Hongkie Town

I'm not surprised that this article over at All Things Digital points out that Twitter is having a hard time maintaining user loyalty. It seems that up to 60% of people who register for Twitter don't come back after the first month.

The article does mention that a large percentage of that could be due to people accessing Twitter via a variety of 3rd party clients rather than visits to Twitter's web site. (Though to me, one of the things that says is that it is going to be next to impossible to make money off this service, if people who use it don't even visit the web site.)



Look at the spikes on Twitter's line, whereas usage on Facebook and MySpace is clearly more consistent.

I stopped using Twitter after a month, but after a few months I returned. I've got Twinkle on my iPhone and have TweetDeck installed on my PC. My stats say that I'm following 37 people and that 34 are following me.

The thing is, 99% of what I'm getting in tweets from the people I follow is of no interest to me. I don't follow anyone who's tweeting stuff like "just had breakfast" or "going to bed now". And I try not to tweet nonsense like that as well. But most of what I'm getting isn't really grabbing me, stuff like: KPMG's global chair of comms & mobile, sean Collins: "mobile users are willing to take ads in exchange for free music downloads." Little one line micro-blogging attempts with no commentary or analysis? I'll pass. At this point, when someone adds me, I'll check out their feed to see if what they've been tweeting is of potential interest to me.

The fact remains, I get more useful information via comments to my blog.

I can see how I might use it to promote myself - if more people were following me - by linking to the blog, to my pieces in BC, my upcoming job search or attempt to start a business, etc. But with just 34 followers, I ain't gonna be setting the world on fire any time soon.

I don't think Twitter provides tools to make it intuitive to find people whom I ought to follow. A list of people they suggest I follow includes the Dell Outlet Store, JetBlue Airways, Al Gore and Alison (hi there, i'm ali. i'm in a band called a fine frenzy. life is funny. let's have a laugh).

And, as you've no doubt read, the current swine flu scare has created an incredible amount of misinformation circulating on Twitter.

So I don't get it.

But feel free to suggest Twitter tools or people you think I should follow to get more practical use from the thing.

The SCMP reports that a 12 year old girl is in serious condition - she was riding a bicycle, was in a pedestrian crossing, and was hit by a drunk driver. This happened at 7 AM in Sheung Shui on Wednesday. The motorist, who suffered no injuries, failed a breath test, but was released without being charged and on $5,000 bail.

Apparently this is being seen as the fault of the girl or her mother, because they were crossing against a red light and (it's hard to tell from the article) the mother may have been riding as a passenger on the bicycle, which is illegal in Hong Kong.

Assuming for the moment that traffic was light, it was 7 AM, and they felt safe in crossing, one thing that should be clear to anyone is that if the driver had not been drinking, his reflexes would have been in good enough shape to avoid a collision. One might also ask (though SCMP reporter Clifford Lo does not) if the mother and daughter thought it was clear to cross, and then got hit by a car, was this drunk driver also speeding?

And one might also ask how successful our government's public education campaigns are if statistics show that bicycle accidents and drunk driving accidents are both higher so far this year than last year.

In the first three months of this year, three cyclists were killed and 289 injured in 333 accidents. In the same period of last year, 321 cyclists were hurt in 351 accidents but there were no fatalities.

The police figures showed that 45 people were killed in 38 fatal traffic accidents in the first three months of this year. There were 37 people killed in 37 fatal traffic accidents in the same period last year.

Gradually clawing my way back to health. I'm sure I will be fine in time for the holiday on Friday, at which point I'm also sure that it will rain again.

For lack of anything better to post, here's a web site dedicated to selling a single house, which happens to be in my neck o' the woods. (It looks much better in IE than Firefox.) But the contact numbers are in China and the email address is yahoo.com.cn.

Looks real pretty from the outside:



A chandelier in the frigging bathroom?


Oh, I find this furniture so depressing:

The Chinese furniture seems much nicer


Japanese garden


Outside barbecue for serious barbecue (though that's a tiny little grill for such a setup, isn't it?)

The pool:

The interior of the house is 8,000 square feet. It includes 5 bedrooms, 5 full baths, 2 half baths, 3 kitchens! "this is an one and only prestigious 3-stories mansion is situated in Hong Kong’s New Territories Sai Kung"

Full description of all floors is given, including this one:

• The 3rd Level houses 5 bedroom suites each behind a prestigious entry including a large Master Bedroom Suite with Sitting Area and Balcony; Each of the Bedroom Suites has its Private Full Baths, decorated with French Draperies and Teakwood Closet; The Master bedroom has a partial ocean view, and a balcony and bathroom that overlook the Japanese landscape. The Master bedroom has an area of 380 sq. ft., a corridor of Teak closet upon entry, and a luxurious bathroom equipped with Swedish Sauna, Jacuzzi bathtub w/LCD TV, and Separate Shower with complete view of Japanese landscape.

And as for the garden area, a small gotcha:

Under New Grant No. 3896, Section 6, this estate’s garden and swimming pool area of 18,406 sq. ft. is held under the term of government lease commencing from July 1, 1898 extending to June 30, 2047 (Term of 99 years). Annual lease of HK$104,800. Although under government lease, this land is exclusively used by this property, and the owner has invested at lease $20,000,000 on the improvement of landscape. Designed by renowned landscape designer, Miyamoto Taro, during his visit to Hong Kong in 1982. This authentic Japanese Landscape features unique hardscape and species, including a priceless 100+ year old Buddhist Pine and other exquisite trees and shrubs. Other features include Fish pond, waterfall, swimming pool & spa, and impressive iron fence surrounding the property.

The government leased lands values at approximately HK$50,000,000, unlikely to be purchased by any third party as it is only suitable for this property’s landscaping purpose.

Anyway, they've figured that the house and garden, including renovations, ought to be worth approx HK$120 million, but they're asking just HK$78 million. Furniture, antiques, rugs, lighting fixtures not included but negotiable.

If any of my readers wants to grab this on my behalf, I promise you'll be invited to all parties thrown there.

Wasn't feeling great Thursday, Friday and Saturday night. By Sunday afternoon had a temp of 38.4. (I need use my iphone to do temp conversions to figure out what this is, even after all these years.)

Monday I made an appointment at the Mona Fong clinic, operated by Tseung Kwan O hospital, in Sai Kung town. HK$45 (less than US$6) covers seeing a doctor and medications. Hooray for HK's medical system.

Except ... was the doctor under orders to NOT diagnose people with flu? It's not beyond the realm of possibility, is it? I told him I had all the classic flu symptoms - fever, dizziness, nausea - and he told me that I had a cold with a slight fever. So even though I don't have a runny nose he gave me antihistamine. And even though the only time I'm coughing is when I smoke (and my smoking is down 80% right now) he gave me cough syrup. For the fever, he prescribed Panadol. No anti-biotics.

So one day later, I still have a fever. Basically slept last night from 5 PM till 9 AM, got up a couple of times to look at email only, and this morning temp is holding steady at 37.9. Can't decide if my next step should be to go to the emergency room at Tseung Kwan O hospital or see my regular doctor - who's in Central, a bit more of a trip than I feel up to at the moment. Or just go back to the same place and say, "hey, you see?"

The rain yesterday and today has just been wreaking havoc on my mood. Not in a mood to sit home, not in a mood to go out, not in a mood. And a small health issue for the past few days. Almost went to emergency today but seem to have gotten past it, but a doctor's visit may be called for shortly.

In the meantime, have dug the CPAP machine out of storage and fired it up. I have 4 different masks and they're all fucking uncomfortable. Woke up after 3 hours and almost literally tore the mask off my face. My gf says that if I do it every night, maybe I'll get used to it eventually.

One "benefit" is that today I smoked only about 10 cigarettes instead of my usual 2 packs. I think I've hit the point where I need to stop. Let's see, in the past I've tried cold turkey, acupuncture, hypnosis, the patch ... what else is out there?

I'll have what will likely be my last business trip to Tokyo next month (at least for this job). I've been going to Tokyo since 1994, up to six times per year, but aside from a one day trip to Fuji and Hakone and a day spent at a concert at the Fuji Speedway, I've never traveled anywhere in Japan. So this time I'm planning to extend my visit by 2 days and take a quick tour of Kyoto. Any recommendations?

Today, in bed most of the day, watched several things ....

Blu-Ray disc of Jeff Beck Live at Ronnie Scott's. Filmed last year at the legendary jazz club in London, this captures Beck in a rare small club, playing at the top of his form with a great band (including Vinnie Colaiuta on drums). Clapton comes out to duet on two songs; Jimmy Page is clearly visible in the audience but doesn't come up on stage. Fabulous video, audio and performance. Also some very nice interview footage as part of the bonus features. Unbelievable that bassist Tal Wilkenfeld is just 21 years old (and has already played with Allman Bros, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock as well as Beck).

The other was the Criterion Blu-Ray of The Last Metro, one of the few Truffaut films that I hadn't seen up till now. I did not know that this was the 2nd part of a planned trilogy, with Day for Night being part 1 and part 3 never completed. But some of the character types in Day and Metro are quite similar, even though the circumstances in the 2nd film are much darker. Truffaut plays the director in Day, an obsessed man in love with movies even though the film he's directing is a trifle. And Steiner, the director in Metro, is similarly obsessed and even bears a physical resemblence to Truffaut. Bisset in the first and Deneuve in the 2nd have some similarities, ditto Leaud in the first and Gepardieu in the second.

Set in Paris during the German occupation, it details the efforts of a theater group to do the "the show must go on!" bit, with a surprising emphasis on the plight of French Jews during that era. Catherine Deneuve is radiant as always and a young Gerard Depardieu as a young actor who moonlights with the Resistance seems to slip into his role effortlessly. Great line in there, Deneuve's husband, a Jewish director whom she keeps hidden in the cellar of the theater, reading to his wife from a book of propaganda, something along the lines of, "in addition to usurping our theater and films, the Jews take all the best looking women." And ain't it the truth?

This man is Ian. Ian is British and lives in Sai Kung and claims to have a pregnant wife girlfriend in the Philippines. He took a girl out from a bar in Wanchai on Friday afternoon and agreed to pay her money for her time. At 6 AM Saturday morning, they left his house, he told her to wait in front of the house and that he would get a taxi. After he didn't return, the girl went to the road to find that he was gone. Despite promising to give her money, he gave her nothing, not even taxi fare, but did give her a phony phone number and left her outside stranded in the rain. He knows the girl cannot go to the police.

Well, I finally heard from Aurora, with a link to download a trial version that won't expire until May 8th. So download and install. Works. Except it doesn't handle RAW - only JPEG. I suppose that's to be expected for a program that costs only US$20.

Anyway, here's an image of Edwin from the band Icebox:


And here's the same photo after running it through Aurora:

Could be worth $20. Wish it handled RAW.

Previously blogged about the release of photo editing/management software Aurora from Lightcrafts. I downloaded the 7 day trial version. Installed and ran it. Needed to change its default directory, so I did, at which point I was told to restart the program to have the change take effect. After restarting, I was informed that my 7 day free trial period had ended and that I now need to buy the software - 5 minutes after the initial install! Sent two emails to their tech support address; 36 hours later still no reply. At this rate, I don't think I'm gonna be yanking out my credit card to buy this.
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One of those bits of Chinglish or Hong Konglish that drives me nuts: stores and restaurants that advertise "Buy 1 Get 1". Well, duh, yeah, if I buy one, I damn well expect to get one. Oh, wait, you mean to say "Buy 1 Get 1 Free?" Apparently the word "Free" doesn't exist in Hong Kong.

