A Centenary Worth Celebrating

 

There is a lot of bally hoo  at the moment about the 100th anniversary of a certain organisation, but we won't talk about that.  Meanshile there is a local centenary which many Hongkongers may perhaps consider more worthy of celebration.

Three times in my life I have found stray animals and handed them in to the SPCA - a rabbit roaming in, of all places, the Academy of Performing Arts garden; a puppy unable to escape from a concrete drainage channel in Jardine's Lookout; and a desperately sick kitten, its eyes two pools of pus, dumped in an alley in Kowloon Tong.  Without the SPCA, life for these, and many thousands more lost, sick and abandoned animals every year, would be immeasurably worse.  Their valuable work costs money - why not become a member and give them your support?

The Lesser of Two Goods

Tomorrow's District Council elections are being framed in some quarters as a gargantuan battle between the resurgent forces of democracy and the mighty Beijing United Front electoral machine, a chance to strike a blow against the powerful empire that is crushing Hong Kong.  Well, guess what, most District Council work is pretty humdrum stuff, more concerned with where rubbish bins and bus stops should be located than with the higher scheme of things.  Nevertheless, after months of violent protest the election does present a rare opportunity to raise one's voice peacefully against the DAB juggernaut and to demonstrate the Hong Kong government's near-total lack of support (as an aside, there is no silent majority supporting this clueless government - in fact, any politician anywhere who claims the backing of a silent majority usually lacks much real support).

What may surprise my regular readers is that I have decided, after much reflection, not to vote for the candidate of the democracy movement in my district.  Our constituency is largely rural, with a mix of traditional villages and upmarket estates, and has been represented for two terms now by a local man who is popular in the area.  As an indigenous villager, he has some connections with the Heung Yee Kuk, but his political stance is genuinely independent.  More importantly, he has done a good job for the district - I base this not just on his glossy election brochure listing the many projects he has been involvesd in (as Mary Melville's  comments here point out, some candidates will claim credit for just about anything that happens in their district, or even in neighbouring districts), but on experience.  My wife worked with him on a successful campaign against an unsuitable proposed development in the district, and has observed at first hand the effort he puts in.

Nothing against the "official" democracy candidate, who comes with the backing of various well-known pro-democracy figures, but he has no track record here (and his election leaflet misspells the constituency name; not a great confidence-booster!)  And ultimately, why do we want a more democratic system?  Not to make great gestures with our votes, but to select candidates who are dedicated to their job, care about their constituency, and who listen to and are responsive to their voters' needs and wishes.  We have that already in our constituency, which is why the incumbent will be getting my vote again.  Tell me if I'm wrong.

And by the way, don't worry if your ballot paper has a corner snipped off - it's not damaged, just a new feature to help the blind.

Is it just me, or...?

Am I the only one who wants the kid to take that one extra step into oblivion whenever I see this TV commercial for baby milk?  I guess I'm just a nasty person.

Passport Blues

While Brexidiots have been celebrating the return of the supposedly iconic blue British passport, two ironic facts have largely escaped their attention:

• Contrary to their whines about supposed EU petty bureaucracy, there was never anything in EU regulations compelling Britain to adopt the EU burgundy colour.
• Research shows that areas where fewer people hold passports were more likely to vote Leave.  So we are being forced out of Europe by ignorant people who have never visited mainland Europe and presumably know little about it.  I know those in the Leave camp always complain about Remainers talking about them as if they were stupid, but frankly this kind of thing just proves the point.

Personally I don't give a damn what colour cover my passport has, but I do care deeply that these idiots are depriving me of my right to use it to live, work and travel freely across 27 countries in Europe.

NIL RETURN

I clicked on this link this morning:

and got this:

So presumably we can assume that nothing good happened this year.  Which fits in pretty well with my own experience, marked by deaths and disease among my immediatecircle, against the wider background of Britain slumping ever deeper into the slimy sinkhole of Brexit while Donald Trump does his best to ignite either World War 3 or environmental collapse, whichever comes first.  Not that I can do much to stop any of this stuff – indeed anyone who posts on any online forum probably feels like this at times:

Nevertheless, we can hope. Here's a toast to all my loyal readers (however few in number):

 By the way, the link was repaired later - and there are plenty of similar lists online.  So perhaps it's not all doom and gloom.


[Cartoon borrowed from Private Eye.]

On a wonderful day like today

... and one of the worst minds installed in the White House.

Hard to believe that Trump is of the same generation as me.  He seems to have bypassed that formative experience loosely known as "the Sixties" entirely.

Heaven help us all!

