Hongkie Town

Latest BC column now online here.

We knew it was bad but did we know it was this bad?

At the very outset of the occupation, when L. Paul Bremer was installed as head of the CPA, one of his first brilliant ideas for managing the country was to have $12 billion in cash flown into Baghdad on huge wooden pallets and stored in palaces and government buildings. To pay contractors, he'd have agents go to the various stashes -- a pile of $200 million in one of Saddam's former palaces was watched by a single soldier, who left the key to the vault in a backpack on his desk when he went out to lunch -- withdraw the money, then crisscross the country to pay the bills. When desperate auditors later tried to trace the paths of the money, one agent could account for only $6,306,836 of some $23 million he'd withdrawn. Bremer's office "acknowledged not having any supporting documentation" for $25 million given to a different agent. A ministry that claimed to have paid 8,206 guards was able to document payouts to only 602. An agent who was told by auditors that he still owed $1,878,870 magically produced exactly that amount, which, as the auditors dryly noted, "suggests that the agent had a reserve of cash."

In short, some $8.8 billion of the $12 billion proved impossible to find. "Who in their right mind would send 360 tons of cash into a war zone?" asked Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. "But that's exactly what our government did."

and

The system not only had the advantage of eliminating red tape in a war zone, it also encouraged the "entrepreneurship" of patriots like Custer and Battles, who went from bumming cab fare to doing $100 million in government contracts practically overnight. And what business they did! The bid that Custer claimed to have spent "three sleepless nights" putting together was later described by Col. Richard Ballard, then the inspector general of the Army, as looking "like something that you and I would write over a bottle of vodka, complete with all the spelling and syntax errors and annexes to be filled in later." The two simply "presented it the next day and then got awarded about a $15 million contract."

The deal charged Custer Battles with the responsibility to perform airport ­security for civilian flights. But there were never any civilian flights into Baghdad's airport during the life of their contract, so the CPA gave them a job managing an airport checkpoint, which they failed miserably. They were also given scads of money to buy expensive X-ray equipment and set up an advanced canine bomb-sniffing system, but they never bought the equipment. As for the dog, Ballard reported, "I eventually saw one dog. The dog did not appear to be a certified, trained dog." When the dog was brought to the checkpoint, he added, it would lie down and "refuse to sniff the vehicles" -- as outstanding a metaphor for U.S. contractor performance in Iraq as has yet been produced.

Like most contractors, Custer Battles was on a cost-plus arrangement, which means its profits were guaranteed to rise with its spending. But according to testimony by officials and former employees, the partners also charged the government millions by making out phony invoices to shell companies they controlled. In another stroke of genius, they found a bunch of abandoned Iraqi Airways forklifts on airport property, repainted them to disguise the company markings and billed them to U.S. tax­payers as new equipment. Every time they scratched their asses, they earned; there was so much money around for contractors, officials literally used $100,000 wads of cash as toys. "Yes -- $100 bills in plastic wrap," Frank Willis, a former CPA official, acknowledged in Senate testimony about Custer Battles. "We played football with the plastic-wrapped bricks for a little while."

The Custer Battles show only ended when the pair left a spreadsheet behind after a meeting with CPA officials -- a spreadsheet that scrupulously detailed the pair's phony invoicing. "It was the worst case of fraud I've ever seen, hands down," says Grayson. "But it's also got to be the first instance in history of a defendant leaving behind a spreadsheet full of evidence of the crime."

But even being the clumsiest war profit­eers of all time was not enough to bring swift justice upon the heads of Mr. Custer and Mr. Battles -- and this is where the story of America's reconstruction effort gets really interesting. The Bush administration not only refused to prosecute the pair -- it actually tried to stop a lawsuit filed against the contractors by whistle-blowers hoping to recover the stolen money.

Full article here.

Here is the full text of a letter in the current issue of HK Magazine:

I'm all for former security chief Regina Ip if she were to run for the Legco by-election. Mrs. Ip has been my idol since 2003 - we might have hated her introduction of Article 23 but at least she stood up for her boss. She's a good spirit and a good role model for Hong Kong people. We need actual intellectual stimulation in this otherwise super-dull society.

So you hated Article 23 but think she should be a leader because she blindly followed someone else's orders. (To be fair, the writer may have written a longer letter that made more sense and it might have been edited down to just the above. He might have referenced her paper on democracy or perhaps her latest hair style.)

Of course, by that logic, probably the US - where the majority now vote based on sound bites and image and debate on actual issues is a thing of the past - may not be ready for democracy either.

While I'm coping with this hard disk mess (thanks for that tip on Drobo, anon, looks interesting), various distractions of one type or another ....

* September 5 - Apple's "special event" during which they are expected to announce new iPods. Various shots purported to be the next generation Nano have appeared on the different gadget blogs but that's not of any interest to me. I'm hoping for a 6th gen iPod and that it will have the same large touchscreen as the iPhone.

* Finished off the first season of 30 Rock. That show just seemed to continually improve throughout the season. Now I'm watching Damages but not sure why. I probably should be paying attention to Mad Men or Masters of Science Fiction instead.

Also finally catching up with Two and a Half Men, as previously mentioned. If you've never seen it, here's the deal.

You've got Charlie Sheen as a guy who makes a great living writing TV jingles. He lives in a beach house in Malibu and lives a life of one night stands with beautiful women.

In moves his brother, Jon Cryer, a nerdy chiropractor, wound up a bit too tight, tossed out by his wife who may or may not be in the process of becoming a lesbian. Cryer has weekend custody of his 10 year old kid (who, thankfully, always acts like a 10 year old kid, not some super precocious TV kid).

Then there's their mother, played by the great Holland Taylor. And their housekeeper, played by the equally great Conchata Ferrell. And a woman who lives down the beach who slept with Charlie once and has been stalking him ever since. And a succession of beautiful women for Sheen.

Basically it's the Odd Couple updated to the 00s. My favorite bit is an episode in which Sheen explains that when someone tells him they want something, his standard answer is "I understand," which people interpret as yes, but which really means "I understand that's what you want, doesn't mean I feel like doing it." I'm gonna start using that.

And one episode had Megan Fox running around in tight little shorts and a bikini. Cannot complain about that.




* In other TV news, Entourage wraps up its season in another week or two. And the week after that is the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Yeah!

* Finally watched Spider-man 3 last night. As comic book movies go, I wasn't expecting to like it at all and wound up not loving the film but enjoying it more than I expected and staying awake through the whole thing. But let's face it, Bruce Campbell's brief role runs away with the entire film; they could have done two hours in that restaurant and I wouldn't have minded. Too bad I hear he's not interested in the Bubba Ho-tep sequel.

* 2 or 3 times a week I have lunch at East End Brewery. So the whole staff knows me there. I can smoke, read the paper, chill for an hour or so. I enjoy it. They've had a revolving succession of waitresses. Mostly Filipino. Mostly average in looks, but always nice. I haven't shaved in about a week. Yesterday one of the newer waitresses came up to me and said, "excuse me sir, can I touch?" and started running her fingers across my cheek. I did not mind this at all.

* Senator Larry Craig. How do the Republicans manage to do this so consistently? A family values man who has voted against every gay rights provision that's come his way gets arrested for soliciting gay sex in a toilet, PLEADS GUILTY, and now is trying to back his way out of that one. A Senator, an educated man who is supposed to be expert in our legal system, says his only mistake was pleading guilty, that he thought that would make it go away? And we're supposed to buy that?

The best bit is that he started off a press conference this week by saying, "Thank you all very much for coming out today."

* As you may have already noted, Hilly Krystal died yesterday, less than a year after the closing of his club. The founder and owner of CBGB's in New York, his bar provided a green field for groups like Talking Heads, Television, Blondie, Ramones, Patti Smith and so many, many others to start, play, develop their sounds, revolutionize popular music.

I only met him a few times, back in the early 80s when I was managing a few bands that never went anywhere. The routine was always the same - I'd go down to the Bowery, play him a cassette and as long as it didn't suck he'd take out the schedule there and then and schedule a slot for the band. In my dealings with him he was always straight up, honest, no bullshit.

* Check out this jacket:


It has 39 pockets. It has a "Personal Area Network" (so that cables for things like headphones are already wired throughout the jacket. Normally US$250, right now US$200. Ultimate geek and yet, in the photo at least, it doesn't look at all geeky.

Great. Just fucking great.

So I spend from Friday through Wednesday copying files from DVD-Rs onto the Maxtor drive. I followed the advice of a commenter and disabled caching, "optimized for quick removal."

And then tonight, while in the middle of copying yet another disk, the computer decides to reboot.

Yes. That's right. The computer reboots. I check the drive. First, chkdsk bombs out. Then I look at disk properties and it tells me that there are 292 gigs of data on the drive. Then I look in file explorer and it can only see approximately 32 gigs of the data.

Yes, the indexes are corrupted again.

Yes, in terms of what the drive can "see" it is back at exactly the same place it was on Friday when I started restoring data again.

This never fucking happens on the Stardom box. It has now happened three times on the Maxtor box.

At this point I am thinking about buying another Stardom box, cracking open the Maxtor box and removing the drives and putting them into the other box.

The emails I received from Seagate tech support were absolutely useless. I called their support hotline in the US (using Skype), after 15 minutes got connected to their support desk in India and the guy spent more time trying to correctly spell my name and email address than in offering solutions for the problem - to whit, send the drive to Seagate data recovery, they will recover the data, return the drive, I should reformat the drive and start again. Why does this keep happening? Um, er, uh, reformat the drive and start again?

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An article in the NY Times on some of the great places to get fried clams in the US. "To many New Englanders the humble clam, which stars in chowders, clambakes and clam cakes, reaches its quintessence when coated and fried."

When I lived in the US, frozen fried clams were my I'm-too-lazy-to-cook foods, always kept a bunch of boxes of them in the freezer.

In HK, in 10 years I have never found this on the menu in any restaurant here and have never spotted the frozen variety in any supermarket.

Just like I've never been able to find chicken fried steak here.

My life is so tragic.

The same woman was the inspiration to the lyrics of these two songs:

Something in the way she moves
Attracts me like no other lover
Something in the way she woos me

I don't want to leave her now
You know I believe her now

and

I tried to give you consolation
When your old man had let you down.
Like a fool, I fell in love with you,
Turned my whole world upside down.

Layla, you've got me on my knees.
Layla, I'm begging, darling please.
Layla, darling won't you ease my worried mind.

Yes, that's right, Pattie Boyd, who was married to George Harrison and then left him and married his best friend, Eric Clapton.

Boyd's written her autobiography, Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Me. The NY Times review isn't too complimentary of her (ghostwriter's) bland style but says it does contain some good insights into her relationships.

I think I'll wait until October, when Eric Clapton's autobiography, intriguingly titled Clapton: The Autobiography, is published. The Publishers Weekly summary at Amazon says:

Readers hoping for sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll won't be disappointed by the legendary guitarist's autobiography. As he retraces every step of his career, from the early stints with the Yardbirds and Cream to his solo successes, Clapton also devotes copious detail to his drug and alcohol addictions, particularly how they intersected with his romantic obsession with Pattie Boyd.

I remember working backstage at a Clapton show in Boston circa 1974. His dressing room was stocked with cases - CASES - of booze. And once he hit the stage, we figured he wouldn't notice if just a little bit went missing .....

And Keef's autobiography isn't that far off, in the cosmic scheme of things.

I get about 50 spam emails a day at work, another 100+ per day across my various email accounts. Some are trying to sell me stuff. Some are hoping to install viruses on my PC.

!Do you want rolex or other brander watch under 250?

accelerate there's a fairly wide range of normal pen_is sizes

are you confident in bed?

are you insecure?

are you kidding me?

can you imagine that you are healthy?

can you tell me what's wrong, and how we can fix it?

customers alert, new pharma site is realized!

dude don't send that stuff to my home email

dude your gonna get caught, lol

thanks you, we accepted your business loan request

how did you get that on film, man?

I just started dating a guy I like but his pecker is on the small side

Last chance to supercharge your performance

LOL, dude what are you doing

YourPenis 3-inches longer and thicker, girl will love you fly

man, who filmed this thing?

My boyfriend's penis is too big for my mouth

oh man your nutz

readable top stories for the tag "p_enis" voted on by you!

ROTFLMAO, who is that your with?

I want sale you Rolex Sold Out

Thanks, 4 girls from our site want to meet you

truly the ultimate guide to p en_is size

and on and on and on, day after day after motherfucking day.

I'm tired of living all alone
yeah, nobody ever calls me on the phone
But when, ah, things start getting bad, ah
I just play my music louder

I can't stand it anymore more
I can't stand it anymore more
I can't stand it anymore more
I can't stand it, I can't stand it, oh
I can't stand it, I can't stand it
I can't stand it, I can't stand it, no
I can't stand it, I can't stand it, oh
I can't stand it, I can't stand it
I can't stand it, I can't stand it
I can't stand it, I can't stand it
I can't stand it, I can't stand it

Last night had one of those dinners that was just perfect. A business associate in town who always takes me to some fabulous places when I visit him. So I brought him to Toscana at the Ritz Carlton. In my 10 years here, I'd never eaten there, and time is running out on this building, so while it's not quite now or never, the clock is ticking.

The room itself is a large room, classically decorated, making you feel as if you're in a dining room in Italy. Despite the size of the room, the tables are widely spaced, so even full, it's quiet, peaceful, leave the world outside the door.

The menu - doesn't happen to me very often but this was one of those occasions where everything on the menu was my favorite. I was killing myself trying to make any decision because I wanted it all. We put ourselves in the hands of the maitre d'.

The amuse was simple, a perfect tiny tomato and some cheese, which went well with a couple of glasses of Veuve.

My friend and I ordered the same starter, which was actually from the pasta list rather than the starters, an amazingly good spaghettini with crab and tomato. The pasta was perfectly al dente. A bottle of French chardonnay went so nicely with this.

For the main course, my friend had to order the veal chop as soon as he heard it was Dutch veal. In my case, I hadn't had steak since before my operation and figured it was time - U.S. sirloin, with a sauce that included anchovies and olives, if memory serves, some whipped something, some baby asparagus. Together with a bottle of shiraz, at this point my memory starts fading and the details are weak.

They brought out a small dessert platter for us, 8 small bites. This included a thank you card - white chocolate inscribed with dark chocolate, thanking me by name for coming there.

Since I didn't see the wine list (my friend is expert, I'm not) or the final bill, I can only guess at the cost - I'm thinking somewhere in the $3-4,000 range for the two of us. Well worth it.

I guess the building will be torn down in another year or so. The Ritz will move over to the ICC when it opens. Another landmark HK building will be gone. Another office tower will go up in its place.

I still miss the old Hilton Hotel, replaced by the soulless Cheung Kong Centre. And that revolving restaurant at the top of the old Furama was a great place to bring tourists, now it's that ugly AIG building.

Do you remember the past, Dr. Memory? Do you remember the future? Why does the porridge bird lay its eggs in the air?

Well, it seems like both of the programs I was trying last night would work. But Virtual Lab has this obscene pricing - US$40 to recover 100 meg or unlimited for US$200, whereas R-Studio was US$50 for unlimited recovery on NTFS drives. It took 14 hours to scan the drive and now it's cranking through restoring files.

I stayed up late, watching some of the bonus features on the Inland Empire disc - considering that Mulholland Drive didn't even have chapter stops or a trailer on it, the second disc on Inland Empire has some really wonderful stuff. I'm not really sure how much insight I'm gaining into the film itself but learning a lot about Lynch.

Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive remain two of my favorite films, the first for the Roy Orbison song and Dennis Hopper's over-the-top performance, the second for the way the final third of the film just falls off the edge of the earth and takes place in a completely different time space continuum.

Well, other critics have noted that Inland Empire is 3 hours of stuff like the final third of Mulholland. To me it seems like 5 completely different films that have been randomly cut together. Some of them star the same actors, one is filmed in Poland and in the Polish language. And then there is the room with the giant rabbits in suits (voiced by Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, among others) and its sitcom laugh track.

This was shot on digital video over three years. Actors never knew which scene came before the one they were filming or what would come after. They had no context into which to place their performances.

How does this all come together? How is one supposed to make any sense of it all? I don't know. But as always, the images Lynch puts on screen are so compelling that I never felt like giving up on the film. And Laura Dern's performance is jaw-dropping in its courage. Seeing as how this film does not have major studio backing and made about 37 cents at the box office, I don't expect to see her name on Oscar night, but she certainly deserves it.

After that, after dealing with the complexity of that film and the anguish and suspense of restoring my hard disk, I wanted something relatively brainless. And so I watched several episodes of a sitcom called Two and A Half Men. And I was surprised to find that it's actually very funny in spots. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that a friend from my early days, Eddie Gorodetsky, is one of the writers and producers.

One of Eddie's credits is not in the imdb listing linked above. Many, many years ago, for some bizarre reason, Joe Franklin decided to devote an entire episode of his show to the J. Geils Band. They told Franklin that they were going to quit music and become entymologists and then brought out their guru, Eddie, and told Franklin that he was Professor Igor O'Detsky (get it?). He then riffed on bugs for 5 minutes while Franklin sat there speechless. I think I have this lying around on VHS somewhere.

