This month’s trendy BuzzAngel is called Cordelia. She comes from Singapore, loves fashion and trends and blogs on Curellasays.

Cordelia is speaking

- How old are you?
22.

- Where do you come from?
Singapore.

- What do you do?
I’m a working holidaymaker in the UK (basically it means I work part-time jobs to support my holiday here).

- When did you start blogging?
Sometime in the last quarter of 2006.

- Why did you start blogging? What does blogging give you in daily life?
I was inspired by other fashion/style blogs such as Style Bytes & Style Bubble. At the same time, I wanted to challenge myself to wear something different everyday as part of my blog posts. Blogging is an avenue for me to put out my ideas and thoughts on fashion & style to like-minded people who want to discuss. In real life, it might be a bit too intense for my friends and family. Read on

There is only so much criticism you can take when it comes to something you love, no matter if it’s only about your haircut or about something important like your religion or your country. (OK, I admit that sometimes haircuts can be important, too.) Anyway, the Chinese have apparently had enough of critical Western media coverage and boycotts in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. So when someone had the idea to put a heart and “China” beside their MSN chat icon, this person somehow unleashed a wave of patriotism. Literally millions of Chinese have by now adopted this symbol to pledge allegiance to their home country!

We all know that love and rational thinking may not always be the best of friends, so I will not question the (non)political rationale behind this amazing chain reaction. But isn’t it an incredible, fun gesture? Imagine doing that for your country because the Asian press had criticized your over-meticulous German way of organising the football world championships! I somehow don’t see people waving “I love Europe“ flags in the streets of London or Berlin… We still have a long way to go until a true European patriotism becomes reality.

PS: Now we are only waiting for our Chinese colleague Shu to start the same avalanche on Skype, our favourite internal communication tool (yes, working for BuzzParadise does have its advantages!)… Personally I would still be more apt to put “I love Luxembourg” though. Despite the weather.

Image credit: info.msn.com.cn

Uh, what’s on earth is that? We can reassure you: this is not our favourite clip of the week, but the Microsoft Vista Street Band singing the praise of Windows Vista SP, lead by a guy pretending to be Bruce Springsteen. The Vista what? Are you joking? Has Microsoft stopped producing PCs and entered the music business?

Neither (phew!). Although our Mac freaks in the office wouldn’t mind, eh, Cédric? This video was created by some Microsoft employees for internal use, just for fun, and somehow found its way into the web (probably a firewall problem, but we were not allowed to investigate this further)… who would have thought that PC and humour go together?

Today we have got a real brainteaser for you! This week our colleague Yann brought this mysterious object to our Luxemburgish headquarters:

Now we’d like to know from you: what is that? I can tell you that we had some fun guessing and we hope you will, too!

As this is not an easy one we thought that the winner deserves a prize, so we asked Nils to let us have one of our branded BuzzParadise USB sticks for the winner. He did, and now 512 buzzy megabytes are waiting for their new owner.

Post your guess in the comments before May 5 and it might be you!

The only condition: you have to be a member of the BuzzParadise community. We are looking forward to your guesses!

Photo source: BuzzParadise

Have you ever been really hungry? Very probably not. For millions of people though hunger is part of their daily lives. That’s why today we have a beautiful little buzz for you. If you enjoy learning new words and feel like there must be something you can do to make a change, Free Rice is for you.

Free Rice is an online game that allows you to improve your English in a fun way. It is also a sister site of the world poverty site, Poverty.com. For every word you guess right 20 grains of (real) rice are donated to the UN World Food Program, to help people in the poorest regions of the world to get through another day. A great, encouraging idea, especially in view of the fact that many countries have to cope with a severe food crisis right now. It may only be a drop in the ocean, but at least it’s better than nothing. And it’s fun, too!

Here are some words I just learned: carousal, discombobulate, encephalon, concordant and matins. Never heard of these before and no clue what they mean? Time to check out Free Rice then! How many grains of rice can you add?