Just the other day I praised the Xinmin Evening Post on the Chinese forums, and today my words were validated by thoroughly enjoying tonight's copy of the paper. Flipping past the obligatory cover-full of Tomb Sweeping Holiday stories ("Tomb Sweeping Trash" A Measure Of Citizen Etiquette, Road And Rail Deliver 260,000 Passengers Today, Roads To Cemeteries Clog Early In The Morning, Tourism Absent On Short Long Holiday) and the daily propaganda piece (Developing Agriculture While Guaranteeing Higher Incomes For Farmers) yielded several practical, useful and amusing articles for me to enjoy on the couch while Charlotte chomped on the entertainment section:

• Thousand-Ton Barge To Carry Century-Old Bridge: The Garden/Waibaidu Bridge has been sufficiently dismantled will be carried off on a boat this Sunday. The Xinmin Evening Post will be broadcasting the removal live on their website. This would be a fun and historic event to witness personally.
• University Entrance Tour To Songjiang University Town: SISU Travel is offering in-depth weekend tours of the colleges at Songjiang University town targeted at graduating high school seniors and their parents, but open to interested Shanghai residents as well. This might be a fun way to visit Songjiang University Town at only RMB 80 per person.
• Early Rising City Folk Line Up For Fresh Qingtuan: The traditional Tomb Sweeping Festival food is made by combining the juice of a rare grass with rice paste, wrapping it around a filling (typically red bean paste), and steaming it. The article gives the names of several stores famous for a long history of making qingtuan, whose addresses I could look up online.

And that's only from the first 8 pages or so. The Evening Post also has entertainment, style, sports, and international news, jokes, cross-word puzzles, home-decoration tips, an article entitled "Muscle: Forever Men's Heroic Charm" and illustrated with pictures of Stallone and the Governator, and a literary section with essays that Chen Danyan called "some of the best contemporary writing about Shanghai" at last year's Shanghai International Literary Festival in her talk with Qiu Xiaolong.

The Evening Post is also sprinkled with photos accompanied by longer captions that show funny or touching situations. Today's make me stare in disbelief. The first is a picture that is simply captioned as being an assault on a taxi driver whose passengers were not satisfied with his driving, with no follow-up whatsoever:

Yeah, crazy. The second picture is deceptive. The caption is by the photographer, who teases the reader with the possibility of witnessing a foolhardy thief dipping into the police cart's trunk but then admits that the young man was a business card boy who had been wiping down the police car and was tossing the rag back into the trunk as the police took off:

Thanks, 新民晚报!

BONUS: Here's a clip of edits from the Xinmin's live coverage of the closing of the Waibaidu Bridge on February 29th: