Hongkie Town

First, thinking about food.

When you're a kid, you believe that your mother is the best cook in the entire world. It took me years to find out otherwise. My mother cooked meat 5 nights a week - steak, roast, brisket, meat loaf, lamb chops, veal chops and so on. The sixth night would be either roast chicken or some sort of fish casserole. Let's put it this way, my mother's fish casserole was so pitiful that I grew up thinking I didn't like fish.

On the seventh day, we'd eat out. Sometimes a kosher deli, sometimes a diner, sometimes "Chinese food." We'd go to the same restaurant and order the exact same dishes each time - wonton soup, egg rolls, spare ribs and fried rice - none of which looked anything like the Chinese food in Hong Kong. It was the 60s and this was American Chinese food. (I have to confess, I sometimes feel a nostalgic pang for this stuff.)

When my father retired, he pushed my mother out of the kitchen and took over cooking for the family. The menu didn't change much but at least my father knew how to cook fish.

I was thinking how, if I grew up on such a limited diet, did I turn out to be someone with such varied tastes and so willing to try almost everything? (And by almost everything, I've eaten raw horse, barbecued squirrel, snake, raw whale, fried bees, fried worms.) At any rate, I figure my life is a hundred times better because of that. And I'm quite lucky that T shares the same wide range of tastes and same curiosity.

In the past few days alone, had seafood at Lamma, Australian rib eye at Quarterdeck (those were both business-related meals), Mongolian-style hotpot at Little Sheep, Indian fusion at Maya dinners and so-so Vietnamese and Thai lunches. Sometimes good, sometimes not-so-good, but at least a wide variety.

By the way folks, if you haven't been to Little Sheep, you really gotta go. It's a chain that has probably hundreds of locations throughout China, including 2 or 3 in HK. (The one I go to is in Causeway Bay Plaza.) Unlike other places, Little Sheep does not offer any sauce for dipping your food. That's because their soups are so tasty that you don't need any other sauce. The beef and lamb are incredibly fresh and beautifully marbled. They have an English menu but be careful - you get a preprinted slip to mark off what you want, but they changed the numbering on the slip but didn't update the menu - so if you don't read Chinese, better to call over a waiter and have him mark it off for you.

The price is quite reasonable as well. We went with the "premium" beef and lamb plates, plus a dozen live prawns, cuttlefish paste with roe, shrimp balls, shitake mushrooms and golden mushrooms, corn on the cob, a 32 ounce Carlsberg and a pitcher of watermelon juice. It would have been enough for three; we did our best. A veritable feast for $560. They're open till 1 AM and the place can be quite busy at peak hours but it's a big place and worth the wait.

We stopped off at Bar 109 on the way home. They've got hookahs now and can set one up for you to smoke at your table. Mango margarita, yum. Walked past Bridge and noted some half naked white guy standing outside while his friends (?) inside were pouring pitchers of beer on him.

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One other Wanchai note: Strawberry's is gone, replaced by Galaxy, the opening party was Saturday night, free food and drinks. It looks like they spent all of 2 cents renovating the insides and maybe 3 cents on the band. But longtime Neptune customers will recognize most of the staff there. The place is being managed by Sammy, who ran Neptune for years and more recently was at Boracay and who is vowing to make the place "better than Neptune." Strawberries died a slow death the last year or two and I guess it remains to be seen whether people will hike over there but there was a good crowd for opening night.

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Decided to reorganize and upgrade the hard disks on my main PC. Purchased a 320 gig for my "main" drive and a 500 gig for music and photos. Again, in a vaguely nostaglic mood, as I purchased over 800 gigs of storage for well under US$400, I thought of how excited I was back when I upgraded my Atari from a tape drive to a floppy disk - I think at the time I thought things couldn't possibly ever get better than that.

The thing is, for some reason, I spaced out at the computer mall and asked for Serial ATA drives instead of IDE drives. Got home, opened the first one up, and looked blankly at the back of the drive, thinking "what the fuck?" Examined the motherboard - luckily my motherboard had two sockets for S-ATA cables.

But I was still caught in "what the fuck" mode, because the instruction sheet that came with the drive showed the ATA plug on the back and the usual 4 pin connection for power, but the drive itself didn't have that. I had to go to the Maxtor web site and hunt around and finally found a proper diagram and instructions. Then checked my power supply and thankfully it had two plugs that would fit the drive.

The drives don't come with software but the instruction sheet said one needed to go the Maxtor's website and download their "maxblast" software to get the drives set up. How incredibly fucking cheesy.

The software itself seemed fine with one exception - there was an option to make the drive bootable and copy over everything from your existing C: drive. And I ticked that option, waited the hours for the files to copy over, then rebooted to find that my computer wouldn't boot off the new drive and that Explorer still thought the drive was unformatted. So hours wasted.

Norton Ghost to the rescue. Files, including master boot record, copied over, reboot and yes, it's working the way it should. Still have shitloads of stuff to copy over from the old D: drive, which I'll do overnight. Then will recycle either the old C: or the old D: as a back-up drive.

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Back to food, we watched Tampopo tonight. If you've never seen it, it's a Japanese film from 1985. The story concerns five strangers coming together to help a middle aged Japanese woman create the best ramen shop ever. It's equal parts Kurosawa, John Ford and Luis Bunuel with a touch of Chaplin to boot. (Look for a young Ken Watanabe in a supporting role.)

I had to special order it from Rock Gallery and Kung had a hard time finding it, but of course he came through. I showed the box to T and said that we had to watch it tonight, that I thought she'd like it because it's Japanese and all about food. She asked me if I'd seen it before - yes. "Then why you buy????" "Because I thought you'd like it." She stared up at me for a few seconds and then kissed me. And yes, she enjoyed the movie quite a bit.

Since that went well, now I have to hunt down The Chinese Feast, a wonderful comedy directed by Tsui Hark and starring Leslie Cheung. Used to have it on VCD but that's one of the things that left with the wife.

Other food movies? Not just an eating scene like in Tom Jones, but movies devoted to food? I don't think T will go for "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" or "Grand Bouffe." "Discreet Charm of the Bourgeiosie" would maybe be a stretch, maybe not.

The week is finally over. Most of the company brass has left town; my boss is gone tomorrow. I am satisfied; I accomplished what I needed to get done and maybe even a little bit more.

The highlight of the week was undoubtedly the resignation of the managing director of a key territory, someone who had been with the company for five years and, despite constantly delivering where it counted, was widely disliked because he insisted on being an individual, not playing politics and saying what was actually on his mind. People in the head office tended to refer to him as a "fuckwit" even as he continued to manage one of the few territories that consistently delivered above expectations.

We sat down and talked for about an hour. Our relationship had a rocky start five years ago and took about a year to get on an even keel. This year we'd actually started to be friends. The last time I'd seen him, he'd asked me, "so why does everyone in the home office hate me?" I said, "You don't really need me to answer that, you already know," and he laughed.

Even so, he surprised me last night when he said, "I always respect your insights. You're smart and you say what's on your mind which is why you won't go far in this company." (Okay, it's my blog, I can have a wank here every now and then, no?)

They tried to stop him but he insisted on making a farewell speech. First he mentioned the previous president of the company and said, "every time I had to talk with him my eyes would look like those of a dead fish." Then he mentioned the previous number 2 in the company and said, "we had a relationship that began with my middle finger." He then launched into a personal story and, with several lawyers in the audience, was getting perilously close to a sexual harassment lawsuit. His boss got on stage and basically took the mike away from him before it could get really interesting and before he could circle back to insulting current management.

Moments like this are too few and too far between.

Tonight a very pleasant team dinner at Quarterdeck. Sitting there outside by the water, view partially blocked by barges, an almost-clear night and moderate temperatures, it was really relaxing. Watching the underwhelming light show that passes for a nightly tourist attraction, I was struck again by how HK has missed the potential of its waterfront as a true tourist attraction and a way to improve quality of life for its residents.

Following that, over to Bar 109, which was having a 2-for-1 special on mojitos. DJ Tiny Todd remembered last week, when he was playing "Across 110th Street," I'd told him how the song put me in the mood for some Norman Whitfield, and tonight he brought out an extended remix he'd done on "Papa Was a Rolling Stone," followed by some Isaac Hayes and Barry White, then a whole lotta Motown before segueing into some late 70s funk.

Our group had thinned out and some were in the mood for something less laid back. I walked them over to Joe Bananas, stood inside looking around for 5 or 10 minutes, realized I had no reason to be there, said good night to all and made my way home.

Have been working quite hard all week and somewhat distracted. I'd taken a scroll through the blog and thought to myself that it had become too impersonal and, in a moment of irrationality, decided to do something that several months ago I said I'd no longer do - posting personal details here.

The result was exactly what I should have expected. Comments making judgements about my choices from people who do not share the same morals or philosophy and who are somehow convinced that their way is the only way. Comments telling me what I need or what T needs from total strangers who for some reason seem convinced that they hold the keys to the mysteries of life. The blog equivalent of a drive-by shooting - some stranger "driving past," stopping to take a look, taking a minute or two to leave some comment that more often than not makes it seem that they misunderstood something I wrote. Or not.

Naturally, the only person who is to blame for this is myself. By putting myself on public display, I'm leaving the blog open to all commenters, linked, nicknamed, anonymous. By being a poor writer, I've left things open to misinterpretation and assumption. I temporarily forgot that my view of the world is not universally shared.

Actually I'm grateful to everyone who took the time to post a comment. I believe that each of you thinks you were trying to help. I recognize the validity of your opinions and choices even as you do not recognize mine. I took the time to read each comment carefully. However, I choose not respond individually and I remained essentially unmoved by almost everything that was posted.

I recognize that I'm not perfect and that I don't always make the right choices. And while I do believe that much of life is learning from one's mistakes, you and I may have different ideas of what constitutes "a mistake." I think that by and large I don't repeat the same mistakes too often, though I do find there is no shortage of new mistakes out there for me to make. I realize that I have some decisions to make. And that attempting to work them out by posting the issues here does not provide a solution.

So thanks to one and all. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Stayed up till 4 AM, thought I could sleep in today, but woken up at 8 and in the office by 9. Still "calm before the storm" in a manner of speaking, but found time to install Firefox 2.0 (not on the Mozilla page but on the ftp server), too soon to tell anything about it.

Comments on previous posts all well and good but received an email from someone closer to the actual situation that shed a lot more light on things and left me feeling both happily optimistic and horribly pessimistic for reasons that I don't care to go into.

Sorry, I know the above paragraph is an example of something I really hate when I encounter it in other blogs. "Oooooo, I 'ad a really good day today, 'ope all my lovely readers did too." (Hey, Firefox 2 is doing spellchecks. Now I got tons o' words underlined with red dots. Hmmm ... center or centre? Color or colour? Aha, I've got American English, good.) Anyway, I fucking hate when people do that and I've just done it and well, that's that. Add me to the list of bloggers I hate.