Slept until 1, walked the dogs, probably go out for dinner somewhere after the dogs get their dinner and 6 PM walk.

So one of my external drives is this Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition, 1.5 terabytes, running in RAID1 configuration, connected to the PC via USB. It's finicky as fuck and I hate it.

For one thing, my Stardom RAID box seems quite resilient. Switch it on, switch it off, it's there, it works. But apparently the Maxtor wants you to go through the whole unmounting process before hitting the power switch. Except thanks to Windows, every time I click on "stop" the device, I'm told it's busy or being used by some process and so Windows cannot stop it. (What can Windows do?) (Wondering - would I get more reliability if I used the SATA connection instead of the USB? Will have to try it and see.)

So on one of these power downs, indexes got fucked up. The corrupted indexes then got copied over to the mirror drive, making a large portion of the data unavailable. I ended up copying off all of the data I could, reformatting the drive, and starting over again. I'm guessing I lost between 50 and 100 gigs or so, the rest vaguely recoverable.

A large part of the data was sitting on about 100 DVD-Rs that hadn't been thrown out yet. So it was simply a time-consuming matter of copying them back to the drive, sorting through the files, eliminating duplications, etc. Which I spent the large part of yesterday and today doing.

Tonight, left the drives running, though they weren't doing anything. Went into another room and watched Inland Empire. Three hours later, scratching my head and wondering, "what the fuck did I just watch and was it the best thing I ever saw or the worst," I returned to the PC, only to find that it had rebooted itself. "Windows has recovered from a major system error," the screen said.

I knew what that could mean and I immediately checked the Maxtor box. Fucked again. 150 gig of data on the box but Windows Explorer only sees 32 of it. Everything I did on it from the time I last powered it up is hidden behind corrupted indexes. I'm not talking about stuff from the last 30 minutes. I'm talking TWO DAYS worth of work! About 1,000 albums worth of MP3s.

This time rather than give up and start over, I'm trying out two different data recovery programs - R-Studio and VirtualLab. Each of them is going to take hours to run. If either of them can find everything, I'll buy one.

DiskWarrior would fix the disk in seconds. If the disc was not formatted NTFS, which it is, of course.

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

This afternoon, walking around Wanchai, hungry. Decide I want to go someplace other than my usual pitstop. On the corner of Johnston Road and Fleming Road, some shopping mall that has branches of two Singapore chains - Crystal Jade and Sakae Sushi. I'm thinking xiao long bao but I pass the sushi joint first and so I go in there.

3 in the afternoon, they're freaking sold out of tuna. I have never in my life been in any sort of sushi restaurant that managed to sell out of maguro. I would hope they were getting another delivery before dinner. This is not some local fly by night chop shop. This is a chain that has branches in 7 countries. How do they run out of their most popular item?

So I ordered three dishes. Their cooked dishes are actually reasonably cheap. Ebi tempura - reasonably okay. Tonkatsu - terrible, breading was too heavy and thick, sauce way too salty. The third dish - I forget now what it was but it turns out they were sold out on that too. And they never bothered to inform me until I had to ask someone where it was. I paid for the two dishes I got and left, disgusted. What a bush league operation.

Yeah, I know, all the conveyor belt sushi joints in HK suck. I get what I deserve for even going into one. Thank goodness I'm probably going to Tokyo in two weeks and can get some decent raw fish into my mouth then.

P.S. If anyone likes the US burger chain Fatburger, they're opening up their first HK outlet shortly. Queens Road East, Wanchai, in the new unnecessary tower across the street from Hopewell Centre.

Feeling blah all week, got a screw loose, just can't get into anything.

One personal note - generally at work, I like greenfield situations. I've built my teams from the ground up. And usually I don't stay at jobs too long, so I leave before anyone I've hired has a chance to resign. I've had very few people resign on me in the 21 years I've been in my current line of work. But I've been at my current job for six years now, which means most of my staff has been with me for four or five years. So the law of averages has caught up and have just had my second staff resignation in 3 months. This guy is a real character and I'm trying to tell him that his next employer won't be as tolerant of his idiosyncrasies as I have been, but he can't see that because of the dollar signs in front of his eyes.

Plus I had an unexpected disk crash. Unexpected because it was a RAID 1 unit. But apparently the indexes got screwed up on several directories, did not get detected by the diagnostic software provided my Maxtor, and these errors got copied to the mirror disk as well. The majority of the data is recoverable via other means but in the end I'll probably end up losing around 50 gigs worth of stuff.

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

Coming from New York, I have never liked Rudolph Giuliani. I thought he was a showboating priss as district attorney and a horrible mayor bordering on the insane. And now for some reason he's considered the front runner for the Republican nomination for president. He has just published a huge foreign policy statement. In the 6th paragraph of this giant sized document, he manages to say something that ensures that I will never vote for him:

At the core of all Americans is the belief that all human beings have certain inalienable rights that proceed from God but must be protected by the state.

And on the second page, he writes something that tells me he is truly delusional:

America must remember one of the lessons of the Vietnam War. Then, as now, we fought a war with the wrong strategy for several years. And then, as now, we corrected course and began to show real progress. Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we and our South Vietnamese partners had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency and in setting South Vietnam on a path to political self-sufficiency. But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South.

Found the following MSNBC/Newsweek article via BoingBoing. Were it not on MSNBC/Newsweek I would think it was a hoax along the lines of the cardboard pork buns story. I'm still not entirely sure this is true.

China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation."

If true, I just love the fact that a nation as huge, influential and rich as China could still be so terrified of one man.

Thirty years ago Neil Young was gonna release an album called Chrome Dreams, but he never did. Most of the songs ended up spread across other records, and various bootleg versions of Chrome Dreams appeared during ensuing years. Now, unless he changes his mind, end of October a new album called Chrome Dreams II. Billboard notes two extended tracks, one running 13 minutes, one running 18 and a half minutes.

The Eagles, a group I've alternately loved and hated, have a new album due out and it's their first studio album in 28 years. It's gonna be called Long Road Out of Eden, it will probably sell shitloads.

Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello are teaming up for a 13 city tour in the U.S. in the fall. Maybe I will go visit my mother after all cause neither of 'em are gonna make it here any time soon.

For something a bit older, click here to download a soundboard tape of Frank Sinatra performing live in Hong Kong in 1962.

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

In the Hi Def war, Paramount and Dreamworks have announced that they will no longer support the Blu-Ray format. They released in both formats in the past but are dropping Blu-Ray and will be HD-DVD only. Rumor has it that Paramount is receiving $150 million in promotional incentives from Toshiba and other members of the HD group.

The past few months have seen Blu-Ray take the lead in sales and one or two major chains in the US announce they were going to go Blu-Ray only.

As always, the loser is the consumer. In case you didn't know, when the DVD was being developed, there were also two competing formats. Warren Lieberfarb, at the time president of Warner Home Video, managed to convince the other studios to throw their support behind Toshiba's format. And as you probably do know, the DVD is considered one of the great consumer electronics success stories of the past 25 years or so, due to its rapid acceptance by the public.

There were two competing formats for laser video discs and that never caught on globally. Ditto two competing formats for high end audio discs - SACD and DVD-A, both of which seem dead now. And everyone knows about the VHS/Beta war. I think that's one reason Sony didn't back down on Blu-Ray - they're probably still licking their wounds from losing with Beta, SACD and their own proposed DVD format, let alone ATRAC as a replacement for MP3. Confusion over two competing HD formats is no doubt hurting acceptance of them.

I've got both formats at home via the XBOX 360 and PS3. I have the older XBOX 360, not the new Elite version that has HDMI and can output 1080p rather than 1080i, not that I think I could tell the difference. But when a disc comes out in both HD formats and the features/extras are the same, I tend to go for Blu-Ray because of that "p." Since I'm not into playing video games I think it's very possible I'll replace one or both of these boxes with dedicated disc players once we hit the third generation of machines and prices have further dropped.

There is a combo player from LG that handles both formats, but it has not been certified by the HD-DVD group because it cannot handle HD's interactive features (which are available on only a tiny percentage of titles), and it costs more than the XBOX and PS3 combined. Samsung has a combo player coming out that supposedly will be fully certified for both formats.

The "reappearance" of Fumier on the internet is NOT the Fumier we all know and admire.

I don't think he will mind my saying that he canceled his account on Typepad. The name and URL have been grabbed by someone else.

