Hongkie Town

Right on the heels of news of the death of Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni also died on Monday. The influence of L'Avventura, Red Desert, Blow Up, Zabriskie Point, The Passenger and other films cannot be understated.

From the late 50s through the mid 70s, there was this explosion of astonishing cinema from titans in Europe. Almost all of them are gone now - Fellini, Truffaut, Fassbinder, Malle, now Bergman and Antonioni- and yet it hardly seems that long ago to me that these guys were in their prime. Fuck I'm getting old.

And I'm already in a fucking lousy mood, thanks for asking. For no reason other than just me being me.

Ingmar Bergman died yesterday. To say that he was one of the greatest film directors to have ever walked our planet doesn't seem like enough. Seventh Seal, Cries and Whispers, Persona, Smiles From a Summer Night, Scenes from a Marriage ...

I remember watching Wild Strawberries in college and thinking that it was total perfection.

TV and radio host Tom Snyder also died yesterday. Dan Aykroyd used to do a wicked send-up of him on SNL. But Snyder, chain smoking, plaid sports jackets, sometimes clueless but always enthusiastic. He put John Lydon on his show and Lydon acted the way he is prone to do and it was classic TV. As straight as can be, he also gave air time to the Clash, Plasmatics, Paul Weller, Charlie Manson and Ayn Rand. I loved his show - some episodes are on DVD.

And last week Lazlo Kovacs died. One of the great directors of photography. His films include Easy Rider, New York New York, Ghostbusters, Shampoo ....

Well, my first time to see The Cure. My reactions are kind of mixed.

They played for over two hours barely pausing between songs. Smith never really spoke to the audience, except to say thank you at one point. After awhile, it all started to get kind of samey for me, one song basically blending into another. Smith's voice, the ripsaw guitars, great rhythm section. But the pacing of show was off and I don't think I'm the only one who noticed this. Because looking at the crowd, at roughly 90 minutes in they were all bouncing up and down, fists pumping in the air. And at 120 minutes in, they were mostly just standing there. I didn't feel this building towards anything.

Smith himself, aside from the make-up, is not the most theatrical of performers, mostly just standing there singing and playing guitar. During two songs he picked up a hand mike, walked to either side of the stage and just sort of faced the audience while he sang, not doing any typical rock star moves to pump up the energy - and I suppose there are some who would appreciate that.

But for me, it started to just wear on. And mindful of the crush to get to the train at the end of the concert, we decided at 130 minutes in to beat the crowds and head out.

Overall they sounded great and I'm glad I went. But something was missing for me. Really good, yes. Transcendent, no.

One of the highlights of the night for me was looking at the guards trying to deal with this guy who went to the front of the seated section, placed his briefcase on the railing, and just stood there bopping up and down. One guard came over, tried to get him to move, shined his flashlight in the guy's eyes, but the guy wasn't budging. So the guard called over guard #2 and they both stood there asking the guy to leave, both shining the flashlight in his eyes, and he still wasn't budging. (Not to be racist here, but will mention just in passing that the guy was Asian.)

Neither guard laid a hand on the guy. They tried to get him to move for about 15 minutes, he wouldn't move, and they eventually just gave up and left him there. Back in the days when I worked rock concert security, we would have been a lot more physical about it. But either times have changed or these were clearly the politest security guards in the business.

My friend (I think she's my girlfriend now but still not 100% sure) really got into the show from the very beginning, yelling after the second song that "they sound really good!" And about an hour in, we were both up and dancing. But I think after two plus hours she was also getting a little bored - she'd gone back to just sitting there, watching, tapping her feet.

So we got to the train, got seats, decided to head over to Causeway Bay for a late supper and then, well, around midnight and (sigh) separate taxis to our separate homes. Which is why I'm blogging now and why I expect to have trouble falling asleep ....

I watched the pilot for a new US sitcom called Caveman. It's based on a series of TV commercials, believe it or not, for an auto insurance agency. Those commercials depict cavemen in our modern society and everything about them is unremarkable - they speak good English, have educations, hold jobs, have families - except for the fact that they're cavemen. The point being that the insurance company's procedures are so simple, even a caveman can understand them. The series is scheduled to start airing in October but the pilot appeared on torrent sites over the weekend.

So in this new series, there are three cavemen who are roommates - two brothers and a best friend. One of them is engaged to the beautiful blonde-haired daughter of a rich businessman. And they're very aware of prejudice and cavemen's media image. (At one point, one says, "they still show Flintstones six times a week, what's that all about?")

The writing seems vaguely clever enough that I'll watch a few more episodes to see how they string this out - nothing knee-slappingly funny but not overly obnoxious either. The thing is, I was sitting there watching this and I was thinking to myself, "This is the 21st century, is this still a message that needs to be delivered to the public, not to judge people based on their race?"

Well, I guess I forgot how long it has been since I lived in the US, because just a few minutes later, I came across this news item over at Yahoo:

BOISE, Idaho (AP) -- Before Boise State running back Ian Johnson married the girl he proposed to on national television, the couple prayed to end prejudice.

Johnson and Chrissy Popadics, the cheerleader he proposed to after scoring the winning points in the Fiesta Bowl against Oklahoma, were married Saturday in a traditional ceremony at Cathedral of the Rockies First United Methodist Church.

Johnson, who is black, has said he received phone calls and about 30 letters, including personal threats from people who objected to his plans to marry his white fiancee.

I guess we haven't come as far as we should have by now.

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This has been a very quiet weekend for me. The only times I went out were for dinner and to join a friend for a couple of (non-alcoholic - yikes!) drinks Sunday evening. The US Navy's in town. Apparently LKF has been mobbed every night because of some weekend carnival event there. I've chosen to steer clear.

Most of the Wanchai bars would like to hold similar events. But the last one was several years ago. They keep trying to do new ones but the District Council keeps turning them down. They refuse to shut down a stretch of Lockhart Road for a Sunday afternoon - "streets are for cars, not people" seems to be their philosophy.

It just strikes me as so freaking odd that so many major cities in the world don't think twice about doing these kind of street festivals. People enjoy them and they generate great business for sponsors and local businesses. So why not here?

At this point all I can ask is what century is the Wanchai District Council living in?

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Another theme I'm planning on developing more fully later. Two albums I continue to play almost weekly for decades illustrate this theme. These are No Other by Gene Clark and Starfish by The Church.

Gene Clark was an original member of the Byrds. In 1974 he poured his heart and soul into an album, "No Other," that was a total commercial failure. Decades later almost everyone who hears it agrees it is one of the great albums of all time. But in 1974 it only got up to number 144 on the Billboard album charts. It's said that Clark never personally recovered from the failure of this album. He died from a bleeding ulcer at the age of 46.

In 1988, I saw the Australian band The Church play at the Bottom Line in NYC. They knew the audience was packed with music industry bigwigs and backstage, before the show, they said that they were going to go out and prove to them that they were the best band in the world. And that night they really were. It remains in my memory as one of the best concerts I've ever attended. The album Starfish yielded a hit single, Under the Milky Way. They really deserved to conquer the world but they didn't. 20 years later they're still together but their time has passed and they never quite scaled the heights that they expected.

Not only do you not always get what you want in this life, sometimes you don't even get what you deserve.

All of the following found via links on Boing Boing.

David Mackett, president of Airline Pilots Security Alliance:

There is simply no deployable technology that has a prayer of keeping a motivated, prepared terrorist out of the system every time — even most times. TSA misses more than 90% of detectable weapons at passenger checkpoints in their own tests, and it is not their fault, because of the limitations of technology and the number of inspections they must conduct. This doesn’t count several classes of completely undetectable weapons like composite knives and liquid explosives.

What is TSA’s fault is their abject failure to embrace more robust approaches than high visibility inspections, and their accommodations to the Air Transport Association’s revenue interests at the expense of true security, while largely ignoring the recommendations of the front-line airline crews and air marshals who have no direct revenue agenda and are much more familiar with airline operations than are the bureaucrats (remember government ignoring the front-line FBI agents who tried to warn them about 9/11?). Deplorable amounts of money have been wasted on incomprehensible security strategies, while KISS [Keep It Simple, Stupid] methods proven to work have been ignored.

Almost six years after 9/11, it is inexcusable that — in an environment where TSA misses more than 90% of weapons, RON aircraft are not secured, and ground employees are not screened — fewer than 2% of our airliners have a team of armed pilots aboard, fewer than 5% have air marshals, and the flight attendants have no mandatory tactical or behavioral assessment training. $24 billion dollars later, we are not materially safer, except in the areas of intelligence that prevent an attack from getting to an airport. Once at the airport, there is little reason to believe the attack won’t succeed.

