Hongkie Town

Found these photos of the Shanghai building collapse on Gizmodo, of all places. Go there if you want to see even larger versions of these. Pretty fricking amazing, innit?





Ya know, one day, I don't know when, someone in the China government is going to realize that if they really want to be a first world country, they need to have some laws that protect their citizens and they need to actually enforce those laws too.

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I don't think this new iPhone app works very well.


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In the news today, in The Standard I think ... a bunch of local kids in HK were playing Truth or Dare. A 12 year old girl lost. Her penalty? To have sex with a 16 year old boy for 10 minutes while everyone else watched. She did it. A few days later, a social worker at their school found out about this and the boy was convicted of having sex with a minor. No comment from me on this one; the story itself is enough.

Just got a call this morning. The guy who was my boss for my first 6 years at my current job died from a massive heart attack yesterday. Beautiful wife, 3 kids, 1 year younger than me. Certainly makes all my current unhappiness seem trivial by comparison.

And not to put too fine a point on it but the person who called and gave me the news told me he thought it was the job that killed him, or at least played a large factor in the stress that no doubt led to this. And I agree.

I realized this morning that getting hepatitis is one of the luckiest things that's happened to me. Because if I didn't have it, I'd be using the shit I'm going through right now as an excuse to drink like a lunatic. But because of it, I can't even have a drop of the stuff.

Which was a great song by Was (Not Was) but that's not what this post is about.

Michael Jackson's been dead two days and the vultures are coming out. How much truth is in any of this remains to be seen. I have no idea how much or how little these sources are to be trusted.

First, from the UK's News of the World:

Now for the first time the News of the World reveals the explosive story spelled out to author Victor M. Gutierrez in his shock book Michael Jackson Was My Lover: The Secret Diary of Jordy Chandler.

This is pretty detailed, salacious stuff. Here's one of the milder excerpts:

The moment they arrived in the hotel room Jackson locked the door and asked Jordy if he wanted to take a hot bath. Jordy said: "While I was taking off my shirt Michael took me in his arms and began to kiss me.

Celebitchy links to another News of the World article about Jackson's ex-wife Debbie Rowe. But follow the link and the story is gone. Here's some of what they purport to be in that article:

JACKSON never had sex with her throughout their marriage and parenthood;

SHE offered to have babies for him after he told her that his first wife Lisa Marie Presley had refused to bear him any;

THE star arranged for a sham marriage to make them appear like a family;

HE cruelly ditched her when the painful second birth left her “all torn up inside” and unable to give him any more kids.

So the question is - is the truth coming out? Or are these also-wasses and never-wasses simply simply looking to cash in on others' misfortune?

And if you think I'm just being grumpy or even the Grinch who stole Christmas for posting stuff like this, well maybe I'm am. I've had two successive days of bad news and disappointments and I could be all Mary Sunshine and say, "It can only go up from here!" But I doubt it.

Even more so in Hong Kong, eh?

After July 7th, stores are supposed to charge 50 cents (about 6.5 cents US) for plastic bags. They're getting ready for this with signs and posters and .... items on store shelves now already in plastic bags, bags large enough to shove other items into as well, according to the SCMP.

All of this speaks to the fact that the government has done a frigging miserable job of explaining to the public why this might be a good idea. Take for example Mr. Cheung in today's letters to the editor page, who exclaims, that the 50 cent levy amounts to a double tax because the shops have already included the cost of the bags in the prices on their goods and if they're going to start charging for bags, they need to lower the price of everything else! I can actually see the logic in that thinking ... but what do these bags cost the shop, purchased in massive bulk? probably a buck for a thousand? Anyway, when do shops in Hong Kong ever really reduce the price on anything?

Now a second article in the SCMP leads off with the headline, "Some feel embarrassed to take bags to shops." It seems that more than 10% of people polled won't be carrying their own bags to shops because it is inconvenient, difficult to remember or embarrassing.

But wait a minute! Doesn't that mean that almost 90% of people polled do plan to bring bags along? 90% of the public plans to bring bags along with them, the newspaper chooses for god knows what reason to emphasize a tiny minority who won't, and supermarkets are playing to the wishes of 10% of the public? (Not unusual, that last bit.) Ooooh, the SCMP stirring up controversy again!

Why, that second article even goes so far as to say that in a recent poll, 85% of those polled think the 50 cent charge is reasonable. But that's buried at the bottom of the article. Why is the SCMP so determined to sabotage this initiative?

And now can we deal with all of the office buildings that hand out free plastic bags on rainy days for umbrellas?
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The Australian shithead who killed a taxi driver over the weekend was brought to court today and faces one count of murder. He didn't enter a plea and is being held without bail. Perhaps he could be visited by the family of the taxi driver he allegedly murdered, and maybe get a visit from several hundred of that driver's friends ....

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Wanna know the condition of Michael Jackson when he died? According to The Sun, he weighed 8 stone, was all but bald, his body was bruised and cut in several places and all that was found in his stomach during the autopsy was pills. If true, this is shaping up to be a Howard Hughes-style horror story.

UPDATE June 30 - TMZ says the coroner's report in The Sun was a complete fabrication. And the L.A. County Coroner has released the following statement: "The report that is being published did not come from this office. I don't know where the information came from, or who that information came from. It is not accurate. Some of it is totally false."

Right now, the top grossing film in the U.S. in 2009 is Pixar's Up, at $250m. Up hasn't gone wide internationally yet so its foreign gross is just $20m. This is a film that is probably good.

The #2 film of the year is J.J. Abrams' reboot of Star Trek, coming in at $246m so far. Plus an extra $123m abroad. This film doesn't suck.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has grossed $200m in 5 days. Its opening day gross - a non-holiday Wednesday - was $60m. Foreign gross so far is $80m.

The rest of the top ten grossing films to date this year:

Monsters vs. Aliens - $195m
The Hangover - $183m
X-Men Origins: Wolverine - $177m (guess the leaked workprint didn't hurt them that much)
Night at the Museum 2 - $163m
Fast & Furious 4 - $155m
Angels & Demons - $130m
Terminator Salvation - $121m

CGI rules in Hollywood.

#1 - This article in the SCMP bugs me for several reasons. The first is that when you look at that second paragraph, they insert (as they always do) a totally freaking useless link to themselves but none to Neptune Group, also a listed company and the subject of the damn article FFS!

And then there's this bit:

Using a GPS-equipped mobile telephone, the journalist established that the Neptune was moored beyond Hong Kong waters in mainland territory near Dangan Island.

Which journalist? For which paper? You gonna tell me that the SCMP, with its limited budget, paid to put someone on an overnight gambling cruise ship for this purpose? That this is what they deem worthy of investigative reporting with everything else that goes on in HK? Or some guy wanted a sea cruise and managed to convince an editor to pay for it? FFS!

#2 - According to the SCMP, Friday night/Saturday morning, 22 year old "Australian passport holder" Kelsey Michael Mudd got into an argument with his taxi driver as it drove along Harcourt Road at 3:30 AM. And then the taxi driver crossed the divider on the road, smashing through a metal barrier and then crashed into three other taxis, and the driver subsequently died. The 58 year old taxi driver was married and had two children.

Now here's where the story goes beyond the pale. Police and ambulances arrive on the scene, the paramedics are checking Mr. Mudd, and this genius decides to push them out of the way and drive off in the taxi! And makes it a full 50 meters before colliding head on with another taxi.

What can you say about someone who does this? And how long can we lock him away?

#3 - An okay article gone awry, "Struggling venues may turn a blind eye to smoking ban," wherein two intrepid reporters interview various bar owners and managers to see if they will enforce the smoking ban on July 1st. But for some reason, reportage descends into editorializing and humor by the end of the article, when Dan Kadison decides to create lists of "winners and losers." Winners include:

Snitches An offender who smokes in a bar and leaves can still be slapped with a summons if a witness chooses to rat them out in court.

So how is that a win? Does the "snitch" get a reward?

And losers?

Smokers who drive with children in the car Plenty of people want to see this banned

Which may be so, but WTF does that have to do with people smoking in bars?

In a related article (one in which the above would have belonged):

Ronald Lam Man-kin is the head of the Tobacco Control Office. "We are trying, of course, to strive for a smoke-free environment," he said. "So the next step forward may include, for the protection of children, forbidding smoking in cars or putting in place some smoke-free movie [content] restrictions. But that's just a wish list."

No you putz. The next step forward is to ban the sale of cigarettes. Which probably will never happen because the Hong Kong government, like every government in the world, gets rich from the taxes on cigarette sales. And Mr. Lam would be out of a job. So stop the hypocrisy. 200 years from now scientists will probably discover they were wrong and that smoking is actually good for you. Noah smoked on the ark and gave a taste to most of the animals.

#4 - The way the SCMP posts letters to the editor even when they include blatant disregard for facts. Of course all the "intelligent design" supporters fit in there (and there are two more in the paper today). But what about this useless letter from someone castigating the owner of two dogs that died from the heat in Sai Kung last weekend? I'm all for that. Except that he writes:

However, unlike dogs, the owners were not walking in the heat in fur coats. And, unlike their owners, the dogs could not perspire through their skins to cool off. And the dogs died.

I have seen people walking dogs with heavy coats (for example, huskies) out in the sun when the temperature is more than 30 degrees Celsius.

Is this not cruelty to the dogs?

Dogs' fur coats serve as insulation in both winter and summer. And cutting your dog's hair short in the summer leaves him vulnerable to sun burn. Sometimes I think that in order to get a dog, you should be required to pass a test that proves you know something about raising one properly. Like, oh, when you take your dogs out for a hike or to the park, you gotta carry along some water for them? Cause I'll bet the real nimrod in this case, the guy whose dogs died, was probably walking along with a bottle of water or coke or soy milk for himself - gosh, it's hot, he's thirsty, he never thinks the dogs might also get thirsty?

Well, nothing earth shaking in any of the above, I know. Just not much to do today and a bit of a headache.

I haven't read Doonesbury regularly in years but I keep it in my RSS and every now and then there's one that catches my eye, like this one. (Click on the image for larger version.)

Because, as promised, tonight we went for dinner at Magnolia, the private kitchen serving New Orleans cuisine in Sheung Wan. As mentioned in an earlier post, you need to book ahead here (and you need to pay in advance to get a confirmed booking) because they are only open for dinner 3 nights per week and just one seating per night. The cost is $450 per person - no credit cards, no service charge. And since as a private kitchen they don't have a liquor license, they have no corkage fee. Magnolia is run by Go Gourmet Catering and chef Lori Granito. They also have a take-away and delivery service called Ragin' Cajun.

Arrive at their door in Sheung Wan and there is a sitting room for all the guests, with the kitchen in full view. There's chef Lori Granito and her staff working away. This kitchen is spotlessly clean - TV clean. There's some New Orleans rock & roll and zydeco playing on the stereo to get you in the mood.

While in the sitting room, you're served a fruit juice cocktail along with a bunch of appetizers that give you a good idea of what you're in for. There was some semi-soft cheese topped with sun dried tomatoes and herbs with a basket of crackers and toasted baguette slices. A bit of sausage and cheese on a biscuit. Boiled crab claws with a spicy remoulade dressing. Some tiny cornbread muffins with cheese and jalapeno peppers. And what for us was the piece de resistance - the best salmon mousse I've ever had.

After half an hour, you walk through the kitchen and upstairs to one of the three dining rooms. Each room features a single long table and everyone is seated together. In our room, there were 15 people at the table and we all instantly introduced ourselves to each other and it took only minutes for us to feel as if we were at a dinner party instead of a restaurant. It was friendly and relaxing.

After a few minutes Lori came in, introduced herself, explained the Magnolia concept (since it was the first time there for almost all of us) and told us what we'd be eating.

First up was soup, a classic file gumbo with shrimps, crab, chicken and andouille sausage. Really nice. The salad course was a salad featuring soft shell crab amandine - expertly cooked but not a standout in terms of flavor.

And then the main part of the meal - served family style on platters and bowls. The cajun ribs were without question the best ribs I've ever had in Hong Kong - juicy and fall off the bone tender with a nicely balanced barbecue sauce. The jambalaya was wonderfully cooked as well. And I also got into the fried catfish, served with a spicy cocktail sauce. There was one other main dish - sorry, I've blanked on what it was. Side dishes included sweet potato mash, okra and corn, collard greens, white rice and cornbread.

Dessert was a slice of one of the best pecan pies I've ever tasted, served with fresh whipped cream and a strawberry.

Are you getting the impression that you get a hell of a lot of food for your money? Yeah. You do. And it's really good. I could have been happy filling up on just the gumbo and the ribs, but I wanted to be sure to at least taste a little of everything being brought to our table; the end result being that four hours later, I still feel so stuffed! I left feeling that the quantity and quality of what we were served meant that $450 was actually a bargain. My gf loved every bite and ate in one sitting what she usually eats in 3 meals and I think if they brought out more dishes, she would have found some room for those too!

But to be honest, as much as I enjoyed the food, I wouldn't rate it at 5 stars. They're presenting classic New Orleans recipes, very well made (to the best of my limited knowledge with this cuisine), but there is nothing done to elevate them or make them unique. If I've got no food photos to share, that's because presentation here was an afterthought at most - there's a white bowl filled with okra, there's a platter piled high with ribs - no sauces drizzled around the plate, no towers of stacked food, no bits of parsley or flowers for a garnish. I was expecting the food to be spicier, too - isn't that a constant in Cajun and Creole dishes or am I misinformed? Was the heat toned down for local tastes? Most (but not all) of the people there tonight were expats.

