Classic Hong Kong. Minibus strays into tram lane without looking, gets hit by tram, screws up tram and car traffic. Just stuck camera out the window as I was driving past.


This is in Hang Hau. Town, green mountains, yellow sun, and steel gray sky. Pretty accurate. And some asshole had to tag the sign.

Sai Kung town during Chinese New Year. The town center is filled with these huge lit up signboards and banners.





Every district has a flower market for CNY and Sai Kung is no exception. 51 weeks of the year this is a basketball court, for one week it's like this.

Long day .....

Dinner at Dog House, the new bar on Lockhart. They still don't have their liquor license which is typical HK. But it does mean that you can go to 7-11, buy a can of beer for $15 or whatever they charge (or even a bottle of cheap wine for $75) and then bring it back to the bar and sit there and drink it and enjoy their music, food, comfortable seats, friendly service.

Oh, also, bought a MacBook.

Went for the MB instead of MB Pro for a variety of reasons, two of them being size and weight, also I think the MB will be powerful enough for what I plan to do.

Still in the process of setting it up but it is one beautiful, elegant piece of machinery.

So, Mac fans who read this blog, your recommendations on must have Mac-centric software and accessories (already got the mini-DVI to DVI adapter and upgraded the RAM to 4 gig).

Once upon a time, and for a long time, Italy was one of the undisputed centers of the cinema world. I'm thinking Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Roberto Rossolini, Sergio Leone, Lina Wertmuller and so many others.

I don't know that Matteo Garrone belongs in that same pantheon, but Gomorra is as disturbing and thought-provoking as it is difficult to watch.

It's based on the book by journalist Roberto Saviano, detailing the activities of the organized crime group Camorra in modern day Naples. Saviano's book was supposedly so accurate that he was forced into hiding after its publication.

The film, running two and a quarter hours, isn't a single cohesive narrative. It's a series of intercut sketches, following half a dozen or a dozen people, most of whose lives don't intersect. It's set in a housing project that is, well, look, I lived in The Bronx in the 70s. I worked in Harlem in the 80s. And the places I saw seem like Eden next to this place.

That's the strength of the film. The locations, the camerawork, the acting - it reminds me of classic Italian neo-realist cinema updated to the 00's. It may be fiction but it seems completely real. The violence is random, horrible, never once even remotely glorified. These are ugly people leading hopeless, desperate lives. It's the Anti-Godfather, the Anti-Sopranos.

At first, I was impatient watching this film, waiting for it to settle down into a conventional narrative. It never does. The only film I can think to compare it to offhand, in terms of its realism, in terms of the way it presents a problem with seemingly no possible solution, might be the Brazilian City of God (Cidade de Deus) which, in truth, I probably "enjoyed" more. But this is one that will stay with me.

Gomorra won grand prize at Cannes last year. It was also nominated for the Golden Palm, though it didn't win that. It's difficult, thought provoking, not for everyone, but it does seem to me like a huge accomplishment.

Link sent by a non-blogging friend.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall by Errol Morris.

Whether you love or hate Bush, this is a stunning piece of work.

The traveling pool of press photographers that follows presidents includes representatives from three wire services — AP (The Associated Press), AFP (Agence France-Presse) and Thomson Reuters. During the last week of the Bush administration, I asked the head photo editors of these news services — Vincent Amalvy (AFP), Santiago Lyon (AP) and Jim Bourg (Reuters) — to pick the photographs of the president that they believe captured the character of the man and of his administration. There are overlapping pictures — of the president with a bullhorn at Ground Zero, of the president looking out the window of Air Force One over New Orleans, of the president receiving the news on the morning of 9/11. It is interesting that these pictures are different. They may be of the same scene, but they have different content. They speak in a different way.

It's not just the photos, it's the interviews with the photographers, what they have to say about their subject, about recording history .....

Some of the images in the article:




Yes a picture is worth a thousand words but the words that describe these photos are well worth your time to read.

Take a look at this iPhone app:



It does one thing. You press the onscreen button and it makes the sound of an explosion.

It's a free app. The developer, someone with a lot of experience, set himself a challenge to create an iPhone app in under an hour. He made it cheap, fast, crappy. The shop was already filled with fart, belch and vomit sounds but no grenade sound, so that's what he picked. Put it on the iPhone app store. And within days, it was the #2 downloaded free app in the store.

So he upgraded it to make it "advertiser sponsored." Still free, but every time you use it, an ad banner would appear.

Soon he was grossing US$200 per hour based on clickthroughs from one million ad requests. $200. PER. HOUR.

(Click over to this on Apple Insider. It's worth reading the full story.)

"The App Store is not like any other software market we've ever seen. If it could be compared to any other market, it's like the Billboard Charts for Music. A good pop music producer can take someone with minimal talent, get them to sing some lyrics, and then run it through auto tune. Bam. Number one song. That's all it takes with the App Store. Do some market research, work out that most of the people that download free apps are immature and seriously uncool. Then wrap an average idea that you think will appeal to immature and uncool people with some average graphics, and boom, top 10 app. Like the pop market, it's hit or miss; sometimes it will work, sometimes it won't."

(bold lettering mine)




Now he's just added this one. Sound Grenade Pro. Cost? US$0.99. Somehow I think this will make the top ten as well.

Holy christ. I need to get the iPhone SDK and come up with my own stupid idea.

The iPhone app store seems to have introduced a new paradigm. Applications that are useful are so yesterday.

Hmmm, farts, belches, vomit, hand grenades .... need some public domain sounds and images ... getting an idea ....

Wednesday funnies.

Well, they're not from Wednesday. But today's Wednesday. And I find them funny.

First ... the dilemma faced by all whose friends are bloggers (which means almost everyone these days).



Second, too many of my friends, and maybe me as well, soon ....

Blech.

Monday all I ate was some Italian salami on a baguette, followed up by a piece of blueberry cheesecake that my maid had stashed in the fridge.

Okay, aside from the fact that this is probably an ungodly combination, I think said cheesecake was sitting in the fridge a bit too long. It didn't taste right and I didn't finish it.

I was supposed to go out Monday night to the soft opening of a new bar in Wanchai, Dog House (maybe it's 2 g's?), the manager an old friend.

But by 6 PM, when I gave my dogs dinner and took them for a walk, I started feeling dizzy and cold. Decided to stay home. Around 9 PM, projectile vomiting, pardon the bluntness. This continued on and off for several hours.

My gf is away, but she called my maid and asked her to come back home and take care of me, which she did.

In between puking, I slept for about 18 hours. I never sleep well, and in those 18 hours I woke up at least 20 times, but each time I decided to stay in bed, just grabbing some Tylenol and a lot of water and then sleeping again.

Debated on going to the emergency room - which would have meant a taxi ride to Tseung Kwan O, as I wasn't feeling strong enough to drive. But since I no longer had a fever, didn't want to deal with it. Just more water, more Tylenol, some soup. Couldn't manage to finish one can of chicken soup, even splitting it into two meals, some left over.

Now I'm feeling more myself. Sitting upright in front of the computer. Drinking lots of water.

And what better thing to do after having food poisoning than watching food shows?

Just watched Spain .... On the Road Again, a US PBS series. Mario Batali, chef, author, larger than life (in more ways that one) TV personality and Mark Bittman, writer of the NY Times column "The Minimalist" and cookbook "How To Cook Everything" (which I got last week and is FANTASTIC), take a road trip through Spain. Of course these two guys ain't the most photogenic, so add into the mix American actress Gwyneth Paltrow and Claudia Bassols, a gorgeous multi-lingual Spanish actress. They're driving around in two Mercedes convertibles, investigating fish markets, artisanal cheese makers, and watching famed Spanish chefs cook signature dishes. And some sightseeing as well.

I like the show, but the ratio of good info/b.s. is just not high enough and don't know if I'll last through the entire season. Too much of "Bitty" asking Claudia how to say something in Spanish. Too much of Batali making fun of Paltrow for being recognized more often than he is. And it doesn't help that Batali contracts food poisoning in the first episode, after eating a bit of "partridge sushi". But it feels like therapy, it's building up my appetite again. But maybe not in a good way. Can I eat some plain boiled rice after watching this? A burger with nothing on it? Or do I want some amazing paella infused with saffron, some spice and herb, maybe some seafood .... sigh.

Hope your Lunar New Year break went better than mine ....

And the answer is, "Having a 5 day holiday weekend and being sick."

(sigh)

Clint Eastwood is 78 years old and directed two pictures this year, which is amazing all by itself. If the pictures were total garbage, it would be enough. I suppose he's figured out that if he's going to be making films at an age when most people are in retirement homes, he should spend his time wisely.

That being said, Gran Torino is not a great film, even though it is a mostly entertaining one. It asks some tough questions and doesn't supply easy answers, even though much of it is so predictable that if Eastwood's name wasn't attached, this would have debuted on the Hallmark or the Lifetime channel (well, aside from the liberal use of language). (One spoiler a few paragraphs down.)

If you don't know the story, Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a 70-something year old man whose wife has just died. He's a veteran of the Korean War and decades on the Detroit assembly line. He seems to hate everything (including his family) except for beer and the 1972 Ford Gran Torino in his garage. He's not so much a racist as he is a product of his era - and when he calls his new neighbors (a Hmong family) chinks and gooks, there doesn't seem to be any more anger behind it than when he calls his barber a wop. It's the way he was brought up.

A series of events brings him closer to that next door family and it's all somewhat contrived. There's a surprising amount of humor in the film that's more honest than the violence. And when the end comes, expected as it is, it still has power. I enjoyed that the Hmong family won him over with their food - he could say no to almost everything else but those chicken dumplings sure smelled good. But beyond that, he's a traditional guy and I think he can't help being impressed with how the Asian family follows their traditions so closely, right down to the kids. And so it's little surprise that he develops more of an interest in them than in his own family.

