Hongkie Town

It looks like I will reach 300,000 hits here by the end of the weekend. I'd written something a little different at first, a reflection back on the past 22 months that I've been blogging. How I've changed. How the blog has changed. But I think a simple "thank you" to my regular (and irregular) readers will suffice. So 300,000 thanks from me to you.
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On the other hand, lately it seems that the blogger software is getting buggier and buggier. Half the time when I hit the "publish" button, I get a message that there were errors. I go back, "publish" again, no errors, and find that what I just wrote has been posted twice.

Or tonight, the post immediately prior to this, which was "successful" and which shows up in my "edit posts" list, still does not appear when I go to view the page, despite hitting the refresh button several times.

If I don't see some improvement soon, I may considering moving to a different blogging site.
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In case you haven't seen it elsewhere, Warner Bros. released the DVD of Superman Returns in China this week. It won't be available elsewhere (legally) until late November. The DVD should only have a Mandarin-dubbed version, burnt-in subtitles and no bonus features and should be selling for around 15-20 RMB.

Warner has done early releases of other titles in China recently; this is the biggest one to date. (They can be found in shops in Mong Kok and other parts of HK selling for around HK$35.)

Time will tell if this is an effective strategy against the massive piracy in China or not.
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Taipei trip just about over and goals mostly accomplished, including lunch today at Din Tai Fung. Last night I walked over to the Brass Monkey bar. It was ladies night and there was a long line of people waiting to get in. With no one leaving, the line wasn't moving and I didn't feel like waiting.

I went back tonight, 11 PM and the joint was, well, half empty. Had one drink, contemplated a taxi over to Carnegies, and instead returned to my room and watched the latest episode of Extras, with guests Daniel (Harry Potter, or is it Billie Piper?) Radcliffe and Diana Rigg. Radcliffe must have enjoyed this role, Stephen Merchant gets more time to get even more insane while Gervais's Andy Millman continues to sink lower than humanly possible.

Okay, clicking on "publish post" now, fingers crossed (and it's not easy to move the mouse around with crossed fingers either)(sorry) ...

One reason the Republicans keep attacking Clinton's record is to attempt to divert attention away from their own consistent record of massive failures and lies.

Here's something Republicans don't want you to know. An interview with Bob Woodward will appear on 60 Minutes in the U.S. this Sunday:

According to Woodward, insurgent attacks against coalition troops occur, on average, every 15 minutes, a shocking fact the administration has kept secret. "It’s getting to the point now where there are eight-, nine-hundred attacks a week. That's more than 100 a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces," says Woodward.

The situation is getting much worse, says Woodward, despite what the White House and the Pentagon are saying in public. "The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon [saying], 'Oh, no, things are going to get better,'" he tells Wallace. "Now there’s public, and then there’s private. But what did they do with the private? They stamp it secret. No one is supposed to know," says Woodward.

In his last two books (Bush At War and Plan of Attack), Bob Woodward often seemed as if he was acting as a mouthpiece for the current fascist administration. His new book, State of Denial, reverses that course.

The NY Daily News reports the following from the book:

The CIA'S top counterterrorism officials felt they could have killed Osama Bin Laden in the months before 9/11, but got the "brushoff" when they went to the Bush White House seeking the money and authorization.

CIA Director George Tenet and his counterterrorism head Cofer Black sought an urgent meeting with then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001, writes Bob Woodward in his new book "State of Denial."

They went over top-secret intelligence pointing to an impending attack and "sounded the loudest warning" to the White House of a likely attack on the U.S. by Bin Laden.

Woodward writes that Rice was polite, but, "They felt the brushoff."

...

Woodward claims the intelligence Tenet and Black shared with Rice included communication intercepts indicating the likelihood of an Al Qaeda attack on U.S. soil.

Tenet said he had hoped the meeting would shock Rice into encouraging the President to take immediate action against Al Qaeda.

Black, looking back at the July 10, 2001, meeting with Rice, concludes, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her [Rice's] head."

Woodward says that Tenet described the meeting as a "tremendous lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the 9/11 attacks."

Tenet also claims that his alarm over Bin Laden was downplayed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who asked, "Could all this be a grand deception?"

The book claims that two weeks before the July meeting with Rice, Tenet told Richard Clarke, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director, of his gut feeling about a likely attack.

"It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one," the book quotes Tenet as telling Clarke.

The NY Times focuses in on other sections of the book:

The White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser who said that thousands of additional American troops were desperately needed to quell the insurgency there.

....

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is described as disengaged from the nuts-and-bolts of occupying and reconstructing Iraq — a task that was initially supposed to be under the direction of the Pentagon — and so hostile toward Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, that President Bush had to tell him to return her phone calls. The American commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, is reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the fall of 2005 that “Rumsfeld doesn’t have any credibility anymore” to make a public case for the American strategy for victory in Iraq.

...

The fruitless search for unconventional weapons caused tension between Vice President Cheney’s office, the C.I.A. and officials in Iraq. Mr. Woodward wrote that Mr. Kay, the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, e-mailed top C.I.A. officials directly in the summer of 2003 with his most important early findings.

At one point, when Mr. Kay warned that it was possible the Iraqis might have had the capability to make such weapons but did not actually produce them, waiting instead until they were needed, the book says he was told by John McLaughlin, the C.I.A.’s deputy director: “Don’t tell anyone this. This could be upsetting. Be very careful. We can’t let this out until we’re sure.”

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The Iraq war is now costing US taxpayers $2 billion per week. Afghanistan is costing $370 million per week. Republicans are happy about this because they pay the least amount of taxes and most of the money is going into their pockets.

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And now the Iraqis don't even want us in Iraq. 71% of Iraqis want the U.S. out within a year. 79% of Iraqis say the US presence is having a negative impact in Iraq. 61% of Iraqis support violent attacks against American troops.

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Republicans just seem fundamentally unable to tell the truth about anything. After claiming that there were very few meetings between criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and White House staff, an investigation has found records of at least 485 meetings between Abramoff, his staff and White House staffers.

September 28, 2006 is a turning point, a day that will live in infamy. The U.S.A. is no longer the U.S.A. We have given up the moral high ground. We have stated that we are no better than the insane terrorists around the world.

Excerpts from two key speeches, full texts here.

Obama:

I may have only been in this body for a short while, but I am not naive to the political considerations that go along with many of the decisions we make here. I realize that soon, we will adjourn for the fall, and the campaigning will begin in earnest. And there will be 30-second attack ads and negative mail pieces, and we will be called everything from cut-and-run quitters to Defeatocrats to people who care more about the rights of terrorists than the protection of Americans. And I know that the vote before us was specifically designed and timed to add more fuel to that fire.

And yet, while I know all of this, I’m still disappointed, and I’m still ashamed. Because what we’re doing here today – a debate over the fundamental human rights of the accused – should be bigger than politics. This is serious.
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In the five years that the President’s system of military tribunals has existed, not one terrorist has been tried. Not one has been convicted. Not one has been brought to justice. And in the end, the Supreme Court of the United found the whole thing unconstitutional, which is why we’re here today.
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But politics won today. Politics won. The Administration got its vote, and now it will have its victory lap, and now they will be able to go out on the campaign trail and tell the American people that they were the ones who were tough on the terrorists.

And yet, we have a bill that gives the terrorist mastermind of 9/11 his day in court, but not the innocent people we may have accidentally rounded up and mistaken for terrorists – people who may stay in prison for the rest of their lives.

And yet, we have a report authored by sixteen of our own government’s intelligence agencies, a previous draft of which described, and I quote, “…actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay…”

And yet, we have Al Qaeda and the Taliban regrouping in Afghanistan while we look the other way. We have a war in Iraq that our own government’s intelligence says is serving as Al Qaeda’s best recruitment tool. And we have recommendations from the bipartisan 9/11 commission that we still refuse to implement five years after the fact.
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And the sad part about all of this is that this betrayal of American values is unnecessary. We could’ve drafted a bipartisan, well-structured bill that provided adequate due process through the military courts, had an effective review process that would’ve prevented frivolous lawsuits being filed and kept lawyers from clogging our courts, but upheld the basic ideals that have made this country great.

Clinton:

Democrats and Republicans alike believe that terrorists must be caught captured and sentenced. I believe that there can be no mercy for those who perpetrated 9/11 and other crimes against humanity. But in the process of accomplishing that I believe we must hold on to our values and set an example we can point to with pride, not shame. Those captured are going nowhere – they are in jail now – so we should follow the duty given us by the Supreme Court and carefully craft the right piece of legislation to try them. The president acted without authority and it is our duty now to be careful in handing this president just the right amount of authority to get the job done and no more.
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How would General Washington treat these men? The British had already committed atrocities against Americans, including torture. As David Hackett Fischer describes in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, "Washington's Crossing," thousands of American prisoners of war were "treated with extreme cruelty by British captors." There are accounts of injured soldiers who surrendered being murdered instead of quartered. Countless Americans dying in prison hulks in New York harbor. Starvation and other acts of inhumanity perpetrated against Americans confined to churches in New York City.

The light of our ideals shone dimly in those early dark days, years from an end to the conflict, years before our improbable triumph and the birth of our democracy. General Washington wasn't that far from where the Continental Congress had met and signed the Declaration of Independence. But it's easy to imagine how far that must have seemed. General Washington announced a decision unique in human history, sending the following order for handling prisoners: "Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British Army in their Treatment of our unfortunate brethren."
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For the safety of our soldiers and the reputation of our nation, it is far more important to take the time to do the job right than to do it quickly and badly. There is no reason other than partisanship for not continuing deliberation to find a solution that works to achieve a true consensus based on American values.
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Mr. President, I would like to submit for the Record letters and statements from former military leaders – including Generals Colin Powell and John Vessey, 9/11 Families, the religious community, retired judges, legal scholars and law professors, all of whom have registered serious concerns with this bill and its provisions.

