Hongkie Town

Sometimes I question the wisdom of blogging very personal things (and yet sometimes I still do it). I'm not really seeking comments or feedback. So why do I do it? Fucked if I know.

I have to preface this tale with the information that you already know ... that T is upset over the fact that on this entry to HK, she only received 14 days; that T is bored because she cannot work and has nothing to do but sit in the house all day watching DVDs. I know this, and it becomes a component of the way that I react.

So ... come home from work tonight. Sit with T, discuss my upcoming trip to Thailand to deal with dentists. We discuss splitting the time between Bangkok and Sri Racha. Reassure her that I want to be with her the entire time I'm in Thailand. She tells me that at the end of December there will be some kind of big family get-together, 50 people or more. Then move on to discussing plans on how to get her here legally, specific and legitimate steps we can take. She asks me something she's asked before, have I thought about what we would do if she can't get here legally. I tell her that I haven't thought that far ahead because I don't expect that to happen. She says she'd probably just stay in Thailand and find some other job. I tell her I'm confident that we can make this work.

Should be all good, right? But for some reason it's not. She gets all quiet. I tell her that I need to do stuff for about half an hour and then we can go out for some dinner. She goes out, comes back, says she wants to go out for a walk and I should call her when I'm ready to go.

She comes back 15 minutes later. I tell her I'm ready, we get changed and go out. I offer her several choices for dinner, her response is "you decide."

In the taxi, she turns to me and says maybe she can get someone to marry her. I ask her if she's got someone specific in mind and it turns out she does - someone who is not me. We get out of the taxi, I get some cash from the bank, and we get to a restaurant.

After we order, I ask her more questions about the guy. She says she has a feeling he would marry her. I ask when is the last time she spoke with him and she swears it's before we start living together. I ponder this for awhile, quietly. She asks if I'm upset.

"Yes, of course I am upset! I spent all this time tonight talking about the things we can do so you can stay here, and then you tell me about this guy. It's like you're saying to me, 'if you can't work this out, then I'm going to go with someone else who can.' It's like you're putting a gun to my head."

She apologizes. We move on to eating our dinner, talking about the food. We finish, go to a bar, get a couple of drinks.

I tell her that one of the reasons I'm glad we're living together is that it makes me work at the relationship. I remind her how I dated lots of women in the three years I was single and how I'd always break up with them at the first hint of any problem. But since we live together, when there's a problem, I want to work it out, work our way through it, rather than just running away like I used to do.

Then she tells me that when she went out for her walk earlier, she thought about texting me and breaking up with me, her "can you find some other girl" line. I tell her what I always tell her when she asks me that. That I know I could find 20 other girls that night if I wanted to but that I know she is with me because she loves me and the 20 other girls would be with me just for the money and the opportunity to stop working in the bars. That I love her and trust her and that I would not be able to trust any of those other girls.

We head home. During the taxi ride, she asks a question about my ex. She's interested in how my ex got her HK ID (she got a dependent visa after we got married) and if she still has it. "I suppose she still does, we're still married." "You're still married?????"

This stops me cold. I don't know how many times I've told her this. I don't know how many times I've told her we're going through the divorce, that the papers are all signed and filed and that we're just waiting for the HK courts to finish processing them. I have no idea how she could not know this.

Back home, in the bedroom. I think I start by saying that I'm really worried that she says she didn't know I was still legally married. That either she really needs to work on her English or really needs to work on my Thai.

After awhile, she says that it would be easier for both of us if she moved out, I found someone else, and she went back to "work" as a hooker. I went through the 27 reasons why that would be a bad idea, both in terms of our relationship and in terms of her own life. I tell her how much happier I am since she's moved in with me, how it has made my life better. I tell her I thought she was happier too and she says she is.

Finally she tells me she loves me, tells me she's willing to wait and see if my plan works out.

I go to sleep. She goes into the living room to watch more DVDs. I wake up two hours later. She's taken a bottle of wine from the fridge, drank half of it. Tells me she loves me. Asks me if she can cut her hair short. Asks if I will have a Christmas tree, remembers I'm not Christian, asks me if I believe in any god and I tell her no. She goes back to watching TV, falls asleep on the couch, I wake her up and bring her to the bedroom and tuck her in.

As I read back on what I wrote, I worry that I've omitted important stuff that prevents the reader from getting the true picture of the evening. I worry that I haven't caught the tone right. And I worry that someone reading this might think that she's incredibly smart and manipulative, playing me like a violin to get the results she wants, and that I'm a lovestruck fool, going along with anything she says.

I suppose there is a 10% chance that's possible, that she is scamming me in some way. I choose not to believe that. As I said near the start, I think she's operating from a place of insecurity, and that insecurity influences a lot of her words and actions.

Well, this is all jumbled and I don't know if I see the point in actually posting this but what the hell....

Feeling like poo. I estimate that in the past month or so, my dental bills have totaled about HK$40,000. The wonderful dental insurance policy that my company provides has reimbursed me a grand total of HK$116. And I'm not even close to finished yet.

The only thing to make me smile today is the KKKRamer Rap. Someone has taken the audio from Michael Richards' racist rant at the Laugh Factory plus his appearance with Seinfeld on Letterman to apologize and done the best mash-up/hip-hop single of the year. I'm not kidding, one listen and you will not get this song out of your head.

Actually, the other thing that made me laugh was reading this comment by Donald Tsang.

"The life expectancy in Hong Kong is among the highest in the world ... you can come to only one conclusion: we have the most environmentally friendly place for people, for executives, for Hong Kong people to live."

Which raises the question: Is Donald Tsang really that stupid or does he just think everyone else is that stupid?

I link to news stuff in The Standard because you can. The SCMP must be one of the only major metropolitan newspapers in the world that has a website that charges for content (even to see something like movie or TV listings). The Standard is crap too. It exists mainly as a wrapper for corporate notices.

Check this quote from the story about pianist Lang Lang becoming a "quality migrant" to Hong Kong:

Dressed in a glamorous black suit and Louis Vuitton shoes, the pianist was overjoyed ...

We get the brand name of the shoes but why didn't they get the name of the tailor? What color was the lining of the jacket? Accessories? Shoddy reporting!

And exactly how "overjoyed" was he?

He said he has yet to decide whether he will apply for permanent residence in Hong Kong after seven years ... "In fact, I have had many opportunities to obtain foreign passports."

He sounds completely verklempt.

"I'm a northern Chinese, so Hong Kong is too humid for me. So I think winter here will be perfect for me."

Lang was not quoted as saying, "Actually, I don't like Hong Kong because you can't see the air here like in Beijing. But Donald Tsang has personally assured me he will remedy that situation."

Feeling a bit better, we ventured out this evening. After debating dinner back and forth, we decided to try JoJo's in Wanchai. I've had several people tell me it's their favorite Indian place; one or two had negative comments about the service.

It's certainly a nice looking place. Got to give it that. And with a view overlooking Fenwick's, there's no shortage of entertainment. On the other hand, it's larger than most Indian restaurants I've been to. And when we entered, there were just three people working the floor. One of those three was almost constantly on the phone dealing with, I suppose, Food-By-Fone orders or something. The second was almost constantly behind the bar pouring drinks. That left just one person running back and forth to the tables for a good part of the time. After awhile, someone whom I presume was one of the bosses showed up and he took over the phone.

After we ordered, we had to wait 5 minutes for papadums and another 5 minutes for our drinks. After that, it was another 15 minutes until our food arrived. Perhaps they were equally short handed in the kitchen. This guy came in after us and ordered something for takeaway and it seemed like he was there for at least 20 minutes after ordering. (In all fairness, he didn't use a menu to order so perhaps he's a regular and perhaps we caught them on an off night.)

The food itself was hit and miss. I ordered some variation on chicken tikka and it was so bland that T covered hers with salt and pepper while I liberally applied the mint sauce. Our naan didn't arrive until we'd almost finished this dish (and I usually live to wrap bits of this stuff in naan). T had selected a fish curry which I found spicy but she also thought was bland. The one dish she liked was the vegetable biryani. We agreed that next time we'd go someplace else.

After that, over to Maya. I found our usual table in the front was gone, replaced by a stand holding two Roland keyboards. I thought this did not bode well, but after a few minutes one guy stood behind the keyboards, another guy picked up a 5 string electric bass, and they proceeded to play real jazz. And these guys could really play. T said she recognized the bass player, that she's sometimes seen him sitting in with the band at Neptune.

After the first song, I joked to the bass player that they're not allowed to play real music in Hong Kong and that they're supposed to just play kiddy shit like the Macarena. He laughed, he knew what I was getting at. And while the audience inside was appreciative, it was interesting to watch the people passing by. Maybe only half actually stopped and looked inside once they heard the music. Another 25% stopped but that's because there was a football match on the TV. Another 25% just kept walking.

As they kept on playing, this guy came by, heard them and started dancing, what almost looked like real jazz moves, very slow, very precise. He then lured in two Filipino girls coming down the street, bought them drinks, kept on dancing. The girls left after they finished their drinks so the guy went back to dancing in the street. It was very Borat-like, he'd come up behind someone walking down the street and dance behind them and most often they'd turn and notice and run. One woman actually stopped and danced with him for a few bars before moving on.

At any rate, I didn't catch the musicians' names but I'm told they're gonna be there every Sunday night and if you find yourself in Wanchai and want to hear something other than the Ketchup Song, you should check it out.

What else could have gone wrong? Ah yes, T returned to HK. Although she had gone to the Chinese embassy in Bangkok and received a three month visa, on arrival in HK she was pulled off the line, interviewed in one of those little rooms and at the end given just two weeks instead of three months. Despite the fact that she was carrying a letter from me, a copy of my HK ID card and a stack of photos of the two of us taken at different times, at different locations, with different groups of friends. She asked the immigration guy to call me to verify the information but he refused. He advised her to tell me that I should get my company to provide her with an HK ID card, and of course there's no chance my company would agree to anything like that. For those of you who are new to this ongoing saga, marriage is not a possibility. I do have some other ideas but they will take some time to try.

As you can imagine, this put her in a lousy mood. All she wanted to do was go out and get smashed and I'm in no condition for that, so she went and drank with her fake aunt.

I stayed home and watched Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center." I don't think that anyone expected such an apolitical film from the usually opinionated Mr. Stone and in that sense I think he did exactly the right thing. Yet by giving the movie this title, one expected a sweeping panorama of the entire event. I already knew from the reviews that this was not it - the film focuses in on two Port Authority policemen who were trapped under the rubble and their families, waiting for word in their suburban homes. Which means the definitive account of the event has yet to be made and I'm sure there will be many attempts to do it. In the meantime, this is excellent film making and shows that even Nicolas Cage can be non-annoying when working with the right part and the right director.

T came back early, very smashed. Subsequent conversation included her wondering if I got the flu because I'd gone with other girls while she was away. I waited for her to be sober this morning before telling her that I hadn't been with anyone else and that after a couple of operations, my resistance to germs was down and that's why I got sick. Not sure if that's the reason but the truth is that while she was away, while I was hitting the bars, I was also being faithful (which as many of you know is not something I'm normally good at but this time I was).

At any rate, today, the combination of vitamins, cold pills, lots of fluids, healthy eating means I'm starting to feel better. Two doctor appointments set for this week and the Seoul trip rescheduled for the following week.

Other distractions:

Something that caught my eye on Gizmodo this morning:

According to a recent report by In-Stat, over 15% of people carry two wireless phones. Other findings include:

80% camera phone users say they regularly carry their digital camera
75% of SmartPhone users say they also carry a PDA
>50% of users of multimedia phones also carry their MP3 player.
Just 43% of the respondents thought a smart phone could offer higher productivity.

Guilty as charged. My standard "day-pack" now includes a Treo 750v, a Blackberry 8707g, an iPod (either the 2G nano or 5G 60 gig), a camera (either a Canon Ixus 800IS or Nikon D80). It all gets shoved either into a 7 year old Oakley knapsack or a one year old fake British Army, fake leather shoulder bag (which one of my staff referred to as a "man purse").

Okay - two phones because the Blackberry is supplied by my company and I'm not supposed to use it for personal calls or messaging, and I certainly don't want my private life showing up on the corporate server, waiting for some admin with nothing better to do to start going through my logs. My personal phone is a smart phone because I do too much SMS'ing for a 12 digit keypad and there are a number of apps I have grown dependent on (HanDbase, WorldMate, multi-language dictionaries, a couple of games).

The iPod and the camera because neither phone does a good enough job of playing music or taking photos to replace those - and if they did, then battery life would start to become a major concern I'm sure.

It's worse when I travel because I have all of the above plus my laptop, plus Altec-Lansing InMotion speakers for the iPod, plus a charger for each and assorted plug adapters depending on where I'm going. All of the chargers and adapters, a mouse and assorted cables, go into a small bag (which no longer has space for the laptop charger).

