Hongkie Town

Even boingboing has picked up the story of the vendetta against the Sex and Shanghai blogger. The story has now been covered in the Guardian - "Chinese internet vigilantes have launched a hunt for a self-professed British bounder who has sparked outrage by blogging about his seduction of women in Shanghai ... traffic on the Sex and Shanghai blog has surged from 500 hits to more than 17,000, thanks to a swarm of castration threats, anti-British rants and attacks on women who sleep with foreigners" - and blogger Avant Game says it is an example of a term she has come up with - chinavenging.

And this quote from the same article in the Guardian:

Trial by virtual lynching has become the norm in China's cyberspace," Raymond Zhou wrote in a comment article in China Daily after previous mass campaigns. He added: "Online 'flaming' wars exist everywhere, facilitated by anonymity. But in China they may have a self-propelling force that sweeps thousands, sometimes millions, into a frenzy. It is nearly impossible, even for the most respected scholars, to give voice to dissension."

So, tattoo or not to tattoo? I figured since I've already got two Chinese dragons (one spitting fireballs, one playing electric guitar, a Thai snake, a yin yang circle, and a couple of birds done by a Buddhist monk, I should go in a different direction. I thought about images that I have always loved. I settled on this deer skull from the painting Summer Days by Georgia O'Keefe.


I can't say what she had in mind when she painted it. But it makes me think of the old American West, the wide open spaces, the myths and legends of that time, life and death. I have a poster of this painting in my flat and every time I look at it, it makes me dream of an era that resonates with me even though it was before my time. On my left breast. Here's the result, I'm quite happy with it though maybe I will add the flowers at a later time:



Unfortunately Jimmy won't have time to take me to Wat Bang Phra for another tattoo from the monk, so that will have to wait till my next visit.

Responding to a comment, the seafood market that I go to is on Sukhumvit Soi 7. It's on the right hand side, abou 25 yards or so down the Soi, after the New Wave Bar and before the Park Hotel and across from the Biergarden. If you're not staying in walking distance, it's a very short stroll from the Nana BTS station.

I meant to get a picture of our dinner from last night before we dug into it, but things came out one at a time, so here it is after we had already started digging in, awkwardly cropped to omit faces. Tom yum soup, fish cakes, a prawn dish, fish with veggies, clams, some salad, fried rice and steamed rice, water - all really fresh, all delicious, dinner for four at 1,000 baht or about US$26.


There is a more famous, touristy seafood market on Soi 24. Located inside a former supermarket, it's a single restaurant, not a collection of small stalls like the Soi 7 one. It also costs 3 or 4 times more!

A few years back, I had raw oysters at the Soi 7 market and got really violently ill, bad enough that I had to go to the emergency room at Bumrungrad. Talking to the doctor, I explained that I go to Soi 7 because it's so much cheaper. "What about if you add in the cost of the doctor afterwards," he asked. "Still cheaper!" Lesson learned, I don't get any raw food there any more.

Re-educating Miss Dee pulls the plug. She will be missed.

The Sex and Shanghai witchhunt continues to intensify. Roland has updated his post with links to other blog and media coverage. Meanwhile Chinabounder has made Sex & Shanghai invitation only, hence no link here.

Bruce Springsteen says his marriage is okay. I feel much better now.

A procession of talentless and formerly talented HK stars march in protest against a magazine showing a picture of another talentless star in her brassiere. God forbid they might actually protest anything meaningful.

This cracks me up. Paris Hilton asked Ricky Gervais if she could guest on his series Extras. When he turned her down, she told a newspaper, "I guess he's obviously scared of starring alongside an A-lister." Guests lined up for the second series include B-listers Orlando Bloom, David Bowie, Daniel Radcliffe, Ian McKellen.

I love this. Matt Stone claims that U.S. marines guarding Saddam Hussein have made him repeatedly watch the South Park movie, in which Saddam dies, goes to hell, and becomes Satan's bossy homosexual lover. Nice to know the Marines have good taste.

Speaking of taste and Paris, good to see that her much hyped album isn't selling. Maybe we'll be spared a second helping.

This could be excellent - Universal Music will make its entire music library available for free downloading on the web. You must watch a 90 second ad for each song you download (18 minutes for a 12 song album) and there's heavy DRM. But still, could be worth it.

Variety (paid subscription required) reports that police in Beijing have closed over 3,000 shops selling pirate DVDs. Can you believe there were over 3,000 DVD shops in just one city? That must mean there are 100,000 shops still open around the rest of the country. And not a single disc replicator was shut down.

Rob Corddry pays tribute to himself on his last day on the Daily Show. He was the last the the three C's to leave - Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert being the other two - and most of the new talent on the show is just not at their level. But for now, Daily Show still roolz.

I am seriously thinking about buying one of these.

Bosch makes an iPod dock that requires you to go out and buy an iPod dock to use. Yeah, doesn't make sense to me either. But it looks fuckin' sweet.

And I think I gotta buy one of these for my dogs:



Sean John changes his name from P. Diddy to Pee Did He?

And on that note ...

Received a call today from buddy Justin of Shenzhen Zen and myriad other accomplishments and activities. He asked me to post the following news here - hopefully many of his friends and fans also read this blog.

Last Thursday, Justin suffered a mild heart attack. The good news is that it was mild. There was no permanent damage. They performed an angiogram but he didn't need an angioplasty. He's out of the hospital and will be resting in Shenzhen this weekend.

I could not spend a long time on the phone with him but I asked him to take this as a wake-up call and cut back on his smoking, which is definitely a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

At any rate, I'm sure that all of you join me in wishing our very good friend a speedy recovery back to his usual full-on gonzoness.

Last night hung out at Jimmy Wong's for a bit. Flipped through some books, showed him an idea I had but wasn't completely in love with. I was tired and it just seemed like I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted or where I wanted it. Jimmy told me to come back tonight and we could try to sketch out a few things.

One choice is a drawing someone did for me - a guitar with "Spike" overlayed. But the background as it stands is too gushy and I already have a Fender strat on my arm (being played by a dragon) and maybe one guitar is enough. I saw a drawing of a "G" clef that was kind of detailed like a snakeskin which was nice but was it nice enough? Then I have always loved Georgia O'Keefe's paintings of cattle skulls in the sky over the prairie ... a large one covering my back? A small one on my chest? That might do. One of Salvador Dali's melting clocks over my shoulder?

This young English guy was there, already well covered with tattoos and getting yet more. He had a line of fire along the side of one foot and a line of water along the side of the other, interesting.

I do know I want another temple tattoo and and I know what I want and fairly sure where I want it. But Jimmy's not sure he can take me there this week. He offered to write down the address so that I can show it to a taxi driver, but without someone there to translate for me at the temple, I'm not confident that I could get exactly what I'm looking for, so might have to take a raincheck on that.

Do I want to switch to the beta of the new blogger? No idea.

Anyway, two very good days in Bangkok so far. Sunday I went shopping at MBK. Sure I could go to Siam Paragon, the largest shopping mall in Southeast Asia, to have the privilege of buying the same items I can buy in every shopping mall in HK. But I prefer the thousands of tiny stalls holding untold unique goodness in MBK. And, as opposed to Chatuchak or Pratunam, I can do it all in air conditioned splendor.

After a couple of hours of shopping, clearly the obvious choice was massage. I go to this place on Sukhumvit Soi 11 called, I think, Baan Phua. A two hour Thai style massage there costs about US$10 and they do a very nice job.

Then back to the seafood market on Soi 7. Flipping through one of the picture menus, I decided on fried sea bass with mango sauce. When the woman brought the fish to me, it was fried sea bass all right, but no sauce, just some peanuts sprinkled on top. "Where's my mango sauce?" "This better, you try." Well, it was fresh and tasty to be sure, but with just a little bowl of fish sauce and a bowl of soy sauce heavily laced with Thai chilis, the fish was kind of dry. But I can't complain about an entire fried fish, a bowl of vegetable fried rice and a bottle of water for US$9, can I?

Today, about half the country is wearing yellow polo shirts, emblazoned either with a royal insignia or "I heart the king" (in Thai). It's the 61st anniversary of the king's succession to the throne and this is one of the few places on earth where the people genuinely love their king.

Visiting a dental clinic, I noticed a very cute woman sitting in one of the offices and thought to myself, "I hope she's a dentist and I hope she's mine." Yes and yes. We chatted for awhile. It seems that she is going to HK this weekend for some kind of dental convention. She asked me about the weather in HK and I told her hot, humid and polluted. I said it would be more uncomfortable walking around in HK this time of year than Bangkok. "I guess I will need to wear my bikini then!" Oh my. Later, noticing my Harley t-shirt, she asked if I like choppers and started telling me all about her dad's chopper. She never said "bike" or "hog" or "motorcycle," she kept saying "chopper." Now I wanna go back to HK early and be her tour guide. Sigh.

Oh, sidenote - they had one of these x-ray machines that spins around your face, doing a full mouth x-ray in one shot. When the tech turned it on and it started spinning, it also started playing "It's a Small World After All." It was all I could do to keep myself from cracking up and ruining the photo.

Lunch at the Landmark Cafe. Passed it thousands of times, never stopped to eat there till today, but I was in the mood for western food and wanted to sit outside so I could smoke. Chicken ceasar focaccia - amazing bread baked with olives, herbs and cheese, what seemed like a half pound of white meat chicken and 8 or 10 slices of bacon. Didn't suck.

After that, a visit to one of the hair/massage salons along Sukhumvit. I always choose the same one, because there's a beautiful woman who seems to like me working in one of them and I hadn't seen her in 5 months. As I walked in, she jumped out of her chair, ran over to me and jumped on me, legs wrapping around my waist, almost knocking me to the ground. She noticed that I was wearing a gold chain and asked if that meant I now had a Thai wife. Honesty sometimes being the best policy, I told her that I now have a Thai girlfriend in HK. She still wants me to take her to dinner and take her shopping.

At any rate, foot massage, shave, pedicure, manicure, facial. At these prices, why not spoil myself?

Back to the room to rest and now it's 10 PM, time for a late dinner and then discuss tattoos with Jimmy.

I love this place.

I always thought Beyonce was relatively normal, at least compared to the Mariah Careys and Whitney Houstons of the world - until now. Here is the cover of her new album:

Note the title of said album - B'day. Every time I think of the title, I think "bidet". A whole album about how clean her ass is? Surely she had to know.

Here's the cover of the second single, to which all I can say is, WTF?



Ring the alarm boys, Beyonce is plunging over the deep end.

Hmmm .... I suppose most of you have noted that I have been getting back into blogging more personal stuff recently. Dipping a toe into the water, if you will. I woke up this morning with the idea that I would dip in yet another toe, but several things have caught my eye that give me reason for pause.

The first was a post by Mirebella, who wrote in part:

I have come to a decision that I will no longer be able to blog with the candid candor I have been able to - hiding behind a cloak of anonymity and all that. I might return under a different pseudonym but for now - I will be on the lie - low.

And this is not the only post along those lines that I have run across in recent weeks.