The bill also makes significant changes to the War Crimes Act. As it is now written, the War Crimes Act makes it a federal crime for any soldier or national of the U.S. to violate, among other things, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions in an armed conflict not of an international character. The administration has voiced concern that Common Article – which prohibits "cruel treatment or torture," "outrages against human dignity," and "humiliating and degrading treatment" – sets out an intolerably vague standard on which to base criminal liability, and may expose CIA agents to jail sentences for rough interrogation tactics used in questioning detainees.
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When our nation seeks to lead the world in service to our interests and our values, will we still be able to lead by example?

Last night, out to dinner with a business associate, in town from another city. Last week, with two guests in town, we had excellent dinners at Lotus and Wooloomooloo. But this guy ...

(Hey, if you're him, and you read the blog (I don't think you don't), don't get me wrong here, you're a great guy and all but ...)

... this guy has to be around 40. He makes a great salary. He's lived in three major cities around the world and traveled extensively. And I'm not sure he's ever had a good meal in his life. He thinks that all western food is "a piece of meat on a plate with no sauce." His utter refusal to go for anything other than Chinese food frustrates my attempts to educate him in this area.

Since we were in Causeway Bay, and since he'll only go for Chinese (and non-spicy at that), first I tried Skyview, but they couldn't fit us in before 9:30 and it was 7 and we were hungry. Then I tried suggesting Tack Hsin, Tai Woo, Hoi Tin or Little Sheep. None of them too exciting but all reliable. And since he's on a business trip and the company would pay for the meal, I figured money wouldn't matter too much, and these are all moderately priced places anyway (unless you start going for shark fin or abalone).

He paused in front of Steak Expert. He knows it as the place where Bus Uncle worked for two weeks. I know it as the place that I tried once, ordered the rib eye steak, and found that 6 ounces of my ten ounce steak were fat and gristle.

Eventually he picked Tsui Wah. What the Cantonese refer to, I believe, as a cha chan teng. It's open 24 hours, has branches all around town, it's cheap and the menu is huge. Despite being on a busy street and having an English menu, the staff does not speak English.

There were four of us, and here's what we had:

Singapore noodle with sweet and sour prawn - nice fresh prawns, dried fried noodles with almost no sauce (actually not a bad thing because what little sauce they had was sickenly sweet, the "sour" provided by the presence of four uncooked sichuan peppers on the plate).

Lamb chop curry - an almost sweet curry (probably from a powder mix) with three lamb chops that were almost all fat and gristle, served with an attempt at roti and a lump of really scary looking mashed potato. (And while we were provided with forks and knives for that dish, we were only given tiny rice bowls. You try cutting up a lamb chop in a rice bowl with a butter knife.)

Spaghetti with seafood - a meager amount of tomato sauce (from a tin) with some dried out bits of fish, clam, squid, etc.

Fish ball soup - the least horrible dish.

T kept leaning over and whispering in my ear to ask if I hated the food as much as she did. I was thinking I would have been better off just ordering the ham sandwich.

I would so love to take this guy to a good place but he just never gives me the chance.

Back home, where T provided further torture by immediately putting on the Asian Food Channel and we looked at all the stuff we didn't come close to having, first on the Go! Hokkaido show and then Gordon Ramsay's F Word.

Well, I'm off to Taipei in a short while and I know the friend I'm meeting for dinner will choose something better.

Excerpts from an AP story on Yahoo news:

The Bush administration has blocked release of a report that suggests global warming is contributing to the frequency and strength of hurricanes, the journal Nature reported Tuesday.
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In the new case, Nature said weather experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, part of the Commerce Department, in February set up a seven-member panel to prepare a consensus report on the views of agency scientists about global warming and hurricanes.

According to Nature, a draft of the statement said that warming may be having an effect.
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The report drew a prompt response from Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, D-N.J., who charged that "the administration has effectively declared war on science and truth to advance its anti-environment agenda ... the Bush administration continues to censor scientists who have documented the current impacts of global warming."
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A series of studies over the past year or so have shown an increase in the power of hurricanes in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, a strengthening that many storm experts say is tied to rising sea-surface temperatures.

Just two weeks ago, researchers said that most of the increase in ocean temperature that feeds more intense hurricanes is a result of human-induced global warming, a study one researcher said "closes the loop" between climate change and powerful storms like Katrina.

The RepubliCANTs will never allow debate on facts because the facts aren't on their side.

Lots of noise about Clinton's appearance on Fox. Ostensibly on the program to talk about the work of the Clinton Foundation and the tens of millions of dollars being spent to combat poverty, AIDS, and other global issues. (Compare this work to anything done by a Republican ex-president. You can't because none of them have done anything after leaving office.)

Wallace asked Clinton about his record with Bin Laden, repeating the lies that Clinton didn't do anything to defend the country. Clinton defended himself, listed the actions taken and accepted blame for not being able to get Bin Laden while he was President. Click this link to get a link to two clips of Clinton's appearance, as well as Daily Show commentary the next day.

Neocon monkey commentators have not been able to refute anything that Clinton said on that show, so instead they are attacking him for how he said it. It's a further example of how Republicans use the concept of the Big Lie. Ignore the truth and shout your lies often enough and loud enough and some people will believe it.

Because Bush was briefed about the Cole and about Bin Laden and chose to ignore it. Bush is the one who did nothing.

BLITZER: So you the asked the president in the Oval Office — and the vice president — why didn’t you go after the Taliban in those eight months before 9/11 after he was president. What did he say?

BEN-VENISTE: Well, now that it was established that al Qaeda was responsible for the Cole bombing and the president was briefed in January of 2001, soon after he took office, by George Tenet, head of the CIA, telling him of the finding that al Qaeda was responsible, and I said, "Well, why wouldn’t you go after the Taliban in order to get them to kick bin Laden out of Afghanistan?"

Maybe, just maybe, who knows — we don’t know the answer to that question — but maybe that could have affected the 9/11 plot.

BLITZER: What did he say?

BEN-VENISTE: He said that no one had told him that we had made that threat. And I found that very discouraging and surprising.

The Republicans will never address this issue in any speech or debate because they have no defense. Transcript of Olbermann on MSNBC, here's an excerpt:

Consider the timing: The very same weekend the National Intelligence Estimate would be released and show the Iraq war to be the fraudulent failure it is — not a check on terror, but fertilizer for it!

The kind of proof of incompetence, for which the administration and its hyenas at Fox need to find a diversion, in a scapegoat.

It was the kind of cheap trick which would get a journalist fired — but a propagandist, promoted:

Promise to talk of charity and generosity; but instead launch into the lies and distortions with which the Authoritarians among us attack the virtuous and reward the useless.

And don’t even be professional enough to assume the responsibility for the slanders yourself; blame your audience for "e-mailing" you the question.

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Mr. Bush…

You did not act to prevent 9/11.

We do not know what you have done, to prevent another 9/11.

You have failed us — then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11.

You have failed us anew in Afghanistan.

And you have now tried to hide your failures, by blaming your predecessor.

And now you exploit your failure, to rationalize brazen torture — which doesn’t work anyway; which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding; which only humiliates our country further in the world; and which no true American would ever condone, let alone advocate.And there it is, sir:

Are yours the actions of a true American?

Just like Bush's statement about the national intelligence assessment leaked yesterday. ''Some people have guessed what's in the report and concluded that going into Iraq was a mistake. I strongly disagree."

He's so stupid he's smart. Al-Qaeda hated Saddam as much as the Bush family. In Bin Laden's eyes, Saddam was an apostate and deserved only death. It's not that we went to war in Iraq, it's what we did once we got there - torture, abuse, detaining prisoners in secret prisons scattered around the world without benefit of trial - that have proven potent propaganda for militant Islamic recruiting. This has been their way since 1948 in Egypt. But Bush can't address that, so he lies, knowing that most people will just go, "duh, yeah, war good."

Bush sees the death of tens of thousands of people due to his ineptitude as trivial:

Wolf Blitzer: ...We see these horrible bodies showing up, tortured, mutilation....

Bush: ...I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is — my point is, there’s a strong will for democracy....

It ain't just Bush who is morally corrupt and without shame. Major General John Baptiste on Donald Rumsfeld:

The detailed deliberate planning to finish the job in Iraq was not considered as Secretary Rumsfeld forbade military planners from developing plans for securing a post-war Iraq. At one point, he threatened to fire the next person who talked about the need for a post-war plan. Our country and incredible military were not set up for success.

The Republicans do not address statements like that because they can't. So they use cheap tricks to attempt to distract people from the real issues. Like why we went to war in the first place. Why they didn't attempt to do anything about Al Qaeda prior to 9/11. Why Bush sat in a classroom staring at a childrens picture book for 7 minutes. Why we didn't properly equip our military. Why we didn't plan to win the peace as well as the war. Why reconstruction contracts were awarded to Friends of Bush & Cheney without competitive bidding. Why the price of oil is in the stratosphere. Why we torture. Why we illegally wiretap. Why we put people into secret prisons in foreign countries. Why we have not captured Bin Laden. Why Afganistan is being allowed to slide back into the hands of the Taliban. Why we attacked Iraq for not having weapons of mass destruction but are leaving Iran alone despite proof of them building nuclear weapons.

Incidentally, those who have been most vocal in their opposition to the recent coup in Thailand have been spokespeople in the U.S. State Department. What would their motivation be?

Hmmmm, a leader whom some say rigged an election, who enjoys his greatest support amongst illiterates in rural areas, who used his position to line the pockets of himself and his friends, who totally mishandled a situation with Muslim extremists ... are we describing Thaksin ... or Bush?

Woke up, stomach bad, blogging while waiting for the immodium to take effect.

T has started moving her stuff over to my place. Things are mostly good. I know she's feeling tremendously insecure about making such major lifestyle changes, trying to cut her a lot of slack and be patient and that's kind of telling me how I feel about the whole thing, that I'm doing that. Longtime readers of this blog may recall how quickly I've bolted from others for far less reasons.

