We like Yao Ming because he's cool. He pokes holes in stereotypes about small, subtle Chinese people by being big and in-your-face and famous. And, incidentally, because he's made China's AIDS orphans a reality for people around the world, when many prominent, influential folks are quite happy to forget they exist.

Yao Ming has gotten married to another basketball player, 6-foot-2 Ye Li of the Chinese national women's team. The ceremony took place at the Shangri-La Hotel in Shanghai, followed by a luxury cruise up the Huangpu River. (There are photos here.)

Yao was most recently photographed playing a pick-up game with the AIDS orphans of Anhui and Yunnan during an NBA charity event. AIDS orphans are kind of Yao's thing - he's invited them to the 2008 Olympics and seems to be bringing other NBA stars into China as part of the laudable "Basketball Without Borders" program, for which he launched the China program in 2005. The NBA is teaching kids - all kinds of kids - about basketball, but also doing things with AIDS prevention.

This is a big deal in China because authorities there often seem to be on a par with American leaders in the 1980s - hoping the problem will go away if it's ignored soundly enough, making the occasional jab at the problem - or worse, actually banning medical conferences that might be viewed as critical of government efforts. As a result of this, experts believe only five percent of HIV infection cases are reported, and the disease is spreading rather rapidly, in large part due to sanitation problems with blood donation and transfusions in the 1990s. Those problems have been cleaned up, but the effects linger on.

Things are happening, though, in part because of attention from people like Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, who's just been visiting Henan. And in part because of a few big guys with basketballs - because, after all, the basketball guys make for better pictures.