(Or perhaps I'm being hypercritical. I've already said that the salmon mousse and pecan pie were the best I've ever had and the ribs were easily the best I've had in Hong Kong. And we enjoyed the jambalaya, catfish, crab claws and gumbo too!)

Of course, the success of Magnolia speaks for itself. It's been in operation for roughly 4-1/2 years and seems to depend primarily on word of mouth. We noted that for many of the groups who were there, it was a couple who had already been there introducing the place to friends. And Granito's approach of doing each day's menu based on what she found fresh in the market that morning (combined, no doubt, with some New Orleans specific ingredients that are flown in) is an admirable philosophy.

If the food for me was "only" 4 stars, I'd easily rate the overall experience at 5 stars. The food was all fresh and expertly prepared and served. The party atmosphere meant that we really relaxed and enjoyed ourselves. Everyone was friendly and the meal is served over the course of three hours, so you have time to relax between courses and savor your food and build up your strength for the next course. Was it worth the drive from Sai Kung to Sheung Wan in a heavy rainstorm? You bet your ass it was!

Six months from now, I may not remember the taste of the dishes that we had, but I will always remember how much fun we had there. And yes, we definitely will go back.

So Michael Jackson is dead and I don't give a shit. As far as I'm concerned, someone who had tremendous talent, twisted at an early age by rapaciously greedy parents, and when so many allegations are being tossed around, there has to be some truth there. But he spent the money on plastic surgeons and drugs instead of psychiatrists. 90% of what he released after Thriller was garbage. He squandered his money, his talent and his life. The King of Poop.

Really, how many months do you think it's gonna take for a new Greatest Fits Shits Hits album to appear in stores? Until Michael McDonald, Rod Stewart, Laura Branigan, Willie Tyler & Lester, Siegfried and Roy and the Pussycat Dolls release tribute albums?

Today the people who are celebrating are those at Sony Music. "Thank god we won't have to market whatever shitty new albums that sick twist would have managed to come up with. We can repackage alternate mixes and studio outtakes and half-finished demos for the next 50 years and clean up the way RCA does with Elvis!"

I'm sadder about Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon. Sky Saxon, founder of The Seeds (Pushin' Too Hard) died on Thursday and this Jackson thing is gonna push that news off the front pages I think.

The new Transformers film is upon us. This we get day and date in Hong Kong. It will of course win the weekend box office and surely end up in the top ten top-grossing films of the year.

So far, with 122 reviews counted, Rotten Tomatoes scores it at just 20% - or 22% amongst "top critics."

Manohla Dargis in the NY Times calls the film "cretinous." The Village Voice says, "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a bewildering, noisy, sloppy, cynical piece of work, a movie that sneers at the audience for 147 minutes and expects us to lap it up as entertainment—and be grateful." Roger Ebert's review starts off like this:

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

He also says the film is "dumber than a box of staples."

They love it in the UK too:

"Like watching paint dry while getting hit over the head with a frying pan!" (Bradshaw, Guardian); "Sums up everything that is most tedious, crass and despicable about modern Hollywood!" (Tookey, Daily Mail); "A giant, lumbering idiot of a movie!" (Edwards, Daily Mirror).

Apparently I am going to go see this in a local shoebox movie theater soon. It appears that this is what people want, the world over, so I'm curious. And curious to see just how big the numbers will be on Monday. And then we're gonna get a lot more of the same. (Paramount's next release this summer is a film based on G.I. Joe toys.)

I think we suffer from a lack of food innovation sometimes. Oh, wow, we got a new German restaurant this week. A new Greek restaurant this week. Replicating global dishes as best one can with local ingredients, or flying in stuff from around the globe and charging prices to match. Places that are really trying "new" are beyond the financial reach of the common person (especially an about to be unemployed one like me). I look at Diary of a Growing Boy, someone in Hong Kong with an apparently limitless budget eating 15 course tasting menus every night and bringing along suitcases stuffed with wines from his collection. I've only ever eaten one such tasting menu in my life.

Yet for all that, I can't buy something as simple as an all beef hot dog in the supermarket and know of very few places that serve an all beef dog. Once in a very blue moon I've been able to find Hebrew National at City Super. East End Brewery (and presumably some of the other El Grande outlets) offers an all beef "city dog" and it's okay but it's no Gray's Papaya Sabrett dog "tastier than filet mignon" as they advertise.

A good friend doesn't care for the food at Doghouse, but true to their name, they have a really huge all beef dog (served plain, with chili or with chili and cheese) that's the best one out there right now. (Said friend is not American and hotdogs probably don't register with him; he's probably more thrilled with a good Yorkshire pudding.)

Or maybe I'm just in a grumpy mood today? That's always possible with me.

What's set me off today is this post from Serious Eats on the new breed of haute cuisine hot dogs cropping up all over New York. New York - where you can not only get a dog on almost every corner, but now chefs are competing for fancy dogs (and probably with fancy prices to match). But based on my limited experience, no one even thinks to do something like this here - with hot dogs or other common ingredients?

Just look at these suckers:

Well first, dogs on the griddle at Gray's, enough to make my mouth water - gimme three!


Next, from a chain that has 200 branches in Korea and just opened in New York, a hot dog topped with bulgogi and kimchi!

In a similar vein, David Chang's dog is wrapped in bacon and covered with kimchi:


Time to get serious. Wiley Dufresne's dog comes with deep fried bacon-mayo covered in bread crumbs with tomato molasses, shredded romaine and chopped onions.


Now let's get really crazy, a Malaysian/Thai hybrid dog? It's made from "pork shoulder, fatback, Thai chilies, pickled ginger and garlic, and belacan, or fermented shrimp paste. The toppings: aioli, pickled Thai chilies and radishes, cilantro leaves, and in a nod to Chicago hot dogs, cucumber."

What about a side dish with your dog? PDT on St. Marks offers freshly made tater tots served with cheese sauce and jalapeno peppers.

Serious Eats also has postings from time to time on bizarre and wonderful hamburger combos around the US.

I'm gonna be at the FCC tonight. Cucumber sandwiches again, I suppose.

The SCMP reports today that a man was killed on Castle Peak Road in Mai Po after he was hit by a mini-bus and then run over by a truck. Apparently he got off a mini-bus and then tried to run across the road, first getting hit by a different mini-bus and then run over by the truck. He was pronounced dead on the scene.

"The [police] spokesman said the bad weather may have caused the accident." As opposed to some guy running out into traffic and trying to dodge buses and trucks to cross the street?

Hey, why did Donald Tsang cross the road? He was stapled to the chicken.

(Yeah, I know, it's "why did the punk rocker cross the road" but what the hell.)

Apple says they sold 1 million iPhone 3GS over the weekend. Still no info on the HK launch on either the HK Apple store's or 3's web sites.

Tim Burton's next project is Alice in Wonderland, which will open March 2010. I've lost count of how many screen versions they've made of this. But with Burton's visual flair, who knows? Evidence #1 - this photo of Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. Wander over to USA Today (via Celebitchy) for some more images in an almost cool flash format (panning, zooming, but no saving to your hard disk unless you've got some tool for saving flash off the web, which I don't). Oh wait, there's some more images over at Pajiba. Oh, Helena Bonham Carter's in the movie too? There's a shock.



Meanwhile, this is just so fucking sad it makes me think I should quit Twitter. Music awards ceremony in Canada. Web celeb gossip monger Perez Hilton backstage calls will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas a "gay .... fag". (Yes, I know, Perez is gay.) Little Willie and/or his security guards put the hammer down on Perez. And rather than calling the cops, he tweets about it. Who does he think he is, Iran? This screen grab is from Defamer.


Last for tonight, John Hodgman was the featured speaker at the Radio & Television Correspondents Association dinner in DC and explains the difference between jocks and nerds and why Obama is the first nerd president of the modern era. (And Obama seems to be enjoying every minute of it, even demonstrating the Vulcan salute at one point.) The clip is 14 minutes long and worth watching in its entirety. I love Hodgman on the Daily Show, I enjoyed his books and he just shines here with observations like:

Speaking of Supreme Court nominees, uh, strict constructionists - jocks. Anyone who believes that they know the original intent of the framers of the Constitution are obviously jocks because A they hate hippies and B they neglect the fact that the Constitution is perhaps the most geeky document of all time. It is essentially the Frequently Asked Questions list of the United States. It was written by monied, sickly, bookish, bi-focal wearing nerds who believed that God was a distant uncaring Dungeon Master.

And "there's even talk in some states of decriminalizing evolution."

Literally.

Around 5 PM today my stomach went kerblooey on me. I'll leave out the details. But after work, I was going to meet some friends in Wanchai. Parked the car, stopped into a pharmacy, the one on Fenwick right next to Outback. "Some Imodium please," I says.

And the young lady behind the counter asked me why I don't try something better. I asked her what she had and she pulled out a blue box. I asked her why it was better and the young lady behind the counter said to me, "Imodium only closes up your, um, ass. This closes up your ass and kills the bacteria."

Can't ask for a clearer description than that, can you? So I ask her how much and she says $68 (for 12 pills - you can probably buy a bottle of 100 Imodium in the US for the same price). I ask her how much does the Imodium cost and she says, "About the same." What does that mean? "$67? $65?" "About the same." "$62? 60?" "It costs the same, $68." I had to ask three times to get that answer? Sheesh.

And three hours later? Wish I'd bought the Imodium instead. Cause my ass ain't closed up yet.

Now I ain't saying this is the reason my stomach went all crapola on me but ....

Magnolia, being a private kitchen with limited seating, requires payment in advance to get a confirmed booking. And since they don't accept credit cards, you have to deposit or transfer money - payment in full, mind you - into their account.

So at lunchtime today, I went to HSBC, waited on line and then handed the teller a slip of paper with all the transfer details. "Oh, this is not going into an HSBC account?" Nope, just like it says there on the paper. "Then we're going to charge you $170 for this." WTF????? $170 to transfer less than $1,000 from my account to a non-HSBC account? Almost a 20% surcharge? No wonder HSBC continues to post profits while banks all around them are going belly up.

But ... bless her heart, the teller then suggested that I simply make a deposit into the account at the branch of their bank and then told me where the nearest branch was. I'm not sure that all HSBC tellers would have done this or maybe I just happened to get one who actually believes in the phrase "customer service." Needless to say, I followed her suggestion.

Wish I'd bought the freaking ass-closing Imodium instead of the germ-killing other crap though.

So aside from my so-far unsuccessful quest to find chicken fried steak in HK, one more .....

I know there are plenty of shops selling used CDs and DVDs in Sino Centre in Mong Kok and Oriental 188 in Wanchai. But does anyone know of any shop that will come to your house if you're selling a large collection?

Oh, and also any web sites where people buy/sell bootleg CDs. Probably going to part with a couple hundred of those - all original silver, no CDRs.

Going through the CDs now and figuring that I will be selling off somewhere in excess of 1,000 once they get ripped to MP3. And probably at least 100-200 DVDs that I don't expect I'll ever want to watch again. And probably a couple hundred books, but I think I have the phone number somewhere for some used bookshop that says they'll come collect for large collections.

(Because I'm expecting that within 4 months I'll need to move to a smaller place and want to start getting rid of stuff now so that I stand a chance of actually fitting into a smaller place.)

Today's the first day of summer and if this is a portent of what's to come, help me!

I checked the weather at Weather Underground around 1 PM or so and on the temperature list, Sai Kung was #1, which never happens, with something like 33.7. But then add in the humidity and check the heat index and we came in at 43.5, which is just about 110 for you Celsiusly challenged out there. Even now, after sunset, at 7:30 PM, the heat index has Sai Kung tied for #1 (with Sheung Shui) at 38.8. Oh by jingo!

And didya know that last night, it was T1? Our first typhoon signal of the year, though it's dropped now.

Thanks to the ever-informative SCMP, we now know that Cathay Pacific has a new marketing web site featuring shots of their staff off duty. "Meet the team who go the extra mile to make you feel special." Hello Nancy Hui, flight purser! And a big shout out to Eiko Suenaga, customer services officer! Her pull quote reads, "Maybe ... all he wants is to meet someone who understands him - and that someone is me." Oh Eiko, that's not quite all I want. And flight attendant Karina Yau who tells us she was a former fashion model. 33C, she used to call me. (As in "leave me alone and get back in your seat.") The Post informs us that the staff received no payment for appearing in this promotion other than framed copies of their photos. But the Post neglects to give the website URL, which their editor has apparently deemed unimportant to this inspiring and news-worthy tale.

Ah well, dinner's on the stove, movie later, back to the grind tomorrow.

I got this email recently from a reader who moaned at me because he went for dinner at Quarterdeck on "my recommendation" and thought it was horrible. When was the last time I went to Quarterdeck? A year ago? Two years ago? Things change, and not always for the better.

Tonight's case in point, sadly, Tai Ji. Constant order #1 - xiao long bao, of which they do a pretty decent batch. I thought tonight's were still tasty but my gf complained they were smaller now and not as much soup inside (and she's definitely right on the soup quantity). Constant order #2 - they do this stir fry sichuan chicken thing - the chicken is diced into tiny chunks (bone in) and flash fried with cashews and sichuan peppercorns. Tonight no sichuan peppercorns on the plate at all. There were a few measly slices of red peppers or chili peppers (seeds removed) and the dish still had some heat, but half the fun of that dish is digging through the mountain of sichuan heat to find the few morsels of chicken. We also went for sweet & sour prawns - heavy red sauce, the balance tipped a little too much to the sour side, though the prawns themselves were fresh and perfectly cooked. Topped off with fried rice with shredded chicken and ham which, sorry to say, was the best dish of the night. Honestly, I'm not rushing back there again.