A slight change to my blogger profile - yesterday marked 6 years since my return to HK; I've now been here for a total of ten years. The first four years don't count towards attaining permanent resident status since I left for almost two and a half years, so one more year to go for that.

Pruning down my RSS reader. 250 feeds in there means that once I start to fall behind, as I frequently do, I'm generally greeted with 5,000 or more unread items. First step - knocking down to just 150 feeds, almost done.

Next step - Gonna have to abandon Great News, I fear. As much as I prefer this desktop app to any of the online readers I've seen, the inability to sync between my desktop at home and laptop at work/on the road leads to too much wasted time. And the app is far too unstable, crashes way too often. I tried posting a note or two in their online forum, didn't get any response, time to go another way.

So what readers are readers of this blog using?

Last Friday was the 25th anniversary of the Compact Disc. It's had a good run but now is coughing up blood and wearing adult diapers. I'm expecting that pretty soon it will join JFK, Marilyn Monroe and audio cassettes in that secret home for the aged somewhere in Switzerland.

A member of my staff who usually knows about this sort of thing tells me that there's a shop somewhere in HK selling what they claim to be fully unlocked iPhones. They've done some sort of hardware mod to the sim slot that will allow it to work with any sim card. The price is said to be HK$16,000 (US$2,080). I'll pass, thank you very much.

Follow-up: A few weeks back, I'd mentioned having a less than satisfactory evening at Wanchai bar Canny Man. I do generally like the place and this experience wasn't so horrendous as to keep me from returning. However, I should note that the establishment's owner quickly emailed an apology to me. I particularly admired this portion of his email:

The Canny Man, being a comfortable bar in Wanchai albeit in a basement is very conscious that if customers go to the trouble of bringing themselves down then the onus is on us to ensure they have good service to encourage them to return

I know you won't believe it when I tell you that sometimes I'm just in the mood for a quiet, respectable bar where I can sit and have a conversation with a friend, but this is the truth. Canny Man is the first that comes to mind because they have these great big leather chairs and sofas that you can just sink into, as well as what I suspect is the largest selection of single malt whiskies in HK.

It might also be one of the best choices in Wanchai this week as I suspect it won't be filled with sailors on shore leave wearing those free ersatz Mexican hats they give out at Coyote - not that there's anything wrong with that.

Though in contrast, I'll mention that last night a friend needed to make a quick stop into Joe Bananas. Just past the bar on the end near the toilets is a sort of alcove with a padded bench. A young serviceman was sitting there, completely passed out. The floor in front of him was liberally covered with vomit. I'm not sure if it was his or not, I didn't stop to check. And anyway, as anyone who has ever watched Spinal Tap knows, you can't dust for vomit. Anyway, it had the appearance of having been there a long time and was getting tracked all over, everywhere. Simply put, the place was so packed and so busy that I don't think anyone noticed this on the floor or asked anyone from the staff to clean it up. My friend asked me if I wanted a drink and said to him, "I'm standing in vomit, what do you think?"

I don't expect to ever encounter an experience of this nature in the Canny Man. So perhaps that's a potential new slogan for them - "We don't make you stand in vomit when you want a drink."

Hey, whaddya want from me, I'm real tired today.

A moment of silence is in order as we observe the passing of yet another HK institution, the Fumier blog.

Wait a second, who made that sound? Oh, yes, of course, that's bad drivers in Hong Kong heaving a massive sigh of relief.

Finally offloaded pictures from camera to computer today.

First, an old graveyard tucked away behind Silom Road:


At night, elephants roam the city of Bangkok. Well, guys with elephants - they make their living by selling you bags of stuff to feed to the elephants. Exploitation? Not for me to say. What I especially like is that after you have emptied the plastic bag, you can hand it to the elephant, who will pass it to the guy sitting on his back.



Some shots of the Wora Bura resort south of Hua Hin.





Art for sale near the bar street in Hua Hin. This stuff was so godawful I can't imagine who would buy it. Marilyn Monroe looks about 60 years old in the painting in the center and I still can't figure out who the woman is supposed to be in the one lower left of Monroe.



This bar was so wrong for me on so many levels. Needless to say, I did not enter.



Irish bar in town. Figured shepherd's pie would be a good dish that wouldn't require much chewing. Their's seemed to be a pound of mashed potato and half an ounce of minced meat.



Walk around the bar area of Hua Hin and you'll see lots of these older buildings - and lots of sign for more pricey real estate for rich Thais and foreigners.




Bringing birds to the temple, I would guess. Pay some money, set a bird free, earn some karma.



Yes, that's right, a picture of me on my blog!


I loved this girl's ink.


Back to Bangkok, this site along Sukhumvit has been sitting unfinished for years - perhaps since '99? It's been sitting there so long there's a fricking tree growing out of the concrete.



The next two shots were taken with my phone. They look okay small, horrid on my PC's monitor. Anyway, as promised, here's the one that's NSFW, a ladyboy in Hua Hin who desperately wanted me to bring shim back to my hotel. Sorry Charlie, only the best tuna get to be Starfish.



And last but very far from least, Joy Wong at work in her tattoo shop. Sukhumvit Soi 5, directly opposite from Gullivers.


Here's the "om" she did for me:


And here's the sun/moon taken from a King Crimson cover that Jimmy did, which will obviously look much better once I get it filled in.


Yes, I know, it makes it easier to figure out who I am, should you see me in a bar or something. Whatever.

So, four titanium screws in my jaw and two tattoos later, I'm home.

They had some sort of international sports event in Bangkok that ended today, the 24th Universiade, whatever that is. So at the airport today, I ended up on an immigration line that was reserved just for athletes leaving the country. When you walked in to the immigration area, the line was marked with a stand-up cardboard rabbit holding a torch. I'm supposed to know what the fuck that means? There was no sign over the counter saying "athletes only" but when I got to the front of the line, the guy told me I had to go to another line. I said to him, there's no sign, there's nothing posted, I waited on this line for 15 minutes already, can't you just stamp my passport? What does a bunny holding a fucking torch mean? The guy wouldn't budge. I asked him for his name and he refused to give it to me. I was about to start screaming curses at him when I realized that the only result of that would be that I'd end up in the Bangkok Hilton, and I had no choice but to back down to this typical low life bureaucrat who was happy to have some authority for 5 minutes in his sad little life.

Now, when I fly Cathay, if economy is full, I generally get a free upgrade to business class. When I handed my boarding pass at the counter, they didn't run it through the machine, didn't check the list, and I figured okay, the flight's not full, it is what it is.

And when I got on the plane, it seemed like everyone had come on and that I was going to have my entire row empty and I thought, great, I can stretch out for the flight. And then another crush of people came on and the two seats next to me were taken. As I stood up to let the couple take their seats, I noticed in the row behind me a cute girl in tank top and shorts, sitting by herself. I figured, okay, once the doors are closed, I'll switch to that seat, one empty seat between us, I can stretch my legs if nothing else.

But people continued to come on board. The airplane was getting very full. And then the stewardess showed someone to my seat. Yes indeed, both of our boarding passes said 47C. She took my pass and went off. I knew that someone was getting an upgrade, but would it be me or that guy? I waited, trying not to let anticipation or hope build too much. She came back and yes, sure enough, told me I'd been upgraded. I smiled and said, I can live with that, gathered my stuff and settled into business class for the flight home.

And I'm really happy to be home, even though I'm always somewhat sad to depart Bangkok. This month, several chapters of my life closed, some new chapters have possibly been started, I'm anxious to see what comes next.

One hour till I have to check out from the hotel, approx 5 hours till my flight. I expect that with not much else to do, I will simply head to the airport early and hang out there. Though I suppose I could go for one more foot massage instead.

Last night, got the "om" tattoo from Joy and she did a real nice job of it. The examples of the character that she had in her books didn't resemble the ones I'd seen. Technology - used my phone to go to google to pull up the picture of the one I wanted. She drew it out in minutes and the tat took about half an hour, constrasting shades of blue. Before doing mine, she fixed a tattoo on my friend's ankle that looked like a blob before she started and was quite splendid 30 minutes later. "Hey, come on man, how long you know me? Don't you know how good I am?"

As anyone who has ever met her knows, and as almost everyone in Thailand knows, Joy is gay. Everyone in Thailand knows because she's been with the same woman for 6 years, a somewhat famous pop star here, so their pictures turn up in the gossip mags all the time. I'd had a few drinks last night, not enough to be really drunk, but apparently enough for me to go on for about ten minutes about relationships and how lucky Joy is to find someone and how impossible it all seems for me.

Anyway .....