Bought the car today. 2004 Lexus IS 200. Assuming loan is approved, I'll be back on the road (and terrorizing Fumier) by Sunday or Monday. The Porsche just wasn't a practical purchase for me right now. Plus the Lexus has more buttons on the dashboard and more things that light up. And a much louder stereo (or a much quieter engine). Need to buy iPod FM transmitter for car. And maybe a subwoofer.

Watching the new US teevee shows:

* Studio 60 premiere was fabulous, classic Aaron Sorkin. A large cast, good set-up, but wondering where he plans to take it from here. Most TV shows set backstage of TV shows have not lasted, either too meta or the public is just not that interested.

* Jericho will be this year's Lost. Huge cast, lots of mysteries that I think they intend to let stay mysterious for awhile. Did that black guy escape from the prison bus? I don't think so. I think he's from another planet/dimension/time.

* Kidnapped is another 24/Prison Break kinda show with a strong cast and good production values but it came in third in its time slot. I kinda liked it.

Have been told to look out for Heroes, some sort of nerds-turn-super-heroes comedy thing?


Quick trip to Taipei later this week, two nights, several should-be-easy meetings, Din Tai Fung and (if seriously bored) Hooters.

Short playlist on iPod - "Drone" - featuring (so far):

• Love is the New Feel Awful by Dandy Warhols
• Spectral Mornings by Cornershop
• Pass the Hatchet I Think I'm Goodkind by Yo La Tengo.

Currently reading in the toilet:
Everyone on Amazon hates this book. Fucking nitwits taking it seriously, getting insulted when he disses their cribs. It's a joke fer crissakes. This on the food in Liverpool:

Liverpudlians love the outdoors and are often to be found chatting merrily on park benches, guardedly clutching cans of industrial-strength lager - even in midwinter. Not surprisingly eating is an informal affair and the average meal tends to be deep fried, eaten with the hands and found in a litterbin.

Or this on the city of my birth:

New York winters have been killing people since the Pilgrim Fathers first pitched camp, but they are still preferable to summers in this sweatbox of a city, making it a place with a climate that's tolerable for about two weeks of the year, one in April and one in October.

Yeah, I know, the Pilgrims went to Massachusetts. Doesn't make it any less true.

Jackie Chan confesses to doing porn early in his career. It's been listed on IMDB forever with the "trivia" that it's Chan's only sex scene; hardly news but I guess the Sun ran out of pictures of Posh and Becks that day. Haven't seen the movie but I suspect that what he refers to as porn would be equivalent to a soft R in the US.

Fucking iTunes 7. Just docked the iPod, the Mac sees it but iTunes doesn't until I kill iTunes and restart it. Apple stuff always used to work so well.

Pills are now taking effect. Gotta be up in three hours for a conference call. I'm super, thanks for asking.

I think the second episode of Extras was the best so far, Gervais has topped himself yet again. And some kind soul has posted the David Bowie cameo and song to YouTube - the entire scene so that you get the set-up as it descends into an astonishing bit of humiliation for our hero. If you haven't seen Extras yet, click the link and watch this classic moment.

Excerpts from an article in the NY Times. I can't imagine that anyone would be surprised by this.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

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Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat. It is unclear whether the final draft of the intelligence estimate criticizes individual policies of the United States, but intelligence officials involved in preparing the document said its conclusions were not softened or massaged for political purposes.

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On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released a more ominous report about the terrorist threat. That assessment, based entirely on unclassified documents, details a growing jihad movement and says, “Al Qaeda leaders wait patiently for the right opportunity to attack.”

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The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of “self-generating” cells inspired by Al Qaeda’s leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.

It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.

In early 2005, the National Intelligence Council released a study concluding that Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad leadership.

But the new intelligence estimate is the first report since the war began to present a comprehensive picture about the trends in global terrorism.

Sorry to disappoint you, but I haven't stopped blogging. It's just been a busier-than-usual week. Lots of things to get caught up with in the office after returning from Sydney and prior to heading to Taipei in a few days, plus a few emergencies in the office and some out of town visitors whom I had to watch over and take sightseeing and shopping, not to mention another column for BC that I've started and abandoned four times so far.

I've had some really good meals this week at Lotus and Wooloomooloo, done some drinking and general hanging out at Bar 109 (they had their first foam party last night, looks like this will be an every-Saturday-night thing) and Maya in Wanchai and several bars in LKF.

I also finally managed to find a cheap pocket flask at Stanley Market, so that I can commence upon my idea of making my job more interesting by drinking in the office. I've always wanted to be Ed Asner as Lou Grant on the Mary Tyler Moore show, a bottle of scotch in my desk, someone comes in with a problem, I tell them to close the door, reach into a drawer, slam a bottle and two glasses on the desk and get down to it. Some times when I think about how disfunctional my company can be, it seems as if a shot of Jack Daniels may be the most rational solution.

I did a bit of car shopping yesterday and will be doing some more today. I want to take the dogs up to the New Territories for some hikes and that's just easier with a car than looking for a taxi driver who'll take two big dogs (even though he can charge an extra $10 for that). Plus I will have to move in a few months, so I'm going to start scouting out new locations up in New Territories as I don't think I'm going to remain in Mid Levels and am thinking about getting a house again.

The problem is trying to not get carried away with choices. I need something that seats four - me, the gf, and the two dogs. I've got the idea that I should spend less than $100,000, which means a car at least 5 or 6 years old, and was leaning towards older BMW 3 series, Audi A4, VW Passat, one or two others. Cars tend to have low mileage here and owners usually maintain them pretty well, so a 5 to 10 year old car can be in relatively decent condition.

Then yesterday I spotted a couple of Porsches. Each is 15 years old, which would account for their $200,000 asking price. Double the budget I've set for myself, it would be a stretch. But they're Porsches. One was a C2, the other a 964, both convertibles. I've never owned a Porsche, and deep into my 27th mid life crisis, it's difficult to say no.

But it is double the budget that I arbitrarily set. Annual registration will cost more, insurance will cost more, gas will undoubtedly cost more.

Of course, it is a Porsche. And no one has ever accused me of being sensible. No one that lived, anyway ....

Aside from the regular news sources, all day I've been waiting for a post from Mango Sauce. And here it is:

Thaksin's looting spree has finally been brought to an end by the Thai authorities and no one seems sorry to see him go - except foreign heads of state.

As vintage tanks rumbled towards Government House, panicking officials at the Finance Ministry were seen removing large piles of documents. With the shredders working overtime, it could take months or even years to track down Thaksin's billions.

The unpopular Prime Minister left Thailand last week in a chartered Airbus loaded with all his household goods and personal effects. It's pretty clear that he knew it was a one-way trip.

........

Those concerned about the arrogant little shit's welfare will be relieved to learn that he and his family are safe and well in their lavish new London home.

I was up late last night, expecting some major announcements to come out of my company's head office. At 2 AM, I checked the Blackberry and, sure enough, the first of what I expect will be several had arrived.

Then I figured I'd do a quick news check and saw the info about the coup in Thailand. Ran back into the bedroom, told T what was going on, and switched on CNN. Back to the computer to look for more details.

I thought she'd be concerned, worried about family and friends, all that kind of stuff. When I returned to the bedroom she had switched over from CNN to HBO and was watching one of the Chuckie movies. I didn't ask, but I suspected this was due to a combination of her thinking that she and everyone she knows are so far down the line in Thai society that this would not impact them plus the general Thai "mai pen lai" attitude.

My own thoughts - On the one hand, the King showing his support for the coup leader may not be the most positive thing in the world, showing support for a coup rather than the democratic process and the rule of law. On the other hand, it was long past time for Thaksin to be gone and it was clear the only way he would be gone would be to be dragged out kicking and screaming. And perhaps the King's visible show of support for the mutineers will prevent Thaksin from trying to assemble his loyalists and attempting to re-seize power by force. So far there has been no bloodshed and hopefully it will remain that way. On the other hand, with martial law declared, the constitution has been suspended and Parliament has been "terminated." I hope that this is a very short term thing.

(And I can't help but wonder if this means that soon the bars will once again be allowed to remain open all night?)

I was surprised to receive an answer from SCMP that was written directly to me, and on the same day that I sent my email to them.

Thank you for taking the time and the trouble to write us this excellent
letter. I publish provocative correspondence from people like Mr Straw
partly because it prompts people like your good self to respond, and
keeps the debate on global warming (an important issue) going on our
letters pages.
I'm delighted that you checked the facts and have come up with this
information. As a one-[person] show with an overflowing inbox and many
correspondents who need help in making themselves understood, it's hard
to check every detail, although I swear I do my best.

I do intend to send an answer tomorrow. Whether it will be a "thanks for taking the time to answer" or a "you should give more thought to the consequences of publishing unsubstantiated 'provocative correspondence'" - I have yet to decide.

Letter to the editor of the South China Morning Poop:

I cannot figure out why the SCMP publishes letters from people who have either got their facts wrong or incomplete. Have the editors decided that basic fact-checking is not necessary when it involves the "Letters" section?

In the most recent (but by no means only) example, a Richard Straw holds up the work of Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas as proof that there is no global warming. Aside from the obvious - thousands of scientists have proclaimed global warming as fact and only a small handful have not - had someone taken just three seconds to check Baliunas' bio on Wikipedia, you would have learned that Ms. Baliunas is in the employ of the American Petroleum Institute and a member of nine organizations that receive funding from the petroleum industry. In terms of the "peer review" of their paper:

"13 of the authors of the papers Baliunas and Soon cited refuted her interpretation of their work, and several editors of "Climate Research", the journal which published the paper, resigned in protest at a flawed peer review process which allowed the publication. The
observations used by Baliunas and Soon in respect of MWP and LIA are often not temperature proxies but indications of wet or dry; Mann et al. argue that their failure to ensure that the proxies reflect temperature renders the assessment suspect. More recently, Osborn and
Briffa repeated the Baliunas and Soon study but restricted themselves to records that were validated as temperature proxies, and came to a different result."

