their reach is confined to readers. The rest of Africans still live in the world of Achebe's Things Fall Apart. A vast expanse of Africa is still the world of Achebe's tragic hero Okonkwo, who has good intentions but fears that other men may see that as his weakness. This drives him to make decisions, consciously or unconsciously, that he regrets as he progresses in life. These "other men" in Africa today are the former colonizers.

Till these "other men" exist, even winning the World Cup cannot restore Africa's pride.