I expect that I'll be smoking a lot today and possibly drinking a lot tonight.

Still pondering the personal post. Something that caught my eye today in the SCMP is an article on Page 3 titled "Last-ditch bid to prevent Al Gore's climate crisis film being frozen out."

In the article, it says that the distributor has been trying to "prolong the life of the movie on Hong Kong cinema screens." The film has grossed almost HK$2 million in two weeks, a respectable showing for a documentary here. The distributor was hoping that corporations would buy tickets for staff, that schools would buy for students (and 7,000 seats were purchased in this way). However, grosses are dropping off and it will probably be out of cinemas soon.

The article makes no mention of the fact that the movie was legally screened on HK's flagship airline, Cathay Pacific, more than a month before it appeared on HK movie screens. I watched the movie when flying to Sydney in September. This scheduling mishap represents clear incompetence by either the local HK distributor or the global rights owner.

The article also doesn't mention that the DVD will be released in the US on November 21st, which means it will be available in HK in a fair number out outlets starting on or about November 7th, just two weeks away.

But the funniest bit is a quote from Regent Lai, local manager of Intercontinental Film Distributors. No, the funny bit isn't that some woman thought that "Regent" would be a good English name for herself. The funny bit is where she is quoted as saying, "... it doesn't really help a film that fundamentally lacks entertainment and content for the masses." When the person in charge of distributing a film can't work up enthusiasm for it herself, how does she expect to successfully market it?

The City section also has an interesting follow-up article on a recent tour guide scandal - a guide abandoned a group of mainland tourists after they did not purchase enough garbage at some shop. The article says that the tour guides, who are working for tour agencies, are not paid a salary and frequently have to pay in advance for bus drivers and meals, and that the only way they can earn this money back and make some income is by conducting tours that consist primarily of taking people to places to shop where the guides receive commissions.

A guide confesses that he has told tour groups things such as "no accommodation for the night, or no meal, or they will be left in the middle of nowhere" if they don't each spent a certain amount in these stores, and that he did this on orders from his "employer" (is it really an employer if it doesn't pay you a salary?).

So apparently people are so hard up for work that they are willing to work for nothing in the hopes that they can bilk innocent people out of their hard earned money. And this is all legal.

And Hong Kong, a territory where the tourism industry represents a huge chunk of the economy, is now getting a reputation in China, our number one source for tourists, as a place that routinely rips off tourists.

And apparently the Travel Industry Council is okay with this, because when a tour guide abandoned his tour group, there was no fine, the company was not shut down; they "issued a warning letter." Fuck me sideways.

While I'm pondering a post of a more personal nature, this bit from Think Progress caught my eye:

BUSH: We will stay the course. [8/30/06]

BUSH: We will stay the course, we will complete the job in Iraq. [8/4/05]

BUSH: We will stay the course until the job is done, Steve. And the temptation is to try to get the President or somebody to put a timetable on the definition of getting the job done. We’re just going to stay the course. [12/15/03]

BUSH: And my message today to those in Iraq is: We’ll stay the course. [4/13/04]

BUSH: And that’s why we’re going to stay the course in Iraq. And that’s why when we say something in Iraq, we’re going to do it. [4/16/04]

BUSH: And so we’ve got tough action in Iraq. But we will stay the course. [4/5/04]

Followed by:

STEPHANOPOULOS: James Baker says that he’s looking for something between “cut and run” and “stay the course.”

BUSH: Well, hey, listen, we’ve never been “stay the course,” George. We have been — we will complete the mission, we will do our job, and help achieve the goal, but we’re constantly adjusting to tactics. Constantly.

Part of the day spent at Shenzhen today. Didn't venture too far beyond the Lo Wu shopping mall. This sign shows you that only the finest crap is available there:


Actually, inside, it seems like the hottest items right now are fake iPod Nanos and knock-off Sandisk SD cards.

I was hoping to go for a massage marathon. But then it occured to me that T might not be so comfortable with the experience. So I started to describe it to her in detail, and got no further than "Well, you go to a locker room, take off ALL your clothes, even your underwear, wrap a towel around yourself and go take a shower in a relatively open area." Well, actually, I don't know that the womens' side is like that, but the mens' side certainly is. And as soon as she heard this, she said no thank you.

So I figured I'd at least go for a foot massage within the shopping mall. At this spot, chosen at random, I had one of the best foot massages of my entire life, one hour for 30 RMB (about US$3.75). This guy knew exactly what he was doing, knew exactly where to put pressure and carefully watched my face each time to make sure he wasn't going too far. He had a younger guy he was teaching, so it was a bit weird as the teacher would press on one leg and the student would feel around on my other leg for the proper spots! Nevertheless, I felt great after this and gave the guy 50, keep the change, he was well worth it. In typical Lo Wu fashion, I almost couldn't enjoy the massage because for the first ten minutes I had a steady stream of people asking me if I wanted facial, shoulder massage, manicure, pedicure, start all over again. After tiring of constantly saying "pu yao, xie xie," I'd just close my eyes and put a finger to my lips every time someone came by. Here's the master and his student (and yes, that's my skinny very white foot):


While I relaxed and enjoyed, T ran around the mall on her own, coming back with two pairs of shoes and a blouse. Our shopping together was funny - she knows a fair amount of Cantonese while I'm stronger at Mandarin, so the bargaining was taking place in three languages.

The Lo Wu mall is really oppressive. Shopkeepers stand outside of every shop and yell out their wares to you as you pass by, "Hello sir, missy, you want to buy t shirt, Rolley (sic) watch, bag, pants, pen, painting" not to forget all the people running up to you every second offering pirate DVDs and software. The yelling is bad enough, some of these people poke you to get your attention, a few actually grab you. On the other hand, the next time I need any bedsheets or towels, I think I'll go here instead of Sogo or Wing On.

I much prefer the shopping malls around Dongmen, which is where Shenzhen residents shop - LoWu is for tourists and Hongkies. It's quite telling that something like 90% of the Born to Shop Shenzhen book only covers Lo Wu. And this past Friday SCMP ran a single page guide to Shenzhen that aside from Lo Wu only mentioned the artists village - not even a line on the tacky theme parks near Overseas Chinese Town (the area itself is quite beautiful actually) or the mini-Wanchai over in the Shekou area.

The thing about Dongmen is that you don't have to put up with the relentless touts, there's a much wider choice of cheaper food and the shops only mark things up 100% instead of 300%.

Dongmen is just a 10 minute 1 yuan busride away (not sure if the new subway goes there or not) but sometimes I confess I'm just too lazy to go that one extra mile.

I almost forgot that HK now has vanity license plates, so my first spotting of one kind of caught me offguard. Here 'tis:


Last note, one of the DVDs I special ordered this week was Saturday Night Live - Best of Saturday TV Funhouse. These are short animations created for SNL by Robert Smigel, the guy behind Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, with co-writers including Stephen Colbert and Louis CK. Some of this stuff is great, like this clip which is also on Youtube, the "trailer" for "Bambi 2002." "Walt Disney's Bambi is going into the vault for 10 years, depriving your child or future children of a significant emotional milestone..."

Last night I had plans, so T made plans to go out with friends. My plans fell through but I told her to keep her plans and I'd find something else to do.

I found myself at Laguna, first time there in about two months. Actually 9 PM on Friday night, every place in Wanchai seemed busy, even places that are dead during the week - Swindler seemed to be handing out shrimp cocktails, Typhoon had their usual crowd, Big Ernies was busy, so it was no surprise that Laguna was also quite busy. Several girls tried their luck with me, but I told them I was there just to look.

Over to Dusk Till Dawn to hook up with buddy S, who was having dinner there. When he finished eating, we went back to Laguna, still busy. I ran into I, an Indonesian girl I've known for quite some time, someone who was high on my list when I was single but the timing just never worked out for the two of us.

She just returned from Indonesia. She'd left HK because, apparently, her roommate had stolen her mobile phone and passport (and god knows what else, because I says she's in jail now). So she went back home, got a new passport, returned to HK and found that everyone else had moved out of the place where she was staying so all her stuff was gone. She said she found some Filipino girl who'd taken pity on her and let her move in; that she was in a rush to make quick money because she wanted to send money to her family in time for "Indonesian New Year." I bought her a drink and she showed me a pill before she swallowed it, ecstasy, she said she was too shy without it. I looked over at S and we decided to get out of there and check out Neptune.

On the way over to Neptune, we ran into Sammy. Sammy, you might recall, was one of the long time managers at Neptune. He'd left, moved to Shanghai and opened a bar there, the bar went out of business within three months, he'd returned to HK and was working at Boracay, where he was miserably unhappy. He's happy now, he and some friends have taken over Strawberrys, and the re-opening party will be on October 28th. They wanted to rename the place Hole-In-One, but the police didn't like the word "hole". He tried Hold-In-One, also no good. So it will now be called Galaxy.

I'd say the appropriate word for Neptune would be "mobbed." We managed to find a seat at the bar and I proceeded to get quite wasted. Naturally I ran into a lot of people I knew and a lot of women who didn't know me took their chances without much luck. Thoroughly wasted, I think I made it home around 3:30 or so.

There are just gonna be those times when I gotta go back and do the rounds in Wanchai, it was too big a part of my life for too long and there are times when I miss it. Last night definitely scratched that itch for awhile.

Later today we're off to Shenzhen. I want to go for massage and would like T to join me on that, though right now she's suggesting that I should go for massage alone and let her spend that time shopping for shoes. She's also looking for DVDs of Korean TV series; she'd bought one set on Temple Street last week, some soap opera thing, watched all 8 discs in 3 days, gave it to my maid, who apparently has been staying up all night every night watching this. I've tried getting her to watch Sopranos and Seinfeld with no luck though right now she loves Ugly Betty and Heroes.

I've been a fan of Clint Eastwood's for most of my life. If you look at his career in the 60s and 70s, he acted in a series of westerns and action films that helped define or redefine their various genres - Fistful of Dollars, The Good The Bad & The Ugly, Dirty Harry, High Plains Drifter, Outlaw Josey Wales. And there were a few ringers in there, movies that suggested that there might be more to Eastwood than met the eye, especially Play Misty For Me (his first film as a director, a May/December romance) and The Beguiled (gothic horror).

In the 80s, his star seemed to shine a little less brightly and yet there were projects that showed he was trying to reach further, though not always successfully - Honkytonk Man in particular. But if anyone tried to suggest to me prior to 1992 that he would end up being one of the GREAT American filmmakers, firmly in the pantheon with the Huston, Hawks, Chaplin, Ford, Capra, etc., I would have laughed. 1992 was the year of Unforgiven.

He still does the odd clunker (2002's Blood Work was a horrendous mis-step) but his last two films have been Million Dollar Baby and Mystic River - remarkable for their emotional power and also for the moments of restraint when other directors might have gone over the top.

