Hongkie Town

Need to know today's Zombie Threat Level? Then this site might come in handy.


Ah, Wanchai should be safe tonight.

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How old is your brain? Since this site is in Japanese, I wasn't quite clear on the instructions for this game and scored 37 years old the first time, which ain't too bad. Once I understood the rules, I scored 25. Is there any scientific basis for this? Buddha knows.

(The screen will display several random numbers for one second. Then the screen clears, the numbers are replaced with circles, and you have to click on the circles in ascending order of the numbers previously displayed.)

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You watching Mad Men? (If you're not, you should - it is clearly the best written show on American TV at the moment.)

If you are and you want to live your life like Don Draper, submit your questions to What Would Don Draper Do?

23. Dear Don Draper, I was thinking about getting the 3G iPhone. Thoughts?

Stop thinking about it as a phone with a touch screen. Start thinking about it as a way to touch each other.

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I don't care what anyone else says. I think this is a contender for Worst Movie Title Ever. (Just announced: theme song to be sung by Jack White and Alicia Keys. Hasn't history proven that singing the theme song in a Bond movie is a career-killer?)

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George Lucas has been talking releasing a 3-D version of the Star Wars movies. And an Indiana Jones 5 movie. He officially ran out of ideas about 25 years ago. Someone stop him before he destroys all our happy movie memories!


Ah, thank you!

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So Cuil? Not. Everyone likes the idea of them having images associated with the search results. Helps if the images associated aren't randomly chosen. Still a few bugs in the system.

From The Independent, via Rebecca Mackinnon:

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) will launch an inquiry into internet censorship in China after accusations that Beijing was failing to live up to its promises guaranteeing unrestricted online access.

Furious reporters are finding that their internet access is inadequate. Attempts to use the network to access the website of Amnesty International, which has just released a damning report on human rights in China, proved fruitless yesterday.

There was also an embarrassing moment for the Chinese when one journalist whipped out his laptop at a news conference to show how sites including the BBC's China service fell foul of the Great Firewall of China. Suggestions that it was a technical problem were laughed off.

China has promised to allow the 20,000 accredited journalists the same working conditions they enjoyed at previous Games.

The IOC's press chief, Kevin Gosper, said he would investigate any apparent efforts to interfere with the reporters doing their jobs.

All taken care of, right? Ahhhhh, not so much.

From the NY Times today:

The Chinese government has confirmed what journalists arriving at the lavishly outfitted media center here have suspected: contrary to previous assurances by Olympic and government officials, the Internet will be censored during the upcoming Games.

The International Olympic Committee quietly agreed to some of the limitations, according to a press official, Kevin Gosper, the Reuters news agency reported. Mr. Gosper told Reuters on Wednesday that he had only just learned of the agreement. Sandrine Tonge, the I.O.C. media relations coordinator, said the organization would press the Chinese authorities to reconsider the limits.

Since the Olympic Village press center opened on Friday, reporters have been unable to access scores of Web pages — among them those that discuss Tibetan succession, Taiwanese independence, the violent crackdown of the protests in Tiananmen Square and the sites of Amnesty International, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspapers known for their freewheeling political discourse.

A government spokesman initially suggested the problems originated with the site hosts, but on Wednesday, he acknowledged that journalists would not have unfettered Internet use during the Games, which begin Aug. 8.

...

In the past, both the Chinese government and the International Olympic Committee have suggested that the 20,000 journalists covering the Games would have full Internet access. As recently as two weeks ago, Jacques Rogge, the International Olympic committee president, proclaimed to Agence France-Presse: “For the first time, foreign media will be able to report freely and publish their work freely in China. There will be no censorship on the Internet.”

I love that next to last paragraph above, so typically China - lie about it as long as you can.

Basically, China promised the IOC everything it asked for. And then it reneged on all those promises because the Olympics are a week away and what is the IOC going to do about it? I mean, what is a promise anyway, just words, right? Why were there so many people who didn't want China to get the Olympics? Why are there so many people hoping the event is a colossal failure?

But the one thing you can't call China is "stupid." They knew what they were doing all along. If anyone comes out looking stupid from all this, it's the idiots running the IOC who get that tag, for believing whatever they were told and for not having proper safeguards in place in case covenants were broken, as they clearly have been, over and over and fucking over again.

Incidentally, here is Amnesty International's statement on the censorship:

In reaction to the IOC statement, Mark Allison, East Asia researcher for Amnesty International said: "The International Olympic Committee and the Organizing Committee of the Beijing Olympic Games should fulfil their commitment to ‘full media freedom’ and provide immediate uncensored internet access at Olympic media venues. Censorship of the internet at the Games is compromising fundamental human rights and betraying the Olympic values.

"This blatant media censorship adds one more broken promise that undermines the claim that the Games would help improve human rights in China," said Mark Allison.

Expect the Chinese government to either keep quiet or blame westerners for meddling their internal affairs. And Lee Kuan Yew from his pulpit in Singapore will once again sermonize about how western democracy and freedoms don't apply to Asia.

Here's a link to the Amnesty Report, People's Republic of China: The Olympics Countdown - Broken Promises.

With the Olympics less than two weeks away, it is time to assess progress made by the Chinese authorities to improve human rights in line with their own commitments made in 2001 when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) chose Beijing to host the Games. Regrettably, since the publication of Amnesty International’s last Olympics Countdown report on 1 April 2008, there has been no progress towards fulfilling these promises, only continued deterioration. Unless the authorities make a swift change of direction, the legacy of the Beijing Olympics will not be positive for human rights in China.

......

In fact, the crackdown on human rights defenders, journalists and lawyers has intensified because Beijing is hosting the Olympics. The authorities have stepped up repression of dissident voices in their efforts to present an image of “stability” and “harmony” to the outside world. This has resulted in the detention and imprisonment of those who wish to draw attention to the other side of the picture, which includes human rights violations perpetrated in preparation for the Games.

...

The IOC’s diplomatic, non-public approach on human rights cases and issues does not appear to have yielded significant results. International pressure from other governments for human rights reform has also been insufficient, sending a message that it is acceptable for a government to host the Olympic Games in an atmosphere characterised by repression and persecution. The danger now becomes that after the Olympic Games these patterns of serious human rights violations may continue or intensify with even less attention paid by the international community than has been the case so far.

I ain't watching this shit, I ain't buying tickets, I ain't buying souvenir merchandise.

Only if your definition of "Truly Asia" is "racist and corrupt."

I don't think I can begin find the words that express my disgust for current events in Malaysia. And no, it's not just because my (second) ex-wife is from there - my ex remains fiercely in love with the country of her birth, even though she's left it, and I've never really been able to understand why. There is so much bigotry and prejudice there, so much corruption in the government

Perhaps if Malaysia was a shit hole, then I wouldn't much care. But it's a beautiful country with great cities, amazing spots to visit like Cameron Highlands and Penang, some of the most delicious (and cheapest) food in the world. But it's run by a bunch of thugs and goons who hide behind religion to enact laws that make 40% of its population into second class citizens.

The almost simultaneous scandals with Najib and Anwar and the differences in how they are being handled speaks to the utter venality of the troglodytes in charge of the country.

Anyway, no one in the world seems to care that much. I rarely see this in the NY Times, never see it in the SCMP. I'm sure there are many bloggers covering this, though I only see regular coverage in two of the sites I follow.

There is of course great current coverage over in Asia Sentinel, starting with this recent post:

It is about time for Malaysia to drop the charade. Attempting to convict opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim of forcible sodomy is an embarrassment in contrast with the completely ignored and much more serious allegations linking the deputy prime minister to the execution-style murder of his reputed former girlfriend.

and also:

Malaysia's Najib Ducks a Court Appearance

Besides allegations that Altantuya was the lover of both men, the case has raised additional concerns of corruption. The Mongolian woman was the translator on a controversial transaction in which Malaysia, with Najib as defense minister, paid €1 billion for French submarines, netting a company tied to Abdul Razak US$111 million in “commissions.”

Bringing Najib to Malaysia's Witness Stand:

The government’s response to this affidavit has been most disappointing. It not only failed to set up an independent panel to probe the contents therein as required in any country with rule of law, but not even the police or the prosecutors have shown any seriousness to investigate these alarming revelations. And now the latest, a flat rejection by the court to entertain Karpal’s motion through concerted objection by all participating legal officers who have sworn to uphold the law – prosecutors, defence lawyers and the judge.

Were The Anwar Sodomy Charges Faked?

The doctor who examined a 23-year-old male aide allegedly sodomized by Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim found no evidence of tearing or scarring that would indicate penetration, according to a medical report leaked to local journalists.

Anwar Arrest Looms in Malaysia

Barely two days after a medical report surfaced that appeared to clear opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim of sodomy allegations made by a former aide, a news Web site aligned with Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi declared that “police have completed their investigations” and will soon charge Anwar over the allegations.

Talkin' About My Revolutions, a Singapore based blog/ezine that's primarily about music, also gives frequent coverage to their neighbors to the north. Yeah, okay, Malaysia and Singapore haven't exactly been best pals in the last forty years. Still, when you think about it, how fucking low has Malaysia gotten that they have succeeded in making the government in Singapore look good? (TAMR coverage is via posting excerpts from other blogs - I'll link to the TAMR site and you can follow the links from there.)