(Photo above from engrish.com apparently from a Carrefour sales brochure in China.)
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Follow me on Twitter: SpikeHK
Find me on Facebook: Spike HK

Google Maps and Google Earth still show Tamar back when the carnival was in town. (Such a better use for that site, too.)



And HK Disneyland is still shown as a construction site. (Or maybe it still looks that way. I still haven't been there.)


The 3D effect for buildings and terrain is kinda cool though.


(definitely click on that one for full size.)

Looking at that list of 50 top restaurants again, on a web site put together by a British firm:

William Reed Business Media Ltd 2008. All rights reserved. William Reed Business Media Ltd. Registered Office: Broadfield Park, Crawley RH11 9RT.

I noticed this:

Last year's Chef's Choice, Mugaritz, retains it's highest ever position at number 4

And while the writer or editor went overboard with the use of apostrophes, as if there was a sale on them at the corner grocery, it seems that they ran short on commas and completely forgot that there is such a thing as a semi-colon.

The art of proofreading is dead. Or perhaps it was out-sourced to a call center in Mumbai.

(Yeah yeah yeah, I gots lots of bad grammars throughout my postings too, but I'm not some professional firm charging they're clients big moneys.)
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Via various sources, a new study indicates that people who download "free" music via P2P sources (such as BitTorrent) spend 10 times more money on legal digital downloads than those who are squeaky clean.
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More on Jackie Chan from today's SCMP:

Several Taiwanese groups have launched a campaign to boycott Jackie Chan's new movie, saying the freedom-loving island would not welcome him.

In Hong Kong, the number of complaints to the Tourism Board against Chan's ambassador role also jumped to 121 yesterday, up from 17 on Monday.

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Marble cake? A type of cake. Also something quite different, as I learned this morning reading about how members of online bulletin board 4chan (which claims to have originated rickrolling and lolcatz) manipulated voting for Time's top 100 something or other. I followed this link. I'm not gonna put the results here. Check it out yourself. Or just rest assured that it has several other meanings as well.

Via Serious Eats, the S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants 2009. Intro here:

Restaurant Magazine announces the list of The S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants 2009.

For the fourth year in a row Ferran Adrià has topped a worldwide poll of 806 chefs, critics and other industry experts, whilst Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck retains second place. Below these perennial favourites however it's all change in the eighth annual listing of The S.Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants.

The full list is here - the top ten are:

1. El Bulli - Spain
2. Fat Duck - UK
3. Noma - Denmark
4. Mugaritz - Spain
5. El Celler de Can Roca - Spain
6. Per Se - USA
7. Bras - France
8. Arzak - Spain
9. Pierre Gagnaire - France
10. Alinea - USA

For Asia?

20. Les Creations de Narisawa - Japan
45. Iggy's - Singapore

and that's it.

Australia gets:

17. Tetsuya's
46. Quay

(Out of 50, the only one I've been to is Quay. And I thought it was way too fussy, 20 ingredients in each dish when 10 would have done just fine by me.)

Of course these things ain't meant to be definitive. Just a departure point for discussion.

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Lightcrafts, makers of digital photo editing software LightZone, have just introduced Aurora, which looks like it simplifies some pretty complex tasks. You can download a free 7 day trial version or get the whole thing for just US$20. (No Mac version yet.) Think I will give it a try soon.

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I found this article on tripods and ballheads by Thom Hogan fascinating. His point is that if you work your way up and through your mistakes, you'll end up spending over $1,700 on tripods before you get the right stuff, so just follow his advice, spend $1,000 and get it over with.

All well and good, except no way I can afford to spend $1,000 on a tripod and head. I do wanna get something next month ... one reason I stopped adding photos to the Zippo blog was because I quickly found out the limitations of my bought-in-Shenzhen bargain. But what to buy?

Check out excerpts from Golden Rock's live blogging of TVB's broadcast of the HK Film Awards on Sunday:

9:34pm - And TVB shows the little respect they have for a show by cutting off the In Memoriam sequence for more commercials. This is low, even for TVB. Please just give the rights to a network that actually gives crap next year.

9:59 pm - TVB sucks for cutting off Siao’s classy Lifetime Achievement Award speech before it’s even over.

10:05pm - Switching over the TVB Entertainment News channel (part of their pay TV network), they’ve already revealed the winner for Best Actress. Thanks, TVB, you can’t even keep your information flow together.

10:45 pm - And TVB mercifully cuts it off for more commercial. TVB still sucks for cutting the show up to pieces though.

In the SCMP:

Hundreds of people have written to the Hong Kong Film Awards Association to complain about the broadcaster's handling of the awards show on Sunday, with viewers faulting editing decisions and the timing of advertisements.

Some viewers complained about TVB's decision to cancel a segment paying tribute to filmmakers who died in the past year and to show a shortened version of Josephine Siao Fong-fong's acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award.

Viewers were also upset that the broadcaster cut short a speech by Paw Hee-ching, who won best actress, in which she thanked ATV, TVB's competitor.

Despite cutting the segments, TVB kept a part in which best supporting actor nominee and co-host Louis Fan Siu-wong let slip a swear word while on stage.

The association did not have an exact figure for the number of complaints it received but it is understood that hundreds of members of the local film industry and public lodged complaints by calling its office, sending mobile phone text messages and ringing up organising committee members.

TVB said that the awards ceremony ran for more than three hours but it only had two hours and 45 minutes to screen the programme.

They've been broadcasting this for 28 years and they still don't know how to do it.

Jackie Chan remains in the newspapers today. This from SCMP:

In Hong Kong, the Tourism Board came under pressure to remove him as the city's tourism ambassador, while University of Hong Kong students condemned him as "ill-fitted to represent Hong Kong in future".

On the mainland, 20 scholars issued an open letter attacking Chan for his remarks at the Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan at the weekend, labelling him a "black sheep" and accusing him of turning his back on a system that helped catapult him to where he is now.

In Taiwan, where respondents to a newspaper poll branded Chan's remarks "nonsense", the Democratic Progressive Party urged the Taipei city government to remove him as one of the ambassadors of the Summer Deaflympics in Taipei.

Thousands have formed discussion groups on the Facebook network, condemning his remarks. One, which has accumulated more than 1,200 members in two days, urged Chan to go to North Korea if he did not like excessive freedom.

Jackie Chan - buffoon of the century?

Hero of the day would have to be Court of Appeals justice Anthony Rogers, for telling it like it is:

The HK$15.93 billion buyout deal for PCCW was described yesterday by a Court of Appeal judge as an "outrageous" attempt to squeeze out small shareholders who had put their life savings into a stock that had suffered a "pathetic" decline.

Mr Justice Rogers said that he did not see the rationale behind the privatisation, which offered shareholders a price way below what the shares normally traded at.

"It is simply not good enough to buy out the shares at a price based on the last trading day before the announcement, which was the rock bottom price ... 30 per cent [less] than previous trading. Why?"

Mr Justice Rogers criticised the fact that the offerors - Mr Li's PCRD and Unicom - would get a US$2 billion dividend after the deal was completed, describing it as "outrageous." A minority shareholder began crying in the gallery at this point.

"People put their life savings [into the company] but they received nothing back," the judge said. "This is a widows and orphans type of company ... many people have put money into the company their whole life. The share price had gone down from the peak of HK$120 and it's pathetic."

Richard Li bought a great company at its peak, drove it into the ground, and stands to profit $2 billion, in addition to all the money he's pocketed these past years, from bilking thousands out of their life savings. This entire buyout scheme scam stinks to high heaven.

Oracle is buying Sun - $7.4 billion.

Tiny chance this could backfire .... Oracle software runs on every server; with them owning Sun, will HP, IBM, Dell, etc. rebel? Or is their installed base so secure that it doesn't matter?

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J.G. Ballard, author of Empire of the Sun, Crash and a whole lot more, died yesterday. My one connection to him - 1992, when working for Barclays, they put me up in a service flat in London. Checking the guest register, I saw that Ballard had stayed in the same room immediately before me. So did sleeping in the same bed as him somehow transfer a bit of his talent to me? Nah ...

Well, Coachella was this past weekend. Should I have bought a plane ticket to the US for this? Feeling too old to camp in a field for 3 days. But still ....

Friday .... Beirut, Conor Oberst, Felix da Housecat, Franz Ferdinand, Girl Talk, Leonard Cohen, M Ward, Morrissey, Paul McCartney, The Black Keys, The Hold Steady, The Ting Tings, more

Saturday .... Blitzen Trapper, Bob Mould, Booker T, Calexico, Dr. Dog, Drive By Truckers, Fleet Foxes, Glasvegas, Henry Rollins, Jenny Lewis, Junior Boys, M.I.A., Chemical Brothers, Killers, Thievery Corporation, Tinariwen, TV on the Radio, Joss Stone, many more

Sunday .... Antony & the Johnsons, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Devendra Barnhart, Groove Armada, Lupe Fiasco, Lykke Li, Mexican Institute of Sound, My Bloody Valentine, No Age, Okkervil River, Paul Weller, Perry Farrell, Peter Bjorn & John, Public Enemy, Roni Size, The Cure, Gaslight Anthem, The Orb, X, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and a whole lot more

So yeah, sometimes I feel like I live in a cultural wasteland.

Misc stuff:

HuffPo: You're Fired, So Where Are the Jobs Now?

So many of the recently fired - exhausted by their search on the internet for jobs that aren't there -- turn to the free-lance life; consulting where they can, or trying to establish a new business of their own, providing they can find the funding for it - funding that seems to have been swallowed up by those great banking whales and AIG.

Gizmodo: Sorry Stereo, But Beatles in Mono Rocks a Lot More

But that wasn't all. In the mono version you can hear stuff that is not in the stereo version. And not just bits, but quite a lot of things. Instruments, notes, even lyrics. Take the reprise version of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: It is full of shouting—Lennon going bananas at the end, and other bits at the beginning—that is not in the stereo mix.

Gizmodo: 50 Photographers Worth Checking Out
Links to here and well worth your time

TechCrunch: Hollywood Has a Great Online Distribution Model - If You Hate Selection

The fact that online distribution has to play in this foolish game of broadcast rights tennis, is of course, bullshit. The brick and mortar rental stores of yesteryear, like Blockbuster, don’t have to play by these ridiculous rules. Movies don’t vanish from their shelves because they’re playing on HBO for the next 18 months. If they did, Blockbuster would have been in trouble a lot sooner than its most recent woes (tied to its failure to get out in front of new forms of distribution).

AllMusic Blog: Best Classical Releases - First Quarter of 2009

Since the SCMP couldn't be arsed to print all the winners of this year's HK Film Awards (all 21 of them), here is the full list courtesy of screendaily.com

• Best film: Ip Man (prod: Raymond Wong / dir: Wilson Yip)
• Best director: Ann Hui – The Way We Are
• Best screenplay: Lou Shiu-wa – The Way We Are
• Best actor: Nick Cheung – The Beast Stalker
• Best actress: Paw Hee-ching – The Way We Are
• Best supporting actor: Liu Kai-chi – The Best Stalker
• Best supporting actress: Chan Lai-wun – The Way We Are
• Best new performer: Xu Jiao – CJ7
• Best cinematography: Arthur Wong – Painted Skin
• Best film editing: Yau Chi-wai – Connected
• Best art direction: Tim Yip – Red Cliff
• Best costume & make-up design: Tim Yip – Red Cliff
• Best action choreography: Sammo Hung & Tony Leung Siu-hung – Ip Man
• Best sound design: Wu Jiang & Roger Savage – Red Cliff
• Best visual effects: Craig Hayes – Red Cliff
• Best original score: Taro Iwashiro – Red Cliff
• Best original film song: Jane Zhang – Painted Skin
• Best new director: Derek Kwok – The Moss
• Best Asian film – Assembly
• Lifetime Achievement Award: Josephine Siao Fong-fong
• Professional Achievement Award: Ting Yu

The SCMP did find space to print this bizarre quote from best actor award winner Nick Cheung:

"When I saw [Barack] Obama winning the US presidency, I thought I stood a chance," said Cheung, with tears in his eyes. "I waited for this award for a very long time."