We like to think about the Internet as this vast expanse in which it is possible to bare our souls while at the same time remaining anonymous. But as I have come to realize, if you are writing a personal blog, it really takes a high level of talent to be able to do that successfully. Someone like Hemlock seems to be more the exception than the rule - I have often sat around with other HKers, bloggers and otherwise, and they'll say "I think I know who he is" or "He has to be someone I know, but who?" No one I know has a clue who he is.

For me, while I have not used my real name or the real names of the people I associate with, I do use the names of real places and have given plenty of clues as to where I work. As there are precious few gweilos in my office, it would not take a great deal of mental power to identify me, if someone was so inclined.

While the blog had yet to create any problems for me in the "real" world, I came to realize that I have been lucky so far and that someday a problem could really occur. My lifestyle is not "normal" by most peoples' definitions and what I write about could be highly offensive to some people whose moral code differs from mine. I had to think about what I receive in return for blogging and wonder if that was worth the risk.

What caught my eye this morning was two connected posts on two different blogs that illustrate the risks involved with opening up your life in such a public manner.

The first is this post on EastSouthWestNorth, in which Roland translates a Chinese article on a westerner blogging about his sexual experiences in Shanghai. The translated article starts out this way:

Today, with tremendous anger, I will tell you the story of an immoral foreigner and I call upon all Chinese compatriots to get together and kick this immoral foreigner out of China.

That's powerful stuff. Further down within that article, the writer lists all the clues that the western blogger has used to possibly identify himself. Said writer may have used aliases for the women and the places he frequents but one fact remains - unless he is really thought this through, then he is clearly a teacher in Shanghai who has taught at several universities, so there is at least that one valid clue.

Chinabounder responds in this post. Most of the post is spent refuting individual points that the Chinese blogger has made and defending himself. He writes, "Listen to yourself, Zhang Jiehai, listen to yourself."

He's missing something critical. Now I don't mean to be offensive but I realize what I'm about to write in this paragraph will offend people. So be it. In my experience, Chinese people, specifically people in the PRC who have lived their entire lives in China, do not think as we do. Their cultural backgrounds and the educational system in China have combined in a way that results in their drawing different conclusions to things than westerners, a different way of looking at things, different ways of rationalizing. Note that I am not saying that they are right or wrong, I am just saying this is how it is. And it is no different from some American growing up in some rural part of the U.S. ending up with some irrational fear or hatred of anything different from what he or she has experienced.

I can recall reading about more than a few instances of people in China rising up in mobs for what to outsiders may seem irrational reasons. Why are they bothered by this, we think, it's so trivial - to us. By denying the validity of what to them is of critical importance we close the opportunity for any rational debate, building walls higher and stronger rather than knocking them down.

Don't forget that China is so freaking huge that if just one tenth of one percent of the population gets pissed off over some perceived indignity (e.g. someone saying that Taiwan is independent, the Japanese PM visiting that shrine or a video someone has posted on YouTube of someone insulting someone on the street), well that's still a million and a half pissed-off people. That's not a number to sneeze at.

Roland notes that the Chinese blog post has been reproduced around the world. He further notes that he believes this backlash was inevitable because "the foreigner's blog was obnoxious and clearly intended to arouse such a response."

I'm not sure that Chinabounder did intend to get such a response but I do agree this was bound to happen. I think he thought that he was flying below the radar - in no small part because blogspot was blocked in China and local people had little interest in English blogs. But blogspot isn't blocked in China anymore (at least temporarily) and I think it's inevitable that at least some of the millions of Chinese studying English would take an interest in what the English language blogniverse is saying about them.

What neither Roland nor Chinabounder mention is the fact that Chinabounder's "hobby" (if you will) probably does not differ from that of many other western teachers in China. So some who are innocent (at least in terms of publicizing what they do) may fall under suspicion as well.

If I was Chinabounder, I would think long and hard about what he receives in return for blogging and if that is indeed worth the risk. It would be one thing to endure such a risk if one was blogging about democracy, freedom of speech, human rights, activism and so on. But all he's doing is blogging about how often he's getting laid by how many women and how he's so much better in bed than Chinese men. Is it really worth it?

Oh, the title of this post, which I think is clever, is a reference to Chinabounder once taking a woman to a restaurant called Le Garcon Chinois. The Chinese blogger refers to it as a Japanese restaurant when in fact it is a Spanish restaurant, despite the French name. And in some probably obscure and accidental way, it would seem to reference Chinabounder's opinion of Chinese men - at least in their treatment of women.

Yes, it's true. In China women can often seem undervalued. There are a million tales of female babies being abandoned because families wanted a son under the one child rule. Women are abused in many walks of life in China. But as a stereotype it's only partially true as more and more Chinese women are becoming empowered. And it's no different from other parts of the world, including the U.S., where some men treat some women horrifically.

So, back to me. I'd like to think I'm different from Chinabounder in at least some ways. After all, I'm in Hong Kong, not the PRC proper. I write about the women I'm with as human beings and when I write that some men behave badly towards them, I am writing about westerners as well as Asians. Of course, to some people that does not matter and no amount of rationalization from me would change their minds.

So while I am tempted to write about how I spent last evening (and this morning), I still cannot answer the question, "what do I receive in return for writing about this?" Or the question, "why am I writing about this?"

I'll write about some other stuff later.

On the way home from work, my usual electronics habit got the better of me and I stopped off in Wanchai to look at cameras. I looked at some different models from Canon and also at the Sony Alpha DSLR. What stopped me from the DSLR was the size - I just know if I get something that big and heavy, it won't be something that I always carry with me. A "prosumer" camera seemed like a potential alternative. I didn't like the Canon S3 IS because a 2 inch screen is just too small for my old eyes. I know the Powershot A700 is going to be replaced soon so that was out. The guy was trying to steer me towards Panasonic but I'd read some questionable reviews. Finally I went for small size and got the Canon Ixus 800. It's really fast and I'm mostly happy with the first couple of dozen shots.

Friday night, I was at a loss for dinner, T suggested Japanese. That made it a no-brainer - Sushi Hiro in Causeway Bay. Since they don't speak much English there and T is fairly fluent in Japanese, I asked her to make the reservation. Since it was already Friday night, I didn't really think we'd be able to get a table, but we were able to get a 9:30 booking, and they still had plenty of stuff left to choose from, including the best uni I've ever had outside of Japan. I was a bit disappointed with the oh-toro but the scallops were magnificent and the aji tataki was superb as always. Should have taken a photo of the food when it was first brought out but forgot, here it is more than halfway gone:


Overall, we ordered way too much, pushed ourselves to finish everything and, combined with the sake, it was all we could do after dinner to make it home, shove a movie into the DVD player and veg out.

There was a question that had been on my mind all day but I didn't want to ask because I wasn't sure that I really wanted to know the answer. She answered it in the taxi ride back home, volunteering the information without my ever bringing up the subject, telling me that since she's returned to HK I'm the only one she's been with. Not as a matter of conscious choice, just that's the way the ball sometimes bounces.

It would seem we are in this odd place where each of us doesn't really want the other to go with anyone else while knowing we are each likely to do that, albeit for different reasons. She kind of hinted that she prefers that while I'm in Thailand I go with someone different each time rather than staying with the same person.

On a different note, she told me that a certain Filipino waitress that we both know will be in Bangkok while I am here - for a nose job. She asked her if she had my number and told her she should call me while she's here, but I'll be surprised if she does.

Saturday was a good day all around. Even though my flight tickets were "bought" using miles, I received a free upgrade to business class. Music on the trip down was primarily the new Dylan album, which I might write more about after a few more listens but initial impressions are a mixed bag - some stuff as strong as anything he's ever done, other stuff still lyrically strong but musically, well, odd. You may or may not know that he's doing a weekly radio show on satellite radio in the US, giving little musical history lessons each week, and he seems to be trying to incorporate that tradition into this album and I think the results are mixed. There's something that's kind of country waltz, another thing that's, for lack of a better term, good-timey vaudevillian, and he takes the old blues song "Rollin' and Tumblin'" and completely re-writes the words (and gives himself sole songwriting credit).

The queues in the airport were shorter than usual, so immigration was not too painful. And there were dozens of taxis lined up so I could get a meter taxi right with no wait - sometimes I'll get a car from one of the stands as you exit the airport and pay basically three times more than a regular taxi just to avoid the line that usually stretches back into the terminal.

The taxi I got had huge signs plastered on the rear window - "We heart farang! We speak English!" The driver was typically Thai, typically friendly. He needed to make a pit stop halfway through the ride. Anywhere else, I might have gotten upset over him pulling over and running into a toilet while the meter was running but when you gotta go you gotta go and I figured at most it was going to cost me US$1 more, plus it was a chance for me to get out and have a smoke.

As soon as I got to the hotel and unpacked, I practically ran over to the seafood market on Soi 7 for some barbecued river prawns and some Thai fried rice which I mixed with fish sauce for a really tasty dinner.

Next over to Gulliver, settled in for some drinks and to see if any of the people I know who usually hang out there would show up. None did but two young ladies insisted on introducing themselves to me. By 10, I was a little bit drunk and a lot tired and decided I couldn't wait for Jimmy Wong to show up at his shop - he's rarely there before 11, sometimes not till midnight. I went over to his daughter Joy's shop to say hi, then back to Gulliver, and then decided to show my two new friends all the conveniences of my hotel, stopping at 7-11 to grab some drinks, snacks and other essential supplies first.

Today the skies are grey, which means some shopping and a massage followed by more seafood and ...

From kottke.org:

From boingboing:


From D-Listed, rapper Ne-Yo getting some backstage relief from a backup dancer. Extremely NSFW.

Trumpet player Maynard Ferguson dead at 78, "identified with ear-piercing power and dizzying high notes." Also dead, Bruce Gary, drummer for the Knack; Ed Thrasher, WB art director who designed album covers that defined multiple eras - Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, Doobie Bros, Prince.

Weird Al is back. "Don't Download This Song." Animation by Bill Plympton.

What are the three web sites Stephen Colbert can't live without? Here.

Mixed reviews for OutKast's movie Idlewild. Trailer looks darned good, though so far I'm not that impressed with the album. Co-stars Terrence Howard, Cicely Tyson, Macy Gray, Ben Vereen, Patti LaBelle, Ving Rhames. Somehow I get the feeling this isn't going to screen in Hongkie Town.

Lately I've been averaging around 400 unique visitors to the site per day. But today, that number is over 1,000 (and the day's not quite finished yet).

Ah, Jack Shaffer at Slate linked to me, specifically to my bit on that Forbes article (which Forbes incidentally pulled from their web site due to the "furious blog reaction" to that article). Of the last 100 visitors to this page, 69 of them came via a link at Slate.

Very tired today. People kept looking at me and asking if I was okay. I am.

Got a lot of stuff to get knocked out, both at the office and at home, before I leave for vacation on Saturday. First four nights in Bangkok, will decide then whether to extend the entire week to Bangkok, head to Pattaya or Hua Hin or Phnom Phenh or?

Bangkok agenda - well, aside from the obvious, eat a lot of seafood, see some old friends, visit the dentist, a new tattoo (maybe).

Blogging will be sporadic for the next couple of days. Sorry.

Well, almost.

