It starts out like any other talent segment at any other beauty pageant. Then the beat drops. What opens as a less-than-rousing rendition of “Rocketeer” quickly morphs into a hip-hop medley channeling Timbaland, Keri Hilson, Justin Timberlake and Usher, and by the time Queenierich Rehman of the Philippines is finished Teaching Us How to Dougie we’ve almost forgotten that we’ve taken pause in our day to watch part of the Miss World 2012 beauty pageant.

If the 116 women contestants in this year’s Miss World pageant had made the finals last year, they would have headed to London with their tap dancing and ballet shoes, their batons and their other talents in tow. But Queenierich Rehman and the rest of the beauty queens didn’t make the final last year and instead lucked into a trip to Inner Mongolia, to mining country. This year’s field was the largest ever in the history of the world’s oldest surviving major international beauty pageant (suck it, Miss Universe), and little separated them through the Beach Fashion and Beauty With a Purpose events.

Queenie had no business winning the pageant after she failed to place in the top ten in any of the other events, and probably was a very long shot for the top 15 until she took the stage for the above clip of viral vocal percussion. Her mash-up vaulted her into relevance, both in the pageant and on the web, even if she didn’t win the grand prize. That honor went to China’s Yu Wenxia in her own backyard, and beauty pageant conspiracy theorists from Rio to Sydney to Manila started comment-bombing her Facebook page with accusations that the event was rigged in her favor.

Not the British, though. In the timeless spirit of patronization, The Daily Mail congratulated China on finally beating the U.S. at something after finishing second to the Americans in the London Medal Count.

Have you ever wanted to fight off the rays without greasy sunblock, keep your hair dry in the water AND look like a superhero? Do you have a face for radio? Or do you just want to creep along the beach? Do you have a few bucks to spare?

Yes?

Drumroll, please…

We give you the Face-kini.

Now before you laugh off the Face-kini as doomed to join capri pants and the one-shoulder sports bra in the scrap heap of summer fashion fails, hear us out. Most people escape the summer heat by hitting the pool or beach in their finest and most revealing swimming threads. Less is more, for better or worse (see: Borat’s Man-kini). Not in China and elsewhere in The Far Far East, though, where light makes right and most beach goers avoid tans like the plague, poison ivy and stinky tofu. That, and the Chinese historically associate darker skin with the peasant class of farmers and laborers that toil under the hot sun. So here, more is more. Full-body suits rule beachware’s sartorial roost – we even handed out onesies last year as party favors for The Far Far East’s beachfront launch party.

But tanphobia only partly explains the draw of head-to-toe protection for a Chinese swimmer. There’s little relaxing or clean about a swim here, where the masses crowd the water like you wouldn’t believe. And good luck making it to a bathroom if you find yourself packed in the middle of the madness. In a study completed last year, China’s Health Ministry found that nearly 10% of pools in China breach the safe limit for urea (see: urine) levels, and that the bacteria concentration in PRC swimming pools oftentimes exceeds 90%.

The result? Take the Mao Mao Municipal Pool in Beijing, for example, which holds nearly 50,000 swimmers at capacity. A few years ago, one man died and more than 3,000 swimmers found themselves in critical condition after swallowing a mouthful of Mao Mao’s “water,” which a toxicologist found to comprise 1 part water and 9 parts urine + feces. It makes the kiddie pools and lazy rivers of the West seem sparkling.

Whether at the local (cess)pool or by the beaches lining China’s eastern seaboard, where green algae blankets the waters of resort cities such as Qingdao (site of the Olympic sailing and rowing in 2008), full-body protection is more than just a fashion statement. Vacationers have long-donned their own homemade Face-kini predecessors, but entrepreneurial townies have now started to sell them along the beach for 15-25 yuan (~$2.40 – $4.00). We haven’t found a place to buy them online yet, but we’re going to keep our eye on it because we think it’s only a matter of time before the Face-kini shows up in late-night ShamWow-style infomercials all across The Far Far East. In fact, we’ll go ahead and nominate ourselves to host them.

There were no losers in London, except the Indian Olympic Association.

India, with the world’s second-largest population of 1.2 billion, won 6 medals (2 silver and 4 bronze) and finished 55th in the medal count by the time Posh, Baby, Ginger, Scary and Sporty finished spicing up our Sunday. That put them level with North Korea (24 million people), South Africa (49 million people), and just ahead of Mongolia (just under 3 million mostly nomadic people). The IOC took home less medals than heavyweights such as Romania (21 million people, 9 medals), Azerbaijan (9 million people, 10 medals), Kenya (42 million people, 11 medals), Iran (75 million people, 12 medals) and 50 others.