Star Trek - also I'd give it about 3, maybe 3-1/2 stars out of 5. Good in bits, lagged during the middle. Maybe I'm crazy for expecting it to be a little less "Star Trek-y" in a franchise that's over 40 years old. But I sat there thinking that I hate these original stories in comic book movies (ok, Star Trek not a comic book movie but along the same lines) as too much time and exposition is wasted on how they all meet up or get their powers or whatever and you only get the meat of the story at the end, and this seemed like more of the same to me. I was checking my watch a lot during the final hour. Well, it was better than Star Trek 5, that's for sure.

Sleepy now. Good night all!

Well, no, there are no drive-in movie theaters in Hong Kong. There was one recently; it didn't last long.

Last night my gf was in the mood for the salmon and fettucini at Jaspa's - they do it in a vodka cream sauce. But Jaspa's was full, even people waiting outside. So we ambled over to Cru where I knew if you ask nicely they'll let you order from the Jaspa menu. As for me, I went for Cru's lamb shank, a beautifully done piece of meat, served with mashed potatos and 5 different types of lightly roasted fresh vegetables - baby corn, baby asparagus, cherry tomato, long beans, broccoli. I used to be the kind of guy who'd finish the meat and potato and then go on to the veg if I had room, but that's the old me. Actually right now Cru is doing a promotion on "posh burgers" and the one that has Wagyu steak with (I forget which kind of) cheese and prosciutto certainly looked tempting. Next time.

Played around more with the RAID box. Both drives, removed from the box and tested in a USB enclosure, are working fine. So it must be the box. Which is going back to the shop on Monday.

Started last night, finished this afternoon - Scorsese's New York, New York. Which I hated when it first opened, instantly my least favorite Scorsese film. But because it's Scorsese, I keep going back to it. And it gets better each time I watch it. Including this time. And this time I also noted how well Liza Minneli holds her own against De Niro - not just in that scene in the car where they're going at each other verbally and physically, but throughout. And of course the nice little cameo from Clarence Clemons.

Then, for something light to pass the afternoon, Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

Tonight going to see Star Trek. Finally. Dinner will likely be at Tai Ji, the not quite authentic but still tasty Shanghai joint in Wanchai. And I've finally booked dinner at Magnolia - for next Saturday. I can't even begin to remember the last time I had cajun food - well there was that place that was near the Mid Levels escalator, how long ago was that? Years. Hope it's good!

Years ago in New York there was a restaurant that did great southern and cajun food right around the corner from Tower Records. It was called Acme and their walls were lined with a hundred varieties of hot sauce - order your food and then take a walk around and grab a few bottles off the wall. They did fabulous chicken fried steak. With truly lumpy mashed potatos, all smothered in white gravy. Eventually they opened a music club downstairs called Under Acme. And eventually they were gone.

Does any restaurant even attempt to do chicken fried steak in Hong Kong?

Sorry - I know this will be boring for most, but posting on the off chance that someone who knows more about this sort of stuff can offer some advice here.

The possibility is that Drive 2 is bad. I removed both drives from the RAID box that I thought had gone bad. Put them into another RAID box. Turned off computer. Turned on RAID box (connected to PC via firewire). Turned on computer.

This RAID box doesn't have an LCD screen, just some status lights. And as the computer was coming on, it found the box on boot-up but the status light on the 2nd drive was red. And as the box tried to get the drives going, it would keep locking up the computer during the boot-up process. After ten minutes and not booted I gave up, switched off the RAID box.

I'm willing to toss the whole thing, buy a WD 1 terabyte box and use that going forward.

And for now, put Drive 1 into a USB enclosure and hooked it into the computer. Yes, all the data is there. But one annoying problem. One of these "I'll bet this only happens to me" things.

See, in the boot-up process, when the RAID box was connected by Firewire, it would come up as drive D. Now that the drive is just in a USB box, it gets found later. So my DVD-ROM drive comes up as D and the former RAID drive comes up as E.

What this means is a headache. Because I keep my iTunes library on this drive. And iTunes thinks that all the music is on drive D. Go to play any song and it can't find the song because it's looking on D instead of E.

Now, I could simply reload all the iTunes stuff from E: except that this will wipe out the contents of all my playlists - 30 of them, some of them with a couple hundred tracks. The XML files for the playlists identify songs by an ID that iTunes assigns when the song is added to iTunes. Reload the library and all of the songs will have newly assigned IDs. The playlists won't be able to find them.

So the temporary solution is that each time I boot up, I go into hardware manager, delete the DVD ROM and then go into disk management and reassign the drive letter from E to D.

So with either a bad RAID box or a bad 500 gig drive - and I'm not sure which - the quickest solution is to go out and buy a new RAID box with two drives that will mount before the DVD ROM each time.

The cheapest solution would be to just use this one drive as a standalone disk drive, which I back up weekly to something else.

But that would require some sort of tool or script to migrate my iTunes library and playlists to the new drive letter. Otherwise, it will take me more than 100 hours to recreate all these playlists from scratch. AppleScript is Mac only and my iTunes library is on my PC. Is there any solution to all of this? Argh.

We now return to our regularly scheduled bitching and moaning.

First my keyboard mishap. Logitech wanted me to send it back to them but I couldn't find the receipt. Then I told them that I'd already gone out and bought a new keyboard and let them know it was also Logitech and they offered to fix it for free thanks to my loyalty ... till I told them I was not in the US and hadn't bought the previous keyboard in the US. Ah well, nice of them to try. But something got me thinking - what if the keyboard's okay and the charger cradle's okay and the problem is in the external power supply? Gotta switch that out and see what happens.

This morning .... I've got 5 RAID enclosures, two drives in each. Excessive? Yeah, probably. But I've been through too many hard disk failures in my life and want this extra bit of insurance. There's only one that I run all the time - it has my My Documents folder, all my photos, my iTunes library, all the stuff I use constantly and would be irreplaceable. It's got two fans on the back and this morning, it sounded as if one of the fans was coughing up blood.

Sure enough, as I was copying some MP3s over to my iTunes library, that RAID unit managed to take itself offline and the screen indicated that drive 2 had failed.

Shut down everything. A thorough cleaning - fans, drives, cables, etc. Restart and reconnect and now it's fine. It thinks it needs to rebuild drive 2 again, which is an all day process given the size of the drives. But the fans are still not sounding healthy so I may need to replace the enclosure.

Sigh.

Today's the day for the iPhone 3GS in the US and some other countries around the world. Hong Kong is slated to get it at some point in July. But when exactly? And what upgrade policy, if any, will there be? 3's web site has no mention of the new iPhone anywhere that I can see. The Apple HK online store shows the new phone and just says "coming soon" - no date, no price, no nothing.

In the US, there's a new TV series called Top Chef Masters on Bravo. They've taken the Top Chef concept but this time are using famous chefs, four per show, each "winner" gets a spot in the finals. Week one featured Hubert Keller. Week two was just on, featuring Wiley Dufresne, but I can't find it on Usenet or Pirate Bay.

The first week's show was great because it had a great elimination challenge. The four chefs had to each cook a gourmet 3 course dinner for the judges and a group of college students - and they had to do it in a college dorm room with just a microwave, a hot plate and a toaster oven.

Keller's main course was mac & cheese with prawns. And halfway through he realized that there is no running water in a dorm room! He took his huge pot of pasta into the bathroom in the hall and used the shower hose! Other chefs quickly discovered that when you're using a pan on top of a hot plate, it's impossible to get the pan hot enough to properly sear the meat. And none of them seemed to understand how to use a microwave.

Actually the most ingenious bit belonged to Texan chef Tim Love. He put all his groceries into the fridge the night before - but it turned out he put everything into the freezer. The morning of the challenge he woke up to find all his produce frozen solid. He completely tossed away his planned menu and came up with something new on the spot which everyone liked. If I ever get to Texas (doubtful), I gotta find his Lonesome Dove restaurant.

And what is it about every US reality game show that they think they need to have someone with a British accent on the panel? Every show needs to have their own Simon Cowell? Enough already! No one in the US knows who these people are (the food critic from the London Observer? Wowwee!) and none of them are Simon Cowell, so just let it be.

Anyway, my gf seems to be getting into the US version of I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and Real Housewives of New Jersey. So still haven't gotten around to watching Last Year at Marienbad, but last night did manage to get her to watch a couple of episodes of Little Britain USA. She laughed like crazy for the first 10 minutes or so but it tends to run on. And when you're watching more than 1 episode at a time, you realize the extent to which they repeat themselves.

John Belushi never wanted to do the bees bit on Saturday Night Live. He thought that continuing characters from previous weeks was too easy a way out and that they had to do new stuff every week. Monty Python - 99% never repeated characters. Little Britain ought to take a lesson from that - though with the money they're undoubtedly making, who could blame them if they just keep doing what they've been doing on and on and on and on and on and on ....

There are dozens if not hundreds of examples of the ineptitude of the various "fearless leaders" of Hong Kong that get cited daily by other blogs in our neck of the woods. For me, the latest and greatest example is the on-going stupidity of the attempt to establish this West Kowloon arts hub.

And the latest on that? Yesterday it was reported that Angus Cheng Siu-Chuen had resigned as executive director after just one week on the job for "personal reasons." What could those reasons be, I wondered? Illness or death in the family? Then again, in Hong Kong, it's a relatively common practice for someone to interview for multiple jobs, decide they prefer job A, but the offer for job B comes in first, so they accept that, and when the offer for job A arrives a week later and the pay is $10 more per month, they quit the first job and take the second. So just what were Mr. Cheng's reasons?

A day later, it turns out that Mr. Cheng was not the executive director. He was one of six executive directors, each of whom would have different responsibilities, all direct reports to the CEO, who has not been hired yet, and for whom a search has not even begun.

To make matters worse, according to the SCMP, he was told during the interview that he would be the sole person in charge until a CEO was chosen. And it was only after he was hired that he discovered about the five other directors, most of whom also have not been hired yet. And ... this one beggars belief ... a source at the Home Affairs bureau is quoted as saying, "The authority doesn't have the obligation to tell candidates how many executive directors will be recruited."

So ... #1 since when is it considered a recipe for success to lie to or mislead a candidate during the interview process? What reputable company anywhere in the world feels the need to do that? #2 why wasn't the CEO hired first and then allowed to choose his/her own direct reports (in consultation with the proper government authorities)? Why are they hiring lower positions before they have even begun the search for the chief? And #3, what made Angus Cheng think he was suitable for the position as the head of the entire arts hub when his previous experience was as "a designer" at Disneyland?

It shows that the people who are in charge of this have absolutely no clue, no experience and are driving down the road to destruction as fast as they possibly can. Except in their case the destroyed won't be these people and it won't merely be our taxpayer dollars, it will be this lost potential to actually develop a bit more interest and education in the arts as well as the creation of something that might have been a real draw for tourism.

But as we all know, just as Cyberport became an excuse for PCCW to sell condominiums and townhouses to the wealthy and became an utter failure at the government's stated purpose of developing Hong Kong as a regional tech hub, this so-called arts hub is just an excuse for developers to create more cardboard apartment buildings and shopping malls with a fancy name attached, and perhaps another theater where Emperor Group's latest phony pop stars can play if the Coliseum is booked.

The hubris isn't Angus Cheng's for thinking he was ready to step up to a position with a lot more responsibility than his previous one. And kudos to him for saying, "You lied to me about the job responsibilities. Take this job and shove it!" It's the people in charge who don't know a freaking thing about what they're doing and are unwilling to consult with or bring in anyone who might have actual expertise in the area, at the risk of publicly exposing their own ignorance. The whole concept of "face" dooms this project long before it's ever complete.

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

In a similar story, there's an interesting editorial in the SCMP today by Stephen Vines intriguingly titled, "Symptoms of a regime that has lost the plot." I was prepared for this to be a story about Myanmar or some African nation but it turns out to be about little old Hong Kong.

Our nanny state, which spends tax payer money on posters in toilets showing you how to wash your hands after you pee, has a habit of taking things people actually like and making them illegal (street markets, heritage buildings, al fresco dining, street food) has decided in its wisdom to issue 67 additional licenses for ice cream hawkers. 3,743 people applied for these 67 licenses.

However, such is the suspicion of the way that the government operates these days that many applicants felt the ballot was somehow unfair and its conduct not sufficiently transparent. As, rather typically, the department conducting the ballot could manage nothing better than a non-specific assurance that the polling system was fair, it is impossible to know whether there are reasonable grounds for complaint.

But this is not the issue; what matters is the perception that the government is not to be trusted even in the simplest things because it refuses to communicate in an open manner.

From there it goes to discuss the mishandling of the government's attempts to create what is probably a much-needed drug rehab center for students and the resistance to putting it in Mui Wo.

The problem is that a non-elected government lacks the reflexes to ensure the public can be brought on board for policies, especially about livelihood issues. Instead of seeking public support, or at least public understanding for their plans, the government typically sets about securing the support of the people they perceive to be community leaders who, in turn, tend to be handpicked by the bureaucrats for their compliance.

This means they have little credibility when it comes to the crunch and, by the time the bureaucrats actually deign to speak to the people directly affected, decisions have already been taken and what passes for consultation is understandably seen as a sham.

