Hongkie Town

When we finally got moving today, we made it one block to the Pacific/Robinson shopping mall. Up to the food court on the 4th floor where we stuffed our bellies for less than 100 baht.

Walking through the mall, I was again reminded of how poor T's idea of money can be. I was admiring a Citizen watch that costs 21,000 baht and she said I should buy it. I said there's no way I can afford it when I'm about to spend so much on dental bills. As we looked at some Tag Heuer watches and she was trying to talk me into getting one of those, I discovered that the Tag she wears is not a knock-off - she told me it cost 58,000 baht when she bought it a few years ago. She doesn't seem to get the concept of "saving" - then again I'm no shining example either.

Anyway, a nap after lunch, a bit of afternoon delight, and then off to the night market. So many people know her there, we run into friends of hers everywhere. We grab some fishcake with cucumbers and sweet chili sauce to munch as we walk around. T stops at the fried insect stand, I tell her I don't mind the fried earthworms, but we decide to save our appetite for dinner.

Then foot massage. This time I select the place and we're both happy with the outcome. A one hour foot massage (180 baht each) also includes leg, arm and shoulder massage. Some quasi-famous local singer is in there the same time as us and the girls are pissed off because he leaves without tipping.

We head off in search of a Japanese restaurant she knows but it's closed for the holiday season. It seems that the #1 type of restaurant in this town is Japanese, #2 for some reason is Isaan food. As we wander around and I get hungrier and hungrier, finally I insist on this busy outdoor place. I reason if it's busy, it must be good. Well, actually, it's busy because it's cheap. It's an all you can eat what-they-think-is-Korean barbecue, buffet style, similar to the faux-Korean barbecue joints in HK. Pork, chicken, prawns, squid, fish, veggies and so on, with bowls of fish sauce and Sri Racha sauce for dipping. We get a hotpot at the table, fired with charcoal, not gas, the type that's dry on top for barbecuing but with a thing around it to fill with veggies and minced meat to make soup. Off on the side there's a huge barbecue grill where you can take your larger items for cooking. All you can eat and dinner for 2 costs 320 baht, with beer. That's all you can eat for US$4 per person!!!!!

Then off to one of her favorite corner bars, one we also visited on my previous trip. The manager there is gay - very gay. I'm not sure what they're discussing when suddenly he grabs my dick and says she told him I was big. I tell him if he pays me a thousand baht he can have short time with me. He licks his lips for a minute but does not take me up on the offer.

T tells me that she heard from her ex-husband, that he saw us together on her motorcycle the last time I was here. "Maybe I need to change my hair color," he asked her. I tell her maybe he still loves her, even though it's been at least 8 years since they broke up. She says no, he has many girlfriends now. I say, "doesn't matter, maybe you're still the special one for him?"

A few drinks and I'm getting pissed off because the only music we can hear is coming from the 2 piece band at Zenith across the street - all Western slow pop songs, badly performed. As the Thai whisky is kicking in, every time they end a song I'm yelling requests from across the street. "Stairway!" "Freebird you morose fuckers!" They go from Air Supply to Robbie Williams to the Four Seasons and when they get to "I can't live if living is without you," I'm ready to kill someone.

We walk back through town. Passing some Japanese karaoke hostess bar, T knows the mama-san so she stops to chat while I ogle the girls sitting outside. Passing another Thai night market that's closing down, one stand is playing a VCD of some Thai rock band, some honest to goodness decent guitar rock. We jump up and down and dance in the street and then buy that VCD. The Silly Boys or something like that. Back through the square where the town's annual New Years festival is winding down for the night, two guys on stage with acoustic guitars doing Clapton's "Wonderful Tonight."

Yeah, I know, today was Saturday, but when I'm here, every day feels like a Saturday.

First, shots from Bang Saen Beach, "Unseen in Thailand"?







Cheeky monkey:
T feeding the monkeys:


At a roadside stand, these beautiful stone mortars and pestles cost about US$5. Yes we bought one. T said it would be much better than the clay one I've got right now.

These hanging seashells thingies also cost about 5 bucks each.

Shucking oysters.
The new Chinese temple. There were signs everyone in Thai and Chinese. The only signs in English were those telling you what not to do and "Donation Box."




I managed to squeeze off this one shot inside the main temple before someone pointed at the "No Photo" sign.
Ringing the temple bell for luck.

Sorry, no photos because haven't transferred to the computer yet and too lazy to do right now.

Off to Baeng Saen beach, which I've probably mis-spelled. It's a long stretch of beach with a walkway lined with vendors selling food, toys and souvenirs. Behind the vendors there is row after row of umbrella covered loungers with tables for you to eat whatever you've just bought. Then there is the beach, lined with guys renting jet skis, small motor boats and banana boat rides. Posters every three meters declare that this beach is part of "Unseen Thailand."

While the food looked quite tasty - emphasis on crabs and prawns, grilled and fried - T said "maybe not fresh" so all we bought was a bag of durian chips. All, well maybe some of the taste of durian with none of the god awful smell.

At the northern end of the beach, past a couple of resort hotels, we dined at an open air BBQ seafood place built out over the water. A bowl of mussels was average, a dish of baby clams fried with chili was almost too spicy for me, but the soft shell crabs fried with garlic was just perfection. I think there were four crabs in this dish, which cost about US$5 and after we finished the crabs I started spooning some of that fried garlic. Small side bowls of fish sauce and Sri Racha sauce proved to be the perfect condiments.

Then a short drive took us up to the top of a hill with a commanding view of the area. It was also filled with lots of fat monkeys and vendors waiting to sell us fruits to feed the monkeys. Everyone was buying fruit and feeding them, hence the huge monkey bellies scraping the tarmac. One psychotic monkey reminded me of several people I know, or perhaps one of my dogs. If you went to give a banana to a different monkey, he'd run over and try to push the others out of the way. When he had half a banana in his hand, if you went to give him another one he'd throw away the perfectly good half he had in favor of the new one.

Following that, a stop at a new Chinese temple still under construction in the area. I really will have to post some pictures of this, one of the most ornate Taoist temples I've run across, clearly a lot of money went into this, gold everywhere.

Then a two hour massage. But it was not a good one. The woman massaging me was really fat and I kept worrying that she might try to walk on me or even just sit on me, so I could not relax and enjoy. The best thing about it was the US$6 price. I've had much better.

In the evening, what amounted to my first home-cooked meal in 10 years of traveling to Thailand. We went to the house of one of T's cousins, apparently known as the best cook in the family. She has three kids and a Japanese husband - her next door neighbor also has a Japanese husband. Apparently guys who came down from Japan to work the factories there and discovered their little patch of nirvana. They had this sort of little wooden gazebo - benches surrounding a table on a raised platform with a wooden roof - sitting outside by the corner of their house and we sat out there to eat and drink.

The food really was delicious, even though it was simple. There was a kind of dry crabmeat curry. Tofu fried with shredded pork and chili. Soup with tofu and pork and aromatic herbs. And a western style salad with lettuce, tomato, onion, cucumber and hard boiled eggs.

T was worried in advance that I wouldn't like the food and had said that afterwards we could go someplace else if I was still hungry. But I took three servings of everything and was contemplating going back for fourths when our host broke out a bottle of Chivas Regal.

We made plans for a big group to hit one of the discos on New Years Eve and then for a big multi-family outing to some town near Pattaya for New Years Day.

With my wireless router working perfectly, used Skype installed on my Dopod to make some calls to the US for free. Geek heaven.

Aside from the crappy massage, absolutely nothing to complain about today.

I was brought to this beautiful outdoor restaurant in Sri Racha. I think the English name of the place is something like Mumaroi. While this looks like a big city tourist place, here it is in little Sri Racha. The place was packed and I only saw one or two other fereng eating there so it's an upscale local place.

As you can see, in front, there are these giant aquariums.

In the huge tanks, on the bottom a giant catfish, above something that looks like it should have been extinct a hundred thousand years ago.

The restaurant is open air seating.

Terraced rows leading down to the beach.

The menu is in Thai and English, with lots of photos. All the food looked so good that each time another dish was brought to the table, I'd start eating and then remember later to take a picture. This is sea bass. T said she thought the sauce was a bit on the acid side - maybe it was but very tasty.
T didn't know the English name for this one but I know this as Moreton Bay Bugs. Fried with garlic and spices. Oh my.
River prawns fried with chili and pepper. Very spicy. Very fresh. Actually there were about 8 prawns on the plate but I only remembered to take a pic after most of them were gone!

We also had a dish of squid and and my favorite crabmeat fried rice. Everything was super fresh and tasty. With beer, the total bill (for 5 people) came out to about HK$250. See why I like it here?

Am now in Sri Racha.

Flight down, got seated next to two Indian guys - of course the fat guy had to sit in the middle. Even though they were sitting next to each other, when they talked they yelled, mostly because they had a tendency to talk at the same time. I have no idea what they were talking about but the guy in the middle often got quite excited, jumping around and digging his elbow into me with each twist and turn. Finally he fell asleep and drowned out the jet engines and my ipod with his snoring. Being Indian, I thought they might have ordered a special veggie meal and was looking forward to checking that out, at least, but they just went for the standard chicken rice.

Unpacked now, I find that there are ten electrical chargers/adapters in my bag. Let' see:

1. mobile phone
2. blackberry (no data service here, a peaceful weekend lies ahead)
3. laptop
4. wireless travel router
5. inMotion iPod speakers
6. Archos
7. GPS thingie
8. DVD drive for laptop
9. digital camera
10. bluetooth earpiece (but I don't think I brought the actual unit that this charges)
    

This is seriously insane.

Well, at least the interwub seems to be working normally here. All my RSS feeds are coming in, NY Times page loads, lotsa catching up to do.

I would place strong odds on my having some seafood tonight. Thai-style fried rice with crabmeat, if I have any say in this.

Shortly after he was denied the chance to bail out from a series of disasters at PCCW, evil sub-genius Richard Li, the Mini-Me to Li Ka-Shing, AKA Master of All He Surveys, put his plan, cunningly called "The Plan," into action.

From his lair of semi-evil off, aka "Cyberport," he was going to hold the world ransom for 100 billion Hong Kong dollars. He let it be known that he would assassinate the President of the United States unless he was paid this ransom. This plan backfired when he received higher offers to actually carry out the deed.

So he then went with his other plan, strategically known as "The Other Plan." His target: the interweb, uh, world wide wub, uh, that thingie that people pay me lots of money so they can look at porn. He would threaten to destroy Asia's access to the inter-thingamabob unless they ponied up 100 billion Hong Kong dollars (or unless sales seriously started to increase on NOW-TV's home shopping channel). The inter-whang seemed like a good target because someone told him that a friend of someone who worked for him who actually used the globe wide web once said that people were saying mean things about him there.

He placed a small thermonuclear device at a central communications junction on the ocean bed just off the coast of Taiwan. He was going to threaten to detonate the device unless he received his money or Bai Ling's mobile number.

On the morning of December 27th, his mobile phone rang. Usually one of his semi-evil minions would answer it for him, but they were all on another mission - waiting in line to get him a full set of new collectible Hello Kitty key chains at 7-11. So he had to answer the phone himself.

"Hmmm, I wonder how that's done?" he thought as the ringtone played his favorite tune, "If I Ruled the World." He picked up the phone and tried smacking it with his head, but that didn't work. He slammed it down on the desk, smashing his thumb but at the same time hitting the Big Red Button of Doom that detonated the device.

"Curses! Foiled again! Just wait till next time, I'll get you yet, you wascally wabbit!"

Holy crap. I've managed to hit blogger but we'll see if I'm able to publish or not after I'm done.

As many of you already know, the earthquake in Taiwan has affected phone and internet services in HK and other parts of Asia. It's simply astonishing to me that in "this day and age" this sort of thing isn't anticipated and planned for. I would expect that the financial impact is going to be in the millions if not even billions (at least in HK$) of dollars. PCCW of course will get a free ride on this because if anyone with any weight behind him points a finger at them, Richard Li will just go crying to daddy.

Others more technically inclined than I might find it interesting that throughout the day, while I've been unable to hit most servers in North America, I've had no problem receiving, reading and sending email via my gmail account. And while DNS seems to be working for the most part, even though most web sites time out before loading, it can't seem to find yahoo.com at all.