Last night, dinner at Carnegie's. Ladies night, so started filling up early, and one or two really attractive women mixed in with the crowd.

Over to Neptune, met T, couple of drinks, both of us back home, stretched out on the bed, sometime holding hands, sometime arms around each other, watched a movie, did a conference call, watched another movie, slept, woke up, a bit of hanky panky, off to work.

Two ways last night could have been improved: a better dinner (not that Carnegie's is bad, it's quite good for what it is) and better selection on the movies.

Aside from those minor quibbles, I could use a lot more nights like that.

Another article that just left me open-mouthed, via Mango Sauce.

YOUNG Ballymartin man Alan Turner is making the final preparations for a month-long trip to Thailand on behalf of Christian development charity Tearfund.

Aged 23, Alan has spent the past 12 months at Durham University, training to become a teacher, and has just qualified. He will begin his teaching career at the beginning of September at the Royal School in Dungannon as a Geography teacher.

“Thailand is a Buddhist country,” explained Alan, “but Buddhism basically rejects anyone who is sick, so Siam Care is one of the only groups of people who will help AIDS victims as it is a Christian organisation."

Buddha help the poor, impressionable children who will one day have this shit-for-brains for a teacher.

So sang Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, many years ago, tongues firmly planted in cheeks. Others seem to take this attitude more seriously. Here is an excerpt from a current article in Forbes:

Guys: A word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don't marry a woman with a career.

Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage. While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. A recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, found that women--even those with a "feminist" outlook--are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner.

Among other things, reasons for a man not to marry a career woman include: "When your spouse works outside the home, chances increase they'll meet someone they like more than you."

I love the phrase "professional women." Yeah, I know, they mean college grads with a career. Or do they mean hookers? Or do they mean men who earn a living dressing as women? I wouldn't want to marry one of those.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, innit?

Someone recently left a comment asking questions about Japan. The thing is, those of you who don't blog on blogger may not know comments posted here are forwarded to me via email. There is no indication as to which post you've commented on, just the time that you posted your comment. I've looked back through the last half dozen posts or so to find that comment so that I could reply in the comments section but could not find it.

I'd like to suggest that a better way for readers to initiate a dialog or ask questions, especially if they're not pertaining to the most recent posts, would be to click on "View my complete profile" where you will find an email link.

=====================

A few days ago, I came across this particular item at a blog called Digital Inspiration.

Using the Long Tail concept, Mike Rundle of 9rules offers some excellent advice for bloggers especially the newcomers: "So many new blogs are trying to emulate their heroes on the Technorati 100 when they should actually forget about that and just develop their content and form their own niche, because the audience is already there waiting for them" - No matter how obscure your content subject or niche, there will always be an audience looking for your content.

Clearly it's a piece of advice meant for bloggers who are trying to do something commercial, which I'm not. I'm not trying to be in the Technorati 100 and, to the best of my knowledge, I'm not emulating any of the blogs that are.

And yet, it did strike me that at one time, this blog did fill a well-defined niche. I don't think it does anymore. I had my reasons for making the change that I did and some of those reasons remain valid more than a month later, maybe one or two of them don't.

I'm not in it for the stats, and actually the number of unique visits and pageloads hasn't dropped off as much as I expected since I made the change. Perhaps if I was in it for the numbers and looking to this site as a revenue generator, I would do things differently. I do love to write, in case you couldn't tell. And, believe it or not, writing about myself helps me to work out various issues and make decisions, wrong or right. Holding myself back now isn't always easy (and as you have seen, in one instance I didn't, at least partially).

Sometimes I think about "going back" to what I used to do, sometimes I don't.

At any rate, your comments on this poorly defined topic are invited, either posted here or via the email link.

This is the sort of thing I can only write late at night. By writing these kinds of late night confessionals, it helps me to sort out my thoughts. Most of the time I click on "publish" when finished; some times I don't.

Monday night out for dinner with a friend, pizza night at Devil's Advocate. Following that, he suggested that we pop into Laguna for a quick drink. After 11 PM on a Monday, Laguna is not quite empty and actually there are several not-unattractive Filipino girls there, but it's not what either of us are looking for. As we finish our drink, T calls me, I tell her I'm going to stop over and say hi. My friend begs off and says goodnight.

As I enter Neptune, the first girl I bump into is W. I say hi and want to say something more to her but she quickly turns away. So I walk over and find T. I tell her I just came in to say hi, nothing more, no drink, no nothing. We chat a few minutes and I head back home.

She calls me while I'm in the taxi. She says she's on her way home. I'm not sure why she's calling just 5 minutes after I said goodnight - is she checking to see if I've really gone home or is she looking to come over? I go with the second one and tell her to come over, but she says she's reached her home, she's going to have some food, get some rest, and then maybe head back out in a couple of hours.

Tuesday night, not hungry till late, and ask T if she wants to join me. She says she's broke, she needs to work, she'll be happy to come and have dinner with me but needs to go back to the bar after that. I wait at Insomnia, seated overlooking the street, and I'm reminded of something a friend said recently, that the girls you see walking around Lan Kwai Fong are generally much prettier than the ones you see in Wanchai. And I see some really striking women.

T shows up, we head to the Vietnamese place in Rat Alley, sit there for an hour eating and drinking. She asks what I'm going to do next and I tell her probably just go back home. She gets in a separate taxi and goes back to Wanchai, back to the bar.

One thing I mentioned to T during dinner was that, for better or worse (and probably worse, though I didn't say that), the Wanchai lifestyle has become so deeply ingrained within me that it's a part of me. All of these "normal" girls I've dated recently, I've had to hide this part, even lie about it. Of course with T I can be completely open. And one of the things I've told her is that she cannot expect me to be faithful to her while she continues to work.

So on the one hand, it was really difficult for me to put her into a taxi, send her back to Wanchai, where she could end up sleeping with someone else tonight (and other nights), maybe even a couple of guys within a single night.

I get caught up in what scientists say is deep genetic wiring - the male of the species, in order to ensure survival, wants to spread his seed to as many different places as possible, yet wants his partner(s) to remain faithful.

So I'm caught in this space, hypocritical as it may be, where I want to keep my options open, yet would prefer for her to not have sex with anyone else. It may not be logical, it may not be fair, but that's where my head's at.

She needs money. She has a daughter, she helps support her parents and of course she likes to do a bit of shopping. And I believe she's doing a bit of saving as well, for the rapidly approaching day when she can no longer do this type of work.

If I say to her, just stay with me, I'll pay all of your expenses, then she has nothing left to show for it financially when she goes back home. I can't say to her, "I'll give you every month what you would normally earn so that you don't have to work" - I simply don't have it.

Aside from which, as I blogged 4 or 5 months ago, her attitude is that if I give her money, it's MY money, and she doesn't want to take my money. If she works, even though the work is being a hooker, the money she gets is HER money, and in her world, this is the way she maintains her self-respect and her independence.

(Yes, I do give her money from time to time, but certainly not every time we're together. And when we go out as a couple, she wants to pay for stuff for me sometimes, food, drinks, taxis, etc.)

The last part is that aside from really enjoying her company, sex with her is the best. So I often find myself spotting some girl and thinking, "wow, I should go with her," and then I think, "but she won't be better in bed than T, and if I'm going to spend the money, why not just give it to T and have a guaranteed great time?"

That's what happened tonight. Like I said, I saw some real stunners walking around Lan Kwai Fong. Some of them were Thai and Filipina and heading for Bar George and the back of Insomnia. And I thought about going back out again and seeing if I could find one of the ones that I spotted earlier. And then I thought, well, see previous paragraph. And stayed in.

It's 3 AM. I'm vaguely wide awake. Not because of any of this stuff. I'm just using the fact that I'm awake to get this down. I'm tempted to head out, see if there's anything still doing in Bar George, if Bar 109 is busy, who's at the Bridge. I probably won't.

So, in other words, right now I'm with a woman whom I think is beautiful, whom I have tons of great sex with, whom I enjoy being with out of bed as well as in bed, whom I don't have to be monogamous with (and don't need to lie about it), and for some reason I'm not 110% happy. Could I possibly be more neurotic? Probably not.

The Comedy Central "Roasts" are generally pretty lame affairs and I've avoided them for awhile. But the one they just aired on William Shatner is a hoot 'n a howl (if you're a Star Trek fan anyway).

Devilducky has a whole bunch of lengthy clips from the show that you can stream online. The best bits:

Andy Dick as Kock, "I am the illegitimate butt-baby of Kirk and Spock - Kock!"

Lisa Lampanelli (who?), "when Elton John heard Shatner sing Rocket Man, he spit George Takei's dick out of his mouth."

Five minutes of gay jokes from George Takei, "Bill is a generous actor - he gave Nichelle Nichols herpes."

And Shatner tries to top 'em all (and at least partially succeeds), "The proudest moments of my career are the charitable works I've done, to help the poor and the homeless and the indigent - Nichelle and George know them as Star Treks 3 through 6."

====================

New Kasabian album - is it better than the first (which I thought was brilliant) or total garbage? Three listens and I'm still not sure.

====================

Conservatives are deserting Bush and his cohorts in an attempt to salvage the 2006 election. Example? Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review:

• April 2005: "It is time to say it unequivocally: We are winning in Iraq."
• August 2006: "...success in Iraq seems more out of reach than it has at any time since the initial invasion three years ago" and assailed "the administration's on-again-off-again approach to Iraq.

Last night decided to unwind with a massage. Returned to Oriental Palm Spring sauna in Causeway Bay. A little expensive (and no "extras" provided) but very clean, nice place, and the girl I'd seen last time spoke good English and gave a great massage.

Even though I'd only been there one time before, and that was more than a month ago, she remembered my name, remembered the last time I'd been there, remembered my feeble attempts to speak Mandarin, remembered my job. She was complaining about how hard her job is and how unhappy her life is.

Me: With your great memory and your good English, can't you get some different kind of job?
Her: I'm lazy, I don't like to use my brain.
Me: What do you like to do?
Her: I like shopping, drinking, eating.

=======================

Seven Things You Don't Know About the Iraq War

=======================

Ever notice how the Republicans in the US don't seem to care much about the truth? They will say anything, no matter how silly, to maintain their grip on power. Clearly (most of them) are smart people and they don't believe what they're saying, but they are counting on the vast majority of voters to swallow their crap.

It's easy - right now the media is devoting more attention to a school teacher who may have molested and killed a child ten years ago (or who may simply be a mentally ill attention seeker) than the wars in Iraq or Lebanon - more time on TV, more column inches in newspapers and magazines. (Is this yet another Republican conspiracy? Did they find this guy and pay him off to step up now and draw all the media attention away from their own failures?)(Joking, okay?)

Hence, VP Cheney's announcement that everyone who voted for Lamont in the Connecticutt primary is an Al-Qaeda supporter. Or Orrin Hatch's announcement that the terrorists are hoping that Democrats will win the election.

The Republicans cannot address real issues in any substantial way because they have lost the support of Americans on the real issues. Only 35% now favor the war in Iraq. Only 44% of Americans consider George Bush to be honest. 57% of Americans say they disagree with George Bush on the issues they care about.