It seems my two recent posts on food inspired even better posts from 962 and Private Beach. So while I'm sitting here doing nothing, Mythbusters on as background noise, I'll continue in that vein.

Many of you may not know that in the US, for the longest time, it was very difficult for Asians to emigrate to the US. And "chef" was not a skill deemed visa-worthy. Those Chinese who made it to the US were soon homesick for their comfort foods. But they were not trained in the kitchen and couldn't get the ingredients they could get back home. They did their best to reconstruct those dishes and eventually a new type of Chinese food was born, American Chinese food.

Growing up in the 50s and 60s, I had no idea about that. We went for "Chinese food" every week. Almost always the same restaurant, called Jade Garden, on Jerome Avenue under the El. And we ordered the same things every week. As a kid, I always had wonton soup, egg roll, barbecued spare ribs - none of which resemble the dishes you find in Asia. My parents would then have some chop suey and fried rice. I loved this stuff, never got tired of it.

In 1971, I made my first trip to London. One day, hungry for Chinese food, I went to London's Chinatown. As I studied the restaurant menus and looked through windows, I realized there was NOTHING that I recognized. Nonetheless, I picked a restaurant at random, picked some dishes at random, and found that they were quite tasty as well.

In the 70s, things opened up a bit in the US. Trained Chinese chefs were allowed to come over. We started to see words like "Hunan" and "Szechuan." Menus got larger, dishes got more varied and sometimes more authentic. Older and with money in my pocket, I had the means to go to New York's first Chinatown (it now has three) on a regular basis and explore menus.

In the 80s, I think, the first restaurant in Chinatown opened that had Peking Duck already made - every place else you had to order it 24 hours in advance. This place had lines out the door and down the street. Then-mayor Ed Koch was photographed there regularly. And wow, was it great.

At any rate, by the time I made it to HK in 95, I didn't have menu-shock. I'd been exposed to the real thing and knew what to expect. Though naturally what passes for "average" in HK was mostly superior to what was deemed "great" in New York.

But I do still miss the American Chinese food sometimes. Something else I miss - lots of Chinese restaurants in, er, dodgier areas of the city were sold to Hispanic immigrants and the Chinese owners moved on to "better" neighborhoods. The new owers added their own twists to the dishes and a new cuisine, Cuban Chinese, was born. Eventually of course it went upscale and downtown. And sometimes I miss that too.

One final note .... when I made my first trip to Beijing in 97, of course I was going to go for Peking Duck. The Lonely Planet book, at least back then, said that the duck always gets its revenge, and that foreigners who eat it for the first time always get sick. For me, it was true! We went to one of the branches of Quanjude (not the original) and got the Peking Duck and I stuffed myself silly and then had the screaming shits for the next three days. The next day we went out to the Great Wall and I was freaking dying the whole time. I would barely remember the experience if we hadn't taken a lot of pictures, and I was way too weak to do much walking or climbing. I later read that it wasn't the duck itself, it was something in the scallions or spring onions or whatever. A big bottle of immodium is a permanent part of my travel kit now. My attitude has become that I would rather have the experience of tasting something new, even if I get ill, rather than playing it safe and missing out.

A few years back, I was with a big group at the Soi 7 Seafood Market in Bangkok. One of the women insisted on ordering raw oysters and insisted that I have 3 or 4. The next day was the first time that I was so food poisoned that I was running a fever. I ended up at the emergency room at Bumrungrad.

I explained to the doctor how the prices at the more local Soi 7 Seafood Market were so much cheaper than at the very touristy one on Soi 24. He said, yeah, but if you add in the cost of the emergency room visit, don't you think Soi 24 is better? I asked how much he was going to charge me, did some quick calculations, and said, "No, Soi 7 still cheaper!"

Well, just one night left to my trip, back home late Saturday.

Today the stitches came out and I instantly felt 150% better. Have to return in December to complete the work but the most painful bits are done.

Found a decent Japanese restaurant along Silom - they did a nice rainbow roll with fresh avocado that worked nicely for me. Then a quick stop over at MBK. I got the DVD of a Thai concert that I think is the one they're always showing over at Thai Delight on Lockhart. Plus a couple of pairs of knock-off jeans with different designs by Ed Hardy on the back pockets. Then over to a friend's shop for a haircut.

With Jimmy Wong in Beijing, I can't finish off my King Crimson tattoo this trip. But I don't feel nice about asking someone else to color in what he started, I'll wait. I did talk to his daughter Joy last night about having her do something small for me and if she's not busy tonight perhaps I'll do that. I want an "om" ... somewhere ... not sure where ... combine with a yinyang maybe?

I've had better trips to Bangkok, I've had far worse ones. But today I'm feeling quite peaceful.

New BC column is up here. Not one of my best but it was written the day after my surgery, hopped up on painkillers. No, sadly, that doesn't mean it resembles a PKD short story, just some musings on tattoos.

The BC editor has also seen fit to publish a letter that was posted here as a comment in response to a previous column and blog post, in which the writer called me a "pedantic, white trash pseudo-intellectual bigot spouting hate-speech." I did not respond to the comment online here because I thought the writer was clearly a deranged troglodyte. Since it was going to be in print I wrote a short paragraph that runs under the letter in the magazine.

Thailand is a country of opposites and extremes, and none more so than at this current time.

On the one hand, it seems as if confidence in the economy is at an all time high. I always stay on Sukhumvit Soi 11, and this trip I see a new possibly-hip hotel has opened (Le Fenix or something like that), construction going on in two long-vacant lots along the street, there are some new beer bars, and a huge space that was empty forever is being transformed into a disco to compete with Bed and the other attractions along this street.

Then again, this Sunday is the referendum on a new Constitution. The last Constitution went into effect 10 years ago and seemed fine. The new one was put together by the military junta that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister. Yes, it's true that there were allegations of corruption and nepotism under Thaksin, but it seems almost trivial to note that generally military coups are not a good thing.

It's a dichotomy in and of itself that people who seized power through force are now going through this in an attempt to legitimize what they have done.

They are hoping for a big turnout for the vote. And in what cannot be seen as accidental, this week they issued yet another warrant calling for Thaksin's arrest.

There's also upcoming elections for the parliament. The Bangkok Post today speculates that Thaksin's old party may win up to 100 seats in the election. (No note in the article of what percentage of the total that might represent.)

At the same time, the NY Times mentions yesterday about the publication of a book of interviews with Thaksin written by a 32 year old Thai woman, ex-military, who supposedly camped outside of his London home until he'd grant the interviews. The book is said to be quite favorable to him. Officially it was pulled from publication after sales of a few thousand copies. Unofficially, who knows?

So what we are looking at here is some sort of possibility that the junta's Constitution will not pass and that they also may not win in the upcoming general election. I suppose that the news papers do not feel free to speculate as to what could happen if these events come to pass. Will this junta bow to the will of the people and step aside in that case? Or will they then attempt to maintain their hold on power by any means possible? And should that come to pass, what will the king do?

This is really a make or break time for Thailand. I'll be watching the news if only because, from a purely selfish perspective, I've been thinking about buying a place here but holding off because I simply don't trust the people running the country for the past year.

On a different note, August 24th sees an updated publication of a book that the FCC of Thailand put out 20 years ago, the life of the king and the history of the country under his 60 year reign. Unfortunately I'm leaving here on the 18th but plan to buy this on a future visit.

Good addition to previous post, sorry if I've blogged any of this before ...

Background - I left HK in 99, moved to SF, was working for a start-up and had to travel to Denver on a monthly basis. I had one staff member in that office. So the first time I went out there, of course he wanted to impress his new boss and he knew I'd lived in HK, so he took me to PF Chang's for lunch. "You're from Hong Kong so I figure you like Chinese food," he said. I didn't know at the time that this was some kind of national franchise chain.

So we go there, sit down, and our waitress comes over. Some white girl with red and green hair and multiple facial piercings. "Welcome to PF Changs. Is this your first time here?" she nasally intoned from the franchise employee handbook. Well, yes. "This is soy sauce. You can dip your food in it. These are chopsticks. You can try to pick your food up with them." "Get the fuck away from me!!!!!" Would you be surprised if I told you that the only Asian face I spotted in there was the woman mopping the floors?

I got taken out for Chinese food once in Mumbai, too. A dozen people sitting around the table, all waiting for me to taste the food, and then asking me if it was authentic. Um, er, no.

And one time in Manila - taken out for dinner, asked where I want to go, and I said, "why don't you take me to your favorite place," thinking it might be some hidden away Filipino gem. They took me to California Pizza Kitchen. Once the food was served, one person asked, "Is this like the California Pizza Kitchens in California?" And the whole table got silent. Everyone stared at me, leaned in to hear my response. "Yes, it's EXACTLY like this," I grumbled. A cheer went up from the table and everyone dug into their food.