Tale of Two Medical Reports

I am a goverment doctor in the rank of consultant working in hospital Kuala Lumpur. I know personally the doctors who examined Saiful on that day -28 June 2008.

The so called medical report mentioned in the NST is a fabrication or imagination by the UMNO paper. There is no such medical report submitted to the polis yet.

When examine Saiful, the specialist could not find any signs of Saiful being sodomised. Saiful was very cheerful, unlike real sodomised patient who will usaually very sad and disturbed. Saiful was subsequently admitted to the ward and observed for a day. He was completely well in the ward and not emotionally disturbed.

Doctor on the Run

The doctor’s report says it very clearly. Saiful was never sodomised, either by Anwar or anyone else. If so, Raja Petra Kamarudin of Malaysia Today asks: “Why is the government still pursuing the case against Anwar? And why are they looking for the doctor who has now gone underground with his whole family?” The medical report was first leaked on Malaysia Today and was subsequently spread by bloggers. After the Malaysia Today exclusive, the site was down for a period of time on July 28, 2008 - one cannot rule out the possibility of an online attack.

Listening to Starfish by The Church today. One of my all time favorite albums. I remember seeing them at the Bottom Line in NYC in 1990 when this album came out. Killer freaking show. I had good friends working at Arista Records at the time and they told me later that the band was sitting backstage before the show, well aware that the audience was packed with industry types, and determined to go out and show them that they were the best band on the planet. And that night, they did.

Anyway, here's the lyrics to side 1, track 1, Destination. No freaking idea what this song's about but always liked the "It's not a religion" bridge and after yesterday's and today's record fucking pollution combined with Buddha-awful heat, the last verse seems kinda appropriate.

Our instruments have no way of measuring this feeling
Can never cut below the floor, or penetrate the ceiling

In the space between our houses, some bones have been discovered,
But our procession lurches on, as if we had recovered.

Draconian winter unforetold.
One solar day, suddenly you're old.
Your little envelope just makes me cold,
Makes destination start to unfold.

Our documents are useless, or forged beyond believing.
Page forty-seven is unsigned, i need it by this evening.
In the space between our cities, a storm is slowly forming.
Something eating up our days, i feel it every morning.
Destination, destination.

It's not a religion, it's just a technique.
It's just a way of making you speak.
Distance and speed have left us too weak,
And destination looks kind of bleak.

Our elements are burned out, our beasts have been mistreated.
I tell you it's the only way we'll get this road completed.
In the space between our bodies, the air has grown small fingers.
Just one caress, you're powerless, like all those clapped-out swingers.
Destination, destination.

What were the skies like when you were younger? There were these little fluffy clouds ....

Following my post on the new search engine, I enjoyed this piece by John Paczkowski, who not only knocks them down a few pegs for their poorly chosen name but also discovers that if you do a search at cuil for "cuil" - well, you'd think they'd show up in the first page of their own result set, but nope, they don't. Oops.

Meanwhile someone over at CrunchGear discovered that if you make a mistake in typing cuil and accidentally type culi you end up at an Italian porn site.

I still like their privacy policy and also their approach to displaying result sets, but clearly there's more work to be done there.

One of the comments to this previous post was:

That used to bug me on the jailbroken version, too.

I think it might be that it now knows that +852 9... and 9... are the same, hence gets confused because it doesn't know which of the two to display.

Before adding a third variation, I'd delete the second variation and leave only the +852 one, and try again.
Seems to work for me.

Thanks Fab for the suggestion. I tried it, going through my phone book and having just one entry with +852 for all HK contacts.

This afternoon I received 2 SMS's in quick succession - one from my gf, one from my helper. The former displayed the name just fine. The second had just the phone number with 852 but no +. So it seems to me that I'm getting different results based on people calling me from different networks? Frustrating!

Like others, now that I've filled my iPhone up with apps from the App Store, I'm seeing a noticeable lag time when switching screens or bringing up apps. On Saturday, the Bloomberg app crashed my phone, causing a reboot.

Needless to say, this was not my experience with my old iPhone and I certainly hope Apple is working on OS updates to address this.

Cuil launches today. They claim to index 3 times more pages than Google and there are lots of former Googlerites working here.

Welcome to Cuil—the world’s biggest search engine. The Internet has grown. We think it’s time search did too.

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.

I don't know how to pronounce "cuil." (I'm sure someone will comment on that.) I can barely spell it. Will the odd (to me) name put a brake on their mass acceptance?

From TechCrunch:

Much of the secret sauce of Cuil is in the way they index the web and handle actual queries by users. Both are costly to scale, and Cuil claims to have found a way to massively reduct those costs. That allows them to run the search engine a lot cheaper, even at Google-scale should it ever reach that point. By some estimates, Google spends a billion dollars a year to run the back end infrastructure of it’s search business.
...
Cuil is experimenting with a new type of search interface as well. Results are shown in three columns and contain an image and more summary text than existing search engines. In addition to refinement by category, Cuil will recommend related searches via tabs across the top of search results. A search for New York, for example, also has tabbed results for recommended refinements like New York Times, New York City, New York Yankees, etc.

Perhaps most important of all:

Cuil also says that they will put user privacy at the top of their business objectives. User IP addresses are not recorded to their servers, they say, and cookies are not used to associate a computer with queries. The data is simply dumped as it is created. That means user data cannot be turned over to others...

Side note: I did a search for "hongkie town." My result set only yielded other links to this blog, no pages from this blog itself, until I turned safe search off. Huh!

Sobleizer thinks that they're not in it for the long haul, that they've launched to prove their new search technology and hoping to get bought by Microsoft.

Went to see the Batman movie for the 2nd time last night. My friend wanted to see it and I could have shown her the halfway decent pirate copy I'd downloaded but in this case thought the movie was good enough that she should see it on the big screen first. Not that screens in Hong Kong are exactly big.

I did want to go see the Imax version, but for the next week, the only seats available for night time shows are front row. One of my staff actually took a day off so he could take his kids to see it on the Imax screen during the day time. We went to Times Square.

Dark Knight grossed $76 million in its second weekend in the US. So now it's not just the largest opening day and opening weekend ever, it set a record for making US$300 million in ten days. It's still rolling out internationally and it looks set to become one of the top ten grossing films of all time. It ain't perfect but it is extremely good for a movie adapted from a comic book.

About 20 minutes before the end of the film, a woman sitting across the aisle from me started playing with her Crackberry. You couldn't help but notice the bright light in the dark theater. And then she dropped it. The floor under the seats is completely smooth and on an angle, so it slid forward about 3 rows. She finally got her boyfriend/husband to call the number so it lit up and started flashing under someone else's seat and she could find it. Not too distracting.

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Over at work, where any distraction would be an improvement, an interesting collection of subject headers on spam emails trying to get my attention. Some of the better ones include:

• Apple nosedives on Jobs' death
• First pictures of Pitt and Jolie's babies
• Guy Ritchie declares marriage "over"
• Latest twist on gay marriage policy
• McCain diagnosed with pancreatic cancer
• New Osama video aired
• Osama caught sodomizing lieutenants
• President Bush legalizes gay marriages
• UFO sighting in downtown NY
• [video] Hillary Clinton is hangin tough

and of course

• Cant Believe I Anal Fucked My Girlfriends Sister
• Cherry Peitite (sic) Gets Fucked Hard By Her Friend
• Gorgeous blonde violently fucked doggystyle
• Hot lesbian slut gets punished by her girlfriend for fucking another guy!
• Young newlywed teen couple fucks for cash while they get filmed

Yes, I know, the above five lines are going to mean that this blog will end up in the result set for some unusual searches.

Standing in my garden, watching the storm come in, felt like slow motion. The winds were whipping up everything, trees and bushes swaying like lumbering monsters, the Sai Kung sea all whitecaps as the boats were speeding for shelter. Then the lightning, very distinct bolts coming down very close to the house. After ten minutes, the rain came. And it's coming down in buckets.

The good news is, the surge suppressors I bought after the last storm are working!

Start of a new regular feature here? Don't know, we'll see.

One thing I've noticed on the weekly Amazon lists is that most of the top sellers - including advance sales for upcoming releases - are TV series. This of course points to just how weak theatrical releases were in the first quarter of this year. The end of September is when the hot summer releases will start rolling out, starting with Iron Man. Amazon lists 527 new releases for July 29th; which ones have caught my attention?

Rolling Stones - Shine a Light - Martin Scorsese revolutionized the concert film in 1976 with The Last Waltz by hiring top cinematographers to man the cameras and lighting the stage for film instead of for a concert. Now he's back with this film of a Stones charity gig at the 3,000 seat Beacon Theater in New York City. Special guests include Bill Clinton, Jack White and Christina Aguilera. Haven't had a chance to watch the entire thing but the bits I've watched are really good.

Dark City - Directors Cut - I'm not familiar with this film starring Kiefer Sutherland and William Hurt, but it seems to have something of a cult following.

Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay - Overall I found this weaker than the first film in the series but it still had enough laughs to make it worth watching. The producers have just announced a deal to make H&K3.

Doomsday - The third film from Neil Marshall, who gave us Dog Soldiers and Descent. I guess he likes the letter D. Watched this yesterday. Very derivative and yet a pure adrenaline rush. As in the past two films, a small group of people go on a journey, get attacked, most of them die. But this one combines bits of Aliens, Escape from New York, Road Warrior and many others. Rhona Mitra is yummy and the supporting cast includes Bob Hoskins and Malcolm McDowell and a souped up Bentley. Who would have thought that future punk rocking marauders would enjoy Adam & the Ants?

