Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more ridiculous. Last year, we marveled over the latest courier services offered by certain e-commerce sites, in which deliverymen would wait outside your door while you tried on purchases and then haul away anything you didn’t want. Now check out Tao Girls, a platform Taobao has been running quietly for the past couple of years. Over 40,000 young women have set up “modeling kiosks” on the site to show off their looks and senses of style, and to promote themselves to various modeling agencies. It seems that Taobao is currently in talks to expand the function of Tao Girls, giving customers the option of choosing a prospective model to deliver goods to your home for a small fee.

If your apartment is feeling a little colder than normal, you’re not imagining things. Today, the city turns off the heating (exact time unknown), after having given us an extra three days to get over the cold snap that was predicted. Now we can only wait and hope that temperatures don’t drop again, but we should probably keep our winter blankets nearby just in case.

February's been on the quiet side for Beijing news ... unless you are married or planning on getting hitched. If you fall into either group, you may be facing problems: questioning your partner's sexuality, pondering your own views on sex before marriage or searching for ways to appear more innocent than you actually are. If none of that applies to you, you may be interested to find out where there’s a shortage of cab fares and what you’re not allowed to do in banks any more.

When a Chinese coworker first tipped me off to this trend, my curiosity was piqued. Socks that promise to make your legs thinner?! What’s more, people are buying into this crap?

Traditionally, compression socks – which is more or less what these Asian skinny socks (静脉曲张袜) are – function as medical therapeutic legwear, stimulating blood circulation and providing extra support for the feet. But in China, women have taken to wearing them for the purposes of slimming down their legs.

For most of us, shopping on Taobao.com can be a headache. Even with our English guide (courtesy of the Beijinger's May 2010 issue), it's often impossible to pull up favorable search results.

But as of last week, China’s largest online shopping platform has (sort of) come up with a solution: Imagine, an image search engine. Can’t write Chinese? No problem. Simply upload a photo or enter its URL, specify a product category (so far it only supports clothes, shoes and women’s handbags) and wait for your list of matches.

Sounds neat, right? Well, let's put it to the test and see just how well it works.