Again, I don't think CPK is that bad and I don't want to downplay the terrific hospitality of my various hosts but most of the time when I'm traveling I want to go to places I've never been and have local dishes I've never tried and learn something new.

Day after day of eating fish and I reached my limit last night. I knew I needed meat. And I knew it was too soon for me to attempt a steak. So I did the unthinkable - in Bangkok and had dinner at Tony Roma. Well, it was something that I could handle in my current state. Though afterwards in a bar, just two drinks and I felt like I was going to throw up and I knew it wasn't from the drinks.

Every time I go to Tony Roma - perhaps once or twice a year out of desperation - I recall the amazing barbecue that I had when I lived in the US. When I lived in NYC, there used to be a place in Soho (maybe it's still there, no idea) called Tennessee Mountain, that did proper barbecue, slow cooked all day, great thick sauces. And there was another place in the village called Acme that did all sorts of southern cooking. Their walls were lined with a hundred different hot sauces - order your food, walk around the place, pull 5 or 10 jars off the wall to try. They did the best chicken fried steak and lumpy mashed potatos I've ever had. (I've yet to find a place in HK that even attempts chicken fried steak, I guess I should teach myself how to make it.) And they had a bar downstairs called Under Acme with cranking indie bands.

One time in my life I went to Kansas City, on business, just for one night. On the flight over, I was drooling thinking of the barbecue dinner that was sure to be mine that night. But some things are the same around the world - I was being taken out for dinner and the clients were going to choose an expensive place that they wouldn't normally go to on their own dime. And so they chose - SEAFOOD! In Kansas Fucking City, we went to a fucking seafood restaurant! "Oh, you're from New York, you like fish, right?" I wanted to say, "yeah, and we have great fish restaurants in New York and I've come to KC for some fucking Q, all right?" But I had to be nice about it. Flew out early the next day, so no chance to find some place on my own. And can't think of any reason that I'll ever be going back there.

Sort of like a couple of trips back in Tokyo when I was taken out for dinner and my hosts were so excited that we were going to Lawrys, and of course all I wanted was some very fatty tuna. Of course it was an excellent meal, but still.

Yeah, I know, my life is so tough.

Phil Rizzuto died, 89 years old. A great baseball player, a great baseball announcer, and let's not forget Paradise by the Dashboard Light.

And Tony Wilson died. 56 years old. Would watch 24 Hour Party People again in his memory except the DVD's at home and I ain't.

Lee Hazlewood's gone too. And Merv Griffin.

And me? I ain't feeling so great, slowly feeling better. Emphasis on the word "slowly."

Scorsese's Rolling Stones movie has been pushed back from September to April. Paramount's saying the reason is to give the Stones time to complete the current tour so they can help promote the movie.

It ain't only here: AT&T hosted a live webcast of a Pearl Jam concert and cut out the sound when Eddie Vedder started improvising some anti-George Bush lyrics. AT&T is now saying it was a "major mistake."

HBO has canceled John From Cincinnati. They have decided to go with Alan Ball's (Six Feet Under) new vampire series.

Last night was gonna watch Inland Empire, but the DVD player in my hotel was having a problem with the disc. Very Lynchian, in some obscure way, no?

So instead I watched the first disc from the recent 4 disc release Rolling Stones A Bigger Bang. I don't really care how old they are or that they haven't had a decent new song in 20 years. I'll watch Keef any time. And my appreciation for Ron Wood continues to grow.

Then Ratatouille, which was pretty close to perfection. One thing that Pixar and Brad Bird continue to prove is when you have a great script, your animated movie could be black and white line drawings and would still entertain.

Then the Comedy Central Roast 0f Flavor Flav - the whole time I sat there thinking to myself, why am I watching this? Though there were a couple of funny lines here and there. "Chuck D's not here tonight because the 'D' stands for 'Dignity.'" Boooyyyy!

Last but not least No Reservations - Anthony Bourdain's visit to Sao Paolo. Sometimes I idolize him, sometimes I feel his schtick is starting to wear thin, but he even managed to make a mortadella sandwich look good in this episode. The bull testicles - not so much.

Okay, gonna get dressed and head out in search of .... something, no idea what.

Yes, still alive, barely. Have stopped taking the painkillers but some times feel like I should be starting up with them again, other times feeling almost ready to tackle something more difficult than a piece of fish or some rice. Back to the doctor on Friday, back home on Saturday.

Hua Hin was okay only. The hotel I stayed in, the Wora Bura Resort, was beautiful and great service. Each room was named after a different province in Thailand and is supposedly decorated with things unique to that particular province. The pool was great and the staff was incredibly helpful, even for Thailand. But it was just too damn far away from any place else. Unfortunately the places I wanted, more centrally located, were either fully booked, only had expensive suites, or couldn't guarantee a decent sized bed. Plus the surgery I'd had limited my eating options, so I couldn't really check out some of the restaurants that might have been a cut or two above the norm. If I do ever go back, gotta either stay at the Hilton or Sofitel or rent a bike or both. The weather there is quite nice, the beach is not swarming with hawkers. I wouldn't call it my favorite place in Thailand by a long shot, but it's far better than my least favorite place in Thailand - Pattaya, yuck.

Now I'm back in Bangkok, have got a little bit of a head cold it seems, and am just gonna take it easy for the next couple of days.

In Hua Hin now. All's well. Justin says hi.

Every time I travel I forget to pack one thing, naturally it's a different thing each time. I make packing lists but this time I forgot to look at the list and forgot to pack two things.

Forgot my mouse, stuck using this little red dot on the Thinkpad which is horrible for doing anything real.

And forgot my iPod speakers, which also double as a charger.

So I went to MBK, got a cheap USB cable for the ipod for charging and also a cheap video cable - miniplug to 3 RCA jacks - figuring I'd just plug the ipod into the TV for listening. And for some reason forgot to buy a mouse.

But the TV here is weird. It's one of the older 42 inch plasmas where all of the electronics are in a separate box, and that separate box is attached to cables that are too short to allow me to pull it out and examine the back.

I tried plugging the cables into the Aux input on the TV but nothing. Then plugged the audio jacks into the audio line for the DVD, but I have to turn the DVD player on for some reason for this to work. And the DVD player has an auto-shut-off after 10 minutes of non-use, so I can only get 10 minutes of music at a time through the TV speakers. Argh.

Almost ready for solid food today. Started new tattoo last night. Some of you will recognize this I'm sure:


(minus the red frame, of course) While I've always liked this album, I've also always really loved this symbol separate and apart from the album. May later add a few stars or planets or comets or something around it ...

Off to Hua Hin tomorrow.

Random thoughts

Woke up to a bloody pillow case. Seems like some blood oozing from my mouth all night. I was able to follow doctor's orders and not drink alcohol last night, just water and orange juice. But as for the no smoking bit, told him that was impossible.

Mixed feelings - mp3s as ring tones. I find it really annoying on other peoples' phones. But I am guilty as well. Decided to be as perverse as possible. Right now ring tone on my phone is Sammy Davis Jr, Keep Your Eye on the Sparrow - theme song from Baretta.

Don't go to bed, with no price on your head
No, no, don't do it.

Don't do the crime, if you can't do the time,
Yeah, don't do it.

And keep your eye on the sparrow.
When the going gets narrow.

Don't do it, don't do it.

Where can I go where the cold winds don't blow,
Now.

Well, well, well.

Works okay for me. Though later today might change it to Marvin Gaye, Trouble Man.

I come up hard, baby
But now I'm cool
I didn't make it, sugar
Playin' by the rules

I come up hard, baby
But now I'm fine
I'm checkin' trouble, sugar
Movin' down the line

I come up hard, baby
But that's okay, cause
Trouble man
Don't get in the way

I know some places
And I see some faces
I've got the connections
I dig my directions
What people say, that's okay
They don't bother me, oh yeah

I'm ready to make it
Don't care what the weather
Don't care 'bout no trouble
Got myself together
I feel the kind of protection
That's all around me

Come up hard, baby
Now, I'm fine, I've
Checkin' trouble, sugar
Hey, movin' down the line

Also seems to fit.

Why did George Bush cross the road? He had his dick stuck in the chicken.

So yesterday 4 hours in the dentist's chair. Back to the hotel laden down with different sorts of pills and gauze. A bowl of soup and some sleep. Swallow a fistful of painkillers and back out. Closed three bars, played pool (badly). Discussed next tattoo with Jimmy Wong. Slept. Woke up. Lots to do today!