Speaking of tech, the Chicago Sun-Times puts into print what we all could have guessed:

Microsoft's new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful. I've spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face.

"Avoid," is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that's so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity.

The setup process stands among the very worst experiences I've ever had with digital music players. The installer app failed, and an hour into the ordeal, I found myself asking my office goldfish, "Has it really come to this? Am I really about to manually create and install a .dll file?"

The Zune is a complete, humiliating failure....Result: The Zune will be dead and gone within six months. Good riddance.

Check this out. From ebay, a Playstation 3 sold for 99 cents.

From the NY Times, an article on the glut of new and reissued recordings by Philip Glass. One thing I love about Glass, aside from his music, is the fact that in his early days, he supported himself by being a NYC taxi driver. And back when I was a NYC taxi driver, I once got into a heated argument with a passenger over whether or not what he was doing was "music." My first wife and I went to the NY premiere of Satyagraha, his opera on the life of Gandhi in South Africa, which was sung in Sanskrit. I remember sitting there thinking that the combination of the music and the staging was the most transcendent experience I'd ever had in a theater. I looked over at my wife, she noticed me looking at her and whispered to me, "I'm going to get you for this."

Politics now, then some sex. The NY Times reports:

The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded.

The report offers little hope that much can be done, at least soon, to choke off insurgent revenues. For one thing, it acknowledges how little the American authorities in Iraq know — three and a half years after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein — about crucial aspects of insurgent operations. For another, it paints an almost despairing picture of the Iraqi government’s ability, or willingness, to take steps to tamp down the insurgency’s financing.

And this:

Defying a government curfew, Shiite militiamen stormed Sunni mosques in Baghdad and a nearby city on Friday, shooting guards and burning down buildings in apparent retaliation for the devastating bombings that killed more than 200 people the day before in the capital’s largest Shiite district, residents and police officials said.

Militia fighters drove through neighborhoods in Baghdad and the provincial capital of Baquba, firing at mosques with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades on the Muslim day of prayer.

Similarly from the LA Times:

Iraq's civil war worsened Friday as Shiite and Sunni Arabs engaged in retaliatory attacks after coordinated car bombings that killed more than 200 people in a Shiite neighborhood the day before. A main Shiite political faction threatened to quit the government, a move that probably would cause its collapse and plunge the nation deeper into disarray.

The massacre Thursday in Sadr City — a stronghold of Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr and his Al Mahdi militia — sparked attacks around the country, reinforced doubts about the effectiveness of the Iraqi government and U.S. military and emboldened Shiite vigilantes.

In a sermon Friday, Sadr, a strong opponent of the United States, said the Pentagon's refusal to grant full control of Iraqi security forces to the Baghdad government was leaving the populace vulnerable to insurgent attacks.

And as Sadr's militiamen took matters into their own hands in battles with Sunni Arabs, his political representatives demanded that Prime Minister Nouri Maliki signal his displeasure with the U.S. military occupation by canceling a meeting with President Bush next week in Jordan.

The U.S. government continues to insist that Iraq is not in the midst of a civil war.

Last, some sex stuff:

Everyone is posting this recent picture of Salma Hayek. But just in case you missed, here it is as a public service for my readers.


Also getting posted everywhere are new nudes of Courtney Love published in Pop Magazine (obviously NSFW). Okay, her life is a series of trainwrecks and she's had 'em done (several times) but for 42 years old? Not bad.

One other NSFW recommendation which I keep forgetting to add to my blogroll is Tokyo Undressed. "A concept series project by artist/photographer Rikki Kasso." Mostly very NSFW, despite the two pictures I've put below. Also very artistic.

Just like I'm proud of where I live, I'm proud of where I was born.

Dominatrix alleges bizarre sexual encounter with cop

"He wanted to go to a motel in the Bronx where I would defecate on him, but I told him I was uncomfortable going to the Bronx," testified the dominatrix, Gina Pane, 31.

My health continues to slide rapidly downhill.

Yesterday, two last minute invitations for Thanksgiving dinners but turned both of them down as I did not feel up to being in a social situation with new people. I can't talk too much without being in pain and didn't want to come off as the quiet sociopath sitting in a corner whom everyone whispers about. (Unfortunately for you, dear readers, while I cannot talk, I can still type.)

Thanksgiving is a weird kind of holiday here - one not officially celebrated by the masses and yet definitely celebrated by the tens of thousands of American ex-pats and possibly loads of locals who were educated in the US. But in my current state of mind, all I could think was that the various food delivery services might be really busy and it could take hours to get something delivered.

So out I went and, without thinking, went to Wanchai. I said "without thinking" because I knew it was going to the be the first night of U.S. Navy in town and the word was that this was another large-scale visit. I know this, I know what Wanchai can be like when this happens, I went there anyway.

I managed to get a front-row seat at Devil's Advocate and watched horny sailors just off the boat, many not realizing that the potential pleasures and pitfalls of Wanchai represent their own unique theater of war. Some guys were just very drunk, some had their new-found love (or loves) clutching their arms, others were ... well one guy came up to me and asked me if I knew where he could buy some "you know, party stuff!" Devil's thins out once happy hour is over.

One of the waitresses, an especially cute and sweet lady, walked by me at one point shaking her head and saying to herself, "they're everywhere, my god!" By now a friend has joined me for dinner, but afterwards he has to go off and meet someone and I'm feeling like staying put.

In one of those moments that have become typical in my life, my phone rings, unknown caller. It's a Filipino girl and she's standing right across the street in front of Fenwick. She can recognize me but I can barely make her out and have no idea who she is. She says she just got back in town (fortuitous timing, that). I tell her I'm not setting foot in Fenwick and tell her to come across the street (so I can figure out who she is) but she says she's going back to her room to go to sleep. Guess I'll never know.

Then in another one of those moments, a Thai girl comes walking by, one I'd been with once about six months ago. I tell her I'm being good these days, that I have a girlfriend now. She tells me she really likes me and says my name. I'm impressed that she remembers it; I can't recall hers though I do recall it was one of those nights where I really liked her in the bar when it was dark and I had the beer goggles on but once I got home with her, not so much. So no temptation for me, she's nowhere near kryptonite like one or two others, and after a couple of minutes she descends into Fenwick.

(Look, in my defense, first of all, most of these girls use made-up bar names instead of their real names when they're working. Since the name is fake, why should I bother to try to remember it? And even when it's not fake, the Thai girls are always Lek or Noi or Oi, how can you keep that straight? The odd thing with T is that though she had a bar name and everyone in the bar knew her by that fake name, for some reason when we met she never told me her fake name, she told me her real name right away.)

So now I'm thinking that I wouldn't mind some sort of company for awhile. But I'm also not feeling well. Could it be possible that, aside from all the pain I'm having, I'm coming down with the flu as well? I decide it's time to get away from Wanchai. I'll go home and if I'm feeling okay later, will head to Lan Kwai Fong.

Except later I'm not feeling okay. Instead I watch the HBO/BBC co-production of Elizabeth I. Yes, Helen Mirren's great in it, but it doesn't shake my tree. Despite good acting, nice costumes and sets, it feels small, confined. I'm well aware of the techniques being used to make small crowds seem large, small locations seem big. It seems low budget, it feels too "TV-y".

I start sneezing. I start taking massive amounts of Vitamin C. I get in bed with a book. Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear by Jim Steinmeyer. No jokes about how this does or does not seem related to my life.

This morning I wake up, still sneezing. Swallow a fistful of antibiotics and Vitamin C, open a can of chicken soup. T is back tomorrow. I'm looking forward to home made chicken soup.

P.S. The reason I screwed up on the date for the Wanchai pub crawl thing is because I was right, it has been pushed to a week from Saturday, but the web site hadn't been updated so it was still showing the wrong date. I think the promoters wisely decided to wait for all the Navy to leave town before attempting this.

Lotsa new ones added. Very few taken away. Apologies to those I should have linked to sooner. Can't say it won't happen again!

Just back from the endodontist. One of those dentists who has a flat screen TV on the ceiling and DVDs playing (no sound but subtitles on) in hopes of distracting you from whatever horrors he is orally committing. The movie I was subjected to was worse than the drilling - Analyze That.

Side note ... having been to three different dental specialists in the last couple of weeks, I have noticed that in each case, when the dentist is giving a shot of novocaine, each of the assistants has massaged my shoulder. I never really noticed this before and I guess it's common practice now.

At any rate, back on antibiotics and painkillers. My Thanksgiving dinner will likely be soup and, if feeling bold, a soft roll.

In answer to some recent comments ...

Well, yeah, okay, November 25th is this weekend. I'm on a lot of drugs at the moment to get in peak condition for this.

"How much for the little girl?" No apology needed. Blues Brothers reference enjoyed.

What's there to do in Seoul besides work? There's a red light district in Itaewon catering to the US military and foreigners. It's expensive and not much fun. There's a Hard Rock Cafe, bars in 5 star hotels, and lots of stuff that doesn't really cater to non-Korean speakers. I've been going to Seoul for almost a dozen years and if I'm not going out with friends or on business, I stay in the hotel and watch DVDs.

"double duck portions" Some movie or book or conventional wisdom has it that if you want to know what your girlfriend will look like when she gets old, meet her mother. I am consoled by the fact that so far I have not had any romantic relationship last for 20 years and, should this be the one that does, by the time T is her mother's age I expect to either be dead or not able to care one way or the other.

What a shitty 24 hours this has been. Out last night with buddy S for an impromptu bar crawl and decided against all odds (and some reason) to be good.

Came home, went to bed if not entirely to sleep. Woke up at 4 AM to puke and then woke up at 6 AM in significant pain. I sat there realizing that for possibly the first time in my life I'd have to postpone a scheduled trip for health reasons. By 7:30, I knew I had to get to a dentist and luckily mine was able to see me in the afternoon.

Returning home from the dentist, simultaneously numb and in great pain from novocaine and some assorted pills, I sat in my room morbidly pondering my mortality and then distracted myself first by watching Clerks 2 (a disappointment) and then commencing on redoing all 60 gigs in my iPod. And yes, as you might have guessed, a bowl of soup for dinner.

The true bummer is that if I'd gone on the trip as scheduled, then Thursday night, Thanksgiving night, I'd have been out with friends in Seoul, eating the best barbecue and drinking the best soju all evening long.

I turned down all local invitations for Thanksgiving dinners since I didn't plan to be in town. And unfortunately these were the sorts of dinners that the hosts needed to book in advance, so I can't call them up now and say, "oh, by the way, could I ...?" Not sure that I could actually eat much of anything, but certainly would be able to drink.

My girlfriend is still in Thailand and won't be back till Saturday or Monday, she's still not quite sure. I hate the idea of going to some Dan Ryan kind of place and sitting there by myself. I suppose I'll be going out on my own to the more-or-less usual spots.

Sorry to be so fucking weepy. I'm sure my mood will pick up soon. It always does.

One thing I can look forward to is the Xtreme! Hong Kong Pub Race. It's on November 25th, a week from Saturday. The deal is one drink in each of ten bars plus some sort of challenge or game in each bar. They're looking for teams of 4 and team entry costs $888. That works out to $22.20 per drink and that seems like a pretty good deal to me and I've already got my team lined up. (Guess I should mention that BC magazine is one of the sponsors of this event.)

This is kinda neat:

This is the Gorillapod and it comes in different sizes for point and shoot cameras, SLRs and SLRs with large zooms. The one in the pictures weighs less than 6 ounces and costs US$40. Kinda neat looking gizmo.

Hey, check this sucker out:


This is the "Flame" which will come out from O2 at some point next year. 520 MHz processor, 3G, WiFi, 2 gigs of internal storage and a 3.6 inch VGA screen powered by NVidia. I imagine you'll need a big pocket to fit it in and deep pockets to pay for it

Last but not least, this item from OhGizmo! caught my eye, taken from this article from the BBC. Mobile operator 3 is offering a thing they have boringly called "X-Series". If you buy one of two phones (one's a Nokia, the other a Sony Ericsson), you can buy a package that will come with a bunch of pre-installed software that you could load in yourself (Skype, MS Messenger, etc.) but it will then include flat-fee pricing for internet access. No idea on the price or when (or even if) it will be available here. The per-meg pricing that mobile phone operators are doing today is so 1995. Then again, in many, if not most other countries around the world, you can get a phone at a deep discount or even for free subsidized by the carrier. You get crappy rebates spread out over whatever period the carrier tries to lock you in to.