This whole thing is extra super frustrating because there were some very specific things that I wanted to accomplish today that will remain undone, and tomorrow I'm out of here. I was also going to upload some pictures of HK hidden in smog that I'd taken last week and finally transferred from the camera to the PC, but I don't think that's gonna work today. Such is life.

As I head down to Thailand, things in my life are a bit messier than normal. For one thing, as previously mentioned, my cold and/or flu is back with me. Nothing like taking a little holiday trip when ill. And there are other complications as well.

I know I moan a lot and as I've already said, almost all of my problems are of my own making. Being fully self-aware of that, I should state for the record that I do not have total confidence that I will return from this trip as half of a couple with T. She's done several things over the past couple of days that have really pissed me off and I am waiting until we are together to discuss them with her. There are a lot of big points in her favor as well and I will be taking that into consideration. But several external events are also making me wonder if it is wise to continue in this fashion.

At any rate, I'll have my laptop with me and I'm staying in places that have internet, so blogging will continue while on the road. I'll be splitting my time between Si Racha and Bangkok, with the possibility of a side trip to Ayutthaya or maybe someplace else. I've been combing the Real Thai food blog for suggestions on new food to try and new places to try it.

A couple of hours ago, T sent an SMS asking if I was home. I was, so responded by calling her.

I'm getting a cold again, or the one I had never went away and is flaring up, so I was sniffing on the phone. The conversation went something like this:

Me: sniff, sniff, cough

Her: Why you cry? Someone break your heart?

Me: No, I have a cold again, my nose is all stuffed.

Her: Who break your heart?

Me: No, no one broke my heart, I've got the flu.

Her: It's okay if you want to break up with me, I don't mind.

And more along those lines.

After we got off the phone, she sent an SMS: "Why u cry? Who is break u heart? ... or I'm just only the pass of u life and only pass of u heart?"

Well, I haven't quite figured out that last bit but I replied by saying that I wasn't crying, that my nose is stuffed because I have a cold, and she replied by saying I should get some rest and take some pills, so I guess she finally got it.

No, I'm not cynical enough to (completely) believe this. But as in all the best humor, it has the ring of truth. Excerpted from this post at Thailand Stories:

Hi there. Its thaiexpert here again. Sooner or later in your relationship with your 'Thai cutie' will come the all-important occasion of 'meeting the family'. Much of your future happiness will depend upon this meeting, so pay careful attention!

When you first meet 'papa' (literal translation: the swamp sucking scum who sent his daughter off to bonk fat farangs so he could stay home and drink mekhong all day) and 'mama' (literal translation: holy f*ck this is what my girl will look like in 30 years time) it is important that you give them considerable respect. Small gifts such as fruit (wrapped in money), candy (wrapped in money) or flowers (wrapped in money) are appreciated, although 'papa' (TSSS......) may greatly appreciate something in a bottle (wrapped in money).

As a 'farang' (lit trans :'sucker') 'mama' (HFTIW......) and 'papa' (TSSSW....) will be looking to see if you are 'jai dee' (lit trans: 'open wallet') and good enough for their little 'Lek', 'Noi' or 'Pae' (lit trans: money bank). You maybe lucky enough to meet other members of the family such as 'pii chai' (lit trans: thai husband she has not told you about) and her much younger 'nong chai' and 'nong sao' (lit trans : her kids that she has not told you about). Make good friends with these little bundles of joy, as you can be sure that you will hear about every adventure in their lives from sickness (lit trans : pay money) to education (lit trans : pay money) to their marriage (lit trans : pay money).

"Oh my." That was my reaction on seeing on CNN that James Brown had passed away. Other HK bloggers have also noted this. Brown was easily the creative equal of 20th century music giants Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis ... anyone you'd care to name. As a singer, songwriter, musician, arranger, producer and as a live performer, he had very few peers. Bit o' trivia - we shared the same birthday (though he was 21 years older than me). (Other famous people born the same day include Machiavelli, Golda Meir, Bing Crosby, Pete Seeger, Ben Elton.)

I never saw JB live in concert but have an armful of his CDs. The best place to start for someone who wants to see what all the fuss was about would be the expanded editions of his seminal 60s live albums, Live at the Apollo volumes 1 and 2. This was the man at his peak, live, working it for an audience that would not accept anything other than balls-to-the-wall sweaty dirty hot music. There's also a 4 CD boxed set called Star Time that has all of his significant tracks. There's probably a decent one or two disc compilation via Polygram/Universal out there as well.

Sadly, what I consider to be the best example of James Brown live is no longer available commercially. 20 or 30 years ago, "The T.A.M.I. Show" was available on VHS. This 1965 concert film featured an astonishing array of talent - Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, Jan & Dean, Marvin Gaye, Gerry & the Pacemakers, Lesley Gore, Smokey Robinson, the Supremes and the Rolling Stones. It was pulled from release because the rights hadn't been properly negotiated with all of the artists, and apparently they've never been able to resolve that situation since.

(There was a subsequent, edited release that had highlights from this concert plus the following year's "Big TNT Show" and it does include James Brown footage but I don't know how much. Big TNT Show had a lot of great groups as well - including the Byrds and Ike & Tina Turner but also one of the all-time most horrible moments in rock history - Phil Spector playing piano behind Joan Baez caterwauling her way through "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" - it has to be seen to be believed.)

But the clear performance winner was James Brown. This is the performance that has so often been parodied since then, his stage routine where he breaks down, a friend comes by, drapes a cape on his shoulders, starts to lead him offstage, only for Brown to start dancing, shake off the cape, run back to the microphone and wail again.

I guess I'm gonna have to dig out that tape and convert it over to DVD one of these days.

And tonight I'll hoist up one or two in his memory.

Last night met up with a friend of the British persuasion, who wanted to have a traditional Christmas dinner. The thought occurred to me that for my people, American Jews, the traditional Christmas dinner is Chinese food. This stems from the fact that back in the day when there was no cable TV and just a handful of broadcast stations, on Christmas there'd be fuck-all on TV, so getting out of the house was a priority. The shops would all be closed and the only restaurants open were Chinese restaurants. Eventually the Torah was rewritten to include a mention of wonton soup, egg rolls and moo shu pork (pork actually becomes kosher once you do it moo shu style, did you know that?) But I knew my friend, neither American nor Jewish, had something more like a turkey or ham in mind.

While waiting for him in Wanchai, I was assaulted by a group of Filipinos in Christmas hats who surrounded me and started doing something which I think they thought was singing, mangling Jingle Bell Rock and shaking a can in my face hoping that I would toss some money in to make them go away. Bah! Humbug! I exclaimed and extricated myself from that unpleasant situation and went back to waiting for my friend and watching the Christmas hookers arriving for work, many of them appropriately gift-wrapped.

We went to Devil's Advocate and snagged their one outside table, allowing us an unobstructed view of the various Wanchai happenings. Who needs a TV when you have this view? There were lots of locals coming from the carnival at Wanchai, girls all clutching huge stuffed bears. There were the few diehard ex-pat types who chose to stay in town for the holiday. The occasional beggars, mainland Chinese as well as Filipinos clutching little envelopes ostensibly for some charity but who knows? Various hookers of various South East Asian persuasions who boldly decided to pursue their craft rather than return home and be with their families. And also a lot of Asian guys hanging out in front of Dreams II. I suggested that these were the boyfriends of the girls inside, waiting to take them home if they didn't score a customer for the night. My friend, on a slightly more cynical note, thought they were the pimps for the girls, waiting for their cut. We both agreed that we were fools for leaving our cameras home. We would have gotten some great wildlife shots and maybe snagged a few cute girls to pose with us.

After a couple of hours, I got an SMS telling me that W & C (two HK women - one I've known for years, the other I'd met just a couple of months ago) were hanging out at Carnegie. I went over and found them - that early in the evening Carnegie was empty. Just the two of them and three hookers waiting for customers to arrive. I pulled W & C out of there and they joined us at Devils for the next couple of hours. I think that both my friend and I had some vague interest in C and we therefore sort of canceled each other out on that front. Meanwhile, with two ladies at our table, none of the passers-by were able to express interest in us or vice versa. Eventually our friends went off to try their luck at Dusk Till Dawn.

If in my head I'd had the notion of not going home alone last night, I was partly put off by being under the impression that I'd spent a shitload of money on Saturday night and I was too afraid to open my wallet and get the news. Eventually I worked up the courage to take a look and it was not as bad as I'd feared. But after sitting on that stool for more than five hours eating and drinking, by 2:30 the only thought in my mind was to go home and go to sleep. I didn't even have the energy to go over to Dusk and see if my friends were still there and if so still on their own or not. The battery on my phone had run low and once home and once I plugged my phone into the charger, a whole bunch of delayed SMS's started coming through, and responding to those kept me up a little while longer.

I was up early enough this morning to consider checking out Christmas day festivities at The Bridge but not really in the mood for drinking or listening to loud thumping crappy house music so early in the morning.

On the other hand, I have a feeling that after I've walked the dogs, I may go out for a spot of food and to see what's up in the bars this afternoon.

Tonight I have an invite to attend some party in some bar in Central that would require me to actually put on some nice clothes and I'm thinking, hmmmm, not so much.

Sleepy today. Lotsa chores I should be doing, instead just reading blogs and newspapers, converting DVDs over to AVI, being lazy. I'm semi-house-bound because my maid has three days off and that means I need to stick around to walk and feed the dogs at their regular times.

Should I be worried? The new version of Blogger is out of beta and when I go to switch it says that my blog cannot be converted.

My dogs - okay, they're weird, but everyones' dogs are weird, no? I got Bogey, a white lab, to keep Spikey, a golden retriever, company because HK is so backwards when it comes to dogs. SF is filled with dog runs and leash-free beaches and Spikey was out playing every day with other dogs. Spikey is now 6 and a half years old, Bogey is three and a half. Spikey's a big boy, weighing in at just under 45 kilos, Bogey is about one-third smaller.

Choosing Bogey was a group project. We tried bringing home a mixed breed puppy from someone who had him but couldn't keep him and the two guys just never got along. Fortunately we were able to find another home for that puppy where they took nice care of him.

So after that, we took Spikey to the pet shops in Causeway Bay and let him play with the puppies and then bought the one he seemed to like best. Buying a pet from a pet shop anywhere in the world is an iffy proposition at best, and the CWB shops are notorious for selling inbred dogs that die within a few months of being brought home.

However, with our (me and the ex-wife) experience raising Spikey and with a good, trusted vet, Bogey has grown into a physically healthy, smart and affectionate dog. Physically healthy, because mentally he's quite insane. Mostly the two guys get along like brothers, which means that they seem to have a real love/hate relationship going plus a constant competition for my attention.

When Bogey came into the house, we didn't want Spikey to feel neglected, so we made sure to always put him first - first to be pet when we'd come home, etc. However, Spikey is a mellow dog while Bogey is an "A" type personality. He's desperate for attention and hyperactive and even though he's passed his 3rd birthday he has yet to mellow out. He always tries to push Spikey aside - so that, for example, when I come home, Spikey will run to the toy box, pull out a toy and run to greet me at the door and then Bogey yanks the toy out of Spikey's mouth.

Bogey has refused to become 100% housebroken. However, he's smart enough to figure out that what my maid and I do in the bathroom is pee and shit, so he thinks it's okay to do it there too. So he uses my maid's shower as a toilet. The only problem is if her bathroom door is closed, he's liable to go anywhere else in the house. Sometimes I'll take him for a walk, he'll pee twice and poo once and within 15 minutes of getting home he's running to her bathroom again.

On the other hand, while they're both boys, I've frequently caught Bogey fucking Spikey. Generally Bogey walks over to where Spikey is lying down, starts nipping at him, they wrestle for awhile, Spikey pins him, sits on his face, gets up and then Bogey runs around to the back and starts humping away. What can I say except Boys Will Be Boys.

I've never seen Spikey fuck Bogey, but he does seem to give him doggy blow jobs from time to time. Well, he sticks his nose down there, sniffs a bit, and then seems to lick a few times before coming up for air.

(Why do dogs lick their own balls? Because they can.)