Bob Carter's scientific credentials may be "impeccable" but only in the area of mollusks and he is a member of a group that is funded by the Australian petroleum industry.

Note that Mr. Straw does not mention what business he is engaged in either.

So I'm left to wonder why you've wasted about 5 column inches on this nonsense.

Coupla foodie eye-openers, courtesy of the NY Times.

First, a diet tip for those who visit Starbucks:

A venti — or 20-ounce — Caffè Mocha with whipped cream has 490 calories, equivalent to a Quarter Pounder with cheese. And a 24-ounce Java Chip Frappuccino with whipped cream has 650 calories, not to mention almost an entire day’s allowance of saturated fat.

According to the center, a nutritional advocacy group, the Frappuccino is equivalent in calories to a McDonald’s coffee plus 11 of their creamers and 29 packets of sugar.

Last night, we were watching Jamie Oliver's Italian show and I started feeling this desperate urge to go to Italy (which I've never visited) and sit in some cafe in some small town on some rocky coast and just indulge in pasta and pizza and wine and ... and ... and then I read this article in the Times about Ferran Adria and maybe I should be going to Spain first. Not simply because Joel Rubichon says that Adria is the best chef in the world. Consider this astonishing information:

trompe l’oeil like an elliptical olive that is actually pure liquid, or golden beads of caviar made from olive oil, or stark white pine cone mousse, or Parmesan snow.

or what about this:

So, seeing chicken curry as a concept and determining to do something that hadn’t been done before, he developed a dish, now famous, in which the sauce is solid and the chicken liquid.

Huh??? I can barely even begin to imagine what this would look or taste like but I think I need to find out. How does he do it? Here's one example:

The olive is made by a process Mr. Adrià calls spherification, a result of three years of steady work with the goal of containing liquids in their own microthin skin. Thus it is olive juice — puréed olive, strained and formed into an olive shape — that holds itself together just until you press it between your tongue and palate.

After years of consuming olive oil by the gallon, I am only now just getting into the concept of eating olives (believe it or not) and now I find out there's this?

What else is there? The olive in yet another guise: a silvery coiled spring of salted olive oil, looking like a mini-Slinky and as crunchy as a hard candy, which it effectively is. Also, a thin, brittle basket of solidified passion fruit juice, filled with the essence of tangerine, as floral as a basket of lilies; a bed of savory pine nut ice cream topped with the liquid of nascent pine nuts (a result, in part, of the work of 20 or 30 members of the kitchen staff who spend 30 minutes or more in the morning, cleaning freshly gathered local pine cones); the Parmesan snow, served in a stylishly wrapped plastic-foam box — the better to keep it cold — and topped with, of all things, muesli with dried fruits; a frozen sugar eggshell filled with crunchy coconut and ice cream flavored with the wood from barrels used to make bourbon; and about 25 others.

As I sit here munching on my Pret sandwich, I console myself by thinking, "well, at least I've cut McDonald's out of my diet." Pretty fucking small consolation.

Okay, okay, I know, a third of the world goes to sleep hungry every night and people are dying from starvation every day, do I even have a right to go on about this fancy schmancy kind of stuff?

Screw that, one day I will get to this place.

Not much going on today but I enjoyed this article in the L.A. Times. It's a sidebar to a longer piece about Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone. ("They are sons of strong women. Both have sparred publicly with their heirs, both are plotting to conquer China, and both seem to view immortality as their best succession plan.") Some quotes:

If media moguls Sumner M. Redstone and Rupert Murdoch worry about their mortality, they have a rejuvenating remedy: They both have wives who are about half their own age.

The 83-year-old Redstone married his second wife, Paula Fortunato, a former New York schoolteacher who is now 44, in 2003.

Murdoch, 75, took his third wife, Wendi Deng, in 1999. The former executive at News Corp.'s Asian satellite service is 37.

Call it the "fountain of youth effect," said Stuart Fischoff, professor emeritus of media psychology at Cal State L.A.

He says younger wives can be revitalizing for aging lions. "It's a generalized arouser, giving a sense of purpose, a new spirit … a new inspiration," he said.

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

Deng's effect on Murdoch also should not be underestimated. After News Corp. purchased DirecTV in 2003, Deng, who is of Chinese descent, hired feng shui experts to rid the El Segundo headquarters of bad vibes. Murdoch had installed a new president, but the feng shui experts considered his office overlooking the ocean and the mountains unlucky, given his date of birth. So he was moved to an office with a view of a parking garage and a sewage treatment plant.

The chief financial officer was forced to give up an office with an adjoining bathroom because the feng shui experts concluded that DirecTV's profit, which had been negligible, was being sucked down the toilet.

I imagine said president and CFO have some pretty choice words for Mrs. Murdoch.

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

Probably good reading: How Bush Rules: Chronicle of a Radical Regime by Sidney Blumenthal.

In a series of columns and essays that renowned journalist and former presidential adviser Sidney Blumenthal wrote in the three years following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a unifying theme began to emerge: that Bush, billed by himself and by many others as a conservative, is in fact a radical--more radical than any president in American history. In How Bush Rules, Blumenthal provides a trenchant and vivid account of the progression of Bush's radical style--from his reliance on one-party rule and his unwillingness to allow internal debate to his elevation of the power of the vice president.

Taking readers through pivotal events such as the hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the rise of the foreign-policy neoconservatives, Abu Ghraib, the war on science, the Jack Abramoff scandal, and the catastrophic mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, the book tracks a consistent policy that calls for the president to have complete authority over independent federal agencies and to remain unbound by congressional oversight or even the law.

In an incisive and powerful introduction, Blumenthal argues that these radical actions are not haphazard, but deliberately intended to fundamentally change the presidency and the government. He shows not only the historical precedents for radical governing, but also how Bush has taken his methods to unique extremes. With its penetrating account of a critical new era in American leadership, How Bush Rules is a devastating appraisal of the Bush presidency.

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

And related good reading (excerpt below):

Bush’s torture policy is a centerpiece of his effort to concentrate unfettered power in the executive, an overarching change justified by an executive order declaring that in his role as commander-in-chief in wartime he can make and enforce laws at will. In my new book, “How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime,” I present and analyze the history of Bush’s radical attempt to impose an imperial presidency.

Now, after the Supreme Court has ruled that Bush’s dismissal of the Geneva Conventions and his kangaroo court military commissions for detainees are illegal, the president is trying to force the Congress to reinstate them through legislation. Republicans on the Senate Armed Service Committee are in revolt, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell issued a public letter saying that Bush’s position throws into “doubt” the “moral” basis of his “war on terror.”

The FBI forbids its agents from participating in any way in interrogation of detainees because of agents’ experience of what they considered torture. One agent in an email to bureau officials on August 2, 2004 described what he witnessed at the Guantanamo detainee prison camp: “On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more.” In one case, he said, “The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night.”

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

And speaking of arousers, I definitely enjoyed this review in the NY Times of the new solo album by Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas. Here it is in full, with a couple of bits highlighted by me:

“The Dutchess” is Fergie’s solo debut. But since will.i.am, a fellow Black Eyed Pea, produced most of the tracks and appears on a few, it’s essentially a Black Eyed Peas album with two fewer rappers. That’s an improvement: two down, two to go.

Meet Fergie: former child star, former aspiring pop star, former crystal meth addict. (O.K., so that last one isn’t exactly a claim to fame, but it does spice up her biography.) When she joined the Black Eyed Peas, they were a lightweight rap group trying to find an audience. Now, thanks in no small part to her sung choruses, they are probably the most popular lightweight rap group of all time. The first single from “The Dutchess,” a blithe rap track called “London Bridge,” swiftly scaled Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.

The planned follow-up is “Fergalicious,” and like much of the album, it relies on an oddly effective bad-news-good-news strategy. When Fergie delivers a rap based on the 1988 J. J. Fad hit “Supersonic,” things seem pretty dire. (The worst thing about hearing the word “Fergalicious” for the first time? The dreadful certainty that you’ll hear it again.) But will.i.am sneaks in a flickering melody line, and by the time the chorus arrives, with its quick blast of multitracked vocals, the clouds have parted. She’s shameless, he’s meticulous: it’s not a bad combination.

You could say the album has something for everyone. Fans can savor “Glamorous” (an airy Ludacris collaboration) and “Clumsy,” which cleverly twists a Little Richard sample. Foes can savor the awful lyrics, especially in “Mary Jane Shoes,” a reggae tribute to marijuana, and “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” an otherwise pleasant ballad. Somehow she murmurs, “It’s time to be a big girl now/ Big girls don’t cry” without collapsing into giggles. Even if you’re feeling Fergiecidal, you have to admit that’s quite a feat. KELEFA SANNEH

Back home. Once again, no beautiful woman sitting next to me but for a change the guy sitting next to me was chatty and informative. He gave me tips on some Sydney restaurants and a holiday in Tasmania that sounds like a must-do. Too bad I wasn't sitting next to him on the way there instead of the way back!

Going through immigration, they stuck some new sticker into my passport. If I'm reading this correctly, it means that now I can use the e-channel when entering and leaving HK even though I don't have PR yet. That will be nice, especially at the Shenzhen crossings.

Saturday night, Bar 109 of course. Sitting upstairs, we were joined by several guys, a couple of whom were seriously shitfaced, but fun nonetheless. As they were quite notably sans females, at first I was a bit hesitant about going off to the toilet and leaving T alone with them. But I saw, shitfaced or not, they were all right. Coupla mojitos hit the spot for me.

Sunday night, needed a good meal for my first dinner back home, something Asian style. So we went to Under Bridge for the chili & garlic crab plus a plate of clams in black bean sauce. It was just delicious, could not have been better.

I did not break down to buy a new 5.5G iPod because the changes are not enough. I did buy the new iPod games, haven't tried them yet but soon will, I'm a Bejeweled junkie and a coupla others will also provide good entertainment on the road.