Tai Chi Master - Dragon Dynasty in the US (the Weinstein's label for releasing Asian films) is giving this 1993 Jet Li/Michelle Yeoh film the deluxe 2 disc treatment. Directed by Yuen Woo-Ping, this is one of the few Jet Li movies I can't recall seeing, so I'll probably go for this.

Inglorious Bastards - As you probably already know by now, Tarantino's next film will be a remake of this 70's WWII exploitation film starring Fred Williamson. This is getting the deluxe treatment - 3 discs including a soundtrack CD - the extras include a conversation between Tarantino and director Enzo G. Castellari.

Surfwise - a documentary about a doctor who dropped out of the medical profession to go surfing. His nine children received no education at all, resulting in a very odd family, to say the least. Said to be both amusing and quite sad.

Young and Restless in China - documentary about 9 young professionals coping with life in China in the lead up to the 2008 Olympics.

last but certainly not least .... Best of Hooters - Special Collectors Edition.

New to Blu-Ray this week - Top Gun, Hunt for Red October, Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games, War Games, Lost Boys

Underneath Firefox, it says version 3.0.1

But on the last line in this box it says 2.0.0.11



But the icons are definitely the 3.0 style.


Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy

Just upgraded from Firefox 3.0 to 3.0.1.

Take a look in the address bar and take a look at the screen I got.

Hello? Anybody home?

(Yes, I checked Help/About, it says I'm running 3.0.1)

Anyone out there use any type of contact management software? I'm tracking a lot of different threads in my head and need something to allow me to be organized about this.

I need something that will allow me to keep basic info about people (name, company, address, phone, email, etc.), allow me to put down notes about meetings or conversations and also allow me to enter reminders for follow up calls/emails. My preference would be for something web based - optimized for iPhone/Safari even better.

Thanks in advance for any tips/pointers.

Not much going on with me at the moment. In the words of Firesign Theatre, I'm waiting for the electrician, or someone like him. No hot water all week due to ongoing electrical problems at home. Showering at a sauna okay for $300, including massage. Then it occurred to me that it would be cheaper to just get a room at a love hotel. Except they look at you really funny if you check in alone.

Anyway, some music notes that have caught my eye this week:

* If you missed it, there's a new 4 song live Bruce Springsteen EP that is so far only available as a digital download. The four songs are live from the current tour and 3 of the 4 are duets - with Alejandro Escovedo, Tom Morello, Roger McGuinn - the 4th being Danny Federici's final performance of "Sandy" with the band. All proceeds go to the Danny Federici Melanoma Fund. The songs cost 99 cents each or all 4 for 3 bucks, available on iTunes and Amazon. Also on iTunes, you can buy MP3s of all 4 songs and the videos of all 4 songs for 8 bucks.

* There's a feature film of the last Crosby Stills Nash & Young tour, directed by Neil Young - actually the tour was "directed" by him as well as the film, as Young told CSN that they would have to play his entire Living With War album and the only other songs that they could include would also have to have an anti-war message. A soundtrack album is due out soon. Volume 1 of Neil Young's long-delayed archives series might actually get released this fall; I'll believe it when I see it. Still a lot of flip-flopping on if this will be blu-ray only or if there might also be a CD release.

* Pretenders have a new album due out in late September, their first in 6 years. In the next two months, they will release one MP3 per week for free of tracks from the album, each with a difference sponsor. Go to their web site for the first one now.

* Nils Lofgren has a new album coming out of all Neil Young songs. Most people know Nils as a member of the E Street band but he also played on some of Young's albums as well as on Crazy Horse's first album.

* Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz) has written the score for an opera, "Monkey: Journey to the West," based on the Chinese legend. The CD comes out in September.

* Paul Westerberg (The Replacements) has a new album out. It's a single long track, 44 minutes long, called "49." And it's being sold as a download on Amazon for 49 cents.

* 82 year old B.B. King's next album is produced by T-Bone Burnett (who just did the latest John Mellencamp album, which sounds great, even if the lyrics are depressing as fuck). It's called "One Kind Favor." Basically recorded live in the studio, it's a collection of blues songs from Blind Lemon Jefferson, T-Bone Walker, Howlin' Wolf and others. The backing band? How's about Dr. John, Jim Keltner and Nathan East.

* Last one for now - the short list for this year's Mercury Prize has been announced. Nominees are:

• Adele, "19"
  
• British Sea Power, "Do You Like Rock Music?"
• Burial, "Untrue"
  
• Elbow, "The Seldom Seen Kid"
  
• Estelle, "Shine"
  
• Laura Marling, "Alas I Cannot Swim"
  
• Neon Neon, "Stainless Style"
  
• Portico Quartet, "Knee-Deep In The North Sea"
• Rachel Unthank & The Winterset, "The Bairns"
• Radiohead, "In Rainbows"
  
• Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, "Raising Sand"
  
• The Last Shadow Puppets, "The Age Of The Understatement"

From the NY Times review of new book The Dark Side:

“The Dark Side,” Jane Mayer’s gripping new account of the war on terror, is really the story of two wars: the far-flung battle against Islamic radicalism, and the bitter, closed-doors domestic struggle over whether the president should have limitless power to wage it. The euphemistically named but often grisly particulars of the fight against Al Qaeda — the “extraordinary renditions” by hooded agents in unmarked planes, the secret “black site” prisons across the globe, the “enhanced” interrogation techniques, the “reverse rendition” of detainees lucky enough to be found innocent and dumped blindfolded at remote borders — are harrowingly recounted here, complete with fresh revelations. But in Ms. Mayer’s hands the story of bureaucratic jockeying in well-upholstered offices and in the fine print of legal documents makes for an equally absorbing and disturbing story. It’s a cage match between the Constitution and a cabal of ideological extremists, and the Constitution goes down.

The war on terror, according to Ms. Mayer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, was a “political battle cloaked in legal strategy, an ideological trench war” waged by a small group of true believers whose expansive views of executive power she traces from the Nixon administration through the Iran-contra scandal to the panicked days after 9/11. Ms. Mayer’s prime movers and main villains are Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal counsel (now chief of staff) David Addington, who after the terrorist attacks moved to establish “a policy of deliberate cruelty that would’ve been unthinkable on Sept. 10.”

As the leader of the self-styled “war council,” a group of lawyers who took the lead in making the rules for the war on terror, Mr. Addington startled many colleagues with the depth of his fervor and the reach of his power. “How did this lunatic end up running the country?” an unnamed “high ranking and very conservative” administration lawyer quoted by Ms. Mayer recalls asking himself in meetings. “Even his admirers,” Ms. Mayer writes, “tended to invoke metaphors involving knives.” “Cheney’s Cheney” was known to carry a dog-eared copy of the Constitution in his pocket — a detail that in another story might suggest a steadfast devotion but in Ms. Mayer’s comes off as just a way of breaking it down before swallowing it whole.

...

Ms. Mayer pieces together detailed case histories for several prisoners, beginning with “detainee 001,” the so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lindh, whose botched prosecution led the administration to decide, in Ms. Mayer’s words, that “open criminal trials under the strict rules of the American legal system were not worth the risk.” But even as such trials were largely abandoned, evidence gathering was stepped up, using increasingly exotic means.

...

While waterboarding has drawn the most public criticism, a former government official familiar with the program told Ms. Mayer, the real brutality lay in the sheer number and duration of the different “procedures.” “The totality is just staggering,” this official said.

From Salon:

The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation of the 1970s.

...

Salon has also uncovered further indications of far-reaching and possibly illegal surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency inside the United States under President Bush. That includes the alleged use of a top-secret, sophisticated database system for monitoring people considered to be a threat to national security. It also includes signs of the NSA's working closely with other U.S. government agencies to track financial transactions domestically as well as globally.

...

"If we know this much about torture, rendition, secret prisons and warrantless wiretapping despite the administration's attempts to stonewall, then imagine what we don't know," says a senior Democratic congressional aide who is familiar with the proposal and has been involved in several high-profile congressional investigations.

"You have to go back to the McCarthy era to find this level of abuse," says Barry Steinhardt, the director of the Program on Technology and Liberty for the American Civil Liberties Union. "Because the Bush administration has been so opaque, we don't know [the extent of] what laws have been violated."

...

A prime area of inquiry for a sweeping new investigation would be the Bush administration's alleged use of a top-secret database to guide its domestic surveillance. Dating back to the 1980s and known to government insiders as "Main Core," the database reportedly collects and stores -- without warrants or court orders -- the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security.

According to several former U.S. government officials with extensive knowledge of intelligence operations, Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. One former intelligence official described Main Core as "an emergency internal security database system" designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. Its name, he says, is derived from the fact that it contains "copies of the 'main core' or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community."

Via boingboing:


Via Cinematical:


Oh, Carina, I withdraw my marriage proposal.

But first, just to show that there are idiots all over the world, here's a quote from Brooke Hogan, the daughter of wrestler Hulk Hogan, who has somehow managed to achieve celebrity status in the US. This quote not only speaks to her own stupidity but to that of her fans, whomever they may be:

You know what? I am actually not that much into voting. I think it's kinda crazy that a woman is running, because I think that women deal with a lot of emotions and menopause and PMS and stuff. Like, I'm so moody all the time, I know I couldn't be able to run a country, 'cause I'd be crying one day and yelling at people the next day, ya know?