Couldn't sleep, checked the news, saw that Robert Altman had died. His films were incredibly important to me - he's most famous for using large casts, improvisation, overlapping dialogue, character-driven films. And almost everything he did - good, bad but never indifferent - bore his unique imprint. His career had more downs than ups and I think some of his less-than-well received films will someday also be more properly recognized. Nominated for 5 Academy Awards for best director but never won, did receive one of those honorary Oscars instead. My favorites of his:

M*A*S*H (and he hated the TV series)
Brewster McCloud - a boy who wants to be an angel and lives in the Houston Astrodome
McCabe & Mrs. Miller - no western more revisionist
Images - a hallucination?
The Long Goodbye - the best Raymond Chandler adaptation
Thieves Like Us - the anti-Bonnie & Clyde
California Split - reteaming Sutherland and Gould
Nashville - the magnum opus
Buffalo Bill & the Indians - yet another deconstruction of American myths
3 Women - a dream?
Quintet - left even his biggest fans scratching their heads on this one
Popeye - maybe I'm the only person on the planet who loves this one
Tanner '88 - collaboration with Doonesbury cartoonist Trudeau
The Player - biting the hand that never fed him
Short Cuts - incredibly influential work
Gosford Park - yet another return to success
Prairie Home Companion - meanders too much yet charming

The NY Times obit quotes from a 1993 interview: "“The people who get into this business are fast-buck operators, carnival people, always have been. They don’t try to make good movies now; they’re trying to make successful movies. The marketing people run it now. You don’t really see too many smart people running the studios, running the video companies. They’re all making big money, but they’re not looking for, they don’t have a vested interest in, the shelf life of a movie. There’s no overview. No one says, ‘Forty years from now, who’s going to want to see this?’ No visionaries.”

I can't entirely agree with that but he's not that far off the mark.

Me? Not feeling well. Have postponed Seoul trip. Other priorities today.

I read somewhere that the Playstation 3 is now going for as much as US$10,000 on eBay. It's one of the few things I actually don't want to buy - somehow I remain untouched by that particular bit of hype. Or maybe it's because I'm happy playing a 10 year old version of Risk on my PC. People looking for the PS3 and not able to find it should content themselves with this review in the NY Times, which says it's "surprisingly clunky to use" and "falls far short" of what Sony promised to deliver.

Michael Richards, Kramer from Seinfeld, hasn't had much of a post-Seinfeld career. He's almost 60 years old, certainly wealthy, but still trying new stuff. He tried stand-up over the weekend. He got heckled by the audience and responded by saying stuff like "throw his ass out, he's a nigger, he's a nigger, he's a nigger, a nigger, looks there's a nigger." This is probably not going to help his career. Of course you can watch the entire train wreck on YouTube.

Speaking of videos, K-Fed has been saying he would sell rights to a 3 hour video he made of him and Britney having sex if he doesn't get custody of the kids. He's looking for $30 million. Dollars. Britney has said let him try it, she'll give the video away for free.

Earlier today there was some bit on Reuters about pollution being so bad in Beijing yesterday they had to shut down highways across an area bigger than Great Britain. Lost the link.

Spent too much fucking money at Rock Gallery today. Seems like everything I special ordered over the course of the past month showed up at the same time.

That would include the 2CD + 2DVD Harry Smith Project: David Johansen, Steve Earle, Wilco, Beth Orton, Beck, Elvis Costello, Richard Thompson, Van Dyke Parks, Lou Reed, Marianne Faithfull, Nick Cave and others tackling classic American folk music.

And Forever Changing: The Golden Age of Elektra Records, 5 CDs, 96 page hardcover book, CD ROM with Jac Holzman's book and complete illustrated discography and more. Artists you know like Doors, Stooges, Judy Collins, Phil Ochs, Tim Buckley, Carly Simon, MC5, Incredible String Band, Paul Butterfield, Love ... and dozens of obscure artists and rarities.

Talk Talk China is gone but Sinocidal is here.

Seems like a lotta new (to me, at least) HK blogs recently. I'm heading up to Seoul tomorrow, it's gonna be fucking cold and I don't much like going out there, so hopefully will find lotsa time to update my links.

Spotted along Highway 7. I suppose as long as they focus on safety, spelling doesn't matter.

One of T's aunts and various kids at the Friday night dinner.

T's daughter. Ten years old, she told her mother not to bother with Thai men any more, only fereng, and that I seemed okay because I smile a lot.


T's parents.


This boat, just off the coast, gets all lit up at night for dinners and maybe some kind of show.

More sea turtles, this time the babies.


On Koh Loi (or Koh Loy?) you can see the Chinese temple at the foot of the Buddhist temple.

Another shot of the Chinese temple.

Funny t-shirt #1 from the night market "ween your gun become yuur best friend brgoklyn"

Funny t-shirt #2, every other word is wrong and when they repeat words, they spell them wrong again, only differently each time.

One of the big clubs in town, Time Bomb.

Inside the "famous" restaurant where we had noodle soups on Sunday.

The outside of the soup place. No sign, everyone just knows to go there. We did not have time to get to the "famous" roast duck rice place. Apparently that place is famous for more than just its food. It's run by a widow and it's said that if a young guy is nicely dressed, he gets a double portion of duck but if you're a woman ... well, one time T asked for 2 orders for takeaway and the woman told her she could only have one!

Who knew that the world's most delicious bakery could be found in a shopping mall in Sri Racha? They can't say it if it's not true, right? Don't tell the French.

On the other hand, here's a cornucopia of incredible food at the basement level of the shopping mall.
Rock star in training.

I think even in this picture you can get some idea of the amazing choreography:


The local bookmobile.

The stage at Web Site. Note the projection TVs showing football. Apparently this is almost a legal requirement at every club.

The outside of the club. Despite the signs, there is no www.website.co.th (or web-site or web_site).
And last but not least, a gift for the guys. Flipping around on the TV, came across this music video for Thailand's version of the Sugababes. They're called Girly Berry. They can't sing worth a damn but they don't need to. Thought about buying a VCD but then noticed this stuff was on youtube ...

About to go to sleep, heading back to HK tomorrow after a pretty full day today.

Started off going to a "famous" hole-in-the-wall joint for soup for lunch. I remain astonished at the number of ingredients to be found in Thai soups. Mine was home made chicken soup with fish balls, fish slices, pork slices, dried shrimp, dumplings, shallots, spring onions, bean sprouts and probably other stuff I can't recall. Actually I wasn't so hungry when I got there, but the bowl put in front of me looked so wonderful that I ate it all.

After that, do I want to go to Ko Si Chang? Well, what's there? Some old houses and a famous temple. Is it nice? So-so. So why go?

T has an alternate idea, one I think she had up her sleeve all along. We go to the shopping mall. Upon entering, she immediately steers me to a jewelry store that has a bracelet in the window that she likes. It's her birthday and it only costs 800 baht. I don't even need to think about it, of course I buy it for her.

After that, she wants ice cream, so we go to Swensons and she orders a big sundae. The rest of the mall is a similar kind of hybrid. I spot Giordano and City Chain, McDonalds and KFC, the huge Robinson's department store as well, but there seems to be at least some locally owned shops as well. It's kind of a mini version of MBK.

We walk around the mall a bit more. The bowling alley is closed. Casino Royale is playing at the multiplex but she's not a big 007 fan. Back to the room for a short nap.

Afterwards, we go off for a massage. We go for the 2 hour body massage, which costs 300 baht each.

Here's my theory on Thai massage. The Thais have spent thousands of years determining the best ways to hurt people. They have devised foolproof methods for every conceivable part of the body. Here's a toe - they try to pull it off. Here's a vertebrae - they jam a thumb in. My groin - press on it with full body weight for 5 minutes. My eyeballs - squeeze on the temples until they pop out. The storehouse for the thousands of years of torture techniques is Wat Po in Bangkok. The CIA sends their agents there for training before sending them to Iraq. That's my theory on Thai massage.

The place we went to had the added benefit that the music they were playing seemed to be from the soundtrack from the Thai version of the Three Stooges. Did the Three Stooges ever get to Thailand? Judging from what I've seen of Thai TV, I think they would have been massive here.

Then we go walking through the park that's right on the bay. At the entrance to the park is the town bookmobile, with tables set up outside and people sitting there reading. Further inside the park, a stage is set up. They do this every Sunday. A band is playing and some woman is singing while some 4 year olds randomly dance around the stage. Another four year old stands at the foot of the stage, a fake guitar strapped around him, once in awhile he tries to pretend he's playing it. At the end of the song the stage fills up with dry-ice smoke. Cute.

Off to dinner. T wants Korean food. After the experience with Japanese food last night, I'm not too sure. And I'm going to Seoul on Wednesday. But it is T's birthday so I'm not gonna overrule her.

Almost all the other customers in the place are Japanese and receive a Japanese greeting from the Thai staff when they enter. Some of the Japanese are entire families, and some are single men who've brought in their hookers from neighboring karaoke joints. The food is okay - it's much harder to fuck up Korean food - and we stuff ourselves.

Next we drive back out to Koh Loi to see it at night. Actually the best scene is on the bridge to the island. Along both sides of the bridge, kids have parked their pimped-out rides and each is blasting hip-hop from his car stereo as loud as possible. Battle of the bands, Sri Racha style.

Then off to a deserted parking lot, where I get a lesson in driving a scooter, something I've never done, believe it or not. I'm a little shaky but don't fall over and I don't hit anything. I guess with a little more practice I'll be ready for a Harley.

Then off to a corner bar, Lava, where T knows most of the staff. We sit outside, there's a nice breeze, and loud music coming from the joint across the street, Zenith. Two guys with guitars and a whole lotta MIDI cranking out Air Supply and Eagles. T tells me the owner of Zenith is famous. Why? Apparently because he's a millionaire. I tell T I want to be famous for killing someone and getting away with it. She asks me who I would kill and I tell her it would be a member of my staff in Tokyo. I don't tell her I might want to kill some of the fuckwads leaving anonymous comments here, but the thought does cross my mind.

We head across the street to Cherry Hill, a bar where she knows some of the girls who work there. Looks like a nice place, but her friends are off tonight. She suggests we should go to the Japanese hostess bar where she used to work and that I can be surrounded by women, but I'm thinking that I don't want to pay 2,000 baht for a bottle of booze I don't need to drink and I don't need female company other than what I already have.

So we head over to the big club in town, Web Site (oddly enough I just googled it and it doesn't seem to have a web site). T knows a lot of the staff and the owner there. A Corona and a Thai whisky-coke together cost less than a Corona in Lan Kwai Fong. But even though I've had Thai whisky before, this drink tastes vile. The place is 3/4's empty and I get bored quickly. The band is setting up but I'm not in the mood to wait. It's 11 already and we have to be up early to drive to the airport in the morning, so back to our room.

One of the things I've spent time thinking about this weekend is what it would be like for me to actually live here some day. Buddy S has often commented on white guys who retire to Pattaya and how he would die of boredom if he did that. Sri Racha has much less to offer I suppose. No beach, I don't play golf, I'd probably end up heading over to Pattaya or Bangkok on a regular basis, both of which have their pros and cons (in the case of Pattaya, mostly cons).

On the other hand, I've been really relaxed the whole time I've been here. Of course people are all friendly and open. A few Japanese guys have come up to me to chat, possibly looking for drinking partners - would I be able to find some friends here with similar interests? A nice little flat with a fast internet connection and a good A/V set-up, friendly people, really cheap and tasty food (though limited choices once you get beyond Thai, Japanese and Korean - 1 Italian place, 1 steak place, 1 "international" place). Two huge hospitals. Some nearby islands. I suppose, if it ever came down to it, I could do a whole lot worse.

So Japanese food for dinner. We hit a spot that T said was good. On the table, a free copy of a Japanese magazine all about factory equipment suppliers in Thailand. At other tables, all Japanese factory workers, still in their factory jumpsuits, chowing down, big bottles of beer and soju on their tables. Us? The food was not so good. T said the place used to be better. Only consolation was that it was cheap.

Leaving the restaurant around 9 PM, the karaoke bars on the street are waking up. Each has about a dozen girls sitting outside, wearing whatever outfit dictated by the bar. T points out the place she used to work in before she started doing the Singapore/HK thing.

We go walking around the night market. No one runs up to me, no one tries to drag me off for copy watches or massages or fake Ray Bans. We can wander slowly, left alone. Nothing worth buying. The food stalls look quite good but not hungry.

We park the motorcycle about 4 blocks from the club we're planning to go to. I ask why so far, T is afraid if we park near the club the bike would be stolen. It's happened to her a few times. I'm amazed there's this level of crime here. But same with her car - she's got one of those keyed ignition cut-off switches under the dash. She had one car stolen ten years ago and she's not taking any more chances.

Off to the Cool Club. As with so many spots in Thailand, they don't serve drinks by the drink. You have to buy a bottle. The prices are not too bad for me, I suspect that for locals it's high - a bottle of Johnnie Walker black is 1,000 baht. Several bottles of water, soda, coke are another 400 baht.