Clint is 76 years old and his latest film opens in the US this weekend. From the NY Times review of Flags of Our Fathers bu Manohla Dargis:

It seems hard to believe there is anything left to say about World War II that has not already been stated and restated, chewed, digested and spat out for your consideration and that of the Oscar voters. And yet here, at age 76, is Clint Eastwood saying something new and vital about the war in his new film, and here, too, is this great, gray battleship of a man and a movie icon saying something new and urgent about the uses of war and of the men who fight. “Flags of Our Fathers” concerns one of the most lethal encounters on that distant battlefield, but make no mistake: this is also a work of its own politically fraught moment.

Most war movies, even those that claim to be antiwar, overtly or implicitly embrace violence as either a political or cinematic means to an end. Few filmmakers can resist the thrill of the rocket’s red glare and the spectacle of death; the violence is simply too exciting. There are plenty of big bangs in “Flags of Our Fathers,” but because the screenplay, by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis, oscillates among three separate time frames — Iwo Jima, the bond tour and, less successfully, contemporary scenes involving Doc and his son — and because the flag raisers were pulled off the field before fighting ended, the violence of their war remains at a frenzied pitch. It doesn’t build, evolve, recede; it terrifies and keeps terrifying.

If “Flags of Our Fathers” feels so unlike most war movies and sounds so contrary to the usual political rhetoric, it is not because it affirms that war is hell, which it does with unblinking, graphic brutality. It’s because Mr. Eastwood insists, with a moral certitude that is all too rare in our movies, that we extract an unspeakable cost when we ask men to kill other men. There is never any doubt in the film that the country needed to fight this war, that it was necessary; it is the horror at such necessity that defines “Flags of Our Fathers,” not exultation.

Where “Saving Private Ryan” offers technique, Mr. Eastwood’s film suggests metaphysics. Once again, he takes us into the heart of violence and into the hearts of men, seeing where they converge under a night sky as brightly lighted with explosions as any Fourth of July nocturne and in caves where some soldiers are tortured to death and others surrender to madness. He gives us men whose failings are evidence of their humanity and who are, contrary to our revolted sensitivities, no less human because they kill.

One view of Mr. Eastwood is that he has mellowed with age, or at least begun to take serious measure of the violence that has been an animating force in many of his films. In truth, the critical establishment caught up with the director, who for decades has been building a fascinating body of work that considers annihilating violence as a condition of the American character, not an aberration. “Flags of Our Fathers” is an imperfect addition to that body of work, though its flaws are minor and finally irrelevant in a film in which ambivalence and ambiguity are constituent of a worldview, not an aftereffect. Notably, Mr. Eastwood’s next film, “Letters From Iwo Jima,” set to open early next year, revisits the same battle, this time from the point of view of the Japanese.

I suppose in any major city in the world (and some minor ones) you're going to see poor and old people going around, going through garbage cans, pulling out whatever is recyclable, and then bringing it to some recycling center to get a few pennies per ton to help them buy food, shelter, drugs, sex, whatever. In Hong Kong, it's one of the cornerstones of the Donald's social welfare and pollution policies.

I work at Taikoo Place, a Swire-owned complex of a dozen or so office buildings. They're all non-smoking (except for the restaurants) so there are always lots of people gathered around the ashtrays at the various entrances. I haven't really checked, but I suspect a lot of these people are smokers like T, who never smokes a cigarette more than halfway down.

Enter Butt-man. I see this guy almost every day. He's in his 50s or 60s, I suppose and I guess he lives in neighboring Taikoo Shing. He's about 5 feet tall and 5 feet around. Every day he wears the same clothes - a formerly-white sleeveless undershirt, black shorts and black sneakers. He carries a small plastic bag.

Every afternoon, he makes the rounds of each garbage can around Taikoo Place. He inspects each cigarette butt in each ashtray. If the butt has been smoked all the way down to the filter, he puts it back in the tray. But if there's a quarter inch of smokable cigarette left, he puts it in the bag.

And this guy really scares me.

After all, I'm a heavy smoker. And I know what germs are in my body and can guess which ones are passed along to the cigarette butt. Buddha alone knows what germs are in the bodies of the other tens of thousands of people in these buildings. The Cosmic Muffin alone knows what this guy risks catching every day in order to continue his habit of smoking for free.

So one reason I'm scared is because I have no idea what diseases this guy might have. Another reason is because he's still walking around every day and maybe that means he can't catch any of our diseases and he's really an extra-terrestrial or belongs on the show Heroes.

The concept of going up to someone who's standing there smoking and saying, "yo, dude, got a spare fag?" must have eluded him.

(Back in my college days, I knew this guy, his name was Mickey Jackson. Heaven help anyone who called him "Michael." Mickey didn't go to our school but liked to party at our dorm and he kind of knew me because we both used to hang out with David Peel in the East Village, so he'd often spend the night on my floor - sometimes alone, sometimes not. Mickey was big and Mickey was black and he had a huge jetblack Great Dane named Shaft. If you didn't know him, he looked like a really scary guy, with or without the dog. So he'd go up to people, ask for a cigarette, and 9 times out of 10 he'd end up with the entire pack. He'd smoke one, decide he didn't like it, and leave the rest of the pack for me. And that's how I kinda ended up being a smoker ....)

Betty Bowers:

Governor Jim Gilmore, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, said that he could not account for Mrs. Williams' astonishing omission. "All our focus groups were telling us that we have successfully hammered into our followers' heads just how to deal with any and all criticism of Republican policies -- whether foreign or domestic. Before you even think about what the other person said, you mention Bill Clinton's dick," said Mr. Gilmore. "Frankly, I have to question whether this Williams chick is even a real Republican. I mean, I'm sure she's a nice lady and all, but real Republicans know the game-plan and they don't take unnecessary risks – like talking substantively or throwing in their own so-called 'ideas.' Once you let people do that, you are inviting all types of anarchistic bedlam and introspection. That's not what we are about."

Wall Street Journal:

By 52% to 37%, voters say they want Democrats rather than Republicans to control Congress. That 15-point advantage is the widest ever registered by either party in the Journal/NBC surveys. Also, the result marks the first time voter preference for one party has exceeded 50%.

As for the Republican Party, 32% of voters rate it positively but 49% negatively -- the highest negative ever in the surveys for either party. On the other hand, the Democratic Party's reputation improved. After months in which it had a net negative rating only slightly better than Republicans', the party now is viewed positively by 37% and negatively by 35%.

House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, yesterday sent an email to the media suggesting House Democrats would "plot to establish a Department of Peace, raise your taxes and minimize penalties for crack dealers."

This midterm, like 1994, is shaping up as a referendum on an unpopular president who isn't on the ballot, leaving his party to bear the brunt of voters' wrath. Mr. Bush, however, is even less popular than Mr. Clinton was as Election Day approached. Back then, 45% disapproved of Mr. Clinton's job performance, compared with Mr. Bush's 57% disapproval rating.

Crooks & Liars transcript of Olbermann op-ed:

For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:

A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

We have been here before — and we have been here before led here — by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush.

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens "Unlawful Enemy Combatants" and ship them somewhere — anywhere — but may now, if he so decides, declare you an "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" and ship you somewhere - anywhere.

And if you think this, hyperbole or hysteria… ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was President, or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was President, or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was President.

This President now has his blank check.

He lied to get it.

He lied as he received it.

Is there any reason to even hope, he has not lied about how he intends to use it, nor who he intends to use it against?

"These military commissions will provide a fair trial," you told us yesterday, Mr. Bush. "In which the accused are presumed innocent, have access to an attorney, and can hear all the evidence against them."

'Presumed innocent,' Mr. Bush?

The very piece of paper you signed as you said that, allows for the detainees to be abused up to the point just before they sustain "serious mental and physical trauma" in the hope of getting them to incriminate themselves, and may no longer even invoke The Geneva Conventions in their own defense.

'Access to an attorney,' Mr. Bush?

Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift said on this program, Sir, and to the Supreme Court, that he was only granted access to his detainee defendant, on the promise that the detainee would plead guilty.

'Hearing all the evidence,' Mr. Bush?

The Military Commissions act specifically permits the introduction of classified evidence not made available to the defense.

Your words are lies, Sir.

NY Sun:

A commission formed to assess the Iraq war and recommend a new course has ruled out the prospect of victory for America, according to draft policy options shared with The New York Sun by commission officials.

Currently, the 10-member commission — headed by a secretary of state for President George H.W. Bush, James Baker — is considering two option papers, "Stability First" and "Redeploy and Contain," both of which rule out any prospect of making Iraq a stable democracy in the near term.

Rolling Stone:

These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula -- a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.

The iPod is 5 years old. It's become so successful that it's hard to believe it has only been 5 years.

The 3rd generation iPod was the 3rd portable MP3 player I bought. And the 4th, 5th, 6th, etc. The reason I have stuck with them is because the iPod's clean interface makes it the most usable of any MP3 player I've seen and the sound (when you're ripping at 192k or above) is great, at least for my old ears. I hated iTunes three years ago and was using 3rd party software but iTunes has come a long way and I have it running everywhere now.

Most played on my iPod and iTunes this week remains the Jeremy Enigk album - played it all the way through three times yesterday.

Runner up is the new Robbie Williams album, surely the strangest album ever released by a major pop star. The hype is that he's given up on trying to achieve stardom in the US and made the album "he wanted to make," an odd concept that.

So it has a tribute to the Pet Shop Boys that namechecks all of their singles. And a cover of "King of the Bongo" retitled "Bongo Bong." And lyrics like "What you expect dickhead? Radiohead? Dickhead, this is pop, dickhead."

Who do I think I am, dickhead?
Who the fuck are you, dickhead?
Must have me confused
With someone who gives a shit
I found the dickhead of the year
And you are fucking it, dickhead
Where's the chorus?
No chorus?

Cheeky, innit?

Consumerism gone mad ... am again thinking DSLR. Especially because if I buy it in a dump like Broadway or Fortress, can have it split into 12 monthly cheap amounts on my visa card, no interest. Nikon D80. I mean, I'm mostly happy with my Canon Ixus 700IS, can slip it into my jeans, can take it everywhere, but sometimes I want to do more than just take frigging snapshots. Am possibly going to New York end of this month (waitlisted) and definitely going to Thailand middle of next month, trying to be logical but have never really succeeded where money and toys are involved.

In the 70s and 80s, I was religious about Trudeau and Doonesbury but not so much in the 90s or the oughts. But the third one here is spot on, the first two from the series included to give context to the third, I imagine there will be more as the week continues.

This morning, I'm sitting here sort of wondering how some readers approach this blog. Waiting for the page to load, do some of you think, "Is it gonna be another political rant? Jeez, I hope not, hope it's a CD review or a hooker tale." And maybe some of you think, "damn, I hope it's not another post about American/Hong Kong politics, I'm here for the Hong Kong/American politics only."