So instead they turn to rhetoric. It's worked in the past, no reason it won't work again. John McCain is building his war chest while those around him who have no chance at the presidency (but do have outlets to the media and the public) are encouraged to voice increasingly emotional inanities.

What I have always wondered is why the Democrats don't sink to the same level? It can't be because they are any fonder of the truth, because they are, after all, politicians. It would be so easy and effective for them to steal pages from the Republican play book, and they wouldn't have to stretch the truth very far.

For example, they might look at the past three years in Iraq - how we did not send in enough troops, how the troops were poorly equipped, how no-bid contracts were awarded to friends of George and Dick, how our actions there have swelled the terrorists' ranks, how we have not attacked Iran (which is funding massive international terrorism and building nuclear weapons). Someone can gather up little soundbites into an ad with the theme that Republicans are the terrorists' best friends, Republicans want to kill American youth, Republicans are profiting from the death of American youth, and so on.

I'm not saying any of this is true. I'm not saying I believe any of this. I'm simply saying this is no more farfetched or unreasonable than any of the claims that Republican pundits are making.
If the Dems ain't willing to get down and dirty, get in the mud and swap big lie for big lie with the Reps, they are fated to lose once again.

SMS received this morning, from a Philippines mobile number not on my contact list:

Hey! Spike, my frnd marissa the pregnant girl she want to c u if u like.

A mostly quiet weekend. Slept a lot. Didn't do anything I planned to do, none of it was that important anyway. Today will get my new HK visa - two more years at the end of which I will finally qualify for right of abode. And maybe some shopping for new bookcases - don't wanna go with Ikea crap, just some local woodwork shop will do just fine but not sure where to look.

One of the things I'm really enjoying about using an RSS reader is the ability to subscribe to things other than just blogs. For example, I've got a search set up that gives me all new photos posted to Flickr with the tag "hongkong." A lot of it is standard harbor and skyscraper photos, but a lot of it isn't. Some of it is pure snapshot quality, some comes from people who obviously have a nice eye for composition. A few examples of recent shots:







Someone else has turned this concept into a blog, Asian Flickr Babes, and you can guess the content from the title, right?

If anyone wants to suggest more good Flickr tags or other good RSS feeds, I'm open to it!

Speaking of photos, I'm less and less in love with my Sony T30. Because it's got what's supposed to be great image stabilization and high ISO settings, I've taken to turning off the flash for various shots and the results are almost uniformly bad. One problem may be that I'm trying to get too much out of what's essential a snapshot camera, that my expectations are simply too high.

The idea of a DSLR is appealing ... except for the cost and the size.

With a trip to Bangkok rapidly approaching, I'm debating on whether to stick with the T30 or try something new.

P.S. Folks, I'm gonna blog about what I wanna blog about. This blog be mine and it's not a democracy. It's also not a commercial endeavor so I don't really care if I'm getting 500 page loads a day or 50. I appreciate the fact that some of you don't give two shits about my opinions on politics. And I appreciate the fact that many readers are not American. But when I wanna blog about something, I'm gonna. And dat's da name o' dat tune.

Right now I'm happy. As some have noted I'm fully prepared to be feeling miserable again. A strange admission?

Sunday night, after almost firing my maid, met up with T and we sat at Mes for about three hours. And while we discussed the break-up and the past few months, for the most part we fell into our old rhythm, as if we'd never been apart. We talked non-stop; she says our "styles" match and that might well be true.

Then we grabbed some food from Thai Hut, came home, ate, watched a movie, slept. This morning, she said she didn't sleep well last night, that she'd had a bad dream. In the dream, she was getting on an airplane and everyone wanted to kill her. She hid in a tree and was covered with snakes. I told her it was simple, the plane is her coming to Hong Kong to work, the snakes represent too many dicks in her life and the dream is telling her that she will be safer and happier if she only has one dick.

Before she left, she asked when she would see me again. I told her she could see me every night, and she said she had to work. I said I know, so she could see me any night she wants. I suggested that she work weeknights and that she spend the weekends with me and she said she could do that. At some point I also said that, while in the past, I had been faithful to her when we were together, if she was going to keep on working, then I would probably be "butterflying" some times. I told her I know that when I go off to Bangkok next week she's gonna be working every night and that I wasn't going to be alone every night either.

On the plus side, she says she's no longer drinking as heavily as she used to, and if she can stick to that, that would be a big plus. She says that she was drinking up to 20 beers a night, she didn't drink at all when she went home, and now she's going to try to hold herself to just 5 or 6.

Hey, what do you want me to say? What kind of deep analysis do you expect? The sex remains fantastic and the rest of the time we share the same interests, we like a lot of the same things, and conversation just naturally flows all the time.

Anyway, yes, I'm off to Bangkok on Saturday for one week. Some medical stuff the first part of the week and then maybe head off to a beach somewhere for the last couple of days.

To commemorate my 5th anniversary at my current company, a company computer sent me an e-card.

I understand that this is the result of someone in HR thinking this would be nice. Had they been the least bit creative, they might have instead sent a notification to my boss who would in turn call me up and say something or other. Or give me an extra day off. Or tell me that all of my options aren't under water.

This is the longest I've stayed with one company and I'm not in a huge rush to make a move at this point, either. Without going into details, the elapsed time between my first interview with this company and commencement of employment was 25 years. If I could wait that long to start, I suppose I'm not in a big rush to leave either.

Wanchai at 11 PM, getting pizza at Cul de Sac. Thai Hut has reopened and I see across the street that Venue is now Amazonia - "welcome to the jungle." I pop my head into Amazonia and Bar 109 for a few seconds each to see what each is about, and then head over to Neptune.

It's packed, as always, but eventually W finds me, as always. We're sitting by the dance floor with some of her friends. The place is packed and it takes ten minutes for me to get a drink. W is obviously happy that I'm there and I'm happy to be with her. But she keeps asking me if I'm okay and I keep saying I'm okay and then three seconds later she asks again, repeat over and over. This could be because we don't talk much - her English is okay but we never seem to be able to hold a conversation, even when the music isn't cranking out at full volume, as it is at that moment.

Waitress Michelle comes over. "Chris is back," she says (Chris being T's bar name). "So? What do I care? Don't make trouble for me, Michelle." That's like asking the sun not to rise in the east.

About 15 minutes later, T comes over. I see her first, she sees me and then notices that W is sitting on my lap, she makes a face, turns away, composes herself, and then comes over, smiles and says hello. She looks fantastic, as she always does (at least to me). White button down blouse, short denim skirt, very tan. I say hello and ask her how she is and about her operation. She says she's fine, starts to tell me about the operation but I can barely hear her. She turns away for a minute, W asks me if I know her. "She's my ex-girlfriend," I tell her. W doesn't understand, I repeat, "she used to be my girlfriend. Do you know her?" and W says yes.

T turns back to us, smiles and talks to W for a second, and W backs off a little bit. Then T says to me the last thing I expect to hear her say. "I still love you." She's talking more, but I can barely hear her, so I tell her let's move to the back so we can talk.

We sit at a table in the back room. She knows I'd run into her sister last week and wants to know what her sister told me. She'd only told me about the operation, nothing else. T says that everyone was telling her that I'm back in Neptune again and that I have a new girlfriend. I tell her that I've only known W for a week and only been with her twice.

We talk more. She says everything was her fault, that she apologizes. Then she starts going down the same old road about how she knows I can find many women who want to be with me, blah blah blah. I ask her for once to tell me something I don't already know.

W peeks in the back a few times but doesn't approach us. Some guy in a Hawaiian shirt is staring at us; he had been sitting with T and I guess expecting to bring her home.

We talk some more and then T says that I should go get my girlfriend and bring her home and that she needs to work because she's just back in town and needs money. I tell her that at this point, I'm in no mood to bring W back with me, that I'm going to go to another bar and get drunk and that she can go do what she wants.

She gets up, walks away, I order a drink. I send an SMS to W, "I'm sorry, I need to get drunk." My phone rings, it's T, she says she's outside waiting for me. I go up, it's raining, we walk over to the Bridge. We talk some more. I don't remember everything that's said except for more bits about her going back to Neptune to work and that I should go back for my girlfriend. I tell her some of the same stuff I've told her before, that when I was with her I didn't feel the need to be with anyone else, but what can we do because I can't give her enough money for her to stop working and I can't deal with her going with other guys, even if having sex with those other guys means nothing to her.

And somehow, eventually, she winds up in my arms and we get in a taxi and we end up back at my place.

A part of me knows, or at least thinks, that this is what she planned from the beginning, from when she first walked over to me, that everything was a test, either to see what I'd say or for her to prove that she still has power over me. And I don't really care.

We shower together, she shows me the scar from her operation. (She had a cyst removed, it was right by her vagina, she says it was tested and was not cancerous.) She fiddles around with the music for a bit, we have sex (she says it's her first time in more than a month, because she was recovering from the operation - she's amazing as always but it's far from my best effort, combination of the whisky and the late hour).

In the morning we talk, more sex, we talk some more, eventually she gets dressed and leaves.

I have no idea what I'm going to do next

Via Daily Kos:

"More Americans can name the three stooges than the three branches of government. Well, that's because the three stooges are more likely to get something done."

"According to reports, Fidel Castro is alert and being briefed. And I'm thinking, why didn't we get a president like that?"

Via boingboing, "what right wingers see when they read the NY Times."

Allow me to digress from the politics of late.

It would seem, as of last night, that I am back with T again.

Long time readers of this blog will know what that means. For others, sorry, I am not going to explain.

Yes, yes, I already know.

"President" George Bush's ongoing battle to eradicate the U.S. Bill of Rights was dealt a temporary blow when a U.S. District judge ruled that the government's program of wiretapping without warrants is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to the program.

This news item is from Fox News, so it might not be true.

When I wrote this post, I received 11 comments. Some agreed with what I wrote, some took me to task, which is to be expected. My follow-up received 15 comments. And of course I read what others had to write on the topic. Most people accepted the accounts of the incident at face value and offered differing opinions on its deeper meaning and consequences. But what about the incident itself? How much in danger were we really?

Andrew Sullivan, blogging at the Time Magazine web site, writes:

So far, no one has been charged in the alleged terror plot to blow up several airplanes across the Atlantic. No evidence has been produced supporting the contention that such a plot was indeed imminent. Forgive me if my skepticism just ratcheted up a little notch. Under a law that the Tories helped weaken, the suspects can be held without charges for up to 28 days. Those days are ticking by. Remember: the British authorities had all these people under surveillance; they did not want to act last week; there was no imminent threat of anything but a possible "dummy-run," whatever deranged guest-bloggers at Malkin say. (Correction, please.) Bush and Blair discussed whether to throw Britain's airports into chaos over the weekend before the crackdown occurred.

He then goes on to quote from UK government official Craig Murray who wrote on his blog:

None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.

In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.

What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth.

Further, he states:

In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few - just over two per cent of arrests - who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.