This afternoon, while out for a walk, Spikey found a spot to pee and squatted down and started letting it flow. Bogey walked over, lifted a leg and peed on Spikey's hind leg. I've never seen that before. I'm less than thrilled about this and have to ask the maid if she's seen it before. Though for all I know, every time she walks the dogs she's so busy on the phone that she'd never notice.

And now, for a highbrow change of pace, critics choices from the NY Times, no links provided, you know where to look....

Films:

Manohla Dargis - Army of Shadows, Letters from Iwo Jima, Inland Empire, Our Daily Bread, L'Enfant, Children of Men, Three Times, Miami Vice, Brand Upon the Brain, Borat.

A.O. Scott - Letters From Iwo Jima, Pan's Labyrinth, L'Enfant, Days of Glory, Little Miss Sunshine, Three Times, 51 Birch Street, Volver, Little Children, Prairie Home Companion, and "an 11-way tie for 11th place" Aura, Children of Men, Death of Mr Lazarescu, Fast Food Nation, Flags of Our Fathers, Half Nelson, Iraq in Fragments, Marie Antoinette, Our Brand is Crisis, The Queen, Tristram Shandy

Stephen Holden - Babel, Pan's Labyrinth, Heading South, The Queen, Letters from Iwo Jima, United 93, Death of Mr Lazarescu, Volver, Prairie Home Companion, Little Miss Sunshine "and also" Borat, Departed, Dreamgirls, History Boys, Little Children, Notes on a Scandal

Noteworthy DVDs (by Dave Kehr) - Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, John Wayne/John Ford Collection, Phantom, Wanda, Valerio Zurlini box set, Lubitsch in Berlin, Reds, Mr Moto Collection Vol 1, Cary Grant Screen Legend Collection, Beyond the Rocks

Music

Jon Pareles - TV on the Radio, Marisa Monte, Thom Yorke, Rosanne Cash, Grizzly Bear, Lily Allen, John Legend, Joanna Newsom, My Chemical Romance, Ghostface Killah

Kelefa Sanneh - Arctic Monkeys, T.I., Allan Jackson, Beyonce, Destroyer, The Game, Shearwater, Justin Timberlake, Nelly Furtado, Lil Wayne & DJ Drama

Ben Ratliff - Andrew Hill, Mastodon, Bebo Valdes, Alan Jackson, Beyonce, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Bob Brookmeyer, Paul Motian Trio, Tengir-Too, Gonzalo Rubalcaba

And now, rather than returning to work, think I'm gonna go have me a lie down ...

Specifically, so many of you are leaving town for vacations or to visit your families in other places. This leaves an army of South East Asian maids with a lot of time on their hands. Many of them will choose to spend that time in Laguna or New Makati or other similar dens of iniquity. They will be looking for those few males (and in some cases, females) who had the good sense to stay in town and hopefully the bad sense to pay for their drinks and food, dance like fools and possibly even fill their Christmas, er, stocking.

And so, dear (and not-so-dear) readers, as always I shall be taking my blogging duties with the seriousness and seriosity that they deserve, and I will (or possibly will not) be reporting on all of the action and activities that may or may not be taking place. You can certainly trust or not trust me or someone else to honestly lie to you and to myself about everything and nothing.

And dat's da name o' dat tune!!!!

I should have posted a link to this sooner ....

Chez Pim is holding an annual fund raiser amongst food bloggers called A Menu For Hope III. They are raising funds to support the UN World Food Programme. For each US$10 raffle ticket you purchase, you can specify which prize you'd like to win. And there are a lot of prizes for those of us in the Asia Pacific region. Dinner for two at Felix in HK, a food tour of Bangkok complete with dinner at the famous Bed Supperclub and more. Plus autographed cookbooks, kitchen tools, a really wide range of nice prizes donated by restaurants, shops and individuals.

My lateness in posting a link to this is unforgivable. My only excuse is my ongoing crappy mood. The deadline is today, Friday December 22nd, at 6 PM Pacific time, which means you've got until about 2 AM tonight to take a look at the stuff and make a donation. I certainly will.

CORRECTION: Duh, you've got until 10 AM Saturday morning HK time to make your donation. My mind is really gone lately. Although I could say I was being greedy and don't want too many people selecting items I'm going for. But that's not true. I don't expect to win anything in the raffle. I'm just happy to donate to a good cause and show some support to some great food bloggers who've taught me a lot!

On some rare occasions, I get some perks from having this blog that I never anticipated. Sometimes it's someone buying me a drink. Last night was something quite a bit more.

Seems one of my readers is a Singapore woman who is opening up a salon in Soho and offered me a free massage. The timing couldn't have been better because I've been literally aching to do a day trip to Shenzhen but hadn't gone because I wasn't in the mood to go alone and the people who'd normally make that kind of trip with me weren't able to get away on days when I was free.

So I eagerly took her up on the offer, and on the same day that she made the offer. 45 minutes of foot massage and 45 minutes of oil massage. (Yeah, I know what some of you are gonna ask but it was just massage, okay?) She told me it wasn't for publicity and said I didn't need to blog about it. And since the place isn't quite ready for prime time yet, she's asked me not to link to the web site at this point.

But I will say it was extremely pleasant and I do intend to go back as a paying customer and will post more info on it once she tells me she's ready. She really does read the blog, too ... and read the old one as well as this current one. We talked on a pretty wide range of subjects and I'd start to tell her some related tale from my life and she'd respond that she'd already read it in the blog. It's interesting to meet someone who you know nothing about and they know (almost) everything about you.

One interesting side note - I always feel guilty when I fall asleep during a massage. I think that by falling asleep, I miss out on something. Last night I was told it's actually better if one does fall asleep, as your muscles are more relaxed and when you wake up you feel great. I certainly did.

As the week winds down, I'm trying to figure out what the heck I'm gonna do with myself on this holiday weekend. Pretty much everyone I know is gonna be busy with family and loved ones. I can't travel because my maid will be off for Xmas and that means I need to take care of my dogs. Christmas dinner could well be me plus the two of them. Hmmm, what side dishes would go well with Eukanuba - salad, potato or both? (Okay, the little guy has put in a request for carrots. The big guy wants some bones.) What type of wine should properly accompany dog food and when serving a fine wine to a dog should one use a plastic or a metal bowl?

So I suspect that I'll be following up on some of the suggestions that my recent shopping post inspired. I find it vaguely interesting that a post like that receives more comments than my usual "fuck the government" or "wow gong li has large breasts" posts, not that it's gonna affect what I choose to write about in the future. (Actually I never did a Gong Li has large breasts post but please take a look at these pictures over at Daily Dumpling if that sort of thing interests you.)

Have not watched Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette yet but enjoying the soundtrack and wondering how these songs work within the context of the film. Track 1 is Siouxsie & the Banshees' Hong Kong Garden. Was never really a big fan of Siouxsie but this track is really nice. The song is almost 30 years old and refers to a Chinese takeaway joint in London, not to any visit here (and some people have said the song is racist because of the line "slanted eyes meet a new sunrise, a race of bodies small in size").

Sorry if this post is kinda neither here nor there. Other stuff on my mind at the moment. Waiting for the weekend.

And now, in honor of the pending holiday, "Dear God" by XTC:

Dear God,
Hope you got the letter,
And I pray you can make it better down here.
I dont mean a big reduction in the price of beer,
But all the people that you made in your image,
See them starving on their feet,
cause they dont get enough to eat

From God,
I can't believe in you.

Dear God,
Sorry to disturb you,
But I feel that I should be heard loud and clear.
We all need a big reduction in amount of tears,
And all the people that you made in your image,
See them fighting in the street,
cause they can't make opinions meet,
About god,
I can't believe in you.

Did you make disease, and the diamond blue?
Did you make mankind after we made you?
And the devil too.

Dear God,
Don't know if you noticed,
But your name is on a lot of quotes in this book.
Us crazy humans wrote it, you should take a look,
And all the people that you made in your image,
Still believing that junk is true.
Well I know it ain't and so do you,
Dear God,
I can't believe in,
I don't believe in,

I won't believe in heaven and hell.
No saints, no sinners,
No devil as well.
No pearly gates, no thorny crown.
You're always letting us humans down.
The wars you bring, the babes you drown.
Those lost at sea and never found,
And it's the same the whole world round.
The hurt I see helps to compound,
That the father, son and holy ghost,
Is just somebody's unholy hoax,
And if you're up there you'll perceive,
That my heart's here upon my sleeve.
If there's one thing I don't believe in...

It's you,
Dear God.

My life is a never-ending series of dealing with obsessive-compulsive desires, sometimes succumbing to them, sometimes fighting them into a corner with the use of a whip and a chair.

More simply put, I am one of the few men on the planet to readily admit that shopping cheers me up. Most of the time buying some DVDs or CDs does the trick. Sometimes it needs to be something bigger. Generally when I go shopping it is either for electronic gadgets or sex. I will leave it to the faux Freuds amongst my readers to determine any (ir)relevant connection between the two.

Today, my thoughts turn to gadgets. There are several different paths that I might choose. Last night I found myself in the 298 Computer Mall but managed to avoid choosing any of these paths. That does not mean that final decisions have yet to be made. In increasing order, I am considering ....

1 - Under HK$1,000. New video card for my PC, as the existing one is quite old. It is getting rusty and growing barnacles.

2 - Under HK$3,000. New iPod, yet again. Tough one. Upgrade from 60 gig to 80 gig. Could use the 20 extra gig and supposed longer battery life. But most of that 20 extra gig would be for storing movies, which would then be watched on TV sets in hotel rooms as I travel around. Which requires time to convert the divx and xvid files into mp4. And I won't watch movies on the iPod's screen.

3 - Under HK$4,000. So, instead of that, consider a PMP with a decent size screen. The latest series from Archos looks pretty nice. But another thing to go in the knapsack, another set of plugs and wires to carry when I travel, and it won't get used at all when I'm not traveling.

4 - Under HK$6,000. Upgrade the whole friggin' PC. Intel Core Duo. Which means new motherboard, probably new RAM, and definitely a new video card, especially if I wanna be Vista-ready. Building a new PC and installing everything on it would certainly give me something to do during Xmas break.

5 - HK$6,000 or thereabouts, I think. Longer zoom lens for my Nikon D80.

Anything at all to ease the pain in my life from having to hear this song every time I step into a bar or club.

How come everytime you come around,
My London, London bridge, wanna go down like,
London, London, London, wanna go down like,
London, London, London, we goin’ down like…

How come everytime you come around,
My London, London bridge, wanna go down like,
London, London, London, wanna go down like, 

London, London, London, we goin’ down like… 

SNL - no idea how good or bad it is these days, except every now and then they seem to hit it. The #2, 4 & 9 most viewed video on YouTube today. Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake. Yes, it's Dick in a Box.

It's easy to do, just follow these steps:
One - cut a hole in a box
Two - put your junk in that box
Three - make her open the box

I know who I'll be giving this to on Christmas. (Actually I don't. T will still be in Thailand and I'm not heading down there till the 28th.)

NY Times: In Chinese Boomtown, Middle Class Pushes Back.

When residents here in southern China’s richest city learned of plans to build an expressway that would cut through the heart of their congested, middle-class neighborhood, they immediately organized a campaign to fight City Hall.

Over the next two years they managed to halt work on the most destructive segment of the highway and forced design changes to reduce pollution from the roadway. It became a landmark in citizen efforts to win concessions from a government that by tradition brooked no opposition.

.....

Shenzhen’s 28 percent average annual growth rate since 1980 is likely to stand as a record in China for some time, but the price of this phenomenal success is painfully evident. Throughout most of the year its skies are thick with eye-burning smoke. Street crime is high. And the workers it has drawn so effortlessly in the past from the countryside are becoming harder to recruit, as their options increase elsewhere.

But Shenzhen may also herald more promising changes. Possibly the greatest force taking shape here is the quiet expansion of the middle class, thicker on the ground here than perhaps anywhere else in China. This middle class is beginning to chafe under authoritarian rule, and over time, the quiet, well-organized challenges of the newly affluent may have the deepest impact on this country’s future.

This is not the only public protest yielding results in Shenzhen these days. China Law Blog has a great summary of the reaction to Shenzhen's police marching suspected prostitutes and customers through the streets. It didn't quite go the way the police expected. Here, from the NY Times:

The act of public shaming was intended as the first step in a two-month campaign by the authorities in the southern city of Shenzhen to crack down on prostitution.

