Chinese Hornets for Breakfast

Rhett and Link talk Wild China, grannies on zip-lines, and eating hornets.

Plot
Filled with frustration and angst, Rhett tells Link about the documentary, Wild China, he watched on Netflix. He continues his story and tells about an episode he watched about this remote village in South China where they still are the "get your hands dirty"-type of workers. "There's this place", he says, "in South China where there's this roaring river [Nu Jiang] that will kill anybody that gets into it. There's no bridge, so they have constructed thirty rope zip-lines for the people to get across the river". He says, unlike American zip-lines you'd see at theme parks for fun, China's zip-lines are a serious use of transportation. Rhett even told of an old lady who goes across the zip-line smoking a pipe and then comes back across carrying a pig.

Link then added that he'd love to have her as his grandma. Though, he then reassured his grandmother that she would not like to replace her but to add on another grandma on to his grandmothers.

Anyway, "there's these other guys", Rhett says, "these fisherman and they're on these bamboo rafts, and they go out there, and these rafts look like they are going to fall into the water. But they've got these trained pelican-like birds on each side of the raft. All the fisherman have them. And they go out there and they start jumping on the rafts to kinda shake it up. And the birds jump into the water. And they go and they get a fish to bring it back to the guy. The dudes tie a noose around the bird's neck so they can't swallow the fish. A little loose noose, like a little string. And they're trying to swallow the thing, then he gets the fish out of the bird's mouth, and that's how they catch fish. And then, when they the birds, these birds can count to seven because when they get to seven fish they stop working. And they wait for them to reward them with another kind of fish, this little catfish they pull out of the boat and he takes the little thing off their neck and they give it to them."

The last little tale from China, he tells, there are these two guys who take a grasshopper and put it on the edge of a long stick. And they hold it up until a little hornet comes and lands on the grasshopper, in attempt to eat it. While this hornet is preoccupied with the grasshopper, they tie a little string around it with a white feather on it. The hornet then flies off, but kind of slow because of the feather on him. But they can see it, so they start chasing after the hornet that's going like a mile in the air. The hornet keeps flying until it reaches its nest. The guys see the nest and they take this long stick, like a torch, with fire on the end of it. They burn all the hornets out of the nest. One of the dude shimmies up the tree like forty feet and goes out on a limb, grabs the nest down. And then when he's back on the ground they break it open. Then they eat the fattened larva out of then nest because it's a delicacy.

After hearing the story, Link is bumfuzzled. Rhett then explains why he's filled with angst over this. He envies them. He says, because, while the Chinese are tying feathers to hornets, he only uses his hands to type and tweet. He expresses how we should just be doing more grunt work with our hands: less typing, and more tying things to insects.

The episode soon closes-up after the Wheel of Mythicality tells them to "Shout-Out to Monaco".

Links

 * http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Wild_China/70205730?trkid=2361637, Netflix Instant Stream of Wild China
 * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQusBAhL-Gs, Clip of the old lady zip-lining across the Nu Jiang.
 * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNEplaYZtpI&feature=relmfu, Clip of the guys and the pelican-like birds fishing