The Guardian reports:

Reports from Pakistan suggest that much of the intelligence that led to the raids came from that country and that some of it may have been obtained in ways entirely unacceptable here. In particular Rashid Rauf, a British citizen said to be a prime source of information leading to last week's arrests, has been held without access to full consular or legal assistance. Disturbing reports in Pakistani papers that he had "broken" under interrogation have been echoed by local human rights bodies. The Guardian has quoted one, Asma Jehangir, of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, who has no doubt about the meaning of broken. "I don't deduce, I know - torture," she said. "There is simply no doubt about that, no doubt at all."

That article concludes with something which which I could not agree more strongly:

Recognize this young gentleman?


Why it's none other than Prince Harry of England. Oddly enough, these photos were taken not in former British colony HK but in old Blighty herself.

“Harry was really going for it. He had been downing drink all night and was touchy-feely with everyone — especially Natalie. He had his hands all over her and was kissing her on the face. At one point he reached his arm around her and gave her a proper grope on her breast. She was very shocked but didn’t seem to mind in the slightest. I don’t suppose it’s every day an heir to the throne feels you up.”

Are you strong enough for this? Can you resist? Do you have any willpower at all? Hint, here are the lyrics (via Kaiju Shakedown):

yaa tsi tsup ari dik ari dull an dik ari dill an dits tan dool
la dippyduppy dull la roop uttyroopy la goorigan gook aya gittygangool
arup cha cha adippydappydill la baritztandill lan den lan doe
a barik kata barip pari baribadeebadeebadee standen lan doe
ya baril las ten lan day a doe la babadeadevadevadevaduv ya vou
what is that little las day lan doe badakadagadaga doo doo day a doe

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Raiders of the Lost Ark. In 30 seconds. Re-enacted by bunnies. (Via Milk and Cookies)

Part two of Pitchfork's 200 greatest songs of the 60s, #s 101-150. Entering more mainstream territory now - though how mainstream can they be when the list include Terry Riley and Steve Reich alongside Miles Davis alongside Led Zeppelin - this is my kinda list.

Bruno Giovanni Quidaciolu Jr., better known as Bruno Kirby Jr. dead at 57. One of those movie faces you always recognize even if you didn't know his name. City Slickers, Godfather 2, Good Morning Vietnam, Spinal Tap and, memorably, "man greasing up his fist" in Cruising.

Bars and restaurants in HK can come and go so fast it can make your head spin.

Noted tonight ...

Big Ernies is open. But I'm not that eager to have a $98 hamburger, at least not until someone else tells me it's fabulous.

Swindlers Bar is open. Long, dark, narrow, with a live band that was cranking out Oasis as I passed.

Am told that on the corner of Jaffe and Fenwick, the spot that used to be Pepperonis will be another British-style pub.

Evelyn's is closed, though I guess that's been a couple of weeks now.

Venue is closed, knew that one was just a matter of time. The sign was gone from the wall and there was a crew inside (after 11 PM!) working on the renovations for whatever place will be next.

Thai Hut is closed! The gate is down and the sign is gone. But as I sat at Cul de Sac, a passing Thai girl I know told me they were simply closed for renovation and not out of business. You'd think they'd at least paste a sign up on the gate saying something along those lines.

Another new bar opening soon is owned by the same guys who own the Bridge, same street, on the other side of Agave. I've heard it won't be Bridge II, it will be a different style, something a bit more "lounge-y", along the lines of what Venue initially tried to do but failed, don't know the opening date yet.

And still waiting to see what will happen on the three floors above Joe Bananas, "exciting new F&B destination for lease" the banner proclaims.

Yes, been relatively quiet, just in that kind of mood.

Pitchfork is doing a series, "200 greatest songs of the 60s," so far they've done #200-151, each choice with a photo and a paragraph of description. It's nicely eclectic, with a bit of jazz and a bit of world music tossed in. To give you an example:

151 - David Axelrod - The Human Abstract
152 - The Association - Never My Love
153 - Lorraine Ellison - Stay With Me
154 - The Kingsmen - Louie Louie
155 - Creedence - Bad Moon Rising
156 - Loretta Lynn - Fist City
157 - Aretha Franklin - Do Right Woman, Do Right Man
158 - P.P. Arnold - The First Cut is the Deepest
159 - Pink Floyd - Astronomy Domine
160 - Os Mutantes - A Minha Menina

If you don't know 60s music, there are worse places to start.

The first three episodes of Deadwood online - but just the curse words.

Some folks on Blogger can now use the beta of the next version. I'm not one of them.

Was going to go on a rant about this woman, Lina Joy, in Malaysia who converted to Christianity but was turned down by the courts when she wanted to have that on her ID card - see, all ethnic Malays are legally Muslim regardless of your belief, converting from Muslim to another religion is punishable by death, Malaysia's constitution supposedly guarantees "freedom of religion," people are saying that if the courts allowed this woman to have "christian" on her ID card it would have destabilized the entire country - but I just can't work up the energy to do it right now.

More useless crap I want:
Then again, how cool would it be to plop this 2 pound sucker down on the bar or blow minds walking through Central talking on this? Yes, that's right, it's a GSM tri-band mobile phone. "The sound quality will not be as good as your pocket phone." Costs US$500. Via OhGizmo! (No, I'm not actually planning on getting one. Or am I?)

Sometimes when I take a dump and get up to wipe myself, I notice my nose is a little bit runny. I take a bit of toilet tissue and blow my nose. Then I take the same tissue, fold it over, and use the same bit for its stated purpose.

No, I've never done it the other way around.

Wanchai is even more dangerous for me during the daytime. Every time I go into the Wanchai Computer Centre to buy some small, cheap thing, I end up blowing a wad on something unexpected. This time it was Shure's new E500PTH earphones. Well, the problem may have started when I encountered this review over on ipodlounge:

Prior to January of this year, iLounge’s collected editorial staff would have believed it difficult - perhaps impossible - for a company to release earbuds that could satisfy literally all of our disparate needs. But as we noted in our Best of Show 2006 award for the E500PTH Sound Isolating Earphones ($549), premium headphone maker Shure has hit the trifecta: incredible sound, innovative features, and surprisingly good comfort across different ear sizes and shapes. The result is an earphone that, although expensive in an absolute sense, delivers more bang both overall and for the buck than Ultimate Ears’ $900 UE-10 Pros - our previous gold standard for “price no object” earphone performance.

So when I noticed them in one of the shops, curiosity got the better of me and after a few minutes talking to an extremely well informed sales guy (he gave me detailed comparisons vs. Etymotics and Ultimate Ears, both of which were also for sale in that shop and cost significantly more), I told him to crank up the EPS machine so I could bring them babies home with me.

Not sure I will use the "PTH" option - you get an extra chunky bit of plastic and 10 more feet of cable so that you have this microphone attachment so that you can "Push To Hear" when someone is talking to you, without needing to yank the earphones outta your head.

Well, the thing is, amongst other things, I'm a headphone junkie. The cans that make me happiest - the Bose QuietComfort 2's and a set of Sony DJ headphones - are too huge and heavy for just walking around town or local commuting. And regular earbuds have no bass, and I loves da bass, gots to have da bass. I tried the Etymotics but for some reason that I can't put my finger on, they just didn't work for me.

These new Shures could well be "the one" - just listened to Guillemots and Basement Jaxx and, yeah, not too shabby. (The guy in the shop says that HK list price for these is $4,200. I paid $3,800 (approx US$494) so I'm not unhappy, just insane.)

So as a result, lunch at Subway and stayed home tonight. Lots of blog-reading while doing other stuff, some of what I encountered:

A fabulous article - Media "Schizophrenia" in China - by US copyright attorney David S. Moser, published on danwei's site.

The convenient artificiality of this arrangement is at the heart of the strange, schizophrenic quality of Chinese media. Enormous amounts of time, energy, money and creativity are expended every day in producing a staggering amount of entertainment products to satisfy the enormous demand. Yet despite all this well-meaning effort, the implicit injunction to exclude any content with political implications virtually guarantees that the resulting media products cannot address the lives of ordinary people in any truly meaningful way. The result is a kind of unrelenting stodginess. There is seldom anything jolting, thought-provoking or “edgy” in Chinese media.

The most striking dissociation here is the two-tiered economic sector that piracy created. It is often noted that 90% of the digital products for sale in the Chinese audio-visual shops are bootleg. This, of course, represents great economic losses to both the foreign and Chinese media industry. Few commentators mention, however, that there are now entire sub-sectors of the above-board Chinese economy that are parasitically dependent upon this illegal counterfeit economy. The explosion in the market for VCD and later DVD players, for example, was obviously sparked by the sudden availability of pirated disks. Popular movie magazines like Kan Dianying and the many current movie websites could not have arisen without a readership of savvy Chinese cinephiles, whose film sophistication is entirely due to the bootleg DVD market. Skyrocketing sales of the electric guitars, keyboards and drums used in rock and popular music are almost directly due to the pirated foreign music CDs that have flooded China in the last decade. And on and on. In short, the importation of incorporeal ideas and “memes” (cultural software) always spurs the creation of lots of physical stuff with potential economic value (cultural hardware). The synergistic effect on the economy becomes enormous.

It's long and well worth reading - slowly.

The following found at Wondermark, via boingboing:


Posters for Grindhouse, upcoming anthology film with segments directed by buddies Quentin Tarantino and Roberto Rodriguez. We only gotta wait another 8 months:



Late night nostalgia - "if you went to a record store to buy this record, they'd laugh at you." SCTV remains one o' da best (okay, I just noticed that when I embed youtube in the blog it doesn't show up on RSS so here's the link):



Tiny Tim singing "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" on the Tonight Show. Johnny Carson and guest David Letterman are rendered speechless.

Someone's doing a feature film version of classic TV series The Prisoner. And there's a chance it may not suck. Director will be Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins, Memento) and the screenplay will be by Janet and David Peoples (12 Monkeys and David co-wrote Blade Runner).

Sleepy now ....

(grabbed from boingboing)

The chaos has already started, the economic impact is yet to be gauged but I am sure it will be non-trivial. Here:

Airlines faced a flood of cancellations, rebookings and delayed flights today, following the discovery by British intelligence officials of a plot to blow up airplanes bound for the United States from London.

The delays and cancellations rippled across air traffic grids in the United States in Europe, disrupting travel far beyond London and causing severe congestion in airports. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, every major airport in the United States was experiencing delays of at least 15 minutes. American Airlines has already cancelled six flights to and from London, and it warned that other cancellations are possible today.

In Europe, Air France suspended all flights bound for London. British Airways cancelled all short-haul flights today from Heathrow airport, Europe’s busiest. The low-cost European carrier Ryanair cancelled more than 100 flights.

And here:

"Don't bring carry-on luggage and don't bring personal belongings unless they fit the list that's been provided and presented in a clear plastic bag," he said. "And please, most importantly, check with your airline that their schedule is being operated tomorrow [Friday] or over the weekend before you come to the airport."

But sources close to Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander indicated restrictions could become permanent. One source told the BBC the "way we travel will never be the same again".

If the point of terrorism is to inspire terror, the terrorists have won again. The way to beat them is to go on living your life and render their actions inconsequential. Every time you give them an inch, you have given them a spiritual victory.