If it was an Asian man winning an acting Oscar, the above quote might make sense.

Speaking of actors who make no sense, Jackie Chan regaled an audience in Hainan with his wisdom over the weekend. The Standard says he said this:

I'm not sure if it's good to have freedom or not. I'm gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we're not being controlled, we'll just do what we want. If you're too free, you're like the way Hong Kong is now. It's very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic.

The SCMP translated things differently:

I don't know whether it is better to have freedom or to have no freedom. With too much freedom ... it can get very chaotic, could end up like in Taiwan.

Then, according to the SCMP:

... he said he would definitely not buy a TV set made on the mainland because he feared it might explode. If he wanted to buy a TV set, he would buy a Japanese-made one, he said.

If the Philippines could ban Chip Tsao from visiting there due comments in his column in HK magazine, if Macao can ban HK democrats from visiting because of what they might do or say while there, is it possible for HK to ban Jackie Chan?

I've been doing some casual investigation of camera shops in Hong Kong. Real shops. Not Broadway and Fortress, not shops in computer centers, not rip-off places along Nathan Road. Shops for professionals and advanced amateurs.

There isn't too much info online either, at least not in English, and most of what I could find was 5 or 10 years old, gathered from different threads in photography forums. One of the drawbacks for foreigners in HK is that most of these places don't advertise in English language publications (and why should they bother, 97% of their target audience is local).

Oddly, there don't seem to be many on the Hong Kong side. There's a handful along Stanley Street in Central and one on Lyndhurst Terrace. And another one on Queen Victoria Street. I've also noticed a couple of shops along Des Voeux Road towards Sheung Wan. These are okay, except they are relatively small.

There are two areas to go for hard core photography stores - Mong Kok and Tsim Sha Tsui.

In Mong Kok, the #1 spot to go is Wing Shing Photo Supplies. They have two large branches, the first at 66 Sai Yeung Choi Street, the second I think is on Fa Yuen Street (aka Sneaker Street). Another great shop is Man Shing Photo Supplies, at 106 Tung Choi Street. Seriously, if it has anything to do with photography and is being sold in Hong Kong, these places will have it.

Another great shop with two floors filled with almost everything you might want is Tin Cheung, at 6B Carnarvon Road in TST. Tin Cheung also buys and sells used cameras and lenses.

The mecca for used stuff is in TST, on Nathan Road just south of Kimberley Road. There's a place there called, I believe, Champagne Court. The half-dozen or so of the shops there feature thousands of used items - every type of film camera ever made, I think, from old Nikons to Hasselblad and other large format cameras.

Now there are some cheaper places out there. And if you know exactly what you want, then by all means save some money. I've recently come across an online shop (with some info in English) called CartCart that has seriously cheap prices on cameras and lenses. David D. Busch, who has written some very good books on Nikon, likes a place called HKSupplies. (Clearly they're marketing to a US audience, all prices there in US$.)

I just got the Nikon 18-200mm VR lens and managed to get a price about $600 lower than Wing Shing's price from a random shop in Mong Kok - and then saw it for $300 less than I paid from CartCart. (I haven't tried ordering from them so I don't know how good their service might be; their site is all in Chinese but relatively easy to navigate.)

(David Busch's book on the Nikon D300 is so much better than the 400 page manual that came with the camera. I'm learning so much more about the camera's options, not just how but why to use them, from this book.)

The thing is, price aside, the shops I've mentioned above are all honest. They don't charge tourist prices, they don't do bait and switch, they don't do grey market goods with a warranty only from their shop, and the people there actually know about the stuff that they're selling and can be trusted to advise you on stuff that's good and not just stuff that's filling up their back room. Sometimes it's worth it to pay a little bit more for knowledgable service.

Next purchase for me will be a decent tripod to replace the cheapo one that I got up in Shenzhen.

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One of the benefits of the photography boom in Hong Kong can be found at Open Rice, which of course is the best site for info on restaurants in HK. The site is all Chinese but again, easy enough to navigate. You can input an English name for a restaurant in the search box - and from the results you'll see how many people rated it, an average rating, opening hours, phone numbers, which credit cards they take, average cost, link to Google maps for the location, etc. Of course it helps if you know the Chinese characters for districts and even better if you know the characters for the various types of cuisines. (I'm not 100% but working on it.)

And thousands of food photos! I mean, it seems like everyone who goes out to eat is bringing a camera with them. Not all the pictures are great, but certainly enough to get the info you need. Here are two pics I grabbed from the site, just to give you a brief example.

The first from Hebe 101, one of my local faves.


And this is from Chuen Kee, one of the waterfront seafood places.


I was wondering if local restaurant Wing Wo does yum cha - this photo makes the answer to that rather obvious, doesn't it? (Only rated by 8 people - 5 liked it, 1 okay, 1 didn't like it.)


Even this little hole-in-the-wall The Dumplings House in Sai Kung gets a few photos:


Open Rice lists 211 restaurants in Sai Kung ... I think I've got my work cut out for me.

There's a bakery here called Kookie? Gotta try ...

Lots of apps in the iPhone app store are created by people who don't speak English too well. Here's a description of a new app:

countman (utilities)

countman 0.9

Category: Utilities
Price: Free (iTunes)

Description:

Sometimes we count the random group with silent.
at this time we count something finger or in head.
Count correctly, It's very confusion or difficult.

this is count application for man or something.

countman




















Yes, we know searching for parking in Taipei can be painful (see the image on the right):

Taipei iParking 台北停車查詢 1.0

Category: Navigation
Price: $1.99 (iTunes)

Description:

Taipei iParking is the offline parking lots and parking place search tool,we collect all district's parking information of the Taipei city,and all information you can browse on your iPod Touch/iPhone without network connection, More features are as follow:

1.Zoom In/Out each picture to see the detail map.
2.All information are offline data.
3.Use table view and search bar to search road map.
4.Use Traditional Chinese Language.

if you got any question,please contact us.
E-mail:service@milvusmiigrans.com

台北市停車查詢軟體功能：

-各行政區收費停車場資訊查詢
1.各行政區收費停車場位置圖
2.各行政區收費停車場收費及營業時間
3.各行政區立體、地下收費停車場出入口地圖
4.使用圖片瀏覽，可放大縮小圖片
5.所有資料皆為離線瀏覽

-重要道路路邊停車格查詢
1.各重要道路周邊停車場、停車格瀏覽
2.包含機車停車格及汽車停車格
3.可使用行政區、路名、交叉路口搜尋
4.使用圖片瀏覽，可放大縮小及旋轉圖片
5.所有資料皆為離線瀏覽

*未來將加入查詢剩餘停車位及自訂新增停車場功能
*己購買的使用者,新版本免費更新
*新功能持續規劃中


Of course plenty of native English speakers who don't have a freaking clue either. Too many entries like this one:

It contains more than 51.000 words and expressions and their available right on your hands. You don't need to be connected to the internet: no 3G or WIFI needed at all. Just search, find and learn! It will work even in the North Pole.

And this one:

Use the sounds of Tibet to unwind. The emperors gong is calling you to meditate. Hear the monks chanting and feel yourself aligning with the world again.

Join there chanting and praying and relax.

There are now at least 2 apps in the app store that help you pee - photo of a urinal with appropriate sound effects. Good deal - stand drunk at a urinal and pull out your iPhone to help you pee and then probably drop it in the toilet while you're at it. One of them tries to broaden its appeal to women with the line, "Always wonder what it's like to pee standing up? iPee is for you."

There's an app that claims to put out sound signals for dogs at frequencies up to 22KHz. Is the iphone speaker even capable of outputting that? "Although the sounds should work fine on the devices built in speaker, prolonged use may cause damage so it is recommended that you use an external speaker. This DOES NOT harm the animal, it simply annoys it." Yeah, right, I'm gonna send out a signal for my dog to hear but through my headphones?

So glad I didn't drive last night ....

Yesterday was my gf's birthday. I wanted to take her for a spa day in Shenzhen or to see Cirque du Soleil in Macau. But she didn't like either of those ideas. She doesn't think I should be spending money at the moment and just dug in her heels, insisting we do something in town.

She reminded me that a few months ago, I won a $500 voucher good for any of the restaurants at the Sheraton (except Morton's). So the plan was to book dinner at the Oyster Bar. Except, Saturday morning, I couldn't find the voucher. It's probably on my desk at work.

Thinking fast, I knew she loved Uno Mas and was waiting to try that suckling pig dish I'd had last time and raved about to her. I called and they'd had a last minute cancellation for a balcony table and I thanked my lucky stars.

Now I know that there are some readers of this blog who don't care for Uno Mas and that's fine, but for me it's been good every time I've been there and this was no exception. A bottle of Spanish red, the ham and cheese plate, some fried sausages, sauteed clams and then that amazing bit of pig.

The married couple at the next table were HK residents but originally from Gibraltar. The first Gibraltese? Gibraltarians? I'd ever met. And it was the day before that woman's birthday, so they were out celebrating as well. They're friends of the manager there and have been back often. As were the foursome at the next table over - they said they always travel to Barcelona and they've been back to this place 6 or 7 times since it opened and they love it.

More to the point, one of the guys at that table mentioned he's just started a cupcake business in Hong Kong. "I am so there!" I told him how I'd read in too many blogs about gourmet cupcake shops in New York and was so glad someone was bringing that concept to HK. One branch in Causeway Bay, one in Ap Lei Chau, gonna check it out this week if I can.

(I mean, let's face it, every last one of those major chain bakeries in Hong Kong suck ass. Why is it that Hong Kong is such an anomaly where western style bakeries are concerned? Getting decent bread and cake is easy in Tokyo, Taipei and Singapore but an uphill battle here. Thank Buddha I live in Sai Kung where we have Ali Oli and Mushroom.)

After finishing off the wine and relaxing out there for a bit, we ordered the churros and the manager treated us to a couple of glasses of some Spanish sherry which he described as "liquid gold." Normally I don't go for dessert wines - too many bad memories of Manischewitz at Passover, I suppose - but this was some serious wine and left me licking my lips. The name is a blur at this point - something Hidalgo?

(Aside - why is it that wine goes to my head so much quicker than whiskey? In the right mood, I can go all night on Johnnie Walker, but half a bottle of wine and I'm blotto!)

So, two hours later, somehow made it down the stairs to the street. But as we passed Doghouse, they knew it was my gf's birthday, so they insisted on giving us shots of tequila.

Since I rarely drink any more, the wine and the sherry and the tequila had me pretty much raving and drooling at this point. But over to Amazonia, where more of her friends lay in wait. But I just dropped into one of those big chairs in the back with a bottle of water and chilled.

I asked Icebox to announce her birthday and I pulled her onto the dance floor just before that - I never dance, because I know what it looks like when other guys who can't dance get up to dance, but I was toasted enough to not care.

The second band, Cactus, followed a bit of Led Zepp with a seriously wicked version of Santana's "Soul Sacrifice" and came pretty close to tearing the roof off the joint, but stabbed themselves in the foot by following that with some Joan Jett. Ah well.

Eventually time to go home and pass out. Actually, by the time we left the bar, I was totally sober. But feeling very tired and between that and the rain, just as well I wasn't driving. We get a Kowloon side taxi, I tell him Sai Kung, and off we go. Except the taxi driver doesn't speak English and calls some friend of his, some woman, whom I'm supposed to tell where we're going so she can tell him. Except she doesn't speak English either!