A lot is being made of the fact that Eastwood also acts in this film, his first time on screen in four years. And while he does a good job with the growls and grimaces, his presence is distracting. You're watching him and always aware that it's Clint Eastwood; it's kind of like looking at Mount Rushmore or the Washington Monument. And because it's him, you know that the character he portrays will be redeemed in the end, though exactly how might remain a mystery. I wonder how the film would have played with a different, lesser known actor in the lead. But then again, a film about the friendship between a 75 year old guy and a Hmong family wouldn't exactly have ignited the box office - it took an image of Eastwood standing in front of the car, holding a shotgun, playing to the nostalgia of his 70s films, to help it hit number 1 in the U.S.

The car itself symbolizes the movie. Kowalski installed the steering column on the line and has kept it pristine for more than 30 years. The Gran Torino was never the Mustang or the Firebird, but it's a symbol of its time, when Detroit reigned supreme, when Nixon was president, when there was no such phrase as "politically incorrect." And while it's old, it's still strong, just like Eastwood and just like Kowalski.

So I liked it - there've been very few Eastwood films I haven't at least liked. While this is not on the level of Million Dollar Baby or Mystic River, at least it's far better than Blood Work.

Oh, one warning ... Eastwood himself "sings" the title song over the closing credits for a minute or two before letting Jamie Cullum take over. It's not "cover your ears" like when Stallone sang the theme song for Paradise Alley but he does make Tom Waits sound like Tony Bennett.

Any recommendations for a hotel in Boracay? Planning to go there for the first time in 2 or 3 weeks.

Lots of people have told me Friday's, but that's over US$200 a night and don't want to spend that much.

#1 on TripAdvisor is Dave's Straw Hat Inn, which isn't right on the beach and anyway they're fully booked for the days I plan to go.

What about Two Seasons, Real Maris, Nigi Nigi, One MGM, Isla de Boracay, Regency Beach, Beachcomber?

A techie post - apologies in advance to those who aren't interested in this sort of thing.

Back in the previous century, the 1990s to be exact, I spent three years working for a database software company - Sybase. The amount and magnitude of mistakes that Sybase made back then was simply staggering, especially in retrospect.

• They licensed their premiere product, SQL Server, to Microsoft, for the Windows NT platform, thinking that NT would never amount to anything. Within a couple of years, the public at large thought SQL Server was a Microsoft product, not a Sybase one.
• Despite frequent and loud customer requests for row-level locking, Sybase's constant response was, "you don't need it."
• After spending millions of dollars trying to create a 4GL development tool, Sybase tossed it out and purchased PowerBuilder, which was then the industry leader in that space, paying close to a billion for it. As soon as they bought it, Oracle announced, "PowerBuilder is no longer an independent tool so we can no longer share our database internals with them," which meant that soon PowerBuilder could no longer be used to build apps on top of Oracle, and it withered and basically died.

Yeah, even then, Oracle was the 800 pound gorilla in the database world. They aimed their sights on one database company after another, obliterating them in the marketplace. We watched them do that to Ingres. And then they went after Sybase. And even though the president and co-founder of Sybase was a West Point graduate, he never fought back. Every week a new attack ad came out from Oracle and his response seemed to be, "We won't sink to their level."

The result? Sybase was grossing about a billion a year back in '95 and thought they'd be at 5 billion by 2000. They never got there and while they're still around, they don't even hit the billion dollar a year mark any more. That president and co-founder meanwhile took his millions, left the company to the wolves and moved on to another company.

I was thinking about that when reading this report on All Things Digital about Microsoft's Zune, their would-be competitor to the ubiquitous iPod. It seems that in recent times, the Zune's sales have dropped by 54%. And I thought to myself, what the hell has happened to Microsoft in the past 5 years?

Back in their day, Microsoft operated much like Oracle. They'd decide to go into a space and then spend billions of dollars to ensure success. Look at how they decimated WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Navigator. Even the XBOX was a relative success.

But lately they seem to have lost their will to fight. The Zune is one example. The IE vs. Firefox war another. Windows Mobile is losing market share faster than American cars. And Windows Vista has been a failure on a collosal scale. And the Zune - it wasn't really a matter of how good it was or wasn't, it just seems like Microsoft never really tried to compete.

The question that no one seems to want to ask is - is Steve Ballmer really fit to lead the company? And, with the exception of Bill Gates, is there anyone out there who really can lead such a massive company with so many problems?

Microsoft is not in any danger of going away. Windows is still the most used operating system in the world and Microsoft Office remains the corporate standard, as does Microsoft Exchange. Windows 7 looks like it will recover much of the ground lost by Vista. And there is the axiom, "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft," which remains true.

But with 5,000 layoffs and increasing customer dissatisfaction with so many of their products, they should be thinking about spinning off divisions and concentrating on their core strengths. But they ain't gonna do that. They're wasting billions of dollars on products that no one except marketing seems to want.

And as good as Windows 7 may or may not be, Microsoft is stuck with a behemoth that is built on top of obsolete technology, so many lines of code that it can never be properly tested. They need to throw it all away and start again from scratch. But they can't afford to do that, either.

So the Zune will still be history (along with the billions of dollars spent on it). The XBOX360 beat the PS3 but still had its lunch eaten by the Wii. Linux continues to gather acceptance. MSN is an also-ran. Google continues to chip away at them on a variety of levels, as does Apple.

True, all of the global anti-monopoly suits seem to have taken their toll. And they've got more than enough cash to stick around for years. But it's becoming increasingly obvious that Microsoft's time in the sun is over.

Tonight's movie - In Bruges. There will be spoilers here, but minor ones.

Critics were fairly divided on In Bruges, with just a 66% "fresh" rating from "top critics" over at Rotten Tomatoes. Manohla Dargis at the NY Times calls the movie "both diverting and forgettable" and it's one of those times where I don't entirely agree with her.

This is the feature film debut of award winning playwright Martin McDonagh. (His previous film won an Oscar for live action short subject.) It stars Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes. If I thought it was quite odd for Farrell to win the Golden Globe this year for best lead performance in a comedy before seeing the film, I find it odder still after watching it. He's good (and he's shown a lot of improvement over his past work) but still not that good.

Here's the basic plot. Farrell and Gleeson are hitmen and a job goes down pretty badly. Their boss orders them to hide out in Bruges, or "in fucking Bruges," as it's more often referred to in the film. Gleeson throws himself into the whole tourism thing ("it's the best preserved medieval city in Belgium," he declares) while Farrell hates every second there. Gleeson councils him to obey orders, perhaps they're really there for a job.

Along the way, their encounters include a dwarf with a predilection for horse tranquilizers and who predicts a final war between blacks and whites, fat American tourists and a gorgeous drug dealer.

The comedic aspect comes from the interplay between Gleeson and Farrell in the first half of the film and there are some genuinely funny moments, but this movie is definitely not a comedy. And the final third is dark and violent indeed. I think the film is guilty on more than one occasion of having characters act in unrealistic fashions in order to move the plot along.

But I never would have guessed that this was a playwright's first film. Oh sure, the attention to the precise dialogue is definitely the work of a playwright. But there is nothing stagey at all about the way he has shot this film, the way he has utilized the incredible backdrop of this beautiful city to tell his tale. I understand that McDonagh has been compared to David Mamet (a huge personal fave) and I can sort of see that - though here he only chooses to namedrop Orson Welles and Nicolas Roeg.

So I won't say it's a great film, but for the most part it's quite entertaining. And Martin McDonagh definitely gets added to my list of names to watch out for. Can't wait to see what he does next.

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

Almost 2 AM. The dogs are asleep on the bed. Time for me to join them.

Here's one to ponder (if, like me, you have nothing better to do). Chinese New Year is based on the lunar calendar. It appears on different dates (on the western calendar) every year, sometimes in January, sometimes in February. Yet every year on Chinese New Year, it's frickin' freezin' out! How does that work? I mean, last week, it was 22 degrees, beautiful sunny skies and then Chinese New Year rolls around and, whoop there it is! Grey skies, icy temperatures, even some rain on the way.

Checked out my Chinese horoscope (not that I believe in that sort of thing) in BC Magazine and found it to be interesting. I'm year o' da horse.

After all the major changes you went through last year (ain't that the truth!), you will be enjoying a stable year (stable. horse. get it?) and everything will be nicely ordered (does this mean I am safe in the upcoming round of layoffs at work?). But keep a keen eye on your diet (hah!) and fitness (double hah!) - you may be in for a serious illness (note to self - call insurance agent). Problems hot fate people face will be easily solved (from your lips to Buddha's ears) and such people will earn extra bonuses from investments (note to self - call stock broker). Cold fate people, however, will be obstructed by supervisors and workmates as they try to finish an important job. (I don't do anything important, so I must be a hot fate people.) And their lovers will also affect their careers. (Should I have an affair with someone in the office?)

Well, I did buy a wad of tickets for Friday's Mark Six drawing, top prize $73 million, and came away with about $40 in winnings. Not exactly early retirement money. Sigh.

Well, I'm gonna make myself a cup o' hot cocoa and bury myself under the covers and watch a movie.

Happy new year! Kung hei fat choy! Gong Xi Fa Cai! (Used to know it in Vietnamese too but the mind is the second thing to go.)

Just limping to the weekend. An emotional week on more levels than I care to discuss. Tonight all I had energy for was to get in bed and watch a couple of movies. If only they had been better ones.

I was as a big a Kevin Smith fan as anyone. Note the use of past tense. Loved Clerks. Liked Chasing Amy. Tolerated Mallrats. Giggled at Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back and at Dogma. Jersey Girl was almost as low as anyone could sink, Clerks 2 a partial return to form.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno should have been a home run but seems more like a ground rule double. After all, Seth Rogen practically owes his career to Kevin Smith, so the two of them working together should have been a match made in heaven. But for all its four letter words and occasional nudity, ZaMMaP offers some laughs but no surprises. It plays out like a sitcom, albeit one with a fuckload of 4 letter words. It goes exactly where you expect it to go and the trip isn't quite the laughfest that Smith seems to think it is. Elizabeth Banks is gorgeous, Brandon "Superman" Routh and Justin Long make for a fun odd couple, Traci Lords is given nothing to do, but you get an unexpected cameo from Tom Savini and Craig Robinson seems to have grabbed all the best lines for himself.

