Cantopopped

King's Cube

2011-07-27T18:44:00.000+08:00

I know it's been a very long time indeed since I last posted on this blog, but just came across this wonderful video advertising the benefits of 'King's Cube' in HK.

I've been keeping up with the developments in HK, and it's pleasing to see that there's growing movement against the government. The increasing resistance is for reasons exposed in this video, I'm sure.

The neighbours

2009-02-16T16:54:00.005+08:00

So... Mugabe is moving to Tai Po. House 3, JC Castle. Just a few houses down from T's family!

Here's the view of the "verdant countryside" that the Mugabes will enjoy from their new home.
It's a nice spot. Or, at least it was...

UPDATE: It gets better. T's family's maid actually saw the journalist from The Times get assaulted by Mugabe's goons (see the article linked above). I think T's family are fairly representative of the average HK resident and their lack of knowledge about Zimbabwe and Mugabe's ruinous regime probably explains the HK government's expectation that they could get away with letting the tyrant and his family buy property there.

Perspective

2009-02-08T21:13:00.001+08:00

Build a bridge, sweetheart.

She was late to the gate and denied boarding.

Observation

2009-01-25T08:26:00.000+08:00

It's amazing how the absence of things about which to be miserable reduces the desire to blog.

Maybe we do need that fork after all?

No need for the fork just yet

2008-11-30T20:33:00.000+08:00

This blog is still not done, even if my time here is.

Good looking money

2008-11-29T10:55:00.002+08:00

I am saddened by the news that Standard Chartered might lose the right to issue Hong Kong bank notes as I think they print the best looking money in town. I've decided to shamelessly rip-off Ulaca's idea and put it to the vote: which bank prints the hottest money?

Wale of a time

2008-11-27T11:44:00.005+08:00

I happened upon this book in Page One the other day and instantly thought it might be of interest to Fumie, given his ongoing affection for all things Welsh. What particularly caught my attention, however, was the blurb (is that what you call it - tag line?) on the front cover.

"Holding its 700-page substance is like having all Wales in one's hands"

I'm sure Fumie would agree that it probably says more about the quality of Wales than it does about the quality of the book.

A little too local

2008-11-27T11:32:00.003+08:00

As suspected the Tai Po Market branch of Starbucks is in trouble, if their marketing antics are anything to go by. One of the staff members is walking around the station concourse offering sample sized muffin pieces in order entice commuters in for an overpriced coffee or meal. Unfortunately, even the giveaway muffins aren't attracting much attention. I think it's just a little too local out here...

Short, flabby and middle aged

2008-11-26T11:22:00.001+08:00

A few weeks ago I went into the TST branch of Fitness First - my regular hangout - with the intention of canceling my membership. The friendly Filipino behind the desk told me that, as I had joined at the Fortress Hill branch I would need to cancel there. This seemed like another Fitness First money scamming trick (seems like they're the Somali Pirates of the personal fitness world), but I was in no mood to argue so meekly nodded my head and wondered when the hell I'd get all the back to Fortress Hill again. The answer, it turns out, was Monday.

Fortress Hill's distant location is only one reason why I never go there. Another is the general ill-maintained feel the gym gives off (some of the heavier dumbell weights are starting to rust) and yet another is the general ill-maintained look of those who go there. Short, flabby, middle-aged Chinese men. Short, flabby, middle-aged Chinese men who like to dry their pubic hair, while standing stark naked in front of the mirror enjoying the view of themselves, with the hair-dryers. Short, flabby, middle-aged Chinese men whose pubic hair seem longer than their penises.

I've blogged about this issue before. But it seems much worse at Fortress Hill. Towels, people: use them.

Unseasonally influenced

2008-11-25T22:04:00.003+08:00

Hong Kong seems determined to give me a fond farewell if the current weather is anything to judge by. I'm just waiting for the frigid temperatures, unremitting gray and closed-in pollution to settle in like it did last year. Actually, I'm not waiting for it at all. If the blue skies and pleasant temperatures last until Sunday - which is when I'm outta here - then I'll be happy indeed.

I've been doing lots of catching up these past few days with friends that I don't get to see much of. I can't help but conclude that I would have been much happier in HK if I had been living somewhere other than Tai Po. Yes, my job sucked and, yes, I had to work six days a week in the middle of Prince Edward (in exchange for HK$20K/month!), but that could have been managed if I had been able to come home to somewhere close to civilisation. A place with supermarkets that sold something more than chicken feet, intestines and fish bladders; that had bread that was genuinely fresh. In other words a supermarket that genuinely deserved the prefix 'super'. A place with food options that extended beyond Cafe-de-Coral and KFC and a place that, well, provided something (anything) to do once I came home from work. I know life in the suburbs in most countires is bleak, but it is nothing in comparison to life in the New Territories.

At least the suburbs in the West allow the enjoyment of personal space and the (smug) satisfaction of owning your own McMansion. Here in HK all you get is a shoddily constructed shoebox built in a tower of other shoeboxes.