And from there, the skepticism and cynicism over the recently announced pay cuts for government leaders.

They imagined this would be well received but, instead, it has been greeted with widespread cynicism and has, if anything, deepened disquiet as the public has been reminded just how well bureaucrats are rewarded. This is what happens to a regime that has lost the plot. The public is merciless in criticising it even when it is genuinely trying to be helpful.

Of course, those in power who actually look at this opinion piece will probably note that the author is not Chinese and use that as the basis for ignoring the piece.

It's my growing belief that despite oft-repeated promises, Hong Kong will never get the democracy it seeks and deserves, at least not until some point when China itself becomes one. Democracy is not given, it has to be earned and, in some cases, fought for. The Democracy movement in Hong Kong lacks the type of people who can lead and inspire in this battle.

Of course I could be wrong, I often am, and this is one situation where I would love to be proven wrong.

Okay, some quick thoughts after playing around a little ...

Response time on my phone seems slower, noticeably in email. Read a message, hit "reply," reply screen comes up but then a lag of a couple of seconds until I can start typing.

Apps - WiFi Finder crashes immediately every time. Skype keeps giving me warnings that it's running on an unsupported OS. Other apps I've tried (haven't gone through them all yet) seem to be running okay.

Bluetooth streaming audio - my car has a Pioneer deck with bluetooth and I'd already had the phone paired to it; it took no additional steps at all for streaming audio. But every 30 seconds or so a brief dropout in the sound, can't say if that's due to the phone or the Pioneer unit. Too annoying to use that as my main sound source (rather than iPod Nano connected to the Pioneer's iPod connector cable) unless I can figure out why that's happening.

Email search is great! I needed to search for one particular email from a couple weeks back, searched on the sender's name, it connected to Gmail and I had the search results and email I needed within seconds.

Cisco network speed test - running on 3's 3G network, speed results were exactly the same as my previous test from a month or two back.

Gotta hand it to Apple. I started my download at about 1:10 AM, 10 minutes after this was available online. The 230 meg download took under 10 minutes, so even if their servers are getting hammered, seems as if they were prepared. The install took somewhere between 5 & 10 minutes (wasn't really watching the clock). Quickly tried out landscape mode in SMS, cut/paste, the search screen - all seem to be working as promised.

Here's Walter Mossberg's review of the new OS (and the new iPhone, released in the US on Friday, in HK sometime next month).

And from Mobile Crunch - iPhone OS 3.0 just launched here are 20 things to do with it - which I'll check tomorrow - bedtime now.

From The Guardian (via F-Listed)

The lengths to which drug smugglers will go to conceal their consignments was revealed when the Mexican navy said it had seized more than a tonne of cocaine stuffed inside frozen shark carcasses.

Yes, lots of internet buzz about tonight's release of iPhone OS 3.0, but in the world of digital cameras, here's the one that's hogging all the space this week. It's the new Olympus E-P1.

It uses the Micro Four-Thirds standard and has interchangeable lenses, meaning that you kind of get almost the full range of DSLR features in a camera that can slip into your pocket (depending on which lens you've got mounted, of course.)






So, it's a 12.3 megapixel camera with a Live MOS sensor (which means full-time Live View), 3 inch LCD screen and also capable of shooting 720p HD video. Of course it's capable of shooting RAW and ISO tops out at 6400. The camera body itself measures just 4.7- x 2.7- x 1.4-inches.

It's initially available in 3 configurations. Body only for US$749. Body with 14-42mm zoom lens (35mm equivalent 28-84mm) for $799. Or body with 17mm lens and optical viewfinder for $899. As you've probably noticed, there is no built-in flash - a flash unit for this lists at $199. (At least some of the lenses for Panasonic's Micro Four-Thirds cameras should also fit; seems like there's also some kind of adapter ring available for older lenses in this format.)

Having sold off my Sony DSC-T700 last week, I was sort of tempted to sell off my Canon G10 and get something more pocketable for snapshots, perhaps a Panasonic. (The DMC-ZS3 has a 12X zoom and shoots HD video and is very pocket-friendly. I used to own its predecessor, the TZ5, which was a terrific pocket camera but was stolen on my birthday last year.) This Olympus definitely captures my imagination but the price means it probably ain't gonna be happening.

I get the feeling that I'll be holding onto the G10, which is of course a perfectly good camera. I think I'll be saving my money to get the Nikon 10-24mm lens for my D300; I've been picturing in my mind what I could do with 10mm. Though as my upcoming unemployment date approaches, the thought of spending HK$7,000 on a lens is becoming more unattractive daily.

This is the only possible reason I might go see Transformers 2 when it opens:


I suspect I'm not the only one who feels that way.

Had my iPhone hooked into iTunes and kept clicking on "check for update" but even past midnight, NYC time, no new OS 3.0 for me to download. Part of me says that's okay, I should wait a couple of days and read the early reports first. But the other part wants to check out all the new stuff as soon as possible.

I find that I am incredibly turned off by CNN's attempt to jump on the Twitter bandwagon. I watch televised news to watch the news presented and interpreted by professionals. I don't give a hoot or a holler what Joe Blow in Tuskahogee thinks about the election in Iran. Then again, it does sometimes lead to sublime moments like this one:


From TV Squad, an interview with Denis Leary. Some excerpts:

Susan Boyle. Go.

I think she's a hobbit. The no expectations aspect was fantastic. I kind of wanted her to be the person who not only could sing, but was gonna tell everyone to fuck off and would become the new sex symbol. I hope she comes back fucking crazy like Judy Garland on acid. I'd like to feed her a lot of booze and pills and just let her sing beautiful songs and threaten people from the stage.

What about Heidi and Spencer? You hear how they up and quit I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here? Practically screwed their charity out of any money. [Author's note: at the time of this interview, Speidi had yet to apologize and return to the show.]

That is awesome. I'm so proud of them. Why are these people famous? That's fantastic. Not only do we not care about the charity, but we're not even going to pretend to care! Man, they're such morons. There's already a Baldwin. They should fly in all the Baldwins and just have them beat the crap out of Heidi and Spencer.

What would you call it?

I'm a Baldwin, We're Here to Kill You.

Hey, it's Mr. Positive!

Noted over the weekend that a water pipe behind my house was leaking, one that feeds water to the entire row of houses, not just mine. Went to the water dept. web site and couldn't figure out what number to call, so just sent an email on Sunday. Monday they called me back but I couldn't take the call. I called them today around 3 PM and the guy said they'd be sending someone out to repair it soon. And then it turns out that the repair guy came at 2 PM today! So good for them in being able to come so fast and do something so that gallons of water weren't being wasted.

Dinner tonight at my favorite Malaysian spot in HK, Sabah. Located on Jaffe Road, right next door to Neptune - which you can view as a positive or a negative as you see fit. They've been there for at least 5 or 6 years and on the weekends there's almost always a long wait at dinner. But tonight, 7:30, no wait, seated right away. (By 8:30 they were full.) Disappointment #1 - they were out of fresh mango juice so no mango juice/coconut milk icy shake, had to substitute watermelon juice, which turned out to be darned good as well. Disappointment #2 - we ALWAYS order the beef rendang (and the roti canai) and this time out the beef was a little bit less tender, a little bit more dried out than usual. Good stuff - everytime we go, we order at least one new dish and this time went for the king prawns stir fried in sambal paste. The heat was turned down a bit for Hong Kong tastes, but still enough spice for me, the sauce was yummy and the prawns were perfectly cooked. One of the nice things about this place is if you stay away from the more expensive dishes like the prawn or the crab, it's easy to get out of here for under $100 a person (not counting alcohol). And we were very full and very satisfied.

New keyboard on the computer. Oddly enough, I chose Logitech again - because they had a wired keyboard (don't wanna deal with rechargeable batteries that won't charge and wireless receivers that don't receive) with full backlight illumination. Keyboard action and key spacing isn't bad and this should do just fine for me.

And now, going to bed early, after (ahem) not much sleep last night and a long day today. Got the Criterion blu ray of Last Year at Marienbad, which I've never seen, but I don't think tonight's the night for that. Also picked up the Criterion standard def of Louis Malle's wondrous My Dinner With Andre (and no kids, it's not Andre the Giant). I met Wallace Shawn once. He was out with Sigourney Weaver and he had this giant grin on his face that said, "Hey everybody, look at me! I'm out with Sigourney Weaver!" This was more than 20 years ago - who could blame him? (Even now she's not so bad.)

No, this post probably won't be as spicy as the title implies. Such is blog life.

Pleasure - my gf is back in Hong Kong after 10 days away. Aside from the fact that I missed her, my dogs apparently missed her as much or more, and jumped her before I had a chance to, but were soon banished back to the ground floor for awhile. Sorry, no further juicy details on that but I know you all have very fertile imaginations.

When I did get home and get to my computer, I discovered that my fancy schmancy Logitech Di Novo keyboard had died. It has a built-in battery and no way to open the thing up to get at the battery without basically destroying the keyboard. I put the keyboard in the charger, the charge light does not come on and the keyboard is just completely non-responsive (all the lights come on when you switch it on and after that, zilchoroonie-o). Checked that it was plugged in, cleaned the contacts, tried using it with a different computer, same negative results each time. Have written to Logitech support and needless to say when I go to buy a new keyboard tomorrow it's gonna be something a lot more sensibly priced.

Add to that - my computer was moving quite slowly, as Windows often does when you go days without a reboot. I shut down all the programs, or so I thought, and attempted to do a nice normal reboot, at which point it froze and I had to do a hard reboot. And when it came back, aside from still no keyboard, I discovered that NewsBin Pro (the program that I use for Usenet) had somehow managed to lose its config file - the file that keeps track of all the different groups I follow and status of things like most recent headers downloaded, etc. I searched and the best I could come up with was a back-up file for this from last December - not quite up to date on all the groups I'm following and telling me that it's been 188 days since I last caught up on headers. A lot of time will be spent getting this thing current again, though at least most of the work can proceed unattended. Sigh.

I'm online now (and able to type) thanks to my trusty MacBook. After Apple's new product announcements last week, my attention strayed to the new 13" MacBook Pro with the new longer life battery. I considered the notion of selling my 15" MacBook in order to get the new 13" one - smaller, lighter weight, longer lasting battery, etc. But as I'm sitting here staring at the 15" screen, I realize that 15" is already pretty small for my old eyes (especially because my monitor at work is 19" and my monitor at home is 24") and I don't think moving to a smaller screen will be helpful, especially in terms of my continuing to learn Adobe Lightroom to work with my photos. So I'll stick it out with this guy for awhile longer. Because aside from okay battery life, this MacBook is fabulous, so much better than the succession of Toshiba, Fujitsu, Dell and Lenovo notebooks I've been given at work over the years. It's just a joy to use and I can't wait to upgrade to Snow Leopard later this week. Yeah, I am dual-booting with Windows 7. With either OS, it's an elegant piece of work.

The thing is, it's hard for me to watch a movie all the way through right now because I still get these pains in my back and leg. So I have to get up, move around, sit somewhere else for a bit, have a smoke, whatever.

I thought I'd seen 8 1/2 in my distant past but it turns out I hadn't. I'd bought the Criterion DVD when it first came out and for whatever reason never got around to watching it until today. I feel like I could watch it again tomorrow.

The thing is, having watched two certified cinema masterpieces this week - Seventh Seal and this - I'm struck by how much we've lost that we don't seem to have an entire generation of directors like Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut, Kurosawa, Fassbinder et al working today. And it also occurs to me that someone who has grown up watching only Spiderman and Transformers and Will Ferrell movies (and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with any of those, they're all entertaining and have their place) has no conception of how much more movies are capable of being, or at least how they once were. Then again, I have little doubt that 90% of the movie-watching public probably wouldn't get these films, wouldn't sit through them all the way, wouldn't want to have to work so damned hard to understand what's being put in front of them, let alone dealing with black & white and subtitles.

There have been several notable films about making films - my personal favorite being Truffaut's Day For Night, which is a more conventional film than 8 1/2. 8 1/2 is even better for being so true. Because after the success of La Dolce Vita, Fellini got struck with what he termed "director's block" and had no idea what to do next.

And that's exactly the plot here. Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido, a famous director who is at a luxury spa to take "the cure" but has brought along the entire cast and crew of his next film. All day long they pelt him with questions but he has no answers because he has no idea what the film is going to be about, no idea what he wants to say, he cannot answer anyone, he cannot make even the most simple choices. His co-writer tells him the script is garbage. The producer has spent 80 million lire building a set for a launch pad for a rocket ship. Mix into all of this sequences from his childhood memories, his dreams, his fantasies. His wife and his mistress (Sandra Milo, who plays Guido's mistress ended up becoming Fellini's mistress for 17 years). The film seems very fragmented at the beginning but as it goes along, you begin to pick up on the flow, to understand what's going on and where it's going.

Add to this mix a radiant Claudia Cardinale playing, basically, herself, and who figuratively nails Guido to the wall, seeing through all his bullshit to the incomplete man within. Anouk Aimee as Guido's wife, watching angrily and helplessly as the love they once shared slips away. And a magnificent score by Nino Rota. And a brilliant monologue by Mastroianni at the end that puts all the final pieces together. And then the finale - a band made up of 4 clowns and a child plays circus music while everyone dances in a circle around Mastroianni.