On Youtube, the trailer for No Country For Old Men, based on the Cormac McCarthy book, from the Coen Brothers:



Next, more Japanese shenanigans, from Japan Probe. A shop in Akihabara, aka Electric Town, where you can pay $100 an hour to take photos of scantily clad women wearing anime masks. I assume that when Skippy-san returns home he will check it out and report back to us.


And a very nice comic. (Click to see full size.)

Some stuff upcoming from a certain company that I'm looking forward to adding to my already over-sized collection:

December 18th - The Ultimate Blade Runner. A five disc set, available in Standard Def, Blu-Ray and HD, packaged in a "Deckard Briefcase." This includes 5 different versions of the film, including a new "Final Cut" that has some new footage shot by Ridley Scott in the past year. The set also includes a three and a half hour documentary that goes into the history of the film and exactly why there are five different versions. There will also be 45 minutes of deleted and alternate scenes, featurettes on special effects, abandoned sequences, conceptual designs, Philip K. Dick and other bits.

Not to confuse you, but there will also be a 4 disc edition in standard packaging that will have the five versions of the film and the documentary but not the other bonus features. There will also be a 2 disc edition that features just the new Final Cut plus the documentary. The five disc set in the metal case will retail for US$80, the four disc for US$35 and the two disc for US$21. Prices for the BR and HD versions have not yet been announced.

Said Sir Ridley Scott: "The Final Cut is the product of a process that began in early 2000 and continued off and on through seven years of intense research and meticulous restoration, technical challenges, amazing discoveries and new possibilities. I can now wholeheartedly say that Blade Runner: The Final Cut is my definitive director’s cut of the film."

The Final Cut version will also screen theatrically in selected cities in the US in October.

Coming on October 23rd is a new 10 disc Stanley Kubrick collection. This version includes new 2 disc editions of 2001, Clockwork Orange, Shining, Eyes Wide Shut - each of which will also be sold separately - plus a new single disc "deluxe edition" of Full Metal Jacket only available in the box set and the Stanley Kubrick - A Life in Pictures documentary. This will also see Blu Ray and HD release as well as standard def release. Eyes Wide Shut includes both versions of the film - the uncensored European version as well as the digitally censored US version. List price on the standard def version will be US$80.

No, not that kind. Just some windows I left open earlier today, putting off going to bed so sharing these with you.

Back when I was studying at Fudan University, it mildly peeved me that they didn't teach us food until the third week. Most of the local restaurants didn't have English menus and I was frustrated at only being able to point at dishes on other tables or pictures on the wall. Had I known about these two sites back then, it would have helped a lot!

How to Order Chinese Food. Web site by an American (I think) living in Fujian. You get a picture of each dish, its name in both simplified Chinese and pinyin plus an English description of the dish. (You'll need to have Chinese fonts loaded on your PC to see the simplified Chinese characters.)

Mei Wah aka Mei Hua (because the name in the window is different from the name in the window title bar). Another American who likes Chinese food. This site is all about showing you Chinese characters and giving their meaning in English - albeit without always giving you the Chinese words. The Chinese characters on this site are .gifs so you don't need Chinese fonts loaded on your PC to see them. The guy is a good writer and gives some nice info with each word. "CLOUD SWALLOW is "won ton" - in Cantonese. Bet you always wondered what that meant. Eating won tons is like swallowing clouds." 45 "pages" of text and graphics here.

And now for something completely different ... an indepth review of the upcoming HTC Kaiser, which will probably be my next phone. My current HTC phone, the Dopod 838pro, has been frustratingly slow ever since I upgraded it to Windows Mobile 6. The Kaiser (hate the name) has a cpu that's twice as fast, which should solve that problem. It also has built in GPS and a much better camera.

Last but not least, this from Huffington Post:

"A correction, sir. The new polls do not show that support for you is down to 25 percent ---it's 25 people."

I'm surprised they could find that many. I'm not surprised that talk of impeachment is getting louder, just that it's taken so long.

Yesterday, some last minute arrangements that had me jumping on the train in the afternoon to Shenzhen. For me, most trips there are pretty much the same, this one had one or two significant variations.

My first stop is generally the HSBC ATM at the train station to load up on cash. It was closed for maintenance. And this didn't appear to be a short, one hour thing.

This meant I had to trudge in the 34 degree heat up to the New Century Hotel. This means running the gauntlet just past the Shangri-La, people offering hotel rooms, massage, sex. "Hey mister, you want young girl, pussy? PUSSY? Come take look! PUSSY!!!!" This results in me walking faster than I would prefer, which on hot days like yesterday results in me being drenched in sweat after just a few minutes on the street.

Got there only to find that HSBC was no longer there.

I was meeting my friend in the lobby of the Shangri-La, so I walked the gauntlet in reverse. Now I wasn't merely dripping, I was soaking. I got there before my friend, made an enquiry at the front desk, and found that HSBC was no longer at the New Century because they are now in the back of the Shangri-La! Could have saved myself all that walking and bullshit had I known.

We had dinner at the Shang Palace. An expensive option, yes, but you would be hard pressed to beat the quality of the food and the amazingly good service there. An entire Peking Duck is $190, every bit as good as the one that costs several times more at Maxim's Peking Garden in Central. And they actually do all the work there - not just slice up the duck but roll up all of it into pancakes for you - we had at least a dozen. And it's something I haven't had in ages. We also had some prawns steamed with garlic, minced pork with salted fish, mixed veggies, soup.

After walking my friend's mother over to the train station, my friend and I went to the San Dao (Sunday) sauna. I've been going there for five years. When my (now ex-) wife found the place, a two hour massage with tons of extras cost just 80 RMB. Then they rented out two additional floors, renovated the entire place, and every time I go there, the price has gone up a notch. A two hour massage now costs 168 RMB.

So first my friend got a pedicure while I did that deep ear cleaning thing, which I love. I'm convinced it helps my iPod sound better. They had a new wrinkle for the massage, using hot smooth rocks, very nice.

The massage finished around 1 AM. They left, we pushed the beds together, covered up with the down blankets they provided, and eventually went to sleep. Yeah, that's right, a two hour massage for 168 RMB includes keeping the room all night instead of booking a hotel room, no extra charge.

We woke up around 9:30 and went downstairs for the free buffet breakfast and then off to the train station and back home.

So ... ear cleaning, fruit and drinks, two hour massage, all night stay, breakfast and it came to less than 300 RMB each including tips. But this visit no shopping mall, no DVDs. Even so, ya gotta love Shenzhen.

Oh, "my friend"? Yes, it would seem that I now have a girlfriend. Someone whom I did not meet in Wanchai. Someone who travels as much as I do and so it took a long time for things to slowly come together for us, but it seems to be happening now. No, I don't know how long it's going to last. But she's very different from other women I've dated and right now I have a very good feeling about this. We're going to see the Cure on Monday (unless she has to do a last minute trip) and she has no idea who they are but I am happy that she's open to trying it and excited about going.

Wanchai lunch time, two Red Bull promo girls.


Seen from Bulldogs ... yowza


From the 33rd floor lift lobby in my office, taken on the 19th (shot through a window).




Ah summer time, that time of year when businesses offering private tutoring for kids (or for their parents, worried about their kids making it into the right universities) send their teachers to stylists and promote them like rock stars. The ads are on billboards all over town, on the sides of buses and filling up magazines. Maybe I'll scan some of these ads and upload them. This is a billboard opposite Times Square.

This year, two perfectly good apartment buildings on my street were demolished to make way for new ratholes and shitboxes that will be cheaply built and for which people will line up to spend millions of dollars in hopes of profits from gouging tenants.

The new foundations are being "dug" now. They are using piledrivers. Even though the now-vacant lots are several buildings away, the sound of these machines smashing into the ground every five seconds is omnipresent. Today they're even causing my flat to shake from a series of small earthquakes.

I may be mistaken, but my belief is that Hong Kong is one of the last so-called civilized places in the world where these machines can be used in residential neighborhoods. That's because here the get-richer-quicker mentality of a few landlords outweighs the needs of thousands of ordinary people.

Martin Short as Jiminy Glick interviewing Jon Stewart. I warn you, by the end I was laughing so hard that, well, actually, it's rather disgusting, you don't need to know. (Found via Amateur Gourmet.)



And next, 425 Filipino prisoners re-enact Michael Jackson's Thriller video (found via, shit, I forgot, sorry). Almost as funny, especially the balding inmate playing the girlfriend.



That's all for now!

Wonderful two page ad in The Standard yesterday promoting a resort in Zhuhai. I guarantee that I have not made any typos in the following transcription:


I really like the name of that last one. Do you think they meant to say "Destruction of Disney Land?"

(Unfortunately their web site has links for English language pages but those all seem to be "under construction.")

Don't try to steal this. I'm already in the process of copyrighting and trademarking it. This idea that I'm about to tell you is mine.

Here it is.

The next thing I'm about to tell you will be my idea.