And 61 year old Ronnie Wood's decision to leave his wife of 23 years (and their 4 children) for a 19 year old cocktail waitress? I thought he was off booze and drugs.

That being said, I wish I had more time at the moment to write about the way the problems just seem to be piling up in Hong Kong and how ill equipped our leaders are to deal with it. These goofballs make horrible decisions based on lack of experience, an unwillingness to lose face by consulting with experts and a further unwillingness to lose face after their idiotic decisions are met with storms of protest.

The SCMP letters page often seems like a haven for those who write their missives with crayons, but lately it's been improving. Today's letters include:

* If Donald Tsang claims he has no political ambitions and only cares about his spiritual advancement, then why the fuck is he chief executive and destroying our city?
* A second letter questioning the need for a specific cultural district and wondering how we will ensure a constant flow of talent to fill the venues there.
* A letter responding to the Singapore Consul General's ludicrous assertion that Singapore is a democracy
* A letter asserting that the government's fear of being sued if they try to block the construction of the Mega Greed Tower on Kennedy Road is a joke
* And several comments on the utter and complete stupidity of the way the government is temporarily suspending the maid tax.

Despite government assertions to the contrary, evidencing is mounting that maids are being fired and signing of new contracts are being postponed. The minimum wage for maids was cut during bad times but not restored during good times, and now we've found yet another way to legally abuse these women who leave their families behind for years at a time to wash our cars and carry our childrens' books home from school. No one in the government had the foresight to figure out that if you put this silly plan into action, this is what would happen? Or no one in the government gave a shit because it provides financial benefit to a few wealthy HK families and only hurts poor non-Chinese women?

And donating HK$10b of tax payer money to Sichuan earthquake victims. Why? The Chinese government has a surplus of hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of USD sitting around. My guess is we're donating more than HK$2,000 per tax payer. Why? Why so much? How is the money being spent? Who decides? Who voted for this? Can I just get my HK$2,000 back and donate it to some cause that really needs it?

Oh, btw, the SCMP has an article on new Hong Kong-specific features on Google Maps, without ever mentioning the URL.

Don't know why I'm in a crappy mood today. Maybe just very tired.

Didn't have time to really try to do a lot of manual settings, bracketing, etc. And was having trouble getting my cheapo Shenzhen tripod completely locked down. But these came out kinda okay, no?

BC Magazine has two new blogs.

There's Hong Kong Film Posters - which as you might guess is movie posters for both local and international films - the twist being for the international films, it's the local HK poster in Chinese, which I always thought made for cool collectibles.

And there's BC Unplugged, which features photos from the series of club gigs the magazine is now presenting at the Wanch. Don't think I previously mentioned that I went to the one last Thursday. Aside from enjoying the acts a lot more than I expected, by 11 PM the place was packed tight and the crowd was really enjoying themselves. You get live, original music with no cover charge and the drinks are cheap enough, no reason not to check out future ones.

Oh, here's a link to my latest column in BC, mostly about my fanatical love for a new album called "A Drunkard's Masterpiece" by Johnny Dowd.

Not BC Magazine .... Sex and Shanghai is back but different. Previously a sex blog by an expat teacher in Shanghai, he's now revealed his real name and is publishing excerpts from a book he's co-written, "Fault Lines on the Face of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great." If the China blogosphere was calling for him to be expelled or killed based on the sex stuff, who knows how they'll react to this?

There were some other links I meant to post but it's late and my brain is shutting down.

Guaranteed this post of 0% interest to non-iPhone users.

Previously I was using the first generation 16 gig iPhone on SmarTone-Vodafone, jailbroken and unlocked via ziphone.

Now I am using the 16 gig 3G iphone on 3.

I sync all of my contacts with Microsoft Outlook.

Because I travel a lot, I include country codes for each phone number in Outlook. That includes Hong Kong contacts - each entry includes the "+852". (Example: +852-9999-9999.)

And when in HK, SmarTone was just sending through the local number without the prefix (9999-9999). The iPhone couldn't figure out the contact and would just display the phone number. So for people who called me frequently, I'd put their phone numbers into Outlook twice, once with and once without the country code.

It seems that 3 sends through the country code plus phone number but without the IDD access code (so 852-9999-9999, no + sign in front). So once again, a call or SMS comes through, the iPhone can't figure out the caller name because I have +852-9999-9999 and 9999-9999 stored.

At least that's what happened when one frequent caller sent me an SMS earlier tonight. Though for another frequent caller, that didn't happen. So now I don't know wtf is going on.

And now I have to go through and make triplicate entries for the people who call me most frequently (especially the ones I want to avoid).

You would think this kind of stuff would be standardized. But noooooooooo.........

Following my earlier post on the publicity hungry idiot suing "Kung Fu Panda," thought I should also post some excerpts from this NY Times article, The Panda That Roared:

The main question being asked is: How could Western filmmakers have used Chinese themes to create such a brilliant animated movie with such widespread appeal to the Chinese themselves?

Why, in other words, doesn’t China itself seem to be able to use its rich traditions to such brilliant cinematic and commercial effect?

“Besides borrowing a number of sequences from classic kung fu movies in China, the animated comedy grasped the essence of our culture,” Lu Chuan, a young Chinese movie director, wrote in a much noted commentary in China Daily.

“As a movie director, I cannot help wondering when China will be able to produce a movie of this caliber,” Mr. Lu said.

Or, as Wu Jiang, president of the China National Peking Opera Company, said, according to Reuters: “The film’s protagonist is China’s national treasure and all the elements are Chinese, but why didn’t we make such a film?”

...

“China has first-class directors, first-class playwrights, first-class actors, but it’s a shame that we have censorship by government officials,” one anonymous blogger wrote. “If they don’t like your work, then there’s no way.”

Mr. Lu, the commentator in China Daily, had a telling story in this regard, about a project he undertook to produce an animation for the Olympic Games. “I kept on receiving directions and orders from related parties on what the movie should be like,” he recalled. “We were given very specific rules on how to promote it.

“Under such pressure, my co-workers and I really felt stifled,” he continued. In the end, “the planned animation was never produced.”

Of course neither the education system nor the government would do anything to back creativity and individual thought, because those represent threats to "social stability." So while most countries would strike back by attempting to create something better, in China the government simply limits the number of foreign films that can be screened and periodically bans foreign animation from prime TV time slots.

From the BBC:

Three Chinese reporters attending a police briefing on the success of an anti-gun campaign were accidentally shot, media reports say.

An officer picked up one of the weapons on show - a confiscated home-made gun - but it went off in his hand.

A reporter needed surgery for injuries to his ankle, crotch and chest, after being hit by what appeared to be pebbles fired by the gun.

Full story here.

From Content Agenda, For DVDs, Flat is the New Up:

Content Agenda sister-pub Video Business is reporting on its Web site Friday and in its print edition Monday that 1H '08 consumer spending on DVDs was flat from the same period last year at $10.1 billion. Which is actually good news for the studios, which had generally been expecting sales and rentals to decline by at least a few percentage points. Instead, sales were off only 0.5% while rentals were up 0.5%. Warner Home Video president Ron Sanders was so giddy at the news that he raised his full-year forecast to flat as well.

Studio execs interviewed by VB attributed the not-as-bad-as-expected results to the crummy economy making the value of a DVD look better in comparison, and increased sales of Blu-ray discs. According to Fox Home Entertainment chief Mike Dunn, Blu-ray is currently running about 8% of sales on a per-title basis, and could reach 10-12% by year end.

"While we are not bullish on the performance of home entertainment as a sector over the next few years (as standard def DVD player penetration has matured), the increase in 1H 2008 DVD spending should remind investors that the DVD industry is not rapidly declining in favor of digital distribution (whose revenues remain completely insignificant to the Hollywood studios)," Pali Research analyst Rich Greenfield wrote in a note last week in reference to the Hollywood Reporter data.

So where are the dark clouds behind all this silver lining? Here are a few:

• Consumer spending on DVD may be holding steady, but studio spending on making and marketing movies continues to climb through the roof. What the studios need is not something that's flat but something's that's growing. If it's not going to be DVD than it needs to come from some other distribution channel, and right now, digital ain't gettin' it done. It's nice that digital isn't yet eroding DVD sales, but where is the growth going to come from? Blu-ray? Maybe, but more likely it will simply help hold the line on consumer spending without really solving the growth problem.
• I disagree with my good friend Tom Adams that there is "very little digital downloading" going. There's lots of it going on, it's just that much of it is illegal and not being paid for. Just check any BitTorrent tracker site. It's heartening (and quite interesting) that illegal downloads at this point don't seem to be doing unto DVD sales what they did to the CD business, but that doesn't mean they're not siphoning off growth, from both DVDs and legit digital sales.
• The economy is likely to continue to suck for a while, which could blunt the growth of Blu-ray--about the best thing the studios have going for them right now.

Unfortunately this moderately not bad news comes too late for Warner Home Video Hong Kong.

