Filling their day

A case, perhaps, of two men with too much time on their hands. The first, a Beijing man called Chen, sued the Commercial Press, claiming to have spotted 22,638 errors in the Xinhua Dictionary it publishes. The Commercial Press rejected Chen’s claim, reports the Beijing Times. But Chen wants to see the dictionary– which is China’s most popular – removed from bookshop shelves. He’s asking for personal compensation of Rmb1 (around 15 US cents) too. But for a truly empty existence, look no further than a man called Wang from Chongqing. He called a police hotline 800 times “with no good reason”. He dialled it an average of 166 times per day, before the police picked him up. He said he was bored.

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