If you watch it, sit through the end credits to see "Zack and Miri Make YOUR Porno," which is quite funny. Oh, and be warned. Jason Mewes, Jay of Jay and Silent Bob? You get to see his penis.

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

And what about Guy Ritchie? Lock Stock & 2 Smoking Barrels was a pleasure but it's been a long and bumpy road from there. The rehash, called Snatch, was mostly saved by a typically quirky Brad Pitt performance. Then there was his wife's godawful vanity remake of Swept Away. Followed by the totally incomprehensible Revolver.

Now there's RocknRolla, which wants to be a return to form, but it ain't. The plot is far more convoluted than it needs to be but the absence of the snappy dialogue of earlier films keenly felt. Most of the cast does all right for themselves - Gerard Butler, Tom Wilkinson, of course Thandie Newton looks fabulous, Jeremy Piven and Ludacris are along for the ride with nothing to do. Almost everyone lives happily ever after but by the time you get there you don't really give a shit.

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

More movies and TV to catch up on over the next 5 days, hopefully things will get better.

Variety reports the opening of the first Blu-ray disc manufacturing plant in China. Thanks to China's notorious third shift, pirate Blu-ray discs will probably start appearing sometime after the CNY break. Up to this point, pirate "Blu-ray" discs in China were actually standard DVDs in Blu-ray packaging.

Since this blog is not a commercial enterprise for me, I don't generally pay too much attention to the hit counter. But I publish my RSS through Feedburner and have a little widget over there on the left hand side that tells how many people read my feed the previous day. Normally that number hovers somewhere around 50 or so. Today it was in the low 20s. It struck me as odd, to say the least.

Then I came across this piece on TechCrunch about how the service has become increasingly unreliable. And how the widget on their page dropped from 1.7 million to 0 in just a day. "It’s clear ... that the [Feedburner] team is having a lot of problems just keeping the lights on." Feedburner is owned by Google and it may be time for Google to take a more active interest in how the service is being managed.

But I can't resist linking to a good line when I find one, and this one from Defamer about the layoffs at Warner Bros. has put a smile on my face today:

The slack will be picked up by overseas labor from countries like India and Poland, outsourced through French company Capgemini. Because there's really nothing more helpful than having someone from Mumbai try to deduce how 98% percent of your paycheck was accidentally withheld for Polish state taxes.

Read the entire bit here.

Didn't even realize that the Oscar nominations were today. Benjamin Button leads the pack with 13 noms; 10 for Slumdog Millionaire.

No best song nomination for Springsteen! Is Wall-E first animated film to get a best screenplay award?

Here are the nominations in some of the key categories, my guesses (for the moment) prefaced with +++:

(Have not seen Slumdog Millionaire yet. I'm betting that in this year of economic downturn, including layoffs and cutbacks at almost all Hollywood majors, voters will opt to support the big studios. Button would have to be the front runner right now, but there are always voter backlashes depending on publicity campaigns are managed.)

Johnny Caspar, as portrayed by the always wonderful Jon Polito, in Ethan & Joel Coen's vastly under-rated Miller's Crossing:

I'm talkin' about friendship. I'm talkin' about character. I'm talkin' about - hell, Leo, I ain't embarrassed to use the word - I'm talkin' about ethics.

You know I'm a sporting man. I like to make the occasional bet. But I ain't that sporting. When I fix a fight, say - if I pay a three-to-one favorite to throw a goddamn fight - I figure I got a right to expect that fight to go off at three-to-one. But every time I lay a bet with this sonofabitch Bernie Bernbaum, before I know it the odds is even up - or worse, I'm betting the short money. The sheeny knows I like sure things. He's selling the information I fixed the fight. Out-of-town money comes pourin' in. The odds go straight to hell. I don't know who he's sellin' it to, maybe the Los Angeles combine, I don't know. The point is, Bernie ain't satisfied with the honest dollar he can make off the vig. He ain't satisfied with the business I do on his book. He's sellin' tips on how I bet, and that means part of the payoff that should be ridin' on my hip is ridin' on someone else's. So back we go to these questions - friendship, character, ethics.

So its clear what I'm sayin'?

Leo (Albert Finney in one of his best performances):

Clear as mud.

Johnny:

It's a wrong situation. It's gettin' so a businessman can't expect no return from a fixed fight. Now if you can't trust a fix, what can you trust? For a good return you gotta go bettin' on chance, and then you're back with anarchy. Right back inna jungle. On account of the breakdown of ethics. That's why ethics is important. It's the grease makes us get along, what separates us from the animals, beasts a burden, beasts a prey. Ethics. Whereas Bernie Bernbaum is a horse of a different color ethics-wise. As in, he ain't got any. He's stealin' from me plain and simple.

Now, I've been advised by a trusted friend to avoid public commentary on the current changes underway at my company. Believe me, I could vent, I mean, how could ..... well, don't get me started, okay?

So instead I'm just gonna this brief essay I came across at Harvard Business Review, written by Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies. And I'm gonna wish that at least some people in positions of power in my company might think about what he's saying here:

Recently, Thomas Friedman - the man who fired the imagination of world business with his book The World is Flat -- wrote in his New York Times column: "We don't just need a financial bailout; we need an ethical bailout. We need to re-establish the core balance between our markets, ethics, and regulations."

The very next day, while announcing his nominee for head of the SEC, president-elect Barack Obama noted that there needed to be a shift in ethics in business and that "everybody from CEOs to shareholders to investors are going to have to be asking themselves not only, 'Is this profitable?' not only whether this will boost my bonus, but is 'Is it right?'"

Much as we would have wanted to move beyond these sentiments and focus on navigating our ships through an already challenging environment, the disclosures made by Satyam have brought this issue from the US and Wall Street to much closer home. And yet, it only confirms a trend we have been witnessing among organizations to select partners with a track record of performance, innovation, and -- above all -- a robust corporate governance structure.

Credentials today run far beyond turnover, growth and profits. They extend deep into ethics, integrity, credibility, track record, domain experience, creativity, professionalism and corporate governance.

In other words, in addition to "what a company does," it is equally important to focus on "how it does it."

Looking ahead, sustainable business can only be built on a culture of trusted partnerships with each and every stakeholder group - including employees, customers, shareholders, vendors, regulators. Trust through transparency will finally gain its due recognition as the only way forward.

As customers move out of the economic turbulence of the recent past, there will be a clear shift towards companies that can create the highest business value while maintaining the highest ethical and governance standards. For the financial health of business can only be anchored in trust.

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

That piece by Friedman (which can be reached via this link, the one above merely connects to whatever his latest column is), has some text that points to why I live here and not in the USA.

It actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend’s Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.

Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.

The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.

All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out — that’s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.”

It's all these little things that you get so used to, that you start to take for granted, and then you go back to the US on a trip and the absence of them is right there, shoved into your face, and you wonder why you put up with it if you're lucky enough (as I am) to have a choice.

Oh, and that last line from the Friedman quote. Same in my company. It's a safe bet that no one over the rank of VP will be losing their job. And that's the way of every company. The workers pay the price for the bad decisions of management. Like I said, don't get me started. And as a friend said to me on the phone today, "It is what it is."

Within 30 minutes of the completion of President Obama's speech, a series of meetings were held in my company's home office announcing massive budget cuts and layoffs. No, of course I'm not suggesting any connection between the two, simply thinking that the timing was typically insensitive on the part of my company's management.

Where do I stand on Obama's speech? Maybe no splendid soundbite to latch onto, but I can't recall another inauguration speech where I agreed with so much of what was said, where I felt that the person speaking was truly speaking to me and for me. I don't know if Obama can do everything he claims he will set out to do, it's probably impossible, but I felt uplifted nonetheless.

And my company? No decision on international yet. Which means another week or two of nervous waiting till they get around to those of us in the boondocks.

"Paul Blart: Mall Cop" stars Kevin James, who had a long running sitcom hit with King of Queens. It is produced by Adam Sandler's production company. It has been blasted in the reviews, scoring just 26% over at Rotten Tomatoes. Two quotes from the NY Times review:

... a tossed-off comedy from Adam Sandler’s production company that makes one long for the comparative genius of “I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry.”

“Paul Blart: Mall Cop” is directed by Steve Carr, a man who knows how to put a camera in front of things, if little else, and written, sort of, by Nick Bakay and Mr. James.

And it was the #1 film at the box office in the US this weekend.

How does this happen?

Sunday night was the second time I did some steaks on the barbecue grill. The first time I did them, they came out really nice - mostly because I used good quality beef and didn't fuss with it too much. But they could have been juicier. I figured all the fat was dripping off onto the barbecue, causing the flames to rise up and the steaks would have burnt to a crisp if I wasn't keeping a careful eye on them. I was thinking about what I could do to improve on that.

When I was living in Mid Levels, I didn't have a grill and so I'd sort of mastered the French style of making a steak - cast iron pan in the oven till it was glowing hot, sear the steaks on the stove top and then whole pan back in the oven to finish things off. I was thinking that since I have an electric oven here, I wouldn't get the same results.

So I adapted that. Maybe this is something other people have always known, but it was new to me. Cast iron pan on the barbecue grill! Put the pan on the grill, closed the cover, let the pan get steaming hot, steaks into the pan, seared on both sides, then closed the grill cover for 3 minutes. Then took the steaks out of the pan, put them directly on the grill for 30 seconds each side. Let them rest on the plate for a few minutes and when I finally cut into them, they were medium rare and the plate was just swimming in natural beef juice. This worked really well. Served with some grilled corn on the cob and a simple salad, just sliced tomatoes with a bit of olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

Last night we watched the latest episode of Anthony Bourdain, a tour of local hangouts in the back alleys of Venice. Decided I need to work on my pasta skills. No more sauce from a jar or a can - ever! And fish. More fish, less beef. I'm gonna have four days next week on my own, even the maid will be off - so lots of time to experiment (but - yikes! - no one to wash up after me!).