From The Economist, via Content Agenda, Look For the Silver Lining: Piracy:

Piracy is a bad thing. But sometimes companies can turn it to their advantage

"MERCHANT and pirate were for a long period one and the same person," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche. "Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality." Companies, of course, would strongly disagree with this suggestion. Piracy is generally bad for business. It can undermine sales of legitimate products, deprive a company of its valuable intellectual property and tarnish its brand. Commercial piracy may not be as horrific as the seaborne version off the Horn of Africa. But stealing other people?s R&D, artistic endeavour or even journalism is still theft.

That principle is worth defending. Yet companies have to deal with the real world—and, despite the best efforts of recorded-music companies, luxury-goods firms and software-industry associations, piracy has proved very hard to stop. Given that a certain amount of stealing is going to happen anyway, some companies are turning it to their advantage.

For example, around 20 times as many music tracks are exchanged over the internet on "peer to peer" file-sharing networks as are legitimately sold online or in shops. Statistics about the traffic on file-sharing networks can be useful. They can reveal, for example, the countries where a new singer is most popular, even before his album has been released there. Having initially been reluctant to be seen exploiting this information, record companies are now making use of it. This month BigChampagne, the main music-data analyser, is extending its monitoring service to pirated video, too. Knowing which TV programmes are being most widely passed around online can help broadcasters when negotiating with advertisers or planning schedules.

In other industries, piracy can help to open up new markets. Take software, for instance. Microsoft's Windows operating system is used on 90% of PCs in China, but most copies are pirated. Officially, the software giant has taken a firm line against piracy. But unofficially, it admits that tolerating piracy of its products has given it huge market share and will boost revenues in the long term, because users stick with Microsoft's products when they go legit. Clamping down too hard on pirates may also encourage people to switch to free, open-source alternatives. "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not," Microsoft's chairman, Bill Gates, told Fortune magazine last year.

Piracy can also be a source of innovation, if someone takes a product and then modifies it in a popular way. In music unofficial remixes can boost sales of the original work. And in a recent book, "The Pirate's Dilemma", Matt Mason gives the example of Nigo, a Japanese designer who took Air Force 1 trainers made by Nike, removed the famous "swoosh" logo, applied his own designs and then sold the resulting shoes in limited editions at $300 a pair under his own label, A Bathing Ape. Instead of suing Nigo, Nike realised that he had spotted a gap in the market. It took a stake in his firm and also launched its own premium "remixes" of its trainers. Mr Mason argues that "the best way to profit from pirates is to copy them."

That this silver lining exists should not obscure the cloud. Most of the time, companies will decide to combat piracy of their products by sending in the lawyers with all guns blazing. And most of the time that is the right thing to do. But before they rush into action companies should check to see if there is a way for them to turn piracy to their advantage.

Which mirrors ideas that I have long held. Piracy is bad. Piracy is illegal. But it is a fact of life. It is never going away. So build your business model around it. The status quo only lasts so long (except for the band named Status Quo, which seems to be going on forever). Turn away for an instant and the status quo has changed. Home video executives are trying to bail out a sinking ship with a teaspoon.

In China, where only 20 foreign films can be screened theatrically each year, pirates keep market awareness alive for films that do not hit movie theaters. They know their steady customers, know what the customers want, make recommendations that their customers follow, accept exchanges and returns, make deliveries and generally provide strong customer service. These are people who should not be arrested, they should be hired.

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

Last night I spent some time trying to snag Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog from the web site, which is streaming a protected feed from hulu.com. It was an instinctive reaction, I see content, I want content, I go to grab it. Then I thought about the words I had written here on Thursday, took another look at it on iTunes, saw it was just 4 bucks, and decided that it was a more than reasonable price to pay for something that I thought was creative and entertaining.

But I'm in the minority in Hong Kong because I maintain a US credit card so that I can make purchases from the US iTunes store. Others will grab this illegally, because they have no other way to get it. They will show it to their friends. They will do more than just email a URL, they will show friends the videos on their laptop or mobile phone or PMP. More people will know about it. And when the DVD comes out later this year, perhaps more people will buy it because of the way piracy increased consumer awareness of the title. And it will also increase peoples' awareness of Joss Whedon and Neil Patrick Harris, so it will be easier for them to get funding for new projects, attract ad dollars for content they place on line, and so on.

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

Well, a lot to do today, time to start doing it ....

Noted on Chopped Onions, this memorial ride in memory of John Desmond Hew. Hew was murdered in Hong Kong by a drunk driver - someone who was allegedly driving drunk at 10:30 AM and was allegedly fleeing from the scene of another accident he had allegedly caused, and was released on his own recognizance with minimal bail because he is the brother of a celebrity.

With all the chaos swirling around me this morning, this had me laughing my ass off and shaking my head in disbelief at the same time. There are always going to be schemers but note how the court in China has decided to play along. From Variety Asia Online:

Chinese performance artist Zhao Bandi, best known for using panda images in his art, including clothes designs for panda prostitutes and panda concubines, is suing DreamWorks in a Beijing court, demanding an apology from the Hollywood studio for "Kung Fu Panda's" depiction of China's national symbol.

The amusing tale about an overweight panda-turned-noodle chef called Po who aspires to be a kung fu master has done boffo B.O. in China since it was first screened June 20. The Chinese are hugely proud of kung fu, and they also love their national symbol, the giant panda, and DreamWorks Animation has been widely praised for addressing these two big issues sensitively in "Kung Fu Panda."

Zhao, who likes to carry a stuffed panda around with him and whose art is all based on pandas, says the fact that Po's father in the film is a duck is an insult to all Chinese and also the panda's eyes are green, which is an evil color.

"Designing the panda with green eyes is a conspiracy. A panda with green eyes has the feeling of evil. I have studied oil painting, and we would never use green eyes to describe a kind-hearted figure. So I ask them to open their creative meeting records of this film and explain why the green eyes?

"Next, why is the panda's father is a duck? Many foreigners think the giant panda is not just China's symbol, but also the Chinese people's symbol. Drawing the father of the giant panda as a duck is an insult to the Chinese people. In a few years time, I'm worried some young Chinese people will think their ancestor is Donald Duck," Zhao said.

Zhao's earlier calls for a boycott of the film because it would upset victims of the Sichuan earthquake prompted the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, the state body that tightly controls the entertainment business, to delay the film's release in the Sichuan earthquake zone, but there was an immediate response online calling for the film to be released.

Zhao said he's not seeking any money; he just wants an apology from the filmmakers. He said Beijing Chaoyang District People's Court had formally accepted his lawsuit, and he wrote on his blog that the decision by the court to proceed with his case showed that he was about more than just mere publicity stunts.

After days, if not weeks of hype, it's finally here. No, not the Dark Knight (though that opens in HK today and please go see our little Bat Boy movie, it's very nice).

No, it's not a bird, it's not a plane, it's not a other thing that it's not, it's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, the latest project from Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, and starring the always wonderful Neil Patrick Harris. You can stream parts 1 and 2 online at that link (part 3 will be posted this weekend) or buy it on iTunes.

ONE WEEK ONLY! AN INTERNET MINISERIES EVENT!

"Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog" will be streamed, LIVE (that part’s not true), FREE (sadly, that part is) right on Drhorrible.com, in mid-July. Specifically:

ACT ONE (Wheee!) will go up Tuesday July 15th.

ACT TWO (OMG!) will go up Thursday July 17th.

ACT THREE (Denouement!) will go up Saturday July 19th.

All acts will stay up until midnight Sunday July 20th. Then they will vanish into the night, like a phantom (but not THE Phantom – that’s still playing. Like, everywhere.)

Just watched part 1. No, it ain't Gone With the Wind, but it's pretty darn good, and when content like this is being produced for the web, you know that at least paradigms have already shifted. Written during the writers strike and there are plans for eventual DVD release, but still, making it available online first is pretty notable.

You like it, you want more like this, then support it.

Over at the Convention Center today, attending the regional Broadband conference, killing a couple of hours on the exhibition floor.

I was surprised to find a small booth for Giganews, the commercial Usenet server that I've subscribed to for about ten years. And surprised to find that despite the size and international scope of the company, it's basically a family business. As for why they were at an Asian broadband conference, since they haven't posted this specific bit of news on their web site, I won't mention it here.

But I'd like to ask my Asian-based readers some of the questions that came up during our conversation today:

If you live in Asia, do you use Usenet?

If yes, what do you use it for? And how do you access it (what news reader, service provider, etc.)?

In case you haven't seen it elsewhere, the above is the cover of this week's issue of The New Yorker magazine. I saw this and didn't need anyone to tell me that this was satirizing the lies and misconceptions about Obama that many are currently circulating in the US.

But the blogosphere, and in particular the Huffington Post, are filled with essays expressing outrage at this cover.

So the question is ... is this effective satire or was the expression of the idea done poorly?

And does McCain have a full-sized framed poster of this hanging in his office?

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

Yes, I have the 3G iphone now. Hutchison's corporate sales staked out our office. And I was able to have one delivered to me in my office, without waiting on line anywhere. The deal offered was a discount on the price of the phone, no prepayment necessary and no need to subscribe to any value added services (see small print on 3's web site).

I told the guy that I was worried about coverage at my home which, despite being relatively remote, does get a strong signal on my current SmarTone account. The salesman told me that if I'm having trouble with reception at home, I should call him and he'd send an engineer out to my house to see what could be done.

