The shoe. Look at the big honkin' sole on that thing!

Well, a bit of hyperbole. (That’s the fun thing about titles. Tailor-made for hyperbole.)

I do remember thinking when that Iraqi guy did it that it was the sort of simple-but-obvious thing that was likely to be replicated. What, are they going to make everyone take their shoes off at any sort of public event? (“They” being anyone who is in the business of protecting a high-up muckety-muck who faces a possibly disgruntled public.) Make everyone wear Crocs?

Now it’s happened again — a student threw his shoe at Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao yesterday. The shoe landed “several meters away.”

I had originally thought that this happened in China and that the thrower was Chinese, and actually stopped at this point in my draft last night because I suddenly worried what would happen to the thrower. I read about it this morning, though, and evidently the whole thing happened in England (a speech at Cambridge University) and it’s unclear what nationality the thrower was but he may have been German.

Evidently the Chinese media doesn’t want to give anyone any ideas, though — for a while, they left out the shoe-throwing from accounts of the speech. Chinese blogs went ahead and talked about it, leading (?) the media to break its silence.

Go blogs.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson expressed official displeasure: “Facts show the troublemaker who conducted this mean act is not accepted by the public, and he will not stop the trend of a developing friendly relationship between China and Britain.”

“Mean”?