I tell her the name of my village. (In Cantonese.) The name of the road. (In Cantonese.) The name of the road before the road. (In Cantonese.) Okay, I know my tones are off but drunk or not I know where I live. And this woman's just not getting it. I think she's deaf. "Chuk Yeung Doh!" I tell her. "Puk Fung Lo?" she answers. "Sai Kung Hotel?" she keeps asking me. I can show him how to go, I tell her. "Sow him?" "I can point where to go." "Point?" I stopped myself from screaming curses into the phone - maybe I'm not that sober after all and I guess she was trying to help in her own special way.

Then after we get through the central tunnel, he wants to know if we should go by way of Tseung Kwan O. Why should I want to go 10 kilometers out of the way? Choi Hung, dude!

We get back home without further ado. I mean, I know how to say go straight, turn left, turn right. And I know how to point. As the taxi lets us off, the taxi driver says (in English) "Thank you sir. Thank you madam!" and then adds, "Good luck sir!"

Today is also the birthday of one of my gf's friends. And so we're having a combined birthday party at the house. Would be nice if it stopped raining so we could sit outside with a few bottles of wine. But doesn't look like that will happen. Can still barbecue as long as the rain doesn't get horizontal.

Sacha Baron Cohen's Bruno has now received an R rating in the US.

Time Warner is backing away from its tiered menu of internet pricing - for now.

(Image grabbed from Celebitchy)

This one really has me puzzled. American Apparel used an image of Woody Allen, taken from the film Annie Hall, for some billboard advertising in the US. Allen doesn't do ads (in the US) and of course this image makes it look like he's agreed to one. So he sued American Apparel for $10 million, citing the usual stuff like misrepresentation, appropriating his image without his consent and so on.

American Apparel's lawyers have decided to take what's being termed a scorched earth, best defense is a strong offense approach to their defense. They've issued subpoenas to anyone close to him and requests for his financial records. They're going to claim that their ads didn't tarnish his image because he's already done that himself via the whole Mia Farrow/Soon-Yi scandal.

I don't understand how a major American corporation can think they can use a celebrity in their ads without getting prior clearance. And then be so surprised and vindictive about it when that celebrity gets upset. It falls into the "what do you call 500 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? a good start" category.

There's this letter in the SCMP today ... this guy apparently isn't pissed off about the way supermarkets manipulate prices but how dare they take down the free notice boards? Oh and he's pissed that some "fast-food-chain operator [that] sells steak" (guessing Steak Expert) won't give him Worcestershire sauce. Man oh man, I wish those were the worst things I had to worry about.

So the big "news" today is that the major supermarket chains in Hong Kong raise prices and then have "sales" at the old prices and then after the sale they drop the price again. (Check Private Beach for more on this.)

Well, why wouldn't they? It's not illegal. It's immoral but since when did that stop them? They're claiming this is due to fluctuations in prices from their suppliers. Fine. Prove it. Show us the invoices.

They won't, because these little shoebox "super" markets which are about as big as corner grocery stores elsewhere in the world, are all owned by real estate developers and no one in HK dares to challenge them.

Even that guy who worked for the government who helped New World get a bargain price on a plot of land and was rewarded with a job with New World isn't getting into trouble. People are pointing fingers at everyone around him, but no one's saying a word about forcing him out of his job or forcing New World to pony up some dough.

Speaking of immoral scum, the Somali pirates now have their own blog. Latest post, "Meet Our New Captain"

I bet you think we've had a bad day. I bet you think you've got us on the run.

What you fail to realize, stupid Americans, is that our recruitment has only increased. Capture eleven, and twenty-two will rise to take their place! Mariners from around the world have rallied to our cause, joining forces with us in the name of fortune and adventure. In fact, we have recruited some of your own countrymen to our cause.

Our newest recruit, we call him "G". he was a First Mate in your country, but he's been promoted to Captain in ours. He knows your secrets and will undermine your defenses. Last night he made a radio out of a coconut. Look below into the face of your worst nightmare.

While on the subject of movies, I mentioned that I'd dug out Pulp Fiction the other night to show my girlfriend, but that night she opted for Casino instead.

But after watching last night's American Idol, on which Quentin Tarantino served as "guest mentor," it did give me an excuse to screen PF for her.

Yes, I still watch American Idol. No, I couldn't tell you why. I can understand why QT is there; he has always positioned himself as a champion of lowbrow, kitsch, ephemera. But what the hell was Steve Van Zandt and his wife doing in the audience? Aside from the E Street Band and the Sopranos, Van Zandt is a champion of all things garage music and AI is certainly the antithesis of that.

So, we watched Pulp Fiction. And I was struck anew with the absolute beginning to end brilliance of this film. Little touches leaped off the screen at me - Steve Buscemi as the Buddy Holly look-alike waiter, "we're gonna be like 3 little Fonzies" and being reminded that Winston Wolf, for all his airs, was driving an Acura and not a Ferrari (well, maybe the budget wouldn't have covered that).

And it's the brilliance of Pulp Fiction that makes the rest of QT's career so fucking annoying. I mean, we get Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction - two brilliant bits of cinema. And the script for True Romance, studio intervention and Tony Scott and all. And then Jackie Brown, wonderful but a box office disaster, followed by a retreat that seems to dog Tarantino to this day. Kill Bill was just too fucking long and Death Proof was a trifle. And an episode of CSI. And some bizarre acting roles. I'm not really holding any high hopes for Inglorious Basterds, a remake!

I still think he's capable of better.

The Turner Classic Movies (TCM) cable network has compiled their list of the 15 "Most Influential Classic Movies." They don't say who compiled the list but it's not bad. I think in large part they limited themselves to films they have screened on their network.

Naturally everyone can probably think of 37 other titles that belong here, but these lists aren't seriously meant to be definitive, they're meant to be a starting point for debate.

1 - Birth of a Nation
D.W. Griffith invented much of the language of cinema. Birth of a Nation, his first great feature film, is marred by Griffith's racism. Intolerance is a far better film but didn't have the impact of this one.

2 - Battleship Potemkin
Countless directors have either copied or parodied the Odessa Steps sequence here (most notably Brian DePalma's The Untouchables), a masterpiece of the editing room. The original is still the best.

3 - Metropolis
Haven't watched this in so long I barely remember it now.

4 - 42nd Street
So many great Busby Berkeley musicals to pick from but this is the one usually cited as the favorite. The important thing here is that Berkeley was the first to "open up" the musical film, not merely staging numbers as filmed theatrical pieces, paving the way for Stanley Donen's American in Paris, Richard Lester's Hard Days Night and MTV.

5 - It Happened One Night
I've always thought this was a bit over-rated, but maybe that's because I'm not the world's biggest Frank Capra fan. You wanna talk screwball comedies from the 30s, there's Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday.

6 - Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs
Well, it's the first feature length animated film. And it's wonderful. But Disney did better later.

7 - Gone With the Wind
My mom's favorite film and I believe still the top grossing film ever (in inflation-adjusted dollars). But to me, it's just a very long soap opera.

8 - Stagecoach
John Wayne as the Ringo Kid. John Ford directs. But it's creaky compared to what came later.

9 - Citizen Kane
To me, this never gets old, it never loses relevance, I never get tired of watching it.

10 - The Bicycle Thief
Rips your heart out no matter how many times you see it.

11 - Rashomon
How to choose just one Kurosawa film? But hard to argue with this choice.

12 - The Searchers
How does John Ford get on this list twice? Well, Searchers is an infinitely better film than Stagecoach and it's the movie that should have won Wayne his Oscar.

13 - Breathless
Godard came in fast and furious. He didn't invent the French New Wave but this film says it all and really influenced scores of American directors. Still, I prefer Truffaut, Jules & Jim and the Antoine Doinel cycle.

14 - Psycho
Does this still have the capacity to shock the way it once did?

15 - Star Wars
The film which invented modern science fiction films but also came close to killing off literary science fiction. Star Wars didn't invent the modern blockbuster, that was Jaws.

So what else belongs on here? The first two to come to mind are Godfather (every organized crime film and TV show since owes a debt to the cliches invented here) and Pulp Fiction (Tarantino was not the first to tell a story out of sequence, and this wasn't the first time he did it, but this is the one that registered with both audiences and filmmakers). Bergman. Fellini. Chaplin. Billy Wilder. Preston Sturges. Dozens more.

And the list omits the single greatest film ever made, Dude Where's My Car.

Kinda sad to read about Marilyn Chambers dying so young.


And also Mark "Bird" Fidrych, whose brief career in baseball made him a household name. The guy was just 4 months younger than me.

And yes, Phil Spector was found guilty in his second trial for the murder of Lana Clarkson. It's a tragedy on so many levels. But now that it's settled, there's probably 100 guys running around in Hollywood trying to put a movie package together. I predict Nicolas Cage and Reese Witherspoon, Oliver Stone to direct? Or, if budget's an issue, that pale guy from Twilight and Jessica Simpson, directed by Uwe Boll.

Thinking about a new phone? (E@L?) Over at All Things Digital, the WSJ's tech guru Walter Mossberg serves up a round-up of the major smart phone operating systems as well as his view of their pros and cons. Spoiler - he really likes the Palm Pre.

Via Lifehacker, 50 Side Businesses You Can Start on Your Own. Since I'm gonna be out of work soon, maybe I could start all 50? You'd think there would be a strong demand for this one in HK:

Proofreading Have strong English skills and exceptional grammar? You may have opportunities to work as a proofreader from home. Advertising for this can be difficult - seek out those who might actually be able to use your services and advertise directly to them.

Also over at Lifehacker, Michael Ruhlman on Freeing Yourself From Recipes, an interview to promote his forthcoming book Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. I'm a huge believer in this - I watch the cooking shows on TV to learn techniques, not recipes. If you know what goes together and what doesn't, it's easy to DIY.

I've encountered this one in several spots, Boing Boing's got a link to the accompanying YouTube video. A Texas lawmaker suggests to a Chinese American ... "Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese -- I understand it's a rather difficult language -- do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?" You and your citizens? The guy gives her a more polite answer than she deserves. Anyone shocked that said lawmaker is a Republican?

Also, via Boing Boing, this link to an amazing photo gallery containing the work of Peter Funch. (Unfortunately it looks like the publicity from Boing Boing has flooded this guy's server.) Basically he takes shots from the same location every day for two weeks and then uses Photoshop to composite them into single images, with results like this:

Last for now, via Never Get Out of the Boat, information on the next CSI spinoff starring Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young - CSI:CSN&Y.

"HIGH NOON AT HIPPIE HIGH" - After a local high school's cafeteria food is spiked with some bad acid, the gang goes undercover as teachers trying to get to the source. Things go from bad to worse when they discover that they have to actually try and teach their children. You see, teaching children is a lot easier to just sing about when your gacked out on blow in a Hollywood hottub than to actually have to do it in real life. (Guest starring: Morgan Freeman)

There's a profile on Mike Nichols in the NY Times, because of an upcoming MOMA retrospective of his films, which include:

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
The Graduate
Catch-22
Carnal Knowledge
Silkwood
The Birdcage
Charlie Wilson's War

Now I'm old enough to have known Nichols first via his comedy albums, when he was part of a duo with Elaine May (and those albums still hold up well).

Anyway, I'm reading the profile and I get to this bit ....

He wakes up every morning in his Fifth Avenue apartment, collects himself and, wearing a wig and paste-on eyebrows, plays a character called Mike Nichols.

He was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky, the son of a White Russian doctor who emigrated to Berlin after the Russian revolution, and he arrived in New York in 1939, at the age of 7, permanently hairless (a reaction to whooping cough vaccine) and with almost no English

And I thought maybe he was putting the writer on. I never came across any mention of this before and there is no mention of it in his Wikipedia entry, but Google turned up a bio on a blog from several years ago that would seem to confirm this.