Haven't had a chance to try surfing at 3G speeds yet because it will be another day until my existing number is switched over from SmarTone to 3. (Yes, I can confirm that the phone being sold by 3 is sold unlocked and is working just fine with my ST simcard.)

Oh, if you haven't seen it elsewhere, the version of the OS shipping on the iPhone is a bit buggy but Apple have already released an update. Just connect your phone to iTunes and then click on "restore" and it will get the newer version of the OS as part of the process.

I never used to be afraid of lightning or thunder. But tonight, around 10 PM, as the latest in a seemingly non-stop series of storms passed over my house, there was a bolt of lightning, a crash of thunder and once again my house was plunged into darkness.

I found myself sitting watching the storm, waiting for the next bit of whatever to kill the power again.

It's just my house. It ain't happening to my neighbors. Something in the wiring. I don't know enough about this kind of stuff to say.

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

I'm so happy with the DVD-ROM edition of Rolling Stone magazine that I checked around to see what other magazines might be available in this format.

The same company is offering a similar package for every issue of Playboy from the 1950s. The retail price is US$100 and the company's web site is offering 20% off. And then I looked on Amazon and saw it, not for 20% off but for $20. Two weeks later the price has gone up to $40. The package includes a reprint of the very first issue and a 200 page book. For me, the "iconic years" (for want of a better term) would be the 60s and 70s, when I was a hopelessly horny kid.

Also of potential interest: every issue of MAD magazine from its first 50 years. "600 complete printable issues, over 17,500 scanned pages in full color."

And all 246 issues of National Lampoon magazine. 29 years, and it was certainly terrific stuff for the first 5 or so of those years.

And 80 years worth of The New Yorker Magazine.

Of course, eventually all of this stuff will end up online, free, legally or otherwise. Physical storage of data in the home will be about as relevant in the future as an electric typewriter is today.

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

Apple says they sold 1 million 3G iPhones in three days. It took 74 days to sell a million of the first generation iPhone. The NY Times points out that Nokia sells 10 million phones per week and Samsung ships about 100 million phones per year. So Apple's still got a little catching up to do. (No stats yet on how many people were first time buyers and how many were upgrading from the first generation.)

Possibly more relevant, in the same three days, 10 million applications were downloaded from the new iPhone App Store, even with all the network glitches Apple was having. Apple has promised that 25% of apps in the store would be freebies, and no word on how many of those 10 million downloads were of free ones - I suspect the majority. But still, if 2 million downloads were for apps at an average cost of 10 bucks a piece, that ain't a bad chunk o' change.

Note in Hong Kong: Hutchison is offering the iPhone to many of their corporate customers. Same monthly price, same two year contract, but you only have to prepay two months' service. Not sure how long delivery time is on these.

The SCMP reports that a shop in Mong Kok is taking advance orders for unlocked iPhones, charging $5,980 for the 8 gig version and $6,980 for the 16 gig - probably reasonable given the price of unlocked ones in other countries. I've got a friend at the Wanchai computer center who promises to call me once he has stock.

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

Finally for tonight, I'd like to call attention to something that's been mentioned several times in the SCMP but I haven't seen mentioned in HK blogs - the idiotic idea to move the cruise ship terminal from TST to the old airport. This will cost billions and tax payers will end up footing at least half the bill.

Jake van der Kamp has written about this several times. Some excerpts from his most recent column:

Only two developers submitted tenders to build our big new cruise terminal and both were deemed invalid for demanding concessions that were not on offer.

The reported price of this facility has now risen to HK$4 billion from a 2006 estimate of HK$2.4 billion and we, the taxpayers, will have to stump up HK$2 billion of the cost.

Have you ever wondered, as I often have, why it is that this tourism industry, which is supposed to provide so many good things for Hong Kong, only ever shows itself to demand more money from us, big sums, too? If the pay-off to us is meant to be so good, how come we never collect?

One obvious reason that developers show no interest in the project is that it is to be built in our equivalent of Siberia, the far tip of the old Kai Tak runway.

It will require turning much of the rest of the runway into roadway, thus destroying another opportunity for a glorious big inner city park and ensuring that the cruise terminal location remains Siberia forever. No one else will be there.

I admit I have been told that the government's official figure for spending by cruise passengers last year, a grand total for the whole year of only HK$46.7 million (get out your microscope), understates the real spending level.

They can, for instance, do what cruise operators in New York did when New York faced a similar conundrum on whether to build a new cruise terminal. New York went ahead only after the cruise lines gave binding commitments on passengers they would bring to New York for the next 10 years.

And then there is this letter, from Paul Zimmerman, "Designing Hong Kong, Causeway Bay":

The failed tender for the new cruise terminal at Kai Tak reconfirms Designing Hong Kong's position that the terminal is in the wrong place. The 50,000 square metres of commercial development rights granted have so little value on the tip of Kowloon that they can't pay for building the terminal.

Previous papers to the Legislative Council show a hyped-up expectation that the terminal would become a world-class tourism node - a hotel, shopping and dining paradise. We have pointed out from day one that this is highly unlikely, as the tip of the runway is an extremely remote location without any mass transit links.

The alternative, upgrading the piers in Tsim Sha Tsui and adding new berths in West Kowloon, is ideal and preferred by many, as it has all the high-capacity rail and road links into the city, the airport, and the mainland. It is also right next to the core tourist attractions - and even more so when the cultural venues are built.

What most people don't know and will only realise when it is too late, is that the value of the runway as an oasis with residential facilities, parks, sports fields, marinas and pedestrian and bike paths along the harbour, will be completely destroyed by the two high-capacity roads that are being built on both sides of the narrow runway.

The failed tender has now put a clear price tag on the planning madness.

Of course, this is yet another example of what happens when you have a non-elected government, appointees in charge who got their jobs through favors and friendships rather than merit and not answerable to the general public for their decisions - I've decided that the people coming up with these ideas are either drug addicts, alcoholics or escapees from the local loony bin.

Well, as I mentioned, on Friday night I was without electricity. And when the CLP guy came, I found a circuit breaker switch outside the house, around the back, that I didn't know about. I thought the four rows of switches on the ground and second floors here were the whole deal.

Sunday I went out for lunch, came back home, went to put the leftovers in the fridge and noticed the fridge light was out. And then realized that the electricity was out again. I checked all the switches in the house and then went outside, around the back and saw that one was in the off position. But each time I turned it on, it immediately flicked off again.

So I had to call CLP again and they showed up within 30 minutes. With the two guys from their crew, we worked our way through every switch in the house. Eventually we found the culprit, the switch for the water heater. They said they couldn't fix the heater, that I needed to get an electrician in to do it. So, no hot water.

Now the thing is, one of the things the landlord was supposed to do when I moved in was replace the existing water heater. And she kept coming up with excuses not to do it, even saying at one point, "You know, I only agreed to do this out of the goodness of my heart, I don't have to do it." Ex-squeeze me? It's written into the lease. Yes you have to do it.

So finally she sent someone out to the house who announced that the heater is fine. He did some kind of tinkering with it and left.

So the landlord called that guy today, he called my assistant and screamed at her that he didn't need to come here to fix the heater, that it was fine. She explained to him the details of what happened on Sunday. He arrived this afternoon, said he couldn't fix it and that the power company has to fix it and that he would call them.

So I have no hot water and am now trapped in finger-pointing hell. If this is not resolved on Tuesday then I will call in my own electrician and deduct it from the rent.

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

Geeky shit department: One of the things that happened during Friday night's thunder storm was that my wireless router got blown out. Saturday I went shopping for surge protectors and a new router. I decided to stick with Linksys because I've used those in the past, happy with them and very familiar with their firmware.

But the new one came with a new set-up program that just refused to recognize the router. I was jumping through hoops of fire trying everything I could think of and going back and forth with Linksys tech support via their online forum (I was getting answers to my posted messages within minutes). Finally I noticed I was getting some errors related to Microsoft Net Framework. The only software using that was some back-up software that I no longer use. After I uninstalled that, the router installed just fine. Weird.

And also discovered lots of errors on the RAID array that I store most of my data on. Chkdsk doesn't want to run all the way through. So I'm going to be spending tonight copying 400 gigs onto other drives and then probably doing a reinstall of Windows just for the hell of it. Yes my life is exciting, isn't it?

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

New albums:

My next BC column is all about A Drunkard's Masterpiece by Johnny Dowd. Astonishing.

Live album from Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. Some of it works really well.

New album from John Mellencamp produced by T-Bone Burnett. Haven't made my mind up on this one yet.

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New DVD - complete episodes of Comedy Central series TV Funhouse (stream excerpts here). This is seriously demented stuff from Robert Smigel, who did a series of animated shorts of the same name on SNL and also is the hand up the butt of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.

Just to give you some idea ....

It's Western Day at TV Funhouse but the Ani-pals (animal puppets) are having none of it. The rooster's wife is having her period, he's horny as hell, so they all head for Tijuana. They stop at a cockfight and then enjoy themselves in a Mexican whorehouse.

Meanwhile the cartoon this episode is Wonderman, who tells a female fan that he doesn't date but that she should stay away from Kenneth Moore (his secret identity) because Kenneth's dick is so big most women can't handle it. And then he flings the woman's boyfriend into space and the episode ends with Kenneth Moore not minding that the woman calls him Wonderman when they're fucking.

And a short feature on Mnemonics and how it can help you remember stuff like North South East West by substituting No Spaniard Enjoys Washing.