A metaphysical whorehouse. A hostess bar for all the men who have married young Asian woman to go and pay women their own age (divorced or widowed, university degrees) to have meaningful and intelligent conversations with them about religion, philosophy, politics, art, history.

I still need a catchy name. I'll give 5% of first year's net revenue to whomever comes up with a good name for the joint.

From '99 through '01, I was working for a start-up in SF. The company had a seasoned management team, a business plan to sell a desirable product for more than it cost them and US$300 million in funding raised from various venture capital firms. Couldn't lose, right? And as one of the first hundred employees, I had roughly 40,000 shares of stock.

In 2001, someone offered to buy the company for US$600 million. "We think we're worth US$2 billion," was our response. We would sit around dreaming about the day the company would go public. We would whip out our calculators and say, "hmmm, if the IPO price is 200, I will make $$$$$!!!" We were signing up customers fast and had a range of innovative product offerings that no one else in the industry could match.

Unfortunately, it was a capital intensive business. A third round of funding was canceled as it was supposed to start on September 11, 2001. And around then the bottom dropped out of the telco market.

I left in 01 to return to HK. In 02 the company was sold for US$2 million plus $18 million in assumed debt. All existing shares of stock were worthless.

The company's just been sold again, this time to an Indian firm, for US$300 million in cash.

Sigh.

Over in the UK, they've announced this year's nomination for the Mercury Music Prize. This prize, which only goes to British and Irish albums, has a good track record of nominating quality as opposed to just recognizing sales figures. This year's noms are:

Arctic Monkeys - Favourite Worst Nightmare
Dizzee Rascal - Maths + English
Amy Winehouse - Back to Black
Bat For Lashes - Fur and Gold
Fionn Regan - The End of History
New Young Pony Club - Fantastic Playroom
Klaxons - Myths of the Near Future
Young Knives - Voices of Animals and Men
Maps - We Can Create
View - Hats Off to the Buskers
Jamie T - Panic Prevention
Basquiat Strings - With Seb Rochford

The winner will be announced on September 4th.

I only have six of the above, I'll have to seek out the rest.

So I finally got around to renewing my China visa this week and I was thinking about making a Shenzhen run today.

Then I checked and right now in HK computer says no Weather Watcher is telling me it's 34 degrees and feels like 40. The perfect weather for walking around the concrete no-shade-anywhere Lo Wu plaza and beyond to be hit up by gypsies tramps and thieves beggars, hookers and assorted other ne'er do wells.

So a two hour massage for a quarter of the cost of same in HK is going to wait.

Plan B is to stay home in air conditioned comfort and then guilt myself into doing all the chores I've been postponing for months. That's not an attractive option either, is it?

Need to think of a plan C.

Speaking of A, B, C, D and beyond, here's a report from the BBC from a couple of weeks back that says scientists can take fat cells from a woman's stomach, mix them with stem cells, inject them into the breasts and then the woman can naturally grow larger breasts over a period of six months. While it was initially developed to help women who've had mastectomies, clearly this is destined to be used for cosmetic surgery purposes as well. It will probably be a couple of years before this procedure is generally available. I for one cannot wait. O brave new world that has such large natural-feeling breasts in it!

Watched Danny Boyle's Sunshine tonight. A definite addition to the very short list of movies so far this year that I've liked - Breach, Zodiac, Sicko, Hot Fuzz, maybe one or two others that I can't recall at the moment.

Upcoming:



The Coen Brothers. Cormac McCarthy. What else needs to be said?



Okay, I didn't much care for the Life Aquatic. I'm hoping that's just a temporary career dip for Wes Anderson.

And I am optimistic about the Simpsons. Plan to also see these, though I ain't expecting miracles:




Word is in 2008 we can expect Righteous Kill, reteaming DeNiro and Pacino and, um, er, 50 Cent.

NY Times:

Federal aviation authorities have decided to stop enforcing a two-year-old rule against taking cigarette lighters on airplanes, concluding that it was a waste of time to search for them before passengers boarded.

Lawmakers said that if Mr. Reid had used a lighter, instead of matches, he might have been able to ignite the bomb, but Kip Hawley, assistant secretary for the Transportation Security Administration, said in an interview on Thursday that the ban had done little to improve aviation security because small batteries could be used to set off a bomb.

Matches have never been prohibited on flights.

“Taking lighters away is security theater,” Mr. Hawley said. “It trivializes the security process.”

...

Disposing of the seized lighters has cost about $4 million a year.

By lifting the ban, Mr. Hawley said, security officers could spend more time looking for bombs or bomb parts.

This bullshit with liquids is bound to stop soon too.

Taxi ride from home to Wanchai last night. The taxi driver had SIX mobile phones mounted on his dashboard. One was a large O2 smartphone, the others various Nokias and Sonys. Then he had two bluetooth earpieces. As he drove, the phones would go off, and he would scramble around for bits of paper, reading off phone numbers or making notes. Assuming that this guy was not operating a side business as a bookie, I was wondering if he was operating his own little dispatch service.

On arrival, he turned and handed me his business card, offering discount rates to the airport. The back of the card listed all the rates - from my home to the airport would be approximately $100 less than using a metered taxi and $200 less than the limo the company books for me.

Anyway, I was not in the mood for anything high impact last night. I've been super tired all week long and my stomach has been up and down, in and out. All a result of the heat, I would imagine. So, some of the things I did last night ....

#1 - I had dinner at Thai Delight. The memory of their soft shell crab brought me back for dinner just four nights after my previous visit and gosh, yes, it was still tasty. Along with that, I had the beef skewers - like Thai street BBQ upscale. Each of the two skewers had three nice sized chunks of good quality beef - charred on the outside, pink on the inside, not overcooked at all. Then huge slices of onion, green red & yellow peppers, pineapple. Then half a tomato stuck on the end. Barbecued and served in a bowl on top of a fresh salad. This dish alone would have made a decent meal for me, I'll keep that in mind for next time. I had such low expectations when this place opened. I've now eaten there three times and really enjoyed it. It's definitely not authentic Thai food, it's Thai style, but everything seems quite fresh and flavorful.

I sat there dividing my attention between the latest Don DeLillo novel, Falling Man (read the first 50 pages during dinner, nice), and the large projection screen, showing a DVD of a Thai pop concert featuring an extremely sexy female singer.

#2 - After dinner, not quite ready to go home, so over to Amazonia, settled into a chair in a dark corner on my own with a big soft drink and listened to the band play two sets. As it turns out, they're called Icebox, for whatever that's worth to ya. Much to my dismay but the apparent pleasure of the crowd they did a 15 minute medly of Queen's greatest fits, including a reasonable facsimile of an unreasonable song (Bohemian Rhapsody). They also did a long Stairway to Heaven, which made me want to pull a Wayne's World move - if only there was a sign there saying "No Stairway" that I could point to and then hear them say, "Denied!"

But even though I wasn't thrilled with their set list last night, I did enjoy listening to guys who knew how to really play and were even, from time to time, throwing their own stuff in rather than always looking to duplicate the records. And so far I have yet to hear them play Hotel California or any songs from Britney Spears.

Tonight I expect will be even lower key. Maybe stay home and watch viddies. Except I don't think there's any food in the house and there's not much money in my wallet which means Dial a Dinner and credit card or going out and likely getting into some sort of trouble.

The blog name says her name is Yumiko but my friend says she's Coco, the nightclub hostess who brought down the head of RTHK.

Huge fake breasts. Email address and mobile phone number provided. Enjoy.

Following up, I did visit one of the SmarTone-Vodafone emporiums yesterday to inquire about the internet packages.

They first offered to sign me up for something at $108 per month. I told them that a friend of mine said there was a cheaper package. "Oh," like in, "damn, this guy is informed, we're in trouble." So they then pulled out all the stops, and since I had not brought my slide rule and since it has been decades since I studied calculus, I stood no chance against their nefarious schemes.

Here's how it works. I think.

Internet browsing - HTML only - $28 per month gives you 20 meg per day. If you go over, then they automatically bump you up to $68 per month, which gives you unlimited. But just browsing. No downloading. Browsing with Opera instead of IE is considered downloading - go figure that one.

And you have to extend your contract for one year to get this rate. If you don't want to extend, add $10 per month.

Downloading - which in this case means using any apps that run on the internet other than IE, is a completely separate package and menu of prices.

Actually, now that I have the gmail java app running properly, I don't know how much html browsing I'm going to do on the phone. The only other thing I consistently do right now is updates to WorldMate for weather reports and currencies. Probably I'd do more if I had GPS tied into Google maps or something like that, but that's something I rarely need in HK.

Today I have a basic package that runs around $200 a month. It has lots of components I find I don't need, but I can't drop those until the end of August because that's a year from when I allowed myself to get locked into a contract.