Really, some of these things that we've gotten used to opening a jar or a can are things that are so simple and basic to do on one's own - pasta sauces and salad dressings are two things that come to mind first. They take just seconds to do and yet we've gotten accustomed to buying them already made at the supermarket - except that the stuff in the market is loaded with crap because it's cheaper, lets the stuff last on shelves for months. But when you think about it - salad dressing, really. Oil. Vinegar. Some herbs or some mustard. How hard is that to do?

Thinking about this helps take my mind off other stuff right now.

Because on Tuesday my gf goes home and I won't be able to see her for about 3 weeks.

And Tuesday, California time, is when they will likely be announcing lay-offs in the MIS division of my company, as I've previously noted. My boss, based in London, was told he had to fly in to attend this meeting in person. I am not that fortunate. The meeting is only scheduled for 30 minutes, so I don't imagine they will get into specifics. But with representatives invited from HR and Legal, I don't think it will be good. And since our CIO reports to the CFO and has always been primarily concerned with budget, I don't think they'll be offering golden parachutes to those "asked" to leave - brass or tin more likely.

But today ....

David Byrne. Wow. I never saw Talking Heads live, but I've lost track of how many times I've watched Stop Making Sense. With the show billed as music of Talking Heads and David Byrne/Brian Eno, my guess was that the T Heads songs would be limited to the albums co-produced by Eno, which are my favorites, and my guess was right. A healthy dose of the new album, one song from Bush of Ghosts, one song from Catherine Wheel, but it was the classic Talking Heads tunes that had the crowd on their feet and literally stomping for more. Two hours in total, with four encores.

Byrne on guitar - the rest of the band included keyboards, bass, drums, percussion, three back-up singers and three dancers - all introduced but sorry, didn't recognize any of their names, but they were all topnotch. The dancing was beautifully integrated into the show. Not being a dance aficionado, I'm not sure I can describe the style any better than to say probably the same sort of modern interpretative dance you'd see if you went to see something choreographed by Twyla Tharp (Byrne made a point of mentioning after the Catherine Wheel number that the choreography was not by her, even though she'd done the original CW show). I was a tad distracted actually because the one male dancer really reminded me of Spike Jonze in the Fatboy Slim "Praise You" video.

T Heads songs performed included I Zimbra, Life During Wartime, Born Under Punches, Crosseyed and Painless, The Great Curve, Once in a Lifetime, Houses in Motion, Burning Down the House ... and yes, Take Me to the River was one of the energetic encores. It was literally my wishlist. No, there was no Psycho Killer, even though some people kept screaming for it, but I wasn't expecting it since so much of the focus was on collaborations with Eno.

My gf, who was totally unfamiliar with Byrne and Talking Heads (I had shown her some bits of Stop Making Sense over the weekend but she didn't seem impressed) was totally enthralled by the show. The great multi-part harmonies, the inventive dancing.

Byrne's voice was in fine form for most of the show - but by the time he reached the final encore (a lovely rendition of the title track from Everything That Happens Will Happen Today)(Byrne and the entire band wearing tutus!) his voice was almost completely blown out. And at 56 years old, he's much more of a showman than I expected, taking part in a lot of the dancing, even shaking his butt a bit for the audience.

Hall 3 of the HK Convention Centre in Wanchai - even Byrne commented that he figured it was probably the first time for almost everyone to be in that building.

Anyway, I have to rank this as among the best shows I've seen in HK. Finally getting to see Byrne after being a fan for almost 32 years, he still managed to surpass my expectations.

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

Sidebar - At the last minute, I had not put my Canon G10 into my jacket pocket, so my only camera at the concert was on my iPhone - com-fucking-pletely useless. Couple of days ago a friend was showing off the Panasonic LX3 (which I hadn't bought because it only has that 2.5x zoom as compared to the G10's 5x) and I was surprised at how much smaller than the Canon it is, even though it's reputed to be of comparable or even higher quality. Tonight I found myself wondering if I wouldn't be better off with that Panasonic after all - because that camera would have been in my pocket and I would have had some really nice shots of the show.

Perhaps by the end of the week, if I still have a job, I'll buy the Panasonic and put the Canon up for sale. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Well, I never claimed to be rational.

Hope you don't find all these photos tiresome. I've tried to include some different sorts of things than the previous Sunday Sai Kung post. Bear with me.

22 degrees today and not a cloud in the sky. A great day to be outdoors!

Spikey and Bogey making a new friend:


Love the view.


Actually this kid was kind of freaked out by all the dogs. This was one of the few moments when she (best guess) wasn't crying.

This St. Bernard got a lot of attention:

Caught him mid-drool:

No, he didn't belong to this girl, she just had to pose for a few shots with him. He didn't seem to mind.


Even the dogs enjoy the sea view.


Giddyap!

Not as many kites as last weekend







Lots of folks out on the water today

And that includes Spikey - who was having so much fun we had a hard time getting him to come back. Bogey on the other hand just got his feet wet and decided that was enough.





Some guy taking glamour photos of his girlfriend on the rocks.

Not sure if she was too thrilled when she spotted me taking pictures too.

The town beach. Note all the garbage on the sand. Lots of garbage in the park in the dog area as well. What the hell is wrong with people, they can't carry an ounce of paper 10 feet to a trash can and spoil everything.

Back home, barbecued a couple of steaks, now it's movie time.

Back home again. Collected my car from the repair shop; now that it's fixed up seriously considering selling it and replacing it with something about 90% cheaper. I asked the mechanic how much he thought it was worth. He looked at me as if I was crazy and said, "you're going to sell this car?" Yeah, it is a pretty sweet ride, but these ain't normal times we're living in, are they?

But a good dinner to celebrate my return home (plus my gf is going home for awhile, early next week). We went to Causeway Bay in search of typhoon shelter crab and this time went to Hee Kee instead of Under Bridge. Hee Kee also has several branches around, their sign says "since 1965" and they have photos of local celebs in their window - Andy Lau instead of Anthony Bourdain.

Another sign in the window (sorry, was out sans camera) is as good an indication of our economy as any. Get any medium sized fried crab and get a second dish for $1. That's HK$1. And they don't just mean veggies or rice. We had a plate of clams in black bean sauce and chili and it was really good - this is one of my favorite dishes and we've had it in several spots over the past month and Hee Kee's might have been the best. Also a plate of fried rice with roast pork and salted fish. But all of those were almost forgotten once the crab came. Fresh and perfectly cooked, this was roll up your sleeves and get dirty up to your elbows goodness. The crab was $500 - together with the clams, rice and some drinks, not to forget the ubiquitously annoying service charge, the entire bill was about $680.

More signs of the times ... on paying our bill, we were given a $50 off coupon good for the next visit AND a "gift" of one of their signature bottles of garlic chili sauce.

Ah yes, also, those cowboy boots I ordered arrived. Gotta say they look even more kickass "in person" than in the photo on the web site and the fit is not perfect but comfortable enough.

This morning, something that tells me that now may not have been the best time to blow a huge wad on cowboy boots .... hard on the heels that my company is planning across the board 10% layoffs, an invitation in email to attend a compulsory meeting in HQ (also available via WebEx). The meeting is for everyone in my entire division and the invitation list includes the heads of HR, so you know it ain't gonna be about the roll out of some new global EDI standard. Oh yeah, the meeting is at 2 AM HK time. So the only remaining question is - will the layoffs include me and if not, how many of my staff am I going to be asked to axe?

So I'm gonna be hibernating this weekend - probably hit the Sai Kung dog run area on Sunday. And the David Byrne concert is Monday night, hope he can help me forget my worries for a couple of hours.

Variations on this sign are all over Taipei, certainly a good way to call attention to the new tough anti-smoking laws.


Shintori, a high end Japanese restaurant in Taipei.



I don't know a lot of different sakes by name, but this one is my favorite. It's called Uragusume (not sure on the spelling) and easy to recognize because of the distinctive drawing on the label. I first had it at a wonderful shabu-shabu restaurant in Tokyo and have been pleased to discover that it's a popular one - I've found it in several spots in HK, too.


Aside from sashimi and sushi, several good cooked dishes. This is prawns and vegetables wrapped in wild taro.


Some kobe beef cooking away at our table.




Outside the restaurant, which is basement level. There is no sign for this place, apparently you have to know where it is, and the place was full, so lots of people know ....


This was at the bottom of their well-stocked koi pond, struck me as an odd place to put it.


This was their branch at Jian-Guo North Road. English menu and some English-speaking staff. They have 4 locations in Taipei, 3 in Shanghai and 1 in Beijing.

The cover of this month's GQ in Taiwan definitely caught my eye. No idea who she is.



Geeky postscript - went to the GQ Taiwan web site, could only find the image as an animated GIF, was able to separate the frames via this free online tool. Just for the heck of it, below is the other image, which ain't too shabby either.

Western films prevail in the US because they're the American myth. And like any good mythological stories, they tend to be a reflection of their times as much as of a distant era. The themes are universal - they resonate worldwide and influence world artists from Sergio Leone to Akira Kurosawa.

The mythologizing started in the late 19th century with the dime novels and continues up to this day. In the past 40 years, only a small handful of films have advanced or redefined the genre, films & TV programs like The Wild Bunch, Unforgiven, Lonesome Dove, Deadwood. Others aren't as ambitious but are damned fine entertainments - Silverado, Tombstone and Open Season are three that come to mind.

Appaloosa fits firmly in the latter category. Ed Harris co-wrote this based on the novel by Robert B. Parker. And it's his second film as a director (the first, his bio-pic Pollock). He stars in it but brings along a great cast - Viggo Mortenson, Jeremy Irons, Renee Zellweger, Timothy Spall, Lance Henriksen.

The film seems to have no more ambition than to take a good story and do a good job of telling it and in that, it succeeds completely. It has a few elements just different enough to set it apart from the pack, one of which is the actions and motivations of the lead female character. And while it starts off in territory that's been well covered in the past, it quickly turns and heads down its own road.