The government and media back home tried to find the silver lining in their country’s medal haul. The Hindustan Times pointed out that India’s strike rate had risen to one medal in every 14 participants, up from its historical average of one medal for every 50 participants. And those that did win medals were rightfully celebrated. Boxer MC Mary Kom fought above her weight, literally, and took a bronze medal. In the badminton competition, Saina Nehwal earned a bronze when her Chinese opponent conceded their match after the first game due to injury.

On the balance, however, this Indian delegation underachieved. Men’s boxing flopped. Ronjan Sodhi, the world record holder in the double trap shooting, fell short during qualifying and finished in 11th place. Same for Abhinav Bindra in the 10m air rifle competition, who became India’s first-ever individual gold medalist in Beijing in 2008 but finished 16th this time around. Archer Deepika Kumari, the world number one, lost her first round match and none of her teammates on the women’s or men’s side fared much better. The men’s field hockey team lost all of their matches in the competition, finishing dead last in a sport that India once dominated.

In fact, it was hard to find an article about any Indian Olympic athlete that didn’t include the words “crashed out” in the headline. But hey, at least the press awarded a gold medal to the Indian tea brewed in the Olympic Village, so it wasn’t a complete loss of a trip to London.

They outlasted just about everyone. Zuccotti Park protesters scattered on November 15, and London Occupiers near St. Paul’s Cathedral held out until February 28 before authorities evicted them. But as of Sunday, August 12, Occupy Hong Kong had survived for nearly 10 months and was one of the only movements still encamped, even if its presence in the bowels of Central’s HSBC building had tapered off from its early peak.

Then on Monday, the big bad bank won a court order to clear those still in the open atrium on the ground floor of its Asia headquarters. They have two weeks to leave, but had already vowed to stay regardless of today’s ruling. What’s left of them, at least.

There’s not much that will be said about the inhabitants of 1 Queen’s Road Central, just a stone’s throw away from The Far Far East’s Hong Kong bureau. Nothing too newsworthy. They didn’t clash with police, heckle or throw eggs at suit-wearing passersby, or even yell all that much. By the summer, a swell of 100-200 activists had dwindled down to about a dozen, give or take a handful of visiting backpackers and homeless residents eager to take a free shelter from Hong Kong’s oppressive heat, filthy air and the Abercrombie & Fitch bus (more on that soon). More people waited in line at HSBC’s ATMs on a weekday afternoon than squatted among the cluster of sofas and tents that fortified Occupy Hong Kong’s last stand.

But they made a lot of signs, and managed to stick around for almost a whole year while most camps elsewhere in the world had dispersed. And they must have done something right, because the mainland’s state-run China Daily called out the scene as “appalling” and urged HSBC to cease its “gentlemanly tolerance” of the occupiers, their megaphones and their signs.

Hong Kong has the most excessive convergence of wealth and power out of any of the cities to have drawn the ire of the 99%, which perhaps makes their longevity more impressive. The New York Times’ Neil Gough puts it well:

If ever there was a city where pure or considerably unfettered capitalism has approached its logical end, surely Hong Kong is it. The city is home to more billionaires than popularly elected legislators. It has more Cartier, Gucci, Hermès and Louis Vuitton boutiques than Hong Kong Island has hospitals or post offices. Buddhism and Taoism are the main religions here, but bank branches outnumber temples by more than two to one.

We’ll see how long the tents stay up before nudge comes to push, but another occupation fist-pumps onward in the meantime. This group poses a greater threat than the HSBC crew too, because they’re mobile. They showed up two weeks ago, from all over – London, Madrid, Paris, Singapore, Tokyo, even Düsseldorf – and they brought their loud music but forgot their shirts. More than a hundred of them. They dropped anchor at Kowloon’s W Hotel, hijacked a bus and have used it to taunt the good people of Hong Kong in the days since. They warned us, but the courts were too busy with Occupy Hong Kong to notice.

We’re talking about the boy army of Abercrombie & Fitch, which has terrorized the streets of Central in the days leading up to the opening of A&F’s flagship store in the iconic Pedder Building space formerly occupied by Shanghai Tang. Word on the pavement is that they’ll stick around for the first couple of weeks to help promote the new store, which means two more weeks of looking over our shoulders to make sure the bus isn’t trailing us. So far we’ve found it hard to avoid. They’re everywhere.