But then here comes the bit that stopped me in my tracks.

“I’ll tell you the most extreme example of immigrant’s ear in all of Western civilization. My grandfather, Gustav Landauer, was quite a well-known writer in Germany. He was also very political, and he was part of the two-week provisional Weimar government after the kaiser fell. When the government fell, he was taken to the police station and beaten to death. His best friend, who was also in the government, escaped, made his way to Sante Fe, changed his name to B. Traven and wrote ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.’ That’s the ur-immigrant story.”

I read several of the books attributed to B. Traven many years ago and, like so many others, marveled at how he managed to hide his identity for his entire life. There's the tale of his agent, who showed up for the filming of Sierra Madre, and how John Huston was convinced the agent was really him. I'm also relatively sure that the writer in Bolano's 2666 is based on Traven, or rather the mystery of Traven. Mike Nichols knows who B. Traven was? And Charles McGrath, the writer of the NY Times profile, doesn't follow up on this?

Or is it just a put-on?

"Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges."

Well, not quite.

But if you're thinking about going to Thailand, or you care about Thailand, then jump over to Frisko Dude, where Carl's been posting some excellent summaries of recent political events and the personalities involved, to help you gain more of a handle on this lunacy.

And then for something completely different, the 52 best natural breasts of all time. Perhaps it should have been more properly titled "52 pairs of ...." as the list is of 52 women. Rosario Dawson only #48? I predict a riot.

Oops, that's all I gots for nows.

Thought I should mention Monsters vs. Aliens.

As previously noted, there is just one IMAX screen in Hong Kong and they have chosen to screen the Cantonese dubbed 3D IMAX version, with just two showings of the original English - both on weekdays at 5:30 PM. Yes, I understand that most of Hong Kong speaks Cantonese as a first language. Yes, I understand that kids don't want to read subtitles. But is that any excuse to not do at least some 10 PM or midnight screenings in the original English?

And with a voice cast that includes Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogen, Hugh Laurie, Kiefer Sutherland, Rainn Wilson, Will Arnett, Stephen Colbert, Paul Rudd, Jeffrey Tambor, Amy Poehler, Renee Zellweger and John Krasinski, would anyone choose to view this dubbed by a bunch of local also-rans and never-wases, probably under the direction of the local marketing manager, rather than the original voice cast under the direction of the film's actual directors?

So there are two local screens showing the 35mm 3-D version in English - at the IFC and Elements shopping malls. We went to the IFC, House #5, a shoebox - 13 rows, 14 seats across, first row practically underneath the screen. HK$120 per ticket, plus $6 per ticket internet booking fee. Sigh. Fortunately we were able to get seats right in the middle of the theater.

Now the disclosure bit - the 3D projection process for MvA was done by a U.S. company called RealD, and a very good friend of mine is president of the division of RealD working to bring 3D to home TVs, computers and even mobile phones.

The movie starts off with the Dreamworks logo in black & white. After a funny bit of animation, the logo screen is torn off, revealing behind it a breathtaking space scape, a planet with rings much like Saturn, and I couldn't stop myself from saying "Wow!" out loud. It looked really good. And the 3D effect remained great throughout the film, even those bits that weren't reminiscent of SCTV's Dr. Tongue's 3D House of Pancakes.

MvA itself is an okay film. It's coming from people involved with the Shrek series so the humor is the same - aimed at the kids with a few mild risque bits for the parents and lots of pop culture references (including a nice CE3K reference that my gf didn't get at all - reminder to self to show her that film soon)(the day before I gave her a choice between Casino and Pulp Fiction and she went for Sharon Stone).

Most of the jokes are okay, it sagged a little in the middle and the end wasn't quite as strong as I might have liked, but there is certainly room for a franchise here, plus lots of associated toys, videogames and action figures. Basically I wanted more BOB, more Seth Rogen, and more characters like that one. Almost any time Rogen opened his "mouth" I was laughing and I enjoyed the vaguely anarchic characteristics they gave to BOB - a couple more BOBs and this would have been a classic. (How is it that Rogen seems to be in a new movie every month and I've yet to grow tired of him? He had 7 movies in 2008 and has at least 5 this year.) As it is, it's a harmless and mostly entertaining way to spend 90 minutes.

MvA scored 73% at Rotten Tomatoes and just 58% with "top critics."

They also showed 3-D trailers for Ice Age 3-D and Coraline. Seeing as how Coraline comes from a Neil Gaiman book and is directed by Henry Selick (Nightmare Before Christmas), and scored much higher with critics than MvA, I'd rank that as a must see as well. It opened in the U.S. on February 9th, we finally get it on April 30th.

Oh, by the way, the Palace's retrospective series is doing Jacques Tati, I suppose to coincide with our annual "Le French May" marketing whatchamacallit. Writer/director/star Tati was the greatest film comedian to ever come out of France (even if it is a country not particularly well known for its sense of humor). He only directed 9 films. Only 9! But you must see Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, Mon Oncle, Playtime and Traffic - they are also available in great editions from Criterion. (And, to be honest, they make films like MvA look like poo.)

For further investigation ....

For all the new music I listen to, for all the different genres that I know and love, when it comes down to it, I'm a classic rock kind of guy. That's not surprising, there are numerous studies of music out there that point to reasons why the music that we grow up with is what continues to resonate with us far into our old age. There are some of those groups that I love, albums that I count among my favorites, even though I stopped following the group a long time ago.

The Allman Brothers Band - I stopped listening to them after Brothers and Sisters. After the deaths of Duane and Berry, after Gregg married Cher, I thought their music descended into triviality. Yet Live at the Fillmore East and Eat a Peach remain two all time favorite albums. The Allmans are still around and apparently they've managed to get at least a couple of serious players to join the modern band, in particular recreating the dual lead guitar sound of Duane Allman and Dickie Betts with Derek Trucks and Warren Haynes. They do an annual series of gigs at New York's Beacon Theatre that are always sold out well in advance.

There's a 2 CD set, One Way Out, drawn from their Beacon shows in 2004. And three soundboards are circulating from the 2009 shows last month. For the March 28th shows, they were joined by Bob Weir and Phil Lesh for some songs.

On the one hand, there are some great performances here. On the other, 90% of the material dates from the late 60s, early 70s. They haven't really grown the canon.

Then there's the Grateful Dead. I got to see some of their amazing shows at the Fillmore East, shows where they'd start playing around 8 PM and by the time they finished and you stumbled outside, it was daylight. After Pigpen died, they weren't quite the same for me. And there was a 1972 show that I went to where my date spotted her old boyfriend there and decided to reconcile with him in the middle of the show. But in the late 80s, I worked for a start-up that was funded from the Grateful Dead Pension Fund and Bob Weir used to come around from time to time to check on their investment.

There's this article in the NY Times over the weekend, Bring Out Your Dead, that goes into fans' discussions of the Dead and their concerts in their prime. The group played approximately 2,350 shows and about 2,200 of them are on tape and circulating on the net.

If my Dead fandom stopped in 1972, I was surprised to find out that the concensus among fans is that the all-time single best Grateful Dead show took place on May 8, 1977 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. I've found four different audience recordings of this show (the one recorded by Stevenson sounds the best to me).

The next one cited is February 13th and 14th, 1970 at the Fillmore East in New York. (Curious how a San Francisco band's best shows are both said to be in New York.) Can't find full soundboards of those but highlights are collected in Dick's Picks Volume 4. I was at the Fillmore for these shows, but can't recall which one.

Not gonna start listening to all 2,200 shows but guess I will spend some time listening to some of these post-72 concerts. Rhino recently put out a 10 CD box of the Dead's 1973 stand at Winterland.

I suppose the above represents geeky fanboyism to the extreme. But then again, just checked, I've got over 600 Springsteen concerts in my collection (focusing in on the 70s but scattered stuff up to the present day). There's only a few that I consistently listen to (Main Point and Bottom Line 75, Palladium 76, San Francisco 78) but still I suppose it borders on the obsessive.
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There's a new band playing at Amazonia, alternating with long time fave Icebox; last night was their first night. This band is called Cactus and it's not the crap 70s band featuring Bogart and Appice and others, it is of course a Filipino band. They're much better than the previous #2 band that used to play there. The male lead singer has dreadlocks down to his waist and does a decent Bob Marley imitation; the female singer is cute and has a lot of energy. The guitarist is a former student of Willie, the great lead guitarist from Icebox. There were a couple of times that I thought they were about to stray into Sandinista-era Clash dub stuff, but no, they never quite got there. Still, you could do worse than to check them out.

On April 5th, the SCMP reported that the rooftop garden at The Pawn on Johnston Road is actually public space.

The rooftop of the building, which is decorated as a garden, is public open space under a consensus between the government and the URA. However, its status as a public open space is not stated clearly either on the lease or the master layout plan of the development.

The only hint that the area is an open space is a sign posted next to the lift inside the building, which says the roof garden is open to the public daily from 11am to 11pm.

But a letter in today's SCMP from Angela Tang, "General Manager (External Relations), Urban Renewal Authority" (that's a mouthful of a title) says:

The rooftop garden of 60-66 Johnston Road is not a public open space pursuant to the land lease and the approved master layout plan of the development.

The current arrangement of making the roof garden accessible to the public at designated hours is the intention of the Urban Renewal Authority and its joint venture partner to facilitate members of the public to enjoy and appreciate the architecture of the restored historical buildings.

So is Ms. Tang prevaricating? Or did the SCMP reporters get the original story wrong?

A couple of articles in the SCMP on current conditions at Stanley:

Seaweed, plastic bags and food packages lie everywhere at the southern side of Stanley Main Beach, in contrast with the tidy northern side.

A visit yesterday found rubbish and seaweed brought by ocean currents scattered around the area, while broken trailers, abandoned water sports equipment and waste bins were piled at the back of the beach. Just a stone's throw away, bathers were enjoying the clean and clutter-free northern side of the beach.

Alson Wong Kam-chuen, chairman of the Stanley Residents Association, said this was no surprise, as the beach's management was split between two different government departments. "The Leisure and Cultural Services Department takes care of the northern part, and it has sufficient manpower and vehicles to do cleaning every day," he said. "The other side belongs to the Lands Department. The contract workers they hire also come regularly. But they have fewer people and rely heavily on manual work."

And this one:

The Liechtenstein Princely Navy is on the warpath. The navy's self-styled "Admiral" Silvan Colani, and other members of Hong Kong's large dragon boat community, say that they will soon have no beach left on which to drop anchor in Stanley.

They blame a windsurfing rental shop which has recently built a "massive" concrete podium on the Stanley shoreline.

Barry Ho, the owner of the windsurfing rental shop, admitted he built the concrete platform earlier this year without government approval. "We submitted the application to the Lands Department two weeks ago and now we're waiting for its response," he said.

I love that last bit - that he submitted the application but didn't wait for the approval, just went ahead and did what he wanted.

Meanwhile, over in Lamma Island:

The dumping of building debris into a stream has caused a furore on Lamma Island. A farmer claims he faces being forced from the land, a scientist says the habitat of a rare tree frog is being destroyed, and Lamma residents are fuming that a slice of green tranquillity has been lost.

The rubble, dumped on private land into a stream in the Yung Shue Long Valley, is believed to come from the demolition of a local restaurant and a large, disused sewage works.

Since the debris first began appearing in the valley on March 23, the mound has grown into a partial dam covering a 3-metre section of the stream, which residents believe blocks the water's natural exit out of the valley and into the sea.