It's About Time

In a nice bit of synchronicity, I decided to read a couple of pages of the book I'm currently working through - Thief of Time by Terry Practchett - this morning after being up half of the night watching Germany win the World Cup, when within a few sentences I came upon this:

"Lu-Tze had long considered that everything happens for a reason, except possibly football."

Go Google Yourself

There are a lot of things I like about the Chrome browser, but I've been wondering why it doesn't allow me to use Realdownloader to download videos from YouTube.  Now I find that Google has disabled this, and any other extension not in their Chrome Web Store.  They won't allow me to re-enable it unless it's added to the Web Store, which requires the developer to apply and pay a fee (not a lot, but multiply it by the number of browser extensions out there...)

It is obvious from the postings on the Chrome forum that I am far from the only user annoyed by this policy.  If Google want to flag extensions as potentially dangerous to alert the user, that's fine.  But what gives them the right to decide what software the user can add to his system, and to irretrievably disable anything they don't like?  Oh well, back to Firefox.  Realdownloader works fine with that.

New Love, New Hate

I love my new toy - which I took out for a maiden voyage yesterday - but it has inadvertently given me something else to hate - the braindead pedestrians who wander aimlessly along the cycle track instead of using the adjacent footpath. Grrrr!

Advice on Smartphones for those with Poor Eyesight?

I've never tried asking for advice here before, and I don't even know how many people actually read this, but does anyone have any idea which smartphone is best for someone with poor eyesight?  I have vision problems and even after 2 operations on my eyes and with glasses, small print and fine detail remain a problem.  At home I use a 27-inch computer monitor; when out and about I've been using an unsmart Nokia phone for years for voice calls, but I rarely use SMS as the screen is too small for comfort.

Now my phone is showing signs of dying on me, plus I really need to be able to access my email when I'm out for meetings or whatever; it would also be nice to use WhatsApp.  I don't care so much about photographic capability, as I generally carry a neat little Canon S100 everywhere with me.  Music capability is not a deal-breaker either.

So, time for a smartphone (several generations behind everyone else!), but which one?  After a bit of Googling, which mostly uncovered recommendations for already-obsolete models (isn't it time everything on the Internet carried a "use by" date?), I have reached a few conclusions:

• A big screen should help, but is not always better if the resolution is not good enough.  Contrast and brightness are important, not just size (and other factors, too).
• Most phones made specifically for those with poor eyesight appear to assume that the user is a senile centenarian who's deadly afraid of technology.  I'm not.
• Both Apple and Android operating systems offer some features or apps which can help (e.g. by magnifying text or reading it aloud), as does Windows Phone, but none has a definitive edge over the others in this area.

Does anyone have any comments on the following, which look like the best possibilities?

• Samsung Galaxy Note 3 or Galaxy Mega 6.3
• HTC One Max
• Nokia Lumia 1520
• Sony Xperia Z Ultra
• Huawei Ascend Mate
• LG G Flex

Experiences and alternatives welcome.  Incidentally, I have big hands so a relatively large phone is not a problem - in fact, smaller phones tend to be too fiddly for my fingers.

By the way, am I the only one who wonders why, in a world where the proportion of elderly people is steadily increasing, with the inevitable deterioration of visual functioning that comes with age, we are nevertheless being expected to read ever smaller print?  (Shrinking screens, bank terms and conditions printed in 6-point type - not to mention the teenage website designers, probably descended from Douglas Adams' telephone sanitisers, who think that pink on purple is a really cool colour combination.) 

Odd One Out

So, goodbye Lou Reed.  According to Brian Eno, not many people bought the Velvet Underground & Nico album first time around, but everyone who did went out and started a band.  Sorry Brian, I guess I'm the exception that proves the rule.  But I've been a Lou fan ever since, and apart from seeing him live in the 1970s, I was lucky enough to catch the Velvets reunion tour in 1993.  Though my original copy of the first album is long gone, I also own more Velvets box sets (vinyl and CD) than I have space for.

Lou was notoriously tough on journalists, who commonly asked him stupid questions and got things wrong (not that he was above feeding them contradictory stories for the hell of it), so he would not have been too surprised to see the BBC report that he was survived by his second wife  - in fact Laurie Anderson was his third, not counting the mysterious Rachel.


There are millions of musicians, but only a handful change the direction of music: Lou was one.  And even Susan Boyle recorded one of his songs...