This is actually not a heavy film, far from it, although it does require concentration. There's so much humor here, so many great characters and faces on the screen, often in the background and off on the sides while other action is taking place. I think this is a film you can watch 10 different times and walk away with 10 different versions of what's going on here.

Terry Gilliam, in a video introduction on the Criterion disc, says that some have accused Fellini of treating women like objects in this film. There is, after all, a famous fantasy sequence in which all the women in his life are living with him in his childhood home, all in love with him and none jealous of the others - until they rebel and he tries to tame them with a bullwhip but fails. Fellini says it himself in the film - he doesn't know what love is, as much as he's attracted to women and loves them he doesn't understand them, and this is confirmed in an extraordinarily revealing interview with Sandra Milo on the 2nd disc.

Fellini truly put his soul on screen with this film. At the end of the day, this film is about someone who has been a success as an artist, not as much of a success as a man, and a process of self-realization and perhaps some attempt at growth, or perhaps not.

Oh, and it's beyond me how this was ever turned into a Broadway musical (Nine) - which is coming to the screen this year directed by Rob Marshall and starring Daniel Day Lewis as Guido and a cast that includes Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman, Sophia Loren ... and Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas playing the role of La Saraghina? Not frigging possible. (Especially if you know what La Saraghina looks like in the original film - Edra Gale must have weighed close to 200 pounds.)

Anyway, in movies news this weekend, The Hangover remains at #1 in the US for the 2nd weekend in a row. Up continues in the #2 spot. The John Travolta/Denzel Washington/Tony Scott remake of Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 opened in the #3 spot.

Hey, could the Pixar guys be the Fellinis of our generation? Think about the dialogue-free opening sequences of Wall-E. And by all accounts, some of the opening stuff in Up is very personal and emotional as well.

Paul Thomas Anderson? Maybe. But too soon to tell.

Who else?

Before I go to bed (and finish watching 8-1/2), want to share this fascinating bit from the NY Times Sunday Magazine section, Data Center Overload by Tom Vanderbilt. Even though I work in corporate MIS, we don't even begin to approach the scale of the sites he writes about here. Curious about how you can get a search result from Google in 0.15 seconds when millions of others are searching at the same time?

At Tukwila — as at any big data center — the computing machinery is supported by what Manos calls the “back-of-the-house stuff”: the chiller towers, the miles of battery springs, the intricate networks of piping. There’s also what Manos calls “the big iron,” the 2.5-megawatt, diesel-powered Caterpillar generators clustered at one end of a cavernous space known as the wind tunnel, through which air rushes to cool the generators. “In reality, the cloud is giant buildings full of computers and diesel generators,” Manos says. “There’s not really anything white or fluffy about it.”

Tukwila is one of Microsoft’s smaller data centers (they number “more than 10 and fewer than 100,” Manos told me with deliberate vagueness). In 2006, the company, lured by cheap hydropower, tax incentives and a good fiber-optic network, built a 500,000-plus-square-foot data center in Quincy, Wash., a small town three hours from Tukwila known for its bean and spearmint fields. This summer, Microsoft will open a 700,000-plus-square-foot data center — one of the world’s largest — in Chicago. “We are about three to four times larger than when I joined the company” — in 2004 — “just in terms of data-center footprint,” Debra Chrapaty, corporate vice president of Global Foundation Services at Microsoft, told me when I met with her at Microsoft’s offices in Redmond, Wash.

......

Facebook’s numbers are staggering. More than 200 million users have uploaded more than 15 billion photos, making Facebook the world’s largest photo-sharing service. This expansion has required a corresponding infrastructure push, with an energetic search for financing. “We literally spend all our time figuring how to keep up with the growth,” Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s vice president of technical operations, told me in a company conference room in Palo Alto, Calif. “We basically buy space and power.” Facebook, he says, is too large to rent space in a managed “co-location facility,” yet not large enough to build its own data centers. “Five years ago, Facebook was a couple of servers under Mark’s desk in his dorm room,” Heiliger explained, referring to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder. “Then it moved to two sorts of hosting facilities; then it graduated to this next category, taking a data center from an R.E.I.T.” — real estate investment trust — “in the Bay Area and then basically continued to expand that. We now have a fleet of data centers.”

The article focuses on physical buildings in the U.S. and doesn't really begin to address how they're caching stuff internationally, nor the continual building out of the backbones that transmit the data. But what do you want in just 5 pages? There's plenty here to whet the appetite for more. (At least, if you're a geek like me.)

Actually I did watch one good movie in the past week, the Criterion Blu-Ray upgrade of Bergman's Seventh Seal. Magnificent. Maybe that's what to do on a Sunday afternoon, depress myself with more Bergman.

Sitting here thinking about lunch, no decision yet, so more blogging.

One of the things in my RSS is this feed from AppShopper.com that tells you about every new iPhone app added to the app store. There are on average about 500 adds per day, about 99.9% of them garbage. But here are a few things of potential interest.

First, this free app from the Hong Kong Tourism Board.



720 degrees? What is that? The temperature outside today? Is it meant to mean "twice around Hong Kong?" They couldn't use 360 because of the cable cars? I don't get it.

Actually, beyond the name, for a tourist this isn't a bad free application to load on your phone before coming here. It does contain info on about a dozen "must see" places, some videos, some "fast facts" and a link to the board's web site. But note that it says "Information is correct as of April 2009." And since then, they have not issued any updates to this.

I think they could extend the app by including listings of museums, cultural events, music and theater, and updating it monthly with a calendar of events.

This free Macau guide is an extension of the UOMacau.com web site.


As you can see, it does contain basic calendar info on events, as well as very limited listings of hotels, restaurants, shopping, casinos, etc. The maps are very basic (not from Google maps). The only complaint I can find about this app is that it would be useful for tourists if place names were also given in Chinese so you could show your destination to a taxi driver.


Hey, did you know Spinal Tap is back? Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer have released a new CD/DVD package and have been doing a tour in the US. And now they have this free app.


This is a great app with everything you could hope for. There is news (right now info that they're scheduled to be on the Tonight Show), streaming music and video, photos, discography, tour schedule and links, among other stuff. If you're a fan of Spinal Tap, definitely tap into this one. (Sorry.)


Last but not least is this application from onOne Software. The "pro" version costs $20 and the "lite" version costs $2.

This allows you to control your DSLR camera from your iPhone! From their web site:

• Remotely fire your Canon EOS DSLR camera
  with your iPhone or iPod Touch
• Remotely control the camera settings like
  shutter-speed, aperture, white-balance and more
• View images saved on the camera from your iPhone or iPod Touch
• Look through your camera's viewfinder remotely
• Great for remote-firing at weddings, sporting events, for kids, and for self-portraits

That's just a partial list of features. This is amazing stuff and I think well worth 20 bucks. Right now they only support Canon but are promising Nikon support in their next update, due in July, at which point I will definitely be buying this.

I can't seem to find any movie to watch that holds my attention, that I can make it through without hitting the pause button and taking a two hour break and then reluctantly finished off. Ask me the last movie I watched that I really enjoyed? I can't remember.

Yesterday I tried watching Neil Young's Journey Through the Past. Tried. Made it less than halfway. In between some really good performance footage, there is lots more nonsense that maybe made sense to Young if he was really stoned when editing this. Example - a great performance clip of CSNY cuts away halfway through to footage of some hippie with a black eye silently wandering the streets of downtown Vegas, then after a minute or two it cuts back to CSNY. How artistic! Yeesh.

Then I sat down with the director's cut of Woodstock, all 3 hours and 44 minutes of it, and after 20 minutes or so skipped ahead, watched The Who, then turned it off and had a smoke.

Finally last night I settled in and randomly chose My Name is Bruce. I knew the reviews were bad, but I'm a fan of Bruce Campbell, star of the Evil Dead trilogy, Bubba Ho-Tep and lots of grade Z crap. He stars in this and directs it and I was hoping it would be more than it turned out to be.

Here's the deal - there may be spoilers here but I don't think it matters much with this movie.

It starts off with two guys with guitars in a town called Gold Lick. They're singing a song about the Chinese god Guan Di. "Guan Di is his name. Guan You, Guan Me, Guan Di is his name." It turns out he's not just the Chinese god of war, he's also the god of bean curd. No, I'm not making this up. Some kids go out to the graveyard at night, a place where 100 Chinese workers were buried in a mine disaster 100 years ago. One kid steals a Chinese amulet stuck to the boarded-up door of the mineshaft, unleashing Guan Di, who goes around killing everyone in town except if they happen to have a bowl of bean curd in their hands.

Not only am I not making any of that up, but to that point the plot is almost identical to The Devil's Express, the first film I worked on after college.

Cut to Los Angeles, where Campbell is playing a cartoonized version of himself. He's acting in straight to video horror films, hanging out in strip bars using lines from his old movies to try to pick up hookers, living in a trailer. Some kid from Gold Lick who idolizes Campbell kidnaps him and brings him to town to fight the monster for them. Campbell thinks it's a birthday prank by his agent so plays along.

This could have been funnier but the jokes are flat and the delivery by most of the low budget cast doesn't help. A real director instead of Campbell also might have made this play a little bit better.

About the only reason I could find to watch this to the end was actress Grace Thorsen, who doesn't appear to have done much but has those classic Scandinavian cheek bones and humonguous breasts, which remain hidden throughout the film.

Now it's 1:30 in the afternoon. Got some writing to do, nothing at all that I feel like watching, an entire day to kill on my own. Feed and walk the dogs at 6, maybe go out for dinner after that, try to find someway to occupy my time this evening.

My gf comes back tomorrow.

(For those who haven't been paying attention, the reason I'm stuck close to home .... I'm still not 100% recovered from my illness yet; I'm about 90% and want to stay on the path and hit 110%. No point in going to a bar because I can't drink, I don't like the music, and not looking to cheat on my gf when she's away; don't feel like going to the movies alone; weather is hot and humid and crappy; what else am I gonna do with my time? Sit home, play with the dogs, read and watch movies - maybe I'll finally crank through my Adobe Light Room 2 book.)

Sitting here looking at this photo of Moon Bloodgood, the Dutch-Irish-Korean-Native American actress most recently seen in Terminator Salvation. And keep reminding myself that my gf comes back to HK in just 2 more days. Two days. Less than 60 hours. I can do this. Lots more pictures of her over here.

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Over in China, taobao.com, the Chinese version of eBay, has removed listings put up by a man selling the saliva of teenage girls as a health tonic.

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Are you a fan of the Turtles? Mark Volman & Howard Kaylan? Phlorescent Leech & Eddie?

The Turtles had some glorious pop hits in the 60s and then went into Bonzo Dog Band territory with their final album, Battle of the Bands, in which they impersonated a variety of fake bands. (Track down the non-album B-side Umbassa the Dragon to hear what I'm talking about.)

It's no wonder that Frank Zappa asked them to join the 2nd edition of the Mothers. But they couldn't use their real names for silly contractual reasons, so Zappa called them the Phlorescent Leech & Eddie, which they later shortened to Flo & Eddie.

After Zappa, they released two splendid pop albums that sold a total of 17 copies. So they went back into parody territory, developing a live act that allowed them to satirize whatever bands were currently topping the charts, throwing a few old Turtles songs into the mix. They also sang back-up for everyone from Marc Bolan to Bruce Springsteen.

They did a film in 2003 called My Dinner With Jimi, a sort of career history combined with humorous re-enactments of key events in their past, which will be released on DVD on June 23rd. Could be worth checking out.

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

On a more serious note, it seems that Facebook still is allowing Holocaust denial and other anti-semitic groups on their service, despite numerous complaints about their hosting these sorts of hate groups. Now advertisers are starting to speak up, saying they don't want their ads to appear anywhere near these pages - including Vodafone, Tesco, American Airlines and Domino Pizza.

That TechCrunch piece (the link in the previous paragraph) links to this op-ed piece in USA Today . Following the shooting in the Holocaust Museum in D.C.:

A burst of rage from a geriatric assassin hardly matches Adolf Hitler's systematic slaughter of 11 million people, most of them Jews. But it is a reminder of how pervasive hate remains in dark corners of America, where the elections of the first African-American president and the first black Republican Party chairman feed anger and paranoia on white supremacy websites.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based civil rights law firm, identified 926 hate groups in the USA in its most recent study this spring.The numbers have been steadily edging up since 2000, when it counted 602. The rise is driven, the group says, by the intense reaction in some quarters to an influx of illegal immigrants.

The hate groups include neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan organizations and several other categories. By the center's estimate, roughly 100,000 people participate on a single Internet forum for white supremacists called Stormfront.org.

... the Internet gives formerly isolated racists, whether individuals or small groups, a means to stoke one another's smoldering anger. With the ready availability of weapons, even a single person can do enormous harm.

Which is just one reason why, if I left HK, I wouldn't return to the U.S. I simply don't feel safe there.

And Facebook needs to take action against this sort of thing. They can't continue to just sit around with their thumbs up their asses doing nothing.

So, the Neil Young Archives set on Blu-Ray. US$350 list price. I got it from Amazon for $240. They've now upped the price to $280 there. From Warner/Reprise's web site:

So even though I was on the radio last night, walking around today no one recognized me or asked for my autograph. Darn.

HK's sub-Standard reports:

The number of confirmed cases of swine flu in Thailand nearly tripled to 46 yesterday, with most of the new infections detected among workers at a nightclub in the seaside resort of Pattaya.

"Nightclub" of course being a euphemism.