Virgil Cole (Harris) and Everett Hitch (Mortensen) are lifelong friends. They've go from town to town, get hired as lawmen, clean things up and move on. The town of Appaloosa has its resident bad man (Irons) and the town elders hire Cole and Hitch to clean things up. Soon widow woman Allie French (Zellweger) arrives in town and shakes things up a bit herself.

It's beautifully photographed, has a great score from Jeff Beal, and moves along nicely. It probably won't convert anyone who doesn't care for Westerns; for anyone else it's a very entertaining two hours with just enough suspense and action but also some humor. If the relationship between Cole and Hitch is very reminiscent of Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones in Lonesome Dove, that's not a bad thing because it's almost equally well played here.

And here's a line that come about 2/3rds of the way in that I really liked - among other things I think it points to the somewhat unique nature of the film.

I never met a woman like her. Mostly I been with whores and that squaw lady I told ya about. She speaks well and dresses fine, good lookin', she can play the piano, she cooks good, she's very clean, chews her food nice ... but it appears she'll fuck anything ain't gelded.

Basically a B picture with an A cast and A production values, as I said, if this is the sort of thing you like then you're gonna like this.

Taipei 101 towers over the city, lit up at night.

It's quite cold here (to me), a couple of degrees colder than HK, so what better dinner than hotpot? And what place better than Khubilai Khan, a restaurant with two branches in Taipei, Mongolian hotpot, had been here once before and loved it - and loved it equally tonight.

Khubilai Khan was always on the road fighting and conquering. One day while his army was moving North, Khubilai suddenly had a yearn for “ Mutton Stew ” a delicacy of the great grasslands. So his cooks slaughtered some sheep … .
But alas, the scouts returned with news that the enemies were rapidly approaching!

The army had to move fast, and it seemed that they could not enjoy mutton stew. But Khubilai really wanted to eat mutton. A clever cook thought of an idea, he cut the best parts of the sheep into very thin slices and swished them rapidly in boiling water. Then he put the mutton slices in a bowl and added some salt. The starving Khubilai Khan gulped down the mutton slices and was energized and eventually won a victory.
After returning to the palace, Khubilai gave a big reward to the clever cook, and named the dish “ Khuabilai Khan ' s Swished Mutton ” .

The entrance - notice the propane heaters out front, for smokers and people waiting for a table. And you do have to wait here. Great food, great price, this is a popular spot.



The restaurant is simply designed, with autographs (presumably celebrities) scrawled on the walls).

Not sure if you can note from this photo but unlike HK, tables are not placed on top of each other, they're a good distance apart, so you can feel relaxed.

Ah yes, one of the things I love best, the "make your own dipping sauce" bar. I went for a spicy concoction that included soy sauce, chili oil, sesame oil, shrimp oil, vinegar, parsley, garlic, green onion, chili peppers, sugar. And that's only about half of the available choices there!



Old school - the pot is heated with charcoal, not with gas. Move the lid around to regulate the temperature. What's especially nice is that when they bring this to your table, the soup is already seriously hot - you don't have to sit and stare at the food, you can get right to work!




Look at this beautifully marbled beef:


Mongolian steak sandwich - thin slices of grilled steak with sauteed onions, so nice.

And prawns and "mongolian dumplings" and tofu and veg.

The staff doesn't speak much English but they do have an English menu available.

If you come here around 9, you won't have to wait for a table. Any earlier and be prepared to stand around waiting. I think they close around 10:30 or 11.

The delightfully modern SCMP has this in today's useless CitySeen column:

It seems motherhood really agrees with Cathy Tsui Chi-kei. The former model is pregnant with Henderson Land heir Martin Lee Ka-shing's second child.

Ah, it's his child. Because apparently she had nothing to do with it.
===================================================
Heading to Taipei tomorrow. And just my luck, today is the start date of the new stricter rules against smoking in Taiwan. Among other things, apparently the smoking rooms in the airport are now closed. Despite the new wing, this is one of the worst international airports in the region. Being able to smoke was the only thing that made waiting there tolerable.
===================================================
Golden Globes are announced, and it's the usual bizarre krewe of winners, including 2 awards for Kate Winslet. Colin Farrell best actor in a comedy????

Best film - Drama - Slumdog Millionaire
Best film - Comedy - Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Actor - Drama - Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
Actress - Drama - Kate Winslet, Revolutionary Road
Actor - Comedy - Colin Farrell, In Bruges
Actress - Comedy - Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky
Supporting Actor - Heath Ledger, Dark Knight
Supporting Actress - Kate Winslet, The Reader
Director - Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
Foreign Language Film - Waltz with Bashir
Animated Film - Wall-E
TV Comedy Series - 30 Rock
TV Drama Series - Mad Men
Mini-series - John Adams

and so on ....
================================================
Finally did get around to watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona last night. It reinforced my opinion that Scarlett Johansson is great to look at but she's a horrible actress. Rebecca Hall is quite good but the picture only truly comes alive when Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz are on screen. Otherwise it seems quite stilted and formal.

Sort of spoiler:

Essentially a tragedy with jokes along the way and where no one dies, the movie does end with almost everyone completely miserable, almost no one getting what they wanted. I do like that Woody Allen chooses to eschew happy endings but cannot figure out why he's so miserable (cynicism is an alternate spelling for reality, he's quoted as saying).

I mean, here's a guy, for most of his life he's been able to do exactly what he wants to do. He leads the life he wants, he has plenty of money, he has an Asian wife half his age (even if the way they hooked up is unusually disgraceful), what the hell does he have to be so damned unhappy about?

Yes, I'm one of those fans he so memorably made fun of in Stardust Memories, someone who prefers him when he made the earlier, "funny" movies like Bananas, Sleeper and most of all, Annie Hall. And for once he's made a film in which he neither appears nor has a character appear as a surrogate for him (unless one counts the curiously detached narrator).

So it was okay, only. Didn't make me want to watch it again. I already knew I wanted to sleep with Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson. Confirms that Barcelona looks like an awfully nice place to visit.
=====================================
We also watched Thai martial arts film Chocolate. Wowwee. This is the kind of movie they made in Hong Kong during the "golden age" and can't come close to any more. Star JeeJa Yanin (that's her name on imdb, in the end credits of the film it's given as something like Yanin Mitaranda) is a natural.


Some minor spoilers:

Here's the excessive set-up .... you've got a Thai mafia guy getting pissed off at a Japanese Yakuza guy who has been doing scores on his turf. They both love Zin, who loves the Japanese guy. He goes back to Japan, she gets her toe cut off and goes to live somewhere in the 'burbs, right next to a Muay Thai school. She has a daughter who's autistic. The kid grows up watching students next door and Tony Jaa movies. The mom gets cancer and the kid beats the shit out of everyone who owes her mother money.

Once you get past that first half hour or so, it's almost non-stop fighting scenes. Yanin is 24 years old, but she's short and thin and looks like she's 15. She's got Jet Li moves and does a half decent job of acting.

The final battle sequence is about 45 minutes long ("too much fighting" says my gf). The first half takes place in a teahouse and is clearly influenced by the teahouse fight at the end of Kill Bill 1, but not as good, because, well, let's face it, director Prachya Pinkaew ain't no Quentin Tarantino.

But the film kicks it into overdrive when that battle moves outside, up and down the side of a building and jumping on and off the SkyTrain platform. Even though it appears she's using wires for some of the shots, the moves are spectacular and, as you can see from the outtakes during the end credits, some people got seriously hurt doing this stuff.

Oh yeah, great fight scene between two autistic children. And a squad of Thai ladyboy killers, who probably should get a movie all to themselves.

No, I'm not procrastinating - this afternoon the weather was just gorgeous. Clear blue skies, roughly 14 degrees - so I realized we should get out of the house. We grabbed the dogs, drove into town and walked right into a reminder of why I love living in Sai Kung so much. I've always wondered what it would be like to live in some exotic resort town - and today I had that feeling, just minutes away from my home. And yes, it feels every bit as great as you'd think!


Along the pier, people lined up to buy some fish right off the boat.








Dog day afternoon indeed.










Chestnuts (and eggs) roasting on an open fire.






Oh what a relief it is!




And fortunately his owner scurried by to clean up afterwards. Not everyone was so civic minded and you did have to be careful about where you stepped. Despite prominent signs posted everywhere, a few idiots seem determined to ruin this for everyone.

Seems like everyone in Sai Kung on Sunday has a dog - and a camera!


Spikey getting some action here.








This weekend was the 2nd weekend of the "Black Kite Festival" and lots of people were having fun - though this guy was extremely serious about his kite flying.




My boys - Bogey and Spikey, taking a rest from all the action.





Back to this guy again.






Inconceivable to me that some idiot would put graffiti over this.






After enjoying for a couple of hours, over to Cru for a very late lunch/very early dinner.

I love living up here!

The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is currently happening in Vegas. I haven't gone to one of these in, gasp, 20 years, but things that plug in and light up remain a keen area of interest for me. Last year I was following this stuff professionally, for the short bits I was writing for the SCMP. This year is just me taking a look at the stuff I might find myself buying in a few short months. With a down economy, I'm finding a few interesting items but nothing that will make me actually take the plastic cards out of my wallet.


The Palm "Pre" is getting most of the press, many reporters saying that this might be the first actual "iPhone killer." I don't think it will.

I used to be a big fan of Palm. I had several of their PDAs and for awhile I loved the Treo smartphone. Palm's OS was elegant, easy to use and stable.

But Palm made a lot of mistakes back in the day. They thought they were Apple and refused to license their OS to third parties. And their product development cycle was screwed up - for one thing, as I recall it took about a year after the CDMA version of the Treo for the GSM version to appear. And while other phone manufacturers were coming out with new devices almost monthly, Palm took years to come up with a successor to the Treo. They wasted millions of dollars developing a crippled laptop that they eventually decided not to release. In the meantime, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices ate away at their market share; the Blackberry and the iPhone all but killed them.