First Adventures in Photography

Scanning some very ancient black & white negatives recently (possibly 50 years old), I was reminded of the camera that produced them.  I have taken pictures with my Dad's Brownie 127 and my grandfather's old Brownie box camera, but the first camera I remember owning for myself in my teens was this little beauty:

The specification was somewhat sparse: fixed aperture, no focus control, no exposure control, certainly no autowind or zoom.  A viewfinder (of sorts) took the form of a foldout metal frame that offered all the accuracy of a Hong Kong government budget forecast.  The lens, though proudly proclaiming itself "bloomed" (apparently this means coated so as to increase its light transmitting power) gave all the fine resolution of a transparent shirt button.

However, this simple piece of equipment did have several advantages:

• It was dirt cheap (from Woolworths, then still a mighty name in retailing).
• It took 16 half-frame shots on 127 film, making it economical on film as well.
• Very little could go wrong with it (though with advancing age mine began to leak light around the edges and needed to be sealed with black tape after changing each film).

Thinking about it for the first time in decades, I Googled "Woolworths camera" and with only a few minutes of research was amazed to find not only these images, but the original instruction sheets (which I don't remember ever possessing, not that they were really needed) and the history of the camera - apparently it dates back to the 1930s, though mine appear to have been the 1950s "updated" model.

And the results: about as good as you would expect, and sometimes better - this is one of the more acceptable examples (not too bad considering it's from a very old negative):

By the way, does anyone have any idea where this is?  I wasn't systematic about keeping photographic records back then, and many of my old shots are a total mystery now.  I only know it's in the UK somewhere.

Anyway, after a couple of years I graduated to a more modern Instamatic and started getting better pictures, though it was still a few more years before I got my first SLR (once I started working and could afford it).  Now we have cameras that do almost everything for you, but don't necessarily give better pictures - just more accurately exposed and sharper lousy ones!

Longer still and longer

I was out for about 4 or 5 hours this afternoon.  I returned to find no fewer than 34 email messages in my Junk Mail folder, every single one of them offering to enhance what the British tabloid press would refer to as my "manhood".  If I responded to all of them it would probably grow long enough to "put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes".

The Mrs Rochester in Bob Dylan's Attic

In days gone by, it was common for the mad or retarded (a non-PC word these days) to be hidden away in shame, out of sight of the world.  In the recent BBC series Upstairs Downstairs, the main protagonist Sir Hallam Holland discovers that his Down's Syndrome sister Pamela is not dead, as he's been led to believe, but has been secretly shut away in an asylum.  And of course there is the famous case in Jane Eyre of the mad Mrs Rochester, detested by her husband and locked up under guard in his attic.

The Dylan album from 1973 (called A Fool Such As I in some releases) has always seemed like the Mrs Rochester in Bob Dylan's attic.  Compiled without input from Bob after he left Columbia for Asylum (!) Records (only to return later with full artistic control), it is the only one of his studio albums not currently available on CD, though it was briefly released in that format in Holland many years ago.  Nor is it available on iTunes, I believe, though it made a brief appearance there as part of a larger Dylan collection.  In fact it was until recently only available on cassette (probably clearing old stocks), though Amazon UK now sells a nicely packaged but overpriced CD version of dubious legality [click on the picture for details] which also includes bonus tracks from the Bob Dylan/Johnny Cash sessions (surely a candidate for a future Bootleg Series release).  Indeed, so neglected is the album that Columbia even reused its title for a later hits collection in 2007.

Yet just as Hallam Holland brings his sister back into the family circle, and Jean Rhys gives Bertha Mason (Mrs Rochester) a voice of her own in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, perhaps now is the perfect time to bring this abandoned child out of the attic and take another look at it.  After all, we are currently in the middle of a media blitz for the forthcoming Bootleg Series number 10, Another Self Portrait.  This consists largely of out-takes from the Self Portrait and New Morning sessions - the exact same sources as Dylan.  The simple fact is, while it is far from Dylan at his best, it has (like Self Portrait, which is now undergoing critical reappraisal) never been as bad as its reputation.  Take it for what it is - Dylan running casually through some old folk songs and a few contemporary songs he likes by other writers - and it becomes a pleasant if unremarkable footnote to his more celebrated albums.

Now there are rumours - via an apparently premature story later withdrawn - of a career-spanning box set of all Dylan's albums (some newly remastered) plus a double CD of other previously released material, much of it currently unavailable.  Details are sketchy at this stage - it is not even certain it will appear at all - but if so, it will be interesting to see whether Dylan gets included as part of the official canon, and if so, whether it will finally get a standalone CD reissue as well.  I hope the rarities set comes out separately, because I have all Bob's albums already - some in multiple editions including the Original Mono Recordings box set - so it would take a lot to make me fork out US$300, the rumoured price, to get them all again.  As with many things Dylan, however, everything at the moment is mixed-up confusion, all tangled up in blue.

