It’s apparently the new trend in foreign relations: chucking shoes at world leaders when you don’t like what they stand for.

It happened to President Bush, and now it’s happened to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao while he spoke in Cambridge.

The sole protestor, a 27 year-old man, was promptly arrested.   Unlike his Iraqi counterpart, though, he’ll just have to appear in front of a magistrate in England, rather than being maimed and tortured in an undisclosed location in Iraq.

What’s funny about this story - I mean, in addition to the general silliness of having a shoe thrown at one’s head - is the Chinese spin on the matter. After the government was done purging message boards of comments about the matter, the boards were left with messages like this:

“The uncompromising Iraqi people threw a shoe at Bush which is a brave act by a suppressed nation,” said one comment on the tiexue.net bulletin board. “But the ugly Englishman threw a shoe at Wen, which was only a barbaric trick.”

In addition to the hilarity of such a simplistic, nationalist comparison, I giggle at the notion of a ‘barbaric trick’.  It might be just a difficulty with the translation, but ‘trick’ seems much too casual a word to put together with ‘barbaric’ and the combination tickles the wordie in me.

From Reuters:

HELSINKI - Finland has rated the DVD release of the much-loved children’s television series “Little House on the Prairie” suitable for adult viewing only.

Ummm. Excuse me?  I mean sure, Michael Landon’s hair was somewhat pornstar-tastic, and Nellie looked like a right little tart, but…whaaa?

To save money, Universal Pictures decided not to submit the series to state inspection, the company’s Finland marketing manager Meri Suomela told Reuters on Wednesday.

Finnish authorities charge 2 euros ($2.57) per minute for assessing the correct age limit on films and television series. Distributors who forego this can only sell their shows with a sticker saying “Banned for under-18s.”

“Long series can get quite expensive to check, and some use this exemption in the law to their advantage,” said Matti Paloheimo, Director at the Finnish Board of Film Classification.

Ohhhh. Well, that’s pretty anticlimactic, huh?