Sophomoric stuff? I suppose. But I find it funny as hell. Or as they say, if this is the sort of thing that you like, then you'll like this too.

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The Dark Knight, the new Batman movie, opens in HK this Thursday. I got to see it at a media preview screening in Taipei on Friday. I really can't give any detailed comments on it but I will say that while it may not be perfect, I didn't glance at my watch once during the 2-1/2 hour film and that Heath Ledger's performance really lives up to the hype.

Hong Kong gossiper mongers will want to watch it for Edison Chan's brief appearance. Whether it was cut down following the scandal or not I can't say, but he's basically a glorified extra, with just two lines of dialogue.

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Other stuff going on but that's quite enough for now.

Home. Went to sleep as a huge fucking thunderstorm started up. And after a really loud and bright one, lost all power in the house at 2:30 AM. Find the flashlight. Light some candles. Find the CLP bill. Call them. And bless their little hearts, someone was here in an hour and got the power back on. Only two fish died. And my router? That ain't coming back on. Fuse in the plug looks okay. Don't know if it's just the power supply or the router itself and ain't gonna bother with that this evening.

Did you see the Apple news? If you didn't, here's the deal. When you buy an iPhone now, you gotta plug it into iTunes and then it has to finish its activation by connecting to Apple on the internet for some final code. With lines around the block at Apple stores, who knows how many people are trying to activate new phones? At the same time, millions of existing iPhone owners are also trying to do this because they downloaded the new version of the software to be able to hit the app store. And at the same time Apple migrated their old .Mac to new Mobile Me. Which means thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of iPhone owners have inoperable phones until Apple sorts out their network problems. Shouldn't they have anticipated this? What year is this?

Leading off from Hotel One towards the museum is this broad boulevard filled with modern sculpture.




Rows of bicycles at a school near the park.

More sculpture.




Entrance to National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts



On the other side of the museum is a boulevard called Museum Art-park Way. No sculpture here, just trees, grass, but each side of the street is lined with a collection of funky and interesting restaurants.

This one with the drawbridge in front had, sadly, just gone out of business.

Here's Walnut's Castle:

Most of the restaurants are European, though we spotted some Japanese, Beijingese and Shanghainese as well.



Pumpkin House: "New Orleans Italian"


This is where we had lunch, le jardin de Giverny. Obviously not the overpriced housing development in Hebe Haven, this is a charming little French restaurant and bakery, where we had a reasonably okay 4 course lunch, priced at about HK$120 per person.

The bakery window. Can you just smell that bread? Our lunch included a loaf with mushrooms baked inside.

Their outdoor deck.


All of which serves as an example of things you can do when you have a little ambition, a little creativity and you're not being FUCKING RAPED BY REAL ESTATE DEVELOPERS.

My pictures last night of the Wein Restaurant and today of the area around the museum only scratch the surface of this city and its amazing charm.

Since I'm back in Taichung, I can return to the restaurant that impressed me so much a year ago. Wein Restaurant and Lounge.





Some shots of the amazing interior. The place is dark, the photos were taken without flash, and I had to play around with the contrast to get things to show up. Not the greatest pictures in the world but enough to give you an idea.





The menu is modern Chinese, incorporating a lot of different regional Chinese spices and techniques, mixed with western influences. Some of the names on the menu were great too.

First, from desserts, "Afternoon Tea in England"


Appetizers included "Aloe with Loofah." Yes, this is a restaurant, not a spa.

Special juices (not cocktails, juices) included Affair, Sunset in Milan, Hibiscus rising out of snow, Volcanic Magma and of course, Slyphlike Curve.


What did we eat? Here's some salmon


Fatty pork, roll it up with cucumber


Deep fried soft shell crab Sichuan style

Steak


Not tempura - deep fried prawns wrapped in "fillo" dough


And one other dish I forgot to get a picture off. Dinner for four, less than NT$3,000. I'm so full I can barely move.

I do love photos of cloudy skies, so dramatic. These are taken through a window on a moving train - Taiwan High Speed Rail, zipping south along north western Taiwan.








And, at the end of the rainbow, there's a pot of gold, a city called Taichung (this taken from the backseat of a speeding car):

Couple of shots just past sunset from my hotel room looking out over Taichung.



Hotel One in Taichung:

Yesterday, at the HK airport, on that annoying train out to the far-away, gates, standing next to me an Asian woman. Towering over me. She's at least 5 foot 8 and wearing 5 inch platform shoes. I take a closer look. Is this a ladyboy? Adam's apple, nope. Excessively large hands or feet? Nope. Does she even glance in my direction? Nope. Against all odds, she's on the same flight as me. But not sitting anywhere near me. After landing, I lose track of her.

Last night at dinner, with a friend to a Japanese BBQ restaurant. Wagyu beef from Australia. Scallops from Hokkaido. Giant prawns from, um, Giant Prawnville? Forgot to ask. U-shaped counter, small buckets of charcoal in front of each person, everything grilled to perfection. No English menu anywhere but most of the staff spoke really good English (one told us he'd never even been to college, learned most of his English from listening to ICRT, local western style radio station with DJs with American accents and syndicated content like Rick Dees).

Aside from the delicious food, the view is delicious, as most of the female customers were at least cute and one was freaking gorgeous - flawless face and hair, thin, super short denim skirt, green button down blouse, sitting at the other end of the place with two other women talking in a mixture of Mandarin and English. "Let's send them some drinks!" I suggested to my friend (married). "Let's send them a plate of french fries!" "Do they even have french fries here?" "Let's send them something! Anything!" They finished before us and left and I grabbed our flask of sake and attacked it.

Oh, the place is called Da-Wan Yakiniku Dining Restaurant, 1F, No. 22, Lane 177, Section 1, Dunhua South Road. Highly recommend it. There are a number of similar places nearby that I'm told are also good. And on nearby Civic Blvd my friend points out a crab place that he says is similar to Under Bridge in Causeway Bay and also quite good.

Afterwards, it wasn't raining, not too hot though a bit humid, we walked the mile or two back to the hotel.

Some relatively optimistic business news from a source in L.A. last night. If I can believe it.

Off to Taichung tonight.

In what I like to call my career, I've allowed myself to get off track twice. And each time, there was no going back.

#1

My university degree is in film production and as a poor (well, middle class, actually) kid from Da Bronx with absolutely no connections in the biz, I tried everything I could think of to get into the industry.

While still in college, I took a list of 500 production houses in NYC, arranged that by geographic location (and this was all done by hand, no PCs back then), knocked on every door, handed a resume to anyone who would look, and after knocking on 200 doors found myself with a summer internship as an assistant editor on weekly TV series CBS Sports Illustrated.

Years later, I was doing temp work for another production house. Coming in and putting together the house sample reel led to some production assistant work on shoots and somehow that led to my becoming the office receptionist. (I was newly married and grateful for any steady paycheck.) And a year later, they came to me and said that they were trying to decide whether to train me to be a producer or to take over from the boss's father-in-law, who was the business manager and wanted to retire. Of course they eventually decided on the latter.

The thought that at the age of 24, I was business manager for one of the top ten TV commercial director/cameramen in the country went to my head. Sure, I had no training or credentials in this area and of course it meant I never got anywhere near a film set. And of course they'd picked me not just because I'd shown some aptitude for the job but also because it was at least 50% cheaper to use me than to go out and hire a real business manager. Oddly enough, I was pretty good at the job. But they resented the fact that I'd go into the bank to negotiate loans wearing jeans and cowboy boots and come back with a lower interest rate than the father-in-law ever got.

And several years later, when I got tired of the director's binge drinking and his wife's binge drinking and pill popping and went out into the world to get another job, no one else wanted to hire me as a business manager because I didn't have the proper credentials for that and they didn't believe I'd actually been doing that job. And no one wanted to hire me to work on a film set because I hadn't been near a set in years.

So I ended up working in my cousin's TV repair shop by day and managing bands that were part of the post-punk scene in NYC by night and never really worked in the film production business again. From there I went on to driving a taxi and from there being a clerk in a video rental store and then opening my own record store.

#2

In 1998, I was a VP in the technology group of a major international investment bank in Hong Kong. (How I got from working in a record shop to VP in an investment bank is a different tale for another time. But yes, I am that good.) They decided that since I was an expat and had been with them in HK for three years, it was time to move me and they offered me the choice of India or New York. I didn't want either, was unable to find another job in HK, and moved to San Francisco and got a job with a major investment bank there.

But it was 1999 and the internet start-ups were going crazy. Soon I'd left the bank to work at one of those start-ups, a well funded one that lured me with a big salary and tens of thousands of stock options. But it was in a business space that had nothing to do with banking or finance.

Two years later, desperate to return to Hong Kong, I accepted my present job. Even though it also had nothing to do with the financial industry, it got me back to Hong Kong and the salary was and remains quite okay. And while the start-up had me working on bleeding edge web applications, my current job has me working with rusty old legacy crap. Annual bonuses are 90% less than in the investment banking industry and stock options? I'm under water on all my grants.

So now I'm looking around and, granted, the investment banks are kind of shaky at the moment but still hiring, but they're all telling me the same thing - I've been away from investment banking IT for ten years and they won't consider me.

#3

Is coming up. Will I take something that builds on the experience gained from seven years in my current job? Or will I be so desperate for a job that I end up taking whatever is offered, regardless of how it furthers or doesn't further the remainder of my career?

