And Another Thing...

Another Alternative continued:

...AND I would make sure the cans get recycled afterwards.

A word of praise here for the bottlers of Lucozade, who have recently switched from glass bottles, which cannot be recycled in Hong Kong, to plastic ones, which can. But why doesn't Hong Kong have any glass recycling facilities? Huh?

Another Alternative

Another story from The Sun: Malaysian customs officials are planning to pour 200,000 cans of seized smuggled beer down the drain. They claim to have no alternative because to sell it would disrupt the domestic market.

Well, they could try shipping it to me instead. I promise not to resell it, but I might throw one hell of a party.

A Painful Story

Britain's Sun newspaper reports that police in Ontario, Canada, are seeking a man who has asked three women in the street to kick him in the groin. The paper reports Sgt Cate Welsh as saying, "That kind of behaviour tends to be a precursor to sexual assault".

I'm assuming that Sgt Welsh is female. Any man will tell you that if you've just received a forceful boot in the groin, the last thing on your mind is sexual activity, consensual or otherwise. You're more likely to be writhing in agony on the ground clutching your injured privates.

Return of the Living Dead

I thought Monty Python's "Bring out your dead" sketch was just a joke - until I read this story.

Bollocks

Quote of the week:

I am in no way a violent person.

--Amanda Monti, sentenced to prison for ripping off her ex-boyfriend's left testicle with her bare hands and trying to swallow it.

Fascinating Facts

Amazing what facts you come across accidentally online. Who knew that hair straightener (1909), the gas mask (1912) and traffic lights (1923) were all invented by a black American man? No, nor did I.

Silly Buggers

Today's Standard reports that Hong Kong's Court of Final Appeal yesterday upheld a verdict dismissing a charge against two men for engaging in anal sex in a public place (a parked car, in fact), on the grounds that the relevant law was unconstitutional because it applied only to homosexuals, contrary to the Basic Law which guarantees that everyone shall be equal before the law.

As in any case involving sexual activity, up pop the usual suspects to moralise about it. Choi Chi-sum, general secretary of the Christian group the Society for Truth and Light, says the verdict is "regrettable" and "disappointing" and "sets a dangerous precedent", arguing that "using a technicality to strike down the appeal is worrisome". "What the people are worried about is that indecent acts in public places are inappropriate. It's not about whether hetero or homo sex is involved", he is reported as saying.

Choi seems to have grasped only half the point here. Certainly most people would prefer not to witness a mass outbreak of sodomy in the streets, whether homosexual or heterosexual. But applying the law against it to only one sector of the population is not a "technicality"; it is a clear violation of basic human rights. If the law banned public buggery between white people but allowed it between Chinese people, would Choi consider that sort of discrimination a mere technicality?

8 Things you may not want to know about me

I have been challenged by the misanthropic Mr Fumier to write eight autobiographical facts. So without getting too up close and personal with myself, here are eight things you may not want to know about me:

1. I set out for Australia in 1975 and still haven't got there yet.

2. Having heard a new word as a child, and always eager to enlarge my vocabulary, I asked my mother, "Mummy, what's a prostitute?" She promised to tell me when I was grown up, but she still hasn't. I guess I haven't grown up yet...

3. As a child, I had several out-of-body experiences. I can still vividly recall looking down on myself pitching a tent while setting up camp with the Boy Scouts.

4. I attended the same school as Paul Boateng, later Britain's first black cabinet minister. In a television interview some years ago, he pronounced himself lucky to have been at a school that had little racial prejudice. "Huh!", sneered my brother, "You should hear what his sister [my brother's classmate] has to say about that."

5. As a child, I saved a younger playmate's life when he was choking on a sweet, by turning him upside down and slapping him so violently on the back that it popped out.

6. Photographs I have taken have been published in the South China Morning Post, Photo Asia, Fragrant Harbour and Recruit.

7. I learned driving at the late age of 38, ad scuba diving at 48. At 58 I plan to take up skiving.

8. I have never met anyone (including Americans) who likes George W. Bush or supports his policies.

So, not much change there then...

As the tenth anniversary of the handover (sorry, "reunion with the beloved motherland") passes, we have seen a lot of looking back to the events of 1997. Here are a couple of extracts from my annual newsletter to family and friends in December of that year that I think deserve a wider audience:

Local politics become ever more farcical, with one of our Chief Executive’s senior advisers defending the reappointment of election losers to the “provisional” local councils as a step towards greater democracy, thus placing us in the elevated company of such shining models of democratic development as Burma, Nigeria and Algeria.

The so-called election (by 400 hand-picked China cronies) of Hong Kong’s representatives to China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress, saw all but one of those “elected” coming from the ranks of the electors themselves. The most votes went to the head of the New China News Agency, China’s de facto top man in Hong Kong. This leaves China’s top representative in Hong Kong as Hong Kong’s top representative in China, but we are assured by the Chinese Communist Party that this is all right and we just don’t understand the system (who could?).

