here comes the sun

to celebrate this killer sun burn i've had for the last few days we're going to talk about a couple of my favorite things. little packages tied up in string, china, and the virgin mary.
so in the kottayam area in southeast india the virgin mary appeared in the sky.
churches warned their congregations that looking at the sun would cause permanent blindness and told them that the supposed miracle is not one.
oh, and then all the statues of the virgin mary started crying honey and bleeding oils and perfumes. and then 48 people were admitted to the hospital with burned retinas.
which brings us to china.
so china wants to have the sun on demand for the beijing olympics, they've been doing weather modification experiments for a while now and they want the sun to be shining the whole time, through the fog. snip from the article:
One thing worth considering when you tamper with nature is what sort of nature you’re tampering with. Nature is not kind to the city of Beijing. China’s capital is arid, nearly a desert, and its natural weather patterns are fickle and harsh. Winter is marked by howling Siberian winds; summer, by sweltering monsoon heat. In lieu of showers, springtime is best known for seasonal dust storms that sweep down from Central Asia. Fall is parched and gusty too, but the dust settles down. This basic brutality is overlaid with levels of pollution like those of England’s Industrial Revolution. Many things blot out the sunshine, and most have nothing to do with rain: factory and power plant emissions, construction dust, smoke from stoves burning scrap wood or pressed coal. There are more than 3 million cars on the streets—and the count is said to be growing by 400,000 vehicles annually. It is not unusual to check the AccuWeather international forecast on the New York Times website and find that while other cities’ weather is “mostly sunny” or “overcast,” Beijing’s is “smoky.” In February 2007, authorities finally abandoned a longstanding policy in which haze was referred to as wu, Mandarin for fog, and just called it what it is—mai, or haze.