Not quite ready for bed yet, but I can sleep on the plane tomorrow .....

Hong Kong shops used to have the world's worst rep for customer service. Not sure when things started to improve - was it the financial crisis in 99 or SARS in 03? Things are good now, but every now and then I encounter someone quite special.

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

Example 1: I wanted massive amounts of hard disk for a project and went to a shop I know well, Hightech Computer, Shop 153 in the Wanchai Computer Centre. Mostly they sell hard disks and enclosures and they really know their products. I have bought from them in the past and trust them.

So I got two Stardom RAID boxes and 4 500 gig drives and for some reason box #2 never wanted to work properly. It kept doing a variety of odd things. I brought it back to them and they tried swapping out one of the hard disks. No, that didn't fix it. Brought it back again, they swapped the box itself and things seemed better but still just a little bit off. I sent them an email, described the problem, told them that I would try to live with it a little longer, and they told me to bring both boxes back.

For box #1, the one which never had a problem, they installed a more powerful fan. No charge. For box #2, they swapped that plus the two hard disks for a new Maxtor 1.5 terabyte One Touch set. I watched as the guy sat with a calculator for a minute, figuring out the difference in cost between what I had already bought and this new drive. On the one hand, it did occur to me to say something about all the times I'd had to come back to the shop. But I kept my mouth shut because each of those times and in email he was clearly working very hard to figure out the issues. And without my even asking, he gave me a big discount and apologized for all the problems I'd had.

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

That's an independent shop. What about the chain stores?

I was walking down Johnston Road in Wanchai on Saturday and passed City Chain, a watch retailer that has branches almost everywhere in HK. I recalled seeing an ad for a watch that looked quite nice - the ad is in all the magazines and even on buses, and in small print it says this model is only being sold at City Chain.

So I went in, looked for the watch, and someone came up and asked if she could help. I pointed to a picture of the watch and said I wanted to see it. She said it was very popular because of all the advertising and they were sold out but that they would be getting a shipment later in the day and I could leave a deposit.

I told her I did want to see the watch first. She asked me to wait a minute. Seems another assistant, who was off on his lunch break, has that watch. She called him, he came running back to the store so I could try it on.

Convinced, I told her I wanted to buy it. She said they were getting just one piece and they expected the delivery at 4 PM. She took my number and gave me hers.

I returned at 4 PM but the delivery was late. The same woman started calling the driver every ten minutes to check on his progress. She apologized to me every five minutes.

We talked for awhile and I was surprised to discover that every City Chain employee gets refresher training every three months. They are trained in all the new models and features, how to resize bands, changing batteries, but also they get constant training in customer service.

At 5 PM, the driver showed up. The woman went through the boxes quickly, found my watch, adjusted the size, showed me how to use it. After I paid my bill and was putting the box in my shoulder bag, she reached under the counter and pulled out a Stanley 8 piece screwdriver set and said, "I want to give you a gift for waiting so long and being so patient."

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

Tonight a friend and I met at Heat. We sat there for an hour or two talking after which she said she wanted to go to a different bar and asked if there was a quiet place so that we could continue talking. I thought for a moment and then suggested the Canny Man bar, basement of the Wharney Hotel. I'd only been there once before but liked it - quiet, relaxing, big comfortable chairs to settle into and something like 200 single malt whiskeys on the menu.

Tonight, every table in the place was full. There was one woman working behind the bar and just one waitress serving all of the tables.

When we wanted to order our second round, it took about 10 minutes before the waitress could come over to us. And after she took our order, she got waylaid by four guys sitting at a table (who seemed to be friends of the owner).

She brought them a bottle of wine, opened it, they tasted it and for some reason didn't like it and sent it back. She returned to them with the wine list and they spent 10 minutes perusing it and talking with her, going on about how pinot noir is this and something else is that. She was being polite and attentive but all of the other customers were withering on the vine (pun intended).

After waiting another 10 or 15 minutes and finally getting her attention (at which point she informed us that one of the whiskeys we'd ordered was out of stock), we told her to cancel the second round and just give us the bill.

I don't blame her. It's not her fault she's the only one working the floor. Maybe someone called in sick. Maybe the manager underestimated how busy the place would get on a Monday night. But these four guys sitting there might have taken the time to look around and note that she was the only one working, that every table was full, and then not tie her up for half an hour. I hope they gave her a big tip.

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

All of which left me no time to watch Inland Empire, which I picked up this afternoon and am extremely eager to see. I also got the new Criterion edition of House of Games and it's nowhere near as well known as it should be.

This was David Mamet's first film as a director and it perfectly sets the tone for most of his subsequent work. His then-wife (or girlfriend?) Lindsay Crouse plays a famous psychiatrist and author who gets conned by professional con man Joe Mantegna. Rather than calling the police, she's intrigued, tracks him down, asks him to teach her about different cons, falls in love with him and asks to take part in a scam he's planning....

Let me just add that the always amazing Ricky Jay is both in the cast and serves as a technical advisor. And that presumably this DVD will look a lot better than the awful MGM release a long time ago, plus has the usual wealth of extras found on most Criterion releases.

But it's gonna have to wait till I get back from Bangkok....

Putting the (mostly unblogged) events of the past week behind me, Friday night was spent catching up on TV.

Caught the first two episodes of a new series on FX called Damages, which stars Glenn Close. On first glance it seems like just another lawyer series, with Close as super lawyer and a younger actress playing her newly hired protege. Except it also looks to be a season-long plotline rather than one-case-per-week, and the end of the first episode had enough "oh shit!" moments so I'll probably stick with it for awhile. I think people who like Prison Break might go for this (actually I lost my patience with PB midway through the first season).

Saturday, not wanting to sit around the flat, following lunch with a friend I spent the afternoon engaging in Hong Kong's #1 pastime, shopping.

I had been thinking about waiting for a new phone until the release of the HTC Kaiser. But I'm fed up with Windows Mobile as a phone OS. The need for constant reboots is ludicrous beyond words. So with the release of the Sony P1i, I return to Symbian. After just a few hours and minimal time to play with it, I think I'm okay with it. Only 3 band GSM and single band UMTS. The WiFi is 802.11b, not g. Camera is 3.2 meg with autofocus, nice. I can get used to the keyboard.

Aside from that, a few other things that I convinced myself I couldn't live without.

One thing I did not buy was a t-shirt I saw in Milk magazine with the words Kill All Luxury People. This t-shirt sells for $570 - in other words only "luxury people" can afford it.

Also noted in Milk that someone has taken the Andy Warhol banana from the Velvet Underground & Nico album cover and turned it into a little pendant sort of thing. Nice to have but the article didn't mention the price and I didn't feel like walking to Causeway Bay to find out that a piece of plastic would be selling for thousands of dollars.

Back at home, I managed to fuck up my computer by installing the latest version of Google Desktop. It crashed the PC twice while indexing files before I uninstalled it. And somehow the index files on certain programs I use got destroyed - e.g Newsbin Pro now thinks it has been weeks rather than days since I last updated forum headings.

Put off dealing with that hiccup until now, following dinner with a friend, we stretched out and watched the Simpsons movie. Going to watch Spaced now I think - the TV series from the director and stars of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

Taking it easy for the next couple of days. Out of here on Tuesday. Plane and hotel set, doctor set. Need a recommendation on a place to stay in Hua Hin?

Wish there was something more exciting going on to write about but same days that's just how it is.

New "red band" trailer for Shoot 'Em Up:



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

Okay, I realize that the following is an odd juxtaposition with the previous.

R.J. Eskow, in Huffington Post, writes:

The facts in the Tillman case make friendly fire highly unlikely. He died from three bullet holes grouped together in his forehead, fired from a M-16 that was no more than ten yards away....

1. Pat Tillman dies. Medical examiners request a fratricide investigation sometime thereafter. Their request is denied.

2. Gen. McChrystal sends a cable to Gen. Abizaid and another general on April 22 urging them to notify the President of this probable fratricide "in order to preclude any unknowing statements by our country's leaders which might cause embarrassment if the circumstances of Cpl. Tillman's death becomes public."

3. Gen.Abizaid claims he didn't receive it for 10 or 12 days, because he was in Iraq. (They don't have email, or even secure pouches for urgent memos?) Defense Department records later show that Gen. Abizaid was not in Iraq, but was actually in Qatar and Afghanistan - where the killing occurred - during that 10 to 12 days.

4. Gen. Myers learns the true nature of Cpl. Tillman's death in late April, yet - according to his testimony - did not feel the need to inform either the Secretary of Defense or the President.