Whoever dumped the debris apparently placed a 60cm-diameter concrete pipe under the rubble to try to keep the stream flowing. However, the farmer, who was unwilling to give his name, said the pipe was far too small to drain the entire valley. "This will lead to the flooding of my land at least twice a year," he said.

A group of angry residents has reported the dumping to the government, but it has continued.

District lands officer Choy Kin-lun said the department had already raised concerns about how well the concrete pipe would handle the runoff during rainstorms. In response to residents' complaints, various government departments took part in a fact-finding inspection at the site on April 2.

The Environmental Protection Department conducted five surprise inspections to assess the levels of noise and air pollution caused by the dumping, but they were considered to be negligible on all occasions.

"From our investigations, the areas where construction waste has been deposited are all within private lots owned by different people," Peter Diu Chin-pong, an environmental protection officer, said.

Officers inspecting the site found a man dumping construction waste, but were unable to do anything as the owner of the land said it was taking place under his direction.

The environment department said it would continue to monitor the situation and carry out spraying to prevent mosquito breeding.

Gosh, thanks for that.

And then there's the 10 year old brouhaha at Fairview Park of heavy trucks driving down a private road through a residential estate ... which apparently is now settled but it took 10 years to get something done.

And now we're looking at these proposals to widen Hiram's Highway in Sai Kung, which no one except the government seems to want. The Sai Kung district council has shut down public consultations on this on the basis that it would delay the start of construction. Years of noise, pollution and traffic jams await us for reasons that have not been fully explained. And the thing is, the existing road is only rarely backed up to overflowing. Most of the time traffic flows quite freely. Wider roads are not the answer. More public transportation options and more "Park & Ride" spots are.

When a tree fell over and killed a young woman standing nearby, in the midst of the SAR's worst financial crisis in decades it was decided to place the #2 guy in the HK government in charge of trees. Maybe they could put the #3 guy in charge of protecting land for the public, or do we have to wait for someone to die first?

So today I decide not to bring the camera with me when bringing the dogs to the park in Sai Kung. "It's going to be the same stuff as always, no need."

So first when I get there, the tide is lower than I've ever seen it, exposing all sorts of rocks, which have people climbing all over them and fishing.

Second, perhaps because the combination of Saturday, holiday and beautiful weather, some seriously hot women walking their dogs.

And third, some guy decides to bring his pet tortoises to the dog park! These were big - at least a foot long - and attracting a ton of attention from humans and dogs alike, as you'd well expect.

Well, at least I had the camera on the iPhone .....

Got several things that I'm looking to sell off, thought I'd pimp them here, drop an email to hongkietown at gmail dot com if you're interested in any of this ....

* Sony A350 DSLR with Sigma 28-300mm lens, wired remote, various filters

* Casablanca Ultimate Collectors Edition Blu-Ray boxed set, still sealed

* Novatron NTD37HD multi-codec media player with 500 gig drive and remote control (mine has HDMI output, the one reviewed in this link doesn't)

* Bose Quiet Comfort 2 headphones

* Archos 504 portable media player, 80 gig model

* Synology DS106 NAS drive with 320 gig hard disk

* KitchenAid Artisan Series mixer

Geek and other stuff ....

Time-Warner recently spun off its cable company in the US. They've introduced a tiered service plan for internet access. The top plan offers 100 gig at 10mbps for US$75 per month. If you go over your allocation in any month, you'll be charged $1 per gig, capped at $75. That means a potential monthly internet bill of US$150. Does 175 gig per month sound like a lot? Not with a multitude of websites streaming HD video movies and TV, among other content. I would suppose that HK ISPs are watching this closely.

Over in France, Sarkozy's attempt to pass a bill that would allow cutting off internet service for people who were thought to be pirating audio and video, failed to pass in the National Assembly. Most lawmakers decided to skip the vote - there are 577 members but the bill failed with a vote of just 21-15. The bill will be resubmitted in a somewhat different form.

The iPhone app store is getting close to 1 billion downloads. That's in less than a year. The person who downloads the billionth app will win a US$10,000 iTunes gift card, a MacBook Pro and other goodies. Follow the link to see the all-time top 20 free and paid apps.

I've downloaded 85 apps, probably about 70 or so free ones. The ones I use most are Bloomberg, Evernote, HK Mark Six, Hong Kong Weather, mSecure, Oblique Strategies, Pocket God, Remember the Milk, plus a backgammon game and various unit and currency converters.

I only knew it was Passover because I know it generally comes around Easter time and from reading some other folks' status updates on Facebook. At least it meant that I got to call my mother and wish her a happy holiday before she had a chance to call and curse me out for forgetting. There's no winning with her but I try to minimize the losses.

Obviously a Seder was not in my plans but without giving it much thought, Thursday night I had a BLT for dinner - so pork and bread. Friday afternoon Italian salami hero for lunch (more pork and bread) and then Friday night kicked off dinner with crab cakes.

Hmmmm .... can't even recall the last time I had matzoh or gefilte fish or a latke. Oh well.

Is there any place in Hong Kong that does a decent blintz or pierogi? And I could kill for Roumanian tenderloin steak. (And while I'm at it, chicken fried steak. With lumpy mashed potatoes and white gravy.)
===============
Re-started my Mandarin lessons this week. Decided to go to a school because I know I'm a shitty student and figured I'm best getting something approaching a professional teacher rather than some college kid looking to make money on the side. But also wanted private lessons, both so that they could be tailored to those bits I remember plus flexibility in case of any remaining business trips. Yes there are probably cheaper options out there but I didn't want to spend weeks investigating and agonizing over a decision; I wanted to get started ASAP.

This one place offered a free sample lesson and fit my requirement for being relatively convenient to the MTR, so took my free lesson last week. I liked the guy who was teaching me; from Beijing, good English and didn't laugh at any of my jokes, which I figured meant I wouldn't be able to distract him from the business at hand, something I'm awfully good at.

But following the first real lesson this week, when I sat down to study, I realized that the lesson was all over the map. The guy didn't stick to the book that he'd given to me (which led to pages of handwritten notes) and he was giving me some simple verbs and nouns and then racing right to some pretty complex grammar. Oh crap, I thought to myself, I've paid for all these lessons in advance (to get a discount) and now I don't like the teacher. I hoped that things would get better as they went along.

When I showed up for the second lesson, this guy greeted me by telling me that he had a previous engagement that night and had arranged for a substitute. Only the second lesson and he's the one dumping out? I kept a lid on my temper for the time being.

Then it turned out that the substitute teacher was giving me exactly what I was looking for. She used a different book, there was a good combination of the familiar and the new, and she also knew to jump back a page or two every 10 minutes and quiz me on earlier stuff.

By the end of the lesson, I asked her if she could be my permanent teacher. She was fine with that, but wanted me to be the one to inform the other guy. When the class finished, the other guy was there - what was his previous engagement, teaching someone else?

Anyway, I went into his office and said, "I don't want to offend you but I'd like her to be my permanent teacher rather than you." He agreed so quickly and so calmly, it almost made me feel as if I was set up. The whole thing just seems odd. But I'll continue with this woman and see how it goes.

P.S. In case you're wondering, yes, she's cute. But some of what we covered (in Mandarin) was her asking me about my girlfriend and telling me about her boyfriend. So that line is drawn.
=======================
I'm doing the Mandarin classes for several reasons, not the least of which is that I hope that having at least some facility with the language will make the job hunt easier when the time comes.

On the other hand, I'm starting to think to myself that I'm feeling really burned out on what I'm currently doing. I've been doing the MIS thing for 23 years now - 17 of those years spent working for large multinational corporations. How much more of that do I want to do?

I feel the same way about going into consulting - it would just be more of the same.

So (and yes, more than a few commenters have said this, and some people IRL too) I have two basic choices .... take the severance package and use it to get by until I find a similar job, if possible. Or decide that it's time for a change and take at least part of the severance and use it to start something of my own. But what? And where? Luckily I've got some time to work on that. (A restaurant featuring chicken fried steak? Would that be big here? But the 1% I know about what it takes to run a successful restaurant ain't enough to go down that road.)

FYI - I have started my own business twice in the past; neither time was successful though the second did better than the first, which is sort of how I ended up doing the corporate IT thing. I have also worked for two start-ups; both are still around.

The Telegraph reports:

During his captivity, US marines forced Saddam, who was executed in 2006, to repeatedly watch the move South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut, which shows him as gay, as well as the boyfriend of Satan. He was also regularly depicted in a similar manner during the TV series.

...

Stone, 37, said both he and Parker, 39, were most proud of the signed Saddam photo, given to them by the US Army's 4th Infantry Division.

He said: "We're very proud of our signed Saddam picture and what it means. Its one of our biggest highlights.

"I have it on pretty good information from the marines on detail in Iraq that they showed Saddam the movie.

"Over and over again – which is a pretty funny thought.

"That's really adding insult to injury."

I've never been to Dubai and never will go there. Several years back, when the joint was booming, I did a bit of googling on "Jews in Dubai" and found some local message boards and the message was the same in all of them - We don't want Jews here.

I know some people who've gone there for holidays and I can't figure out why. Travel halfway around the world to a city in the desert to shop for the same crap you can buy here.

Anyway, with the economic downturn and the collapse of oil prices, Dubai is starting to show its real face to the world. This article in The Independent (via Boing Boing) captured my attention this morning.

Karen Andrews can't speak. Every time she starts to tell her story, she puts her head down and crumples. She is slim and angular and has the faded radiance of the once-rich, even though her clothes are as creased as her forehead. I find her in the car park of one of Dubai's finest international hotels, where she is living, in her Range Rover. She has been sleeping here for months, thanks to the kindness of the Bangladeshi car park attendants who don't have the heart to move her on. This is not where she thought her Dubai dream would end.

... Daniel was arrested and taken away on the day of their eviction. It was six days before she could talk to him. "He told me he was put in a cell with another debtor, a Sri Lankan guy who was only 27, who said he couldn't face the shame to his family. Daniel woke up and the boy had swallowed razor-blades. He banged for help, but nobody came, and the boy died in front of him."

... Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were shuttled back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like greenhouses in the desert heat. They sweat like sponges being slowly wrung out.

... As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

...

And then – suddenly – Mohammed thwacked into the limits of Sheikh Mohammed's tolerance. Horrified by the "system of slavery" his country was being built on, he spoke out to Human Rights Watch and the BBC. "So I was hauled in by the secret police and told: shut up, or you will lose you job, and your children will be unemployable," he says. "But how could I be silent?"

He was stripped of his lawyer's licence and his passport – becoming yet another person imprisoned in this country. "I have been blacklisted and so have my children. The newspapers are not allowed to write about me."

...

The only hostel for women in Dubai – a filthy private villa on the brink of being repossessed – is filled with escaped maids. Mela Matari, a 25-year-old Ethiopian woman with a drooping smile, tells me what happened to her – and thousands like her. She was promised a paradise in the sands by an agency, so she left her four year-old daughter at home and headed here to earn money for a better future. "But they paid me half what they promised. I was put with an Australian family – four children – and Madam made me work from 6am to 1am every day, with no day off. I was exhausted and pleaded for a break, but they just shouted: 'You came here to work, not sleep!' Then one day I just couldn't go on, and Madam beat me. She beat me with her fists and kicked me. My ear still hurts. They wouldn't give me my wages: they said they'd pay me at the end of the two years. What could I do? I didn't know anybody here. I was terrified."

One day, after yet another beating, Mela ran out onto the streets, and asked – in broken English – how to find the Ethiopian consulate. After walking for two days, she found it, but they told her she had to get her passport back from Madam. "Well, how could I?" she asks. She has been in this hostel for six months. She has spoken to her daughter twice. "I lost my country, I lost my daughter, I lost everything," she says.