Inside at 10:30, the place is quite large and almost full and continues to fill up the rest of the night till the joint is literally packed. Very few people bother to dress up in any way. Girls are mostly wearing jeans and tank tops, guys are mostly in jeans and t-shirts. The DJ is pumping out hip hop, the same stuff you'd hear in any club anywhere else in the world.

Going to the toilet is an experience. There is an army of attendants inside. As I stand at the urinal, one guy reaches around in front of me to flush, which almost causes me to jump back 10 feet. Another guy sticks a hot towel on my neck and then starts giving me a massage. This is not comfortable for me! Yet with all the drinking, I will be forced to make a couple of return visits and by the third time am looking forward to the massage.

Walking to and from the toilet I am able to observe there are a large number of cute women here. I am the only white guy in the club and getting some attention from the women (none of whom are "working"). If I'd been there on my own, and especially if I had more facility with the language (like Morally Diminished), I'm sure I could compile a long list of phone numbers at the very least.

The band comes on. Guitar, bass, drums, singer. All their songs are in Thai but clearly they own a few Nirvana records. Thai grunge. Doesn't suck.

Band goes off. DJ launches into a reggaeton set. We're joined by a cousin of T's and a friend of hers, a Japanese guy who has been living and working in Thailand for 8 months. He likes it so much he's hoping to find a Thai woman who will marry him so he can stay forever. Then T spots another cousin. Very young, very pretty, very short skirt. T says she's working locally in the Japanese hostess bars and that she offered to bring the girl with her to HK but the girl doesn't want to go. She's scared of white guys and prefers to go with Japanese. T suggests that she should go with me, that I could be her first fereng, luckily she says no.

The band is back on. The seven guys at the next table decide to adopt me. They're hugging me, telling me they love me, we're toasting at a furious rate. They ask if T is my "madame" and tell me they think she's beautiful. A song comes on, they tell me it's for people with broken hearts and one guy declares he has a broken heart. I tell him there are so many beautiful women there, he should go and meet one. But he prefers to get drunk with his friends now. As we reach the bottom of our bottle of Johnnie, I'm not quite wasted but almost there.

Just before the club is ready to close at 2, we leave. We head to a nearby restaurant and load up on soup, chicken feet, tofu with bean sprouts, spicy baby clams, veggies, other stuff. The bill for all this comes out to 35 baht.

Somehow we make it back to the room around 3.

Today we're thinking about taking the ferry to nearby island Ko Si Chang. But it's really freaking hot out. I'm not hung over but I'm still sleepy...

Just south of Sri Racha is a village called Ao Udom. In this center square you'll find a 200 year old Ficus tree. (Well, I don't know spit about trees, the sign on it said something ficus).

Just past the tree is this restaurant, famous for its pad thai.


Happy people enjoying their lunch.


The busy open kitchen. Anthony Bourdain would have loved this place. Nothing but local, natural food simply prepared, delicious, wonderful.

The view of the container port from the restaurant.


So the place is famous for pad thai, but we didn't get that. Here's the fried rice. Note the beautiful presentation. On the place are slivers of mango, scrambled egg, fried shallots, onions, chili and Thai bacon.
Two more dishes - on the left is a crab shell, stuffed with crab meat and fried in a light batter. On the right is crab meat wrapped in bean curd and fried. These were perfectly prepared. The meat was fresh, light, moist.

A kind of fish pudding. This was spiciest dish of the ones T ordered.


Last but not least, prawns and mushrooms in a sort of black pepper sauce.

Typical Thai condiments on the table.

This meal came out to 460 baht, that's about HK$90 or US$12. I suspect this is one of the more expensive places around. I pointed at some of the nearby buildings containing service apartments and said, if I lived there, I'd eat at this place every day!

So Sri Racha (or Si Racha, depending on which sign you look at), is a busy town. It's the gateway to the "industrial estates" to the east, factories mostly owned by Japanese companies, and also a busy rail line and a container port. So lots of Japanese expats here, lots of businesses catering to them. I saw some signs along the highway in Chinese and my service apartment offers almost as many Chinese channels as Japanese ones, so I suppose there's growing investment either from China or Taiwan here. For the locals this means abundant work in the factories and at the port, so unemployment is very low, but then again so are the wages.

This is a view of Sri Racha taken from Koh Loi, a island consisting of a park and temples connected to the mainland by a short bridge.


A sea turtle conservation pond, baby turtles in the cage.



Kids posing by a waterfall, flowing down from the Buddhist temple above.

Sleeping monk guarding the entrance to the temple.

A new Chinese pavilion being constructed next to a Chinese temple.

A new temple under construction

Around the park, lots of people painting pictures.


At the entrance to the temple, not really sure what was going on with this and T didn't want to translate it.

Driving around later, came to a railroad crossing as a freight train was passing through, the dry grass around the tracks on fire. Surreal in a way ...

Posting will be light to non-existent for the next few days as I'm now in Thailand, in the town of Si Racha, also spelled Sri Racha. Told T that I don't want to go to the most famous local attraction - a tiger zoo - and no need to go to Pattaya.

New Bangkok airport seems okay ... got through it fast enough and luggage was waiting for me after immigration, so no complaints. They still have smoking rooms before you hit immigration, so not unhappy.

Noted tonight that one can buy a nice house on a small plot of land for just 50,000 baht down, then 3 or 4,000 baht per month mortgage payment. Of course, foreigners are not permitted to buy houses here.

Staying in a new service apartment complex. Japanese restaurant downstairs. Room is 1,200 baht per night and the place has a pool, small gym and about 60 channels on the TV.

Seafood dinner tonight for about 20 people in an open air restaurant, garden sort of setting, right next to the water. Lost track of what we had - prawns, crab, couple of fish, several soups and salads, oysters, stuff people didn't know the English name of. Total bill came to 3,600 baht, that's just over 700 HK. For 20 people.

Japanese restaurants and karaoke bars everywhere. Bookshops advertising that they buy and sell used Japanese books. A huge disco near where I'm staying, seems to be called "Web Site." Big shopping mall with a Robinsons in the center of town. Busy night market.

Not the prettiest of towns by a long shot but not bad at all.

Every time I log into Blogger, it tells me I can switch to the new version. This time, it didn't offer any option except to switch to the new version. Each time I click on "okay do it," it then tells me it can't switch me. Fuckin' A.

So my sleep pattern got disrupted after my operation, sleeping in bits and pieces. This week every night I was unable to keep myself from falling asleep at some point after 6 PM, would sleep for an hour, then be up all night till 6 AM.

Today I tried to change it. Went to the office, ran errands in Wanchai (sold off some CDs, DVDs and yet another old mobile phone - yes, I took a hit on the $$$ but did it all in an hour, better than posting ads online and waiting weeks and having to sift through hundreds of emails from Nigerian scammers, which happened when I tried to sell an old iPod on geoxpat), met a friend, stayed out past midnight, came home. No nap. But it's almost 4 AM and I'm still awake.

Mobile phones - I kind of like the Treo 750v. I wish the screen was larger though for most of the stuff I'm doing, that's not a big deal - it may be a big deal if I decide to go for GPS. Kind of missing WiFi. And I tried following some hacks I saw elsewhere to install a Java Virtual Machine so that I could run the new gmail app, but they just crashed the phone. I like the gmail app, nice.

There's a waiting list for the Dopod 636pro now and I'm still not convinced I care for the form factor. So lessee, if I want a phone that has 3G (so's I can roam in Korea and Japan), bluetooth, WiFi, a popular OS so there's lots of applications (which rules out Symbian), touchscreen (which also rules out Symbian) and a QWERTY keyboard, what other choices are there beside the Dopod?

Out on the town with buddy S tonight. Nothing too eventful I suppose.

Started out at Maya, front row seats. And tonight was the most crowded I've ever seen it. The place was packed. Excellent. I love seeing bars I like doing well. We sat there, had dinner, watched the girls heading to work at the various bars. Best sight of the night: some Caucasian guy getting out of a taxi with a girl wearing stockings and a garter belt - quite obvious as the hem of her skirt was above the tops of her stockings. Nice legs, didn't see the face. They went into Klong.

10:30 over to Laguna. Since it's ladies night all over town, Laguna emptied early. By 11, it wasn't quite a ghost town but the signs were there. S asked if I wanted to check out Neptune. "You only live once," I said, knowing full well that it's possible that as soon as I walk in, 20 people will be sending SMS's to T to let her know I'm there.

We peek in the window of soon-to-be-open Bull and Bear (or Bear and Bull? I hope not Unbearabull)(sleepy, sorry), yet another British or Irish style pub, where Pepperoni used to be. Kinda looks like Typhoon - they'll be able to roll back the doors all the way and open the place up and they filled up the center of the place with the bar. Rouge still out of business. The three floors above Joe Banana still vacant, no signs of any work commenced on any of them, all lights brightly shining, no one home.

Descent into Neptune. Actually, I only spot one friend of Ts. Maybe they've all synchronized their visa runs. Several newer girls poke and grab at me, three actually try to block me into a corner, I think one was under 5 feet tall. Waitress M comes by and scolds me, saying, "you better be good!" Busy, the band is in decent form. There are 2 or 3 girls who frequent Neptune whom I might characterize as my own personal kryptonite but I don't see any of them, for better or worse. I do see several cute ones but not feeling any temptation to be bad.

Okay, Bar 109. DJ Tiny Todd introduces me to someone sitting at the bar, a bar manager or owner from a certain Lan Kwai Fong hot spot. Asked why I don't recognize the guy, I respond by saying, "I never look at other guys when I'm in bars." He tells me to ask for him next time I go there and that he'll give me a "private tour," nudge nudge wink wink. Todd laments the passing of the old Hongkie Town but says, "well, you're married now."

Back to Maya. It's now empty. Upstairs at Klong. Half-full but not appealing. S heads home. I do the circuit one more time. Mes filled with yuppies. Ammonia, oops, Amazonia, the band is playing to a crowd of maybe 3 or 4 people. Joe Banana, half full, so-so. Run the gauntlet through Fuckwick, okay, been there, seen that. Taxi home, alone, at 1 AM.

4 AM still awake. Will try to sleep now. Perchance to dream ...

Clear The Air Hong Kong.

Pollution for dummies:

In fact, about 50 per cent of the air pollution you breathe while walking, shopping or living next to a typical Hong Kong city street comes from the traffic right in front of you - mostly from diesel trucks and buses.

This statistic is clearly illustrated by the Environmental Protection Department's air pollution index (API) for last year. Air pollution was rated "high" or worse over 42 per cent of the year (measured hourly) at general testing stations - and 77 per cent of the year at roadside testing stations.

Fixing this would actually be quite straightforward. There are various solutions that could be instituted and completed within the next 18 months, which could make a drastic improvement.

The first is adding bio-diesel fuel to the petroleum diesel sold here. Not only does bio-diesel burn significantly more cleanly, it's also the ideal way to recycle used frying oil in Hong Kong. This would support our energy needs from a locally available fuel source.

The second is an outright ban on the dirty, industrial-grade diesel used in local ferry and construction fleets, as well as in local factories.

Third, do a wholesale conversion of the local bus and ferry franchise fleets from old, standard diesel motors and engines to the Euro IV standard.

Fourth, require all local commercial trucking to have a full tank of Hong Kong diesel fuel (which is substantially cleaner than mainland diesel) before they are allowed to cross the border into Guangdong.

Fifth, change the voluntary conversion scheme of minibuses to LPG (which ended last year) into a mandatory programme. About 2,500 of the 4,600 minibuses have been converted: finish the job.

Finally, we need to adopt a strategy on traffic congestion. The easiest step would be a rush-hour congestion charge for the Cross-Harbour Tunnel, which would divert traffic from downtown Hong Kong to the eastern and western harbour tunnels.

Hong Kong's air is still much better than Beijing, Shanghai, Mumbai and New Delhi but worse than Singapore or Tokyo. Beyond Asia, our air is worse than New York and London.

Visibility in Hong Kong is Worsening

The Hong Kong Observatory released its findings on long-term visibility change in Hong Kong today (6 January 2005). The results showed that visibility in Hong Kong has a long-term deteriorating trend, and instances of reduced visibility reached a record high in 2004.

Assistant Director of the Hong Kong Observatory Mr. Yeung Kai-hing noted that in Hong Kong, instances of reduced visibility, meaning visibility below 8 km excluding cases of rain, fog and mist, were occurring more often. He said, "Between 1968 and 1986, the percentage of time that reduced visibility occurred at the Hong Kong Observatory Headquarters rose at a rate of 0.8% per decade. Between 1986 and 2004 the rate became significantly greater, at 5.7% per decade or 7 times faster than that of the previous period. In 2004, low visibility occurred some 18% of the time, the highest on record. For the seven months February, April, June, August, September, October and December 2004, new records were set for the corresponding months."