My bill ends up running close to a thousand a month anyway thanks to international roaming charges. I can't use local sim cards when I travel because I use my phone for business and I'm not about to email 500 people with a new phone number for me every week.

Meanwhile, my phone has developed an unsightly bulge. I think I've dropped it one time too many and it looks like the keyboard is trying to make a dash for freedom. I suppose I will be getting the HTC Kaiser (fuck I hate that name) when it comes out, which probably won't be a moment too soon at this rate.

Maybe I should just shift everything over to my Blackberry. I love the Blackberry keyboard. And I never need to reboot it - I need to hit the reset button on the Dopod every couple of days, thank you Microsoft. But the other stuff on the Blackberry, everything except email, is just too kludgy for me. Clearly the Blackberry is email first, everything else second. The lack of a touchscreen; the lack of dedicated, configurable keys tied to most-used apps and functions; the scarcity of third party apps ... just adds up to a non-starter for me.

Well, not quite ready for bed yet. These recent posts on Fumier and Exordinarily Ordinary have pissed me off. Tagging people for various purposes but I am not one of the ones tagged. I thought you guys were my friends! Or is it just that you already know the answers to the questions asked?

Well, gonna do them anyway, I think.

EO's:

What were you doing ten years ago?
Ten years ago I was in HK, newly married and newly promoted to VP at an investment bank.

What were you doing one year ago?
Pretty much what I'm doing now. No forward progress but no backward progress either.

Five snacks you enjoy?
1 - Chocolate
2 - Chocolate
3 - Chocolate
4 - Chocolate
5 - Chocolate

Five songs that you know all the lyrics to?
1 - Born to Run
2 - Thunder Road
3 - Losing My Religion
4 - Pretzel Logic
5 - Satisfaction

Five things you would do if you were a millionaire?
1 - Retire
2 - Disappear
3 - Eat better dinners
4 - Drink more expensive whiskey
5 - You can probably guess

Five bad habits?
1 - Smoking
2 - Gossiping
3 - Spending too much money
4 - Not brushing my teeth often enough
5 - Not cleaning up my room

Five things you would never wear again?
1 - Bell bottoms
2 - Nehru jacket
3 - Speedo
4 - Jock strap
5 - Condoms (if this was the 1970s again)

Five favorite toys?
1 - Computer
2 - Ipod
3 - Camera
4 - Talking & singing Triumph the Insult Comic Dog
5 - Car

And now fumier's, which is a bit harder as it's more open ended: eight biographical facts. Coming up with stuff I haven't blogged about is the tough part.

1 - I have a surname that practically no one can pronounce (especially in Asia). It pisses me off because according to my father, his father snuck into the US and changed his name from something very nice and easy to this Yiddish-derived word. I should change it back but I'm too lazy.

2 - Celebrities I have met include Bruce Springsteen, Bob Weir, Ian Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Vincent Spano, Jennifer Grey, Rod Steiger, Grace Jones & Dolph Lundgren, Sandy Denny, Roberta Flack, Mariel Hemingway, John Kay (Steppenwolf, not Jamiroquai), James Taylor, David Peel, Penn & Teller, Tom Waits, Harry Chapin, Cheech & Chong, Todd Rundgren, Michael Bloomfield, Gerry Goffin, Barry Goldberg and others I can't recall right now. Also Stanley Kubrick (if talking on the phone counts as "met"). I have never slept with any celebrities but did one time sleep with a former (non-medal-winning) Olympic athlete. (Sadly my performance that time was less than Olympian, which I suppose is why it was just the one time.)

3 - My great grandfather's passport shows his place of birth as Transylvania.

4 - When I was 17 I was picked up by the police on suspicion of armed robbery and attempted murder. I thought this put me one up on my friends, most of whom were simply arrested for drug possession. Two years later I was tossed in jail for running a red light in Florida. Since then I have not had the pleasure.

5 - No one has ever successfully mugged me. A lot of people have tried, using fists, guns, knives and (one time) a rather large fork.

6 - Both the FBI and the KGB had files on me, for different reasons and several years apart.

7 - Jobs I have held in the past include taxi driver, loading dock, income tax preparation, TV repair, short order cook, rock concert security, film lab technician, office clerk, magazine writer, hot dog vendor, video store clerk, record store owner and others I prefer to forget. Naturally when I was a kid I had a paper route.

8 - I worked on the crews of 3 feature films and approximately 150 TV commercials before I was 30. I also appeared in two of those films - the first was a martial arts-blaxploitation-horror film in which I had two roles, the second a Triple-X feature in which I can only be seen from the neck down.

Okay, I feel better now. I ain't gonna tag anyone. Do it if ya feel it.

Thanks to Mr. Bijou for linking to this important post by Rebecca MacKinnon providing updates on the Oiwan Lam case.

This case is of critical importance to anyone who values freedom of speech. The government, for Buddha knows what reason, has decided to apply an antiquated law passed before the creation of the world wide web, to local internet users. Essentially all traditional media need to go through the government censorship board and receive a rating before publication. They are trying to make this pertain to internet users and prosecuting someone for publishing something to the internet that would have received an "adult" rating. Right now this is not being applied to content of a political nature, just content of a sexual nature.

Again, the question is why? Why are they doing this? What is their long term objective?

In a city obsessed with sex, why this action and why now? Is it too paranoid to think that if this is allowed to continue, Singapore style political censorship is not too far behind?

For all sorts of spoilers for the new Harry Potter book, click here. The server is very busy, you may have to retry several times to get there. Since I've never read the books and we're two to three years away from film #7, figured I might as well take a peek. It all makes quite a bit of sense.

Should I read the books now that all 7 are out? Given the amount of time I have for leisure reading, do I want to devote six months of my life to this?

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

Getting used to the WM6 changes now. Not saying I like it but not as bad as I first thought.

Blackberry's releasing a new model with WiFi and GPS - but not 3G.

I get tired of waiting for the future some times. You just know that one day WiFi will be just about everywhere and probably free. Why can't that day be yesterday?

And you just know that one day even Hong Kong's real estate-owned mobile phone companies will offer unlimited internet access for a flat monthly rate. They know they'll have to do it, too. But for now they're gonna grab every last dollar until the times catch up with them.

Here's a trick I have - have I ever mentioned this before? The Subway in Wanchai across from Neptune has free WiFi. I stand outside the shop, connect up and then can use Skype. Mobile phone companies probably hate people like me.

I'm told that SmarTone has a package for unlimited html browsing for $108. As a SmarTone customer, you'd think they might send me some sort of promotional announcement for this. They can't send me a flyer in the mail? (I don't receive a paper bill.) They can't send me an email? Oh, it's advertised on TV. (I don't watch TV.) And in the Chinese newspapers probably but not the English ones. (My fault for not being able to read more than a few hundred characters after all these years.) I see ads saying they are the only ones to offer the "real internet," which not only makes little sense but makes no mention of the package.

Weather Watcher tells me that at 3 PM it will be 33.9 degrees but will feel like 41.7. Shee-it. Gotta go to the computer mall, Price-Rite and, I suppose, the SmarTone shop.

Yesterday, took my team out for lunch. My company has this ludicrous policy where we cannot be reimbursed for lunches in town - except if there's an out of town visitor joining us. I come from a business culture where one element of rewarding your team is celebrating success in some meaningful way but I'm not allowed to do it here. Yet I can take 12 people out to lunch on the company tit if one of those 12 is not locally based. It makes no sense.

So fuck it. I pick up the tab myself and do this every few months. My team is important to me. Without them, I'm nothing, and this is one way that I show them I know it. Dim sum lunch for 12 at East Ocean only runs around 100 a person anyway; it's not gonna break me.

Last night with some out of town visitors who've already seen most of what Wanchai has to offer. For a temporary diversion, I took them into Amazonia, where the band was just gearing up. After a couple of songs, I asked them if they wanted to check out Fenwick or Neptune and they wanted to stay put, and so we did, for awhile.

The band there plays the kind of stuff that other Filipino bands in Wanchai don't play - Led Zep, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Free, Black Crows, Aerosmith - and they do a reasonable job of all of it. One friend commented that it was just like going to a concert and he was right. Yes, they're singing songs that others have sung, playing solos that others have played, doing their best to sound just like the records. But they do it with a bit of style at least.

The keyboard player has one of those strap-on keyboards so he can come forward on stage and pretend he's playing guitar while soloing. There seems to be someone actually working the lights as opposed to just some randomized computer blinking. These guys even do a bit where most of the band goes off stage and the drummer comes forward, grabs a guitar and goes one on one against the lead guitarist for 10 minutes. When the rest of the band comes back, the keyboard player sits down behind the drum kit while the drummer takes over lead vocals. At one point some white guy came out of the audience, grabbed the guitar and soloed for two songs, cigarette glued between his lips - wish I could do that.

It's simultaneously funny and entertaining to see these old standard moves brought out in a small bar in HK. We stayed for one entire set.