Now there are rumors that they will be charging US$399 for the Pre, double the cost of the iPhone. The reality of the market is that if they charge more than $199, the Pre will be an also-ran.





Netbooks are also all over the show. All of the usual suspects have new models. Dell's got the Mini 10 which looks nice - 720p 10 inch display, integrated 3G and other features - and also their new Adamo line, meant to compete against the MacBook Air. But most of the attention is going to Sony's first netbook, the Vaio P. Weighing in at 1.4 pounds, it has an eight inch screen with 1600 x 768 resolution, 802.11n WiFi, 3G, bluetooth, GPS and an optional high capacity battery that will last up to 8 hours. But at a list price of US$900, this costs about double the price of most netbooks. Samsung's NC10 is the reigning netbook king (review-wise) and the NC20 will be out this year.

Being insane, I keep looking at these netbooks and drooling, even though I know they're not powerful enough to do some of the tasks I'd want them to do. I hate my current laptop, a Thinkpad X41 which is slower than goop now - two years old and only 1 gig of RAM, so even with degragging, it takes forever just to come back to a usable state after hibernation - forget a full boot-up, that takes almost 10 minutes now!). Sometime next month my company will replace that with a Dell (don't know which model yet) and how do I justify spending money for a laptop when I get a free one, even if the one I get is crap. (Security drones at Miracle Pictures have decided to put on all this unremovable crapware that slows things down to a crawl. )





Tons of cameras, but all pretty much incremental advances on last year's batch, nothing too major that I've come across so far. The above is Sony's DSC-G3. The camera has built-in WiFi and even something of a web browser, meaning you can use it to upload photos to a variety of web sites when you're online. List price US$500 - so you're paying about $200 for that internet goodness.

I think I'll be sticking with my Sony Alpha 350 and Canon G10 for awhile - though maybe this year I'll consider replacing my bargain Sigma lenses for the Sony with something better.

All of the above represents me procrastinating mightily and a method for avoiding all the chores I planned to do today.

Okay, Weather Underground is saying that the temp is just 1.7 C in Ta Kwu Ling, and I can't recall ever seeing a temperature that low here. In Sai Kung it's 10.2 C, which means up on my hill it's probably closer to 9. And that means that we didn't do nothing all day long.

So tonight we got out of the house for a bit, dinner at Sabah. It's actually the third time we tried to go there in the past 10 days. The previous times we were too hungry to wait. I was hoping that getting there a bit later plus the cold weather might lessen the crowd a bit, but arriving at 8:45, we still had to wait 15 or 20 minutes for a table.

Sabah is one of the only Malaysian restaurants in HK that my Chinese-Malaysian ex-wife would tolerate. Based on my limited knowledge of Malaysian cuisine, I know this place isn't exactly authentic but it's about as close as I've found in HK. Chicken satays, seafood curry laksa, beef rendang, roti canai and a couple of mango/coconut shakes. All tasty and the total was comfortably under $300.

Back home and watched Ghost Town, a rom-com, as they seem to call it these days. In case you don't know, it stars Ricky Gervais and it's his first time to star in something which he didn't write. Director/co-writer David Koepp doesn't have much of a track record as a director but as a writer he's more associated with a different kind of film - Indiana Jones 4, Spider Man 1, Carlito's Way.

It managed to be less offensive than most, with 2 or 3 moments that stood out and made it vaguely worth watching. And I realized Gervais and Tea Leoni never kiss in the film. At least they paired the 47 year old Gervais with an attractive, over-40 actress rather than throwing in Anne Hathaway or Kate Hudson.

The Daily Show's Aasif Mandvi has a small role, as does SNL's Kristen Wiig - too bad she had to play far more normal here than on SNL, the film might have used her better. Oh, and Greg Kinnear, whom I suppose people either love or hate. And I think Gervais is starting to look more and more like W.C. Fields. Anyway, don't go out of your way for this but there are far worse ways to kill 100 minutes.

And, well, that's about it for now .....

I grew up on the auteur theory of filmmaking, invented by Andre Bazin and Francois Truffaut, popularized in the US by critic Andrew Sarris. It holds that the director is the individual most responsible for the final finished film. It doesn't hold true all the time - strong producers leave more of an impact, weak directors leave little personal stamp on things they touch.

The Directors Guild of America announced their nominations for 2008. They always get a lot of attention because their award seems to match up to Oscar most years. And because I always dreamed of winning one myself, though of course it ain't gonna be in this lifetime. For this year, we have:

Danny Boyle - Slumdog Millionaire
Have not seen this yet but eagerly anticipating; Boyle is not American and that may affect his chance to win, also his low budget digital video approach may not find favor with Hollywood mainstream voters.

Christopher Nolan - Dark Knight
Even with Heath Ledger's amazing performance, Nolan deserves the lion's share of the credit in taking a comic book movie and turning it into something resembling adult entertainment; in making a film with a huge budget and still showing personal vision; in creating the second highest grossing film of all time. And Nolan, much like Soderbergh, seems to have become adept at bouncing back and forth between huge commercial projects and smaller personal ones, something the Guild likes.

Gus Van Sant - Milk
Van Sant gets a lot of credit for taking a very non-mainstream story and making it appealing to the masses. But without Sean Penn, the film wouldn't get half the attention it did. Then again, Penn hasn't smiled as much on screen since he played Spicoli and if Van Sant is responsible for that, it means he's a true miracle worker.

David Fincher - Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Fincher's most mainstream film yet and further proof that he excels at telling stories; the film is also an amazing technical accomplishment.

Ron Howard - Frost/Nixon
Howard's best film in years, a nice comeback from the DaVinci Quagmire. Also a good achievement because he's taken a play, successfully opened it up for the screen, and made a film that moves along at a good pace even though it's all dialogue and no action; he's managed to visualize something relatively internal and intellectual and make it interesting. Howard is also one of the best-liked people working in Hollywood but this film's appeal was very specific and limited.

So I think I see a win coming up for Nolan.

Just watched Marley and Me. #1 film in the US for the past two weeks, based on a book that sold zillions of copies.

Spoilers ahead, ok?

As someone who owns two dogs, one of which is a lab (like Marley), and loves them as if they were family, in other words I'm a really dog lover and I gotta say, this movie is awful. And it's not merely that halfway through I was praying for the dog to die and for the movie to end.

Look, first thing you gotta know is, this movie is about two thoroughly unremarkable people who lead completely unremarkable lives. They get a dog. They don't bother to train the dog and the dog misbehaves. Wow, there's a shocker. They have kids. They fight. They get along. Time goes by. For two hours.

If author John Grogan possesses any talent at all, it's a talent for describing the activities of that dog in prose, something which doesn't make it to the screen at all. The film rarely manages to communicate the joys of having a pet, which is presumably its chief purpose. It barely provides any reason for the people in the film to be sad at the end when the dog dies.

Yes, I got a bit sad at the end because it made me think about how my dogs are getting older (Spikey switched to "senior" dog food this year and climbs up the stairs very slowly, sometimes he needs help jumping up to the bed) and what will happen to them some day.

David Frankel, the director, works mostly in TV (he did have success with Devil Wears Prada) and this is very much a TV movie, probably would have played well on Lifetime. And trust me on this - if you've seen the trailer and thought it was funny and cute and sweet, this is one of those cases where ALL the best moments from the film are in the trailer and nothing's left over.

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

Maybe in an extra bad mood because we had a horrible dinner at the branch of Jojo's in Sai Kung, our first and last time to go there.

The mango lassi had the thickness of a glass of water.

The samosas were cold inside.

The chicken tikka was prepared with the skin on and almost no spice.

The lamb vindaloo and garlic naan were passable.

My gf thought that the veg in the vegetable biryani was out of a bag, not fresh from the market - what few vegetables there were in there were chopped up so small I couldn't tell what they once were.

We'll be going back to Dia for our Indian fix for now on.

Well, had to finish off a BC column and already at work on the next one. And things have been quiet, so not too much to write about.

I know this is insane, but I am thinking about buying these Old Gringo boots:


Insane because of the price, about three times more than I've ever spent for a pair of shoes. And because my choice is if I have them delivered directly, I have to pay $60 US for shipping and can't return them for any reason. If I have them shipped to my mother, shipping is free and I have 365 days to return them (for any reason) and I have to ask an 87 year old woman to go to the post office in the middle of New York City winter to mail them to me.

In the meantime, while I'm waiting for my copy of Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything to arrive via Amazon, he's got this wonderful article in the NY Times this week, which I am posting here in full, because it all makes so much sense. Eating well and eating healthy doesn't have to be horribly expensive or time consuming ....

January 7, 2009

The Minimalist

Fresh Start for a New Year? Let's Begin in the Kitchen

By MARK BITTMAN

PERHAPS, like me, you have this romantic notion of shopping daily — maybe even a mental vision of yourself making the rounds, wicker basket in hand, of your little Shropshire or Provençal or Tuscan village. The reality, of course, is that few of us provision our kitchens or cook exclusively with ultra-fresh ingredients, especially in winter, when there simply are no ultra-fresh ingredients.

But if your goal is to cook and cook quickly, to get a satisfying and enjoyable variety of real food on the table as often as possible, a well-stocked pantry and fridge can sustain you. Replenished weekly or even less frequently, with an occasional stop for fresh vegetables, meat, fish and dairy, they are the core supply houses for the home cook.

While you’re stocking up, you might clear out a bit of the detritus that’s cluttering your shelves. Some of these things take up more space than they’re worth, while others are so much better in their real forms that the difference is laughable. Sadly, some remain in common usage even among good cooks. My point here is not to criminalize their use, but to point out how easily and successfully we can substitute for them, in every case with better results.

Here, then, is my little list of items you might spurn, along with some essential pantry and long-keeping refrigerator items you might consider. Note that I’m not including the ultra-obvious, things that are more or less ubiquitous in the contemporary American pantry, like potatoes, eggs and honey.