But the event has prompted an angry nationwide backlash, with many people making common cause with the prostitutes over the violation of their human rights and expressing outrage in one online forum after another.

.....

Instead of jumping on the bandwagon against prostitution, which is illegal but omnipresent in China, many commentators aimed their criticisms at the government for its hypocrisy in not acting against the rich underworld that operates the sex trade or even arresting the prostitutes’ customers.

“Looming in the background of this case is the fact that the sex trade emerged along with China’s reforms themselves,” said Li Jian, a prominent Beijing human rights activist who has called for organized action to defend the arrested women. “If you say that prostitution is illegal, there is an administrative backdrop to the issue. To punish the prostitutes in such a crude manner is a way of avoiding responsibility on the part of the administration and the police.”

I don't have time to fully develop this, but take a moment to compare these protests to the recent spate of protests over the coming demolition of the old Star Ferry Pier.

At first I thought Glutter was out of her frigging mind when she wrote that this ugly building was "our most enduring symbol of home." I would have thought the image of the skyline against the Peak, or the harbor itself, or the Hong Kong flag overlaid with big gold dollar signs.

Then I was watching the evening news the other day and they interviewed this old couple that had been going to the building almost since it was erected. They went there for the harbor breezes and to people watch.

And as I was riding in a taxi today, we passed Tamar, where there is a carnival set up that runs until March. HK$150 buys you unlimited rides on the ferris wheel, tilt-a-whirl, assorted roller coasters and other stuff people actually like. All right next to the harbor. They are selling advance tickets for this because it's proving to be very popular. But this will be gone in three months to make way for a building that no one wants.

God knows we don't need something that both local residents and tourists would enjoy and spend lots of money and keep coming back to smack dab in a central location facing our once-beautiful harbor. Why isn't Tamar being used for some sort of permanent installation for the people of Hong Kong and the world? Because the Li Ka-Shings and SHKs and HKLs aren't making any money from this.

I think Beneath the Peak got it exactly write when he wrote:

... the 49-year-old clock tower has become a lighting rod for people increasingly dissatisfied with an administration that has no popular mandate, holds mock public consultations, and then does whatever it wants.

They're knocking down this building that has sentimental value for a great percentage of the population, in order to build a highway and yet another fucking shopping mall. Queens Pier is next.

And it's not just that these idiots are doing this, it's the way in which they are handling the entire matter. They have consistently been vague and have outright lied in order to move this ahead.

The public is getting fed up with Donald Tsang and his gang of wharf rats. If he has shown one thing while in power, it is utter disregard for everyone else in Hong Kong except for appeasement for Beijing and the super-rich.

This is what happens, folks, when you don't have democracy. This is what happens when government officials are not answerable to the public.

I think these public demonstrations are addictive. In recent times, it started with the candlelight vigils for Tiananmen Square. It grew with the pro-democracy demonstrations a few years back that drove Tung from office.

Assuming that Tsang is not as far removed from day to day reality as George Bush, one must assume that he is growing nervous at these public protests. And Beijing will soon sit up and take notice, if they haven't already. They may even draw some uncomfortable and incorrect conclusions - e.g. the protesters are emboldened because of their proximity to freewheeling Hong Kong.

So what will Beijing do? They thought they appeased us once by dumping Tofu-For-Brains and giving us Donald Duck. It ain't working. And somehow I don't think they're gonna say, "well, shee-it, we've run out of ideas, let's just give 'em democracy and let them sort it out themselves."

A change is gonna come, that's for sure. But it may be worse than what we have now.

Got dragged into Amazonia on Sunday night, against my better judgment. By an overage quasi-psychotic HK hooker, also against my better judgment. She claimed that the band there was the best Filipino band in HK and that they all love her and that she really knows music and I had to check them out.

When the band came on, it was five greasy overweight guys with stringy long hair. The band had a rhythm guitarist - you don't seem to see much of that in these bands, at least not around HK. The lead guitarist was playing some slide, too. And for awhile they played some competent rock and roll that fit their image. A good Faces tune (and there are only a handful of those) and when they did the Red Hot Chili Peppers, they did Dani California, not too well, but at least it was something different, so I was vaguely impressed. It was kinda like stumbling on some backwoods roadhouse blues band, a feeling that was further reinforced when they launched into a very sloppy version of The Doors' Roadhouse Blues.

But as the set wore on, they ran off the road by doing Bon Jovi. When they followed that up with Hotel California I ran from the bar (and the quasi-psycho hooker) before they might have launched into Free Bird or Caravan (with a drum solo), looking almost exactly like this:


or perhaps like this:

Yeah, I know, that choice of images ain't very original. Neither was the band.

I'm not hung over but tired, sleepy, achy.

I met T on May 1st, 2005. In the year and a half that I've known her, we've probably been a "couple" for about six months, on and off. During those times we've been together, she has broken up with me an average of once per week. It's pretty complicated. I understand some of her reasons for doing it and I'm coming to understand other reasons and motivations as time goes by. Some of it is her, some of it is me. Sometimes it's her insecurities about herself and her life, sometimes it's her insecurities about me and sometimes it's simply her reaction when she doesn't get what she wants. Regardless of the forces driving it, you can well imagine that it's more than a little bit frustrating.

The most recent break-up attempt came on Friday night, via SMS and phone. About the only good thing I can say about it is that when it came, I was eating in Subway. Subway has free WiFi and I have Skype installed on my phone, so at least the calls didn't cost an arm and a leg.

There are other frustrations with the relationship that are building as time goes along. Won't go into them at the moment except for one - there are huge gaps in her English. For someone who has only been speaking English for about three years, her ability is amazing. But on the phone, we each end up having to say everything three times. I have to consciously downsize my conversation, both in terms of the words I use and the concepts I want to discuss. This is not a good thing.

Also, one other thing. When she wants something, if my response is that we can't do that because I can't afford it, her response is that she's sorry to be using so much of my money and maybe we're better off breaking up. I'm usually a relatively generous person. However I've specifically told her that I've spent $40,000 in medical bills in the past two months and anticipate spending at least another $25,000 next month; she doesn't draw a connection between that and anything else.

As I did the rounds of the usual bars in Wanchai last night, I was in an odd mood. Laguna, Makati, Bananas, Fenwick, Neptune, Galaxy - some revisited multiple times. I was with a friend and ran into other friends along the way, and I confess I had little desire to return home alone. Yet that's how the evening ended up.

On the one hand, I found that I didn't want to go with someone I found myself liking, for fear of where that would take me in my present mood. And I didn't see the point of going with someone I didn't like, simply for the point of being with someone. It was also a frustrating feeling.

As the night wore on, as the frustrations built up that I was incapable of understanding at the time because the alcohol level in my bloodstream was also building up, I took on the persona of Borat, though I didn't do a great job with the accent. If you think his lines are funny in the movie, imagine trying them out in Wanchai.

On entering a bar, I would introduce myself to the bouncers at the door. "Hello, my name Borat. I am looking for woman to have sexy time. Can I find such a woman in here?"

And then in the bar, as girls would come up to me to try their luck. "Hello, my name Borat. I like you. I like sex. It's nice." Most would suppress a laugh, some would just stare with their mouths open.

Actually, if any of these girls would have known who Borat is and had played along, I probably would have found that irresistible. However, 'twas not to be.

So now it's Sunday. I'm not quite hung over but am feeling achy. I'm supposed to go meet someone for yum cha but not sure that my stomach is up to it. Well, gonna get dressed, go out and walk the dogs, and see how I'm feeling after that.

Someone asked in a comment about my experiences as a taxi driver.

The thing about my life is that I've always worked, since I was about 12 years old and had a paper route and helped my father out in his warehouse. Because for years I didn't know what I really wanted to do, I took any job I could get just so that I could keep working. My "career" included repairing TVs, installing air conditioners, working on loading docks, working in restaurants, income tax preparation, temp office work - anything I could do to pay the rent in between whatever work I could find in film and TV.

Around 1982 I found myself out of work. I'd given up on working in film and the bands I was managing had sucked out all of my money without getting anywhere. I was working in a shop in Harlem owned by a cousin of mine, but he and I had a falling out and I didn't want to be there anymore. I had no idea what I would do next. I had an uncle who was a lifelong taxi driver (he owned his taxi and made a nice living in the era of cheap gas and cheap insurance, owned a house and put 2 kids through college) and I always said that if I couldn't get any other job, I could always drive. So I applied for a hack license and went to work.

The funny thing is ... on my first day of driving, I picked up a fare going to Kennedy Airport from midtown and I got lost going there! At that point in my life, I think I'd only been to Kennedy Airport twice. Of course try explaining to the passenger that it was my first day on the job ...

It was a miserable fucking job. I'd leave home around 4:30 AM to go to the garage to get the taxi. I'd drive 11 hours a day, 5 AM to 4 PM. Because I was a newbie, I was expected to drive Sundays, the worst day of the week. On a good day I'd book $100 on the meter and take home about $30-$50, depending on tips (this is the reason why, when I first moved to HK, I used to tip taxi drivers here 20% of the meter). On a bad day it could be a lot less. I was making less than $200 per week. But at least I was working.

At 6 AM Sunday morning, who is there to pick up? Mostly hookers going home after a hard night's work. I'd cruise the hooker areas and they'd always be going to some strange part of Brooklyn. And they'd always tell me their life story during the ride. No, they never offered to get me off in exchange for the fare.

I was never robbed although I did have one or two people run from the taxi without paying once we'd reached wherever they were going. And unlike some other taxi drivers, I had no qualms about going to Harlem or Bed-Stuy or wherever. The law says you go anywhere in the city limits the passenger wants to go and that's what I did. I remember one time taking some woman and her little kid up to Harlem and as we got near their street, the kid shouted out, "no whitey allowed!" The woman was horribly embarrassed, I just laughed and told her it was okay.

As I mentioned before, in a year I had four celebrities in the back seat - Bruce Springsteen, Harvey Keitel, Roberta Flack, Mariel Hemingway. Bruce was very talkative and I confess that I took him the long way to where he was going so I could talk with him more. $4 on the meter, I told him I didn't want a tip, just his autograph. He gave me the autograph and then 10 bucks, keep the change. With Keitel it was funny because I'd just stopped off at a video rental shop and picked up "Taxi Driver" and then he flags me down. I was like, "Harvey! Harvey! This is unbelievable! Look what I just rented!" I think I scared him a bit. Hemingway got in the taxi after I'd sat two hours on a hotel line, was going someplace less than a mile away and didn't tip.

After a year of utter misery and boredom, a friend took pity on me. He owned a couple of record stores and was putting money into a new video rental store. He asked if I wanted to work in that shop and it was a no-brainer for me.

Two years working in that shop. Because of its location, we got a lot of celebrities. But I'd estimate that 2/3rds of the clients were gay and most of the staff was gay. I ended up having a little side business setting up video systems in all the gay bars in Greenwich Village. It basically put me at ground zero in the early days of AIDS. I can recall visiting friends in hospitals. The nurses would put on two pairs of gloves and two masks and looked like they wanted to spit on me while I'd be sitting on the bed holding my friends' hands. But I digress.

Anyway, in 1985 I opened a CD store in partnership with the friend who owned the record stores. It did okay but there were problems that I cannot talk about here. A year and a half later a customer lured me away from the store and we started the CD Hotline. Among other things, I started running the computer systems there because I was able to pick up that stuff pretty easily. We went from a single rented PC to a 25 PCs on a Novell network and I was running the entire system, mostly self-taught.

When it became clear that the owners of the CD Hotline weren't going to keep their promise to give me equity in the company, I figured I'd concentrate on the computer stuff, so I went back to school and studied relational databases and went into corporate IT, which led to my working a lot in London, which led to my first marriage breaking up, and then I had my first trip to Tokyo in August 1994 and my first trip to Hong Kong in February 1995 ....

Just checked - my first blog post went up on December 4, 2004, a day that won't live in infamy.

I wrote a long, introspective piece about the past two years, how I've changed, things I'm happy with in my life, things that I'm not happy with.

I shit-canned it.

This blogging thing is addictive but sometimes there's no need to be so damned public about everything.

I was in a pretty low mood yesterday.