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

I have a three year old Sony 29 inch old style picture tube TV that I still want to get rid of. And a Yamaha stereo receiver that three years ago was top of the line (but doesn't have HDMI inputs, upscaling, Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD) that I want to upgrade. Anyone interested?

Stuff that's caught my ear this week includes Gogol Bordello, Cherry Ghost, Interpol, Matthew Good, Spoon, Biffy Clyro.

Gogol Bordello had one song on the soundtrack to Everything is Illuminated and their lead singer was one of the lead actors in that film. Now I'm listening to them and trying to figure out if their gypsy punk fusion is more than just a gimmick - the energy level on the album is definitely there. Somehow I don't think they'll be playing any concerts in HK anytime soon.

I am thinking about going to see the Cure, simply because I've never seen them live. Ditto for Nine Inch Nails.

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

Is it a bad judge or bad reporting? From an article in the SCMP:

A married man who duped an 11-year-old girl into having sex with him by claiming he was dying of cancer was jailed for three years and four months yesterday.

The girl - whose identity was protected in court - was in Primary Six when she met Chung Kwok-man, 33, through a free telephone chat-line service in 2004, the District Court heard.

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Chung yesterday pleaded guilty to one charge of indecent assault and one of having unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl under 13.

........

Chung's solicitor, Szeto Yuk-ting, told the judge Chung married in 2003 and his son, who was born in 2004, was being treated in hospital for kidney cancer. "[The treatment] will last for 22 months," Mr Szeto said. Chung's wife had forgiven him.

Mr Szeto also said the girl had consented to sex and Chung had not used violence. "They were both attracted to each other," he said.

Judge Chan said: "I do not accept they had developed a boyfriend and girlfriend relationship ... There is no other reason for this offence apart from his sexual desire."

An eleven year old girl and the judge only says "sexual desire"????? This is fucking pedophilia. This guy is a child molester. The guy's wife forgave him for having sex with an 11 year old? One only hopes this sick fuck is gang raped every day of his sentence.

This heat is just killing me. Every time I go out for a smoke I melt. How did people survive for 5 million years without air conditioning? Actually I suspect people were better off in those days. Without going into and out of air con places, heat was all they had and all they knew and it just simply was what it was. Now we're wimps.

This has gotta be the ultimate iPhone review, over here. I note that one HK blogger has an iPhone - useless as a phone of course. The temptation to buy this comes over me now and then but if I'm just looking for a larger screened-iPod I have a feeling Apple will release them before the end of the year - no phone, just iPod, but with the new bigger touch screen, no scroll wheel, etc. I think I'll wait.

While my upgrade to WM6 went okay and I eventually managed to sync the phone with the PC, I am just so depressed by this "upgrade." There are some basic tasks that now require even more key presses than before! The only good thing is that the gmail java app runs properly - it wouldn't under WM5. And while there's some bizarro bug with this app that prevents me from sending out messages when running it on the Blackberry, it's working okay on the Dopod.

But overall, I am not impressed with this upgrade and today started to seriously question if I should upgrade to the HTC Kaiser when it comes out. Stretch the current Dope-odd out for another six months and hope that when the iPhone comes to Asia it's seriously improved over the current version?

Time for another smoke. Wish me luck.

Right now I'm in the midst of the nerve-wracking process of upgrading my Dopod 838pro phone to Windows Mobile 6. Since I actually have a grey market Softbank phone, I understand there is a small chance that this will totally fry my phone. Typing this blog entry is taking my mind off the upgrade. I like to live on the edge.

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

Would you ... ? #1

I have a "friend." We worked together for 3 years back in the 90s. When I returned to HK in 01, he was one of the first people I got in touch with and he we went around quite a bit. Shortly there after he moved away from HK.

Three years later, when he decided to return here and was looking for a job, I heard from him every day. And if memory serves, I'm the one who introduced him to the headhunter who found a job for him.

As soon as he got the job, I never heard from him again. Three years (during which time both my email address and mobile number have remained the same).

Today I received a request from LinkedIn that he wants to link to me.

Would you accept?

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

Would you ... ? #2

One of my not-so-secret secrets is that I have the world's worth teeth. My teeth are so bad I could be British.

At the beginning of the year, I had some work done in a dental clinic in Bangkok. The work came out basically okay but I was unhappy about the fact that I was told I would be seeing one dentist and then arrived and was handed to someone else.

I recommended this place to a friend who tried it. He was not happy that he was provided with an estimate for the work and then when finished was told the price was noticeably higher.

Now I have to get some more work done. It's not cheap and it's not covered by insurance.

I have received three quotes for the work. The one place I've been to before is about 30% cheaper than the other two. But the other two may be a bit more reliable.

Would you go the cheaper route to save money even though there is a higher element of risk?

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

The upgrade succeeded - sort of. (Thank you Hong Kong Phooey.) Naturally my PC had to "see" the phone in order to do the upgrade. Now that it's complete and I've rebooted the phone several times, the PC no longer sees it. I think I may need to reboot the PC as well.

Signing off ....

Phillip Glass's latest work premiered in New York over the weekend. It's called Book of Longing and it sets 22 poems by Leonard Cohen to music. The NY Times says it's Glass's best work in years.

Damon Albarn, of Blur and Gorillaz, is collaborating with Jamie Hewlett and Chinese director Chen Shi-zheng on a new operatic version of the Chinese Journey to the West tale that's been done so many times before. Will be interesting to see what they do differently.

And me?

Yesterday I had a brief visit from my ex-wife. There are times that I focus in on the good years between us, which were very good indeed. This visit, however, left me wondering what I ever saw in her in the first place.

Dinner last night at Thai Delight in Wanchai. Seems to me to be fusion Thai and while the word "fusion" can often make one cringe, everything was quite tasty, especially their soft shell crab. For a hot Sunday night and a relatively quiet Wanchai, at 9 PM the restaurant was just about full. I'll happily return there.

After the appetizers, I went downstairs to have a smoke. Three Thai girls were walking down the street - young, barely covered, obviously on their way to Neptune or Fenwick or whatever. As they passed by they looked at me and I smiled. Walking immediately behind them was a Caucasian woman, over 40 years old, who gave me a look of immense disgust merely because I smiled at three cute young ladies. I was going to stick out my tongue or one of my fingers at her by way of response but figured she wasn't worth it and went back upstairs in time for the main course.

Interview with one of my heroes, Stanley Owsley - didn't even know he was still alive! Owsley is now 72 and living in the Australian Outback.

I spend a fair amount of time thinking about where I will live. Assuming that I can survive my lifestyle into my so-called "golden years," I assume I will not remain in Hong Kong, purely for economic reasons. I have no desire to return to the United States. And while many Americans seem to be heading to Costa Rica these days, I've never been there.

Lately I've assumed I'd end up in Thailand. But the current military dictators are so completely off the wall - I'm afraid that any investment in that country would be less than secure.

What about the Philippines? I don't want to end up another sexpat in Angeles City. And I think I remain a city boy at heart. When I was in Manila last week, having lunch at Serendra and hanging out at Handlebar and finding out that the purchase price for a fully furnished condo at Serendra is 3 million pesos, I started thinking that I could do a lot worse.

Oddly enough, the one thing that puts me off is not government corruption, extreme traffic and pollution or the high crime rate. It's that you can't get a decent broadband line there.

Obviously I need to think about this some more but it's almost past time for me to be doing this.

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

Please read this boingboing bit about the Hong Kong blogger being persecuted by the government for exercising freedom of speech. And are you aware that Flickr has now implemented geographic content blocking - global censorship - which means that Flickr is now censored in HK.

If only that first person from Sham Shui Po had contested his arrest and let this thing go to trial, we would probably not be going through this now. Following that trial, several bloggers protested by also posting similar links and now one, Oiwan Lam, is facing a prison term or a $400k fine.

It's the end of my world as I know it and I don't feel fine.

Well, that's it, Manila trip is finished, heading to the airport shortly. Definitely one of my better visits. One really good meal, at the new mall over by Fort Bonifacio. Brought to a new (to me) bar called Handlebar, a huge barn of a place with barbecue, a couple of pool tables and a live band fronted by 3 over-50 Americans cranking out occasionally grungy 60s and 70s rock, my kind of joint and I'll definitely head back there next time. After three consecutive nights out and little sleep, it will be nice to come home and relax for a bit.

Getting home just in time. Lots of visitors coming to town today, including a friend from the UK and my ex-wife, who said we should get together for a drink but I know she really wants to see the dogs, not me.

For once, no other trips booked at the moment. Possibly planning a Bangkok run next month to take care of some medical stuff, otherwise can just relax at home and get caught up on stuff for a change.