Disclaimer - I get a small commission from Amazon UK if you buy the CD through the picture link here.

Putting the boot in on Hong Kong's cultural heritage

From my earliest days in Hong Kong one TV advert kept popping up at odd times - the one for Curcyrin, a remedy for athlete's foot (also commonly called Hong Kong foot because of its local prevalence in our humid climate).  Remember the giant foot and the guy in the tacky checked suit?

It should probably be in the Guinness Book of records as the longest-running (and cheesiest) TV commercial of all time.  [Click the link to see it on Youtube.]

Sadly, this irreplaceable piece of Hong Kong's cultural heritage appears to have been retired after many decades, and a new series of (actually rather good) ads has replaced it.  I quite like the one with the colourful wellies:

Nevertheless I can't help feeling a little sad that another fragment of an earlier and less sophisticated Hong Kong has gone - like the fact that you never see people popping out for a late night bowl of noodles in their pyjamas any more.  This used to be common, but today no Hong Konger would dream of going out without dressing up in name brand clothing.  I miss those simpler times - I must be getting old.  Am I the only one who feels nostalgia for stuff like this?

So Far So Good

I saw a furniture shop in Hong Kong called Sofa So Good.  Quite witty, but puns are not my subject today.

English is a wonderfully ambiguous language.  This notice appears beside the lifts in the Taipo Public Library.  That's on the fifth of eight floors, so if I followed its advice, I would end up in the basement car park - that being the farthest possible destination accessible by the stairs from the fifth floor.  But I only wanted to go to the ground floor!

Headline Blues

All I usually see of the South China Morning Post website is its headlines, because you need to subscribe to read the full stories on its website, and I don't.  But those are a most peculiar mix.  On the one hand, there are some - usually one or two a day - that would be more at home in Fashion Week than a serious newspaper.  Today's example, Louis Vuitton holds reopening party at Pacific Place, may be of interest to some, but it's hardly headline news.  Do the companies they promote so blatantly pay them for this publicity?

Others could come straight our of the People's Daily: Xi Jinping wins support with his forceful yet peace-driven persona sounds like a puff piece for the next Chinese President.  Or is there an implied hint of criticism here?  After all persona, the dictionary tells us, means "a person's perceived or evident personality, as that of a well-known official, actor or celebrity; personal image; public role".  But more deeply, in Jungian psychology, it means "the mask or façade presented to satisfy the demands of the situation or the environment and not representing the inner personality of the individual".  In other words, Xi is putting on a face which is winning him public popularity, but one one knows his real thoughts.  Sounds like another leader closer to home (though he can hardly be said to be winning support!)

Coming back to the SCMP, then we have its readers' polls which invariably ask the wrong question.  Today's, for example, asks "Do you support legalising euthanasia in Hong Kong?"  I would want to see the word voluntary or involuntary in front of "euthanasia" before I could answer that question, and my answer would be different depending on which of the two words appeared.  Such polls tend to over-simplify complex issues, so that I often want to respond with an essay or a supplementary question rather than simply a "Yes or No".  Older British readers may remember Professor Joad on Brains Trust, who invariably opened his answer to any question with "it depends what you mean by..."

Money for Nothing

My sympathies on most issues are usually with the pan-democrats in LegCo rather than with the Hong Kong government, but their call to scrap the means test on the government's proposed Old Age Living Allowance raises a simple question that none of them has yet answered to my satisfaction.  As a taxpayer, I am happy to contribute to the support of those elderly people in real need.  But what the hell gives anyone the right to take my hard-earned money and give it to people who don't need it?

Filibuster or not, the government should stand firm on this one.

And there it is!

I've just been playing around with Blogger's template options, so this post brings a new look to the blog.  In the conversion process, Blogger somehow lost my list of blogs and quote at the right side, but they were overdue for an update anyway, so I'll work out how to restore them later.

Apart from the colour scheme, the biggest change you'll see is the picture above, which is of the beach I think of as my private beach.  Of course I don't actually own it, but it's far enough off the beaten track in Hong Kong that relatively few people know of it.  And no I'm not going to tell you where it is - if I did, it wouldn't be private, would it?

Fame At Last!

Thanks to Ulaca for naming this "Most Sensible Blog" - though I'm not sure everyone I know would agree!  Now I am going to be flooded with new readers (possibly), I may even get around to the long overdue task of updating my blogroll.  Half of those listed are probably defunct by now.