Without going into reams of detail, I've been having some medical issues recently. The big part of the problem isn't the medical issues themselves, it's the cost involved, as it turns out that what I need done isn't covered by insurance. This was driven home to me when I submitted the first medical bill for reimbursement. The bill was HK$11,000 and I got back $115. I've now spent a total of HK$40,000, received back a total of $350, and am only about halfway done.

(I did complain about this situation to my company's HR department, though that of course got me nowhere. My company has this official policy called "Employees First!" but it really should be called "American Employees First!" because it's clear that staff in the home office enjoy a level of benefits that are deemed not appropriate for those of us located somewhat west of Texas. Why should we receive the same medical coverage as those in the U.S. What we're given is "appropriate" for our region.)

The only way to ease the financial burden then is to complete the procedures in Bangkok, where the cost will be less than half of what it would be in Hong Kong. Something that would cost HK$7,000 here would cost the equivalent of HK$3,000 there. My doctor in HK yesterday started arguing strenuously against this approach, telling me all sorts of horror stories. The problem is trying to figure out how real all of this is vs. being a sales pitch from the doctor here to keep using him. I checked the qualifications of the doctor I will be seeing in Thailand and found that he is US educated, US board certified, articles published in US medical journals and a lecturer at Thai universities. He certainly seems qualified and I will stick with my original plan.

But my doctor managed to get me in such a bad mood that I decided that drinking was called for. Following dinner at Bon Appetit, the Vietnamese place in Rat Alley, I decided to brave the jungle known as Bar George. Fishing in a different pond, in a manner of speaking. It was quite busy, as you'd expect since this is one of the few places in Lan Kwai Fong that fills up with Thai and Filipino women doing what Thai and Filipino women do in HK bars.

For me, I was simply enjoying the view. A few women tried their luck with me but none of them were that inspiring or more entertaining than the friend who was with me for the night, a gentleman named Johnnie Walker.

But then I saw that rarity in HK bars, a local HK girl sitting there on her own, drinking and smoking. I felt duty bound to investigate. Not for me, mind you, but so that I could report on this rare siting to you, my faithful readers. Okay, it didn't hurt that she was quite cute. "R" was over 30, divorced and working in a nearby shop. She decided to take advantage of ladies night to drink for free and unwind after work. I bought her a real drink, the kind you can't get for free, and we talked and laughed and smoked and danced together for awhile.

When she went to the toilet, a Filipino ladyboy whom I know came over to say hello and ask me about my "friend." This has parallels to my doctor. My doctor was telling me horror stories about Bangkok doctors to get me to stick with him. The ladyboy was telling me potential horror stories about the local HK girl to try to lure me over to s/him. She's telling me the woman is lying and is probably a hooker and that she probably has AIDS, all that kind of stuff.

R returns while the ladyboy is still standing there talking to me. And me, being completely blitzed, I think what the ladyboy was saying was quite funny and I tell R about the conversation. That was mistake number 1. Mistake number 2 was when I managed to spill an entire drink into R's shopping bag. Well, I was about 6 or 7 drinks in at that point and someone had made the mistake of actually putting a drink on the bar, what else could I have done? But through the fog I was able to tell that it would have taken more effort than I was willing to put in in order to recover from that faux pas.

So I said good night to R, who barely glanced in my direction as I left Bar George, fell into a taxi and somehow ended up in Wanchai. I left Johnnie Walker in Lan Kwai Fong but somehow he followed me to Wanchai. Another hour or two prowling the bars before deciding it was time to get my little white butt in bed. I was afraid that coming home alone would be a mistake and that I'd lie in bed all night regretting it. Luckily I was able to fall asleep quickly and not dwell on the various issues of the day.

Today is a new day. But the weather still sucks.

Blender Magazine has a bit on the 50 Worst Artists in Music History. I took a peek to see if someone other than Michael Bolton or Kenny G came in at #1 and to see how many on the list are ones that I would admit to liking. Celine Dion only makes it in at #27, thought she'd have to be top 5 for sure.

#37 - The Doors.
#35 - Paul Oakenfold
#16 - Oingo Boingo
#15 - Yanni (no, I don't like him, but I once interviewed to be his manager)

Okay, their top ten worst, in descending order: Air Supply, Lee Greenwood, Vanilla Ice, Asia, Kansas, Starship, Kenny G, Michael Bolton, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Insane Clown Posse.

Journey shoulda been on the list. And Chicago (after the first 2 albums). Can't think of others because the stuff ain't in my house to reference. Oh, Jim Croce. And Black Eyed Peas, please.

Peter Boyle died, 71 years old. He was so damned good in Joe that you thought he was that insane bigot and it's a tribute to his talent that he didn't get typecast in that kind of role. 201 episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond and his great performance in Young Frankenstein and lots of other stuff to remember him by. Maybe I'll dig out Where the Buffalo Roam.

Noted in Variety:

China is on the verge of overtaking Japan as the second largest market for advertising in the world, according to Nielsen Media Research chairman and CEO Robert L. McCann.

Already the world's fastest growing ad market for several consecutive years, China's ad spend in 2005 was around $37 billion, just shy of Japan's $38.4 billion.

Also from Variety:

HONG KONG -- The first person in the world to be charged with a crime for distributing movies on peer-to-peer platform BitTorrent lost his appeal Tuesday.

Chan Nai-ming, whose screen name was "Big Crook," started his three-month jail sentence after the hearing.

The ruling was significant because it clarified under copyright laws here that films can be distributed via BitTorrent.

The defense argued that Chan's computer -- the seeder computer from which files were downloaded -- was passive. Therefore, the charge of "attempting to distribute" couldn't apply, the defense said, because movie files were simply made available.

The act of distributing should fall on the downloading computers, according to the defense.

Chan, 38, was arrested in January 2005 after customs officers found that someone had uploaded "Daredevil," "Red Planet" and "Miss Congeniality" to a local BitTorrent, or BT, discussion forum.

As previously mentioned, I prefer to think that he went to jail for bad taste. Or stupidity. Wonder how much he spent in legal fees?

NY Times has a piece on the staging of Lou Reed's album Berlin. It's gonna be at Brooklyn Academy of Music. Bob Ezrin, the original producer, is working with Hal Willner on the arrangements and some vaguely famous people are going to appear in this. I love that album and have played the hell out of it at several points in my life. After BAM, they're gonna stage this in Sydney, could be worth it.

Watched Borat tonight. Loved it, as you would have expected, and maybe even more than I expected to. Okay, it's a kind of one-sided view of the US, but there are people like that there - a lot of them - and it reinforces reasons why I no longer wish to live there.

I'm voting in the Idolator 2006 Jackin' Pop Critics Poll, organized by them following the Village Voice's firing of Robert Christgau (who is now doing his Consumer Guide thing over on MSN but I won't be following it because no RSS). Trying to finalize who I'll be voting for and an order and some cute comments. In no particular order I'm thinking about:

Dylan, Springsteen, Depeche Mode, Guillemots, Shack, Joanna Newsom, Midlake, Tom Waits, Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint, Scritti Politti, Elton John, Pet Shop Boys, Gnarls Barkley, Raconteurs, Kasabian, Amy Winehouse, Keith Jarrett.

Assuming there's a reissue category, so far Springsteen, the Elektra box set, Neil Young (okay it's a new release but 35+ years old, where else to put it?), Gram Parsons, Beatles

Anyone who cares to comment in the next 24 hours can try to convince me to add something else; odds of convincing me to subtract something are slim.

Skype now installed on my Dopod, yeah baby. Tiny chance I might go to Macau Thurs nite or Shenzhen Saturday. Sunday seems destined for a day of me rewiring the computers and stereo equipment in my "home office."

HKMGB notes that he saw Antony Bourdain in town today. I'm such a fan. And I know he'd get a kick out of watching my maid and my girlfriend cooking Filipino and Thai food side by side in the kitchen. Sigh.

HKMGB then goes on to note celebs he's met in 20 years in HK. I note that he says he saw Robbie Coltrane in Swire House in '95. Assuming that's the location of the old HMV (memory fails), saw him there too and my wife tripped and fell into his arms but I thought that was in 96.

Outside of company functions, my local star sightings are few and far between - Anthony Wong in restaurants a couple of times, Michael Wong ditto (plus a junk trip with Michael & Russell's brother Declan). Bumped into Maggie Cheung and Leon Lai when they were filming in San Francisco in '00 - does that count? Maggie got divorced soon after that, did I have something to do with that? A Miss HK when "Chicago" was playing in town, she glowed.

But in the old days, that list would go on for quite a bit and I see it's 4 AM so I should try to get a coupla hours sleep. Will just mention that in my annus horribulus (or however it's spelled) (bad year, not horrible ass) as a NYC taxi driver I had Bruce Springsteen, Harvey Keitel, Mariel Hemingway and Roberta Flack in the back of the cab - not all at once, of course.

And I shouldn't be able to, but I can recall a party when Cheech & Chong's first album came out. A Chinese restaurant in NYC with a strolling mariachi band and Tex-Mex food. C&C of course. Harry Chapin, cause he was sharing a bill with them. Todd Rundgren - it's very possible I puked on his shoes. R. Meltzer, one of my top 5 favorite rock critics.

There are a whole lot more but I really need to be sleeping!

New York Film Critics Circle:

• Picture - United 93
• Director - Martin Scorsese, The Departed
• Actor - Forest Whitaker, Last King of Scotland
• Actress - Helen Mirren, The Queen
• Animated - Happy Feet
• Foreign Film - Army of Shadows (1969 French film that had first US distribution this year)
• Documentary - Deliver Us From Evil

San Francisco Film Critics Circle:

• Picture - Little Children
• Director - Paul Greengrass, United 93
• Actor - Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat
• Actress - Helen Mirren, The Queen
• Foreign Film - Pan's Labyrinth
• Documentary - Inconvenient Truth

Washington DC Area Film Critics Association:

• Picture - United 93
• Director - Martin Scorsese, The Departed
• Actor - Forest Whitaker, Last King of Scotland
• Actress - Helen Mirren, The Queen

Boston Society of Film Critics:

• Picture - The Departed
• Director - Martin Scorsese, The Departed
• Actor - Forest Whitaker, Last King of Scotland
• Actress - Helen Mirren, The Queen
• Foreign Film - Pan's Labyrinth
• Documentary - (tie) Shut Up and Sing, Deliver Us From Evil

The nominees in the 2006 Weblog Awards for Best Asian Blog strike me as an odd group, particularly because there are so many HK blogs that I consider "crucial" that are not listed.

No, it's not because I was nominated last year and not this year. After all, last year I was writing mostly about sex, which is exciting!!!!, and this year I seem to be writing about everything except. Just seems strange that certain ones aren't even nominated. Many of my faves were nominated last year and most of those have kept on blogging and kept up a high level of consistency this year.

I think the nominating process must be seriously flawed. The way it works is that they announce the awards and the nominations are made via posted comments, rather than any sort of reviewing panel. I never even saw an announcement that nominations were open - and you'd think that as a finalist last year I might have received an email.

Be that as it may, I just checked and I have almost 70 HK-based blogs in my RSS reader. The only one of those to receive a nomination is Daily Dumpling, a blog that's been online for less than two months (it is very high quality though, if you care about Asian entertainment news and gossip, I recommend it).

Anyway, that 70 is an odd batch. Some of the bloggers are friends, either in the "real" world or the virtual world or both. Some of them, when I see they've been updated, I get excited and click on the link right away, anxious to see what they have to say. Some of them piss me off; I feel like it's a waste of time to check them because there's rarely so little of value. And most fall somewhere in between, like mine.

Here are the ones I consider, if not the best, then consistently my favorites. I think I may have done something along these lines in the past - consider this an update. In alphabetical order:

A Babe in Toyland ... A Singapore girl in HK who is having a lot of sex. Some people accuse her of making this stuff up. Some people say horrible things about her in comments. Whatever. She's a seriously good writer and the only problem with her blog is that it's not updated frequently enough.

Batgung I didn't pay attention to this one for a long time. When I finally did, I found a lot of helpful stuff here, nice attempts to provide guides to various facets of daily HK life.

Blogging ... Walk the Talk A unique blog that provides a valuable series of HK history lessons, all entertainingly written.