From the country that brought you “low crime doesn’t mean no crime” and “SARS is a virus that I just want to minus” comes a fresh ad campaign that takes patriotic duty to levels not seen since, well, ever. It’s National Night, baby — Are you doing your part?

To honor Singapore’s 47th birthday today, Mentos has thrown down with a provocative commercial designed to put mints in the mouths and tingles in the dingles of men and women across the Lion City, where officials have grown wary of an oncoming demographic birth-pocalypse. The numbers are ugly, as the FT’s Jeremy Grant points out – The “Baby Boomers” continue to grow their ranks, and a large portion of men and women aged 30 to 34 remain single. According to CIA World Factbook estimates for 2012, Singapore’s 7.7 births per 1000 persons will rank 219 out of 221 countries and its fertility rate of 0.78 births per woman of child-bearing age will rank dead last.

The irony, of course, is that the government spent much of Singapore’s early years trying to persuade citizens not to have kids. Worried that aggressive population growth would hamper economic development, Lee Kuan Yew peppered the city with posters preaching a “Stop at Two” campaign in the 1970s, a campaign which offered women cash incentives to get sterilized after their second child. But by the 1980s the fertility rate had plummeted, the population rate had dipped below replacement rate, and the government ditched “Stop at Two” in favor of a new initiative: “Have Three or More (If You can Afford it)”. Despite the catchy slogan and financial incentives that reward women for having more children, however, Singapore’s birth rate has fallen about 60% since 1988. Population growth slipped below 1 percent last year.

Enter Mentos, The Freshmaker, whose new ad encourages Singaporeans to do their civic duty, pop a few Mentos and let their patriotism explode. It’s probably a better option than Viagra, with less side effects, right? In the commercial, the man reels off a string of creepy lines to seduce and persuade his female counterpart to “make a baby, baby,” including:

• “Let’s not watch fireworks, let’s make ‘em instead”
• “I’ll take your breath away like a sonic boom”
• “Like a government scholar I want to cram real hard, and tap you all night like an EZ Link card”
• “Let’s make a baby human that looks like you and me, exploring your body like the Night Safari“
• “You finer than eating durian on the MRT” (our favorite)

Nevermind that The Far Far East has used most of these lines for years, with varying degrees of success, and nevermind that the woman seems more interested in the baby bonus and the chance to buy a really fancy stroller than in the baby itself. We can look past that, because what the ad lacks in originality it more than makes up for with a catchy beat and killer animation. And in a country with overwhelming restrictions on everything from chewing gum to loitering to toilet flushing, we salute Mentos and ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty for putting out a spot that they claim did not need government approval.

So if you’re in Singapore tonight, we hope you’re making fireworks ignite. Just don’t be Mer-lyin about it at the water cooler tomorrow – that’s not cool.

Some people head to the pool to escape the heat, some to the movies. We’ve heard that Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra likes to steal away to the lazy river at Siam Park City when the Bangkok heat surges.

In South Korea, however, they have their own way of battling the Dog Days of Summer.

Yesterday marked malbok, the last of the hottest days of summer and Black Tuesday for Gaegogi restaurateurs in the South Korean capital. As is tradition, many observe malbok by eating dishes containing dog meat because they believe it restores much of the energy lost in the sweltering heat. Dog meat is typically the fourth most popular meat in South Korea, after beef, chicken and pork, but not in August. Gaegogi establishments in Seoul told The Associated Press that they were busier than normal on Tuesday.

It’s important to point out that The Far Far East strongly opposes the eating of dog meat because it’s wrong and cruel and sick, but also because it doesn’t taste good. We accidentally ate dog through an act of unforgivable trickery in the dark Beijing winter of 2007, and can tell you that it’s terrible. No amount of sauce or spices or MSG can distract from such a dry, tough and tasteless meat. But we’re mostly against it because it’s wrong and cruel and sick, a sentiment shared by animal rights activists in South Korea and around the world who waved damning signs and piled into dog cages on Tuesday in protest of malbok. Global animal rights group In Defense of Animals declared the day an “International Day of Action.”

But Ann Yong-geun, a.k.a. Dr. Dogmeat, president of The Korean Society of Food and Nutrition, is tired of the haters. In an opinion piece submitted to The Korea Herald today, he claims to have written six theses, two books and one comic book on the topic of dogmeat, and he lays out a ten point argument to support his claim that “the criticism of Korea’s long tradition of eating dog meat is absurd.” Ann also has a web site, where he showcases his publishing prowess, calls animal rights activists racists, vouches for the medical effectiveness and nutritional value of dog meat, and details his favorite recipes.