On Taiwan’s National Day a cluster of Taiwanese flags was taken down by the police, with the government first saying it was illegal to fly them, then realising they hadn’t actually got round to passing the planned anti-sedition law to outlaw them yet. They then changed their tune and announced that the real reason they were removed was because they’d been erected in a public place without permission. Ironically one of the plain clothes police removing them was wearing a Union Jack T-shirt!

One Country, Two Standards

At the 10th anniversary celebrations of Hong Kong's handover to China at Happy Valley today, seven female Chinese paratroopers scattered confetti from a height while coming down to land. Wanna bet they won't get ticketed for littering?

Looking back on ten years in which we have survived the challenges of SARS and the Asian financial crisis with little real change in Hong Kong (i.e. it's still run for their own benefit by the same cartel of property developers as before), it's hard to recall today how much fear was in the air as the last hours of British rule ticked inexorably away. Memories of the Tienanmen killings were still fresh (I nearly said massacre, but as Ma Lik has kindly explained to us, there was no massacre, in the same way that there was no sex between Bill Clinton and "that woman").

One particular incident sticks in my mind. As midnight approached on June 30th, I was in the old Bull & Bear pub in Hutchison House with a visiting friend from Australia. The pub was packed, and all eyes were on the big screen as the handover ceremony neared its climax. As midnight chimed the British flag was lowered, the Chinese flag raised, and a couple of people began to applaud. Another person called acros the room, in a voice heard by everyone, "Why are you clapping?" The applause stopped, and the entire pub fell silent for several seconds. When conversation resumed, it was in hushed tones.

So, are you clapping today, and why?

My Enemy's Enemy Is Not Always My Friend

I can rarely see George W Bush spouting his latest poisonous nonsense without feeling angry - do you feel that, too? Not long ago the idiot was on TV telling the long-suffering American people that defeating Al-Qaeda in Iraq is vital to America's security. In that case, why the hell didn't he just leave Saddam Hussein in power?

Under Saddam, Al-Qaeda had no presence in Iraq; for all his faults, he at least kept religious fanaticism firmly suppressed. It was the American invasion that gave Al-Qaeda the chance to enter the country, presenting themselves as heroic allies of the Iraqi resistance to the invasion, and giving them the biggest recruitment opportunity they had ever enjoyed.

The USA (and its lapdog Britain) are very good at creating their own enemies. Support the courageous Mujahideen fighting Russian communist control in Afghanistan, and watch them mutate into the dreaded Taliban. Build up the military might of the secular Saddam Hussein against the mad mullahs of Iran, and watch him turn it against Kuwait.

Most of the time, America and Britain would be better off if they kept out of physical intervention in other countries' affairs. At the least, they should learn that believing the old saying, "My enemy's enemy is my friend" is often foolish and dangerous.

Bring Out Your Dead

I wrote back in April about the reduced frequency of household waste collection in Britain. Now Private Eye has a nice cartoon on the subject:


This reminds me of the old Monty Python sketch:

Bring out your dead!

A family dump a struggling old man on the cart. He vociferously complains, "But I'm not dead yet!"

"Shut up, you soon will be."

Expensive Ferry to Inconvenience

It comes as no surprise that the Star Ferry is applying for a price rise on its Hung Hom routes, probably to be followed by its Tsimshatsui route soon. As everyone with a brain predicted, passenger numbers have slumped since the government moved the Central terminus from its former convenient location to an inaccessible new home in the middle of nowhere.

Apparently the next stage in the government's master plan to ruin Hong Kong's waterfront is to relocate the Central bus terminus to a less convenient location as well. They are already planning to relocate the Tsimshatsui bus terminus away from the Star Ferry Pier.

Have Hong Kong's planners never heard of integrated transport? Sometimes they get it right, as in extending the KCR back to Tsimshatsui to connect with the MTR there, but all too often they seem to look at one transport mode in total isolation from others, destroying connections instead of creating convenient interchanges between them.

The Rip-off Files 1: What you see is not what you get

How's this for deceptive and wasteful packaging? I know it says 28 pieces on the wrapper, but I don't think any purchaser would expect 40% of the space inside to be taken up by cardboard and air. Less for the consumer and more for the landfill.

Purchased from PARKnSHOP, as they now write their name. (Thank you, Mr Li).

Unintended Consequences for America

Several American senators are planning to introduce a bill in the Senate to push China to accelerate the rise in its currency, in order to ease its gigantic trade surplus with the United States. This only proves that politicians don't understand economics very well.

The intended consequence of this bill is to sell more American goods to China and slow the flow of Chinese goods into the USA. However, a sharp rise in the RMB may well have other effects:

1. American firms with factories in China will receive smaller profits from them in US$ terms, losing money they might have otherwise have invested back into the US.
   