And let's hear it for HK Disneyland, which has taken the 2 week closing of HK's schools due to fears over swine flu as a marketing opportunity. So the health folks advise you to keep your kids home or at least away from crowds but Disney is offering school kids a special promotion of unlimited visits for the next two weeks for HK$250. In other words, Disney don't give a hoot in hell if your kids get sick just so long as they get their money first.

Continuing on the David Carradine story, Carradine's body has been examined by star forensic scientist Michael Baden, who says he has ruled out the possibility of suicide. A final determination on cause of death is still weeks away, if ever.

My latest order from Amazon has shown up a couple of days early. It includes the numbered, limited edition of the David Lynch/Danger Mouse/Sparklehorse book (and blank CD) for Dark Night of the Soul and the blu-ray edition of Neil Young's archives. Yes, I broke down and went for the Blu-Ray (which apparently has sold out its first pressing, at least at the wholesale level), due to early reviews discussing its supposedly unique, immersive experience as well as the notion that additional content would be made available in the future via Blu-Ray Live. Lemme tell ya, the box is fucking huge. I think I may need to add on a new room to the house to store it. Will start digging my way through it tonight, possibly a full review for a BC mag column in the near future. Can't figure this out - there's the book, some posters, 10 Blu-Ray discs, then this sort of big drawer that you pull out that has a small notepad and also the previously released Suger Mountain live DVD/CD set stuck in there. Just off the wall. Book is really nice.

... from F-Listed. It's a comment made by Anthony Bourdain about the Mario Batali/Gwyneth Paltrow series "Spain .... On the Road Again." (She's a vegetarian, btw.)

Why would you go to [there] with the one b*tch who refuses to eat ham?

Um, for you straight men out there, clicking on the above link will bring you to a photo of Bourdain that shows a bit more than you might care to see. Everyone else, click away.

Tonight I met Hong Kong's legendary DJ Uncle Ray. Ray Cordeiro, MBE, is in the Guinness Book of World Records as "The World's Most Durable DJ," having been on the air for almost 60 years and still going strong.

I met him at RTHK's studios to interview and photograph him for an upcoming feature piece in BC Magazine. With very little prompting, he regaled me with tales of the famous people he's met and interviewed, as well as the day he received his MBE from Queen Elizabeth. A great story teller, a gracious host and a true gentleman. I'd love to post some of the photos I took but of course BC gets first dibs.

And then ... he turned the tables on me. As his nightly four hour radio show commenced, he stuck a mike in front of me, handed me a set of headphones, and interviewed me live on air. I haven't been on the radio in more than 20 years, so to say I was nervous was an understatement, but as Marco Pierre White loves to say, he took me by the hand and led me down the path, even managing to make me sound almost interesting. He allowed me to make a request and, given the topics we'd been talking about and the nature of his show, I went with Penny Lane.

He recorded the entire segment to Mini Disc and gave it to me. I have an MD player but haven't tried to use it in years, not sure it still works. If anyone out there's got an MD player and can convert this to a more accessible format for me, I'd appreciate it!

Thanks Uncle Ray!

Now some Thai paper has published David Carradine autopsy photos. This is beyond bizarre and sick. A U.S. site has one of the photos - and I'll give you the link (courtesy of Asian Sweetheart) but I'll warn you what it is first. The face cannot be seen - the image is just waist to neck, with hands folded across the chest, and the chest sewn up following the procedure. Carradine is presumably identifiable because of the tattoos and rings. Now that you've been warned, if you want to see it, click here.

This same web site has a report that says French government agents have "confirmed" that at least two passengers on that downed Air France flight had links to Islamic terrorist groups. I don't see this in the Times yet.

Oh, and the same web site has an article titled Man calls a prostitute - his own daughter shows up. This happened in Israel. The guy runs home to his wife. "Honey, guess what happened on that business trip I just took! I called a hooker to come to my hotel and our own daughter shows up! Isn't that awful?" You guessed it, the wife is now seeking a divorce.

Oh, and there's also a mention of that new dance craze in Jamaica, "daggering," and how it's caused incidents of broken penises to triple.

Yes, this site is now in my RSS.

I always enjoy what Pico Iyer has to say, even if I don't always agree with him. This opinion piece in the NY Times is currently the #1 most read item online.

So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.

I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).

Look, I know my lifestyle is quite the opposite, if anything I've got way too much stuff, to the point where it's even beginning to overload me. (I'm planning on selling off or giving away a large percentage of my books, CDs and DVDs soon, in preparation for the possibility of having to move to a smaller place.) But there's no way I could ever embrace this sort of minimalist lifestyle.

Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.

He does briefly mention writing letters to friends and "going shopping for my sweetheart," yet to me the whole thing seems like a mostly solitary, lonely existance.

That column has received, as of now, 543 comments. A lot of them are in full agreement with him. (One criticizes him for living (part-time) in Kyoto for 21 years and not speaking Japanese!) And of course there's the "Sounds like an incredibly boring life. To each his own. Glad I live in NYC!" And "All the time in the world and he reads John le Carre?!" Well, to each his own.

Agree with it or not, it's an interesting piece to read and reflect upon. And worth scrolling through the comments as well.

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

I have to admit, there are times that Hong Kong really gets to me.

As many of you know, for most of the past 8 years, I've averaged two trips a month, sometimes more. Hong Kong is a really small place, and getting out on a regular basis helped refresh my attitude towards it. I'd be away for 5 or 7 or 10 days and come back and everything would seem new and fresh to me again.

But with budget cuts and my approaching final date at my current job, I haven't been away from HK for three months - not even a quickie to Shenzhen or Macau. Every day I drive the same roads to the same places to do the same things. Perhaps it's worse because I was lying in bed sick for 4 weeks, I don't know.

And my annoyances are exactly the opposite of Iyer's, that less is less. It's little things that irk me. The crappy choices in the depressing excuses for supermarkets here. That I gotta wait two weeks for stuff to show up from Amazon. That when a friend of mine went to New York he brought me back a bottle with 225 extra strength Tylenol that cost the same as a box of 20 Panadol here. The ridiculous real estate prices, the cheaply built closets masquerading as apartments, waiting months for movies to get here to go see them in tiny shoeboxes, even the commercials on TV that seem as if they were written and drawn by 12 year olds for 10 year olds, the debates over teaching intelligent design in school (and please, here is the ultimate argument against intelligent design: Donald Tsang exists). US$20 for a halfway decent hamburger and a coke? No good pizza, no good hot dogs (Gray's Papaya - "our hot dogs are tastier than filet mignon" - how I miss them), the saddest burritos ever tossed carelessly on a plate, the pastrami not even a pale imitation of the real thing, and is there any place here that does pierogis or blintzes?

Okay, it's made worse by the fact that my girlfriend's away for 10 days and I feel like there's fuck-all I can do while she's away. I mean, what's the point of hanging out in a bar if I'm not looking to pick up women and I can't even drink?

But come on, if I lived in New York or Tokyo or London or Paris, on any given night I'd have a choice of a hundred movies to go and see, a hundred clubs featuring bands that I've heard of or bands that I might actually want to discover instead of a glut of Filipino cover bands all playing "Sweet Home Alabama." Hmmm, what's on tap at HKTicketing? Air Supply. Placebo. Cats. Tweenies Live! Coming for 4 days in November: Abbamania. Shoot me now.

But mostly it's the uncertainty about my future. I haven't been out of work in ten years and don't even really know what I want to do next. So that has me feeling restless. Got an email from a co-worker/friend whose last day is this Friday - "sorry you have to stay here till November." I know exactly what he meant. Because hundreds of hardworking, formerly loyal people have come to despise this company. (Not saying I'm one of them! But it's the truth.)

And if I left here, where would I go? Because for everything I can put on a list of things I hate about Hong Kong, there's another list of the stuff I still love here that's probably equally long.

Ah, just write it off to boredom. I'm so tired by the end of the work day, it's all I can do to make it home. Where I'll eat dinner, watch a movie, and try to fill up several hours alone before it's time to go to bed and not sleep.

It'll pass. Summer will flow into autumn, the weather will be cooler, less humid, gorgeous sunny days (or what passes for them in HK nowadays). I'll sort my future out. I'll chill.

But tonight I'm in a grumpy mood. Maybe I just need to get in the car, put the top down, crank up the Springsteen, and drive all night.

This week's episodes of the Colbert Report were all taped live in Baghdad. And you can watch full episodes online at comedycentral.com - unlike that sucky Hulu, Comedy Central can be streamed from anywhere. "Operation Iraqi Stephen - Going Commando!"

Nice filmed piece of Colbert attempting to go through basic training and the first night's guest was General Odierno, who gives Colbert a military haircut at the behest of the Commander in Chief. Guess what? Obama can deliver a punchline!

Obama: General, I overheard your conversation about Stephen's hair.

Colbert: Wait a second, you overheard? Are your spy satellites really that good?

Obama: No, but my ears are really that big.

Found over at Pop Matters: It Might Get Loud, a new documentary film from Davis Guggenheim, director of An Inconvenient Truth.

What's it about? Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White sit down together and talk about how they developed their guitar styles and sounds.

Opens in the US on August 14th. Opens in Hong Kong? Probably fucking never. Guess the DVD should be out before the end of the year. Here's the trailer.

A lot less blog posts today, in case you didn't notice. Tired. Didn't sleep much last night, had a bad night as a matter of fact, and then the phone started going almost non-stop from early morning. Then pushed myself a bit harder than I should have to do more than I should have this afternoon. Thinking/hoping I will pass out early tonight.

So probably just this for today, unless sleep eludes me again. Omar Bongo, ruler of Gabon for 41 years, died in Spain on Monday. I don't know anything about this guy and I don't want to make fun of the recently deceased but for crissakes his name was Omar fucking Bongo and how cool a name is that?

Or am I just that tired?

Despite several attempts, not sleeping. Trying not to take a sleeping pill but may have to give in at this rate - it's after 4! So finished off reading the live-blogging on the new iPhone. No, this is not what kept me up, various things going somewhat off kilter physically tonight.

Anyway, here's the deal with the iPhone 3GS.

* Faster CPU
* 3 megapixel camera with autofocus
* video recording VGA quality, 30 fps
* voice control for phone, ipod functions
* digital compass
* increased battery life

Available in the US in 10 days, in Hong Kong sometime in July.

US pricing - 32 gig phone $299 with contract, 16 gig phone $199 with contract, iPhone 3G $99 with contract. That's for new contracts. If you already have a contract with AT&T, it's an extra $200 to upgrade!

Also worth noting, when they were talking about some of the new features available with iPhone OS 3.0, especially tethering and MMS, they mentioned that these are only supported by some of the carriers. Of course US bloggers are throwing a fit that AT&T isn't on that list. Guess what? I don't see 3 on the list either (but I do see Hutchison, hmmm).

New features in iPhone OS 3.0.

* Cut & paste
* Landscape mode available in more apps
* MMS
* Spotlight - search entire phone from one app
* Rent & purchase movies directly from phone
* Tethering via USB cable or bluetooth
* Safari much quicker
* Find My Phone - send a signal to the phone and it will beep repeatedly, even if in silent mode, till found. if stolen, ability to send a signal to the phone to wipe all contents.
* Developers can build apps that "talk" to 3rd party hardware
* Push text alerts, sound alerts, numerical badges
* True turn-by-turn GPS navigation (with software from TomTom)

Available June 17th - free for iPhone, $10 upgrade for iPod Touch

Yeah, guess I'm calling my corporate sales rep at 3 to put me on the list for one of the new ones. I know, most of the new stuff that's directly hardware related isn't really such a big deal to me - except the bump to 32 gigs will be significant for me and makes the upgrade worthwhile.

Following the liveblogging on Engadget, which is loading much quicker than Gizmodo. Have just read through all the Snow Leopard stuff. And it's struck me - how much is Microsoft gonna charge for Windows 7? $150 or so, right, for the "home" version? Even if you're upgrading from Vista or XP. And how much is Apple charging for Snow Leopard? $29. At which point an upgrade becomes a no-brainer. Available in September.

Actually feeling tired, eyes bleary, may just wait until morning to find out all the iPhone news.

Well, not really touch per se, but the Carradine saga continues, and there's a great wrap-up on what's known so far over at Movieline (the web site run by the people who ran Defamer when it was good). For example, the Thai police first politely refused any assistance by the FBI and have now kind of welcomed it. And Thai tabloid Thai Rath ran a forensic photo of Carradine's body on Saturday - face and dick blacked out but still this begs the question of how they got a hold of the picture. The story gets weirder as the conspiracy theories fly. Anyway click over to there to see the whole deal.

In tech, the day some of us have been waiting for, today is the keynote address at Apple's WWDC conference. People are expecting that they will announce the next generation iPhone, more info on iPhone OS 3.0, info on Apple OS Snow Leopard, and more? It kicks off at 1 AM Hong Kong time and of course both Engadget and Gizmodo should be live-blogging it.

My iPhone, now close to one year old, can't wait for the announcement - my battery is showing signs of exhaustion. I used to get two days of light usage on a single charge. Last night a full charge, today I left the phone at home and there were no calls, no SMSes, no playing games or internet surfing, but when I got home the battery was halfway down. Hmmmm. Sham Shui Po for a battery replacement kit? Third party external battery add-on? Guess the answer to that will depend on the announcement tonight - when will the new phone go on sale, worldwide availability, etc.