In the interest of remaining above the fray, we’ll let you be the judge of Dr. Dogmeat’s platform. You can reach him at annygn@hanmail.net, and let him know what you think. Please do. In the meantime, we leave you with the lyrics for his own original song, the aptly-named Dogmeat Song:

Greetings from London, where we’ve infiltrated the Far Far Eastern wing of the Olympic village for the past two weeks and made the organizing committee wish they had given us a press credential. After a brief and shaky stint as a translator for Mongolian judo silver medalist Naidan Tuvshinbayar (YOU try translating “floating half hip throw” into Mongolian), we’ve spent the past few days embedded with the entourage of Chinese trampoline star Dong Dong, who took home adult bouncy castle gold on Friday and parlayed his victory into one of the most raucous late-night celebrations we’ve ever seen. Make no mistake: Trampoliners know how to party.

With one week left in the London games, and with our Dong Dong-induced hangover finally abating, here’s our rundown of some of the top Asia storylines to grace (or disgrace) the competition so far:

1) Dong Dong – just watch (above).

2) 16-year-old Chinese female swimmer Ye Shiwen destroyed the world record in the 400 meter individual medley, and no result in the Olympics has produced more controversy since. Ye swam her final 100 meters in 58.68 seconds, and her final 50 meter split of 28.93 seconds bested Ryan Lochte’s time in the same men’s race. John Leonard, head of the American Swim Coaches Association, called Ye’s closing leg “impossible” and her overall swim “disturbing” in suggesting that the Chinese star had used banned substances.

3) South Korean archer Im Dong-Hyun, who is legally blind, set a world record during the men’s preliminary round on July 27th.

4) North Korea’s women’s soccer team refused to take the field for its preliminary match with Columbia on July 25th, delaying the start by more than an hour after organizers in Glasgow used the South Korean flag to introduce the North Korean players on the jumbo video screen. British Prime Minister David Cameron called it “an honest mistake.”

5) Eight badminton players – two women’s teams from South Korea and one each from China and Indonesia, were disqualified for “not using one’s best efforts to win” during the last round of preliminary matches on August 1st. Officials alleged that the pairs purposefully tried to manipulate the draw for the tournament’s knockout stage, after a match between China and South Korea lasted just 23 minutes and saw no rally of more than four shots. South Korea’s coach responded to the allegations by claiming that “The Chinese started this. They did it first.” Real mature, buddy.

If you owned a kayak in Beijing, it came in handy this weekend.

It poured and poured and poured in the Chinese capital, and residents were swimming after storms brought the city’s most rainfall in six decades. As of Monday, 37 had died in the city and surrounding areas, including a district to the southwest that has apparently been keeping precipitation records since the Ming Dynasty: Flood authorities in Fangshan said that one area saw its heaviest rainfall in 500 years.

Bold claims aside, the situation is real. Sinocism’s Bill Bishop wrote yesterday that Fangshan makes “Appalachia look almost like Westchester County,” and “is a stark reminder of the close proximity of the first and third worlds in China.”

The water overwhelmed the drainage “system” in Beijing too, and the city came under fire for its lack of preparedness. Even the state-run Global Times called out Beijing’s inadequate infrastructure as “unforgivable,” and Tech in Asia’s Charlie Custer questioned why the Meteorological Bureau didn’t send out text warnings in a city where over 95 percent of residents own mobile phones. Roofs collapsed and power lines toppled over as the ensuing havoc left planes, trains, automobiles and their passengers stranded all across town. And Beijing Cream’s Anthony Tao captured the weekend better than anyone, as rescuers worked to free a submerged car and five foreigners made lemonade in the streets just a mile away:

As the tough questions continued on Monday, and with Beijing officials taking to the web to fight the criticism, the people of southern China had their own weather problems approaching. By Tuesday night, Typhoon Vicente had brushed up against Hong Kong and the city’s severe weather alert system had reached a signal 10, the highest possible, for the first time since 1999. But while schools, offices and shops closed, and traffic at ports and the airport ground to a halt amid gale-force winds, one guy made the most of his rainy night:

What madness, you ask? Indonesia’s Muslims are quarreling with astronomers, as they do every year, about whether Ramadan started yesterday or today. The North Koreans have accused the South Koreans of plotting to blow up not their leaders, but rather statues of their leaders. Underprotective Cambodian fathers are building backyard love huts for their young daughters to encourage them to marry. And in Mongolia, a country which American leaders have praised as a model of democracy in Asia, political gridlock ensued earlier this month as the two main parties argued over whether man, machine or yak should count the ballots in the just-completed elections. The yaks selflessly stepped aside.