Stay tuned.

Science fiction writer and poet Thomas M. Disch committed suicide on July 4th at the age of 68. The obituaries I've read so far have not mentioned what led to this, if he was in ill health or depressed or simply bored, a la George Sanders. Back in the 70s, when I read very little aside from science fiction, his novels Camp Concentration and 334 were two of my favorites.

Ironically enough, two days before he died, he began a post on his blog about inflation by writing, "Short of succumbing to the madness of anorexia, I doubt I am likely to experience actual starvation before I die."

Several of my favorite writers committed suicide including two at the very top of my list - Ernest Hemingway and Hunter Thompson.

When I was younger, I used to believe that there was nothing that could ever cause me to commit suicide. That life was too interesting, that I'd always want to see what waited beyond the next bend. Now that my life is probably two-thirds (or three-quarters?) finished, the list of reasons why I might consider it grows longer.

On the other hand, things like this video (which has been extensively linked to throughout the blogosphere but I am also linking because everyone should see this) do make me feel a bit more optimistic:




And now, with no connection to the above at all, a few quotes from a writer who did not commit suicide, Oscar Wilde:

• A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
• All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
• America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
• An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
• Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
• By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. (Just think, he wrote that without ever having seen the SCMP letters page.)
• Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
• Do you really think ... that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not -- there is no weakness in that.
• Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
• I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.
• I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
• I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.

... and so on ...

Tomorrow I'm heading to Taiwan. Hope my mood improves while there.

This story in today's SCMP caught my eye:

Hong Kong Island traffic was thrown into chaos yesterday when a 39-year-old Malaysian motorcyclist died after being hit by a car on the Eastern Island Corridor yesterday.

The car's 31-year-old driver was arrested for drink-driving after the accident at about 10.30am near the North Point Ferry. The impact knocked Hew John Desmond off his motorcycle, parts of which were scattered across the road.

The rest of the article points out that the same driver had been involved in an accident in March and "fled the scene." No word on the severity of that accident.

However, the article goes on to mention this:

The driver was injured in the second accident and taken to hospital where he failed an alcohol test. He has been released on HK$10,000 bail and ordered to return to police at the end of the month.

His second accident in three months. He was drunk. He killed someone. That's murder in most countries. And he was released on minimal bail and told to come back in 4 weeks? This is justice?

Also in the SCMP, apparently they've decided to actually do some investigative journalism. And what did they choose to uncover? That love hotels in Hong Kong won't rent rooms to same sex couples. NINE reporters worked on this story. Yes, Bradley Crawford was one of them.

But the main headline for HK news in the SCMP is about a fight that broke out in the early morning hours at Lan Kwai Fong when 30 "blokes" decided to attack another group that turned out to be a group of kick boxing champions. A couple of witnesses are interviewed but very few actual details. One witness is quoted as saying, "I went outside for a fag." Perhaps he would have been better served joining the other reporters trying to check into love hotels?

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In other news, one of the worst human beings to ever walk our planet, U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, died on the 4th of July. Helms fought against federal funding for AIDS research and treatment, saying the disease resulted from “unnatural” and “disgusting” homosexual behavior. A self-described redneck who ran overtly racist campaigns, he opposed academic research, the arts, foreign aid, the United Nations, domestic and international public health efforts, and of course affirmative action and the Martin Luther King holiday.

What did President Idiot have to say about this?

Jesse Helms was a kind, decent, and humble man and a passionate defender of what he called 'the Miracle of America.' So it is fitting that this great patriot left us on the 4th of July.

Yeah, that's right, Bush sees him as a "great patriot."

Up early this morning. Actually I was unable to sleep all night, for reasons I won't go into. Around 5:30, took a look outside, ran back inside and grabbed the camera. And here's what I got:

Yeah, I know, saying "tgif" is about as bad as saying "someone's got a case of the Mondays." So freaking sue me. I'm glad it's the weekend. I need it. And next week in Taipei and Taichung, I need that too, especially chilling in Taichung for a night. Hotel One. Wein Lounge. National Museum. Pig Pen Bar. My kinda town.

Noted in Da SubStandard:

Someone who uploaded Edison Chen pictures - not the original guy but some guy who had them and then re-upped them to share with friends - has pleaded (pled?) guilty to distributing obscene material. A reminder that Hong Kong may have more freedom of speech than many of its neighbors but not all the way, not yet, a long way off.

Drivers Seek Probe Into Police Terror. "Professional drivers who took part in a slow-drive protest have lashed out at the police, describing the action officers took to break up the demonstration as a form of "white terror.'" Eh? White terror? WTF is white terror? I'm seriously not comfortable seeing that phrase in an English language newspaper here, even one as shitty as The SubStandard.

Look out the window and tell me if pigs are flying because "Mary Ma" has written a column that I almost agree with. She says it would be nice if Bruce Lee's former home could be turned into a museum. (Right now it's a love hotel. The owner put it up for sale but has temporarily taken it off the market pending a public outcry.) "It would be ideal if the property were to be donated for public use. But will that be too ideal?" Er, "Mary," is that the limit to your imagination? That the owner should donate it? Why not suggest that the government buy it and convert it into a museum? The government is all too eager to spend money to support the billionaires; would anyone get upset if the government spent some money to create a tourist attraction that people might actually want to visit?

Noted in the SCMP ....

If you get 15 points on your license, the government mails you a summons to appear in court at which point the judge suspends your license. How to get around this? Don't go! Then just say you never got it in the mail. Or don't update your address when you move with the Transport Dept, in which case they can never find you. And keep driving. Legally. Badly.

Last one for today. In the letters column. A Mr. or Ms. T. Narain expresses surprise at an earlier letter by a Mr. or Ms. G. Marques which stated that many domestic helpers do not receive their statutory days off. Mr. Narain disagrees with this. Mr. Narain's sole proof is that Statue Square is so filled with Filipinos on holidays. The question is, who is the bigger idiot? Dr. Narain for thinking that is sufficient proof and that this was important enough for her to write a letter? Or the SCMP, for thinking this letter was important enough to publish?

Everyone knows that social networking web sites are the current big thing. And aside from the various 800 pound gorillas (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.) there are lots of niche players.

Looking at the list of social networking sites on Wikipedia, I see:

aSmallWorld - Euro jetsetters
Flixster - for movie fans
Library Thing - book lovers
Muxlim - social networking for Muslims
StoryMash - group story writing


One that's not on that list but really exists is My Free Implants. What is it? Women who want breast implants but can't afford them join the site and post their profiles and photos of themselves. Men join the site and can view the profiles and photos, chat online with the women and, if they choose, make "donations" towards implant jobs for the women of their choice.

I would guess that the people running the web site get money via advertisements and possibly a percentage of the donations, and since there's a section for implant doctor recommendations, they may receive a kickback from that as well.

All of the good ideas are already taken.

Hmmm, in the mood to go out tonight, but need to be up early tomorrow, so maybe not the best idea.

Over at Crunchgear, they've said that HK is the cheapest place in the world to get the new iPhone. Seems like someone else agrees with my reading of the 3 website details.

Over at Amazonia, they now have two bands. The band that's been there for a year, Icebox, alternates sets with a band called Advent Call.

The set I caught from Icebox last night had them in a heavy metal goofy mood. They introduced lead singer "Brian Johnson," their drummer out in front in shorts and a cap and roaring through an AC/DC number. Then they introduced lead singer "Asshole Rose," again the drummer, this time with an American flag bandana and a skirt and a respectable version of "Sweet Child of Mine."

The other band, Advent Call is not as good. At least they're playing mostly rock and even try their hands at some punk rock. The keyboard player, who seems to be the band's leader, also does some blues harp. Neither Little Walter nor Magic Dick are gonna lose any sleep over this, but at least it's something different.

The real draw of Advent Call is probably their female singer. Very pretty, light skin, long hair, humonguous breasts. Last night she was wearing an extremely short skirt and a top that was only slightly more than a bikini.

(Get ready for the most sexist comment ever.)

I was watching her sing, turned to my friend and said, "That's the reason God invented penises."

Anyway, if you wanna hear them and see what they look like, it turns out they're on YouTube. This is an actual music video they did for what might be an original song, "Wonderful Things." Oh, wait, here's the goldmine, a YouTube video called "porfolio" (sic) of the female singer made up of various still photos of her in various sexy outfits.



And here's a video of them playing at Amazonia ... but Amazonia in Manila, not in Hong Kong.

Um, er, can you tell I'm really bored right now?


Hmmm .... for some reason if you click on the Youtube video embedded in the blog post, it says the video is no longer available. But if you click on the link in the text, it works. So I've removed the embedded video.

Well, Hutchison's Three has announced their pricing for the iPhone. Web site 852signal has their analysis on the pricing, but I think they read the chart wrong.

Here's how I read it:

The maximum plan includes unlimited data and 2200 minutes of airtime (voice calls, I presume). With a two year contract, this plan costs $498 a month, which is well in line with US pricing. And with a two year contract, one year prepaid in advance, the 8 gig iPhone is free, the 16 gig is $138. Can that be correct?

Maybe I'm the one who is reading it wrong.

At any rate, I think I have a year left to go on my current contract with SmarTone. But maybe I'll give Mr. Li some of my hard earned cash.