Eminem's back. But does he still have it? I'm less than thrilled with his new single after the first listen. Here's the video, featuring look-a-likes for Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Sarah Palin, Bret Michaels, Kim Kardashian and the cast of Star Trek.






Here's something much more to my liking, two videos from Jack White's new group, The Dead Weather.

Finally ... remastered versions of the Beatles' albums are going to be released on September 9th. The original CDs were pretty good but there were some errors made, especially on the first four albums, and remastering technology has advanced significantly in the 20 or so years since those CDs were released.

There will be the 12 original albums (proper British versions) in stereo, Magical Mystery Tour and Past Masters 1&2 combined into a single release - buy them separately or as a boxed set with a bonus DVD documentary (no word on what that will consist of yet); no bonus tracks. Also available on that date will be a box containing the mono mixes of 10 of their albums along with two discs of bonus tracks - presumably mixes from singles and B-sides.

Still no decision on putting the stuff on iTunes or other online digital stores.

Couple of other quick things that caught my eye today ....

TechCrunch has this piece on Facebook's struggles to keep up with user demand. The guess is that their electricity bill every month is US$1 million, another $500,000 per month on bandwidth. Users are now uploading 850 million photos every month so they're also spending like crazy on storage.

Over at Content Agenda, results of a survey in the US say that 90% of consumers think they should be able to back up their DVD to a hard disk or copy the movie onto a portable device. Now here's the kicker - 40% of consumers say they would buy more DVDs if they could make back-ups. And 51% say they don't want to pay for those deluxe editions that include a second disk with a "digital copy." The studios need to wake up to the facts.

Simon and Garfunkel are reuniting again and touring again, kicking off in Australia and New Zealand in June. Any chance they'll get to Hong Kong or Macau?

Latest inductions to the R&R Hall of Fame last night, and for the first time, tix for the proceedings were on sale to the public. Bobby Womack, Run-DMC, Wanda Jackson, Jeff Beck, Metallica, Little Anthony & the Imperials, Bill Black, DJ Fontana and Spooner Oldham. It took this long for Beck to make it in on his own?

Stupid blogger #4,587: X-Men Origins: Wolverine got uploaded to the internet a month early. It's distributed by Fox. Fox News entertainment reporter and blogger Roger Friedman wrote a blog entry reviewing the illegally distributed workprint. I suppose he thought that wasn't a bad idea as long as he gave it a good review. "Right now, my 'cousins' at 20th Century Fox are probably having apoplexy.... But everyone can relax. I am, in fact, amazed about how great Wolverine turned out. It exceeds expectations at every turn. I was completely riveted to my desk chair in front of my computer." He thought wrong. Or did he?

(I've watched it. I didn't write a review because I don't think it's fair to publicly review a work-in-progress. Just like over the weekend my gf and I went to a new restaurant in town and I was supposed to write a review but the owner told me they hadn't had their official opening yet and were still trying to iron out some issues with suppliers, so I didn't write it. The guy clearly is putting his heart into this place and good or bad, now ain't the time.)

#1 - Rumor on the streets is that Fenwick will re-open in June.

#2 - Found out today that Spikey, my not-quite-9-year-old Golden Retriever, has hip displasia and arthritis. Vet gave us 5 different kinds of pills, have to wait and see how he responds to them. I'm at a loss for words on this one.

The SCMP reports that people are up in arms over an April Fool's story that ran in the feature section of the Taipei Times, an English language daily newspaper. Here's an excerpt from that story:

Pandemonium breaks out at Taipei Zoo

Zookeepers become suspicious of the resident giant pandas' true pedigree after Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan began acting strangely

Taiwan-China relations were dealt a severe setback yesterday when it was found that Taipei Zoo’s “pandas” are not what they seem.

Zookeepers discovered at feeding time yesterday that the two pandas are in fact Wenzhou brown forest bears that had been dyed to create the panda’s distinctive black-and-white appearance.

The Taipei Zoo’s head of ursidae ex-procyonidae care, Connie Liu, said she became suspicious when the pandas, Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan, began to spend almost all of their waking hours having sex. Pandas are notorious for their low libidos, which make them difficult to breed in captivity.

“Let’s just say Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan would tuan yuan at every chance,” said Liu, referring to the combination of the panda’s names, which means “to reunite” in Mandarin. “They would do it doggy-style and every armchair zoologist knows that pandas favor the missionary position — when they do it at all. Their behavior caused chaos. Children screamed and parents became irate.”

Her suspicions were confirmed yesterday when she noticed that the animals’ new hair growth was discolored.

“Their roots began to show,” she said.

The bottom of the page says "Happy April Fools' Day!" (though maybe that was added later).

The SCMP reports:

However, Taipei zoo director Jason Yeh was not amused and demanded a correction of the report he said had "seriously damaged" panda conservation education.

"We urge the newspaper to correct this improper story as it sends the wrong message," Mr Yeh said. "The joke has gone too far which not only hurt its credibility but [also] ... conservation education."

The zoo had received dozens of phone calls complaining about the article, he said.

Lawmaker Wu Yu-sheng, of the ruling Kuomintang, also demanded the paper apologise.

The Taipei Times defended the story, saying readers should be capable of telling a joke from the truth.

Sigh.

When I first saw posters for the movie Ip Man, I thought, "How strange, a Hong Kong movie about Internet Protocol? Intellectual Property?" But no, Ip Man is an alternate spelling of the name of martial arts master Yip Man, who today is remembered as being one of Bruce Lee's teachers.

Spoilers ahead.

If you're going to make a biographical film, a movie about someone who really existed, someone who lived in relatively recent times (he died in 1972), one would think the script writers might try to fit in details of the guy's actual life, but most of the movie is made up. For example, Ip Man did not flee to Hong Kong in the early 1940s after being shot by the Japanese; he was a member of the KMT in China and left in 1948 as Mao was coming to power. Ip wasn't just sitting around in his house every day sipping tea and accepting duels from wanna-bes, he was a cop in Fo Shan, but they make no mention of that. Actually, according to Wikipedia, he wasn't in Fo Shan, where the entire film takes place, during the Japanese occupation. And yet, Ip's oldest son is one of the consultants credited on the film.

And apparently they are still making films where an unarmed man can go up against 10 guys wielding axes and the only injuries he gets are bruised knuckles. Why doesn't one of the 10 just throw the fucking axe?

This is a movie carefully designed to fan the flames of Chinese hatred against the Japanese for their actions during WWII. To the point where the end titles make it seem that the Japanese surrendered to the Chinese on August 14, 1945.

Now I'm obviously not Chinese and I would assume that if I were to make claims that the depiction of the Japanese in this film is entirely one-sided and that they couldn't have been as bad as all that would be as offensive to Chinese as if someone told me the same thing about Nazis. (So why is it that in 2008 there were two films made about "good Nazis" - Valkyrie and The Reader?) I know, via Facebook, that many HK people went to see this movie and left feeling "proud to be Chinese." I suppose one could say the film is even-handed because it does depict Chinese who collaborated with the Japanese and gangs of Chinese bandits who are preying on Chinese during the war.

Yet showing the truth would be problematic. It was mainly the KMT that resisted the Japanese during WWII; they're the ones who fought 22 major battles against the Japanese, they're the ones who lost millions while the Communist army watched from the sidelines, building up its strength for the civil war that they knew would continue once the Japanese were tossed out. But you can't depict that in a film and then have a prayer of it screening in modern China. So you can't mention that Ip was a member of the KMT. Once you throw away that historical fact, you might as well make up the rest too.

The other thing is, knowing the ending - knowing that he's going to survive the war and move to HK and set up a school, robs the film of much of the tension the director tries to set up towards the end. Will the Japanese general kill him in the duel? Obviously not. When he gets shot and lies on the ground motionless in a pool of blood, is he dead or dying? Not so much.

So aside from my complaints about historical accuracy and fights in which an unarmed man goes up alone against 10 or more at a time and no one lays a finger on him, it's a relatively entertaining fictional film. I've always liked Donnie Yen and Simon Yam is used to good effect here. Anyway, I think this whole thing was done better in Fists of Fury and Fists of Legend.

Yes, another Saturday afternoon with the dogs by the sea in Sai Kung.

Boring geeky stuff: This time using the Nikon D300. The majority of the shots were done in aperture shutter-priority mode because I wanted to capture the dogs running around. I probably should have dialed the ISO up to 400 or so because some of the shots are dark. Shooting RAW, I could then lighten them up a bit in Lightroom, but I'm still learning that as well, so a little bit of fiddling here and there. Actually I found a D300 template for Lightroom (sorry lost the link) so used that and then played around a bit just with brightness, contrast, clarity settings. But .... I then created jpegs and used Picasa to shrink the jpegs down into a more web-friendly size. But take my word for it - looking at the RAW shots in Lightroom, I am now getting what I want. Those shots are richly detailed and wonderful. For awhile I was thinking that I would only shoot in RAW occasionally but shooting RAW+JPEG and comparing the results of the original shots, even my old eyes can see the difference.


Here are some dragon boaters taking a break on an island beach.


I presume this is a practice race.




Bogey looking happy.

This kid wasn't looking too happy about having his picture taken. Enough already, dad!



Spikey enjoying his day.


Easy rider.

Why so serious?


This one looks great full size.

Bat kite!





This guy looked seriously unhappy.


It was about 23, 24 degrees. This girl is wearing jeans, a dress, a big coat with a furry collar and TWO scarves. With flipflops.




The pier was packed.



And that's it!

This car has been sitting in the village parking lot under a tarp for awhile. This afternoon the tarp was off, they were working on it, and I couldn't resist going over and taking some pictures.

As the plate says, this is a Simplex/American La France Model Type 45. It was made in Elmira, New York in 1918 and first hit the road in Pennsylvania in 1919. Check out the weight - 3,500kg!



So these guys bought the car in the UK in 2001 and had it shipped to Hong Kong. In 2007, they drove it from HK to Beijing and then from Beijing to Paris, which took 35 days. In 2010 they'll be doing another Beijing to Paris drive, this time along the Silk Road. I can only begin to imagine the reactions they get driving this in China (or anywhere else for that matter)!

It took the editors a little time to get the March 19th issue of BC Magazine online but it's there now. And it has my first feature article for the magazine. I interviewed French musician Xavier Jamaux, who co-wrote the score for Johnnie To's films Sparrow and Mad Detective and is currently working on scores for two more HK films. I greatly admired the score for Sparrow and Jamaux gave very eloquent answers to my very basic questions.

My column in the same issue is a very good example of an editor taking a look at my submission and coming back to me and getting me to tone things down for my own protection. And no, I'm not going to be posting the original piece online.

For personal reasons, I was not able to write a column for the current issue, the second time I've missed an issue in more than two years. So thanks to Hong Kong Phooey for filling in for me as Faux Spike.

I'll be back with my usual nonsense in the next issue.

First off, let me state categorically that I don't believe in ghosts, the afterlife, reincarnation or anything else along those lines.

But sometimes, when it's quiet in the house, my dogs stand there and stare at nothing. Sometimes it's at the top of the stairs, sometimes in the bedroom, they stand there and stare at something I cannot see. "Maybe dogs can see ghosts," I joke to myself.

Fast forward to today. Get home from work around 7:30. My gf is waiting to tell me a story. She says she was in the bathroom, taking a bath. The bedroom door was closed as was the bathroom door. All the windows were closed. She heard footsteps in the hallway that she says were my footsteps; she says she knows what my steps sound like. And then she saw the bathroom door open a little bit. And then she heard footsteps again. She got out of the tub, started drying herself off. Her mobile phone rang. It was my helper, calling from downstairs to ask her what she should cook for dinner. "Why don't you ask Spike, he's home now, right?" "No, he's not home yet."