Cha Xiu Bao The only HK English-language food blog. The focus is on small, local style places that you would otherwise miss, not the 5 star hotel restaurants. I've tried some of the recommendations from here and I've never been disappointed.

Daai Tou Lam I suppose I'm including this one because when this American expat goes off on American politics, I'm generally in agreement.

Daily Dumpling - mentioned and linked to above.

EastSouthWestNorth English translations of Chinese media. My biggest complaint is that he only puts one section into RSS and if I don't click over to his actual site I miss 2/3rds of the content.

Flagrant Harbour formerly known as Flying Chair. Just 5 posts in November and none so far in December. Used to be more political, now a little bit of everything, generally entertaining.

Fumier Well, it seems like half the blog is about all the traffic accidents he almost causes with his attempts to flummox local drivers. But the other half has some stuff of more general appeal and usually amusing.

Hemlock Everybody loves Hemlock, except for those who hate him. Consensus is his political insights are those of someone with "inside access" and his ongoing cast of characters has become the stuff of local legend. But he has this unreasonable hatred of dogs but not in a charming, W.C. Fields fashion.

HKMGB Says he's been here 20 years but only started blogging recently. Some have compared him to the "old me." I enjoy his writing.

Hong Kong Phooey Not the previous blog of the same name, some sourpuss complaining that HK people don't know how to walk a straight line. This one's mostly tech stuff and generally covers topics that I find interesting.

Lost Horizons One of the better examples of a diary-type blog.

Ordinary Gweilo Mostly local political coverage.

Shenzhen Zen Maybe the only "professional" writer blogging here - and the quality of his writing is the proof. Good insights and funny tales from both HK and SZ.

Simon World Sorry to say that this one isn't as good as it used to be. It used to be updated multiple times a day and contain great links and synopses. What's there now is still good, there's just not enough of it.

So there's the "dirty dozen plus 4" (not counting me, of course). There are a few others that perhaps I should also have included but it's growing late and my fingers are getting tired. Omission from the above list doesn't mean that you're one of the HK blogs I hate - yes, there are definitely a few of those, but for the most part I've deleted them from my blogroll. Most of the ones there on the left are "endorsed by Spike," that's why they're there. Some of them are just not updated frequently enough any more and some of them, well, perhaps I just couldn't think of something to write at the moment.

And some of those would include Brian Donovan's Descriptors, Chopped Onions, Dave's Wibblings, every day HK, Outside Looking In, Private Beach, People's Republic of Tung Chung, See Lai (and Nude King), Shaky Kaiser (one month since last update!). And a few others.

One of these days I'll get around to the Asian, non-HK blogs I follow.

During lunch, read an article in the Standard about China trying to come up with its own standard transmission protocol for mobile phone service, a new variant on CDMA. This reminded me of recent coverage of China's video disc variation, the EVD.

My response to these two bits of information: What the fuck is wrong with these people?

Maybe if the motivation was, "we can do it better," that would be understandable. But instead this is being propelled by the fact that they don't like paying royalties to foreign companies, so they want to come up with their own standards to keep the money within the country. Most of the world knows that you cannot legislate technology. China doesn't seem to have learned this yet.

Ya know, for years I bitched and moaned about how I couldn't have a cellphone that worked everywhere I travel because Japan and Korea had to buck the tide with their own crap and the US was late to the GSM party. Now with 3G phones I have a phone that works practically everywhere and now China wants to have yet another standard. Maybe this will work for people within the country who never leave the country; maybe it will open up the world of cellular to the poorer classes.

On the other hand, they can't un-deploy existing GSM services because too much of the country is already dependent on that. And foreigners traveling to China are dependent on it. And Chinese who travel abroad are dependent on it. They're gonna spend tens of millions, if not billions, developing and deploying this thing that really no one wants.

Same with the EVD, with stands for Eeeediot Video Disc. Again, they're spending millions on this. They've signed up 30 companies to make the boxes. Early tests show the quality to be far inferior to the existing format.

And who's gonna make the software for these crappy boxes? Yeah, Hollywood studios claim they will make it if the market is there, but the fact is the market isn't there. The numbers for sales of western movies on legitimate DVDs in China are pathetic. So the only content that's going to end up being available for these boxes is a combination of locally produced films and pirated stuff.

People still buy VCDs in China for fucks sake. They buy DVD players because they're cheap or prestigious and then they only buy VCDs and pirate DVDs to play on them. Who the fuck is banging down the doors demanding yet another video format?

And why are they spending so much money to develop a format that will be extinct within ten years? Is the physical distribution business for this sort of thing going to be around in 2015? Maybe, more likely not.

Lord Buddha forbid they might take all this money they're investing into development of technology no one wants and build some schools or buy some people meals or anything useful at all.

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

Here's proof that you can never defeat the pirates. Microsoft Vista. Needs to be activated. Microsoft supplies the activation server software to enterprises to save some time, cut some costs. And the pirates pirate the activation server software. These are not bored precocious kids with too much time on their hands. This is big money. This is creativity at its best. And it will never go away.

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

And another thing. What the fuck is up with the Philippines? Why is it spelled with 3 p's and 1 l? Why can't they spell it Phillipines so that the p's and l's equal out?

But more to the point. You remember Katrina, right? You know the outrage that is going on to this day over the government's failure to properly respond to that horrific disaster.

So where is the outrage in the Phil's over Durian? A thousand people died. I'll say that again. A thousand people died. The storm was on the radar. People knew it was coming. And what was done in advance to lessen the impact? They get these storms there every year, and every year people die from these storms. And no one is doing anything about it.

Where are the mass demonstrations? Why aren't there thousands of people out in the streets demanding accountability? Demanding that things be done so that this sort of thing isn't an annual event?

Decades of corrupt leaders hellbent on lining their own pockets and raping the rest of the country has left them at the mercy of the weather, for fuck's sake. So does that mean this is the status quo? It rains, a thousand people die, that's just the way it is? Is it God's will? Marcos raping the country, Estrada raping the country, GMA doing nothing except being really short, Islamic extremists cutting off heads in Mindanao?

Hey, I got the solution for you. The Philippines prides itself on being the shopping mall capitol of the world. So build MORE malls in all the provinces so that people can have a place to go for shelter when the big storms hit. Plus they can shop and help the economy which will pay for the reconstruction after the storms. Because the government there sure as shit ain't gonna do it.

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

And another thing. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. I fucking hate Christmas. To me Christmas represents a billion Christians celebrating the birth of one Jew and using it as an excuse to kill millions of other Jews. Big whoop.

He wasn't born on December 25th. That date got picked because Christians co-opted an earlier winter solstice holiday. He wasn't born in the year 0 or the year 1, he was born in the year 4 BC or 7 BC - Christ was born 7 years Before Christ, go figure that. And his name wasn't Jesus either. You guys took the Greek translation because his real name sounds too Jewish.

Hey, Iran is hosting a conference for all those people who wanna pretend the Nazi holocaust never happened. Is it too much to hope for a bit of sectarian violence to break out during this atrocity?

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

Sorry. Monday. You know how it is.

Too lazy to write about my weekend. And not sure that there was anything unique or special enough about it to merit some prose. Except I got a 2007 calendar with pictures of a naked lady from a trash pile on Jaffe Road. That was the high point of my weekend? Shit.

American Film Institute's best films of the year, in alphabetical order:

• Babel
• Borat
• Devil Wears Prada
• Dreamgirls
• Half Nelson
• Happy Feet
• Inside Man
• Letters from Iwo Jima
• Little Miss Sunshine
• United 93

So far from that list I've only seen Inside Man, Sunshine, United. Liked all of 'em.

Next, Los Angeles Film Critics:

• Picture: Letters From Iwo Jima
• Director: Paul Greengrass (United 93)
• Actor: (tie) Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat) and Forrest Whitaker (Last King of Scotland)
• Actress: Helen Mirren (The Queen)
• Documentary: Inconvenient Truth
• Animation: Happy Feet
• Career Achievement Award: Robert Mulligan

Apocalypto claimed the #1 box office spot in the U.S. this weekend.

Circling back to the AFI, here's their top ten TV shows of the year:

• Battlestar Galactica
• Dexter
• Elizabeth I
• Friday Night Lights
• Heroes
• The Office
• South Park
• 24
• The West Wing
• The Wire

Back in the day I knew this guy, he used to say, "Hey! If I'm in the living room and my wife's in the kitchen, we're separated!" I think he was serious. Or he was one of these all talk no action guys. I'll never know for sure. Not that I care. A good line is a good line.

I did go out late last night. Just not in the mood to sit at home. So a Wanchai pub crawl of sorts, veering around between Neptune, Joe Banana, Fenwick and even Boracay. Going into Neptune these days is dangerous for me because so many of T's friends are still in there. All came up to say hello, ask how she is, ask where she is. Most would then say that they were keeping an eye on me and that I shouldn't be a butterfly.

Fenwick sucked as always, Joe Banana was borderline, Bridge was empty, and eventually it was too late for other places. I ended up at 4 AM in Boracay, a spot that I haven't visited in months, talking with this very cute, very drunk 22 year old half Filipina half Japanese girl. Then a last check in at Neptune where one of T's friends was practically begging to come home with me. At five in the morning my resolve can be pretty weak; fortunately this was one of her less attractive friends, so it was easy to be good. I just said, "I can't, you know my girlfriend," and she promised she wouldn't say a word and I'm sure I believed her but I came home alone anyway.

Naturally when I spoke to T today, telling her I was at Neptune and the friends of hers that I saw and which ones said hello, she asked why I didn't take someone back with me. But I've learned my lesson. If I did, and if I then told her about it, she'd say it was okay, that it's the "course of my life" or something like that. Later on she'd go out with some friends, get drunk, call me up and ask me if I can find some other girl, many girls love me and want to go with me, and so on and so on and so on.

I must admit that I'm at something of a loss as to what to do with myself today. Some friends are out of town. Some are in town but in "married" mode. I can sit at home and watch some movies, maybe continue with my never-ending iPod reorganization, sleep ... somehow I get the feeling that I'm going to be in a bar tonight.

So I received my latest order from Amazon earlier this week. And now already I'm compiling the next order. First in the batch could well be Civilization: A New History of the Western World by Roger Osborne.

We are drawn to wonder whether the western way of thinking and of organizing human affairs makes us incapable of gazing on, and perhaps even learning from, another culture without needing to dominate and destroy it and make it part of the western system.
...
The fundamental western belief that there are rational ways of organizing the world which will bring benefit to all has been at the root of every human-made catastrophe that has overtaken us, yet many of us still believe that we have a bounden duty to bring our simplistic, universalizing, ‘progressive’ systems of government, economics, education, policing, judiciary and morals to every part of every society on the planet.

From the NY Times review:

“Civilization” is not a recitation of greatest hits, or a checklist of events and dates. Mr. Osborne, with great skill, ties his disparate topics together into a coherent narrative, as absorbing as any novel, with felicitous turns of phrase, and tidy summations, on virtually every page. Theoretically it should be impossible to describe the life, thought and influence of Thomas Aquinas in less than two pages, but Mr. Osborne does it, showing no signs of strain. It would be hard to imagine a more readable general history of the West that covers so much ground so incisively.
...................
Mr. Osborne sees Western history as a series of transformations — social, philosophical and economic — that impel citizens rich and poor to look for new ways of organizing their world, the better to serve new desires and needs. His sympathies lie with the common folk, and with the pre-industrial past. His never-never land can be found in the early Middle Ages, “a period of diversity and mutual tolerance in which local culture, craftsmanship and scholarship could thrive within a continent-wide network, with few boundaries between nations, kingdoms, ethnic and religious orthodoxies, and little central control.”

By contrast most of the developments since the Industrial Revolution have, in Mr. Osborne’s view, led to stratified, intolerant, self-obsessed, materialistic societies dominated by corporations and, in their relations with the rest of the world, intent on imposing alien Western ideas like the nation state. In a grudging sort of way Mr. Osborne documents the growing prosperity of the West over the last two centuries, but never without noting, as he does in a discussion of the United States in the 1920s, that under industrial capitalism “the cohesion of communities, customary arrangements, family loyalties must all be sacrificed to the continual churning need for better, cheaper, newer goods to be brought to market.”