Newly reviewed book in the NY Times that will likely be of interest to some of my readers. The East, The West, And Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters by Richard Bernstein. (Yes, I know, one comma too many; that's how it is shown in the Times.) Some excerpts from Simon Winchester's review:

This idea — of the East as the center of a “harem culture” so enticingly different from what is parodied as our own Judeo-Calvinist dreariness — has captivated Westerners since the first imperialists planted their flags in the heat and dust of far away. In recent years, however, it is a notion that has spiraled frighteningly out of control. Nowadays there is precious little that passes for romance about the picture: the charming 19th-century image of Kipling’s temple girl at the old pagoda in Moulmein, the “neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land,” has been replaced by today’s obese American pederast trolling for catamites in the bars of Zamboanga, or of middle-aged sex tourists buying infants in Phnom Penh or on the beaches outside Colombo.

Precisely how we regressed from the delights so well described by writers like Gustave Flaubert a century and a half ago — times when, dare one say it, true love did occasionally blossom among the bougainvillea and the date palms — to the grim realities of today’s meat markets in Thailand and the Philippines is the main thrust of Mr. Bernstein’s properly high-minded book. That we get rather less than a fully considered answer — but a good deal of alluring and titillating description in its place — is the single shortcoming of a book that is based on a very good and eminently discussable idea.

......

And though white imperialists did plenty of frightful things, a good many of their accounts speak of their total enthrallment with what they found: the Taoist idea that intercourse, for example, permitted a man to absorb life-enhancing yin forces, undeniably offered a degree of justification for foreigners to have a great deal of fun. Steadily, from soldiers and district commissioners, this habit passed downstream and into the world of commerce: “Do anything you like out there, old boy,” was for decades the watchword of all the great British China trading companies, even when I lived in Hong Kong a decade ago. “Whatever you like — so long as you don’t bring it home.”

......

In recent years Eastern entrepreneurs, perhaps the tawdriest of all players in an increasingly tawdry business, have cashed in on the trade, creating for millions of foreign visitors the fancy that what is on sale in today’s bars and brothels is somehow mystical, magical and a traditional sacrament of the Orient. It isn’t: it is every bit as much about power and exploitation as if it took place on Eighth Avenue or north of King’s Cross Station. There is absolutely nothing Eastern, nothing magical and nothing exotic about it. It is all just quite desperately sad.

I suppose I'm up for a book that doesn't have a "fully considered answer" but does have "a good deal of alluring and titillating description..." Added to my wish list on Amazon.

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

Compensated dating has been in the news a lot lately. This has gone on for ages in Japan and I'm sure for a long time in Hong Kong as well, but is only just hitting the (English language) news. In particular, web sites advertising the services of high school girls willing to trade their services for money to buy the latest fashions.

Anyway, here's to local blog The Dark Side for not only reporting on the antics of one 17 year old girl named Kikimushr00m but also posting a link to a video that she put online, giving a blow job on a bus for $200. The Dark Side apparently doesn't realize that they themselves are now liable for prosecution under Hong Kong law for posting the link. And hey, aside from the fact that this is definitely hard core, the girl in question is only 17. So until they wise up, click on over to them to find the link to the video itself.

One side point of all this ... this is commercial sex by Asians for Asians. The web sites pimping this are all in Chinese, as far as I know. And that's the story all over Asia - commercial sex for foreigners is generally just the tip of the iceberg. It would be nice if some writer who is so quick to condemn westerners for partaking in this exploitation would shake a fist or two at the homegrown market as well for a change.

In case you haven't guessed, I'm bored. Sitting home alone. Apparently Sai Kung is too far away for anyone to visit me. So this weekend lots of naps, a bunch of movies. But all the movies I chose ... feh. In reverse order:

The International - Clive Owen, Naomi Watts and Armin Muehler-Stahl, directed by Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run). Ostensibly a thriller about a corrupt international bank, more of a snooze fest. Owen doesn't show anything he hasn't shown onscreen a dozen times before, Naomi Watts is given nothing to do but stand around and be blonde, only Muehler-Stahl manages to elevate the bland script in a quiet interrogation scene that beats the crap out of the shoot-out in the Guggenheim scene just minutes before.

The Bed Sitting Room - an infamous critical and box office failure from 1969, I thought it was time to give this another shot (but I was wrong). Basically they gave director Richard Lester a shitload of money and full artistic freedom. He had a script by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus (?) based on their play. And assembled a cast that includes Rita Tushingham, Ralph Richardson, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Harry Secombe, Spike Milligan, Michael Hordern, Roy Kinnear, Arthur Lowe and "introducing" Marty Feldman, and ended up with this piece of intermittently funny but generally incomprehensible nonsense, with no sense of pacing to the script or editing, no flow at all, and weirdly shot with lots of color filters (or weirdly post-processed), it looks as bad as it plays. Three (or maybe four) years after WWIII (which lasted for 2 minutes and 28 seconds), there are only 20 people left alive in England. After a while you're left thinking that there's 19 people too many - the 20th being Tushingham, who at least looks fabulous.

The Spirit - Frank Miller directs Samuel L. Jackson, Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson, Paz Vega and Gabriel Maecht in front of computer generated backgrounds in a total piece of nonsense. The three lead women look fabulous in their silly (but revealing) outfits but otherwise this is just awful across the board. Even if you like comics, even if you liked Sin City and Frank Miller, avoid at all costs.

Pride and Glory - Yawn. And more yawn. A tale of corrupt New York cops, starring Edward Norton, Colin Farrell, Jon Voight, directed by Gavin O'Connor, who has done nothing noteworthy yet manages to get "A Gavin O'Connor Film" credit at the beginning. There's nothing in this movie you haven't seen before. Nothing. Except for the final 30 minutes, which gets increasingly stupid. Let me ask you this - what the fuck happened to Edward Norton? A brilliant start with Primal Fear. Great in American History X and Fight Club. And then Death to Smoochy and all downhill after that.

Changeling - Clint Eastwood directs Angelina Jolie in a role that just screams "Academy Award! Academy Award!" And it's such a fabulous story (a true one at that) that you marvel that no one brought this to the screen sooner. A single mom returns home from work to find her son his missing. Five months later, the L.A. Police force returns her son to her. Except it's not her son. The corrupt police, embarassed by a string of bad publicity, refuse to admit their mistake and instead undertake a campaign of persecution against the woman. And then the truth comes out, as it always will. But the film goes on for far too long, attempts to cover too much ground and Eastwood's laconic style needed someone to come in and tighten this up after him - way too long at 2 hours and 20 minutes, and the film goes seriously wrong in its final hour. Eastwood was sort of a hired gun on this, brought in by Brian Grazer's Imagine (I suspect they brought him in due to some superficial similarities to Mystic River) rather than this being something he initiated himself, and I think it shows.

If you had to see any of these, Changeling is probably the least painful.

So another Sunday. This marks approximately 6 weeks since I became ill. I'm still not 100% but somewhere in the 85-90% range. I'm being very careful, not pushing myself too fast, and especially this means that I still have not gone out at night (aside from an occasional dinner in Sai Kung town). Of course I'm not drinking. Almost all of the back pain and leg pain is gone. I'm still not sleeping well but I've managed to eliminate the sleeping pills before I could risk getting addicted to them.

Most importantly, I've been sticking almost religiously to the "reduce inflammation" diet given to me by my doctor, which stresses "increase proteins at the expense of carbs." There's no more blood in my urine but I still feel that my liver hasn't quite gone down to normal size - though I realize this is probably entirely in my mind.

So almost no bread, no pasta, nothing deep fried or greasy, trying to avoid processed in favor of fresh as much as possible. "Lots of herbs and spices." Having what for me is an incredible amount of fruit and veg daily. Last night I went to Cru, in Sai Kung, for dinner. I couldn't resist going for the grilled king prawns (maybe not the best menu option but I haven't had prawns in weeks and didn't care for their fish choices and at least they dry grill it, put the sauce on the side, cover it with a nice mixture of herbs for the grilling). Got it with rice instead of mashed potato. And found myself really digging in with gusto to the roasted veg on the side - baby asparagus, baby corn, broccoli and cherry tomato. I hated asparagus as a kid - only ever had it soggy, out of cans - but the flavor of these lightly grilled stalks was intense and satisfying.

The biggest change has been cutting down the amount of chocolate and cookies I used to eat on a daily basis, going from "gluttony" to "just a smidge." I used to tear through a couple of candy bars and half a box of cookies (or biscuits, as some call them) on a daily basis. Probably not a big surprise but I have now discovered that if you're only going to have one Tim Tam a day instead of ten, you tend to really focus on it and savor each little bit a lot more than when you're gulping them down so fast you barely notice the taste. People always thought my belly was from beer but no! It's from soda and chocolate - soda's almost completely off my menu as well now.

I don't know how much weight I lost while I was ill. Two weeks with almost no food can do that to you. I do know that jeans I bought three months ago that were snug now fall to the floor if I don't use a belt. And I do know that people are telling me, "hey, you lost weight! you look great!"

Not that I recommend Spike's Getting So Sick You Can't Keep Any Food Down Diet as a diet plan.

Today's tough. My gf is not in Hong Kong. It's my maid's day off. Walking the dogs at noon, for the first time in weeks by myself, wore me out completely. Between the heat and the hills, it was all I could do to get back home, make myself a small lunch and then go back to sleep again for two hours. Gotta walk them again at 6, and then cook myself some sort of healthy dinner, and probably asleep early. I'm really looking forward to when my gf returns, I'm feeling better, and we can spend our Sundays taking the dogs swimming again.

Ah well, every day in every way I am getting blah blah blah blah blah.

Two articles from Sunday's NY Times that caught my attention.

The first, Persian Cooking Finds a Home in Los Angeles, talks about the Persian food available in "Tehrangeles." I don't expect to be going to L.A. again in this lifetime, but I still found this interesting for its description of what appears to be some truly mouthwatering dishes.

To balance out the sandwiches, Attari serves up pomegranate juice, crispy salads of cucumber and tomatoes, and cooling yogurt dips. One of the most pleasant aspects of Iranian cuisine are these cooling elements, particularly fresh herbs, which are served by the plateful to brighten up the earthier dishes like Attari’s Friday-only special: ab-goosht. It is a long-braised lamb stew, served in its separate components: chunks of tender meat, a turmeric-laced mash of yellow split peas and cooking vegetables, and a strained meaty broth. I mimicked my experienced tablemates who assembled ad hoc sandwiches of the meat and vegetables on pieces of flatbread and garnished them with the fresh greens. The brace of the herbs put the earthy stew in check — a most satisfying balance of lightness and depth.

It was also in Westwood that I picked up a new expression of affection. I was dining at Flame restaurant, with two new friends — Jewish sisters whose family fled Iran at the time of the revolution. At the far corner of the dining room, two men flanked the round, tiled oven known as a tanoor, using metal hooks to pull soft, blistered flatbreads from its fiery interior. We had just received a platter of kebabs — kebob barg, made of strips of beef tenderloin; koobideh, of spiced ground beef; and another composed of the tiny, yogurt-marinated joints of Cornish game hen. One sister tipped the platter to gather the meat juices, and explained that to declare adoration for someone, one can say, in Farsi, “You are the bread beneath my kebab.” After cleaning my plate with some of the still-warm flatbread, I got a visceral grasp of its meaning.

To the best of my knowledge, this is something that you can't find in Hong Kong. Of course for kebabs we have the deservedly much-loved 6 or 7 branches of Ebeneezer's (which I believe is Pakistani or Bengladeshi owned and managed; they also hold the Subway franchise for our little SAR). If there was an Ebenezeer's near my office, I'd probably get lunch from there at least twice a week - take-away sandwich options in Quarry Bay are limited to Pret, Olivers, the new-ish upscale Pumpernickel and 7-11.

Then there's Beirut, attempting to represent Lebanese food, and Habibi, which is ostensibly Egyptian. Hmmm, Open Rice shows a place called Assaf Lebanese Cuisine on Lyndhurst Terrace. Any good? The photos don't look like it's worth making a special trip. Searches on "Persia" and "Iran" yield no results. Ditto on Food Easy.

(A search on "kebab" on Food Easy - Kori Kebab, an Indian place in Sai Kung that closed almost a year ago, cuisine is listed as Indonesian. Way to go Food Easy!)(To be fair, Kori Kebab is still listed on Open Rice too, but at least they correctly tag it as Indian.)

Then I read this article - Eat, Drink, Think, Change - about the upcoming documentary film Food, Inc., which opens with author Michael Pollan saying, "The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than the previous 10,000."

“Food, Inc.” begins with images of a bright, bulging American supermarket, and then moves to the jammed chicken houses, grim meat-cutting rooms and chemical-laced cornfields where much of the American diet comes from. Along the way Mr. Kenner attempts to expose the hidden costs of a system in which fast-food hamburgers cost $1 and soda is cheaper than milk.

Viewers who haven’t thought much about how all that food in the grocery store got to be there will likely find it hard to toss a few packages of pork chops and some Froot Loops in the cart and call it a day. Some viewers will undoubtedly look away during the meat cutting and processing scenes. For parents the eye-averting moment will come during repeated slow-motion scenes of a 2-year-old’s last vacation. His mother, now a food-safety advocate, explains in a tearful voice-over the gruesome details of his death after he ate hamburger tainted with E. coli.

While the film may be specifically about the food chain in the US, I don't imagine that things are all that different anywhere else in the world.

Reuters reports that the Carradine family has asked the FBI to step in and investigate the death of David Carradine. Conflicting and often contradictory reports coming out of Thailand include some reports saying that when his body was found, his hands were tied behind his back. And while the Thai police have ruled this a suicide in advance of the local coroner's report, the Carradine family has arranged for their own autopsy once the body is returned to the US. This story will continue for awhile.