Since my helper was downstairs, the only way someone could have gotten into the house would have been if my next door neighbor decided to jump from his balcony to mine and then somehow get through the locked sliding glass door (which makes a lot of noise when you slide it). My dogs can't open the doors if they're fully closed, of course.

So now she's convinced that a ghost came into the bedroom and bathroom and walked around for a bit. And she says this is the second time that's happened.

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

The following is a true story.

I was roughly 20 years old. It was Passover and my parents were going to hold a Passover Seder at our apartment in The Bronx. Usually for Passover we went to my mother's relatives, but there are generally two Seders, at least for conservative Jews in the US, and this year my mother was doing a Seder at home for my father's side of the family on the second night. Among those coming was an elderly aunt and my father told me that if we asked her nicely, she would raise the table after dinner. I had no idea what he was talking about. "You'll see."

After Passover service and dinner, my dad set up a folding wooden table in the living room, with four chairs around it. My aunt sat at one side, my father and I sat down, one more relative on the fourth side. Someone dimmed the lights. We placed our hands on the table, palms down, and sat there in silence.

After a few minutes, the table started sliding around on the bare wood floor. My aunt started talking to the table. It was just like a seance. It was a seance. There was no way that my aunt had the strength to move the table like that and I couldn't see anyone else doing it either. The table rose up in the air, all four legs off the floor. It settled down. My aunt kept talking and the table started tapping out answers like a Ouija board - one tap yes, two taps no, or tapping out letters of the alphabet.

Via these taps, my aunt announced that it was Molly, my father's mother, who had been dead for 30 years. I got to ask the first question so I asked if I would ever get to be a director. "Yes" was the answer. "Will I get to be one before I'm 30?" I asked. The table spun on one leg and sort of jumped onto my lap. Don't ask ghosts stupid questions.

Then my aunt asked if Molly had a message for anyone in the room. Yes. For my father. Via tapping, the message was, "Call your brother." My father and his brother hadn't spoken in ten years.

The table settled back down, the lights came back on and I thought I saw a tear in my father's eye. Later that night he made jokes about the whole thing. But if it was a trick, he wasn't revealing to me how it was done, no matter how many times I asked. For the rest of his life, he swore it was the real thing.

The next day, he called his brother and they spoke for the first time in 10 years. His brother died soon after that - if he hadn't made that call they would not have reconciled before his death.

25 years later, I did go to work for a Hollywood studio. And while I never directed films, the title on my business card reads "Director."

I don't believe in the supernatural. But to this day I cannot explain what happened that night. So if my gf says a ghost came into the bathroom while she was taking a bath, I'm not going to make fun of her.

As someone who writes a sometimes scattershot column for a local magazine, I take a bit more interest than usual in the work of others doing a similar thing. I've read Chip Tsao's column in HK Magazine from time to time; sometimes I've liked it, sometimes I haven't, but I've always been able to appreciate what he's trying to do.

His column last week created an uproar. Here's a summary of the issue at hand, complete with large excerpts from the "offensive" column, from Asia Sentinel:

The farce, or to be more precise a serious loss of humor, is between a Filipino government and local community unable to appreciate satire or to distinguish between friend and foe. Hong Kong’s Chip Tsao, a witty and irreverent writer with a superb command of English, had written in his aptly named "Politically Incorrect" column in the weekly HK Magazine an article entitled The War at Home, a tongue in cheek piece about local Chinese pretensions to patriotism.

It included the following:

"Manila has just claimed sovereignty over the scattered rocks in the South China Sea called the Spratly islands, complete with a blatant threat from its congress to send gunboats to the South China Sea to defend the islands from China if necessary. This is beyond reproach. Why? Because there are more than 130,000 Filipina maids working for HK$3,580 (a month) in Hong Kong. As a nation of servants, you don’t flex your muscles at your master from whom you earn most of your bread and butter.

"As a patriotic Chinese man, the news has made my blood boil. I summoned Louisa my domestic assistant who holds a degree in international politics from the University of Manila, hung a map on the wall and gave her a harsh lecture. I sternly warned her that if she wants her wages increased next year she had better tell every one of her compatriots in Statue Square on Sunday that the entirety of the Spratly Islands belongs to China.

"Grimly, I told her that if war breaks out between the Philippines and China I would have to send her straight home for I would not risk the crime of treason by harboring an enemy of the state by paying her to wash my toilet and clean my windows…

"Some of my friends have already told me that they have declared a state of emergency at home. Their maids have been made to shout "China, Madam/Sir" whenever they hear the world "Spratly…"

Someone with limited knowledge of English could be forgiven for taking this literally. But to anyone with both a modest command of the language and a slight knowledge of Hong Kong – and most Filipinos have both – should have instantly realized that this was a barb aimed at Hong Kong Chinese claims to patriotism and at their treatment of Filipina domestic helpers.

But so defensive have the Philippine government and the local community become about the nation’s role as supplier of domestic help to the world that they immediately expressed outrage. Philippine Immigration Commissioner Marcelino Libanan announced a ban on Tsao visiting the country and local representatives expressed outrage. Even the bureaucrats of Hong Kong’s Equal Opportunities Commission joined the bandwagon of the dumb by saying the language was derogatory and "inappropriate for racial harmony". Tsao was forced to issue a groveling apology saying he had been misunderstood.

Indeed despite this he continued to be misunderstood by the secretary general of United Filipinos in Hong Kong, Eman Villanueva, who insisted in the face of reason that it was not satire.

Of course any reference to their role as domestic helpers is naturally as sensitive for the government as for Philippine nationals. But they do not help their cause when they make a fuss over an article by a journalist known for poking fun at Chinese pretensions and assumptions. A former editor of the now defunct Eastern Express, Tsao has a reputation for supporting the underdog. He is one of the few local journalists who is willing to address the issues of local discrimination against brown Asians, most of whom are domestic helpers or construction workers.

Instead of Tsao’s joke being on the local Chinese maid-employing middle class, those now being laughed at in Hong Kong and beyond are the Filipinos and their government.

In any case, Hong Kong’s minority population may be set to shrink a little as a result of a British decision to allow those left stateless at the time of the 1997 handover to move to Britain. Believed to number about 1,000, they are mostly of south Asian origin. They currently hold British National (Overseas) passports which enable them to travel but not to live in Britain. However, many may elect to stay in Hong Kong.

This has gotten HK Magazine and Mr. Tsao more attention than either has received in years. But how anyone could have read this article, in particular the line that I have put into bold font above, and thought it was meant as an attack on The Philippines or Filipinos in general is beyond me. Some publicity hungry neanderthals clearly seized upon this as a chance to get some media exposure for themselves, in my opinion.

HK Magazine should have stood behind Mr. Tsao's column and supported him in this time of difficulty. The editors should have known in advance that the column might be misread by some. They should have either rejected the column or worked with the writer to shape it into the clearest possible form. There are five ways of reading everything. If someone writes "the sky was blue today," 5% of the people who read that are likely to take offense for one reason or another.

Even if they didn't foresee this reaction, once they went ahead and published it, the responsibility is as much their's as it is the writer's. They should have stood behind their writer and their editorial decision.

Instead, they've published an apology to their readers for something which required no apology in the first place. They've also yanked the "offending" column from their website. There was nothing racist or offensive there and they knew that when they printed it, why are they backing down now?

I don't know if there's a Chip Tsao column in this week's issue - I don't see any link on the website. I do hope that Mr. Tsao takes his talents to a different home, one where he will be more respected and supported.

The UA IMAX theater at Megabox has now added some English language screenings of the IMAX 3-D version of Monsters vs. Aliens.

Exactly two screenings.

On weekdays. During office hours.

Thanks for nothing.

Yes, it's the red band trailer for Sacha Baron Cohen's NC-17-until-someone-recuts-it Bruno.

Just wanted to mention that my short reviews of the bands at Underground 78 can now be seen on the Underground web site, along with Angus's great photos. Support local music!

I think I'm going to just bite the bullet, deal with the weight, and carry my Nikon D300 with me every day now. Even though I'm still in the early stages of learning how to use it, I can see that it more consistently is giving me the results I want.

What's funny - and is probably more about me than the camera - is that 2 years ago I had the Nikon D80 and sold it because I found it difficult to use. Now I have the D300, with far more options and settings, and I'm finding it an absolute joy. Maybe I'm just more ready for something like this now.

Anyway, here's the crowd at Uno Mas last night. ISO bumped up to 1600 but with the dim lights best I could do was a 1/8th second exposure. So a little bit of blur but I'm quite pleased with how it remains relatively noise free.


A number of new dishes added to the Uno Mas menu so we sampled most of them. Below, they've taken the Spanish ham platter and added three Spanish cheeses to them. The one on the bottom right is Manchego, don't recall the names of the other two, but we were told that the one in the middle actually costs more than the Serrano ham.

This is the lamb shank.


The Spanish roast suckling pig was the clear winner of the night. This is made fresh every day and for now they are only making 6 portions per day.

And some glazed tuna.


I'm told that since their official opening last week, Uno Mas has been booked solid every night. The manager, Yuri, told me about some upcoming specials they've got planned - Saturday and Sunday afternoons all you can drink (wine, cava, sangria) for $280; a "paella hour" where the staff will walk around with huge vats of their great paella; a late night tapas menu serving until 2 AM.

After that, over to Amazonia, here are some shots of perennial fave Icebox (but with a substitute rhythm guitarist). They were trying out lots of new material last night; their cover of Neil Young's Rockin' in the Free World was quite nice.

#1 - A workprint of the film X-Men Origins: Wolverine is on the internet. The film, starring Hugh Jackman, opens in the US on May 1st but this high quality (but unfinished) version of the film can be downloaded via the usual sources. "Fox said the leaked version is an early rough cut and is missing some scenes. The version also features temporary sound and music and a darker appearance than the finished footage." When I saw this available online, I thought it was an April Fool's joke. But after viewing a sample, I downloaded the whole thing. I only had a chance to watch bits and pieces but yes, it's Wolverine and yes, the quality is excellent. This is going to really hurt Fox.

#2 - Fox has decided to release DVDs with no bonus features for the US rental market - I suppose their thinking is you rent the film, you like it, you go out and buy it to get the director commentary or whatever. The first major release under this plan is Slumdog Millionaire. And Variety reports that they managed to screw it up, delivering barebones rental DVDs to retailers in retail packaging. "Slumdog Millionaire, for example, has special features on the retail DVD but not the rental version. On Blu-ray, it has bonus features on both the rental and retail versions, but only the retail package includes digital copy."

"Stores also report that Fox had problems getting its program rolling for Tuesday March 31 release "Marley and Me." The studio chose not to send out any standard DVD rental copies, which were to carry special features but no digital copy, apparently because it did not have time to manufacture the discs to meet street date deadlines. Instead, all stores got the retail version, which includes digital copy."

Last night was one bit of bad luck after another for me, culminating in an attempt to walk through a glass door at full speed. I was at home and, no, I was not drinking. No visible scars but today it hurts quite a bit.
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I guess Hong Kong has nothing to fear from Shanghai if they insist on copying some of Hong Kong's worst actions. Channel News Asia reports (via Serious Eats) that Wujiang Street will essentially be demolished to make room for more shopping malls. This food street was popular with both locals and tourists and was a place I never missed on my once-frequent trips to Shanghai. It wasn't just that the food was so great and cheap, though it certainly was - it was a great spot to mix and mingle and meet people and probably one of the few spots left in that part of Shanghai that everyone could afford. CNA reports that the fabulous Xiao Yang dumpling shop has already found a new location. Just seeing the name of the shop gets me hungry.

Well, that's about it for now. Does my face hurt? It's killing me.