Next month, I predict all those who wish to travel by air will need to wear identical grey jumpsuits and have barcodes tattooed on their foreheads which contain details of all personal information. Extensive databases will be used to prevent people who know each other from traveling on the same flight. Every row on an airplane will contain an armed security guard with gun drawn and trained on other passengers in the row - except the rest of the row will be empty because no one will be fucking traveling any more!

As an American, I've always thought the British stood for calm in the face of danger, a certain bored under-reaction typified by the heroic response to the Nazi bombing of London in WWII or the Monty Python sketch in Meaning of Life in which an officer discovers his leg has been bitten off in his sleep:

Ainsworth: What's all the trouble then?

Perkins: Bitten sir. During the night.

Ainsworth: Hm. Whole leg gone eh?

Perkins: Yes.

Ainsworth: How's it feel?

Perkins: Stings a bit.

Ainsworth: Mmm. Well it would, wouldn't it. That's quite a bite you've got there you know.

Perkins: Yes, real beauty isn't it?

All: Yes.

Ainsworth: Any idea how it happened?

Perkins: None at all. Complete mystery to me. Woke up just now... one sock too many.

Well, seems like I had it all wrong. Check this out:

All cabin baggage must be processed as hold baggage and carried in the hold of passenger aircraft departing UK airports.

Passengers may take through the airport security search point, in a single (ideally transparent) plastic carrier bag, only the following items. Nothing may be carried in pockets:

• Pocket-size wallets and pocket-size purses plus contents (for example money, credit cards, identity cards etc (not handbags)
  
• Travel documents essential for the journey (for example passports and travel tickets)
  
• Prescription medicines and medical items sufficient and essential for the flight (eg, diabetic kit), except in liquid form unless verified as authentic
  
• Spectacles and sunglasses, without cases
  
• Contact lens holders, without bottles of solution
  
• For those travelling with an infant: baby food, milk (the contents of each bottle must be tasted by the accompanying passenger) and sanitary items sufficient and essential for the flight (nappies, wipes, creams and nappy disposal bags)
• Female sanitary items sufficient and essential for the flight, if unboxed (eg tampons, pads, towels and wipes)
  
• Tissues (unboxed) and/or handkerchiefs
  
• Keys (but no electrical key fobs).
  
• All passengers must be hand searched, and their footwear and all the items they are carrying must be X-ray screened.
• Any liquids discovered must be removed from the passenger.

No books. No magazines. No laptops. No iPods.

I submit to you that the terrorists have already won. And I suspect that right now, in a cave somewhere, they are laughing so hard that they are wetting themselves. They don't even need to actually plan attacks anymore. All they need to do is make it look like they're planning something and let a few of them get caught. (Surely getting caught and doing a few years in prison is better than a suicide-bombing run, even if you don't get the 72 virgins.) The massive disruption to international commerce that will result from this surely will carry a price tag into the billions of dollars. Who is going to fly under these conditions except if absolutely forced into it? No way I'm going on any flight near the UK ... or the US if they follow suit.

Speaking of not sleeping, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is of course the title of one of PK Dick's best books, very freely adapted into the cult classic film Blade Runner. (The movie is good, the book is far better IMHO.)

And electricsheep is, well, let them tell it:

Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers "sleep", the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep". The result is a collective "android dream", an homage to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience. You can also design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool.

• Electric Sheep is a screensaver that realizes the "collective dream" of sleeping computers from all over the internet. By installing the software, you join a collective evolution of animated fractal flames.

When your computer is idle, the screen saver (the client software) is activated and an animated fractal 'sheep' appears. Behind the scenes, the screen-saver contacts a server and joins the parallel computation of thousands of Internet computers in the generation of new sheep.

If you just installed the software your cache directory is empty, you need to download your first sheep. Leave the screen saver running overnight (make sure to disable power settings that might hibernate your computer). Each sheep is about 4.6MB and if the server is heavily loaded, it might take some time before you see something. Please be patient.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, "computers communicate with each other on the internet" can probably be translated as "massive virus attack waiting to happen" but until then, I'm running it and it looks fucking sweet.

By way of partially answering a question posed by Expat@Large on the prior post, here's a link (and some quotes) to an article in the NY Times by Joe Queenan titled, "Why I Can't Stop Starting Books." (I imagine Mme. Chiang will also appreciate.)

But I am never reading fewer than 25 books. I am not talking about books I have delved into, perused and set aside, like “Finnegans Wake” or Pamela Anderson’s first novel — that would get me up way over a hundred. I am talking about books I am actively reading, books that are on my nightstand and are not leaving there until I am done with them. Right now, the number is 27.

Like any addiction, the insatiable desire to start new books provides immense pleasure. Still, it is a monkey I often wish to get off my back, because I do not want to wait another five years to find out how “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” turns out, and would love to know what Shelby Foote (“The Civil War”) thinks about the stand-alone burial of Stonewall Jackson’s arm. At my current glacial pace — I am now roughly 400 pages into each — I will be a grandfather before I get to the part where the Crusaders sack Constantinople, and will be festering in my grave long before Pickett rolls the dice at Gettysburg.

Friends say that I suffer from a short attention span, but exactly the opposite is true. I do not stop reading books because I lose interest in them; if anything, I have too long an attention span, one that allows me to read dozens of books simultaneously without losing interest in any of them. Moreover, I have an excellent memory that allows me to suspend reading, pick up a book six months later, and not miss a beat. A chess player once told me that a good memory is a cheap trick that creates a deceptive aura of intelligence around an otherwise ordinary intellect. This is true.

I used to think that I kept stopping and starting books because I could never find the right one. Untrue. All these books are the right one. It’s the fact that all these books are generally so good that makes me stop reading them, as I am in no hurry to finish; the bad ones I whip through in a few hours. The problem is, there are just too many good books. Reading is like being in a candy shop, or the Frick: Just because you love the Rembrandts and the Van Dycks doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be tempted by the Titians and Bellinis.

I'm probably part-way through about six books at the moment (and just ordered another dozen from Amazon). I'm partway through three movies and three TV series box sets. I have one TV in my living room, another in my bedroom, another in the kitchen (been collecting cookbooks and a few cooking-related DVDs lately and thinking about getting into trying some serious cooking) and I have two monitors side-by-side in my home office - the second one is a wide screen LCD that is hooked to a DVD player and the Mac, so I can be watching something while doing whatever it is I'm doing on the computer at the moment.

And, yes, I have a full time job. I am still seeing more than my share of women. I'm in the midst of re-organizing all my digital photos (and thinking about scanning the non-digital ones). I've been going through all the books in the closet trying to decide which ones to keep and which ones to buy new shelves for. Reorganizing my one thousand CD-Rs of MP3s onto DVD-Rs. And I've just committed to writing a bi-weekly column for a magazine.

It's amazing what you can accomplish when you have OSA and can't sleep much ...

It only took a day for me to find the essential weakness of Great News. Read at home in the morning, mark everything read, come into the office and in the office everything is still marked as unread. Yes, I should have thought of that right away, but my brain seems to have trouble getting out of first gear this week due to some personal stuff that I'd rather not discuss.

(Ah, I can hear you ask, shouldn't you be working and not reading blogs when you're in the office? Shut the fuck up, I gently respond.)

So following another reader's advice, am trying bloglines. One feature I'm on the fence about - when you subscribe to a feed, it tells you how many other subscribers there are (presumably just through Bloglines and across the entire software spectrum. I see that I have 35 subscribers, not too shabby I guess.

The most useful feature so far is the ability to bring up a feed and click on a button marked "related feeds" - these have check boxes so you can then batch subscribe to ones from the list. There seem to be 3 separate feeds for subscribing to this blog, and for one of them, the related feeds are all things related to internet security. Tips on how to keep this blog off your computer, perhaps?

So, who will win? Will it be GreatNews? Will it be Bloglines? Someone or something else? Is there a reality TV series in this?

I think I may have played with RSS a couple of years ago when I first got into reading blogs. But I found it difficult to set up and preferred looking at the "real" web sites. But a couple of years have passed and of course the technology has significantly advanced.

More importantly (for me), the number of blogs I view on a daily basis has exploded. I use Firefox and found that when opening groups of web pages in tabs, anything over 10 or 12 at a time tends to really slow things down. As a result, I have 7 groups of blogs totaling 66 different web sites that I look at daily. Cycling through all of this to find the ones that have been updated can be a slow and unrewarding process. What's even worse is at night, if I'm bored, going through the 4 "groups" of Asian blogs only to find that only 1 or 2 of the 38 I monitor has been updated is simply frustrating.

At one point I tried using the built-in RSS in Firefox but didn't like it. Tried using Thunderbird, Mozilla's email/rss reader on the Mac, but it still seemed to be missing something. Finally, following a recent poll on Download Squad on RSS Readers, I decided to take the winner for a spin. It's called Great News and I'm sold.

First of all, it's free. It's light, with no adware or spamware. It took me way under an hour to get all 66 blogs into there. Click on "add feed" and type in the URL, it will check the site and let you know if it's, um, rss-able and what options you've got. I then exported everything as an opml file so I can have the same settings at both home and office. It periodically goes out and checks everything on the list for updates, or I can click on an "Update All" button - and it checks 66 blogs in well under a minute, so that I can see at a glance what's been updated. And aside from blogs, other types of things are retrievable - haven't checked all the options here but one of the things preloaded is a search for all new pictures of dogs on Flickr - I changed that to make it a search for all new HK pics.

Of course, different blogs look different in Great News, depending upon whatever options the blog owner did or didn't set.

This blog, for example, you'll see full content (minus comments) including any photos. The other end of the spectrum is HKMacs, who is also on blogspot, where you only get the headline, no text. Shaky is somewhere in the middle, with just the first four lines of each post. (In cases like this, you can click on the headline and the full web page will appear in Great News just as it would on your browser.)

So the only thing I've "lost" is the ability to know if a particular post has comments, without first clicking on a link to view the piece in its "native environment" (for lack of a better term). In return, I'll save a ton of time each day cruising for new content and know almost instantly whenever one of the sites I follow has been updated.

I'm not clear on the differences between RSS 2.0 and Atom .3. Looking at this blog each way gives me the same image. Any comments from anyone?

For those of you (most of you?) for whom this is old news, well, I'm a bit behind the curve here. For those of you who are even further behind the curve than me, check this out.

Britney Spears photo shoot for some glamour mag - what was published ...


And from the same session, unretouched:



I don't think anyone is talented enough with Photoshop to do much with this one, taken on August 6th:


I saw this in Esquire magazine, no idea if it's for real or not, but the possibilities ....


This, unfortunately, is for real. An upcoming product from Levis, iPod pants - pocket to hold iPod, iPod controls over the watch pocket, crappy headphones. No idea what it will cost, no idea who would want to be seen in public wearing this. (And how do you wash these?)

Every time I'm interviewed by the press, they get things wrong. The most horrible example is buried 8 years in my past, when I was interviewed by the Financial Times of India, where they just used quotes out of context to suit their purposes. (Yeah, I know, like it's never happened to anyone else.) I was managing the regional Y2K project for a major investment bank and was discussing the perceived extent of the problem (yeah, yeah, okay, but back then, who knew) and gave a laundry list of examples, near the bottom of which was checking the BIOS on motherboards. That became the headline on the second page of the article, "You have to check your motherboard!!!!!"