But, okay, consumeritis struck and I did get a 2G Nano, the 8 GB one, using the logic that having double the storage in that size made it worthwhile. Doncha just know, the 2G Nano is every so slightly wider and longer than the 1G, so the case I have doesn't fit. Boogers.

Have heard that iTunes 7 is buggy but so far I've only had one (minor) problem with it - trying to drag and drop artwork from Firefox doesn't work now, I have to save the jpegs and then add them manually. (Their new download artwork feature ain't working for me because of the naming convention I use on my albums.) Some have complained that it takes noticeably longer to transfer music now, I'll agree with that. But the gapless playback option is something that I badly needed, very happy to have it!

Australia is beautiful. Great weather. Almost everyone speaks English. Great food choices. Great things to do. Healthy lifestyle. Prostitution is legal. And I enjoy my visits here twice a year.

We had an office party at a neighboring pub last night. Our own room so everyone who was there was in that room was from the company. Lots of people came up to ask if I was new, to introduce themselves to me, to thank me for the work I'd done and that my team does on their behalf. Several people asked me if I wanted to live there and were shocked when I said no.

One reason (that I didn't state) - we have some new ladies in the office. Really tall, not model-beautiful but not hard on the eyes either. Not one of them said one word to me or even glanced in my direction, even when I tried looking in their direction and trying to catch their eye with a smile. They all went about their business, ignoring me.

Second reason - at my hotel last night, there was some sort of party in the ballroom. Lots of 20-somethings. Guys in suits and some in tuxes. Women in party dresses and evening gowns. Lots of cleavage. I mean LOTS. And it seemed like they were all six feet tall with long hair. Lots of them stood outside, crowding the entrance, to smoke. And as I came and went, having to snake my way through the crowd, no eye contact, not even once. "The man who wasn't there."

Third reason - walking up George Street last night, passing a somewhat hip night spot, "@stablishment," again, lots of girls hanging outside either smoking or waiting to get in. Asian women as well as Caucasian. Again, I pass completely unnoticed.

I'm just not used to that. I'm just an ordinary white guy in a crowd of millions. I'm not special. I like being special. I like being noticed, even if it's sometimes for the wrong reasons. And yes, okay, it's fucking shallow. SFW? That's how I feel. At least a little eye contact, a little smile as I pass and smile, but noooo, nada, nothing, zilch.

(Actually, there have been times that I have thought that if I was married and that part of my life was settled, Oz would be a good place to live. But, if T and I were to stay together, I know she would hate it here. I just know she'd feel too far away from home, too far away from family and friends, too far away from the things that make her comfortable.)

Extras, season 2 (already announced as the final season) has commenced:

Orlando Bloom: What were you rolling your eyes at?

Maggie: Just all that lot, all,"oooo", fawning all over you, that must get a bit exhausting, eh?

OB: Yeah, it can be pretty exhausting, yeah.

M: I suppose because they're just doing it because you're famous.

OB: Well, they're not doing it just cause I'm famous.

M: No, but it is, no, isn't it?

OB: No, it's my looks as well.

M: I just don't think they would be acting like that if you weren't a film star.

OB: Yeah, they pretty much would. Yeah, I've always had attention.

M: No, all I'm saying is, if you were the prop boy, you'd just get ignored.

OB: What? With this face? I wouldn't get ignored. I'll tell you who does get ignored - Johnny Depp. On the set of Pirates of the Caribbean, the birds just walked straight past him, "get out of the bloody way whoever you are we wanna get to Orlando!" They were around me like flies around shit.

M: They ignored Johnny Depp?

OB: Yeah. They kept going, "Oh, Orlando, who's that freak over there that we didn't notice?" I'm going, "It's Johnny Depp." They're going, "phh, who cares? you were Legolas in Lord of the Rings!" "Ooo, look at me, I make arthouse movies! Oooo, I've got scissors for hands!" Willie Wonka? Johnny Wanker!

Madame Chiang has asked for seven current favorite songs. For me, I turn to a playlist on my ipod called "current faves" and am picking seven at random.

Doves - Almost Forgot Myself
Elbow - Forget Myself
Robert Plant - I Believe
Depeche Mode - John the Revelator
Basement Jaxx - Hush Boy
Neil Young - Prairie Wind
Linda Ronstadt & Ann Savoy - Walk Away Renee

bonus - current guilty pleasure: Jessica Simpson - A Public Affair

Let me also note there are several albums I've grabbed in recent weeks that I'm in the process of exploring and expect quite a few changes to the "current faves" playlist once I've absorbed these a bit more:

Elton John - The Captain and the Kid
Scissor Sisters - Ta-Dah!
Bob Seger - Face the Promise
Justin Timberlake - Future Sex
Kasabian - Empire
Lambchop - Damaged
M. Ward - Post-War
Michael Brook - RockPaperScissors
Yo La Tengo - I'm Not Afraid and I Will Kick Your Ass

I ain't taggin' anyone but share on your blog or in comments here if'n ya feels likes it.

I'm lucky enough to have reached a space where I get to do my business travel at a fairly luxe level. (Of course it spoils me rotten in terms of holiday travel.)

My hotel room affords me a front-row center view of Sydney's famous bridge and opera house. These two shots were both taken from my hotel room.



(Though in at least a dozen visits here in the past 5 years I have yet to have time to do the Bridge walk.)

Another case in point, tonight's dinner. At a restaurant in Crow's Nest called La Grillade. I'm told that during the day, this place fills up with media people.

I started with tuna tataki, which did not resemble any traditional tataki dish at all and yet was incredibly tasty. Large, almost paper thin slices, lightly seared, marinated, served over cold noodles and some veggies.

Next, not having had steak for awhile, a 250 gram black angus eye fillet, cooked to perfection, with a red wine mushroom sauce, a seriously good tasting steak, some roasted mushrooms, long beans and mash on the side. Sometimes I have to remind myself that Oz is as famous for its beef as for its seafood. And that with steak, it really is a matter of "you get what you pay for."

Topped off by a chocolate mousse on light pastry base with pistachio anglaise.

Accompanied by a glass of Veuve champagne, followed by a french Pouilly-Fousse (or, as Cheech and Chong once called it, "that fussy pussy wine"), followed by an Australian shiraz, followed by (I think) a German riesling dessert wine. Sorry, names and vintages escape me as I was somewhat toasted by the end of the meal. I didn't see the final bill but would estimate that the meal for the three of us cost at least Aus$750.

The only downside is that with my decreasing tolerance for alcohol, I was back in the hotel and asleep at 10:30, awake at 2 AM, and now trying to get sleepy again and grab a few more hours of sleep because at 9 AM I've got the meeting which is the entire reason for the trip.

So, having checked email and written this bit, back to bed, read a bit, hopefully get sleepy and get 3 or 4 more hours of sleep before heading back to the office ...

First, Iraq, led off by this comment left by "mw" on an earlier post: "I pretty much follow Tom Friedman of the NYT on this: here was a great opportunity, and look how we've handled out it. "

Actually, while I admire Friedman, I don't read his stuff because I don't feel like paying for "Times Select." But it does touch on something that I've tried to explain here before.

It SHOULD be possible to be FOR the war in Iraq and AGAINST Bush and his wicked elves. But the CONservatives insist on politicizing this, casting matters in black and white and with no shades of grey.

Putting aside the matter of whether we should have gone there in the first place (and we still have not been provided either with a reasonable justification or an apology for getting things so wrong), since we have been there we have done everything wrong. Should we exit now, we will leave a mass slaughter in our wake and I don't know how that could be acceptable to anyone.

But it should be obvious that we have done a shitty job and someone else should be put in charge and maybe some other people can bring some order to the chaos that we helped to create.

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

So, as promised, first thing I did was check on the Apple product announcements. Disappointed! The top of the line iPod is expanded to 80 gig, with a "brighter" screen and some games. But the screen is still the same size. This is the first new iPod release that doesn't make me want to rush out the door and get one yesterday. I've also decided on holding off on buying a second device like the Archos because I'm just not sure how much I'll use it.

These days, I don't walk out of the house without mobile phone, blackberry, camera, ipod. When I travel, half of my suitcase is filled with chargers, plug adapters and cables. Enough is enough.

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

For those who are interested in such mundane matters, it appears that when I return from Sydney, T will be moving in with me. Further, it appears that she is willing to give up her night job and get a day job instead. Last night I sent her an SMS from the airport as I was about to board the plane. She responded by calling me instead of sending a message, and she was at home, not out. She thinks she's found a small lunch counter kind of place willing to hire her as a cook - cooking seems to be the greatest love in her life after her family.

So right now, it's all good. It's all VERY good.

Crooks and Liars has the video and a transcript of a Keith Olbermann editorial on MSNBC. Some excerpts:

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government, by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation’s wounds, but to take political advantage.

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.

The President — and those around him — did that.

They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, "bi-partisanship" meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused; as appeasers; as those who, in the Vice President’s words yesterday, "validate the strategy of the terrorists."

They promised protection, and then showed that to them "protection" meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken… a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated Al-Qaeda as much as we did.

The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had ’something to do’ with 9/11, is "lying by implication." The impolite phrase, is "impeachable offense."

Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space… and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.

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

When those who dissent are told time and time again — as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus — that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American…

When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"… look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:

Who has left this hole in the ground?
We have not forgotten, Mr. President.
You have.
May this country forgive you.

Over at Salon, Sidney Blumenthal writes that George Bush "has become the most radical president in American history - and arguably the worst."

Rasmussen Reports, a public opinion polling firm, says:

The number of Americans calling themselves Republican has fallen to its lowest level in more than two-and-a-half years. Just 31.9% of American adults now say they’re affiliated with the GOP. That’s down from 37.2% in October 2004 and 34.5% at the beginning of 2006. These results come from Rasmussen Reports tracking surveys of 15,000 voters per month and have a margin of sampling error smaller than a percentage point.