5. Military records show that dozens of officers knew of the true nature of the Lieutenant's death within days, yet senior officers and Pentagon officials still maintain they didn't know for weeks. (Surprisingly, they did not undertake a massive review of military procedures in order to determine how such a massive series of communications failures could occur - one that eerily affected every single senior officer with responsibility for this case simultaneously.)

6. The military continues to press the story that Tillman was killed while courageously leading a counterattack in an Afghan mountain pass. (Nice poetic touch, that "mountain pass" - good for recruitment.)

7. A national memorial service is held for Lt. Tillman several days later. The President and others talk about Cpl. Tillmans heroism in that mythical mountain pass - yet Gen. Myers, per his own testimony, still felt no need to inform either the SecDef or the President .

8. Rumsfeld says he was not told the truth until "some time after May 20," or approximately a month after Gen. Myers learned of the incident. Yet he seems strangely undisturbed to learn that the truth was known six weeks earlier and he wasn't informed.

9. Neither Rumsfeld nor the President felt the need to correct the record publicly upon learning the truth.

10. It wasn't until reporters filed a Freedom of Information Act that the following information became public on July 27: ""Army medical examiners were suspicious about the close proximity of the three bullet holes in Pat Tillman's forehead and tried without success to get authorities to investigate whether the former NFL player's death amounted to a crime."

Let's say it again, to be very clear: The White House and Pentagon withheld the facts about this killing until they were legally forced to reveal them months later by Freedom of Information laws. And they never ordered a criminal investigation.

Of course Republicans all seem to be okay with the above.

New BC Mag Spike column is up. Basically what I did was to take the blogpost here that got the most comments ever and expand it for the magazine.

Otherwise, not much to say at the moment.

Something that I thought was just about carved in stone may turn out to be carved in sand.

Next week off to Bangkok and Hua Hin for ten days.

Another year, another Dylan compilation, this a 3 CD set with 51 tracks spanning his entire career available in either regular or deluxe editions; also a single disc 18 track collection, all coming out in October, which sounds like the fricking future until you stop and think, Holy Crap! It's Freaking August already!

And a remix! Ace producer/remixer Mark Ronson (produced Amy Winehouse and I love some bits of his own album, especially the version of BritBrit's Toxic with Ol Dirty Bastard) has applied his retro touch to Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine). Is it great? Does it suck? You can stream the first 30 seconds here.

Since I previously posted some one sheets for the upcoming movie Shoot 'Em Up, it's only fair that I post some excerpts from this review of the film in Variety.

As Mr. Smith (Owen) is minding his own business, a car comes careening around the corner in pursuit of a pregnant woman. Smith pulls a carrot from his trenchcoat and takes a hearty bite, a gesture meant to set the tone for the cartoonishly over-the-top action sequences to come. A better indicator comes moments later when Smith drives the carrot through the would-be assassin's skull, or, shortly thereafter, as he delivers the woman's baby amid heavy crossfire, severing the umbilical cord with a well-aimed bullet.

Smith survives the opening action scene -- a jaw-dropping ordeal for both its ingenuity and sheer tactlessness -- but the anonymous woman isn't so lucky, leaving Smith in charge of the orphaned infant. Luckily, he just so happens to know a lactating hooker, DQ (Monica Bellucci as a Madonna-whore hybrid), who, with understandable reluctance, agrees to assume the mother's role in this dysfunctional family.

After a little snooping, the couple uncovers a convoluted plot by which an ailing presidential candidate (Daniel Pilon) plans to harvest bone marrow from surrogate babies (typical of Davis' sense of humor, the artificially inseminated mothers provide the off-color pun of the movie's title). Giamatti is in gruffly manic mode as Hertz, a short-tempered assassin with no more luck than Elmer Fudd in capturing his prey, but a nearly inexhaustible supply of henchmen to assist the cause.

In terms of trash cinema, it doesn't sound like it could get much better than this!

Right now I'm dating someone 16 years younger than me. (Though in terms of maturity, I'm about 16 years younger than her.)

Steve Martin, 61 years old, just married a 35 year old writer. (Doesn't she kinda look like Claire Danes in Shopgirl?)



James Woods, 60, is engaged to a 21 year old.


Joe Pesci, 64 years old and 5'4" tall, is engaged to former supermodel Angie Everhart, 37 years old and 5'10". Now, if my recollection of human biology is correct, 37 puts Angie at her sexual peak. 64 puts Pesci about 45 years past his sexual peak. I wonder who will outlive the other. (But what a way to go.)



Yes, I know, they all have wonderful personalities.

(Photos 1 & 3 from Celebitchy, photo 2 from Perez Hilton)

A photo taken while walking around Wanchai early evening.


Then, just for fun, applying the sepia effect in Picasa. Which I quite like.



Followed by a closer shot in which the Blue Girl Beer portion of the sign can be seen a little more clearly.



Cilaxy is certainly an odd name. Anyone care to tell me the translation of the Chinese? I believe the first character is something along the lines of xian or mountain spirits, no idea on the other characters.

From the NY Times:

For now, thanks to psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin, we can at last count the whys. After asking nearly 2,000 people why they’d had sex, the researchers have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons — everything from “I wanted to feel closer to God” to “I was drunk.” They even found a few people who claimed to have been motivated by the desire to have a child ...

Others said they did it to “help me fall asleep,” “make my partner feel powerful,” “burn calories,” “return a favor,” “keep warm,” “hurt an enemy” or “change the topic of conversation.” The lamest may have been, “It seemed like good exercise,” although there is also this: “Someone dared me.” ...

The best news is that both men and women ranked the same reason most often: “I was attracted to the person.”

The rest of the top 10 for each gender were also almost all the same, including “I wanted to express my love for the person,” “I was sexually aroused and wanted the release” and “It’s fun.”

No matter what the reason, men were more likely to cite it than women, with a couple of notable exceptions. Women were more likely to say they had sex because, “I wanted to express my love for the person” and “I realized I was in love.” This jibes with conventional wisdom about women emphasizing the emotional aspects of sex, although it might also reflect the female respondents’ reluctance to admit to less lofty motives.

The results contradicted another stereotype about women: their supposed tendency to use sex to gain status or resources.

“Our findings suggest that men do these things more than women,” Dr. Buss said, alluding to the respondents who said they’d had sex to get things, like a promotion, a raise or a favor. Men were much more likely than women to say they’d had sex to “boost my social status” or because the partner was famous or “usually ‘out of my league.’ ” ...

If nothing else, the results seem to be a robust confirmation of the hypothesis in the old joke: How can a woman get a man to take off his clothes? Ask him.

To make sense of the 237 reasons, Dr. Buss and Dr. Meston created a taxonomy with four general categories:

¶Physical: “The person had beautiful eyes” or “a desirable body,” or “was good kisser” or “too physically attractive to resist.” Or “I wanted to achieve an orgasm.”

¶Goal Attainment: “I wanted to even the score with a cheating partner” or “break up a rival’s relationship” or “make money” or “be popular.” Or “because of a bet.”

¶Emotional: “I wanted to communicate at a deeper level” or “lift my partner’s spirits” or “say ‘Thank you.’ ” Or just because “the person was intelligent.”

¶Insecurity: “I felt like it was my duty” or “I wanted to boost my self-esteem” or “It was the only way my partner would spend time with me.”

So if you had this list of all 237 reasons with you on a date and a woman kept turning you down, you could, ahem, whip this out and run down the list, surely finding something the woman would agree with.

However, if that fails, then it will be useful to know this: How Swearing Works:

Most researchers agree that swearing came from early forms of word magic. Studies of modern, non-literate cultures suggest that swearwords came from the belief that spoken words have power. Some cultures, especially ones that have not developed a written language, believe that spoken words can curse or bless people or can otherwise affect the world. This leads to the idea that some words are either very good or very bad....

In the Western, English-speaking world, people from every race, class and level of education swear. In America, 72 percent of men and 58 percent of women swear in public. The same is true for 74 percent of 18 to 34 year olds and 48 percent of people who are over age 55. Numerous language researchers report that men swear more than women, but studies that focus on women's use of language theorize that women's swearing is simply more context specific....

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have shown that the higher and lower parts of the brain can struggle with each other when a person swears. A New York Times article cites several other studies that involve how a healthy brain processes swearing. For example, the brains of people who pride themselves on being educated respond to slang and "illiterate" phrases the same way they do to swearwords. In addition, in studies in which people must identify the color a word is written in (instead of the word itself), swearwords distract the participants from color recognition. You can also remember swearwords about four times better than other words.

Which I suppose goes a long way towards explaining why I can curse fluently in Cantonese but otherwise all I know is how to ask for a Coke and an ashtray.