T has gone back to Thailand. My plan is to join her there in three weeks time. Until then, well, who knows?

Google Earth - here is the current view of HK Disneyland:


When they finish it, perhaps I'll go there.

Grammy awards announced. Full list here. As I type this, I'm listening to The Trials of Van Occupanther by Midlake - a little late to the party on this one but in time to add it to my best of '06 list.

Some noms:

Record of the year
Mary J Blige - Be Without You
James Blunt - You're Beautiful
Dixie Chicks - Not Ready to Make Nice
Gnarls Barkley - Crazy
Corinne Bailey Rae - Put Your Records On

Album of the year
Dixie Chicks - Taking the Long Way
Gnarls Barkley - St Elsewhere
John Mayer - Continuum
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Stadium Arcadium
Justin Timberlake - Futuresex

Best one hit wonder new artist
James Blunt, Chris Brown, Imogen Heap, Corinne Bailey Rae, Carrie Underwood

Rock album
John Mayer - Try!
Tom Petty - Highway Companion
Raconteurs - Broken Boy Soldiers
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Stadium Arcadium
Neil Young - Living with War

Dance recording (must be some mistake, they have 2 tracks here I really love)
Depeche Mode - Suffer Well
Goldfrapp - Ooh La La
Madonna - Get Together
Pet Shop Boys - I'm With Stupid
Justin Timberlake - Sexyback

Bob Dylan gets a nomination for "best rock vocal performance"!

Alternative Music album
Arctic Monkeys, Flaming Lips, Gnarls Barkley, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Thom Yorke

Contemporary jazz album
Bela Fleck, Groove Collective, Christian Scott, Sex Mob, Mike Stern

Jazz instrumental album
Ornette Coleman, Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette Larry Goldings & John Scofield, Kenny Garrett, Sonny Rollins

Springsteen's Seeger sessions nominated for Best Traditional Folk album

They still have Best Polka album as a category!

Spoken Word album
Bob Newhart, Bill Maher, Jimmy Carter, Al Franken, Ossie Davis & Ruby Dee

Comedy Album
Blue Collar Comedy Tour, Lewis Black, George Carlin, Al Yankovic, Ron White

well, there are 108 categories this year, take a look if you have nothing better to do ...

The good news is that there seems to be a bigger influx of western musical acts than we usually get. I'm going to go see Eric Clapton next month - I'm not expecting much but I haven't seen him live since around '74 or so so what the heck. I'm debating on going to see John Legend. Other upcoming cheese includes Il Divo and Cliff Richard.

HKClubbing.com has an article on the upcoming appearance of "Rober Walters". So okay, if you read the article (or if you already saw the ads elsewhere) you'll know they mean Roger Waters. And while they have ticket prices, they apparently can't be bothered to include the date of the concert (February 15th). Dickheads.

Oddly enough, the above picture was not taken outside of Fenwicks and is not a picture of a hooker. Nabbed from Go Fug Yourself, this is British "celebrity" Sophia Hyatt attending a premiere. I would hope that after she's taken all the trouble to go out in public undressed like this that at the end of the evening she had wild monkey sex while still wearing this "dress." (Actually I prefer to believe that she had sex during the premiere in the toilet or back alley.) I would hope that she didn't say, "oh honey, wait till I get changed, I don't want to ruin this, it's expensive."

One further hopes that some of the Wanchai brigade surf the net in their spare time and either adopt similar styles or attempt to out do this. One future career I've considered is owning a clothing store for hookers. I've already got the name - Slut Shack (TM). Eventually I expect that I could franchise it all over the world, with branches outside every U.S. military base.

Speaking of global franchises, da New Yawk Times reports that the Seminole Tribe of Florida is in negotations to buy the Hard Rock chain for somewhere in the neighborhood of US$1 billion.

Does it come as a shock to anyone that the bi-partisan commission studying the war in Iraq has decided that things are not going well and that the U.S. should get its collective Bush ass outta there? Recommendation #1 - Announce a plan for American forces to begin pulling back, whether the Iraqis are ready or not, to signal to the Iraqis that Washington would not prop up the Iraqi government with military forces endlessly. For the rest of the summary, look here.

The 2006 Weblog Award finalists have been announced. In the best Asian blog, there are a bunch that I've never read. No Hemlock, no ESWN. I'm only familiar with 2 of the 10 and not sure if any are HK-based. Anyway, congrats to 8.T.C.M., China Law Blog, Pinoy Stupid, IZ Reloaded, Western Confucian, One Man Bandwidth, Daily Dumpling, Kristin Collins, Japan Marketing News, Desicritics.

The movie awards season has kicked off too. First out of the gate is the National Board of Review, which has chosen Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima as the best picture of the year. As this film depicts the battle for Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective, I don't expect this to ever screen in HK. The rest of their top ten films of the year includes: Babel, Blood Diamond, The Departed, The Devil Wears Prada, Flags Of Our Fathers, The History Boys, Little Miss Sunshine, Notes On A Scandal, The Painted Veil.

Best actor Forrest Whitaker (Last King of Scotland), best actress Helen Mirren (Queen), best director Martin Scorsese, and in a nice bit of irony, supporting actress Catherine O'Hara (For Your Consideration, a Christopher Guest comedy about what happens to the cast of a horrible movie when the internet starts to generate some buzz about one of the cast possibly getting an Oscar nomination).

My friend S will be happy to know that Rinko Kinkuchi tied for first in the category of best breakthrough performance female for her reportedly splendid nakedness in Babel. The rest of the winners can be seen here.

Last item for now:

The Beatles rendered in Legos. To see more great (and not so great) musicians made of little bits of plastic, check Brickshelf.

As quickly as the storm came, it passed. Yesterday all was normal in my world.

My company recently switched its Blackberry service from CSL to SmarTone-Vodafone. Yesterday I received my final bill from CSL. It was for HK$0.02. They had to print this out and mail it to me and presumably give 3% back to Visa. Good thinking guys.

Dinner with friends at Little Sheep, excellent as always. We had a waiter who had great English and made several recommendations, some of which we followed - including "lamb sashimi" and Mongolian style roasted lamb ribs. Also the "premium Mongolian lamb and mutton," the "premium Mongolian marble beef," oysters, mushed-up squid with roe, assorted mushroom basket, all so nice. We did not order "cow testes" or "cow mallow." Actually we couldn't work out what cow mallow would be. I suggested that it's like marshmallow but made from cow. T said, "I think the waiter is gay." I said, "I don't care, he's got great English and he's really helpful." M said, "and he's really sensitive to our needs!"

Then drinks at Maya where the manager said to me, "I didn't know you're that funny cunt who writes that stuff in BC Magazine." And then she said something about how she always cackles when she reads my column. And then she offered to buy me a drink. Basically you can call me anything if there's free booze.

Hooray for Captain Spaulding, the African explorer! "Did someone call me schnorrer?" Hooray, hooray, hooray!

But first ... NY Times has a review of the new David Lynch movie, Inland Empire. In this review, Manohla Dargis writes:

Mr. Lynch revisits that bewitched boulevard in the extraordinary, savagely uncompromised “Inland Empire,” his first feature in five years, his first shot in video and one of the few films I’ve seen this year that deserves to be called art. Dark as pitch, as noir, as hate, by turns beautiful and ugly, funny and horrifying, the film is also as cracked as Mad magazine, though generally more difficult to parse. I’m still trying to figure out what the giant talking rabbits — which seem to be living in Ralph Kramden’s apartment, as redesigned by Edward Hopper — have to do with the weepy Polish woman who may be a whore or merely lost or, because this is a David Lynch film (after all), probably both.

And Buddha only knows when this will screen in HK.

Now ... not going into too many details this time. Let's just say that last night was yet another night for T to go full goose gonzo on me. Her timing is always impeccable. Last night I was bumping up hard against a deadline so I should have expected it. The fact that I still made the deadline (and that there was also make-up sex involved) should make me feel better today, but I don't.

To top it off, my now ex-wife called at 3 in the morning, drunk as hell. At first I thought it was some kind of attempt at a reconciliation but it turned out to be pretty far away from that.

Net net, I'm a fucking basket case today.

Yeah, some of you are saying, "so what's new about that?"

For the last couple of weeks, I've been trapped in this alternate sleep cycle. I fall asleep at some point after 7 PM, nap for an hour, up all night till 5 AM, sleep till 10 AM. Not the best. Last night I managed to get asleep by midnight, woke up every hour but stayed in bed till around 6 AM or so. Today I expect to be a zombie but maybe this puts me back on track.

My kitchen is more interesting than yours. Last night, T and the maid working side by side in the kitchen, each preparing their own dinner. T making something Thai, maid making something Filipino. So what did I have for dinner? Well, it was Monday night. That meant I went out to meet a buddy for our weekly "Monday Madness" night at Devil's Advocate - a 12 inch pizza, an appetizer and two drinks for $88. (Devil's is doing a Tuesday night special now, two entrees for the price of one - which means you can get two steak dinners for around a hundred bucks. Not too shabby.)

Some new Thai restaurant opened up in Wanchai, on Lockhart Road at the site of the former Kong King fusion Chinese place. I think it's called Thai Delight. No word yet on whether this place is western Thai, Chinese Thai or Thai Thai. And does that area of Wanchai need another Thai place of any style? It already has Klong, Thai Hut, Thai Farmer, Pad Thai and Chili Club.

I've been kind of wondering about this whole Britney Spears thing - all the photos all over the net about her nights out with Paris Hilton, no panties, flashing everything for the entire world to see. (No links provided. If you care about this, you already know where to go to find the pix.) Less than 10 years ago, when the former Mousketeer first hit it big, she made a big deal about being a virgin. Now she's just turned 25 years old, two ex-husbands, two kids, and she very knowingly is showing her shaved snatch to the entire world.

Having re-watched Casablanca just a couple of days ago, I was thinking about the life of Ingrid Bergman. Surely one of the most beautiful women of her time, in 1949 she caused a scandal by getting pregnant by a man other than her husband and then leaving her husband to go live with this other man (the great director Roberto Rossellini). She was denounced in the U.S. Senate, went into voluntary exile from the U.S. and it was seven years before she made another Hollywood picture. Two generations later, that seems tame by comparison to the antics of many of today's "stars." I'm not saying this is good or bad, just noting how things have changed within the timespan of two generations.

I'm also wondering, just what was Spears trying to accomplish, if anything? This is one topic I don't see being addressed by any of the pundits. Clearly she knew what she was doing. She knows she is followed everywhere by the press. And she did this not once but three nights in a row. I'm mystified by this.

More to the point, I wonder if this is a style that will catch on in Wanchai, and if so, will it just be ladyboys trying to display their credentials?

A book you can't find in Hong Kong (there's a shock). I'm a huge fan of artist Drew Friedman. I think his Wikipedia entry does an excellent job of summing up his work:

He began his career in the '80s doing very dark alternative comics stories, sometimes working solo but often with his brother Josh Alan Friedman writing the scripts. These stories took various celebrities and character actors of yesteryear and put them in very seedy, absurd, tragi-comic situations. One memorable story followed Bud Abbott and Lou Costello wandering around the urban jungle late at night, encountering whores, junkies and other lowlifes. Friedman created many strips featuring actor/wrestler Tor Johnson in his well known hulking moron persona from many Ed Wood films. In one strip, Johnson has a dream where he is walking at night and encounters several other Tor Johnsons. ("Me Tor!" "Me Tor too!") He awakens and telephones his friend Bela Lugosi, demanding to know, "Bela, How many Tor?" The brothers also did many stories about talk-show host Joe Franklin, including one strip, The Incredible Shrinking Joe Franklin, that led Franklin to threaten legal action.

So I'm thrilled that he has a new book out, Old Jewish Comedians, and included it in my latest Amazon order. Aside from an intro by Leonard Maltin, there is no text in this slim book (32 pages). Just page after page of these incredibly detailed drawings of, as the title says, old Jewish comedians, each captioned by the star's real name and stage name. They are mostly captured not at the height of their careers but towards the end of their lives.


Another book purchased - Good Medicine For Thailand Fever.


The book is written in both English and Thai and is supposed to be a guidebook, of sorts, to western/Thai relationships.

