Well, back to the “free condom” boxes, despite my comment yesterday that “I’d bet a large amount of money that these boxes have never and never will see a single box of condoms!” I had a quick check when i got home yesterday and to my amazement the thing was now full of condoms.

Apparently the “Population and Family Planning Commission of Luwan District” had visited our apartment complex earlier in the day, spent ten minutes looking at the type of people coming in and out and quickly rubber stamped the form “MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO BREED” before cramming as many boxes of condoms as possible into the box on the wall. The swines have probably already started sprinkling bromide into our piped drinking water, I’m going to start ingesting enormous amounts of korean ginseng every day to fortify my ebbing libido.

Anyway, in the name of science (well, “blogology” if you will) I took a sample box for further study.

Here are my conclusions:

• the box claims that there are 10 condoms per box, a quick check confirms this claim for the box I studied (later I’ll check all the other boxes)
• condom width is 52mm (standard width according to British Standards)
• apparently some mix-up has happened with the packaging and the printers misheard the communication from the suppliers as wanting a close-up picture of “a giant clock” on the cover of the box.
• the only English on the box is the words “For greater pleasure”, it is repeated 18 times in varying degrees of boldness, nowhere on the box does it tell you how to get this “greater pleasure”.
• the condoms were manufactured in May 2009 and will expire in April 2010. I can only assume this is some kind of “family box”, there’s no way a single human could use so up the whole box over this period of time.