At the Chek Lap Kok International Airport, the situation was similar. In 2004, reduced visibility occurred 24% of the time, the highest on record at that location. For the eight months February, May, June, August, September, October, November and December 2004, new records were set for the corresponding months.

In the eight years between 1997 and 2004, reduced visibility occurred at the Chek Lap Kok International Airport 13% of the time on average, far higher than the average of 4% observed between 1980 and 1982 by the Observatory staff at Chek Lap Kok before the new airport was built.

The government has a responsibility to act in order to protect its citizens and, if this was a democracy, they would do so otherwise face being voted out of office. But we have a "leader" appointed by Beijing and a legislature that is primarily made up of representatives of functional constituencies that has a priority protecting those constituencies. It is as if the U.S. Congress was only one-third elected representatives and two-thirds lobbyists (I know, the more cynical of you will say it's already that way and sometimes it seems hard to argue that point.)

The sad fact is, things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. Even if we act now, it will take years. But we're doing nothing and the longer we wait, the longer and more expensive it will be. Businesses will locate elsewhere, foreign investment will fall, the affluent will move away, tourists will stop coming, medical bills for respiratory-related illnesses will soar. Health insurance rates will rise, real estate prices will drop, hospitals will be overcrowded and under-staffed.

Hong Kong Air Pollution - The Tipping Point is Reached

The air in Hong Kong is now 40% dirtier than in Los Angeles, the most polluted city in North America. It is twice as polluted as London, nearly three times as polluted as New York City and Paris. About 43% of the days in Hong Kong have average or poor air quality. Long term health effects are expected for over half of the residents due to persistent exposure.

The response by the local government has been weak. In July, the Chief Executive Donald Tsang promised to fight air pollution, noting the threat to health of the city's residents. His words were not matched by immediate action; he commissioned an 18 month study of air quality objectives that would not be implemented until 2009. The present standard for sulfur dioxide is twice as high as the European Union, 50% higher than for China and three times higher than the State of California. Add to this government paralysis a Kafka-like regulation for the local electric utility, CLP Power, which is seeking approval of a Liquid Natural Gas facility on an island now deemed a protected area by the Government. The utility cannot make its case for the receiving terminal to the public without forfeiting its right to avoid a possible two year litigation in the courts.

Most important of all, the residents of the city must band together and increase the public pressure for change. The status quo is eroding the city's attractiveness as a regional business hub while endangering the health of its citizens. I would appreciate your views on this subject.

From a New York Times Editorial October 13 (taken from here)

Such departures have finally begun to raise concerns in Hong Kong’s business community. The local Chamber of Commerce issued an urgent request for the government to commit to “genuine reductions in air pollution” after it found that “an alarming 95 percent” of executives interviewed were worried or very worried about air quality and its effects on their health. But in a disheartening development this week, Hong Kong’s chief executive, Donald Tsang, missed yet another opportunity to lay out a workable plan for clearing the air quickly.

This is not a hopeless situation, as leaders in Mexico City could attest. Once a place where residents courted asthma with every step outside, Mexico City approved what is generally regarded as one of the best and most comprehensive approaches to air pollution in 1990. The measures included everything from new fuel composition standards to new emission standards for vehicles. As a result, Mexico City halved some forms of air pollution in only five years. If Hong Kong even committed to cutting its pollution in half, that would be a good start.

I don't think I've cooked in at least 6 years. Yeah, I can make a sandwich or open a can of soup, but nothing more. The last time I did any real cooking was the first time I was single and living alone, which was 1992-5. Back then, my idea of a home cooked meal was to make mashed potatoes from a powder in a box, layer on some slices of roast beef from the neighborhood deli, dump a can of peas on top, dump a can of Heinz beef gravy in, stick it in the microwave, wow was I proud of myself.

The past several months, I've been watching a lot of cooking shows and bought a few cookbooks. Tonight I decided it was time to try something. I needed something relatively simple and easy to chew, because my mouth is still recovering from the extensive surgery last week. I decided to do an old favorite, spaghetti bolognese.

I took a look through the cookbooks I have, looked at some recipes online and didn't see anything that really caught my eye or seemed like what I had in mind. I finally figured, oh the hell with it, I don't need a recipe for this. I've eaten it a thousand times. I've watched Jamie Oliver in Italy. I know what goes in it and can guess how much of each thing.

I made a shopping list for the maid and she scurried down to Park 'n Slop or Wellcum or wherever it is she goes to complain about me to her friends. Without a recipe, and because I'd made certain assumptions about what's in the house, of course I left things off.

Anyway, here's what I did. Smashed a couple of cloves of garlic and minced them. Diced half an onion. Minced the somewhat minced beef, adding in some kosher salt and some freshly ground pepper.

Started the water boiling for the pasta, adding in some olive oil and salt. When the water started boiling, tossed in the noodle goodness.

Now for the sauce. Some olive oil in the pan. Fry up the garlic and onions. Add the meat and brown it. Take a taste - needs more salt. Okay, cans of tomato paste lined up and waiting. Some wine would be nice. Oops, no cheap wine in the house. I should have thought to use a good wine, a cup for cooking and drink the rest of the bottle with the meal, but I wasn't thinking. So, add the tomato paste. Damn, that's thick, no wine to cut it with, okay, some water. Let it cook down, reduce, taste again. Hmmm, needs both a bit of salt and a bit of sugar. Not bad now but still a little bland, what else is on the shelf? Basil and oregano, perfecto! Stir those in, reduce down a bit more.

Check the pasta, very nice, very al dente, drain and rinse. Put in two bowls (I made a serving for the maid, T's in Thailand), ladle on copious amounts of my sauce, eat. Did not take a picture as I was too hungry to run for the camera.

You know, it wasn't perfect, it wasn't gourmet, but it was very edible, certainly no worse than anything I've had at Fat Angelo, and I felt really good about eating something I had made relatively from scratch.

Would have been nicer with wine and nicer with fresh basil and one or two other herbs rather than the contents of jars that have been sitting next to the stove for 5 years but, well, next time, right?

And the whole thing took only 20 minutes to make, start to finish. The cleaning up is another story - probably an hour there, but that's why I have the maid. And that's why she runs down to Park 'n Slop or Wellcum to complain about me ....

Wolfgang's Vault (Bill Graham's real first name)

300 concerts online, free, streaming audio only.

Allman Bros, Big Brother, Byrds, Cream, CSNY, Derek & Dominos, Devo, Dave Edmunds, Elvis Costello, Flamin Groovies, Grateful Dead, Emmylou Harris, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, King Crimson, Los Lobos, Miles Davis, Muddy Waters, Neil Young, Quicksilver, Rolling Thunder, Sly & Family Stone, Springsteen, Traffic, more.

I need recommendations for software (preferably freeware) to record streaming audio!

(And before you ask, no, there's no Be Bop Deluxe. But seemed like a good title for this post.)

Uncut has their top 50 albums for 2006 already. Here are the first ten:

1 - Bob Dylan - Modern Times
2 - Scritti Politti - White Bread Black Beer
3 - Comets on Fire - Avatar
4 - Joanna Newsom - Ys
5 - Neil Young - Living With War
6 - Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
7 - Midlake - Trials of Van Occupanther
8 - Hot Chip - The Warning
9 - Sufjan Stevens - Avalanche
10 - Thom Yorke - Eraser

Further inside the magazine, I noticed that they gave a 5 star review to Newcom. I noticed that the album was produced by Jim O'Rourke, who has worked with Wilco, John Fahey and Beth Orton amongst others. The engineer is Steve Albini, who has worked with Nirvana, Pixies, Page & Plant, too many others to list here. And, most eye-catching to me of all, the album was arranged by Van Dyke Parks, one of my musical heroes for his collaborations with Brian Wilson and almost anyone else who's anyone. How did this person I've never heard of attract such names?

Then I opened Mojo and they gave it four stars and said, "Newsom's second is the best hallucinatory orchestral wash-effect album in the world, ever." Hmmm.

I found her listed on Wikipedia. 24 years old, based in San Francisco, her entry says that at least one critic has compared her voice to Lisa Simpson's. Huh.

Checking the usual sources, I managed to obtain a copy. Five songs running 55 minutes. She plays harp, with the usual amazing Van Dyke Parks arrangements behind her. And yes, her voice is damned strange. Actually, within her normal range, she has quite a lovely voice. It's just that she likes to push it into places where it doesn't seem to want to go and it fights back. And at other times, she seems to randomly make her voice do twists and turns - not by line or by verse but on individual words. Actually it doesn't take too long to get used to.

Found this review here:

However much people have written about her voice, nothing can quite prepare you for it. Her voice is scary, her voice is mad : it oscillates between that of a three-year-old spoilt girl and a ninety-two-year-old raving witch, a wet wild cat, Judge Doom out of his cartoon, a voice from a forgotten past, a forgotten planet. It is at first alienating. I remember wondering whether it was an affectation, but soon realised that the idea was so incongruous it was bound to be improbable. For the first time in my life, I had to work out what I made of it : I usually fall in love with voices at first listen, not by force of habit. But something kept me wanting to understand this vocal accent, as it were a new kind of musical semantics, because I was guessing that its unfamiliar tones would depict a story I longed to hear. Seeing Joanna Newsom live finally gives me the opportunity to hear the fairytale.

Her lyrics, well, too soon I guess to tell if she's in the upper echelon. Sometimes she comes up with verses like this:

Come on home, the poppies are all grown knee-deep by now
Blossoms all have fallen, and the pollen ruins the plow
Peonies nod in the breeze and while they wetly bow, with
Hydrocephalitic listlessness ants mop up-a their brow

How did that happen? Did a friend challenge her to use the word "hydrocephalitic" in a song? I don't think anyone's used it before.

But she also writes stuff like this, an excerpt from a song called "Sawdust and Diamonds":

There's a light in the wings
Hits this system of strings
From the side while they swing;
See the wires, the wires, the wires

And the articulation
In our elbows and knees
Makes us buckle as we couple in endless increase
As the audience admires

And the little white dove
Made with love, made with love:
Made with glue, and a glove, and some pliers

Swings a low sickle arc
From its perch in the dark
Settle down
Settle down my desire

And the moment I slept I was swept up in a terrible tremor
Though no longer bereft, how I shook and I couldn't remember

Then the furthermost shake drove a murdering stake in
And cleft me right down through my center
And I shouldn't say so, but I know that it was then, or never

Push me back into a tree
Bind my buttons with salt
Fill my long ears with bees
Praying: please, please, please,
Love, you ought not!
No you ought not!

Is this twee sappy stuff for heartsick teenage girls or is she the real thing? Not gonna commit so soon but will be playing this album some more.

Oh, forgot to add, might have mentioned before, on Friday will be going down to Thailand, to Sri Ratcha, the town where T is from. Not quite "meet the parents" but it will be her birthday next weekend so I should be there for that.

Sri Ratcha is about an hour from the new airport and perhaps half an hour before Pattaya. I'm told that for years it's been a favorite place for Japanese men - not sure if it's a vacation spot or a place where they go for retirement or both. I'm told the town is filled with Japanese restaurants and Japanese style nightclubs and karaoke bars. Thanks in part to the new airport, westerners are starting to find this place as well.

The town has only one hotel (with a second one under construction). Managed to find a description of it on the net. Some interesting details:

• 24 hrs. security guard on floor from 9.00pm-9.00am.

So 24 hours, just not in a row.

• CCTV system on all floor.

This makes me feel less secure. Have never stayed in a hotel before where they felt this was a selling point.

• Daily Yomiuri Shimbun direct to your room.

Thanks but no thanks.

• Wi-Fi Internet in room (Free of charge).

Wasn't planning on bringing the laptop but maybe I will.

• UBC Cable, NHK and in house Japanese entertainment.

Geishas?

• In room massage center.

Geishas?

Under pictures of facilities, this one stood out to me:


Seems like they have some sort of karaoke bar there. You can see the hostess is cute and the Japanese guy's face is artfully blurred out. I am so looking forward to this hotel!

Sunday, after the Peak and dropping off the dogs at home, dinner at Sabah. T now seems as addicted to their rendang as I am. Some fish cake, some morning glory with sambal, some roti. Horrible service there - the fish cake is listed as a starter, they brought it after we'd almost finished everything else - but the food is reliably good.

Then over to 109 for a drink or two. From there, T went off to say goodbye to her fake auntie, I went home. For a change she did not stay out too late and did not come home too drunk.

Nevertheless problems with my teeth kept me up most of the night. I think I slept perhaps three hours. T left for the airport at 9:30. I went to the dentist, told the receptionist I was early, and it turns out I wasn't 15 minutes early, I was 24 hours and 15 minutes early. Ran into a friend as I was walking out the lobby of the building, he said I looked tired.

Have not eaten all day. Probably go out for some food as soon as I can figure out what it will be.