And neither last nor least, The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation by David Kamp, which discusses how the food scene has changed in the US over the past 50 years and supposedly answers a question a friend asked me a year ago (and which I could not answer at the time) - how did this happen? I love this bit from the intro:

"If someone suggests a 'pizza pie' after the theater, don't think it is going to be a wedge of apple. It is going to be the surprise of your life." So began the April 21, 1939 column of the New York Herald Tribune food editor, Clementine Paddleford, the doyenne of America's then tiny contingent of food journalists. Her column went on to promote pizza as a "nice stunt to surprise the visiting relatives, who will be heading east soon for the World's Fair. They come to be surprised, and pizza, pronounced 'peet-za,' will do the job up brown."

Aside from everything else, that name, Clementine Paddleford. Sounds like a character from a W.C. Fields movie. (Among the names of Fields's own eternal characters were Eustance McGargle, Elmer Prettywillie, J. Effingham Bellweather, Augustus Q. Winterbottom, C. Ellsworth Stubbins, Harold Bissonnette, Ambrose Wolfinger, Cuthbert J. Twillie, Egbert Souse (accent grave over the e) and the immortal Larson E. Whipsnade.)

Speaking of movies, among the movies I watched over the weekend was Miami Vice. Even though I'm a huge fan of Michael Mann, my expectations for this were quite low. And while the movie is far from successful, I think I will treat this as the third party of a loose trilogy that began with Thief and continued with Heat. Thief focused on a professional safecracker with a strict moral code. Heat shifted focus between a similar career criminal and an obsessed cop. Miami Vice puts the focus completely on two obsessed cops. I don't think that MV can be discussed apart from those other two films.

The familiar elements are there - the amazing night photography accompanied by whooshing electronic music; the attention to tiny details, the amount of research and preparation that Mann seems to have put into this. But the sense of realism? Are there really vice cops in Miami who drive Ferraris and live in houses like those? Suspension of disbelief works fine here. But what doesn't work fine is Colin Farrell, an indifferent actor wearing a bad mustache and a frequently bewildered look on his face. As another reviewer noted, when he's not onscreen you don't miss him and when he is on screen you're looking for other things to look at - for which we are graciously provided with Jamie Foxx, Gong Li and the always amazing Barry Shabaka Henley.

Mann usually excels at violent set-pieces, and here there's also a bit of a let-down. The final big, long anticipated shoot-out is dark and the editing is off. The king of this sort of thing was Peckinpah - watch the final shoot-out in Wild Bunch and you always know exactly who is doing what and where they are physically placed in relation to everyone else. This is clearly beyond the reach of many directors and here Mann suffers the same flaw. The territory is not well-defined and you frequently can't tell who's who.

So over all not a total success, not a total failure. I'll watch it again - though maybe not as often as Thief or Heat.

... but I'm not sure.

Today, December 2nd, I received a notice in the mail that the judge would review the divorce papers and make his/her pronouncement on the case. On December 1st. So presumably it went through on Friday and I'll receive a copy of the decree sometime when the mailman gets around to delivering it.

It's an uncontested divorce. We did all the property and financial settlement stuff a long time ago - the usual she gets the money and I get the bills deal. Which in this case was fair because I earn multiples of what she earns. Officially we were married for ten years. This month marks approximately three years since we separated.

So how do I feel? Mixed emotions. Although the last years together were terrible for both of us, the first years were wonderful beyond words. I can remember a time when my love for her was strong enough that I would have taken a bullet for her. And a time when she loved me so much she was willing to leave her country and friends and family to be with me first in Hong Kong, then the U.S. and then back in Hong Kong again. She was very smart about certain things and taught me a lot and hopefully she feels the same way about me.

At first we were simply living together and I thought that was enough. But she didn't have an HK ID and didn't have a job. She got tired of being asked if she was a prostitute every time she did a visa run. And she couldn't find someone to sponsor her for an employment visa and was bored not working. Getting married would simplify a lot of things, at the time it made sense and so we did it.

We had three good years and then it was progressively downhill. She will put the blame all on me because she refuses to accept aspects of her behavior that pushed me away. And, of course, I did things that made matters even worse.

When she first moved to Hong Kong, I threw a party to introduce her to all of my friends and co-workers. After a few hours, one of them pulled me aside and asked, "you can handle all that?" I asked what he meant and he said, "your girlfriend." I said, "sure, no problem." At our wedding banquet, as she got ferociously drunk and led some of the guests in drinking games, one of the waiters remarked that he'd never seen a Chinese bride act that way before.

In truth, we were probably not meant to be married. We both have "big" personalities, huge egos, domineering and stubborn. Each of us was used to getting our own way 100% and often neither of us was willing to compromise.

I don't think it was a mistake. I think the only mistake we both made was that after we separated in 1999, we got back together again in 2000. That should have been the end. Instead we reconciled but it was never the same and it quickly went from bad to worse. Three years ago we agreed to go our separate ways and she left HK.

Get this ... my mother started pushing for the divorce earlier this year. Her reason was that she had forgotten we weren't divorced and had told some relatives that we were and she didn't want to be a liar. This is the same mother who, after we split up, asked me if there was any chance that my next wife could be white. "What difference could it possibly make," I asked. "No difference, but is there any chance?" Well, we all have our crosses to bear, don't we?

So there you have it.

Hong Kong would not be what it is today without the Bronx. Aside from being the birthplace of hiphop, Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, Haagen-Dazs ice cream is from the Bronx.

I knew this but had forgotten it until reading the obituary today of Rose Mattus, who with her husband created the brand. They'd been making and selling ice cream since the 1920s. And then inspiration struck:

Around 1960, while sitting on their couch in the Bronx, Mr. and Mrs. Mattus fabricated the foreign-sounding name. It was Mr. Mattus’s idea to include a map of Denmark on the carton and to put an umlaut over the first “a” in Häagen, even though no umlaut is used in Danish.

This idea, combined with the fact that they used more natural ingredients than most of the competition, led to the brand being acquired by Pillsbury in 1983 for $70 million (it's now owned by Nestle).

Okay, the Bronx has also given the world J-Lo and me, so maybe it ain't all biscuits and gravy.

From NY Times review of documentary "Highway Courtesans":

Filmed literally on the side of a road in central India from 1995 to 2004, the movie observes the daughters of the impoverished Bachara community as they sell themselves to an endless stream of long-haul truckers. This centuries-old tradition robs the girls of any chance of marriage and enslaves them to male family members who live (and drink) off their earnings.

“Some people commit crimes to feed themselves, but these girls do this with dignity, as a profession,” says one satisfied customer, while parents and a village leader insist the girls have a choice. Yet we see the fights that ensue when an enterprising 17-year-old, Guddi Chauhan — who, along with her sisters, supports her parents and four brothers — leaves “the business” to teach school and start a microcredit group. Even her boyfriend and sometime customer, the skittish Sagar, turns violent when she talks back to him.

That last sentence made me stop. I know this is a horrific situation for these women and my emphasizing this part is probably wildly non-PC but I can't help myself. "Boyfriend and sometime customer"?????

Excerpted from The MPA Vs. China in Kaiju Shakedown:

Asia has traditionally skipped certain steps in technological development that America thinks are necessary. Some Asian countries don’t have a fully-developed landline based telecommunications infrastructure because they embraced cell phone technology early on. Korea and China have largely skipped dial-up and gone straight to broadband internet access. The result is that China is the on the bleeding edge frontier of the post-copyright world.

Young people in China think of movie theaters as over-priced, musty mausoleums and would prefer to either download content or pick up a DVD. Add to that the fact that the internet is less regulated and vastly more open in China than any other form of media and you have a compelling argument for Hollywood to embrace a download-oriented delivery mechanism in China, rather than the old fashioned brick and mortar approach.

“When it comes to the cultural industries,” says Goldkorn, “the timetable is going to be set by the Chinese government and they’re not going to listen to anyone about it. If I was in the MPA’s position I would look at IP TV, which they’re starting to experiment with in China; it’s where foreign media companies have the best chance of getting in.”

From Variety:

While Kazakhstan tabloid Karavan voted "Borat" best pic of the year, the Sacha Baron Cohen laffer is getting no love in the Mideast: "Borat" has been banned by censors in every Arab country except Lebanon.

Censorship remains a problem for Mideast distribs. Recently, Martin Scorsese's "The Departed" underwent 21 cuts in Kuwait to pass censors on account of its salty dialogue.

Sometimes, it's not even nudity, politics or cursing that spurs the censors to take their scissors out. One incident saw Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" re-edited by its Lebanese distrib to run chronologically on the grounds that its nonlinear story would confuse local auds. A public outcry eventually saw the original print being released.

Apparently all the Arab countries were prepared to make this film mandatory viewing due to the "running of the Jews" and the "Throw the Jew Down the Well" sequences until they found out that Borat is really Jewish. Lebanon has yet to find out because they're on the verge of a civil war.

Was gonna call this "A Brand New Day" but I think I've used that before.

Anyway, the day started with good news. I can't go into any details but let's just say it set the framework for the entire day. Actually there were two pieces of good news today and I hate to be dweeby about it but can't discuss either, at least not yet.

In my good mood, I sauntered down to the Wanchai Computer Center after work. The lure of the Dopod 838pro was growing stronger and stronger. I wanted those things that the Treo 750v didn't have - in particular WiFi and HSPDA. There were just two questions in my mind - availability and price.

Well, here's where Hong Kong was really Hong Kong. Yes, the 838pro was all over the place. However, this thing is made by a company called HTC and they've sold it all over the world to different suppliers who have rebranded it. I think in the UK it's the TyTN and in the US it's the Cingular 8525 or something like that. In Japan it's the Softbank X01HT.

So some enterprising importer brought in a whole bunch of the Softbank ones. He loaded them up variously with the Dopod 838pro English and Chinese operating systems. The dealers have also been mysteriously stocked with files that they burn on the spot with ActiveSync (English and Chinese) and the Dopod 838pro manual (English and Chinese) and, oh, maybe a few pirated programs to boot. Softbank has tweaked it a bit for the Japan market - as near as I can tell the differences are cosmetic. The buttons have been slightly re-arranged and the front is now a sort of brushed metal instead of dark plastic. But under the hood, it's the exact same specs - 400 MHz processor, 2 megapixel camera, tri-band GSM + UMTS, WiFi, bluetooth, and so on.

And the thing is, the Softbank X01HT is selling for $2,000 less than the Dopod.

How could I resist? I couldn't.

Have been setting it up, installing apps, etc. for the past couple of hours. It's a good thing they gave me a pdf manual because it looks like I'll actually need it for some functions. Setting up MP3s for ringtones is not intuitive. And oddly enough, browsing the internet via a WiFi connection is also not intuitive.

But so far I like the beast.

After shopping, out for dinner. I was in need of meat. A nice steak. Hadn't been near one in a month. We went down to Lan Kwai Fong and Insomnia was fairly unbusy since it was way before time for the band to start. T made the same mistake she always makes in this sort of place. She always says she's sick of Thai food and wants to try other things. Then we go to some western place that has one Thai dish on the menu and she orders it and she gets it and hates it because it's not really Thai. I tell her never mind, get something else, no problem, but she shakes her head and finishes the rice.

T will be heading back to Thailand in one week. I will be joining her there before the end of the month for a big family get-together followed by some cheaper dentistry. I've already visited two dental hospitals in Bangkok. However, I noticed several dental centers in Sri Racha. Assuming that the Japanese are generally finicky about their teeth and who works on them, I've asked T to check these centers out and find out, if she can, if these dentists trained locally or abroad. It could be that it would be even cheaper for me to get the work done there, if I can be assured in advance of reasonable quality. And get some more practice on a motorcycle.

Last note of the night ... James Bond DVDs. The "ultimate editions" distributed here in HK by Deltamac don't have the DTS sound that's available on the Region 1 and Region 2 editions. Presumably it's not on the disc in order to make room for extra languages in 5.1 Dolby surround. I figured okay, the Region 3 set is a thousand bucks less than the others so I can live with Dolby. But those eediots went so far as to include the trailer for the Bond set on the disc, which boldly proclaims "5.1 DTS SOUND!!!!!" It's like they're rubbing your face in it. (The Deltamac guys once took me out for a dinner in Shanghai. Classy joint, multi-course meal, and they didn't order the sharks fin. So there you go ...)