Some nice comments on the last post, thanks. Someone tagged my bit as being reminiscent of Murakami, which is interesting because he's someone I've never read, recently decided he's someone I should "know" and picked up a couple of his books on my last Australian trip. Kafka on the Shore is with me now and I've just started it tonight.

Yes, I'm in Manila. Business trip this time, cleaning up a mess left behind by someone else and telling a new employee why he's screwed before he even knows it. Should be fun.

All 5 original Bonzo Dog Band albums have just been reissued on CD in the UK with extra tracks. And after years of collecting, I think there are some tracks there I don't have. Hopefully Rock Gallery can score these for me.

There's a pair of Oakley sunglasses I want. "Whisker" frames with polychromatic lenses, which would be useful for me. I went to Optical 88 and they had the right frames but not those lenses. They told me they could make polychromatic lenses for me, but I'm so conditioned by marketing that I asked them why I would spend the money for the Oakley frames and lenses and then throw the Oakley lenses away and pay extra for their own inferior plastic? Finally some guy at Seibu told me these are not available in HK and probably won't be for at least two years - he wanted them himself and asked the distributor. So now I'm hunting around on websites and all the sites selling them say they can't ship them outside of the US. Do I want them bad enough to buy them, ship them to my mother and then ask an 86 year old woman to trudge down to the post office to mail them to me? And if so, do I ask her to get an iPhone for me at the same time?

My life is a series of underwhelming crises.

Well, I don't need to decide today. I'm in Manila. Might as well go out and do at night what I normally do in Manila at night. You thought I was gonna stay in my room and watch movies on my laptop, take a bath and go to sleep? (Actually that's probably tomorrow night.)

After reading this post on Indy's blog, inspired to share a memory with y'all. It's a little funny because I'd just shared parts of this story with a friend over dinner last night (and probably the 20th time I've bored him with it) and then Indy's post got me thinking about it all over again. I don't think I've ever written about it here. It's far more personal than most of what I've written here in the past year and I hesitate to share it but what the fuck.

I have tried to live my life free of regrets. I have tried to enter every door that life opened up for me. I've never wanted to be an old man sitting in a rocking chair wondering, "What if?" But sometimes things are beyond my control.

Roughly three years ago, I "met" a woman in Beijing via Asia Friend Finder. We had an instant rapport via email and ending up chatting online, sitting in front of our webcams for hours each night. She was 31 years old, divorced with one kid, had a masters degree and was working as a writer and an editor. She was very familiar with western culture and told me her favorite songwriter was Leonard Cohen and her favorite band was Nirvana. She sent me a lot of photos of herself. While none of them were nude, several could easily be classified as erotic. She wasn't beautiful, but her intellect and her sense of humor made her irresistibly sexy to me.

After a couple of weeks, I booked a trip to Beijing to visit her. She asked me to bring along the DVD of Pillow Book, a movie she'd heard about but hadn't been able to find. I also brought along a Patti Smith compilation because she told me she'd never heard her and I had a feeling it would be something she'd like.

Well, I flew up there, she met me at the airport and we were instantly all over each other. It was all we could do to wait till we'd reached her home to rip off each other's clothes. And when I did rip off her clothes, there was a surprise waiting for me. No, not what you're thinking. She had several unusual piercings on her body with chains running between them.

When I played her some songs off the Patti Smith CD, she started to cry. I interpreted this to mean that she liked Patti's words and attitude so much, as well as how well I understood her, to have chosen this particular music to introduce her to.

We talked a lot. And one thing we agreed was that we wouldn't use the words "I love you" too soon, we would wait to say them when we were really certain and they would really mean something. We went out. We went all over town. She wouldn't let me pay for anything. She said, "you spent so much money on the plane ticket, I'll pay for everything else." I think she finally broke down and let me pay for one lunch.

The next evening, she had a deadline approaching and had to get some work done. I stretched out in the next room, watching videos. After awhile, from the next room, she sent me an SMS that read, simply, "I love you."

My recollection of what came next is hazy. I was surprised that she would say that to me just a day after saying that we wouldn't say those words so soon. I know I went into the next room and kissed her. But I didn't say "I love you" to her.

The next day, I had to leave at 8 AM for the airport. We woke up early, she brought me downstairs, put me in a taxi, and gave me a look that I could not interpret at the time but that struck me as odd.

And that was it. I never heard from her again.

She would not reply to my SMS's or my emails. I spoke with her flatmate who refused to offer any explanations, just saying it was none of her business. I think I sent a non-stop torrent of SMS's, emails, phone calls for a month before finally giving up.

In the three years since then, I haven't met anyone who has come even remotely close to her in my eyes. Some times I don't think I ever will, either.

So what was it? I will never know. Was she just a female version of me - approaching sex like a man; enjoying it often, openly, completely with as many partners as possible and I was just another notch on her bedpost? Was it that I didn't say "I love you" there and then? I will never know.

A friend tells me he went past Fenwick on Saturday night, around 11 PM or midnight, and that the shutters were down, the place seemed closed. Anyone have any information on this?

Even by my own meager standards I did fuck-all all weekend. I've accomplished so little that I believe I've now earned by PhD in Procrastination. Didn't do anything that was vaguely on my list of things I would do this weekend, including various bits of writing that have deadlines rapidly approaching.

Almost all's I did was sit home, watch movies, and copy mp3s off CD-Rs onto my new RAID arrays. It takes almost 2 hours to copy roughly 20 discs. After which, I need to ensure that the file naming is consistent, that they're all properly tagged and eliminate duplicates. And while I'm doing this, I'm watching movies.

Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima. I can see why most critics preferred the latter and I thought both were okay but as a huge Eastwood fan, these did not have me jumping up and down.

Slither - pulpy horror film that manages to be fun and doesn't insult the audience.

If .... - now on DVD from Criterion. It's possible that I haven't seen this since it was first released in 1968. It stands up amazingly well and Malcolm McDowell in his first starring role (several years before Clockwork Orange and several decades before killing Kirk) is wonderful. Now that this is out, can O Lucky Man! be far behind?

Epic Movie - well, I tried to watch it, but it was so horrendous that I had to say "life's too short" and switched it off after about 10 minutes.

Smokin' Aces - obviously patterned on Tarantino and Guy Ritchie, it doesn't suck and it's occasionally quite okay. But it makes two classic mistakes - the initial set-up, the "here's what came before and you need to know before we get started" is 20 minutes of dialog (with quick edits to try to disguise that) and, worse, the end is mostly dialog, one guy telling another guy "okay here's what really happened and here's the big plot twist to blow your mind." Don't tell me, show me. (And show me more of Alicia Keys while you're at it.)

Dog Bite Dog - ridiculous.

And now, before I go to bed, please go here and look at this 2007 timeline of hazardous products produced in China (via BoingBoing). Faulty wiring. Excessive amounts of lead in childrens' products. Poisonous food. Poisonous health products (now there's an oxymoron for ya).

I think it was Marvin Kittman writing at Huffington Post who suggested that China is doing this on purpose, that they're continuing the cold war and this is their new plan to destroy America, via cheap faulty products. A joke, of course, but close enough to be almost true. Getting rich is glorious, regardless of who you kill in the process.



I need to see this movie. (via I Watch Stuff) View the trailer here.

This afternoon watched an HK movie called Dog Bite Dog, starring Edison Chen. I'd heard it was maybe okay. I don't know why I bothered.

Here is the plot. This is the whole plot. Just in case you were thinking about watching this.

In Cambodia, poor children are bought up by men who raise them like dogs, train them to fight and then send them out as hit men.

One, Pang, is sent to HK to kill the wife of a judge, which he does in a restaurant. The police show up. One cop is very sloppy, gets yelled at by all the others, his name is Wai.

Wai and his partner track Pang to a nearby restaurant. Pang kills Wai's partner and surrenders. Wai is about to kill him when the other cops show up. They put Pang in a car, take him to the station, he manages to get out of his handcuffs, beat up the other 4 cops in the car, cause an accident and run away.

We find out the judge hired the hit man to kill his wife. They were married "30 something" years, she wanted a divorce and all his money so he hired the hit man to kill her.

Pang runs to a landfill and finds a shack with some guy and a girl. He strangles the guy, who lies on the floor unconscious for hours but is not dead. The girl is a retard who manages to say that she came to find her mother, her mother is dead, the fat guy is her father and has been raping her non-stop. She cooks him dinner. Pang gives her underwear.

Wai tortures a lot of people and figures out that Pang is in the landfill. Pang hits him with a sack of bottles. Wai kills the girl's father.

Wai's superior shows up at the landfill. Pang beats the crap out of him and steals his car. But walking to the car, the girl steps on a rusty nail.

We now find out the reason that Wai is bad cop is because his father was a crooked cop. Wai found out, shot his father, his father's been in a coma for a year. But now comes out of the coma.