David Carradine. Member of a great acting family - perhaps not as revered as his father, but certainly his share of memorable roles. Woody Guthrie in Bound for Glory. Frankenstein in Death Race 2000. Bill in Kill Bill. Drunk in Mean Streets. And of course Caine in Kung Fu. Even in his less-than-glory days, the guy was always in demand at some level and worked non-stop. In 2009 alone, he's in no fewer than 9 movies that are either complete or currently in post-production.

And now, he'll forever be remembered as the dude who accidentally hung himself in a closet in Thailand while jerking off.

Then again, props to him for being 72 and still getting it up (even if it apparently took a bit of doing and some accessories) and having some interest in getting off?

Just wanted to mention, over at Singapore's BigOZine Recordings of Indeterminate Origin section, stuff available for free downloading right now includes a Tim Buckley tribute concert from 1991 that includes Jeff Buckley, Eric Andersen, Richard Hell, Robert Quine and Syd Straw. There's also a Mahavishnu Orchestra remastered concert boot from '72. And the Clash live in Hong Kong in 1982. Plus some Springsteen, Eartha Kitt, Nick Cave, Emmylou Harris, Yes and Dylan, among others. Check it out!

Sam Butera died in Las Vegas, aged 81. The tenor sax player, band leader and arranger is best remembered as the leader of The Witnesses, the band that backed Louis Prima and Keely Smith for close to 20 years, arranging and playing on all of Prima's signature tunes including Just a Gigolo and That Old Black Magic. Prima died in 1978 and Butera went on to form Sam Butera and The Wildest, a feature act in Vegas casino lounges for 30 years. Butera straddled the worlds of big band, r&b and lounge music. As the wikipedia entry on Louis Prima notes, the onstage interplay between Prima and Butera would have a strong influence on Bruce Springsteen/Clarence Clemons onstage.

When I went to Vegas for the first time and saw that Butera was playing, I made it a point to go see him, and also made it a point after the set to meet him. And of course he was exceedingly gracious and nice.

So here's Sam Butera and the Wildest doing what they do best:



And here's Butera with Prima and Smith doing Just a Gigolo:

Sitting here feeling good because my mom called to tell me that she loved the flowers I sent but went absolutely crazy over the teddy bear (she collects them). I told her that I knew she'd know it was flowers in the box, glad I could surprise her with something extra.

Of course June 4th isn't just my mom's birthday, it's also the 20th anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square, as noted here and in thousands of other places. And it seems that the turnout for the candlelight vigil in Victoria Park tonight tied the record set by the first vigil back in 1990, with at least 150,000 people showing up. Donald Tsang speaks for all Hong Kong. It. Is. To. Laugh. I wonder - maybe Tsang is a closet advocacy for democracy after all and he knew if he said something really stupid and offensive, it would result in a record turnout like this?

Also in the news, I see that David Carradine was found dead in a hotel room in Bangkok, aged 72. The star of the Kung Fu TV series, Death Race 2000 and Tarantino's Kill Bill was in Thailand working on a film. Thai police say that a hotel maid told them that she found him on a chair in a closet with a rope around his neck and "other parts of his body."

Blues great Koko Taylor died this week as well, aged 80. She had a million-selling single back in 1965 with Wang Dang Doodle, a song that she thought was silly, but it proved the foundation for a 40 year career. I saw her live once at the Bottom Line in New York City in the 70s. Can't recall who she was opening for, but I confess that I had no idea who she was before she came out on stage. With that voice and stage presence, I've been a fan ever since. Here she is back in 1967 singing Wang Dang Doodle, with the great Little Walter blowing the harp.


Last but not least for tonight, the latest issue of BC Magazine is out and includes the return of my column, this one a tribute to the Criterion Collection.

Having a blog allows me to address something done to my piece by one of the editors there. Referring to the great French film Wages of Fear, here is the text as published:

Yeah, yeah, we’ve all seen Speed – the French film is a cartoon next to the amped-up sound effects and Dennis Hopper’s scene-chewing villainy.

Now here's my original text:

Yeah, yeah, you’ve seen Speed, we’ve all seen Speed – it’s a cartoon
next to this, with the amped-up sound effects and Dennis Hopper’s
scene chewing villainy.

Sometimes I'm given a chance to review the edited copy before it goes to the printers but this time, illness and all, I couldn't deal with it. And got left with something that makes no sense.

Something else that makes no sense but seems kinda funny - Cheap Trick's latest album will be released in a US$30 limited edition version - on 8 track cartridge!

Chen Guang was a 17 year old soldier in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Now he is an artist and is painting his memories from 20 years ago. He still lives in China - wonder how long he will be allowed to do this.

Image hot-linked from here (because Blogger's acting a bit weird today)



Image hot-linked from here

I don't have anything original to say about June 4, 1989, but don't want to let the anniversary of this important and tragic date in history pass without a mention.

China is working extra hard this year to blot it out, blocking Twitter and other mainstream web sites. Both Hong Kong and Macau have refused entry to Tiananmen survivors and activists. And of course our own embarrassment of a "Chief Executive" has suggested that subsequent economic progress in China means that the government sanctioned murder of untold hundreds or thousands makes it all okay, and that as our unelected leader, he speaks for all of us.

If there's anything that history has taught us, it's that events like this don't go away, won't go away, won't get pushed into the shadows. 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, people are going to remember and the outrage will remain. 100 years from now China may be a more enlightened society and June 4th may well be a public holiday, a day in which the country reflects on the sacrifices made by so many.

It's not whether or not I was bad in previous lives. I've been bad enough in this life alone to screw up my karma for at least my next 10 incarnations. But fate doesn't want to wait for me to die and come back as a dung beetle. That would be too simple.

I know, I know. I've just walked through the Valley of Serious Illness and come out the other side and I should be happy with that. And I am. But even so.

1 - I normally sleep on my right side. After screwing up my back from lying in bed in weird positions when I was ill, I had to sleep on my left side or on my back. But now that my back pain is gone, last night I thought I'd try sleeping on my right side again. It didn't take more than 3 minutes for me to be in excruciating pain. And me, I'm so tired and in so much pain, it never even occurred to me to reach for my pain killers until the morning.

(1A - I've sprained my right ankle twice in the past 14 years and it's noticeably weaker than the left. Especially after my foot swelled up and then the swelling went down, there's enough pain there that I'm limping. Yes, I know, soon another trip to the doctor and to the x-ray lab to find out what's going on.)

2 - My maid and my gf are both Filipinos. They got on like sisters when my gf first moved in. But at some point while I was sick, for reasons unknown to me, they stopped talking to each other. Do you know what it's like to live in a house with 2 people who aren't talking to each other? And apparently I'm not allowed to acknowledge it.

Example: Tonight, driving home from work, for 45 minutes, I had to listen to my gf complain about the situation with my maid and how she's fed up. How she got some SMS from the maid today that ruined her entire day - asking if she can empty a bucket that's been left on the roof and is now filled with rain water. Apparently this question was asked simply to irritate her. "Well," says I, "it's your problem because you let it get to you, and by letting it get to you, you lose and she wins."

So she says she's finally going to confront her as soon as we get home. I told her great, nice that you're gonna stand up for yourself. I tried to coach her in how to handle the situation, to be unemotional, constructive, etc. "But what if she yells?" she asks me. "If she yells, you stay calm, don't yell back. Then you'll win. If you yell back, you lose."

So we get home, I go upstairs to leave the two alone to talk. After 5 minutes, my gf heads up stairs. "She's busy now, I'll talk to her later." After about an hour I say, "Why don't you go downstairs and talk to her now?" "I've changed my mind, I'm not going to do it." WTF?

Apparently I don't understand the Filipino style. If two people aren't talking, whoever talks first is the loser. Please don't take this the wrong way, I'm not trying to be purposely racist here, but if that's the Filipino style, no wonder the country's in such a freaking mess.

Then she refused to come downstairs and have dinner with me. She won't budge from the bed. She turned out the lights and went to sleep at 8:30 and that's probably it for her for tonight.

Unfortunately, she's headed back to the Philippines for 10 days on Friday. So this is going to be hanging over everyone's head for two weeks? Splendid.

3 - The fact is, my gf is a much better cook than my maid. She understands spices better and is addicted to the Asian Food Channel, so she's more willing to experiment in the kitchen.

Perhaps this is the reason for the two not talking? My praising my gf's cooking more, my maid getting jealous? The ultimate was just last Saturday, when my maid decided to take some recipe from a cookbook that was minced pork, diced up vegetables, soy sauce and corn starch - and not a single drop of salt let alone any other spice.

Sometimes my maid trys to expand her cooking horizons. And last night it worked, she made this baked pork chop with tomatoes and onions and rice and it was quite tasty.

But more often, nights end up like tonight. She got two halibut steaks. She deep fried them. (And yes, I would have thought she'd have known that's a no-no for me right now.) Then she covered the whole thing in some bizarro cream of corn sauce. I ate it - because that's what was on the table and I hate seeing food go to waste - and confined my comments afterwards to, "Please don't rush to make this again."

#s 4 through 17 will probably have to wait for another time. I think I've gone on long enough. And yeah, I know, my life ain't all that tough compared to 90% of the people in the world. And all this will pass. But still, sometimes, it gets to me, just a little.

My mother is 88 years old tomorrow. Rocket 88! She lives alone. She still owns a car and drives. Actually, her mother and her mother's six sisters all lived into their 80s and some into their 90s. Am I facing similar longevity? If I'd known, I would have taken much better care of myself all these years.

I'm kicking myself, but I've broken down and ordered the Blu-Ray version of Neil Young's Archives. Several rave reviews and the publicity that Young plans to utilize Blu-Ray Live to add additional downloadable content to the set pushed me over the edge. And I figured, I was sick for so long, now I'm better, I should buy myself a toy, and this seems about as good as any.

While I was at it, I also ordered next week's reissue of Woodstock, remastered, tons of new bonus material including previously unreleased performances. And Amazon (which had a 3 month exclusive on the Van Morrison Astral Weeks Live DVD)(which I didn't get) has a disc of Amazon-only bonus material, even more live performances.

Speaking of older music, last week I picked up the new Rhino DVD release of Fillmore: The Last Days. Santana, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver, Airplane, Elvin Bishop, etc. Couldn't resist. The music performances are mostly not that great, and just one or two songs from most of the bands. But as a look into Bill Graham's psyche, the film is fascinating. I loved Graham when I was growing up. I loved going to the Fillmore East, the fabulous shows he put on, cheap tickets, and I'd often see him running around attending to tiny details. So it's a good view if you care about Graham, otherwise give it a pass.

Also watched the last Leno Tonight show, which didn't have the gravitas of Carson's farewell, for many obvious reasons. But it was a nice touch at the end when he filled the stage with the 60+ kids born to crew members since the show first went on the air.

Conan's first Tonight show, Monday night, was a rocky start. The first half hour was comedy bits that were hit and miss. 8 minutes with Will Ferrell, one song from Pearl Jam, and it was over. Critics have been mostly harsh in their assessment.

But critics also thought that Conan wouldn't last through his first year at Late Night and I expect that it will take several months for him to settle into the new timeslot, but that he's smart enough that he'll work it out, as long as the network decides to stick with him.

Oh, one of the comedy bits used a song I hadn't heard in a long time, Cheap Trick's Surrender. Lyrically, it had nothing to do with the bit, but the guitar stuff worked. I checked the lyrics afterwards as a reminder, typical Rick Nielsen stuff, worth repeating here:

Mother told me, yes, she told me I'd meet girls like you.
She also told me, "Stay away, you'll never know what you'll catch."
Just the other day I heard a soldier falling off
Some Indonesian junk that's going round.

Mommy's alright, Daddy's alright, they just seem a little weird.
Surrender, surrender, but don't give yourself away.

Father says, "Your mother's right, she's really up on things."
"Before we married, Mommy served in the WACS in the Philippines."
Now, I had heard the WACS recruited old maids for the war.
But mommy isn't one of those, I've known her all these years.

Mommy's alright, Daddy's alright, they just seem a little weird.
Surrender, surrender, but don't give yourself away.

Whatever happened to all this season's losers of the year?
Ev'ry time I got to thinking, where'd they disappear?
When I woke up, Mom and Dad are rolling on the couch.
Rolling numbers, rock and rolling, got my Kiss records out.

Mommy's alright, Daddy's alright, they just seem a little weird.
Surrender, surrender, but don't give yourself away.

Away.
Away.

Saturday night was a rough night, not that much sleep. And Sunday most of the day not much better - was planning to go out for dinner but in the end decided I wasn't up to it. Oddly enough, right about now I'm feeling pretty okay, which means trying to sleep soon I guess.

Pixar has now gone 10 for 10. Up, their 10th film, wins the weekend in the US with a projected 68 million dollar gross. Checking web sites for UA Cinemas and Broadway Circuit, there isn't even an announced opening date for HK yet. WTF?

Here are some of the films that Broadway Circuit's web site lists as coming soon to HK:

Taken - opens in HK July 23; US opening date January 30th
The Brothers Bloom - opens in HK July 2nd; US opening date Sept 27, 2008
Duplicity - opens in HK June 11; US opening date March 20th

What do we get in a reasonable period of time? Night at the Museum 2. Angels and Demons. Transformers 2. Terminator Salvation.

It is to laugh.