I know that I have certain expectations of what I'm going to see when I visit various blogs. I mean, it's not like my personal sun rises or sets by something on Danwei or Idolator. And with 173 feeds in my RSS reader at the moment, I know it can't all be gravy.

Or maybe I'm just reading (no pun intended) too much into all of this.

So, new toy. It took me all of a week to be miserable with the stock stereo system in the Lexus. Most people would find it perfectly acceptable. In-dash 6 disc changer and very loud. But it could not play CDRs with MP3s and there was no way to get the iPod running through it except to use the FM transmitter thingies - tried one and was not happy with the results.

So I found this - the Pioneer DEH-P9850BT. This is a wonderful little box.

First off, it has bluetooth. That means I can use the phone handsfree. It includes a microphone (which has been permanently mounted in the car in a relatively unobtrusive spot) and when my phone rings, I can just hit a button on the stereo to take the call. I can also store my most frequently used phone numbers in the head unit so it will dial calls for me. Or I can dial numbers on the supplied remote control.

Even cooler, it is "iPod ready." Which means it comes with a cable (which the installer ran under the center console up through the cup holder) that fits into the iPod's dock connector. Once the iPod is connected, all functions are then done through the head unit or remote rather than the iPod. So nice.

And I gotta say a few words about the "Organic EL display." Okay, I can have random animated geometric patterns. Or I can have a slide show of some sort. Or I can have what they call a "movie," which seems to be a ten second loop of kung fu kids playing basketball. I can have fake dials that pretend to tell me things about the car. I can have volume level meters or spectrum analyzers (that really work). And other stuff I simply haven't played with yet, but will.

That's the great think about marketing technology - supplying you with what you need and even with what you didn't know you needed ....

Some stuff that caught my eye today ...

NY Times - Citing Heavenly Injunctions to Fight Earthly Warming:

Over the last year, religious activism on global warming has won much attention. Last February, 86 evangelical Christian leaders backed an initiative to combat global warming, a move that broke the evangelical movement’s broad silence on the issue but exposed stark divisions.

Simon Patkin probably hates bits like this:

In 2005 and the first three quarters of 2006 combined, energy-saving efforts by the group’s members have prevented the release into the atmosphere of 14,130 tons of carbon dioxide, according to Enerficiency, an energy consulting firm. Investments in new technology are projected to save the group’s congregations nearly $2 million “over the life of the new products,” Enerficiency said.

St. Elizabeth itself has reduced its peak energy demand by 60 percent over the last five years and has reduced its annual energy bills by $20,000, Father Morris said.

(To me, the failure of Donald Tsang to step up and do any fucking thing at all about the pollution in Hong Kong speaks to the need for democracy here, because this is what you get when you have a government that does not need to answer to its constituency; in our case a government that is only interested in giving itself raises, building monuments to itself and protecting vested interests of the minority against the common good.)

NY Times - In Thailand, More Survive AIDS, Only to Face Rejection:

Thailand’s successes in both prevention and treatment have brought with them another, perhaps predictable problem: the loss of a sense of urgency that has caused a slackening of prevention campaigns and the beginning of a rise in new infections.

Since 1984, one million people have been infected in Thailand; 400,000 have died. In an August report, the World Bank estimated that without Thailand’s vigorous prevention program, a total of 7.7 million people would have become infected.

Fewer than 17,000 new infections are expected this year, said Patrick Brenny, the Thailand coordinator for Unaids, the United Nations agency dealing with AIDS. That compares with 143,000 new infections in 1990, according to the World Bank.

Slate - Bill Clinton Caused 9/11(TM):

But one thing we can all be sure of is that Bill Clinton caused 9/11™.

He failed to catch bin Laden during the movie Black Hawk Down

I mean, come on. Obi Wan Kenobi practically had him in his sights when he took out that one tank thingie with a grenade launcher in order to help save the dude from Pearl Harbor. Not him, the other one. No, you're thinking of the dude from Troy and Munich. I'm talking about Colonel William ("Wally") Sharp from Armageddon. Please try to keep up.

His vice president was an insane lunatic

All that weenie Al Gore did for 8 long years was to yammer on and on and on about the environment, predicting that if we didn't ease back off on all the consuming we'd suffer massive fluctuations in the weather, causing unprecedented natural disasters. I'm still chortling at that one, retard. Newsflash! Tsunamis and hurricanes are not caused by the weather. They're caused by God. Everybody knows that. I guess the last laughs on you, pinhead!

Washington Post - White House Upbeat About GOP Prospects:

Amid widespread panic in the Republican establishment about the coming midterm elections, there are two people whose confidence about GOP prospects strikes even their closest allies as almost inexplicably upbeat: President Bush and his top political adviser, Karl Rove.

Now, combine the above paragraph with this item from Alternet:

The aircraft carrier Eisenhower, accompanied by the guided-missile cruiser USS Anzio, guided-missile destroyer USS Ramage, guided-missile destroyer USS Mason and the fast-attack submarine USS Newport News, is, as I write, making its way to the Straits of Hormuz off Iran. The ships will be in place to strike Iran by the end of the month.

Just a coinky-dink? November surprise? Time will tell. "Oops, y'all. This here's what I meant to do three years ago. Damned spelling. The N and the Q are real close to each other, ain't they? How'm I s'posed to tell 'em apart after all the cocaine I snorted in the good ole days? Smoke 'em if ya got 'em, this time we're going in there to win!"

From Shenzhen Zen:

"Everyone thinks Van Gogh was a great artist but a great artist should be rich," he said with a smug grin. "If he couldn't make a living as an artist he wasn't a great artist."

I think my company could find a job for this guy.

More later ...

A handy guide to how to have sex on airplanes.

Now that you know how, the question is with whom?

So yet another "end of an era" mark, the closing of CBGB's in New York. And in terms of "dawn of a new era," they're going to open a new CBGB's in Vegas. Tres absurd.

One reason that CB's worked in New York was because it was in New Fucking York, okay? A billion homegrown bands and people from all over the world coming to New York to make it, so there was an endless supply of talent bodies to toss up on stage.

CB's was a big deal in the 70s, when it was the launch pad for Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell and more. I don't think that any bands that started there from the 80s onwards went on to rock god status.

But that was never the point, was it? There was a stage, a sound system, a bar and a built-in audience. Almost anyone could (and did) play there. And that's what it was about.

I know this semi-firsthand because around '81 or so I got the idea in my head to start herding kittens managing rock bands and one of the bands I handled played at CB's several times. Yeah, the toilets were disgusting but what I enjoyed was the hole in the ceiling of the dressing room, allowing me to pop up onstage behind the drummer of whatever act was playing at the time.

Forced out by their landlord after 33 years, it's another example of the blandification of New York, exemplified by the garish hellhole that is called Times Square. The NY Times article on CB's closing mentions that the Bottom Line (surely one of the best clubs ever and model for hundreds more) closed last year, along with several newer venues.

Saturday night, a concert by the Bombay Rockers. They're actually a duo from Denmark, but one of the two guys is ethnically Indian, and they do a sort of hybrid hiphop/bhangra kind of thing.

The performance was held out at Cyberport, of all places. They'd set up a stage and a sound system inside the atrium of the shopping mall. The atrium is next to an open deck called the Ocean View Deck or something like that. So they had a DJ working inside, a large TV (showing Benny Hill, don't ask me why, I don't know) and out on the deck they had an open bar and a buffet. Even a little corner set up with shishas (or hookahs as I know them) and you could grab a seat and a few puffs.

This being HK, a couple of policemen showed up and told them that they had to close the doors to the mall because the music was too loud and that they had to close the bar by midnight due to some sort of licensing restriction.

So you've got several hundred people outside where the bar and food is and the DJ is inside but you can't hear the music because the doors are closed. Meanwhile, the bar had been stocked to provide drinks for hundreds through 4 AM, but because they had to shut the bar at midnight, they just handed out bottles to everyone. So everyone is walking around holding a bottle of Johnnie Walker, Stoli, Jack Daniels, Champagne, etc. I'm forced to be good because I'm driving. T, under no such restriction, after a few JD cokes probably drank the equivalent of two bottles of champagne.

Which would explain how T later found herself onstage; more on that shortly.

I had been told the concert part would start around 11, so we showed up at 10:30. For some reason, the Bombay Rockers didn't take the stage till almost 1:30. And I've read that their concerts can have a full complement of musicians and dancers of every description, but this being HK, it was just the two of them rapping and singing to pre-recorded backing tracks.

Never mind, because events like this are truly rare in HK, and younger members of HK's affluent Indian community were out in force. And when I say younger - while we were puffing away on a shisha, we were sitting with kids discussing which universities they were going to apply to (Columbia and NYU seemed to be popular choices).

The music itself was okay and the crowd seemed to be more into watching than dancing, but the guys on stage were high energy. T found herself swept away with the vibe and ran off. After about 5 minutes, I scanned the crowd looking for her and could not see her. Next thing I know, she walks out on stage! I have no idea how she got there, but it would seem that she just went around to the side, climbed up and somehow managed to get one of the guys to hand her his microphone. Probably the fact that she was wearing a Press pass didn't hurt.

Her English goes markedly downhill when she's wasted, so it took her about two minutes to deliver her message to the crowd, all of whom were probably trying to figure out what the heck a Thai girl in a miniskirt was doing onstage at this show. "I love .... I love ... it's true .... I love ...." and then she blurted out my name. She was scanning the spot where I had been standing, not realizing that I was now standing next to the stage taking pictures of whatever it was she was attempting to do.

She came down off stage, found me, threw her arms around me, and some guys ran up and yelled "congratulations!"

The problem was, once we got home, I had to deal with the downside of her drinking. The barfing was okay, the depression wasn't, further details not forthcoming on that, except to say that I have a very difficult time dealing with people who are drunk when I am sober, but I did my best to try to remain upbeat, soothing, supportive.

This morning, we're both dead to the world but we're both still here.

HK has only two English newspapers but god-knows-how-many dozens of Chinese language newspapers. If you look at the SCMP, the display ads are all for expensive watches, investment property in other countries and the occasional bespoke tailor. Classified ads include travel agencies and outcall "massage" services and escort agencies. Meanwhile the major Chinese papers seem to be over 100 pages per day and that's where you gotta look to see what's on sale at the supermarkets and other ads for things you might actually need.

Magazines are the same way. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of locally produced magazines in Chinese covering every possible niche. It's pretty impressive to see how many there are, and how well-produced they are, when you consider the relatively small size of this market.

Yesterday I came across Option Fans magazine, a monthly glossy magazine published for sale in HK and Taiwan, for people who like to fuck around with their cars. Everything from sports suspensions to engine modifications to car stereo.