There's a small bit about me in the August 06 issue of Business 2.0 (no, I ain't gonna tell you which bit). I went back and forth with their fact checker three times and the piece still contains quotes attributed to me that are total inventions. AND they spelled my name wrong.

Sigh.

I seem to be blogging a lot today, huh? Here's a little more ...

Cory Doctorow in Information Week on why Apple's DRM sucks. Followed by a well-reasoned response from blog PlaybackTime which seems to be attracting an equal amount of attention. (I'm siding with PbT on this one, though I am pissed that I cannot use the iTunes store in HK and am left with a choice between piracy and PCCW's feeble MOOV service.)

No connection at all to the above, a new trailer for the upcoming Borat movie. Me likee.

Just read that Arthur Lee died. After serving six years in prison in the 90s, Lee seemed to be in the midst of a successful comeback. Because of the extreme highs and lows of his career, Lee was sometimes compared to Syd Barrett, who also recently died.

For those who don't know, Lee was the leader of Love, an influential Los Angeles band which made its greatest impact in the 60s. The Wikipedia entry says, "Love's music is difficult to categorize, and has been described as a mixture of folk-rock, psychedelic rock, baroque pop, Spanish-tinged pop, R&B, garage rock, even protopunk."

In the canon of rock music, a lot of albums tried to be Forever Changes, but to date none have succeeded. Dave Marsh calls the album "Indescribably essential."

Here's a great detailed review of Forever Changes, while this is a good article on the making of the album. I don't think anyone can sit down and listen to this record and not have it change their life. Here are the lyrics for "You Set the Scene"

Where are you walking, I've seen you walking
Have you been there before?
Walk down your doorsteps, you'll take some more steps
What did you take them for?
There's a private in my boat and he wears
Pins instead of medals on his coat
There's a chicken in my nest and she won't
Lay until I've given her my best

At her request she asks for nothing
You get nothing in return
If you want she brings you water
If you don't then you will burn

You go through changes, it may seem strange
Is this what you're put here for?
You think you're happy and you are happy
That's what you're happy for
There's a man who can't decide if he should
Fight for what his father thinks is right
There are people wearing frowns who'll screw you up
But they would rather screw you down

At my request I ask for nothing
You get nothing in return
If you're nice she'll bring me water
If you're not then I will burn

This is the time and life that I am living
And I'll face each day with a smile
For the time that I've been given's such a little while
And the things that I must do consist of more than style
there are places that I am going

This is the only thing that I am sure of
And that's all that lives is gonna die
And there'll always be some people here to wonder why
And for every happy hello, there will be good-bye
There'll be time for you to put yourself on

Everything I've seen needs rearranging
And for anyone who thinks it's strange
Then you should be the first to want to make this change
And for everyone who thinks that life is just a game
Do you like the part you're playing

I see your picture
It's in the same old frame
We meet again

You look so lovely
You with the same old smile
Stay for a while
I need you so, oh, oh, oh, oh
And if you take it easy
I'm still teethin'
I wanna love you, but
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh

This is the time and this is the time and
It is time, time, time, time, time, time, time, time, time...

Date last night. Left it to her to choose the spot and, to my complete non-surprise, she chose Cinta J.

If you've never been there, Cinta J is a Wanchai institution. I have no idea how long it's been there; certainly it predates my arrival in 1995. They ostensibly serve Filipino, Thai and Indonesian food, but it's primarily Filipino. There's a wide variety at a reasonable price. The food is neither awful nor great, it simply is what it is. Sunday night seems to be family night, though there were one or two couples who had obviously met very recently in nearby discos. (My date asked how I could tell. I said, "when the guy is 60, the girl is 20 and her skirt only comes down as far as her waist, it's a safe guess.")

There is always a guy working some keyboards and MIDI and one or two female singers crooning the most awful, slow, MOR love songs as if their lives depended on it. An hour of sitting there listening to variations on "Wind Beneath My Wings" and how I managed to keep my food down I'm not sure. When they started inviting people in the audience to come up and sing with them, I frantically called for the bill.

Across the street to Dusk Till Dawn. Getting there before the band's first set, it was easy to grab seats at a table in the corner near the stage. We were soon joined by 5 young local HK girls, living "dangerously" by coming to this kind of place. They were all smoking Marlboro Menthol lights and needed to consult the menu for five minutes before ordering 5 Carlsbergs.

My first thought was that they were gay. They were all very plain looking - no dyed hair and not an ounce of make-up between the 5 of them and all in "comfortable" clothes (forgot to check the shoes). But as the beers took effect and the band was playing, I turned to my date and said, "I take it back, they're not lesbians, they're virgins."

Why did I think that? Their attempts to dance and to clap along with the band were so awkward and so off the beat. 5 girls clapping along, no two clapping at the same time yet all 5 managing to clap off the beat, even though they're sitting mere feet away from the drums. And their dancing? Over-excited, jumping up and down, completely without rhythm and without any movement in the hips at all, performing moves usually reserved for four year old children at wedding receptions with bands like those seen in The Wedding Singer. Rock & roll is the devil's music after all. Rock & roll is sex. And when you're young and innocent and grew up on a diet of Cantopop, even something as banal as "Play That Funky Music White Boy" is beyond you (though is that really a bad thing?) until you've gotten laid, then it all makes at least a little bit of sense.

Some Indian guy (who spoke fluent Cantonese) seemed intent on picking up any or all of the five. He tried everything from dancing to arm wrestling and maybe by the end of the night, he succeeded, we weren't there late enough to find out.

More inspirationally, there was this 60-ish couple who were first on the dance floor. Wearing jeans and matching t-shirts, they were gracefully dancing away to every number. Was this some old couple celebrating their anniversary or just a regular night out for them? No idea, but after a while, it seemed that the applause after each song was more for them than for the band.

Walking through Causeway Bay yesterday, I noted someone holding a sign saying that Krispy Kreme's first HK shop, on Lee Garden Road, will open this Tuesday. As their web site says, "Opening day at a Krispy Kreme store is a fun event and we'd love to have you come by, join in the festivities and experience a Hot Original Glazed doughnut fresh off the line!"

"I am so there," I thought to myself, already planning my first dozen.

Then I went into Esprit. Saw some shirts that didn't look dreadful. Tried on XL, and while the sleeves and shoulders were perfect, buttoning the shirts was, shall we say, a bit of a stretch. Ended up buying two shirts, XXL size. Sigh.

Maybe I'm not so there. And yet, in the face of Krispy Kreme, I am Homer Simpson. "Ooooo, doughnuts."

Reading through the SCMP during lunch .....

Li Xinmin, a top environmental guy in the China government, says pollution cost the country 500 billion yuan last year. Out of 696 cities monitored, acid rain was noted in 357 cities. This is probably not a good thing. He further says that since sulfur dioxide emissions in the past five years have "only" increased by 27%, this shows that China's controls on air pollution are working. We should put these people in charge of stamping out prostitution in Wanchai. Within five years the number of working girls would triple and prices would decrease by half.

The front page of the SCMP is about people stranded at the airport due to the typhoon. A bunch of cry babies complaining that the airlines didn't provide free hotel rooms for them when most of them live a 25 minute train ride away. The airlines did provide blankets, food and water but seem to have gotten little credit for that.

The more important piece, about the HK Observatory's failure to raise Signal 8, comes on the front of the City section. See, even though windspeeds of over 200 kph were noted on the mountain next to the airport, the Observ bases their calculations on the wind in Victoria Harbor.

On page two of the City section, in the "Talkback" column, they ask the question: Are today's youngsters a "spoilt" generation? The answer can be found on the next page. Six people, ages 16 through 23, spent ten hours beating an 18 year old woman to death. The reason? She weighed 100 kg and had a "domineering personality." The same people had attacked this woman three days earlier at which point she begged for time to improve herself. The gang then poured acid on the body, stuffed it into a box (a large box, presumably) and dumped it on a hillside. Astonishingly, these people were acquitted of murder and only found guilty of manslaughter. Are today's youngsters a spoilt generation in-fucking-deed.

A 280 square foot retail space in Causeway Bay has just been rented out for HK$400,000 per month. However, this is the gross space. In terms of actual usable space, the cost works out to more like $8,000 per square foot, which may be a record for the HK retail market. At this price, I imagine they're selling something more than just fishballs.

Coming soon to Wanchai - Big Ernies Diner, "another new concept by Igor's". Not sure why Igor's rates an apostrophe but Ernies doesn't. And not sure why an American style diner would be a new concept, even in Hongkie Town. This will be on Lockhart Road just past Typhoon; the last occupant of the site was Sultana.

The same ad that has run every day or week for decades, proclaiming that the Red Pepper Restaurant in Causeway Bay has won the "Best Sichuan Restaurant Award." As ever, the ad neglects to mention who bestowed that award. My guess is it was the Society of People Who Have Never Eaten Sichuan Food.

Life goes on.

A rarity today - walked past Esprit in Cityplaza and saw exactly the shorts I was looking for in the window. Three mannequins, each wearing the same style in a different color. So I went in, searched the store in vain, located a sales girl and asked for the shorts that are in the window. She started to giggle and told me they were sold out. But you have them in the window, why do you have them in the window if you don't have any in stock? She repeated, they're sold out, and giggled even more.

Somehow I didn't get the joke.

My taxi driver told me this morning that on every radio station, they're saying the same thing: fuck the government! Because they did not raise typhoon signal 8 yesterday, putting peoples' lives in danger. This is what happens when you have a government that is not answerable to its people.

I want this:


Uncrate offers an idea for a future Al Swearengen shirt that in my opinion is even better: "God rest the souls of that poor family... and pussy's half price for the next 15 minutes." All of which means nothing to you if you don't watch Deadwood. But there's really no excuse to not watch the best show on TV, is there?

Another full page ad in Variety, this one from Jewish Filipino Rob Schneider, who vows to never work with Mel Gibson, except if Mel really wants him and his agents get very drunk. It's about as funny as his movies, more or less (though I do like the Deuce Bigalow series and am hoping they do a third one and set it somewhere in Asia) ....

Around 4 PM today, when I went down for a smoke, the wind was blowing so hard that the rain was basically horizontal. Back upstairs, I was told that it should have been signal 8 (which means everyone can go home and things basically shut down) but that the HK Observatory was "cheating us." This is not as mild as it might seem.

I had my first signal 9 or 10 here in the summer of '95. I figured, no big deal, I've driven through hurricanes in the US, I'm not gonna be fussed about the weather. So I went out to Lan Kwai Fong, lots of bars were still open, and I figured that simply reinforced my theory that it was much ado about nothing. Okay, it was not so pleasant around 4 AM when I wanted to go home and there were no taxis and I ended up walking from Lan Kwai Fong to Happy Valley in the wind and the rain.

The next day, when I woke up and went outside for some food, I saw the results of the storm. Big pieces of trees on the ground. Bamboo scaffolding knocked over. Some shop signs came down. "Ah, I see, you go out in the high winds and risk having something come crashing down on your head. I get it now." And since then, I've taken the typhoon warnings seriously. This is, after all, a town filled with buildings where people have illegally added on to their dwellings without any regard to building codes.