Sunday night I had this dream:

I was in some building, in my room, but not where I live now. My mobile phone rings. It's my (soon-to-be-ex) wife. I'm having trouble hearing her, too much noise. Turns out I'm in a dorm and the music and partying from other rooms drowns her out.

I step out onto the porch, the door comes off its hinges. We talk but I can't recollect the conversation now. I go back into my dorm room. My roommate is there. She is female, blonde, unattractive. She starts a tirade about why can't guys just come right out and ask girls out instead of playing games if they like the girl. I think she's coming on to me but I'm not attracted to her at all. My stuff is spread out all over the room. I tell her I'll move my stuff off her dresser. Open the closet and realize it's not another closet; there's some guy living in this room and he has to walk through ours to get to his.

My friend Donald shows up. He was my best friend from about age 4 till 15. Haven't seen him in at least 12 years, maybe more. Says he's there with a bunch of people to take me out and party.

We get in a car, filled with girls. We go driving off. At first I think it's a taxi but later it seems to be a rental car that Donald is driving. I start to thank him for finally coming to visit me in Hong Kong but I realize I don't know where I am. I look out the window and we're in Kuala Lumpur.

The car stops, everyone gets out. There are way too many people for just one car. Must have been another car following us. We're going to head to some place for the party but first I have to get cigarettes. I spot a store, walk over to it, an open air place but it's under construction. Right in front is a smaller stand. Of course they don't have my brand so I tell the guy Marlboro Lights. He points to the packs and says they're all open already, do I want something else? I look at a bunch of local brands and then see a whole shelf of Marlboro Lights underneath and ask the guy what about those?

And I wake up.

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

Okay, so the bit about school seems to be referring back to when I went to school in Shanghai last year - I had a balcony in my dorm room but no roommate.

My ex is on my mind because on Saturday she said she might be coming to HK for two months on a freelance job and asked if she could stay with me, and I told her it wouldn't work because I've got someone else staying with me (T) and she said she hopes it works out.

Kuala Lumpur I suppose because my ex is from there and that's where she's living now. Or because we had dinner at Sabah.

My friend Donald? Can't figure out how he got in there.

And the funniest bit is that while most dreams fade within a few minutes of waking, this one has stayed with me all day.

Remember years gone by? Perfect sunny days, blue skies all winter long? It wasn't that long ago. Will those days ever return?

Unretouched photos taken on The Peak, November 12, 2006.


Hemlock refers to Tung Chee-Hwa as "Tofu For Brains." I think it's time we start calling Donald Tsang "Shit For Brains."

Movie watched tonight: Leonard Cohen I'm Your Man. Documentary of a tribute concert, produced by Hal Willner, with Cohen's songs sung by Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright, Jarvis Cocker, Antony (of "and the Johnsons"), Beth Orton, Bono & Edge, McGarrigles and others. All the participants give their little tributes to Cohen and it's all rather ho-hum. If it's not Cohen singing Cohen, I prefer Jennifer Warnes' album and greatly prefer Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah to R. Wainwright's. But interspersed between the songs is an interview with Cohen, lots of old footage, tales of Buddhist monastic life, Janis Joplin, the real Suzanne - this stuff is the real heart of the film and its only claim to uniqueness.

CD played tonight: Neil Young & Crazy Horse at the Fillmore 1970. Six songs with both Danny Whitten and Jack Nitzsche in the band. Nothing definitive here, won't be replacing anything on my Neil Young playlist with these versions, but they're good solid versions and any chance for a bit more Whitten is worthwhile. The first release from Neil's archives, it's labeled "Neil Young Archives - Performance Series - Disc 2."

TV watched tonight: Daily Show/Colbert Report hour special from election night. Too many good bits to mention them all. One that's standing out at the moment is when Colbert realizes that the Democrats have been in power for 5 minutes and already have us stuck in an unwinnable war, damn them!

Was reading this in the New York Review of Books, Larry McMurtry reviewing a new memoir by Gore Vidal. He leads off the review with a paragraph about Virginia Woolf's husband:

In 1904, when Leonard Woolf steamed off eastward to become a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service, he took with him seventy large and well-printed volumes of Voltaire, the edition of 1784, in Baskerville type. In Ceylon his duties were not light—from time to time it became necessary to hang a felon. Fortunately, in compensation, native women were available, and also, it appears, cheap. Very little more is heard from Leonard Woolf about Voltaire or the Baskerville type.

I think I know how Leonard felt. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Anyway, for those of you outside of HK, here are links to the columns I've written for BC Magazine so far. Nothing great, but if you're bored enough to be reading this, you might be bored enough for that too.

• Issue 215
• Issue 216
• Issue 217
• Issue 218
• Issue 219

Next one should be hitting the streets any day now ....

For those who miss the "old" Hongkie Town, there's a new gunslinger in town who just might fill that need. Hong Kong's Miserable Gweilo Bastard, aka HKMGB. I'm in full agreement with his comments on some Wanchai bars:

Carnegies had its usual quota of dumpy western women out for a 'crrrrazy' night but I do find Carnegie's all about expectation - by the time some drunken trollop actually gets up and starts dancing on the bar they're the only ones left enjoying themselves.

Old China Hand - depressingly depressing with a faint air of menace

and he has the good sense to link to me.

Well, last week was bad, this week wasn't much better.

Major oral surgery on Monday. Good news on the US elections on Wednesday.

Some ups and downs with crazy insecure girlfriend on Tuesday and Thursday.

And did you know that in Japan you can't fire someone for being massively incompetent? According to our HR department, we have to offer a huge financial severance package and have this person agree to leave, I cannot unilaterally fire the idiot. So take the cost of severance + the cost of paying some headhunter to find the replacement + the cost of having the position open for several months + the cost of training the new person in our specific crap. Is that less than or equal to the cost of keeping an ineffectual person in place? Thinking about it.

Suppose most of you have read that CBS news reporter Ed Bradley passed away. Also taken from us this week were Ellen Willis (writer on politics and religion who also wrote great rock criticism); Leonard Schrader (Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and brother of Paul, wrote or co-wrote Kiss of Spider Woman, Mishima, Yakuza); Paul Mauriat (French conductor and arranger, had a hit in the 60s with Love Is Blue); and the shocking murder of actress/writer/director Adrienne Shelly.

I like early Oasis and can tolerate their later stuff. To me, these are two drunken, brawling brothers and while that's what rock & roll is all about (see: The Kinks), it would be nice if just one time they met a Beatles song they didn't like enough to steal. At any rate, I am in strong semi-agreement with Noel Gallagher on this one:

"Everyone just wants more and more information. All the fantasy's gone out of music, 'cos everything is too fucking real. Every album comes with a DVD with some cunt going, 'Yeah well, we tried the drums over there, but...' Give a shit, man! It makes people seem too human, whereas I was brought up on Marc Bolan and David Bowie, and it was like, 'Do they actually come from fucking Mars?'"

Speaking of the Beatles, have managed to download four tracks from the upcoming Love. In case you don't know what this is, it's the soundtrack for a new Cirque Du Soleil show. Essentially it's mash-ups, except they were done by George Martin and he's used some alternate material from the vaults that's never been officially released for some of the source material. And, whaddya know, it's actually kind of nice.

I imagine it won't stop there, we'll be deluged with "officially sanctioned" mash-ups in the future as a new way for conglomerates to milk the catalogues of their "music division." Some of it will be good, most of it's gonna suck. But I guess that's no different from anything else.

What's the news across the nation? We have got the information in a way we hope will amuse you. We just love to give you our view, wo-do-dee-do. Ladies and gents, Hongkie Town looks at the news! (Sorry, that will probably only make sense if you're American and and really fucking old like me.)

It's all over but the shouting (which will surely continue for the next two years and beyond). Democrats have both the House and Senate. And their pick-ups in gubernatorial races is an indicator of how things could go in 2008. Except, like the NY Mets, they are good at finding new ways to lose. Will they learn any lessons from this year or will they nominate Kerry again?

I was almost tempted to put on Fox News last night to watch how they were going to try to spin the election results. This screen capture, from Think Progress, shows how worthless Fox is. Since they didn't like the actual news, they decided to just make shit up.

Technically it's true. Hastert will not run for that position because there is no such position.

Other news outlets aren't doing much better. Idolator grabbed this from CNN:


(Yeah, okay, I did the same thing. But if you're gonna equate me with CNN, you have issues.)

For truly balanced coverage, you can stream the entire Daily Show/Colbert Report Indecision 2006 special here.

Last week Bush told reporters that criminally insane Donald Rumsfeld would remain with him for the rest of his presidency. Today, maybe not so much. (Image from BoingBoing.)


However, we must remain vigilant. The terrorists are still out there, ready to strike at all we hold dear without warning. The New York City subway system was attacked just this week:


Other music news - Kinky Friedman lost his bid to be governor of Texas. But John Hall (of Orleans' "Still the One" fame) will be going to Congress.

Moving a bit slowly this week due to some surgery on Monday, it took a friend in Shanghai to alert me to the existence of this upcoming release:

Six tracks from when Crazy Horse included Danny Whitten. This is one of those shows that always stands out when I browse through my old Fillmore East program books, one of those "damn, why didn't I go to that?" Bill Graham did lots of unusual pairings and the top ticket price in 1970 was either $5 or $5.50. Anyway, there's a CD/DVD version that features "high resolution audio" and a photo montage but no video footage. Rock Gallery's gonna have it tomorrow, I've already reserved my copy.

Yes, it's true. Britney finally got k-fed up with K-Fed.

Oh yeah, the Democrats got control of the House, gaining 26 seats. They picked up additional seats in the Senate but not enough to take the majority. For me, so far the most interesting fact is that nationwide, not a single Republican challenger won. Many Republican incumbents held onto their seats but there is not one instance anywhere of a Republican challenging a Democratic incumbent and winning.

Of course, we have two more years for "President" Bush and his pack of sociopaths to continue to try to destroy the United States but now it will be a tiny bit harder for them.

Saw Luke on Friday night. In his blog, he refers to me as someone who "could fire Donald Trump." Well, yeah, I could do that in a heartbeat. Except I'd never make the mistake of hiring him in the first place. Most New Yorkers know his only skill is self-promotion. That's why I've never been able to make it through an entire season of The Apprentice. Every time those game show contestants start in with their, "Oooo, it's such an honor to work for Mr. Trump and learn from the master," I have to run to the toilet and puke and by the time I'm finished the show's over.

Sorry for the quiet. Had some very painful oral surgery on Monday which has cut my energy levels down to zero. Busy in the office. Struggling with my latest column for BC. Things should get back to normal by the weekend I suppose.

One thing that's been on my mind lately is rent in HK. Market prices tend to rocket up and down based on a variety of external events and individual greed. And I've fallen into what isn't an unusual situation in HK: I'm living in a place and paying far below the current market rent for this location and this size and faced with the possibility of having to move in a few months.

In my case, the apartment I'm renting was the home of the landlord, as opposed to something that someone had purchased just for investment purposes. He rented his flat out because he'd taken a two year contract to teach in Shanghai. At the end of those two years, he accepted a one year extension to his contract and in turn gave me a one year extension at a modest increase. He will decide next month whether he is going to stay in Shanghai for an additional year or if he will return to HK, in which case he will want his flat. If I have to move, in order for me to have something on the same street at the same size, it looks like I'd need to pay somewhere between 33% to 50% more, which is not possible.

So I'm starting to think about where to go. Clearly I'm going to leave Mid Levels but I don't know if I'm going to leave HK island. Stay on the island and pay higher prices but have the convenience or move out to New Territories and have low price and space but a longer commute? Real estate in HK always means compromise unless you're a millionaire.

Anyway, last night T, friend J and the dogs took a drive up to Sai Kung. We had dinner at Jaspa's, sharing several appetizers and salads, sitting for a couple of hours at our open table in that square. Then we took a long, slow walk along the waterfront (except for J, who decided to take turns racing with each of the dogs). Since it was Sunday night, it was busy but most of the people who flock there every weekend had already gone home. There were a lot of other people out with their dogs so my guys were really enjoying making new friends and sniffing their butts.

I did live in the Sai Kung area before. At the time, I was living in Marina Cove, a gated community. Very luxe - we not only had the rooftop and three balconies, our patio was right on the water. Not only was our rent high but we had to have two cars and after a year I realized it was not a realistic place for us.

I find myself thinking New Territories, Sai Kung area once again. I really do love that little town and that area. This time no Marina Cove, just a village house somewhere around there will do.

While I wait for my landlord to make up his mind .... T returns to Thailand in one week and she's planning on being there for two weeks. Her birthday comes when she's there, so I'm planning on a long weekend there to help her celebrate with her family. And a business trip to Seoul later in the month.

High marks for the first new Cracker episode in 10 years. The quality one has come to expect from writer Jimmy McGovern, a thoughtful and timely story, Coltrane is great and a nice ambiguous ending that leaves the door open for more. As always, Cracker leaves crap like CSI in the dust.