Even though most of it's in Chinese, for people like me who know just a few hundred characters (and more simplified than traditional ones at that) I can still figure stuff out from the photos and little bits of English here and there. The major problem for me is that addresses for shops are mostly given in Chinese, not English, but there are web site URLs and phone numbers given (and I do know the Chinese characters for some districts).

Here's a shop that specializes in customizing Toyotas. Not too hard to figure out which page covers Lexus. Part of me wants to make fun of the English on this page, part of me is grateful that they even made the attempt. I can certainly figure out what they're trying to say in this description of a console tray, even if the English is a bit off:

When receiving the change and the cards and the pen and the like which have entered into the pocket of the suit temporarily, the tray of this leather specification which is convenient. It gathered lenient curved line in the divider, used and it considered the fact that the sheath, you can use easily freely.

Not entirely sure I follow what they're saying in this description of a front bumper spoiler:

The flow of the wind which hits from the front is arranged, down fourth of the appropriate quantity is generated to the front section. High operation stability was brought even the high-speed travelling time with the power which works to this road surface direction.

However, I just read this over at Think Progress. They mention a new study from the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University:

[I]f nothing is done to restrain greenhouse gas emissions, annual economic damages could reach US$20 trillion by 2100 (expressed in U.S. dollars at 2002 prices), or 6 to 8 percent of global economic output at that time (Kemfert 2005). The same study found that immediate adoption of active climate protection policies could limit the temperature increase to 2° and eliminate more than half of the damages…If, however, climate protection efforts do not begin until 2025, the same model estimates that it will be impossible to limit warming to 2° by 2100 — and climate protection in general will be more expensive, the later it starts.

I think I'd better hold off on the car mods and start saving for this.

Just to follow up last post, actually, anonymous comments that are compliments also don't mean much to me, again because I don't know who they're coming from, no context to put them in. What comments mean something? Things that add info to what I've posted, intelligent debate ... some commenters have actually become friends in the real world, odd as that may (or may not) seem.

Anyway, T is recovering, I thought I was coming down with the same crap but seem to have side-stepped it a bit.

Wednesday night, dinner at Tonkichi in Causeway Bay, the only place I've found in Hong Kong that serves absolutely authentic tonkatsu. They cook it right and serve it right, complete with shredded cabbage, pickles, rice, miso soup, the right mustard and sauces on the side, even a bowl filled with sesame seeds and a pestle for mashing the crap outta them. It actually costs more than my fave tonkatsu place in Tokyo, but I figure you gotta pay extra for authentic when it's also foreign.

Thursday night, looking for something different to do ... did not want to stay home, didn't want to just go out for dinner and come back yet didn't want to sit in a bar either. Tonight's solution - Temple Street night market. T had never been there and there are some street-side cheap seafood places that don't suck (I like one on the side street, not directly alongside the market). We filled up on spicy prawns, clams in black bean sauce, spicy tofu and fried rice with salted fish, well under HK$200 and the portions were so big we ended up needing to have some stuff wrapped for take-away.

Spotted - a jeans shop off to the side with a Velvet Underground t-shirt, but they didn't have old fat white guy size. Also spotted - at least three stores bring down pirate DVDs from China and openly selling them (though at higher prices than in Shenzhen, of course). Not so heavy on the movie selection but tons o' TV boxed sets. Which is because the MPAA doesn't seem to give a shit about TV piracy - at least that's my impression - even though the bulk of legit TV DVDs are distributed by home video arms of MPAA members .

Finished off at the "local" back section of the market, where I loaded up on cheap calculators, magnifying glasses, LED flash lights and other crap that seemed useful at the time but I'll probably never use. Oh, and a "Bruce Lee in car" sticker for my window. Also spotted - at the sex toys stands, something called "squirmy vagina" (I don't wanna know) and something pitched as an "infinitely stretchable vagina" (who would want that? men want three things in life - comfortable shoes, clean sheets and a tight pussy, not a stretchy one). I never have my camera when I need it.

Current listening - Jeremy Enigk "World Waits." I believe he's a born-again Christian, but this ain't Christian rock. And I see he's associated with the groups Sunny Day Real Estate and Fire Theft, neither of which I know. Big melodies, soaring harmonies, guitar and he sorta reminds me a little of Matthew Sweet or Ron Sexsmith or some other guy who's name I can't recall right now (I know, that's real effin' helpful).

Decemberists has possibilities. The Hold Steady was a let-down (I already have a CD by the Iron City Houserockers). Kasabian's second is getting a lot of play from me; the Killers' second sucks. Lindsey Buckingham's first platter in 10 years needs more careful listening, but will I find the time? The live double from My Morning Jacket ain't doing a lot for me so far. New Sting - 16th century songs performed on the lute, are you fucking kidding me or what? Weather Report - boxed set of 3 CDs plus DVD of 2 hour concert from '78 with Jaco (I saw 'em live in pre-Jaco days), life doesn't suck.

Next year, 50 cent tax on plastic bags - good. New anti-smoking laws - bad, consider move to thirder world country.

Thinking about upgrading the old PC, been a long time since I did a serious upgrade. Core 2 duo, new motherboard and vid card? New Mac? The Mini is slow, don't want an iMac, so the big beast?

And where do you go in HK to find a street filled with nothing but pimp-my-ride car accessories shops? I want a subwoofer that fills the entire trunk, neon lights under the car, spinning hubcaps, fuzzy dice, bongos in the back, no idea where to look.

Sadly, one can always count on two things: Republicans to put money and power ahead of morals and Democrats to blow whatever opportunities fate hands to them.

No need to mention the recent study that says that possibly more than 600,000 Iraqis have died since 2003. We'll never really know the number, but even if it's the 30,000 that Bush claims, that's an awful lot we have to answer for, much more than just a comma.

And not much point in mentioning Bush's latest train wreck of a press conference, because it held no surprises.

Today I'm pissed off about John McCain. I once believed he was one of the few Republicans with an ounce of credibility. But he fell into line on the torture bill and his latest idiotic remarks on Korea show he's just another party hack.

McCain, 10/10/06, Hannity & Colmes:

The fact is that it is a failure of the Clinton administration policies that I was heavily involved in at the time that have caused us to be in the situation we’re in today.

McCain, 10/11/06, NBC Today

I think this is the wrong time for us to be engaging in finger pointing when in this crucial time, we need the world and Americans united in going to the United Nations to bring about sanctions against North Korea.

Which is a typical Republican method for avoiding any opportunity for debate on real issues. Point the finger at everyone else and then accuse anyone else who points a finger of being disloyal.

Meanwhile, I love the tenth comment on my post here. When some nittering nabob thinks he or she has posted some clever insult and hides behind "anonymous," I'm supposed to be upset? Oh, bad man, you have mortally wounded me. Please someone, help me, remove this spear from my side. Who will rid me of this troublesome anonymousy commenter? Shall I stop blogging to appease your ass? I think maybe I'll follow Phil's example and use this quote, "Some blogs, like toilet paper, contain all kinds of shit. This blog is one of them." as the new summary for my blog. It's cute.

Any time I start to feel that life in Hong Kong isn't all it's cracked up to be, I think about what life in Singapore would be like and am cheered up almost instantly.

A great example - Singapore Donkey. I suppose Hemlock just found it; I followed a link he posted today. And instantly added it to my RSS reader.

An example of what you'll find there once you check it out:

A military coup in Thailand has resulted from Madam Ho Ching’s Temasek Holdings investment in Shin Corporation. It is unknown at this time whether Madam Ho purposely wanted to overthrow the Thai democracy or not. However, at a recent meeting of ASEAN, leaders expressed concern that too many governments in the region such as Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, and Thailand were becoming increasingly democratic and that this was pressuring more authoritarian regimes. An anonymous source in the Singapore government indicated that plans were underway to “take out one of the democracies” to relieve pressure, but it seems at this point that Madam Ho managed to do it accidentally.

And this one too:

Minister of Health Khaw Boon Wan indicated today that a law revision would be recommended soon to Parliament. This comes after evidence that Singapore is banning the wrong kinds of sex in order to prevent HIV spread. Statistically, oral sex is far safer than penile-vaginal sex, yet Singapore law currently bans oral sex unless followed by the riskier variety. Mr. Khaw reportedly said that this aspect of the law must be revised. “In Singapore, we need to ban some kind of sex, but currently we are banning the wrong kind,” a Ministry of Health spokesman explained. It is estimated that by “switching bans” and making traditional penile-vaginal sex an offence, the HIV infection rate in Singapore will drop dramatically.

Or how 'bout this one:

The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) reported today that the current list of countries that may supply maids to Singaporean households remains unchanged. Currently only The Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh may supply maids. “We must be careful to choose countries with darker-skinned peoples, so that we can easily tell the maids apart from local Chinese Singaporeans,” explained a MOM spokeswoman. “This is why we cannot allow Vietnamese and Chinese maids, even though average incomes in those countries is lower than in some of our current supply countries. Vietnamese and Chinese maids would be indistinguishable from ethnic Chinese Singaporeans, and that is a situation that we cannot tolerate.” She added that Singaporeans must be vigilant in identifying maids on Singapore streets, and making sure that they are treated appropriately.

Lots of little things weighing me down today.

Tired. T has the flu and now I've got every symptom she had three days ago. Aside from being ill, the job she was expecting has not come through and clearly she is bored.

Monday got a reminder from my editor that my column was due on Tuesday. Oops. The tough part is, I could crank out a thousand words of miscellaneous CD, DVD, TV, movie reviews in an hour. And then everyone over there says it looks too much like a shopping list. They want one theme, one story, running through an entire column. Plus the admonition: as long as it's not boring .... I'm at this stage where I sit down to write and can easily come up with 350 words on any topic. So I start down the road half a dozen times, 350 words, 300 words there, till finally I chance on something that I can discuss for a thousand words, hopefully a few jokes or a few things to piss someone off.

Last night we went to Bulldogs (too late to join in the quiz). Most of the salads there are fabulous - huge and fresh with a nice variety of ingredients - but she went for the Thai chicken salad, and the attempt at a Thai style dressing was just horrible, so much lemon or lime that the sourness washed out every other taste. We expressed this politely to the waitress, who informed us "that's how it's done" and I just looked at her for a minute, pointed at T, said "she's Thai and she's saying it's wrong." And the waitress, god knows why, repeated her line at us again. Finally we convinced her to take it back and bring us the same thing again but with the dressing on the side. By the time she brought it back, T had lost her appetite and we had it wrapped to go. This is a darned shame because I generally like the food at Bulldogs and now I'm sure T won't go near the place.

My Nokia E61 was purchased gray market, imported from Finland. The importer loaded a Chinese OS on to it, the result being that the keyboard mapping for symbols ($%@# etc) was no longer correct. Nokia Europe just released an OS upgrade so I decided to get that. It restores the correct keyboard mapping. I've lost the ability to display Chinese in SMS, which is not a big deal. But now the keyboard doesn't work at all in the currency converter in WorldMate, which is a big deal.

