Comic Relief on a Cold Day

Freezing out there! Hope you're staying warm and cozy, dear reader. A friend passed me this English summary of a comic tale of insult and lawsuit....

A Mr. Wang in Jiayi County filed a criminal complaint against his neighbors for allegedly teaching their Crested Mynah bird to say 'baimu, baichi' (loser, idiot) when he passed by. He claimed this upset him and made him unable to focus. As a result, he suffered a shock at his job in a factory in Liuying while operating machinery and suffered burns on two percent of his body.

The prosecutor found that since the Crested Mynah did not call him by name and said the same things to passersby and children, the insult was not directed at Wang. Also, Wang had gone to bed the night before after 10pm and had gotten up at 6AM. Normal people need seven hours of sleep to be well-rested, so Wang should have been able to focus at work since he was well rested (it also being found that the Crested Mynah was normally fairly soft spoken and did not call out at night). An decision not to prosecute for public insult was handed down.

According to the Liberty Times version, the man claimed that the neighbors in his dead end alley had trained the bird to insult him in retaliation for him calling the police on them for playing mah-jong too noisily into the wee hours of the night. The paper added another insult: the bird called him a tattle-tale. The neighbors said that the children playing in the street taught the birds all those ugly words and they had only tried to teach it to say ni hao and the like. The police meanwhile noted dolefully that a mynah bird can live to be seventy. The name of the street? Hoping (Peace) Street, of course.
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