Just look at the Republicans who held office since 1968. Richard Nixon destabilized Southeast Asia by illegally bombing Cambodia and Laos, directly resulting in the genocide in Cambodia, not to mention illegally wiretapped his perceived enemies and obstructed federal investigations; even his vice president had to resign to avoid prosecution. Gerald Ford was relatively harmless; his plan to combat inflation was for everyone to wear buttons that said "WIN". Ronald Reagan sold massive amounts of weapons to our enemies to fund an illegal war in South America and increased the budget deficit beyond anyone's wildest imagination. George Bush I pardoned those involved in Iran-Contra so that he would escape prosecution himself, raised taxes despite repeated pledges not to, helping to usher in a major recession. George Bush II repeatedly lied to the American public, ignored warnings that Al Qaeda would attack, allowed Bin Laden to escape, established secret prisons in which people are tortured, started a war with no justification and is responsible for more deaths than Bin Laden many times over.

Who would want to admit to being a Republican?

Decided to spend the evening of September 11th drunk enough to not think about it, or at least to be able to focus on other things and be happy. I succeeded. Tonight I'm off to Sydney, back home Saturday.

When I reach my hotel Wednesday afternoon, will be able to see what Apple's new product announcements were on Tuesday in the U.S. The Unofficial Apple Weblog has this possible agenda, but who can really say for sure?

• Welcoming of Media Members
• Discussion on iTunes software, iTMS integration into iTunes, and iTMS sales and facts.
• Announcement of iTunes version 7.0
• Announces better search feature for Music Store
• Announces Movie Store. Available Immediately will be movies from Disney and Pixar, among other studios.
• New iPod Nano Announcement (nice brushed casing, while it will have same features as first gen, only a longer battery life)
• New iPod Announcement (Widescreen, Bluetooth, and featuring virtual touchweel. Does not include Wi-Fi, or any other protocols)
• One More Thing....TubePort. A $99 2-piece set that includes a dongle that connects via USB to your mac, and another dongle that connects via included HD cables or regular Component cables to your TV. The movie is accessed on your Mac via an iDisk-like storage component hosted by Apple.
  

Jobs will then explain the pricing structure of the Movie Store. Movies will be available as either a smaller iPod-format (which will cost $9.99 per movie), or as a larger, streamed movie to be streamed to your TV via TubePort. This cost $14.99 per movie. To purchase an iPod-formatted movie and a streamed version of the same movie, it will cost you $19.99."

If there is indeed a wide screen video iPod, will I buy it? In part that will depend on if they up the storage from the present 60 gig to a possible 80 gig. I have a hard enough time fitting the music I want onto the current 60 gig one, no space left for videos.

But then ... I would have to deal with the notion of converting all my AVI's to QuickTime, a very non-quick pain in the rear. The newest Archos PMP models are out, including the lovely looking boringly named 604. 4.3" 16:9 screen, plays most video formats, 30 gigs, semi-decent battery life. Or there's the 504, which is available with a 160 gig drive. Have heard rumors that the 504 could feature a touchscreen and WiFi. Did not ask in any of the shops in Wanchai because I was afraid I'd end up buying one then and there. The question being, how badly do I need this, geek quotient aside?

September 11th, 2001. I had moved back to HK just three weeks earlier. That night, I was having dinner in a McDonalds in Quarry Bay when my phone rang. It was my mother. "I heard something on the news. They said the World Trade Center is on fire." Well, why get worked up about a fire? Aside from which, my mother often gets things wrong, or at least sideways.

I finished my dinner, went home, played some computer games for awhile. Then I remembered her call and figured I'd switch on CNN for a bit to see what was going on. It was about 5 minutes before the first tower came down.

In previous years, there had been times when I had been inside the WTC every day. I knew dozens, if not hundreds of people, who worked there or nearby or passed through the buildings for one reason or another. It took a few days of frantic emails and phone calls; eventually I was able to ascertain that a family member of one friend had died but that everyone else I knew had escaped - some just barely.

So, five years later. Many thousands of dead later. The person responsible has not been caught or killed. We're not even close to catching him.

Tonight I will give thanks once again for all the people I know who survived. I'll mourn for those who are gone. I'll reflect on where the past five years have (and haven't) taken us. I will probably be assisted with this thanking, mourning and reflecting by ingesting improper amounts of beverages containing more than a little alcoholic content.

(The story is a few days old but I feel like writing about it.)

Republicans continue to prove there is no depth so low to which they will sink in order to maintain their hold on power and continue their almost 40-year attempt to subvert and destroy the United States.

This is from the Seattle Times but has been widely covered elsewhere:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld compared critics of the Bush administration to those who sought to appease the Nazis before World War II, warning Tuesday that the United States is confronting "a new type of fascism."

And here is Rumsfeld in 1983:


The Raw Story:

...Well before Rumsfeld's trip, Amnesty International had reported the dictator's use of torture -- "beating, burning, sexual abuse and the infliction of electric shocks" -- on hundreds of political prisoners. Dozens more had been summarily executed or had "disappeared." American intelligence agencies knew that Saddam had used chemical weapons to gas both Iraqi Kurds and Iranians.

As always, the Republican party ignores ethical considerations as all they care about is enriching themselves and their friends. They are willing to literally shake hands with the devil if there's a buck to be made. And then they accuse their opponents of the very sins they are guilty of!

Some of you may already be aware that in the US, the ABC network (owned by Disney) will be broadcasting a docudrama called "The Path to 9/11." They are promoting this as "the official true story." They are also selling this to TV stations around the world; I don't know if anyone has bought it for the HK market but I wouldn't be surprised.

The problem is, it is filled with fictions, omissions and outright lies. The lies include things like Clinton being too distracted by the Lewinsky scandal to deal with the terrorist threat and the CIA being about to capture Bin Laden and being called off by Democratic leaders. The omissions include the August 6, 2001 report to Bush about Bin Laden that he decided to ignore. The fictions include invented conversations, words put into the mouths of public figures that they never actually said, and entire events. The screenwriter, in an interview, admits to making things up.

In 2002, the so called "Center For Popular Culture," headed by David Horowitz, a friend of Karl Rove, announced that they would begin a PR campaign to place the blame for 9/11 on Clinton. This is one of the results of their efforts.

Max Blumenthal:

"The Path to 9/11" is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11's director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to "transform Hollywood" in line with its messianic vision.

Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC contracted David Cunningham as the film's director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). The young Cunningham helped found an auxiliary of his father's group called The Film Institute (TFI), which, according to its mission statement, is "dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Televisionindustry." As part of TFI's long-term strategy, Cunningham helped place interns from Youth With A Mission's in film industry jobs "so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out," according to a YWAM report.

ABC, being well aware of what they are about to broadcast, provided preview copies to prominent right wing mouthpieces and pundits but refused to provide advance copies to many of those depicted in the movie, including Clinton and Albright. Clinton's lawyer:

Despite several requests to view the miniseries, we have not been given the courtesy of seeing it. This is particularly troubling given the reputation of Cyrus Nowrasteh, the drama’s writer/producer. Mr. Nowrasteh has been criticized for inaccurately portraying historical events in the past. In response to previous criticism, he has even said, “I made a conscious effort not to contact any members of the Administration because I didn’t want them to stymie my efforts.” Indeed, while we have not been given the courtesy of a viewing, based upon reports from people who have seen the drama you plan to air, we understand that there are at least three significant factual errors:

-- The drama leads viewers to believe that National Security Advisor Sandy Berger told the CIA that he would not authorize them to take a shot at bin Laden. This is complete fiction and the event portrayed never happened. First of all, the 9/11 Commission Report makes clear that CIA Director George Tenet had been directed by President Clinton and Mr. Berger to get bin Laden (p. 199 & 508-509). Secondly, Roger Cressy, National Security Council senior director for counterterrorism from 1999-2001, has said, on more than one occasion, “Mr. Clinton approved every request made of him by the CIA and the U.S. military involving using force against bin Laden and al-Qaeda.”

In addition, ABC’s own counter-terrorism consultant, Richard Clarke, has said that contrary to the movie:

1) No US military or CIA personnel were on the ground in Afghanistan and saw bin Laden;

2) The head of the Northern Alliance, Masood, was nowhere near the alleged bin Laden camp and did not see bin Laden; and

3) CIA Director Tenet said that he could not recommend a strike on the camp because the information was single-sourced and there would be no way to know if bin Laden was in the target area by the time a cruise missile hit it.

As Clarke and others will corroborate, President Clinton did in fact approve of a standing plan to use Afghans who worked for the CIA to capture bin Laden. The CIA’s Afghan operatives were never able to carry out the operation and the CIA recommended against inserting Agency personnel to do it. The Department of Defense, when asked by President Clinton to examine the use of US troops to capture bin Laden, also recommended against that option.

-- The drama claims that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright refused to sanction a missile strike against bin Laden without first alerting the Pakistanis and notified them over the objections of the military. Again, this is false.

-- Using newsreel footage of President Clinton, the drama insinuates that President Clinton was too pre-occupied with the impeachment and the Lewinsky matter to be engaged in pursuing bin Laden. This allegation is absurd and was directly refuted by ABC News consultant Richard Clarke in his book, Against All Enemies: “Clinton made clear that we were to give him our best national security advice without regard to his personal problems. ‘Do you recommend that we strike on the 20th? Fine. Do not give me political advice or personal advice about the timing. That’s my problem. Let me worry about that.’ If we thought this was the best time to hit the Afghan camps, he would order it and take the heat.”

FBI agent Thomas Nicoletti resigned as a consultant to the movie. He states that the first FBI agent the producers approached reviewed the script and declined to participate. Nicoletti was hired, informed the producers of various inaccuracies in the script, and resigned after the producers did not make all of the changes.

Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the 9/11 Commission, is interviewed here, where he states, "there are many scenes ... that just didn't happen. It was quite clear in the 9/11 Commission report states that Clinton authorized the CIA and the American forces to get Bin Laden - capture or kill - and this mini-series does not depict it accurately. There are errors, there are mischaracterizations ... the commission's report comes to the opposite conclusion and that is that the Lewinsky affair did not deter him from launching missile attacks at Bin Laden's strongholds in Afganistan and elsewhere and yet at the time Clinton was attacked for trying to ... distract away from the Lewinsky affair and so this is very inaccurate and unfair in that regard."

Scholastic has decided to pull materials they had prepared for classroom discussions because the program does not meet their standards.

Even some Conservatives are not letting their political beliefs stand in the way of truth and are speaking out against this fiction.

Bill Bennett on CNN told Soledad O'Brien that there is “no reason to falsify the record” or “falsify conversations” in ABC’s “Path to 9/11.” “When ABC comes out and has conversations taking place among cabinet members on recent history,” Bennett said, “I think they should correct those inaccuracies.”

Prominent historians are also speaking up:

Dear Robert Iger:

We write as professional historians, who are deeply concerned by the continuing reports about ABC's scheduled broadcast of "The Path to 9/11." These reports document that this drama contains numerous flagrant falsehoods about critical events in recent American history. The key participants and eyewitnesses to these events state that the script distorts and even fabricates evidence into order to mislead viewers about the responsibility of numerous American officials for allegedly ignoring the terrorist threat before 2000.

The claim by the show's producers, broadcaster, and defenders, that these falsehoods are permissible because the show is merely a dramatization, is disingenuous and dangerous given their assertions that the show is also based on authoritative historical evidence. Whatever ABC's motivations might be, broadcasting these falsehoods, connected to the most traumatic historical event of our times, would be a gross disservice to the public. A responsible broadcast network should have nothing to do with the falsification of history, except to expose it. We strongly urge you to halt the show's broadcast and prevent misinforming Americans about their history.

Sincerely,
Arthur Schlesinger
Sean Wilentz, Princeton University
Michael Kazin, Georgetown University
Lizbeth Cohen, Harvard University,
Nicholas Salvatore, Cornell University;
Ted Widmer, Washington College;
Rick Perlstein, Independent Scholar;
David Blight, Yale University;
Eric Alterman, City University of New York;
Beverly Gage, Yale University.

On the other hand, at least one CONservative I know is suggesting that it's a First Amendment issue. I was not aware that the First Amendment protected the presentation of lies as facts.

My suggestion to all - if this is aired in your home town, your time would be better spent watching Scooby Doo 2.

The template is always the same. A music star from the 50s or 60s who has been off the radar for decades mounts a comeback by doing a duets album with his more famous fans. The combination sometimes works, sometimes not so much.

Jerry Lee Lewis has spent the last decade or two in and out of hospitals, the subject of a bad biopic and, if he's thought of at all these days, it's usually as the punchline to a joke. But in the 50s, as one of the cornerstones of Sun Records, his combination of boogie woogie r 'n' b and country laid down one of the key templates for rock & roll. In the 60s, when pop music turned its back on him because his wild ways were just too wild, he took refuge in Nashville, recording a series of successful country records.

Now he's 71 years old and made an album called Last Man Standing. Who has he signed up for this comeback?

Well, the album kicks off with a cover of Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll," with Jimmy Page on lead guitar. Following that, there are duets with Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, Neil Young, Robbie Robertson, John Fogerty, Ringo Starr, Kid Rock, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Delaney Bramlett, B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Don Henley. His Nashville years are represented by duets with Merle Haggard, George Jones, Willie Nelson, Toby Keith.

The two stand-out tracks so far are "I Saw Her Standing There" with Little Richard and "The Pilgrim Chapter 33" with Kris Kristofferson; the former because it's the first time to my knowledge that these two have recorded together and the latter because the lyrics just fit Lewis so well and his voice, now quite shaky on slower songs, fits the lyrics perfectly.

One mark of his true talent may be that, with all of the big names so prominent on the cover, when you hear this, it is undeniably a Jerry Lee Lewis record.

Okay, so with Bob Dylan just scoring his first number one album in 30 years, what are the prospects for this album? It won't be number one, it won't be in the top ten, but it will garner enough attention and sales to give Mr. Lewis one last well deserved peak in a career that has spanned more than 50 years. Good on him.

Two other albums have caught my ear this morning - Post War by M. Ward, someone I've always planned to spend more time listening to, this could be the one; and This Binary Universe by bt, an ambitious non-danceable work by a dj and remixer I've liked for quite some time, will need to hear a couple of times to decide if it's genius or crap.

Oh, the new Evanescence album sounds like more o' the same, which in their case ain't a bad thing, at least not until it'll be done to death by the cover bands in Wanchai.

Coming soon on DVD ... Maybe you're like me and bought the three legit boxed sets containing all the James Bond movies (except Die Another Day and Casino Royale) years back. Or maybe you went to Shenzhen and bought one of the cheapo pirate 20+ disc boxed sets for 200 RMB or less. With a new Bond movie about to come out and a need to milk the catalog around Christmas time, there will be a new series of boxes, 5 movies per box, each a 2 disc set with DTS sound and tons o' extras, dubbed "Ultimate Edition" (until the HD and Blu-Ray versions come out, I suppose). Once again they're not putting the titles in chronological or alphabetical order, which means you can't get just the Sean Connery ones or arrange things smoothly on your shelf.
Box 1 has Goldfinger, World is Not Enough, Diamonds Are Forever, Man With the Golden Gun, Living Daylights. Box 2 is Thunderball, Die Another Day, Spy Who Loved Me, View to a Kill, License to Kill. These are both out in November, the rest in December.

December also sees an extended edition of Bertolucci's The Conformist, which I will buy. Inconvenient Truth comes out in November, ditto.

Meanwhile WB has an 8 disc box coming out of the 4 Chris Reeve Superman flix - 4 discs for the first movie, 2 discs for the second, a disc apiece for the last two. Not part of the box, available separately, a Richard Donner re-edit of the second movie, "as it was originally conceived and intended," for which I have mixed feelings, as I am a much bigger Richard Lester fan. Anyway, all of this available at end of November.

Something I don't think I'll be buying:


However, I am anxiously awaiting Apple's new product announcements on September 12th. With an ad that says "It's Showtime" almost certainly they will announce downloads of feature films from iTunes. But what else? A new iPod video with a bigger screen (which is what I'm hoping for)? A revamped iPod nano? An iPod phone? A non-exploding laptop battery? A cure for cancer?

I'll probably be en route to Sydney so I won't be able to watch people live-blog the event but I'll be checking it out immediately afterwards and (possibly) lining up at Sydney's Apple Store (they have one, right?).

One of the unexpected hazards of increasingly old age is my lowered tolerance for alcohol. Back in my college days I could (and often did) drink a pint of Cuervo Gold per day. Those days are behind me.

So, last night, dinner at Aqua. My first time to go to Aqua since it made the move across the harbor 2 or 3 years ago. Well, I don't get to that part of town as often as I used to. Anyway, the setting is spectacular, the view amazing.

The service at Aqua was surprisingly haphazard. For every course, from wine through to coffee, the servers didn't know where to put the various plates and either stood there looking perplexed or put the wrong food in front of the wrong person and someone had to come over and tell him/her who ordered what. For a restaurant with these prices and aspirations, this was unexpected. We mostly stuck with the Italian side of the menu and found the starters to be more interesting and creative than the mains. Nice wine list, fairly reasonably priced (for HK).

Final verdict: a nice place to bring out of town guests whom you want to impress but it won't be a regular stop for me.

Back across the harbor, first stop a slow night at Joe Banana to collect my Big Red Button of Doom, which a faithful reader managed to find for me during a recent Tokyo trip. I need more readers like him!

Then over to 109, settled into the back room with a mojito and some friends.

But ... 2 glasses of wine during dinner, one coke at Joe Banana, one mojito at 109, and by 11:30 I was ready to pass out. It was all I could do to wait for T to finish her drink, pay the bill and get back home and into bed, lights out and eyes closed before 12:30.

Getting old sucks.

Last night, ladies night at Maya and also Bollywood theme night. The dj's mix was a combination of bhangra and more usual stuff, with Bollywood videos on the screens all night long. Not packed but not empty either. Since Maya is owned by the same company that owns Curry Pot upstairs, some of the tapas on their menu are Indian style. There's this bread basket they do - triangles of naan cooked with minced beef and lamb and a bowl of hummus on the side - best bar snack I've ever had. Seared tuna and garlic prawns were also quite tasty. T had never been to Maya before and said maybe she likes it even more than 109. No mojitos but a nice wine list.

We chatted with the Nepalese manager of a nearby bar, she and T are friends but hadn't seen each other in awhile, she was getting very happily drunk at Maya with her boyfriend. Somehow she got on the subject of what she wears at work, saying it has to be either a mini-skirt or pants so that she can move fast, but because there are so many assholes coming to the bars, anytime she wears a short skirt, she also wears shorts underneath. And showed us. And telling us how she's going to show her legs even when she's an old woman. And how she's famous in Wanchai. Like I said, she was very happily drunk.

Well, you see, after stopping at Rock Gallery - to get the new Criterion upgrades on Seven Samurai and Amarcord and the new downgrades of the Star Wars movies (the first three films in their original, non-digitally messed up versions)(okay, I'll buy anything) - and then stopping at the computer center to get a new monitor, met up with T and went to Bar 109. Okay, I don't wanna turn this into a "I'm a Bar 109 Whore" blog but we did try three of the tapas and decided almost instantly that we want to work our way through the entire menu. Washed the food down with two mojitos.

Weird moment - walked into 109 to see buddy S sitting at one of the front tables and two friends of my ex-wife sitting at the other front table. I stopped and said hi, introduced T, then we went to the back section so we could gorge ourselves and talk in relative privacy.

Then home, TV on, mojitos taking full effect, asleep at 9 PM, awake at 11 PM, wide awake now.

So ....

Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell debate Islam vs. Christianity on the Daily Show and find their common ground - they both hate Jews!