Pang takes the girl to a clinic. The cops track him to the clinic but he has now taken off in search of a ship. He finds a boat, kills the people on board, then goes back to the clinic.

On the way to the clinic, he sees the girl in a car with one of the cops. He follows the cop. The cop decides to hide with the girl in an empty construction site. The other cops show up. Pang kills a couple of cops and gets away with the girl. Wai is shot in the head but survives.

Wai wakes up in the hospital. Finds out all of his teammates are dead. Asks to speak to his father. His father committed suicide the night before.

Pang and the girl make it back to Cambodia. The "fight club" doesn't want him because he's a wanted man. He and the girl head to the country, he works as a farmer, the girl gets pregnant. Lots of shots of him working in a field, the girl brings him food, the music is "you are my sunshine."

The girl's having a difficult pregnancy. The doctor wants a lot of money. Pang returns to the fight club asking for more work. But guess what? Wai is in the fight club. He's been there fighting and killing people waiting for Pang to come back. They fight. Pang runs away, gets in his car with the girl, Wai jumps on the back of the car.

They end up in the ruins of Angkor Wat, fighting and stabbing each other multiple times. Meanwhile the girl, lying there, starts to miscarry. Wai grabs the girl. Pang is about to kill himself so the girl can go free but then she figures if she dies then Pang can kill Wai and get away. So she pushes her neck onto Wai's knife.

Pang jumps over, kills Wai. Then takes his knife, cuts his dead girlfriend's stomach open, pulls out a baby (again, "you are my sunshine" is the music), holds the crying baby in his arms, lies down and dies.

A title on screen tells us something like all creatures exist at the expense of other creatures.

The end.

This scores a 7.1 on imdb. The comment posted at the bottom of the page rates it 9 stars out of 10. The director was nominated as best director at the Tokyo Film Festival.

The world has gone insane.

Create your own Simpsons avatar here.

In recent days, there has been an almost unprecedented coordinated series of attacks against New World, one of the companies that actually owns and runs Hong Kong. This is probably the handiwork of the triads. Take a look at this post from Daai Tou Laam. I'm not sure how much I agree with his second paragraph but the final one is something I do agree with:

This is of course the Security apparatus that has dropped the ball on finding the mastermind of the attack on Albert Ho and accepted at face value the implausible story provided by a group of fall guys. But Ambrose Lee makes it clear that there are three sets of justice in Hong Kong. One for the friends of the government, like the tycoons, and one for the enemies, like the pan-democrats and Falun Gong, and one for everybody else just trying to make a living and provide for their families.

I think there's a fourth set - one for the triads, who are rarely challenged and generally allowed to operate as they wish as long as they don't cross certain boundaries. This attack on New World is probably viewed as crossing one of those boundaries.

And it's fair to say that probably nothing will change in the aftermath.

Here are some quotes from an article in the Standard that reveal Donald Tsang's true colors.

Making friendly appeals and smiling often, Tsang also fielded provocative remarks by Frontier convener Emily Lau Wai-hing and medical representative Kwok Ka-ki. Turning to Kwok, who had accused the government of deceiving the public on the issue of democracy, Tsang said: "It will be difficult to discuss an issue if you keep this attitude ...

"If you want true universal suffrage, you need to smile and listen to others more, while using fewer personal attacks and abusive language."

Tsang is frustrated by having no real power. He is under the collective thumbs of Beijing and the big HK realty companies. But apparently if you are "nice" to him then maybe he'll ask his bosses for the things you want and then come back and tell you nicely why you can't have them.

An article in the Standard today reports on Thailand's military junta unveiling a planned new constitution that would place stricter limits on the office of the Prime Minister. There's also an article in the print edition (which I can't find online) about the failing state of democracy in Cambodia, ten years into the rule of former Khmer Rouge guerilla Hun Sen.

From the NY Times review of new book Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror:

A Sept. 25, 2001, Justice Department memo declared that under the Constitution decisions regarding the “amount of military force to be used” in response to the terrorist threat, as well as “the method, timing and nature of the response,” are “for the President alone to make.” And a January 2002 Justice Department memo argued that “customary international law has no binding legal effect on either the President or the military.”

In fact, as this important book, “Unchecked and Unbalanced,” points out, the Bush White House has repeatedly sought to expand its powers, often doing so in secret, while sidelining both Congress and the judiciary. President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without obtaining a court order on calls and e-mail messages sent from the United States to other countries. He has issued a steady stream of signing statements, signaling his intent not to comply with more than 750 provisions of laws concerning national security and disclosure, most notably one that questioned Congress’s authority to limit coercive interrogation tactics. And the administration has claimed that the president’s war powers give him the authority to detain people indefinitely and deny them access to lawyers and the courts, a policy that it would later be forced to modify in response to legal challenges.

....

As Mr. Schwarz and Mr. Huq see it, the Bush White House’s “broader efforts to seize unfettered control of national security policy and to eliminate the checks and balances imposed by Congress and the courts” is exemplified by its post 9/11 decision “to ignore legal constraints on torture.” In February of 2002 President Bush signed an order declaring that “none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world,” a decision that would set the nation on a slippery slope toward torture, leading to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and other United States-run prisons.

....

“Making the executive supreme makes the nation no safer — either from its enemies or its own worse impulses,” the authors conclude. “Indeed, the abiding genius of the Founding Generation was its rejection of the idea that unchecked unilateral power is ever properly vested in any one branch of government. Our government was framed ‘to control itself,’ as James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers. ‘Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.’ Dividing powers between three branches, the Founders harnessed human passions in the cause of limited government. Madison, again writing in the Federalist Papers, provided the enduring explanation for this division of government: ‘The accumulation of all power, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.’ ”

In the US, checks and balances take the form of multiple branches of government and regularly scheduled elections. While no system is perfect, at least Americans know that there is a definite date when the worst president in US history, the second man in history to obtain the office without winning an election, will step down and be replaced. What will come next can only be an improvement, even if the election winner is Scott Baio or a Waring blender.

Hong Kong is yet to be in a position to have that kind of optimism. It will be decades before Beijing and the landlords allow true democracy here.

(which is the Mansun song currently playing)

A month or so ago, I was dating this woman, I'd really liked her and saw some real possibilities. But after four dates, she said she was very busy with family and business responsibilities and that it was not a good time for her. She said she'd contact me again in awhile, but I figured that was her way of letting me down easy.

Yesterday, out of the blue, an SMS from her saying she was returning from a business trip, wanted to take a short weekend vacation, and did I want to go somewhere with her? As you can guess, that put a smile upon my face.

I reviewed the options with her. She liked one but said it was too expensive for her. I offered to pay. She said she didn't want me to do that for her, that she would think about it.

One day later, a message - too expensive, she's going to spend the weekend visiting friends in Shanghai, another time perhaps.

(now it's Wide Open Space, is there a Mansun song for every mood and tale?)

Tonight, dinner with someone I'd dated a couple of years ago and hadn't seen in almost a year. Mainland Chinese woman with a PhD, 20 years younger than me. After dinner, as we sat in a bar chatting, I knew that she was open to resuming the relationship. Instead, we said good night. I knew that in this case there's no going back and that the end would be the same as it was last time.

(okay, Stripper Vicar isn't quite a fit)

And also this week an email from the mainland TV star I was dating 2 and a half years ago, bringing me up to date on her life and telling me how much she misses me.

And also this week, connected with a former co-worker from more than a decade ago on LinkedIn, someone I all but proposed to not knowing she was in a relationship at the time.

What a funny week, huh? Too much looking back, not enough looking ahead.

By the way, it's extremely possible that At My Age by Nick Lowe is the best album I've heard so far this year.

A new blog toy comes out, everyone jumps on it, me too!

Mingle² - Online Dating

Yes, I'm not as naughty as Expat@Large. (That's because this toy is rating stuff based on the presence of cuss words; it cannot evaluate actual content.)

By X. Or there's 4th of July, Asbury Park by Springsteen. Take yer pick.

So many SMS messages today, coming at the same time, from several different people. I hope I kept it all straight and sent the right replies to the right people. Some were from people I hadn't expected to hear from again and put me in a pretty nice mood.

Slight chance of going away for the weekend though destination not confirmed. Business trip to Manila next week.

Another minor annoyance. In iTunes, when I put a new album in, I preface the album title with a *. This way, in both iTunes and on my iPod, when I look at albums, all the new stuff is on top. Version 7.3, released to accommodate the iPhone, changes the alpha sorting and this non-alphanumeric character is now ignored. So I have to go through and change all the *'s to something like AAA to make it sort in the oddball fashion I prefer.

In really important news, Padma Lakshmi, former model and host of TV's Top Chef, has asked Salman Rushdie for a divorce and he has said okay. I like that he's about 3 feet tall, balding and a sloppy beard and 23 years older than her and when they got married everyone asked HIM why her. Duh. He gave a lot of interviews at the time saying she wasn't just beautiful, she was also smart and nice. Anyone got her mobile number?