So, getting home tonight was a freaking mess. The taxi driver told me he didn't think he could make it up Garden Road, that he'd heard on his radio that some trees had fallen down somewhere around Upper or Lower Albert Road. Sure enough, the traffic was backed up all the way to Pacific Place and the cars on Garden Road seemed to be at a standstill. I had him take me to Central and I came up via the Mid Levels escalator. My street was a mess, little bits of debris on the ground everywhere.

I don't wish death or injury on (most) people but I find myself almost wishing that someone got clobbered so that the headlines tomorrow will be screaming about the Observatory's failure and that something will be done so that this doesn't happen again. Putting peoples' lives in danger in favor of commerce? Fuck that shit.

For those of you in HK who have a live-in maid, ever wonder what she does with her spare time? From the NY Times review of the book A Life Less Ordinary:

Abandoned by her mother at 4, married off at 12 to an abusive husband, a mother herself at 13 — there is little in Baby Halder’s traumatic childhood to suggest that she would become an emerging star on India’s literary horizon.

Baby Halder works for Prabodh Kumar, who encouraged her to write about her life. The resulting book, “A Life Less Ordinary,” is both a critical and commercial success.

A single parent at 25, struggling to feed her three children by working as a maid for a series of exploitative employers, Ms. Halder had no time to devote to reading or to contemplating the harsh reality of her existence until she started work in the home of a sympathetic retired academic, who caught her browsing through his books when she was meant to be dusting the shelves. He discovered a latent interest in literature, gave her a notebook and pen, and encouraged her to start writing. “A Life Less Ordinary,” this season’s publishing sensation in India, is the result of her nighttime writing sessions, squeezed in after her housework duties were finished, when she poured raw memories of her early life into the lined exercise books.

Prabodh Kumar, the retired anthropology professor who discovered her, was impressed with what he read and encouraged her to continue. After several months, he sat down with her and helped edit her text into book form. Written in Bengali and translated into several other Indian languages and English this year, Ms. Halder’s autobiography has become a best seller.

Hailed by Delhi’s literary elite as a groundbreaking work, “A Life Less Ordinary” has also found readers among women who have shared Ms. Halder’s difficulties.

“This is not a book that can be read and tossed aside. It raises questions about the fate of the millions of domestic workers in our country and their ill treatment,” a review in the newspaper The Hindu concluded. “Truly this is a story of courage under fire.”

I think I'm going to have to print that out and share it with my maid and discuss how she might spend some of her free time.

Full page ad in Variety ...

... designed and placed before the whole Mel Gibson mess, back when we only had Tom Cruise to kick around. Those were the days, weren't they?

Trying to have a relatively quiet week. Catching up on music a bit.

I buy a lot of CDs, I download a lot of music. There's a large percentage that I'll listen to once and like, but it doesn't "break through" to the level of something I'll play over and over again. I go through moods, reflected by playlists on my iPod that I haven't played in ages - a bhangra list, some Arabic pop, something I call "crap pop" (big production guilty pleasures like the Jim Steinman stuff from Streets of Fire, Dan Hartman, Londonbeat, Bon Jovi - stuff that on a normal day I would never admit to listening to). Some times I retreat into classic rock territory, other times I'll put on some mindless trance or garage (one stalwart, don't ask me why, is a bootleg of an Underworld club gig from '99). And I know I have a tendency to like new rock that sounds like old rock - not saying it's good or bad, it just is.

Two recent albums have broken through and are getting multiple replays.

"Through the Windowpane" by the Guillemots is my latest discovery. These guys released three EPs, this is their first full album. I'd call it almost absurdly ambitious, moving from quiet passages that remind me of that song from the movie in which Natalie Portman plays a stripper (can't recall song title or movie title right now) to huge sweeping rocking densely layered moments. Some reviews are citing Nick Drake and Jeff Buckley but to me this is more reminiscent of Mike Scott and the Waterboys back when he was in his "big music" phase of "This is the Sea."

"The Corner of Miles and Gil" by Shack. This band, led by two brothers, has apparently been around for more than a decade, but flew under my radar. The title attracted me - was it some tribute to classic Miles Davis/Gil Evans recordings? Not even close. For the most part it sounds like classic 60s (or 90s?) Brit-pop, like an album the Small Faces might have made if they collaborated with Burt Bacharach. Plus quirky lyrics like this from "Tie Me Down":

In that little cupboard
There's some ties (some ties)
And dad's in the Navy
So use a granny knot

The New York Dolls reunion album seems promising. I'm on the fence about Muse but other people seem to be going bonkers over their latest. Something called the Bombay Dub Orchestra is fitting some of my moods - they sound exactly the way you'd think from the name. Faithless's Renaissance triple disc DJ set was a letdown. Night Ripper by Girl Talk (or is it Girl Talk by Night Ripper), a mad mash-up, has possibilities. The new Scritti Politti's nice. So's Tom Petty's latest. And DJ Shadow's. And Thom Yorke. And Serena Maneesh. And Scott Walker. And ... and ... and ...

Lots to keep my ears busy. Too much music, too little time.

No, I'm not going to turn this into a daily rant about Mel Gibson. I can't promise this will be my only follow-up post, but there won't be a lot more I'm sure. If you're bored by this, just close the window and read another blog.

NY Times:

Almost as stunning as Mel Gibson’s anti-Jewish tirade when arrested on suspicion of drunk driving in the early hours of last Friday was the speed at which the scandal unfolded, doing serious damage to one of Hollywood’s most valuable careers along the way.

In a little over 24 hours, Mr. Gibson’s arrest and subsequent behavior in Malibu had already prompted talk of a claimed cover-up, an exposé, worldwide news coverage, an apology and then a full-blown push for alcohol rehabilitation, even as his representatives and executives at the Walt Disney Company rushed to catch up with the event’s effect on the filmmaker’s movie and television projects with the company.

“The pervasiveness of the Internet has caused a dramatic increase in the dissemination of news,” said Michael S. Sitrick, chairman of Sitrick & Company, who specializes in crisis communications. The message was that there is no such thing as a minor incident among those for whom celebrity is an asset.

The Los Angeles Times — in a report that carried no fewer than 11 bylines — reported that a civilian oversight office had already decided to investigate whether Mr. Gibson had been given favorable treatment because of his celebrity status or long-time friendship with the county sheriff, Lee Baca.

Disney has shelved plans to work with Gibson on a mini-series about the Holocaust. They do still plan to be the US distributor for his next film, Apocalypto, due out around Christmas.

From Variety (paid subscription required):

Newly elevated Walt Disney prexy Oren Aviv said he accepted Mel Gibson's apology for the anti-Semitic remarks he reportedly made during a drunken-driving arrest on Friday, even as Endeavor partner Ari Emanuel called on Hollywood to boycott the star.

Meanwhile, Gibson said he had checked into what his rep called "an ongoing program of recovery" to battle his troubles with alcohol.

A few in Hollywood are being very vocal about this, in particular talent agent Ari Emanuel (the Ari Gold character in Entourage is based on him), writing about it on Ariana Huffington's blog, while Huffington wrote a post urging talent agency ICM to drop Gibson. Barbara Walters got out of her oxygen tent to say that she probably won't see any more Mel Gibson movies.

Most other Hollywood figures, however, declined public comment on Gibson. Said one studio exec: "I think it's one of those things where people will choose to vote with their feet; that means either walking toward, or walking away."

In addition to Aviv, other Gibson defenders came forward Monday. Catholic League prexy Bill Donohue, who is known for his fierce rebuttals to slurs against Catholics and as a vocal supporter of Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," released a statement attacking Gibson's critics, including the Anti-Defamation League's Abraham Foxman.

"Mel's enemies will never cut him a break," he said. "Their real goal is to discredit 'The Passion of the Christ,' and that is why their propaganda machine is in full gear ... . How ironic it is to note that the core message of his film -- forgiveness -- is sorely lacking in his critics.

I don't think there was much "forgiveness" in Gibson's own comments.

Earlier in Variety:

Gibson, who has fended off charges of anti-Semitism before, has apologized for his behavior and remarks. But the incident could further isolate the star from the Hollywood establishment he has held at arm's length in recent years. And, perhaps more critically for his current career, the controversy could cost him clout with the millions of conservative Christians who consider him a hero following the 2004 release of "The Passion of the Christ," which grossed more than $1 billion worldwide in combined box office and homevideo.

Also causing a stir Friday was last week's reprimand of Lindsay Lohan, who received a sternly worded letter from the producer of her current film, telling her that hard partying is no excuse for not showing up on the set.

Disney has its hands full, as "Apocalypto" was a marketing challenge to begin with, since it is spoken largely in the Mayan language and several other studios had turned it down as being too violent.

For the Mouse House, the stakes are the hefty P&A commitment it made when it secured domestic distrib rights to "Apocalypto" last summer -- a sum that runs into the tens of millions on the typical studio wide release. Gibson's Icon Prods. financed the pic's undisclosed budget of "Apocalypto," and Icon retains all foreign rights.

Disney declined comment on how it thinks Gibson's arrest could affect the film, but distrib execs at rival studios said they expect the incident to impact the pic's box office potential.

The earlier claims of anti-Semitism stemming from "The Passion" had largely been put to rest before Gibson's drunken outburst in Malibu.

In December, he struck a deal with ABC to develop "Flory," a longform TV project based on the true story of a Dutch Jew named Flory Van Beek and her non-Jewish boyfriend who sheltered her from the Nazis.

In a 2004 interview with ABC's "Primetime Live," Diane Sawyer asked Gibson point blank, "Are you an anti-Semite?" Gibson responded, "No, of course not. And here's the other thing. For me, it goes against the tenets of my faith to be racist in any form. To be anti-Semitic is a sin. It's been condemned by one papal council after another. There's encyclicals on it, which is, you know, to be anti- Semitic is to be un-Christian. And I'm not."

Even his loudest critic, the Anti-Defamation League's Abraham Foxman, interviewed for the same program, agreed, saying he did not believe Gibson was anti-Semitic, but added, "I believe that ("The Passion") has the potential to fuel anti-Semitism, to reinforce it."

And there were signs that even Gibson's conservative Christian fans were not moved by [his apology]. Reaction in the popular conservative online forum FreeRepublic.com, was also largely negative. In response to the statement, one commenter posted, "Gibson showed his true colors last night during his arrest. I argued with you about 'The Passion of the Christ' and his portrayal of Jews. I stood up for Gibson to you and a number of my Jewish friends. Now, I'm sorry I did."

Another, responding to hopeful comments that Gibson can still change his views, wrote, "Lots of denial going on here. It's difficult when your hero falls so far."

But these days almost all celebrities manage to survive scandals, unlike 80 years ago, when Fatty Arbuckle's career was destroyed by scandal. Paul Reubens is working, Roman Polanski got an Oscar, Hugh Grant is busy, Eddie Murphy still makes movies, the list goes on.

Oh, the Lindsay Lohan letter can be found here. It's a hoot, regardless of whether you like her, dislike her or have no idea who she is.