One technical problem resolved is syncing Outlook on my office PC with Outlook on my home PC. (I don't use Outlook for personal email any more but I do rely on its other components.) Attempts to use my phone as "middleman" failed on three consecutive phones, for different reasons. Now I'm using Plaxo. Yeah, I know, all those miserable annoying fucking "Hi, I'm using Plaxo and if you used it, we could stay in touch forever!!!" emails. But it syncs Notes, Calendar, Tasks as well as Contacts. Now everything's in sync. And I was able to stop it from sending out stupid emails to everyone I know (I think).

Last but not least, a general response to some recent comments.

Some of you seem to think that this is a democracy, that you have some say in what I will or will not write.

This blog is not a democracy.

Once in a rare while someone suggests I should mention America less and Hong Kong more and I do see the validity in that one. I rationalize it thusly: A) I'm American and someday may have to live there again; B) The incompetence of the current HK administration fucks up the lives of HK residents but not too many beyond that, while the vile stupidity of the Bush administration has the potential to fuck the entire world in the ass; C) again, it's my blog, I'll write what I wanna write.

Some of you disagree with the political statements and links that I post and take the usual Republican tactic of attacking the messenger rather than the message.

Fuck off.

See, I don't really care about number of hits or Technocrappi rankings. This blog is not a commercial venture; I don't make dime one off it.

No one is forcing you to read this. You don't like what you're reading, change the channel, go find another blog that's more in tune with your thinking. Or start your own blog, if you haven't already.

I kinda feel like Woody Allen in Stardust Memories, people moaning about how they prefer his early "funny" movies.

Yeah, okay, so I'm being fucking cranky. I'm coming down with the flu, I just know it. Plus I'm pissed off that I missed International Talk-Like-A-Pirate Day last month.

There are now initial reports coming in that note a period of seismic activity in North Korea. Guess Kim did it after all. No big surprise, he had lots of help from Georgie.

Nitpicker:

The US Government has announced that it will release $95m to North Korea as part of an agreement to replace the Stalinist country's own nuclear programme, which the US suspected was being misused.
Under the 1994 Agreed Framework an international consortium is building two proliferation-proof nuclear reactors and providing fuel oil for North Korea while the reactors are being built.

In releasing the funding, President George W Bush waived the Framework's requirement that North Korea allow inspectors to ensure it has not hidden away any weapons-grade plutonium from the original reactors.

President Bush argued that the decision was "vital to the national security interests of the United States".

And he did that roughly three months after saying they were part of the "Axis."

Financial Times:

In 1993, North Korea announced it would pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, leaving it free to divert nuclear material from its energy reactors to make a nuclear weapon and setting off a round of crisis diplomacy led by the Clinton administration. The result was the so-called agreed framework, which – in return for supplies of fuel oil to North Korea – froze most aspects of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme for the rest of the decade.

The agreed framework was in effect consigned to history when the Bush administration came to power in 2001. The new administration argued that although the road to a plutonium-based nuclear bomb had been frozen, the North Koreans were cheating by attempting to develop a uranium-based bomb that was not explicitly addressed by the agreement.

That five years later, North Korea has tested a nuclear weapon will be widely interpreted as a sign of the failure of the tougher approach favoured by the Bush team.

From State of Denial, quoted at Rox Populi:

"Governor, what is it?"
"Why should I care about North Korea?"
Bandar said he didn't really know. It was one of the few countries that he did not work on for King Fahd.
"I get these briefings on all parts of the world," Bush said, "and everybody is talking to me about North Korea."
"I'll tell you what, Governor," Bandar said. "One reason should make you care about North Korea."
"All right, smart alek," Bush said, "tell me."
"The 38,000 American troops right on the border." ..."If nothing else counts, this counts. One shot across the border and you lose half these people immediately. You lose 15,000 Americans in a chemical or biological or even regular attack. The United State of America is at war instantly."
"Hmmm," Bush said. "I wish those assholes would put things just point-blank to me. I get half a book telling me about the history of North Korea."

From the Arms Control Association:

Although Bush has given high priority to preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons to perceived U.S. enemies, his actions have either been ineffectual or counterproductive. At the beginning of his term, he overruled the decision of Secretary of State Colin Powell to continue very promising negotiations that the Clinton administration had begun with North Korea, thus spurring Pyongyang to advance its nuclear weapons program. Disregarding the precedent followed by previous presidents, he initiated a preventive war against Iraq on the false grounds that it was illegally developing nuclear weapons. Most recently, he has agreed to negotiate a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with India, despite long-standing U.S. and Nuclear Suppliers Group policy to deny such aid to Pakistan, India, and Israel because they have not signed the NPT and are known to have nuclear weapons.

MSNBC:

On Sept. 19, 2005, North Korea signed a widely heralded denuclearization agreement with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Pyongyang pledged to "abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs." In return, Washington agreed that the United States and North Korea would "respect each other's sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize their relations."

Four days later, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sweeping financial sanctions against North Korea designed to cut off the country's access to the international banking system, branding it a "criminal state" guilty of counterfeiting, money laundering and trafficking in weapons of mass destruction.

Much more at Mahablog here and here.

As we all know, North Koreans lie almost as often as Republicans. (How can you tell when a Republican is lying? His lips are moving.)

Here is the full translated text of the North Korean announcement about their successful nuclear bomb test:

The field of scientific research in the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] successfully conducted an underground nuclear test under secure conditions on October 9, Juche 95 [2006] at a stirring time when all the people of the country are making a great leap forward in the building of a great, prosperous, powerful socialist nation.

It has been confirmed that there was no such danger from radioactive emission in the course of the nuclear test, as it was carried out under scientific consideration and careful calculation.

The nuclear test was conducted with indigenous wisdom and technology, 100 percent.

It marks a historic event as it greatly encouraged and pleased the KPA [Korean People’s Army] and people that have wished to have powerful self-reliant defense capability.

It will contribute to defending the peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the area around it.

There are 5 sentences there. That means that 20% of their announcement is that there were no radioactive emissions, so what they are really saying was "ha ha ha, you can't tell if we did it or not by checking for radioactivity."

Until I see some independent confirmation via records of seismic activity, I'm gonna think this is just more KJI b.s.

On the other hand, if they really did it, it would probably be an understatement to say this is not a positive development for the rest of the world and represents a total failure on the part of U.S., China, Japan and others at the negotiating table. (Though how can one negotiate with a lunatic?)

On hearing the news, President Bush promptly declared war on Kazakhstan, saying this was the right move for America as it starts with the same letter, "they gots a lot of them Islamofascists there" and they have been making problems for his good friend Borat.

Saturday evening started out well enough. It didn't finish off too well, but not as badly as I feared, I suppose.

First, over to what UA Cinemas calls a "movie theater" (and what I call a "shoe box") at Times Square to see The Departed. Good, not great, but certainly better than Aviator or Gangs of New York. I suppose each new Scorsese film now comes with a 16 ton weight attached, "will this finally be the one to get him an Oscar," and some of his choices seem to play into that twaddle, so a relatively simple film, a gangster tale, a remake, is lighter to approach and yields inversely greater rewards. It's too bad that Scorsese didn't work with Nicholson sooner, when he was still serious about acting, though I wouldn't be surprised if he nabs a supporting actor nomination out of this.

Back in 1973, when Scorsese's Mean Streets opened, it completely blew me away. Stylistically, it was very new, at least in my experience. The camera movements, the editing, the soundtrack choices and the very vivid characters. It remains one of my all time favorite films.

Plus I identified with Scorsese. He grew up in an Italian neighborhood in New York, somewhat isolated from the community due to health issues. I grew up in an Italian-Irish neighborhood in New York, isolated from the kids on my block because I was not Italian, Irish or Catholic.

Scorsese attended NYU's film school and his mentor there was Haig Manoogian. When Mean Streets opened, I was at NYU's film school and Manoogian was my teacher. Scorsese's first job, I believe, was editing for CBS Sports, and in 1972 I'd had a summer job as an apprentice editor on a show called CBS Sports Illustrated.

Following that, he edited Woodstock. My first film job after college, on the other hand, was as a production assistant and actor on a blaxploitation/kung-fu/monster movie which seemed to have a different name in each theater dumb enough to screen it, including The Devil's Express and Gang Wars. It starred Warhawk Tanzania (and had a cameo from Brother Theodore, an avant garde comedian in the Lord Buckley tradition who was a semi-regular on Letterman before he died)(my favorite Brother Theodore joke: All the great minds of our generation are dead. Pablo Picasso is dead. John Lennon is dead. And I'm not feeling so well myself.) Thankfully this film has yet to see the light of day on DVD - holy shit, there's a copy on Amazon? Wait a sec, buying it now.

Scorsese went on to direct some low budget independent films, sometimes about the Mafia, I was assistant cameraman on a hard core porno that was financed by the Mafia. So you can see the similarities .....

After the movie, over to Maya for some drinks and food but back home by 11 to walk the dogs. Around midnight I was feeling awake again and suggested to T that we should head back out, but she wasn't in the mood.

Then at 1, she came in and announced that she wanted to go out. I said fine, but I was in the mood to drive so I wouldn't drink. She said that was no good, it wouldn't be fun unless I was drinking too. So I said okay, but I'm only going to have 1 drink and then soda or water after that.

Driving to Wanchai, she said we could go to 109. Then she said, "oh, but it's late, maybe they close soon." I started to get a feeling for where this was heading. "Actually, I want to go see my sister, I haven't seen her since Tuesday." As we walked toward Neptune, I said, "I'm not going in with you unless you promise me we won't have a fight later." And she promised.

Fortunately, sister wasn't there and we left within 5 minutes, finding her at Joe Banana. Sometimes I frigging hate Joe Banana and this was one of those times. They have one of those annoying DJ's there who insists on talking over the records. And last night he was saying repeatedly how "JB is the place to be!" And, dude? If it's the fucking place to be, you know it when you're there, you don't need some guy you don't know telling you that, especially some guy with such limited taste in music. Why is it so difficult for these DJ's to play something newer than a year old, or something that you might not hear in every other bar?

I managed to get a seat at the bar, only to have some old eurotwat leaning up against me, smoking a really foul cigar. He had at least 5 friends with him, so I decided not to accidentally spill my drink on his head or spit on his shoes. At this point, my stomach started feeling crappy.

So T looks at me, sitting there with my arms crossed, watching football on TV, and said, "okay, you're not having a good time, we'll go." And I'm like, no, it's okay, we can stay. But five minutes later, we're outta there.

We get home, she's hungry and my stomach is feeling like shit. So she goes to cook herself something and within the next 15 minutes asks me 27 times if I'd like her to make some chicken soup for me.