The Blackstone Group, a private equity firm, has purchased the Hilton Hotels for $26 BILLION dollars. Then asked for their money back when they realized Paris Hilton isn't included in the deal.

Lead article in HK Standard today claims that in 1989, following the June 4th MASSACRE, a group of HK businessmen approached Beijing and offered to lease HK from China for 10 years for HK$10 billion. Even adjusted for inflation, that sorta makes the value of HK less than the value of the Hilton Hotels, doesn't it? China turned them down and the businessmen ended up getting to run HK for free.

Watched Dreamgirls again last night, this time on Blu-Ray. It's really a lot better the second time, when one watches it with lowered expectations and tries not to think about the fictionalized history that makes up most of its story. And having sex halfway through it.

More to come but gotta head out for dinner now ...

I suppose (some) people are expecting me to weigh in on the recent developments with Libby. Anyone who can claim to be surprised by this turn of events is living with their head down a well.

On the one hand, I think this is fair. Libby was working for the Dark Lord, just a minion following the Evil Orders of the Satanic One, and since he was chosen to be the fall guy and take one for the team, it's not right that he should get a vacation in a minimum security prison where he can play shuffleboard for two years.

On the other hand, well several interesting essays over at Huffington Post.

Paul Begala - George W. Bush Is One Tough Hombre:

Tough enough to execute Karla Fay Tucker -- and then laugh about it. Tough enough to sign a death warrant for a man whose lawyer slept through the trial -- and then snicker when asked about it in a debate. Even tough enough to execute a great-grandmother who murdered her husband -- after he abused her. A friend of mine at the time asked Bush to commute her sentence, telling him, "Betty Lou ain't a threat to no one she ain't married to." No dice.

Mr. Bush is tough enough to invade a country that was no risk to America, causing tens of thousands of civilian deaths and shedding precious American blood in the process. Tough enough to sanction torture. Tough enough to order an American citizen arrested and held without trial.

But if you're rich and right-wing and Republican, George is a real softie. As George W. Bush demonstrated in giving Scooter Libby a Get Out of Jail Free Card, he is only compassionate to conservatives.

Paul Abrams:

George Bush has commuted Libby's sentence so he does not serve jail time.

Democrats will waste their breath on attacking the commutation for all the wrong reasons, even if they are all true: questioning why he did not commute it to a shorter time if he thought the sentence was excessive; indicating the importance of perjury; complaining about unequal justice for those in high places; and the hypocrisy of the right-wing's "law-and-order" mantra.

In addition, despite all of Bush's protestations that he was not considering anything in the Libby case until its course had run, he seemed to have a completely vetted, lawyered, decision and statement ready on the day that course had run. He also said that he "had considered this decision carefully". Really? I thought he was fishing with Putin.

All true. But, all distracting the argument from the key point.

The right-wing will argue that Libby committed no underlying crime, that the trial should not have occurred, and the sentence was excessive. IGNORE THEM, too.

Bush commuted the sentence to prevent Libby from singing. That is the only part of this that is really important. The $250,000 fine remained in place because Libby will keep the lid on for that sum (and probably collect it from his friends).

We all know what he was going to sing about, the Cheney plan to discredit and exact revenge on the Wilsons, because he was unable to refute the truth of the claim that he had hyped the nuclear threat. It would not be surprising if the 16 words in the President's State of the Union were put back by Cheney after having been removed by the CIA.

and especially Tony Hendra - War Criminal Commutes Sentence of Convicted Perjurer at Behest of Traitor:

Honor among liars, killers -- and thieves.

Forget the carefully measured, judicious judicial analyses. Here's what actually went on today. George Bush who has so far been directly responsible for the deaths of at least two hundred thousand of his fellow human beings (that was the most reliable count more than a year ago) is a mass-murderer. That's letting him off the hook for the close to half a million lives lost in the civil war he set in motion. And it doesn't even count the most important figure of all: the 3500-plus incalculably precious lives of our children, which he's squandered with his bare-faced lies and whom he refuses to stop sending to their deaths because then he would lose face, the poor thing.

This gutless coward who deserves to spend the rest of his worthless life in a 23-hour lockdown has just set free a convicted perjurer. For the buzz of the drug called power, aforementioned perjuring reptile did anything for his master however immoral, unconstitutional and criminal, but just like they got Al Capone for taxes, The Man got him on a technicality: lying under oath. (You know that thing his fellow mobsters impeached Bill Clinton for).

But this was no ordinary lie under oath. It was a coverup for his employer who is almost certainly a textbook traitor. That's not polemic overstatement. Just to drive this home one more time: revealing a covert CIA agent's identity is treason. It's treason because it gives aid and comfort to the enemy by informing him that all the other people that person has dealings with may be threats to him. Especially in time of war, a state in which according the Banana Republican junta, we are currently residing. For ordinary people this treason would be punishable by death and few would complain.

Which brings us to the main event: a sack of moral sewage called Richard Cheney.

The angry white whales of the troglosphere can huff and puff all they want about outing a covert agent being no big deal. (Chiefly no doubt because it was a Girl - you know not a real covert agent like one of those cool guys in Ludlum novels). But that's what Richard Cheney did: the five time draft-dodger, the flesh-eating military-corporate parasite Eisenhower warned us about, the snarling hate-mongering flag-waving terror-gogue, stabbed a fellow-member of the national security establishment in the back during time of war. And did so never forget, to save his own soft, white, muscle-free hide.

Like George Orwell said: to see what's in front of one's nose, needs constant struggle.

The major record companies seem to only be able to alienate their customers. They make one error after another. Suing their customers. Raising prices. Releasing garbage. Focusing on one-off hit singles rather than building long term artistic careers. The list goes on. They're so stupid, one suspects Dick Cheney sits on their boards of directors.

According to a report in the NY Times, the Universal Music Group (UMG), the largest record company in the world, told Apple last week that they will not renew their annual contract to sell their digital music through the iTunes store. They are not happy about the 99 cent per song pricing. They want to charge higher prices.

Not only is Apple the largest seller of digital music in the world, they are the third largest seller of music in the United States (following Wal-Mart and Best Buy). UMG receives 15 percent of its gross income from digital music sales, and you can bet that the lion's share of that comes from iTunes.

Presumably UMG is hoping to stimulate competition in the marketplace. But what results can they seriously expect? If they put their stuff on the Zune store at $1.29 per song, do they really think that people will sell off their iPods and buy Zunes so that they can get at this stuff?

One could make the argument that the EU is making, that iTunes software is anticompetitive, that other stores should be able to sell music that will work on the iPod, and that's a valid argument.

But I don't think UMG's way to go up against this is the right way. I think it's going to simply further encourage piracy.

From Reuters:

A peacock that roamed into a fast-food restaurant parking lot was attacked by man who vilified the bird as a vampire, animal-control authorities said.

Beaten so fiercely that most of his tail feathers fell out, the bird was euthanized, said Richard Gentles, a spokesman for the city's Center for Animal Care and Control.

This attacker got away so his identity is not known. I suspect it was Dick Cheney. When Dick Cheney sees beauty, he thinks "destroy."

Also from Reuters:

Yes, folks, Captain America is dead and buried in the latest issue of Marvel Comics' ''Fallen Son,'' due on newsstands the morning after Independence Day. After 66 years of battling villains from Adolf Hitler to the Red Skull, the red, white and blue leader of the Avengers was felled by an assassin's bullet on the steps of a New York federal courthouse.

He was headed to court after refusing to sign the government's Superhero Registration Act, a move that would have revealed his true identity. A sniper who fired from a rooftop was captured as police and Captain America's military escort were left to cope with chaos in the streets.

Probably the sniper was also Dick Cheney. When Dick Cheney sees a symbol of freedom and valor, he thinks "destroy."

One of the things about the iPhone is that right now, it's a closed system. Any additional "applications" you want to run are run off the web, through its browser. It's a shame that AT&T's mobile internet access is so slow.

But it's remarkable to note that all of AT&T's service plans for this phone include unlimited internet usage. The cheapest plan - which includes 450 minutes of talk time, 200 SMS messages, 5000 nights and weekends minutes (if I'm reading this correctly), unlimited calling to other phones on the same network (again, if I'm reading this correctly) and unlimited data costs US$60, or under HK$500. I don't know of any HK mobile company that's offering a similar rate plan.

In Hong Kong, two of the major mobile networks (3 and Orange) are owned by Li Ka Shing. His son, Richard Li, owns PCCW and Sunday.

CSL and One2Free are jointly owned by Telstra and New World, a Hong Kong property developer.

SmarTone-Vodafone is owned by Sun Hung Kai.

In other words, all of the major players in the mobile market are either entirely or partially owned by property developers. Big surprise there, eh?