Wendy Cheng aka XiaXue just announced the end of her popular blog‘s hiatus which thankfully lasted less than one week (updated September 12th). In terms of popularity, her blog was voted the best Asian blog in 2004 and 2005 at bloggies.com and is the 54th most popular blog on technorati.com.

I first found out about XiaXue when I was researching about Sister Furong and later e-mailed her and said that I agreed with many others that she was the real deal and deserved the international attention and recognition that Sister Furong was receiving. I also asked to feature her as the cover model for my Asian Divas Yahoo Group for September and she agreed so you can see her cover photo there.

Among other things, XiaXue is getting pretty good at photoshop as evidenced by the following photo:

Some people including Sister Furong have mistaken XiaXue for the other more notorious Singaporean blogger Sarong Party Girl and I don’t think XiaXue appreciates it based on what she wrote about Sarong Party Girl on her blog. That particular blog entry got attention from the printed press who followed up with an article in the newspaper as can be seen in this scan of the article.

Speaking of Sister Furong, here is what XiaXue wrote about her: Dear Miss Furong.

As you probably guessed, there are no nude pictures of XiaXue but she occasionally ventures into some racier written material such as how to measure a penis without a ruler. According to XiaXue, size does matter. Here is an excerpt:

“Good sex is possible without big boobs but good sex (I say sex) is impossible without a at-least-decent dick. So its ok if we mind small dicks.”

I am not sure if XiaXue is in a relationship but at one point she proposed marriage in her blog to a Malaysian blogger Kenny Sia and here is his response. Hilarious stuff!

In many of her blog photos, XiaXue wears t-shirts with provocative slogans on the front such as “wholesome sluts”, “got boys”, etc. One reason for this is that she is the first Asian blogger to be offered an endorsement deal. You can read more from XiaXue herself about being appointed LocalBrand Ambassador.

There is quite a lot on XiaXue’s main blog website but be sure to checkout the links on the right to the classics some of which have already been mentioned here. Also, her media section is worth checking out and includes links to a radio interviews and scans and excerpts from all the printed news articles about her.

XiaXue has been through a lot including having her blog hacked recently in July 2005 and unlike most celebrities actually reads her own e-mail so it is understandable that she needed a hiatus after being deluged with so much hatred directed at her. I am glad that she returned from her hiatus so quickly and hope things go better for her from this point forward.

Last but not least, I just posted 16 of my favorite photos of XiaXue in the photos section of my Asian Divas Yahoo Group. You can access them directly with the following link if you are a member of that group: 16 photos of XiaXue.

I thought this was a fun little story. Japanese society obsessed with both sex and convenience is seeing the emergence and growth in pornography vending machines. This must be an attempt to diversify from the panty vending trade which came under fire in early 2004, but remains legal.

I also liked the fact that alcohol and beer vending machines must stop sales after 11:30 pm to avoid corrupting youth – meanwhile porn sells on! Bravo – proves once again why I love Japan, they’re wacky!Not much more on this, but I’ll give you:

Japanese bums in undies
Porn not enough? Check out a Japnese ‘happening bar’

Okay, so I guess world events and politics are OT for Asian Sirens, but as this relates to the first major update to my web site for a while it is Asian model news. Besides, as Asian Sirens is hosted on my server I guess I have the right to bend the rules a little bit. 😉

Anyway, I’ve just posted a very lengthy new entry to My Diary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the implications of it. I focus mainly on the Bush administration’s handling of it (and a few other related matters), but one particular aspect of this disaster I thought might be an interesting topic for discussion.Here’s a quote from my diary entry:

“…am I the only person who was shocked and appalled by how the people of New Orleans themselves handled this disaster? It is interesting to contrast this situation with the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster earlier this year. That disaster was on a far greater scale than Hurricane Katrina, killed many times more people, was totally unprepared for and devastated entire countries. Yet while there was some looting, the level of lawlessness there was far less than in New Orleans.

For example, emergency workers were actually being shot at while they were trying to help people and get them out! At least in the countries devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami, emergency workers were able to go there without fearing for their lives. And many of the people in these countries are Muslim, the same people many westerners like to think of as ‘uncivilised’. Yet they were a lot more civilised than the people of New Orleans. What does this say about America today?”

I give my own opinion in my diary entry, but I’d be interested to know what other people think about this. Why was there such a disastrous breakdown of law and order in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina?

Silicon.com: Playboy plans to launch a digital version of its magazine next month, allowing readers to download over the web the same content that’s in the print version. Readers will be able to subscribe to the online version starting with the October issue. They will also be able to purchase single copies of the digital magazine.

Sister Furong is a young woman in Beijing who has somehow become hugely popular on the internet for posting supposedly provocatively posed photos and making somewhat silly egotistical statements about herself. The latest news to come out recently is that China intends to ban her internet presense even though she has not even come close to posing nude or written about sexual exploits like some other notorious Chinese bloggers who were banned from the internet.
I first found out about Sister Furong yesterday in an article talking about her being banished from the web which I reposted in this message in my Asian Divas Yahoo Group.

Here is an excerpt:

Sister Furong started the craze by posting pictures of herself — draped back-down over a stone ball, bent at the knees with her chest thrust out suggestively and in other poses — on Internet bulletin boards of two top Beijing universities to which she had tried but failed to gain entrance.

The shots, and accompanying captions and passages she wrote proclaiming her own beauty and talent, became a campus sensation.

Here is a link to some more pictures of Sister Furong.

Here are some more articles about her:

Hibiscus blooms’ and creates a buzz on the Net
Hush! BBStar Sister Furong is ‘daydreaming’
BBStar Sister Furong debuts in Internet Movie
Ego pays off

She has an officially sanctioned English blog but be warned that it doesn’t come up properly in Internet Explorer (looks fine in Firefox).

While doing research, I came across this amusing blog entry about Sister Furong from this guy in Malaysia. He said that Sister Furong wrote to him and asked him to print out the picture of her lying in the grass and hang it on the wall above his bed.

Okay, so I guess this is strictly OT, but when I saw this story I just couldn’t resist posting it here. Does a ‘female’ Japanese android qualify for inclusion in Asian Sirens?