Katrina - The Stories You Didn't Hear. Mockumentary by Bill Maher. "The little colored girl who does my nails .... drowned. Now I have to go to that Korean place!"

Every fucking blog has something about that crikey guy dying. What did he ever do that was such a big deal? No one has mentioned the death of a true giant of jazz - Dewey Redman. Situation rectified.

This story on Danwei, about a film lab technician who became a censor in China, is more entertaining than most of this summer's films.

Dark Side of the Rainbow. You kids may not know that if you watch Wizard of Oz and listen to Dark Side of the Moon, it seems like Pink Floyd did a new soundtrack for the movie. Here it is, crikey, maybe they're right! (But wouldn't it have been a double album then so it would last for the entire movie? Anyone try it with The Wall?)

Trailer for "I Am a Sex Addict." Oddly, not about me. Or is it?

Trailer for "The Fountain." I like the trailer but the movie was "roundly booed" at the Venice Film Festival.

Joke:

A neurobiology graduate student was working on his dissertation, and went to a brain store to get some brains to complete his lab study. He sees a sign remarking on the quality of professional brains offered at this particular store, and questions the proprietor about the cost of these brains.

"How much does it cost for engineer brain?" he asks.

"$3 an ounce," the shopkeeper says.

"That's not too bad," the biology student says, considering his budget. "How much does it cost for programmer brain?"

"$12 an ounce," the man says.

The student thinks about the cross-section he needs to make his study rigorous and asks, "OK, how much for a fundamentalist right-wing politician's brain?"

The proprietor lifts an eyebrow and proclaims,

"$1,800 an ounce."

"Why is that kind of brain so much more?" the shocked student asks.

"Listen, pal," the busy shopkeeper says. "Do you have any idea how many fundamentalist right-wing politicians we have to harvest to get one ounce of brain?!"

Found via Digital Inspiration: Crusty Demons Tattoo Parlor. Promo site for some Playstation game. Pick a spot on a woman's body, pick a tattoo style, type a message, get a video of the tattoo with your message on woman's body, mail the link to your friends. Here's mine.
www.crustydemons.co.uk

Now that Americans are adopting so many Chinese babies, they are now importing nannies from China. "The last two years have seen an astonishing increase in the number of American parents wishing to employ Mandarin-speaking nannies, difficult to find here and even harder to obtain from China."

Shit, almost 4 AM, still awake ...

Friend S jokes that he has taken it as a mission to take me to some better bars & restaurants. Actually we were going to do the Monday night pizza special at Devils, but they were doing some sort of renovation work there, so we went down the street to Maya.

Aside from the incredibly friendly and chatty hostess there, I was really taken with the food. I ordered a simple thing - chicken tikka skewers. They bring it over to our little table and it's this whole big iron contraption with two skewers hanging down with about 6 pieces of white meat chicken - properly done too, not the kind that's been painted red because they don't have the right spices or oven - dangling over a bowl of salad and a bowl of nan bread. S had a pizza, just the right size for one person, (sadly) not NY style but the thinnest crust I've ever seen, looked quite tasty.

As we sat there, a group of four not unattractive HK women came by, looked at the menu for awhile, then decided to come in - and grabbed a table in the back, quite far away from us. Two things occurred to me though. The first is that if there were more places in Wanchai like this, there'd be more women like that coming to Wanchai to hang out. The second is that it's now easier to walk down the street since two of the three whorehouses go-go bars closed up, so it's not so much like running a gauntlet to get there. (The former go-go bars are going to be replaced with a different kind of whorehouse a branch of HSBC.)

Following that, back over to Bar 109 for a mango mojito, very possibly a new addiction for me. T came and joined us and she seemed very impressed with S's lychee mojito and became mildly upset that I had only ordered a "classic" one for her, so she followed that with a gigantic frozen margarita. Tonight I might try the tapas there.

Yes, I suppose being good makes for boring reading.

From the NY Times:

Across the eastern United States, a gruesome ritual is in full swing. The praying mantis and its relative, the Chinese mantis, are in their courtship season. A male mantis approaches a female, flapping his wings and swaying his abdomen. Leaping on her back, he begins to mate. And quite often, she tears off his head.

Reminds me of my last marriage.

I guess some of you might have glanced through the latest issue of bc magazine and noted a column with the above logo. Lots of self-deprecating (and non-self-deprecating) jokes come to mind but it's late and they're probably not very funny. Suffice to say, as one commenter has already figured out, it is indeed me.

I kind of like how the editor put it:

As you read through this twelfth anniversary issue, I hope you’ll enjoy our new music columnist. “Some say he was a fly on John Peel’s toilet wall and that his genitals are on upside down. All we know is, he’s called the Spike.”

It's a clever turn of phrase that allows him to deny that we have ever actually met. I can understand why any normal person would want to have that bit of plausible deniability.

All I know is that for now on, every other week, I am to walk into the alley between Delaney's and Cul de Sac and hand over a manila envelope filled with my scribblings to someone of indiscriminate gender wearing a Regina Ip mask. She (or he) in turn kicks me in the balls and runs off laughing, leaving a half-eaten kebab for my troubles. I could find this habit-forming.

For those of you not in HK who are bored enough to want to take a look, the first installment of the column can be found online here.

So back home, unpacked, and around 11 PM headed over to Neptune to grab T. Stopped first at Cul de Sac for a slice of pizza and listened to the band from Amazonia cranking out "Another Brick in the Wall" and thought, "oh great, yet another bar with yet another band playing the same crappy covers you can hear every other band play in every other bar. No need to go in there."

Over at Neptune, the joint was packed, as always, and around midnight or so the police came in for one of their random checks for overstayers.

With the lights on, we surveyed the room. T complained that there were too many girls now, that she hadn't had a "customer" in ages, just a few commission drinks now and then. "How many girls you think are here," she asked. I couldn't tell. 100? 200? She said one reason there are so many in HK right now is that cops in Singapore have been doing a sweep of well-known spots like Orchard Towers, so all those girls are coming here.

I don't think this can continue. Even by my meager standards, it's getting to be too much. As our government always attempts to turn our attention away from real issues, one of these days someone with more influence and talent than the SCMP's Barclay what's-his-name will realize this is potentially a big headline. Plainclothes cops will show up in the bars and start busting the girls, at least those who are not protected by pimps who are paying off the triads or are triads themselves.

We sat there and watched some idiot start whistling loudly, repeatedly. Smart move. Piss off the cops, make them come back again and this time let them take an hour checking everyone's IDs. One waitress tried to quiet the guy down, the cops stared at him and finally left.

The lights went down, T asked if I wanted another drink and I said, "yeah, but not here." Walking down the street I said to her, "you know sometimes I love Neptune, but sometimes I just can't fucking stand it there. You're not looking for a customer, I'm not looking for a girl, why do we have to stay there?"

So we went around the corner to Bar 109, our first time to go in there. We noted that their drinks list included mojitos and caipiranhas, and went for one of each. I knew that T, being Thai, would go for the concept of an alcoholic drink that had actual mint leaves in the glass and sure enough, she was joking that she wanted a spoon to slurp them out.

As the place filled up and as DJ Tiny Todd was spinning a great set, I was thinking that Wanchai needs a lot more places like this - a place where, if nothing else, the police would not be coming in to check everyone's IDs. We sat there enjoying the hell out of our mojitos and the music, talking nonstop and when we paused for breath saw that two hours had passed in a flash. Buzzed but not smashed, happy and sleepy, we made our way home.

The torrent of users coming here from that link at Slate has died down. Now I'm getting a lot of visitors because of my posts on the Chinabounder Sex and Shanghai blog. Since I'm not above pandering to the masses, a mention of it again, including making it the heading of this post.

Commenter niarb notes that a Sydney newspaper says that Chinabounder is not a single individual but a "group of performance artists" and that the blog is a hoax, though they didn't expect the angry response they received. I choose not to believe this.

Daai Tou Lam suggests that the entire thing is a marketing stunt, an idea which I find just wacky.

By the way, I feel it worth mentioning that one of my two best friends in Shanghai is a Chinese man, over 35 years old, who sleeps with at least 2 or 3 different women each week. He never dates a woman over 25 years old and breaks up with a girl as soon as she shows any sign of being serious. He does not take them out for expensive dinners and does not buy them expensive gifts. He does not have movie star looks yet I have never seen him with a woman who is anything less than completely fucking hot. He is seen as a good catch because of his position in a foreign company, his salary, that he owns his own flat and has a nice car. The suggestion that only white men are screwing a lot of Chinese women is hogwash.

Speaking of blogs written by white guys living in Asia having a lot of sex with a lot of Asian women, I think I have found my hero. His blog is called Morally Diminished. A 30 year old guy originally from London who has lived for Thailand for years and seems to have it all figured out. The guy was recently interviewed by the Bangkok Recorder, which describes his blog as "the content wallowings of a man unburdened by social constraint. In the new morality, weed is smoked everyday, fellow ex-pats must never be trusted and life is planned around “the penis'’s whims.”"

Of his own life, he says, "Have had several successful relationships, although after a few months I tend to destroy happy functional relationships with girls I still like, so I can continue living the single fantasy life that I'll one day magically get to bang one of Four-Mod, Girly Berry, or Cinderella." I suppose it would be an understatement to say that we have some things in common (though in my case I think about Christy Chung, Carina Lau, Rosemarie, Chingmy Yau and this one actress or model whom I saw at a movie premiere two years ago, still don't know her name).

He offers the following advice, "Learn the language, venture out from the expat bubble, read at the very least one sentence on Thai culture and etiquette, learn that there is more to life than just Nana Plaza, don't fuck anyone less than two-thirds your weight/ height/ age, smoke weed every day," all of which makes good sense to me (though I stopped smoking dope longer ago than I'd care to admit).

I'm back to HK on Saturday. Overall, I didn't do much on this "vacation" though I did see the four doctors I needed to see, ate a lot of yummy Thai food, did some shopping, did a lot of sleeping and resting, and made a friend or three.