OUT Packaged bread crumbs or croutons.

IN Take crumbs, cubes or slices of bread, and either toast evenly in a low oven until dry and lightly browned, tossing occasionally; or cook in olive oil until brown and crisp, stirring frequently. The first keep a long time, and are multipurpose; the second are best used quickly, and are incomparably delicious.

OUT Bouillon cubes or powder, or canned stock.

IN Simmer a carrot, a celery stalk and half an onion in a couple of cups of water for 10 minutes and you’re better off; if you have any chicken scraps, even a half-hour of cooking with those same vegetables will give you something 10 times better than any canned stock.

OUT Aerosol oil. At about $12 a pint, twice as expensive as halfway decent extra virgin olive oil, which spray oil most decidedly is not; and it contains additives.

IN Get some good olive oil and a hand-pumped sprayer or even simpler, a brush. Simplest: your fingers.

OUT Bottled salad dressing and marinades. The biggest rip-offs imaginable.

IN Take good oil and vinegar or lemon juice, and combine them with salt, pepper, maybe a little Dijon, in a proportion of about three parts oil to one of vinegar. Customize from there, because you may like more vinegar or less, and you undoubtedly will want a little shallot, or balsamic vinegar, or honey, or garlic, or tarragon, or soy sauce. ...

OUT Bottled lemon juice.

IN Lemons. Try buying six at a time, then experiment; I never put lemon on something and regret it. (Scramble a couple of eggs in chicken stock, then finish with a lot of lemon, black pepper and dill; call this egg-lemon soup, or avgolemono.) Don’t forget the zest: you can grate it and add it to many pan sauces, or hummus and other purées. And don’t worry about reamers, squeezers or any of that junk; squeeze from one hand into the other and let your fingers filter out the pips.

OUT Spices older than a year: smell before using; if you get a whiff of dust or must before you smell the spice, toss it. I find it easier to clean house once a year and buy new ones.

IN Fresh spices. Almost all spices are worth having. But some that you might think about using more frequently include cardamom (try a tiny bit in your next coffee cake, apple cake, spice cake or rice pilaf); ground cumin (a better starting place in chili — in fact, in many bean dishes — than chili powder); fennel seeds (these will give a Provençal flavor to any tomato sauce or soup; grind them first, or not); an assortment of dried chilies (I store them all together, because dried chipotles make the rest of them slightly smoky); fresh — or at least dried — ginger, which is lovely grated over most vegetables; pimentón, the smoked Spanish red pepper that is insanely popular in restaurants but still barely making inroads among home cooks; and good curry powder.

OUT Dried parsley and basil. They’re worthless.

IN Fresh parsley, which keeps at least a week in the refrigerator. (Try your favorite summer pesto recipe with parsley in place of basil, or simply purée some parsley with a little oil, water, salt and a whisper of garlic. Or add a chopped handful to any salad or almost anything else.) And dried tarragon, rosemary and dill, all of which I use all winter; mix a teaspoon or so of tarragon or rosemary — not more, they’re strong — with olive oil or melted butter and brush on roasted or broiled chicken while it cooks, or add a pinch to vinaigrette. Dill is also good with chicken; on plain broiled fish, with lemon; or in many simple soups.

OUT Canned beans (except in emergencies).

IN Dried beans. More economical, better tasting, space saving and available in far more varieties. Cook a pound once a week and you’ll always have them around (you can freeze small amounts in their cooking liquid, or water, indefinitely). If you’re not sold, try this: soak and cook a pound of white beans. Take some and finish with fresh chopped sage, garlic and good olive oil. Purée another cup or so with a boiled potato and lots of garlic. Mix some with a bit of cooking liquid, and add a can of tomatoes; some chopped celery, carrots and onions; cooked pasta; and cheese and call it pasta fagiole or minestrone. If there are any left, mix them with a can of olive-oil-packed tuna or sardines. And that’s just white beans.

OUT Imitation vanilla.

IN Vanilla beans. They’re expensive, but they keep. (If you look online you can find bargains in bulk, which is why I have 25 in my refrigerator.) If you slice a pod in half and simmer it with some leftover rice and any kind of milk (dairy, coconut, almond...), you’ll never go back to extract.

OUT Grated imitation “Parmesan” (beware the green cylinder, or any other pre-grated cheese for that matter).

IN Real Parmigiano-Reggiano. Wrapped well, it keeps for a year (scrape mold off if necessary). Grated over anything, there is no more magical ingredient. Think about pasta with butter and Parmesan (does your mouth water?). But also think about any egg dish, with Parmesan; anything sautéed with a coating of bread crumbs and Parmesan; or asparagus, broccoli, spinach or any other cooked vegetable, topped with Parmesan (and maybe some bread crumbs) and run under the broiler; how great. Save the rinds to throw in pots of sauce, soup, tomato-y stew or risotto.

OUT Canned peas (and most other canned vegetables, come to think of it).

IN Frozen peas. Especially if you have little kids and make pasta or rice with peas (and Parmesan!); not bad. Or purée with a little lemon juice and salt for a nice spread or dip. In fact, many frozen vegetables are better than you might think.

OUT Tomato paste in a can.

IN Tomato paste in a tube. You rarely need more than two tablespoons so you feel guilty opening a can; this solves that problem. Stir some into vegetables sautéed in olive oil, for example, then add water for fast soup. Or add a bit to almost any vegetable as it cooks in olive oil and garlic — especially cabbage, dark greens, carrots or cauliflower.

OUT Premade pie crusts. O.K., these are a real convenience, but almost all use inferior fats. I’d rather make a “pie” or quiche with no crust than use these.

IN Crumble graham crackers with melted butter and press into a pan. But really — if you put a pinch of salt, a cup of flour, a stick of very cold, cut-up butter in a food processor, then blend with a touch of water until it almost comes together — you have a dough you can refrigerate or freeze and roll out whenever you want, in five minutes.

OUT Cheap balsamic or flavored vinegars.

IN Sherry vinegar. More acidic and more genuine than all but the most expensive balsamic. Try a salad of salted cabbage (shred, then toss with a couple of tablespoons of salt in a colander for an hour or two, then rinse and drain), tossed with plenty of black pepper, a little olive oil and enough sherry vinegar to make the whole thing sharp.

OUT Minute Rice or boil-in-a-bag grains.

IN Genuine grains. Critical; as many different types as you have space for. Short grain rice — for risotto, paella, just good cooked rice — of course. Barley, pearled or not; a super rice alternative, with any kind of gravy, reduction sauce, pan drippings, what have you. Ground corn for polenta, grits, cornbread or thickener (whisk some — not much — into a soup and see what happens). Quinoa — people can’t believe how flavorful this is until they try it. Bulgur, which is ready in maybe 10 minutes (it requires only steeping), and everyone likes. If you’re in doubt about how to cook any of these, combine them with abundant salted water and cook as you would pasta, then drain when tender; you can’t go far wrong.

OUT “Pancake” syrup, which is more akin to Coke than to the real thing.

IN Real maple syrup, an indigenous gift from nature and the north country.

YOU SHOULD ALSO STOCK:

REAL BACON OR PROSCIUTTO Or other traditionally smoked or cured meat of some kind. If you have a quarter pound of prosciutto in the house at all times you can make almost anything — simple cooked grains, beans, vegetables, tomato sauces, soups — taste better. And, tightly wrapped, it’ll keep for weeks in the fridge or months in the freezer.

FISH SAUCE You have soy sauce, presumably; this is different, stronger, cruder (or should I say “less refined”?) in a way — and absolutely delicious. Use sparingly, but use; start by sprinkling a little over plain steamed vegetables, along with a lot of black pepper.

CANNED COCONUT MILK Try this: cook some onions in oil with curry powder; stir in coconut milk; poach chicken, fish, tofu, or even meat in that. Serve over rice.

MISO PASTE Never goes bad, as far as I can tell, and its flavor is incomparable. Whisk into boiling water for real soup in three minutes; thin a bit (with sake if you have it), and smear on meat or fish that’s almost done broiling; add a spoonful to vinaigrette. Etc.

CAPERS, GOOD OLIVES (BUY IN BULK, NOT CANS) AND GOOD ANCHOVIES (IN OLIVE OIL, PLEASE) The combination of the three makes a powerful paste, or pasta sauce, or dip.

WALNUTS And/or other nuts, but walnuts are most basic and useful. Try a purée with garlic, oil and a little water, as a pasta sauce, or just add to salads or cooked grains.

PIGNOLI With raisins, they make any dish Sicilian.

DRIED FRUIT For snacking, in braises (braised pork with prunes is a classic winter dish), or just soaked in water (or booze) or poached for dessert. Don’t forget dried tomatoes, too.

DRIED MUSHROOMS Don’t even bother to reconstitute if you’re cooking with liquid; just toss them in.

FROZEN SHRIMP Incredibly convenient.

WINTER SQUASH AND SWEET POTATOES These store almost as well as potatoes and are more nutritious and equally interesting. A sweet potato roasted until the exterior is nearly blackened and the interior is mush is a wonderful snack. The best winter squashes (delicata, for example) have edible skins and are amazing just chunked and roasted with a little oil (and maybe some ginger or garlic). For butternut- or acorn-type squashes, poke holes through to the center with a skewer in a few places and roast in a 400 degree oven until soft. Let cool, then peel and seed.

Ron Asheton, original guitarist for The Stooges, dead at 60. Damned shame.

Apple announcements at MacWorld this year boring. Only new hardware is MacBook Pro with 17" screen. Yawn. Updates to iWork. Yawn. 80% of music on iTunes will now be DRM-free but there is now variable pricing on songs; upgrading your existing DRM'ed purchases to non-DRM goodness will cost 30 cents a song. Semi-yawn.

If a person goes through their life being insane and gets more insane as they get older, what is the solution. Take my mom. Please.

How can you tell if you've got a brain tumor? (No jokes, eh?)

Yes, that's Zhang Ziyi, at the beach with her Israeli boyfriend. Yes, she's taking off her top in the photos. To see the rest of the pictures, click over to here. I, uh, I um, I need to go do something now.