Also decided to spring for the Depeche Mode Playing the Angel Live in Milan DVD and quite glad I did.

Is there a single person on the planet who thought that Saddam would not be found guilty and would not receive the death penalty? Of course not. Are there people on the planet who are not questioning the timing of the announcement? Well, the average IQ in Mississippi is said to be 85.

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

Michael Kinsley in the NY Times (excerpts):

We have to be careful about sour grapes. The current result of American democracy (though this may change on Tuesday) is Republican control of the presidency, both houses of Congress and (undeniably by now) the federal courts. And that, in turn, has produced policies that, unless I badly misjudge the demographics, most readers of The New York Times Book Review don’t care for: unjustified tax breaks for the rich, a miserable war in Iraq, unbelievable indifference to civil liberties (Secret prison camps? Torture?? America???), among other treats. But this doesn’t prove any flaws in democracy itself. Maybe it’s what people want.

The argument starts to go around in circles: How can people want what is so obviously wrong? Democracy must be flawed to produce an electorate so badly mistaken. No one forces me to believe what I believe. I believe it because reason has told me that it is right. Reason is equally available to every citizen. If self-interest cut the other way, that would be one thing. But the self-interest of most citizens coincides with what I believe, or so it seems to me. So in a fair fight, my side should win. If my side doesn’t win, that proves the fight is not fair. The other side is cheating.

Thoughts like this must have gone through the minds of most liberals over the past four decades. After all, apart from cheating, there are only two possibilities: either you are wrong (and need to undergo intensive self-flagellation followed by extensive reinvention), or the voters are wrong (and even to think this is a severe violation of democratic etiquette). It is unattractive to say or think the voters are wrong. But if reason has led you to a certain set of political beliefs, the fact that others disagree perhaps should give you pause, but it should not automatically change your mind, no matter how many others there are.

The notion of cheating by the other side is a way out of this dilemma. The voters are not at fault and neither are you. But what is cheating? In my view, the worst form of cheating in American democracy today is intellectual dishonesty. The conversation in our democracy is dominated by disingenuousness. Candidates and partisan commentators strike poses of outrage that they don’t really feel, take positions that they would not take if the shoe was on the other foot (e.g., criticizing Bush when you gave Clinton a pass, or vice versa), feel no obligation toward logical consistency. Our democracy occasionally punishes outright lies but not brazen insincerity. When we vote after a modern political campaign run by expensive professionals, we have almost no idea what the victor really believes or what he or she might do in office. It seems to me there is more than enough of this to explain all distressing election results without condemning either yourself or democracy.

It is considered tiresome to complain that the White House was stolen in 2000. In fact, the ultimate triumph of the George W. Bush forces in the 2000 dispute has been to stamp any discussion of that episode as bad sportsmanship and therefore, in a way, undemocratic itself. You lost fair and square: “Get over it,” as Justice Scalia advised.

Call me bitter: I am not over it and don’t want to be over it. I still find it shocking that democracy was so openly subverted, and even more shocking that so few others seem to share my shock. “Stolen”? That depends, as the man said, on what you mean by that word. Here is what I mean. First, a clear majority of those who voted in Florida intended to vote for Gore and walked out of the voting booth (or away from the mailbox) sincerely believing that they had done so. Vindicating the assumptions of those who did vote about whom they voted for (a standard first suggested, as far as I know, by Jacob Weisberg of Slate) seems about the least you can demand of a voting system, and Florida failed this test.

Second, at every stage, Republican government officials thwarted all attempts to let democracy work in the minimal sense of the previous paragraph. Repeatedly, they interpreted the “discretion” that any public official must have as a license to produce the result they wanted, rather than as creating any obligation to do what is right. The Florida recount debate was a festival of intellectual dishonesty. On a whole series of technical issues (those butterfly ballots mispunched by the confused old ladies of Palm Beach, or military absentee ballots mailed after the deadline) there were plausible arguments on both sides. And these arguments had no obvious ideological cast. There is no natural conservative or liberal position on the dilemma of the dangling chad. So it is remarkable — amusing, depressing, not surprising I guess — how quickly and passionately Democrats and Republicans staked out their respective cui bono positions. But Republicans controlled the state and federal governments, so they got their way.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Bush v. Gore was surprising. Shocking, in fact. Probably the most fatuous — i.e., knowingly stupid — Supreme Court decision in history. The justices of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), who upheld racial segregation, could at least plead historical blinders. The majority justices of Bush v. Gore have no such excuse. Both as a raw assertion of judicial power and as a more specific interpretation of the 14th Amendment, it was not merely wrong, but spectacularly wrong in precisely the ways that conservative justices like Scalia, Rehnquist and Thomas had been objecting to for years. The justices invented a nonsensical equal-protection “right” — essentially, the right to an equal risk of having your vote miscounted — and held that any attempt to correct mistakes through a recount was unfair to those who didn’t get recounted. And then they declared this alleged right to be a one-time-only offer, like a grocery-store coupon. As Adam Cohen pointed out recently on the New York Times editorial page, the coupon has indeed expired. Bush v. Gore is rarely cited or applied in other situations.

........

According to the Federal Election Commission, in 2000, Al Gore got 543,895 more votes than George Bush, out of a total of more than 105 million. He deserved to be president. But the size of the injustice is minuscule (even if the practical difference in recent history is enormous). The great flaw in American democracy is not electoral irregularities, purposeful or accidental. It’s not money (which, even under current law, cannot in the end actually buy votes). It’s not even the inexplicable failure of all other Americans to vote my way or of politicians to enact my own agenda. It’s not the broken promises and the outright lying, although we’re getting close. The biggest flaw in our democracy is, as I say, the enormous tolerance for intellectual dishonesty. Politicians are held to account for outright lies, but there seems to be no sanction against saying things you obviously don’t believe. There is no reward for logical consistency, and no punishment for changing your story depending on the circumstances. Yet one minor exercise in disingenuousness can easily have a greater impact on an election than any number of crooked voting machines. And it seems to me, though I can’t prove it, that this problem is getting worse and worse.

A few days before the 2000 election, the Bush team started assembling people to deal with a possible problem: what if Bush won the popular vote but Gore carried the Electoral College. They decided on, and were prepared to begin, a big campaign to convince the citizenry that it would be wrong for Gore to take office under those circumstances. And they intended to create a tidal wave of pressure on Gore’s electors to vote for Bush, which arguably the electors as free agents have the authority to do. In the event, of course, the result was precisely the opposite, and immediately the Bushies launched into precisely the opposite argument: the Electoral College is a vital part of our Constitution, electors are not free agents, threatening the Electoral College result would be thumbing your nose at the founding fathers, and so on. Gore, by the way, never did challenge the Electoral College, although some advisers urged him to do so.

Of all the things Bush did and said during the 2000 election crisis, this having-it-both-ways is the most corrupt. It was reported before the election and is uncontested, but no one seems to care, because so much of our politics is like that. And no electoral reform can fix this problem. Intellectual dishonesty can’t be banned or regulated or “capped” like money. The only way it can be brought under control is if people start voting against it. If they did, the problem would go away. That’s democracy.

Warning, this post all techie crap.

So, as I previously mentioned, while I was basically happy with the Nokia E61, I was getting more and more frustrated about the lack of software for the phone. That's why you get a smartphone, right? To run various mobile programs. And the number of programs for Symbian 60 Ver 3 is in the dozens, as opposed to thousands for Windows Mobile and Palm. I really expected that by now a lot more stuff would have been ported over, but that's not the case at all. So I figured time to move on to another platform.

I've resisted Windows Mobile 5 but the alternatives started looking less attractive. Clearly Symbian wasn't cutting it for me. And Palm as an OS seems to be dying. So Windows it would have to be. I also knew I needed a keyboard, a touch screen, and 3G with capability of roaming in Japan and Korea.

I was semi-focused on the Dopod 838 Pro. As I went around Wanchai, most shops were out of stock on it. The shops that were out of stock were quoting a price of about $6,100. Those guys who had it in stock had bumped up the price to over $6,700. I'd say to these guys, "I ain't paying the gweilo price" but they weren't budging because they know it's a hot item.

Actually, as I looked at the Dopod, it seemed big and it seemed kind of flimsy. The big screen was nice but the slide out keyboard seemed to be just too much.

So I turned my attention to the new Treo 750v. I used to have the Treo 650 and was quite happy with it. The 750v looked good because it was smaller than both the Dopod and my Nokia, so more pocket-friendly. I knew the camera on the Treo wouldn't be as good as the one on the Dopod but, heck, the Nokia didn't have a camera at all and I lived with that.

The other thing the Dopod had but the Treo didn't was WiFi. My Nokia has WiFi but I wasn't using it much because I was so rarely in an open WiFi zone.

So I popped for the Treo 750v. At the same time, I bought a bluetooth GPS thingie ... in part because the guy in the shop said he'd give me a CD with all the GPS software including English HK maps. (No, I ain't gonna say which shop.)

So, home with the Treo. And the pain begins.

First, it took me forever to get the sync working. Installed ActiveSync. Connected the phone. PC started looking for a file NOT on the CD. A search found the required file already sitting in my WINXP/SYSTEM32/DRIVERS directory. Okay, finish install, reboot, phone not found.

Okay. Uninstall all the Nokia files. Reboot. Phone still not found. Pound the table. Cry. Go to sleep.

Next morning. Uninstall ActiveSync. Reboot. Reinstall ActiveSync. Reboot. Phone not found.

Uninstall ActiveSync. Reinstall ActiveSync. Look to see if there's any other version of that "special file." Aha. There's another copy of it sitting in WINXP/SYSTEM32/DLLCACHE and it has a newer timestamp. Use that file. Reboot. Connect phone. Success.

Why the fuck does Microsoft have to make it so fucking hard?

The phone syncs and does it quickly. No complaints there I suppose. One bonus - syncing contacts with Symbian, it never carried over Categories from Outlook and didn't have the ability to view Contacts by Category. Clearly that works in Windows Mobile though. Symbian also wreaked havoc with lines in address fields; that's working okay with WM5.

Step two. Set up speed dials for forwarding calls to my home number/canceling call forwarding, something I do every night when I come home/every morning when I leave. Oh, cool, there are my speed dials, right on the home screen. Test. "You cannot enter control codes here. You must enter them directly from the dial pad."

FUCK! This means that to forward/unforward calls I have to either remember the codes (which use a lot of #'s and *'s, like canceling call forwarding is ##21#) or each time go to contacts, search for that number and then hit "call". That's a shitload more steps!

Step three. Installing software. Try to install the MapKing stuff. It seems to install. Then it won't run, I get a message that the software is not "digitally signed." Download some other stuff. (Yes, pirate, no shit, okay?) A lot of pirate software for mobile phones requires you to follow the normal install procedure, and then replace the "installed" .exe with a "cracked" version. So it installs okay. But then I can't get the cracked .exe on the phone. Cannot copy-and-paste through File Explorer. Cannot drag and drop either. Is there some hack out there for this? No time to google, gotta run for yum cha soon.

Oh, Google's nifty new Gmail mobile app that runs so sweetly on my Blackberry does not work on the Treo.

Last bit - on the install/uninstall programs tool, every time you bring it up, it has a list of everything you've installed. Why? So you have the option to uninstall stuff, even though that can be done directly on the phone. And if you accidentally uncheck something on the list, it gets uninstalled. Pain in the butt.

Net net, it's gonna take me a LONG FUCKING TIME to get used to Windows Mobile.

Catching up .... glad the week is over though next week may not be much better ....

I've been to Nanbantei in Roppongi countless times. It's probably not the best yakitori in Japan but they have an English menu and an English-speaking staff, so it's gaijin-friendly. I'd pointed out the Soho branch to T several days earlier so was not surprised when Thursday night she said she was in a mood for yakitori. The menu items were about the same and the staff seemed well-trained.

We sat at the counter to watch the cooks and I noted that they were opening cartons of pre-packed, frozen skewers. Was this stuff bought from some local wholesale yakitorier (I just made up that word) or shipped from HQ in Japan? No idea. And the grill they were using didn't look the same.

Nevertheless, everything was very tasty and the prices seemed a tad lower than Tokyo. We stuffed ourselves silly. King prawn, chicken and spring onion, shiitake mushroom stuffed with chicken, asparagus wrapped with pork, lamb chop, beef tongue, salmon wrapped in bacon.

I'll go back.

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

Friday night, out very late to meet up with tuxedoed Expat@Large Phil and bumped into Lost Horizons Luke. Ended up in Neptune and had to push away women who kept hitting on me every time T'd go to the toilet. Home late, slept late. Rode hard, put up wet.