2. American households will find themselves paying more for just about everything, as almost every manufactured product in WalMart is now made in China and will cost more.
   
3. This will not bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, as hoped; it is far more likely that they will move to other countries with low labour costs and relatively undervalued currencies.
   
4. China will be less able to afford to purchase American products such as Boeing aircraft, Microsoft and Oracle software, other high technology items, and grain.
   
5. China will produce even more pirate DVDs, as genuine Hollywood movies become more expensive in RMB terms.
   
6. Perhaps most surprising of all, this move could help to end America's illegal invasion of Iraq. Bush's ruinously expensive war (see latest cost in the right side column here) has run up a massive budget deficit, which has been largely financed by borrowing through issuing US Treasury bonds. The largest purchaser of these is China, which holds a large part of its enormous foreign exchange reserves, accumulated because of the trade surplus, in this form. Without this to fall back on, America will have problems coming up with the funding to maintain its occupation - certainly the American people will be in no mood for a tax rise (see 2 above).
   

Have they really thought this out, I wonder?

Help! Star Trek Universal Translator Needed Urgently

What's up with Blogger? For some reason, whenever I log in since yesterday it now shows everything on the screen in Chinese. There doesn't seem to be any button to click on to change language, and I can't use the Help function to sort it out because that's in Chinese too. Nor can I see any language indicator in the URLs it's using that I could try changing to "en".

Is it detecting a Hong Kong IP address and using Chinese because of that? If so, someone should tell the idiots at Google (Blogger's parent) that not everyone here is Chinese. Meanwhile, my annoyance level is rising....

Drowning the Deaf

ATV's English news the other night reported that some parts of Lantau Island had received 100 millimetres of rainfall in 24 hours. Now that's quite a lot (about 4 inches for the metrically challenged), but the subtitles showed it as 100 metres! If true, that would pretty much have washed away every village on the island except Ngong Ping - not to mention the airport.

Another Lost Opportunity

Hong Kong's Chief Executive Donald Tsang is an efficient administrator, but as a former top civil servant he is, I fear, better at carrying out orders than at coming up with new ideas himself. I have long believed that the Hong Kong government's major weakness (apart from constantly attempting to second-guess Beijing's wishes, instead of deciding on the best policies for the SAR and then selling them to the central government) is lack of imagination.

Sadly this lack has been demonstrated yet again in the appointments to Tsang's revamped cabinet. There are no real surprises on the list, and several familiar faces playing musical chairs. One such move sees current Director of Information Services Edward Yau Tang-wah succeeding the largely ineffective Sarah Liao as Secretary for the Environment, Transport and Works.

No doubt Yau is competent enough; but according to The Standard today, "despite Yau's lack of an environmental track record, he beat pan-democrat candidate, the Civic Exchange's executive director, Christine Loh Kung-wai, for the post". Now that really would have been an imaginative appointment (if she accepted it): Christine Loh's environmental credentials are impeccable, she is highly articulate (in English as well as Chinese), creative, and as a former legislator she knows well how LegCo works.

Not only that, Loh is 100% committed to democracy but, being more diplomatic and less abrasive than many in the democratic camp, manages to avoid making too many enemies on the pro-Beijing side; as such she could have helped to bridge some of the divisions between the two sides that make necessary compromises on many issues difficult to achieve.

And if all these qualities aren't enough, she is to my knowledge the only Legislative Councillor ever to have admitted (in an HK Magazine interview) to enjoying skinnydipping!

Start Your Day the Hong Kong Way

One of those mornings:

In a mean mood today, I was entering the lift at 1 minute to 9 with 4 or 5 other people when I spotted the building's shuttle bus arriving. Knowing this would mean a flood of people coming, I hastily pressed the Doors Close button to get us up, up and away before they reached the lift. Pressed several times, but nothing happened.

Then I observed that the jerk on the other side of the lift was frantically pressing the Doors Open button to keep us all waiting while his dear colleagues got off the bus and joined us. Very un-Hong Kong of him.

When I finally reached my office and checked my email, I found a junk mail beginning "Dear Sir/mad". How did they know?

Diddums and Death

Poor Paris Hilton! Sent back to prison where, according to one of her friends, "“It’s so cruel what has happened to her. She wasn’t allowed to wax or use a moisturiser. Her skin is so dry right now.”

Meanwhile I was talking to my mother last night when her doorbell rang. She called me back later to tell me it was her neighbour, informing her that the young man who cleans her windows had been knocked off his bike and killed by a drunk driver.

Well, Paris, some people get arrested for drunk driving and sent to prison where, no matter how rich they are, they have to suffer the indignity of dry skin. Others get killed by drunk drivers - how cruel is that? - which is why we send drunk drivers like you to prison. Get real, you spolied brat.