Things have been a little askew in the Spike household to get the new year started off. My helper had to rush back to the Philippines to get her marriage annulled. Seems like everything was fine when she just thought her husband was cheating on her - simple enough, she just stopped sending him any money. But finding out that he'd just had a kid with another woman was the proverbial straw that broke the proverbial amah's back. The odd thing is that her sister has decided to return to the Philippines and get her marriage annulled at the same time. At least that's what they're telling me. But with both her and her gf gone, it meant an emergency run to immigration to extend my gf's visa. "She's already had two extensions," the guy tells me. I explain the situation as best I can, "you want her to stay because of your dogs?", somehow I pulled it off and she got another two weeks. Which means I can go to the office while she takes care of the dogs and the house. Wait a minute. I hate going to the office. Oops.
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Doesn't anyone know anywhere in HK where they sell cowboy boots? If not Frye, some other respectable brand? Tony Lamas, Old Gringo, Lucchese? Am I really gonna have to order from zappos and pay their ridiculous shipping fees? Or until I get another trip to Tokyo?
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Anywho, just wanted to comment that I finally saw Johnnie To's film Sparrow. If To is the best director currently working in Hong Kong, it's not a matter of him being so great (though he definitely is real good), it's that he has so little serious competition. But at least he keeps trying, pushing the envelope a little bit here and there. And such is the case with Sparrow.

At the beginning of the film, a sparrow flies into Simon Yam's flat. And Simon himself is a sparrow, Cantonese slang for a professional pickpocket. Yam works with 3 friends and thinks he's the best. Until one day all four friends get scammed by the same mysterious woman, who then asks for their help.

It's short, mostly light hearted; it's a souffle, not a steak. It did leave me with a grin on my face when it was over. But what really works in this film is the original soundtrack, composed by Xavier Jamaux and Fred Avril, two names that are new to me. Imagine if you will a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, mixed with traditional Chinese instruments and themes. (Ah, Xavier just responded to my friend request on Facebook, now I see that one of his favorite musicians is Steve Reich, and I can hear a bit of that in this too.)

Anyway, the soundtrack is on iTunes, and I bought/downloaded it as soon as the movie finished, and now listening to the one long track on the soundtrack, the nine-minutes-plus Ballet of the Umbrellas.

I'm not the only one who likes this. From Kaiju Shakedown:

Sitting in a theater and watching Johnnie To's SPARROW was the closest I've come to having religious-experience-quality sex in ages. It was absolutely ecstatic, beautiful, soul-cleansing and life-affirming all at the same time and I didn't even have to worry about getting pregnant. But, like all truly deep love making experiences, the music was half the battle. A wall of mid-century Euro-cool jazz noodles, marimba glissandos, choruses that sigh, croon and chant syncopated nonsense and warm international jet set lounge numbers, this soundtrack by Fred Avril and Xavier Jamaux is the movie's main character after Simon Yam and it swaddles your head in a sonic cocoon, cutting you off from this modern world of ours and temporarily relocating your brain to a fresher, cooler, jazzier time when cocktails mattered.

Okay, he liked the movie more than I did, but we agree on the music. And he's a better writer than I am, which is why he gets paid and I don't.

While I don't do too many personal posts any more, here's one ....

I've been having an exceptionally calm week. It's given me a chance to do some thinking about the future, some reflections on the past.

2008 wasn't a great year for me but I've had far worse. Looking at things chronologically ...

In March I moved to Sai Kung. My house on the hill has been a real refuge, a place where I am almost always calm and collected, a place to chill and forget about the world. It was a bit of an adjustment at first but now, well, I wish I had the money to buy this place, and that's the first time I've said that in 11 years here.

In April, I broke up with the woman I'd been seeing since December. (Well, she broke up with me but didn't like me to put it that way for some reason.) We attempted a reconciliation in May but the issues were still there, though this time I was the first to walk away. She was (and probably still is) a fabulous person and taught me a lot about myself. It was the first time in a very long time that I didn't cheat on the person I was seeing - even on my own for two weeks in Bangkok earlier in the year, I didn't do anything I couldn't tell her about, and I didn't even think such a thing was possible for me. She was worth it and I was glad I succeeded and sorry when we ended.

In June I got the news that my division was going to be drastically cutting back their operations in Asia. While I wasn't entirely happy in my job, I was half/half thinking that perhaps I'd try to ride this one out till retirement. I've been told that my position is secure but I don't really believe them; I think I have until the end of '09 at best. I started looking for a new job almost immediately, but in '08 I was fairly casual about it. In '09 I'm going to have to make looking for a new job my new job.

In July I hooked up with the woman I'm still with today. And once again, I've been completely faithful, even when I'm traveling or when she's been away. I've come to believe that cheating - even with a hooker, even if there's no way the other person can find out about it - remains cheating. Even though I'm someone who has always believed that sex with a stranger is a purely physical, non-emotional experience, I've start to think that doing this kind of thing mentally pulls me out of the relationship. (That's just me I'm talking about; your mileage may vary). I've hit the point where I'd rather put my focus on the person I'm with rather than focusing on what I can get away with. And fortunately, my efforts in this regard seem to be paying off.

In September the US economy all but collapsed, dragging most of the rest of the world with it. I didn't lose all my money but I lost enough.

In October I finalized attained my goal of becoming a permanent resident of Hong Kong. It feels really good.

In November, Obama was elected. A time for optimism and renewed hope for America.

There were of course other highs and lows throughout the year but right now, the major ones are the ones I've listed above. I couldn't have made it through the peaks or the valleys without the friendship of more people than I can count - a few exceptionally close friends and many, many acquaintances. Thanks everyone and happy 2009!

There's a lot of things I liked about Milk and only a very few things to dislike. I lived in San Francisco for a couple of years so I already knew a bit about Harvey Milk and Dan White, but I didn't know the details and I never saw the Oscar-winning documentary, Times of Harvey Milk.

I did know that Harvey Milk was the first openly gay elected public official in the U.S., elected to San Francisco's Board of Supervisors. And I did know that both he and SF Mayor Moscone were murdered by another Supervisor, Dan White. (This is not a spoiler - if you don't know the history, you're told this within the first few minutes of the film.)

The stuff I liked -

Or course there's Sean Penn's amazing performance. It's a complete physical and mental transformation for him and it is the best performance I've seen all year. Not just his voice but the entire way he carries himself, the look in his eyes, the way he moves and walks, it's a Sean Penn you've never seen before. And yes, in a smackdown between Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke, Penn should take the prize in my opinion.

The rest of the cast is also quite good. Josh Brolin is a subtle and nuanced Dan White, the portrayal never descends into stereotype, even though some of his motives are only hinted at and never fully explained. James Franco shows his versatility, 180 degrees away from his gentle stoner in Pineapple Express. Emile Hirsch follows roles in Into the Wild (directed by Penn) and Speed Racer with this winning performance as street hustler turned political operative Cleve Jones.

I don't know how much of this Hollywood biography has been fictionalized, I'm sure some. But Gus Van Sant does an excellent job of mixing (sometimes in separate shots, sometimes digitally) archival footage with the new material wonderfully shot by cinematographer Harris Savides (who did something similar with David Fincher's Zodiac).

The main thing that struck me about the film is that so often in these Hollywood productions about a fight for liberty or a life that many of us know little about, they use a condescending way into the story. Allen Parker's Mississippi Burning comes to mind, a tale of the struggle for civil rights in the south, where the leads were Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe. Van Sant doesn't invent a "straight best friend" character for Milk, he immerses us in the story right from the beginning, as stodgy Republican gay Milk picks up gay hippie Scott Smith in the NYC subways.

Milk is about to turn 40 and as he says, has yet to do a single thing in his life that he is proud of. He and Smith move to San Francisco and open a camera shop and Milk finds himself pulled into politics because of his sense of moral outrage over the way he and his friends are being treated in their community. He loses in three elections but doesn't give up and when he finally wins, his one year in office in a relatively minor position has a huge national impact. How much is true, how much fictionalized, I can't say. But this is an inspiring tale regardless of your sexual persuasion.

In particular, much of the final third of the film, as Milk led the campaign against California's Proposition 6 (which would have required firing not only of gay school teachers but any other teachers who "supported" them) is a reminder of not only how far we've come but how far we still need to go. Coming out as it did on the heels of 2008's Proposition 8 in California may have been an accident, but it shows just how much work needs to be done before a large segment of the population can enjoy equal rights.

The film is not perfect. It sags in spots and I would have a liked a bit more insight into Dan White. But over all, it is a very good film indeed, filled with excellent performances, and telling an important part of American history. I strongly recommend it!

Last night, dinner with friends at Tai Ji, the Shanghai/Northern Chinese restaurant in Wanchai. Tai Ji normally doesn't get that busy at night, but last night they were pretty full. And what's funny is that they'd cordoned off a section of the restaurant last night for food photos - for a menu, an ad, a magazine, who knows? So a full restaurant and some of the staff are busy working on that instead of serving customers. Even so, the food was reliably okay - the Sichuan dishes are toned down for HK tastes - and dinner for 8 (we'd brought our own wine and this place I believe charges a bargain-for-HK-restaurants HK$40 a bottle corkage fee) came out to just HK$170 per person - and we had a LOT of dishes, I lost count early on.

After dinner, over to Carnegie's, not my normal first choice but the concensus of the group. The usual dancing-on-bar madness prevailed. At 11:30 they started announcing that people should buy drinks ASAP as the bar would be closed for 15 minutes at midnight. WTF? At 11:55 they subjected us to Europe's "The Final Countdown," a horrible bit of noise that has nothing to do with New Year's Eve at all. And at midnight, "Auld Lang Syne" on bagpipes, very freaking loud.











And so we left Superman, Batman and Spiderman behind and finished the night at Amazonia.




(Gotta say, for a pocket-sized camera, the flash on the Canon G10 packs a helluva lot of punch.)