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You may have noted that I haven't been writing political stuff lately. It's not from lack of following events leading up to the US midterm elections or lack of interest. It's just my extreme frustration at the level of what is laughingly called "political discourse" in the U.S. The ads this year seem to have sunk to new lows in name-calling, racism, homophobia, fear-mongering - essentially shrill shouting to do anything except address the issues. If this is the example the U.S. wants to set for the world, no wonder so much of the world goes running in the opposite direction.

The whole Michael J. Fox/Rush Limbaugh thing - why anyone with any IQ over 15 pays any attention to Rush Limbaugh is a mystery. The entire Foley/Hastert affair is just one example of Republicans' willingness to sink to any depth and to forego any claim to a moral high ground they might have once possessed in order to maintain power. Bush appearing onstage with Sherwood, a candidate accused of beating and choking his mistress and then paying her half a million dollars to shut up, is another. The Republicans put nuclear secrets on an open website and that's okay but if a newspaper reports it, the newspaper is unpatriotic.

I was planning on writing something on the recent Kerry slip. The fact that Republicans have seized upon a non-candidate screwing up a bad joke as an "issue" merely shows their desperation. However, I don't have to write anything further since Thomas L. Friedman has already covered it quite well, full transcript to be found at Peking Duck:

George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid. Yes, they do.

They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry — a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service — and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.

Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I hope you will say to yourself, “They must think I’m stupid.” Because they surely do.

They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team’s real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and exaggerating Mr. Kerry’s mangled gibe at the president.

And the latest Republican sin? They repeatedly lie about terrorist attempts to influence the campaign in favor of Democrats and at the same time they conspire with a foreign country.

But a Democratic victory next week and in 2008 is far from a sure thing. Democrats have plenty to answer for and also seem to be amazingly inept at campaigning. Does the two party system truly work or is the answer to be found in more of a multi-party approach as found in many other democracies around the world?

Inspired by this post at Wandering Jew, thought I'd post the tale of how I came to Hongkie Town. This may fall under the heading of "more than you wanted to know" but it's a question I've often been asked in 'real life' so here goes.

I spent most of my life dying to go to Tokyo and thinking I'd never get there. Too far, took too long, too expensive, I'd written it off as one of those fantasies that would not come true.

In the summer of 1994, I was working for a software company and one day they said, "the Hong Kong office needs you to go out there." As it turns out, the HK office had undercut the Tokyo office for a teaching gig in Tokyo (like that never happens, huh?) but that's neither here nor there. I was going to Tokyo!

Landing there in the summer of 1994, I was in heaven. Temps were over 40 degrees, even at night, but the heat didn't phase me. I was in Roppongi every night (and it was a far friendlier place than it is today). I finished my assignment and moved into vacation mode. I found a Japanese girlfriend, a beautiful girl with a deep morbid streak, who was my tourguide around the city. But soon my money ran out and I had to get back to New York and back to work.

Well, life in New York was completely boring after that and I wanted to get back to my Japanese girlfriend. I started putting all of my energy into finding a job in Japan but had absolutely no luck. I was depressed and my life in NYC was at a standstill.

Then in February of 1995, my company told me they had an opening in the Hong Kong office and that I was a good fit. I thought to myself, "well, it's not Tokyo but it's close!" And since I had never been to HK, I got the company to send me out for a week so I could check it out. Someone in the NY office had a friend living in HK, so he gave me that guy's number and I called him as soon as I arrived.

My first night in town, we met in Wanchai and hit a variety of bars. At Rick's Cafe (now Chinatown), I met a Filipina woman in town for a week on business (and no, not that kind of business). On the MTR heading back to our respective hotels, she turned to me and said, "I'd invite you back to my hotel but I'm sharing a room with someone." I said, "I've got my own room," and she said, "okay." Simple as that.

Okay, I admit it, I hadn't had any sex in at least several weeks and then to land in a new country and get laid my first night in town, yeah, I could live here.

I'd set up a series of clueless little tests to see if I could get by here on my own. One thing I'd read somewhere was about ordering dim sum lunch. So I wandered around Causeway Bay and Wanchai one day. I had no idea which places would serve dim sum and which ones would even have English menus. Finally I found a place that had a mat in front that said "Welcome!" and I thought, "Okay, that's in English, I'll try it."

I walked to the top of the stairs and watched the hostess ignore me for the next ten minutes. I thought, "oh shit, this is some wacko racist place just like Tokyo, this sucks." Finally I went up to her and said, "what about me?" and she said, in perfect English, "I thought you were waiting for other people." Of course, because no one but an idiot (me) goes for dim sum alone.

They sat me at a round table. At the other end of the table was an older Chinese couple who took pity on me. They helped me order, showed me how to eat stuff, shared some of their food with me. I was completely knocked out. I couldn't get over how friendly they were. I thought, "this is definitely not Tokyo."

At the end of the week, before I went back to NY, I told my company I was willing to make the move. My mother asked me, "why Hong Kong?" I told her, "because it's as far away from you as I can get and still be on the same planet." I was only half-joking.

Less than two months later, I landed here as an ex-pat living my dream, living in Asia.

P.S. One week after moving here, the company sent me to New Jersey for a project for a couple of weeks. I was completely fucking miserable. Here I was, moving to a new country, and sent back to New Jersey? Hated every second I was there. Getting back to HK, my next assignment was to work on a project in Kuala Lumpur. I had never heard of it. I kind of heard of Malaysia but had no idea where it was. So, let's put it this way, I arrived in HK in April, got sent to KL in May and in August met a woman in KL who became my wife. Funny how these things work out.

P.P.S. At the end of a year, that company figured it was time to move me back to New York. Luckily I found another job instantly, working for an investment bank, and also on ex-pat terms. This job also had me constantly traveling throughout the region - Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia and India were all places I got to go to on a somewhat regular basis - and I was promoted to VP within a year of joining.

In 1999, said bank offered me a choice of moving to Mumbai or returning to New York. I don't mind visiting Mumbai and liked the people in the office but had no desire to live there. And no desire to return to New York. Since HK was still in recovery mode from the financial crisis, the banks weren't hiring, at least not senior level positions. While I'm incredibly lazy, I couldn't sit around and not work, draining my savings and my wife's salary. My choices were to either leave HK or move to the cheapest place I could find and hold on till something opened up. I decided to leave.

The internet bubble started looking good so I moved to San Francisco, first working for an investment bank and then for what seemed to be a great start-up company. But the whole time, I was feeling home sick for Hong Kong. I compared everything in SF to HK and SF was coming up lacking. Yes, SF is a great food town and it's close to Napa, Sonoma, Monterey and Carmel. But the streets seemed to roll up at 7 PM and instead of traveling to the capitol cities of Asia Pacific, my job had me going to Denver every other week. I was not happy. My wife hated it even more, eventually telling me that she was going back to Hong Kong with or without me. (I suppose our relationship had dwindled down to that stage by then.)

In 2001, as the internet bubble was bursting, I received a call asking me if I wanted to return to HK. Yes please! This time, when negotiating terms, I insisted that I be a local hire. They asked me why and I told them because I didn't want them thinking they could move me around after 2 or 3 years, that I loved Hong Kong and that's where I wanted to stay, full stop. (This probably did not hurt their image of me.)

Of course, my first four years here don't count towards residency, as one needs seven consecutive years here to qualify for right of abode. So I've got a little less than two years to go. And I intend to make it this time.

So that's my tale, plus a little bit more, take it as you find it and post yours if you feel like it.

High point of the day - I work in the same building as Kristie Lu Stout. Maybe you can't tell from watching her on CNN but she's about 6 feet tall. And today she's wearing matching red skirt and jacket. Oh my my. But can she boogie? I'd like to think she can.

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

This is why lunch is bad for me. I buy a $15 magazine to have something to read while I eat and before I know it I'm thinking about spending $6,000. This week's issue of E-Zone has a big article on the Treo 750v, soon to appear in HK shops if not already there.

See, I've had the Nokia E-61 for about 6 months now. I'm tremendously disappointed about the relatively small amount of software available for the Symbian Series 60 Ver 3 platform. I'm still waiting for my favorite mobile database software (HanDbase) and anytime I ask about GPS maps in the computer malls they tell me Microsoft-only.

I'm also very ambivalent about having a phone based on a Microsoft OS. Every review I've ever read says the OS is not as intuitive as Palm or Symbian and the idea of needing to reboot my phone or getting BSOD is not appealing.

The 750v is appealing because it's a 3G phone and has both GSM and WCDMA, so it will roam in Japan and Korea, like the Nokia. It has a (probably shitty) camera, which the Nokia doesn't have. It doesn't have built-in WiFi, but I've found I'm not using that as much as I thought.

So who else has a 3G smartphone that combines GSM & WCDMA and has a QWERTY keyboard? There's the new Dopod 838 pro. Couple hundred bucks more than the Treo and I think too big for the front pocket of my Levis.

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

Stuff running through my head today:

"When they pulled you out of the oxygen tent, you asked for the latest parties"

"Georgie Tirebiter, he's a spy and a girl delighter"

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Sorry, that's about the best I can do right now.

Having a challenging day. Taking breaks for blogging actually helps me refocus my thoughts for a few minutes here and there, putting the issues into perspective, deciding if I am going to have someone killed or simply fired.

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When I bought the knock-off San Disk SD memory card in Shenzhen, I first insisted on testing it, putting it into the camera and taking a few test shots, including video, to make sure the card worked and that it was fast enough for video. It worked okay and I bought the 2 gig card. I now have two cameras (Nikon D-80 and Olympus Ixus 800 IS) and they both use SD but thought it would be nice to have cards for each camera rather than swapping back and forth.

Well, last night took about 50 photos. (That's one of the amazing sidelights of digital photography that I rarely see mentioned. In the old days, you'd be thinking about processing and printing costs and be a lot more sparing in your picture taking. Now I think nothing of taking 50 photos a day, every day.) And I managed to hit a "dead spot" on the memory card - three pictures where attempting to display them on the camera resulting in an icon and the phrase "data corrupted" appearing on the camera's screen. Transferring these files to the PC, only a portion of the picture was viewable for these three shots.

As of now, don't know if there are any other "dead spots" and whether I can somehow just shoot around them or if I should just toss the card and replace it with a "real" one - probably the latter.

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Oh, happy birthday to Ken Plagge. I'm told he's my number one fan. Ken, if this provides you with a little extra birthday joy, you owe a big thank-you to Jen, who not only made the request but did it in such a sweet way that I could not say no.

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Interesting article in the NY Times talking about three new Southeast Asian cookbooks, especially "Memories of Philippine Kitchens: Stories and Recipes from Far and Near" by Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan. Apparently this is the best English-language book on Filipino cuisine. I may need to get a copy for my maid as I'm hoping this has some recipes in it that do not call for ketchup.

Surprised Fumier hasn't posted this yet. It's either very funny or very sad, I can't quite decide which.



According to the Guardian,

... in Hong Kong, the number-crunching profession is making a valiant effort to shake off its dull image - and now the Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants' attempt to lure hip young things into the profession with a rap recruitment video is climbing rapidly up the YouTube charts.

The Institute - or 'Tute, as it now apparently refers to itself - has entitled its two-minute video "'Tute in da House", as it aims to persuade kids from Hong Kong's 'hoods to consider a career in accountancy.

The aim, according to the HKICPA, was to show that accounting is a "dynamic profession."

The good news, however, is that The Institute of Chartered Accounts in England and Wales says it has no plans so far to put together its own crew to do battle with Hong Kong's accountant/rappers.

What a shame.

Our resolution was to stay the hell away from Lan Kwai Fong, which gets too crowded on holidays like Halloween to be even remotely comfortable. The area is cordoned off and you have to follow a ridiculously labyrintine path to get there and have the privilege of standing ass-to-elbow with people who would be puking on their shoes if yours weren't so much closer.

So off to Wanchai. My guess was that the most popular costume we'd see in Wanchai would be "hooker" and I think I was right.


We went to Maya which was holding what turned out to be a great Halloween party. Here's the lovely waitresses getting into the spirit:

And the guys behind the bar:

Some customers getting into the spirit:

Kids coming by trick or treating ... don't know what kind of candy they expected a bar to have - I think maybe they got chicken wings.

My buddy Justin was in serious need of cheering up. I think Mini Elvis did the trick:

He certainly seemed to be cheering her this devilish kitten (or vice versa?):

Best costume prize winner:

Later, at Bar 109, a clique of Cleopatras came strolling by:


Ray, the manager, told me that if I could get them into the bar, they could drink for free. But two girls didn't believe it, one girl kept asking if it was free drinks for each of them or just one free drink, and the other two kept staring at my friend S, a guy who was wearing a dress. They did not join in.

As the night wound down, a mango marguerita, a lychee martini, a pack o' smokes, getting mellow before heading home:


(Note that this simple post, with 10 small pictures, took 90 minutes to create, because Blogger kept timing out as I was uploading pictures. ARGH!)