Finally her motor ran down and we got some sleep ....

Some of you commenters are extremely smart and helpful.

I've blogged about my friend J before (HK woman, not the alcoholic J I recently posted about). Tonight there was a party for her boyfriend's 40th anniversary and during the party he announced their engagement.

Aside from the fact that I was in pain after yesterday's 5 hours of dentistry (yes, it ended up being 5 hours, not 3), I wasn't sure how much T would enjoy this. Hell, I wasn't sure how much I would enjoy it, as I was guessing I wouldn't know 98% of the people there. But we ended up sitting at a table with 4 other people - 3 female (Chinese), 1 male (Caucasian) - only one of whom I knew prior to this evening. And we had a great time. The women said they want to bring T along for a girl's night out kind of thing, and she was looking at me and asking if it was okay and I was like, "yeah! it's great!"

(And contrary to what some of you might think, no, I wasn't thinking it would be an opportunity for me to slip away and grab some hooker. I'm thinking a new set of friends fwill be great for her and I'm thinking a quiet night at home for me, catching up on some of the movies stacking up that would not be to T's liking.)

Clearly she was enjoying every minute of the evening and when we got home afterwards, though both a little bit blitzed, nothing but happiness.

So definitely, Neptune is off the list.

Recently there was a post on some blog about reasons not to blog, and one of those reasons was that the comments you would receive would be worthless. That's definitely not true in this case! Your comments really helped me to understand this and to take positive steps to improve things. So thanks!

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

Side note - so there I am, sitting at a table with four very attractive women, and at one point the other guy left for a few minutes to go to what we were calling Phi Phi Island. At this point, even though we were all talking away and I was still very much part of the group, some other guy came up to the table, said "hello girls" and introduced himself to each of them, never looking at me at all, completely ignoring me, and I commented on it. Now, three of these girls are single and were quite friendly, but they noticed this too. It would have taken the guy all of two seconds to shake my hand and tell me his name and then turn back to the women, but apparently he couldn't be bothered. The women just wrote him off as rude and ignored him. And he was gone as quickly as he arrived.

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

On a completely different note, I want to draw your attention to this interview with R. Lee Ermey, best known for playing the Drill Instructor in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket.

Did you and Kubrick become close while shooting Full Metal Jacket?
Very close. Stanley called me up all the time. He'd call at three o'clock in the morning and say, "Oh, it's 10 o'clock over here." [Laughs] "Yeah, well, it's three o-fucking-clock in the morning here, Stanley. Oh well." He called me about two weeks before he died, as a matter of fact. We had a long conversation about Eyes Wide Shut. He told me it was a piece of shit and that he was disgusted with it and that the critics were going to have him for lunch. He said Cruise and Kidman had their way with him—exactly the words he used.

What did he mean?
He was kind of a shy little timid guy. He wasn't real forceful. That's why he didn't appreciate working with big, high-powered actors. They would have their way with him, he would lose control, and his movie would turn to shit.

This is getting some play around the internet, especially because gossip bloggers seem to love anything that's anti-Tom Cruise. And it would help to explain how Eyes Wide Shut ended up being such a misfire after a career that seemed to be one success after another.

Well, some of you know that I sort of worked for Kubrick once. I served a very peripheral function on The Shining (too small to rate a screen credit) and while I never had the chance to meet him in person, we did talk on the phone many times and I got to know several people who'd worked closely with him for years.

Well, yes, Stanley had a tight circle of friends and he would call them frequently and discuss things quite openly with them. But I suspect that a lot of what Ermey is saying isn't necessarily the truth. Artists, even those of Kubrick's caliber, are vulnerable, yes, and open to doubts and misgivings. But I have to believe that what ended up on the screen represented Kubrick's vision and, if anything went wrong, it's that he should have made the movie 20 years. Kubrick was a perfectionist, thinking nothing of doing dozens of takes until he got exactly what he wanted on film. On the set, he would have shot the scenes in different ways, sometimes doing it an actor's way, sometimes doing it his. Tom Cruise was not in the editing room and Kubrick had final cut. So this just does not ring true to me.

With Kubrick dead, the only one I'd really trust on this would be his widow, and I don't recall reading her ever saying anything even close to this.

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

Okay, so what did I do for Kubrick?

From 1976 to 1980, I was working for director/cameraman Bob Gaffney. Bob had a long and colorful career. He started in documentaries and for awhile was famous for doing aerial photography, especially after doing some of the camerawork for an Academy Award winning short film called "Sky Over Holland."

Kubrick first used Gaffney to film some second unit footage for Lolita, and called him again for both Strangelove and 2001. After 2001, Gaffney was hired to produce Kubrick's next film, Napoleon. Gaffney moved his family to London and immersed himself in the project. Kubrick's plans were grandiose to say the least. He was envisioning these almost-choreographed battle sequences with tens of thousands of extras (there was no CGI then, of course). Finally Kubrick pulled the plug.

Fed up with the experience, Gaffney moved back to New York and started working as a director/cameraman on TV commercials and amassed a shelf full of awards. He directed Orson Welles' first on-camera commercial and directed the first U.S. TV commercial to be shot in the Soviet Union, among many "firsts."

Stanley kept calling him. For Barry Lyndon, Gaffney had a hand in designing the super low light lenses that allowed Kubrick to shoot some scenes by candlelight.

I started out as a freelancer, called in to edit Bob's promo reel and do a variety of jobs on different commercials he was directing. Then somehow I ended up as the receptionist in the office and from there I ended up as his business manager. Don't ask.

Anyway, one day the phone rang, and the voice on the other end asked for Bob and said he was "Stanley Kubrick." I thought it was a joke, but I was soon filled in on the history.

Following Barry Lyndon's failure at the box office, Kubrick felt he needed a sure-fire hit in order to be able to do other projects he had planned and to be able to retain artistic control. That's why he decided to do a horror film and why he chose a Stephen King book. But he hated the book - and especially the ending. He felt if he filmed it as King wrote it, the audience would run out of the theater laughing. So we were all asked to read the book and suggest alternate endings.

We then found the Steadicam for him, the camera mount that became integral to the way so much of The Shining was shot. The inventor, Garrett Brown, brought it to our office and we took turns running around with it and it was clear this was a revolutionary tool.

At that point, Kubrick thought he might move back to the United States and shoot the picture there. Since he wouldn't fly, one of the things I was doing for him was trying to amass every train schedule for the entire U.S. as well as background material for dozens of cities he thought he might want to live in. And then ... he pulled the plug on that and decided to remain in the UK.

So our office served as an intermediary between him and the second unit crew that was filming all of the exterior shots of the hotel and surrounding areas. A lot of people who'd worked for him on many films came through our office and I got to hear a lot of stories about what he was like as a person, what he was like to work for.

And so, Ermey's comments just don't fit. Then again, clearly any attempt to suggest that I was even 1/1000th as close to Kubrick as Ermey was would be ludicrous.

Anyway, 2001, Dr. Strangelove, Lolita, The Shining and Paths of Glory remain my favorite Kubrick films.

Clockwork Orange didn't quite work for me because I felt that the movie lost the entire point of Burgess's book. Barry Lyndon didn't work for me because of Ryan O'Neal's bland performance ("how do you know that's not how Kubrick directed him to act?" is something one of Kubrick's confidants once said to me when I levelled that criticism). Full Metal Jacket just seemed too disjointed, I didn't like the climactic scenes and was distracted by the attempts to make the UK look like Vietnam. And Eyes Wide Shut, it definitely is a mess, yet a very ambitious mess, and you simply cannot fault him for attempting to make a movie of that type in that time, even if it didn't work.

New York Times correspondent and editor R.W. Apple Jr. passed away this week. The man led an amazing life:

Mr. Apple enjoyed a career like no other in the modern era of The Times. He was the paper’s bureau chief in Albany, Lagos, Nairobi, Saigon, Moscow, London and Washington. He covered 10 presidential elections and more than 20 national nominating conventions. He led The Times’s coverage of the Vietnam War for two and a half years in the 1960’s and of the Persian Gulf war a generation later, chronicling the Iranian revolution in between.

And that's just a small portion, read the obit for the rest.

Aside from his global news coverage, in his latter years he was writing some beautiful articles for the Times about food around the world. Apparently he was the kind of person who always took a small pepper mill whenever he traveled, just in case. I loved his recent article in praise of the mangosteen. I clipped and saved pieces he had written about the joys of local food in Vietnam and Thailand. Well written, wonderfully informative, and his writing did the thing that all good food writing should do - make you want to drop everything and try the things he was writing about.

The last piece he wrote, "The Global Gourmand," was published today. It's a heavily annotated list of "10 restaurants abroad that would be worth boarding a plane to visit." Six are in Europe, one is in South America, two are in Asia, one is in Australia.

The Asian ones are Jean-Georges in Shanghai (which I went to once and remains one of the greatest meals of my life) and Trishna in Mumbai.

In Australia, he singles out Billy Kwong in Sydney. I only just became aware of Kylie Kwong on my last Sydney visit and have now caught some of her work on TV (I can't recall if she's on AFC or Discovery Travel & Living) and she seems wonderful. I am going to try her place the next time I get to Australia.

58% of Americans now believe that the Bush administration deliberately misled the public about the Iraq war.

Check this post at Mahablog which runs down the entire Condi Rice was-she-or-wasn't-she-briefed thing. Yes, she was. And as it turns out, Time Magazine reported on the meeting in 2002. The post also has information on how George Tenet stopped flying domestic commercial flights in July, 2001.

Colin Powell, from a speech yesterday:

In Iraq, "staying the course isn't good enough because a course has to have an end," Powell said.

Mark Foley - calling him scum is unfair to scum.

Former Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) interrupted a vote on the floor of the House in 2003 to engage in Internet sex with a high school student who had served as a congressional page, according to new Internet instant messages provided to ABC News by former pages.

And what about all the Republicans who knew about this sad, sick man and protected him? Here:

In another stunning development, Robert Novak today reveals in his column - published in PostOpinion on Page 31 - that even after House GOP leaders knew that Foley had written an inappropriate e-mail to a 16-year-old former male page, they were still urging him to seek re-election.

Novak writes, "A member of the House leadership told me that Foley, under continuous political pressure because of his sexual orientation, was considering not seeking a seventh term this year but that Rep. Tom Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), talked him into running."

Well, look here, Foley bought their protection. Republicans always put money ahead of morals.

An MSNBC segment examines if Rep. Foley made a large contribution to the Republican Party in exchange for silence about sexual messages that Foley sent to House pages. Foley gave $100,000 to the GOP Campaign Committee in July. The large contribution came at same time when Republican House leadership ignored Foley's emails.

What a day, what a day, what a day.