It all seems a little trivial, however, when compared to the pandemonium in eastern China, where one teenager channeled his inner Will Ferrell and took to the streets this week in his birthday suit. He halted traffic, leaped onto car hoods, banged on windshields, flashed children, taunted and danced his way straight into the business end of a tranquilizer dart. Yes, a tranquilizer dart. But he lived his dream for a half hour, maybe more, and we salute him back.

We also salute North Korean leader and supreme looker Kim Jong-un, who added to his growing list of titles this week by dismissing his army chief and naming himself Marshal of the DPRK. But fancy titles don’t impress The Far Far East as much as gossip, and the Pyongyang tabloids are abuzz with speculation that the Marshal has ensnared a North Korean starlet. Some know her as Hyon Song-wol, some as the lead singer of the Bochonbo Electronic Music Band, and others as the voice behind chart toppers such as Excellent Horse-Like Lady (a must-watch music video), Footsteps of Soldiers, and the unoriginal but still incredibly catchy I Love Pyongyang. We did not, could not have made up those song names.

Could this explain why the Marshal has invited the family’s old sushi chef back to town? While Kim Jong-il may have forbidden the romance during his dear leader days (“because,” as he was known to say, “if I have to be ronery, so do you”), Lil’ Kim has reportedly pulled out all the stops to get her back now that daddy’s gone. After all, we can’t think of a more romantic date setting than an unauthorized and unchoreographed Disney show:

So this post is for the horse-like women everywhere who just want to let loose, and for the young budding dictators everywhere who just want a little respect. It’s for the restless souls out there who, for their sake and ours, need an alternative to going streaking down Main Street. But most of all, it’s for us. We’re bored, we missed you and we’re back.

Let it be known and forever remembered that on January 9, 2012, Kuala Lumpur High Court judge Zabidin Diah scored a victory for the rule of law, democracy and wrongfully-accused sodomists everywhere with one crack of his gavel.

Yes, Anwar Ibrahim is a free man – for now. The Malaysian opposition leader, who already served 4 years in prison on sodomy charges leveled in 1998 before the court overturned the conviction in 2004, was acquitted on another charge that he demanded sex from an aide in a Kuala Lumpur apartment. We noted back in August that the case had way too many holes, including the following big ones:

• An accuser with a healthy anus
• Flawed and unreliable DNA evidence, including samples lifted from the healthy anus of the accuser belonging to three different people
• Uncorroborated testimony from the accuser
• Anwar’s own claims that  ”it would take a great stretch of the imagination” to believe that he, a 60-year old man with a bad back, could pose any real physical threat to the accuser, a fit young man in his early 20s

If we had told you in August that not just any judge but a Malaysian judge faced with such evidence and such a politically-charged backdrop would act objectively, you would have probably laughed us out of the blogosphere. After all, Malaysia takes its sodomy very seriously. Even Anwar himself had prepared for imprisonment and the taste of his own guilty medicine that would have gone with it. But it happened, and it didn’t take long for Anwar’s haters to express their disgust at the verdict. Some time just after 10 a.m., according to the live blog of the proceedings kept by The Star, several explosions went off in the area surrounding the courthouse.

Yes, the morning was live-blogged, from the time the media arrived (around 4:30 a.m.) to the moments when the crowd – which had begun to gather at midnight and finally entered the car park area outside the courthouse around 6 a.m. – cheered the verdict before dispersing when they heard the blasts. This was Malaysia’s twisted double-jeopardy version of the Lewinsky Scandal, with one part O.J. Simpson and a fraudulent pinch of Jerry Sandusky (too soon?), all shaken into one. Dude was trending on Twitter most of the day. And the fact remains that Anwar walked free after battling the charges in question for more than three years, the survivor of not one but two character assassination attempts.

With his latest legal troubles now safely at his rear (ah thank you), Anwar can focus on the political challenge of rallying the opposition to a strong result in elections that have to take place before March 2013, elections which many expect to come much sooner than that and expose cracks in the armor of the ruling coalition. Today, after he wasted no time in vowing to topple the government, one academic handicapped Anwar’s odds of unseating the current Prime Minister Najib Razak at 50-50.

But what of the accuser? Mohamad Saiful Bukhari Azlan, now 26, also did a little live blogging today. First, he said he accepted the verdict “with calmness,” before later writing that he hoped the public prosecutor “will file and take this case to the Court of Appeal.”

That’s right – he wants Sodomy III. And why not? All the best stories are trilogies, anyway.