Picked up the new car yesterday afternoon. As I got behind the wheel and started driving around, I recalled that I hadn't driven in HK in almost 14 months. It took me all of 15 minutes to feel confident enough to start doing 120 in a 70 zone, screaming down the highway, "Fumier, I'm coming for you!" A radar detector might not be a bad purchase this weekend. This is my first Lexus, after 3 BMWs in a row, and it's definitely a very different driving experience, but I shall adapt.

How to celebrate? I figured the best way was to pack the car with friends, head to Sai Kung and gorge on seafood. And so we did. Prawns, lobster, cuttlefish, "garoupa" and some shellfish that I love but don't know the English name. And a lot of beer. A lot. (Never fear, I just drank Coca Cola.)

After dinner, over to Neptune to accommodate some of my single male friends. A lot more booze (and more cola for me). Neptune was very busy. Easily more women than men. And a few of the women were attractive even without beer goggles. Just a few.

In my new monogamous state of mind, I watched V, a Filipina girl I know, fawning all over some guy, using all of her considerable charms. And then I watched her looking very depressed after the guy left the bar alone. What was in her mind at that moment? Was she just thinking that she'd tried so hard and it still didn't work, that at that moment the money she was hoping for wasn't coming her way? Or was it something more, was she thinking she's nice and smart and good looking and why does she have to do this for a living and what is going to happen to her life? Okay, it was probably the former. But I know her a little and I wouldn't entirely rule out the latter.

And then ... and then ... well, I need to give some ancient history here ...

In 1993, I was living with a woman named J in New Jersey. She still kept her own place but we were together every night in her place or mine. She was in her mid 30s, had long blonde hair and the classic 36-24-36 measurements. She was very nice, not the smartest girl I'd ever met but affectionate and caring. I'd ended my 14 year marriage the year before (I guess I should be specific and say that I didn't meet J until months after my marriage ended) and was very happy to be with her. Her parents owned a beautiful house on a lake where we would spend many romantic weekends and she'd tell me that one day that house would be hers. Everyone assumed we would get married. Her parents, her friends, my friends, everyone. But I knew it was never going to happen. J had a secret.

J was an alcoholic. She got drunk every night. Every night. On red wine. Cheap red wine that was sold in supermarkets and came in a plastic-lined cardboard box. Every night she would go through stages that often included her becoming verbally abusive and generally ended with her blacking out.

I told her that some day she was going to have to choose between wine and me. But she refused to accept that she had a problem, refused to change her behavior and wouldn't even discuss the possibility of going to AA. And then one night, when we were sitting in the dining room talking and she blacked out in the middle of a sentence, hitting her head on the table, I told her it was clear to me that she had made her choice and I kicked her out.

Thirteen years later, we remain in touch via the occasional email. I have no idea if she still drinks or not. I know she is still single.

The thing is, I've been through that once, I have no desire to ever go through it again.

Now T has spent most of the past 8 years in bars. She's told me she can drink up to 20 bottles of beer in a single night and I believe her. I also understand that she is feeling very insecure in many ways about our relationship. So while she doesn't drink every night now, and drinks far less than 20 bottles in a night, in the past month she has gotten very drunk twice and when she gets drunk, her Thai reserve melts away and all of her insecurities about me come out. When she's sober, she talks about me meeting her parents and what the two of us might be doing in ten years. When she's drunk, she talks about how we'll probably only be together for a month or two and that when I want to kick her out, it's okay.

I understand that she's feeling insecure. She's making major changes in her lifestyle and wondering if she's doing the right thing. We've broken up so many times in the past that she is probably thinking another break-up is waiting just around the bend.

So last night in Neptune, she kept pointing out other women that she thought looked nice and telling me it was okay if I wanted to try one. Of course I had no interest in that. (It was sad/funny, because last night I was telling a friend that for the first time in many years, I could stand in Neptune, look at all of these women and feel no temptation whatsoever.)

And when we got home, there was more, which I won't detail here, except to say that she was all over the map. Finally I started in on her. Never yelling, never raising my voice, never threatening. I remained, calm, just telling her that her behavior was really hurting me. That in the past I've ended relationships for much less than what she was putting me through - and that in part was how I knew how strong my feelings are for her, that I'm not looking to run away, I'm willing to deal with this stuff and try to fight through it.

I told her that in the past I wasn't willing to commit to her because of that work but now that she's stopped I'm ready to try, that my feelings are even stronger for her now because she's stopped doing that kind of work. I told her that I really want "us" to work out and last. And I told her that she's got to stop trying to hurt me, stop testing me, stop trying to push me away, because one day she could succeed.

She apologized, started hugging me and kissing me and finally the late hour took its toll and, exhausted, I fell asleep. She's sleeping now. I know she's going to wake up and apologize. But now I also know that every time we're going to go out, I'm going to have to wonder if this is what will be waiting for me at the end of the evening.

Obviously this morning I am not in the best of moods.

Plus today I am looking forward (ha!) to a 3 hour session at the dentist.

Stolen from boingboing:

The long weekend draws to a close. Mostly spent relaxing, some organizing of crap around the house, several okay meals, catching up on some TV shows, couple of nights in bars, including Sunday night, showing the "sights" to an out of town visitor.

For a recent commenter, there are no Wanchai adventures to blog about. At the moment, I'm being monogamous. About a month so far. Yes, I have seen some attractive women on the streets and in the bars of Wanchai, but I've felt little temptation in that area right now. T keeps telling me it's all right, if I see some woman I "want to try," she's not jealous. (A) I don't believe her. And (B) I've told her I can't promise how I might feel six months from now but for right now, I don't feel like I need to try anyone else.

I've noticed that some of T's friends are jealous of her. My ego isn't raging hard enough to say it's because she's with me (though that is what she's claiming), I think it's just that she's found someone who has taken her out of the bars and into a normal life. (She's even said to me that now she feels that she can hold her head up when she goes out.) I have noticed some girls looking at me differently now, including a waitress in one of the bars who I think had been trying to land me herself - she knows I'm with T now and we had a short, wistful conversation on Saturday night. Almost every Filipino waitress I know in Wanchai seems to have a western boyfriend and more than a few of the Thai girls (especially those over 30) are looking for at least a steady boyfriend almost as hard as they're looking for money to pay the bills and send back to their families.

At any rate, the point is - for right now, I'm the most relaxed and happiest I've been in I-don't-know-how-long. I'm not two-timing, I'm not short-timing, haven't even gone for a rub and a tug.

T showed me some of the books she's been using to learn English. Two are a series of short, two line poems. As I flipped through the books, I tried explaining to her that poetic English often isn't the same as spoken English, that word order can be reversed among other things. As I looked further, I realized that the book was just filled with bad English and poor grammar! (Yes, I know I should post some examples, just take my word for it.) So I thought about it for a bit and, rather than saying "these books are terrible!" I figured, I really don't give a shit if she has perfect grammar or not.

And I know I've been completely mangling the Thai I've been trying to learn, and she's been patient and encouraging. She mostly understands what I'm saying, I mostly understand what she says, as time goes by her English will continue to get better and I'll pick up some more Thai and that's good enough.

Her English is a lot better than some of the locals here, that goes without saying I suppose. Look, I don't wanna offend anyone, but when I go into Watsons in Times Square and ask someone who works there, "Where is the mens' deodorant," I expect an answer other than a blank stare and "Deeee-ooooh-duh?"

I guess this Watsons fancies itself to be posh. No basic brands, they pointed me at FCUK and Armani products. No thanks.

And City Super has Jamie Oliver pots and pans now, and other fancy stuff - I spotted a frying pan going for more than $1800. I just wanted a no frills cast iron pan, you'd think they would have one hiding somewhere, but no. (Hey, can anyone tell me where restaurants and real cooks go to buy their cookware?)

(Also would appreciate any tips on where I can bring my dogs and let them run off-leash ... and if there's a place for them to swim, even better.)

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be picking up my car. Am planning on celebrating by taking T and some friends up to Sai Kung for a nice dinner.

Music selected to go into the CD changer first - Bob Seger, Kasabian, Massive Attack, Bruce Springsteen, Gatecrasher. Charging up a bluetooth headset and thinking about getting an iPod adapter for the car.

Well, I'd written a long post commemorating 300k hits here and also describing my Saturday night and some general observations on Wanchai. And then I noticed that my USB hub wasn't getting any power and plugged it in and my PC decided to reboot. And I thought that blogger had some sort of auto-save feature and I'd been writing that piece for about 20 minutes but when I rebooted, logged into blogger and went to edit posts, no draft saved. And I do have a few other things to do today, believe it or not.

So the shorthand, Shaky Kaiser-ish version ....

300k hits
jealous girls in Neptune
foam party and drunk asshole (not me) in Bar 109
jenga at klong
happier than I've been in ages

...sigh...

Republicans approve of pedophilia. There is simply no other way to explain this report:

Top House Republicans knew for months about e-mail traffic between Representative Mark Foley and a former teenage page, but kept the matter secret and allowed Mr. Foley to remain head of a Congressional caucus on children’s issues, Republican lawmakers said Saturday.

Or this one:

At least four Republican House Members, one senior GOP aide and a former top officer of the House were aware of the allegations about Foley that prompted the initial reporting regarding his e-mail contacts with a 16-year-old House page. They include: Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Reynolds (N.Y.) and Reps. Rodney Alexander (R-La.) and John Shimkus (R-Ill.), as well as a senior aide to Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and former Clerk of the House Jeff Trandahl.

Or this one:

Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and at least three of his aides were told of allegations that then-Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) had improper e-mail contacts with a former House page months before the incident became public and Foley resigned from Congress, according to a senior House Republican and a report released by Hastert’s office on Saturday.

This contradicts earlier claims from Hastert’s office that the Speaker did not know of Foley’s behavior until it was revealed this week by ABC News.

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

Are you a Republican or an American?

Larry Johnson, terrorist expert, former CIA agent and former Republican gives tips on how to identify if you yourself are a Republican. Some examples:

If you start a war in Iraq while lying to the American people that Saddam was tied to Osama Bin Laden, you might be a Republican.

If you failed to complete your own National Guard service and your Vice President received five deferments to avoid service in Vietnam, but accuse political opponents who challenge your failed foreign policy in Iraq of being cowards, you might be a Republican.

If you call dark skinned people Macacas and Niggers, you might be a Republican.

If you ignore intelligence community warnings that Bin Laden is determined to strike inside the United States, you might be a Republican.

If you follow policies that squander a budget surplus and create an $8.5 trillion dollar budget deficit, you might be a Republican.

If you expose the identity of an undercover CIA officer in charge of tracking down Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, you might be a Republican.

If you believe the President should be entitled to jail, without recourse to Habeus Corpus, anyone he decides is a threat, you might be a Republican.

Finally, he concludes:

After careful consideration, I realize that I lack the moral bankruptcy, cowardice, and fiscal recklessness to call my self a Republican. I've decided, I am an American.