In terms of civilisation arriving in my own little corner of Tai Po, I was pleased recently to note the opening of a small Starbuck's coffee shop in the Tai Po Market train station, just downstairs from my house. I stopped there this morning and enjoyed a reasonably well made latte (no jokes please Ulie) (although the bubble-less froth still troubles most of Hong Kong's baristas). I probably spent around 30 minutes there enjoying my coffee and reading the paper and during that time only two other customers came in. Tai Po Market is hardly a haven for the latte sipping set. At $31 for a 'grande' (中) coffee - that's about A$6 at the current crappy exchange rate - I suspect most locals remain uncovinced of the benefits of the brown liquid. Even if they are making it quite well at the local outlet.

So where am I going with this? Well, I guess I'm saying I'd give HK another go if circumstances require. I'd want to be living somewhere else, of course, and I'd want to be doing something rather more engaging than cookie-cutter English teaching. Maybe that's just the unseasonable blue sky influencing me?

Nearly there

2008-11-22T08:16:00.002+08:00

Eight hours of classes and 29 children stand between me and freedom from teaching today.

What a relief to think that I will soon be liberated from the tedium of Hong Kong's children and their incessant chatter about NDS and PSP.

Strangely, I'll miss more than a few of them... Many of them seem to have wormed their ways into my affection.

Well, saying goodbye to them is a small price to pay for having my Saturdays back. I haven't had a free Saturday since April.

Not long to go and HK will be nothing but a memory. Will I look back in fondness?

Sucky news

2008-11-13T13:07:00.002+08:00

Well... bad news. I'm heading back to Australia on November 30 and T will be following in March. We had planned for T to come and spend a few weeks at Christmas (when I wouldn't be working due to the stand-down over the Christmas period) so that we wouldn't spend so long apart. Anyway, T just checked with his mum to see if he could have the time away from work, but as his sister has already taken the opportunity to go back to France with her other half, he's been denied. So that means three months without seeing each other.

And, well, we're not really in a position to say to her to that it means alot to our relationship. Not that she'd accept that argument anyway.

Damn.

Food, freezing, French

2008-11-13T10:28:00.004+08:00

I went out for dinner last night with the extended family in honour of my m-i-l's birthday . It was a vegetarian affair and, although the evening was nice enough, the food itself was not. I really don't understand the love of vegetables pretending to be meat that so many Chinese vegeterian restaurants provide. The first dish may have looked like chicken, but tasted like baked cardboard.

I also noticed that HK might be the only place in the world that requires people in winter to put more clothes on once they're inside. It was freezing in the restaurant and as the night progressed the people sitting around the table were reaching for their jackets in order to keep warm. As we made it outside, the jackets came off again.

Speaking of food, does anyone (Joyce) have anything to say about the food on offer at Pierre's in the Mandarin Oriental? I'm not going to Rubichon, but am interested in a nice French meal before I leave for Perth. Suggestions welcome!

God Love

2008-11-11T12:45:00.003+08:00

Apparently, God loves the owner of this Porsche 911 Turbo more than you.

Otherwise, you'd have a 911 of your own.

Readers with long memories may remember this scooter, whose owner was far more generous with God's love but who didn't seem to be enjoying the love as much as the 911 owner (judging by the differences in modes of transport).

Window problems

2008-11-11T09:34:00.002+08:00

Now that the cool weather is finally with us, we have taken to opening the windows in the bedroom and sleeping very comfortably with the cool air from outside wafting gently in on the breeze. Unfortunately, it's not only the cool air that wafts into our room but also the noises from outside. On Sunday morning, after a big night out, we had only just put our heads onto the pillows when a drunk woman started a screaming match with a taxi driver on the road below. Apparently she was unhappy with the $280 fare charged to get her from TST back to Tai Po. I fell asleep, but T tells me she went on to call the police. He's not sure what happened either, as he soon fell asleep too.

On Sunday night, my sleep was interrupted by a series of blood-curdling screams that appeared to be coming from a male. He sounded like he was having his balls chopped off (not that I know what that sounds like!). This went on for about five minutes before abruptly stopping and I managed to get back to sleep.

Who would have thought sleeping with the window open would be so problematic?

Voters are good (and bad)

2008-11-05T23:39:00.004+08:00

I'm sorry I didn't keep the live-blogging going. Unfortunately, real life intervened and I was unable to keep it up. Alas, I was out of media-range altogether for most of the day and so missed Obama's victory speech and McCain's concession (although the marvels of the net ensured I could watch them this evening). In fact, I didn't even know Obama had won until about 8:oo PM tonight.

I am very happy for America that Obama has managed to win this election. What a remarkable man he is. He demonstrated throughout this extraordinary, long campaign that he has the intelligence, judgment and oratory to lead America through this challenging period. His victory speech may have had a few recycled lines, but it touched upon important themes of unity and decency that serve to run a line through the divisiveness and immorality of the Bush-Cheney years.

...a new dawn of American leadership is at hand...

Lofty rhetoric perhaps, but I choose to believe that it's true. I choose to believe that America can regain its place as a righteous and decent example for the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, my faith has to be a little shaken following the outcome of a ballot initiative in California. Proposition 8 sought to overturn marriage rights for gay couples in the state following the California Supreme Court's ruling in favour of equal marriage rights. Unfortunately that ballot iniative has seemingly proven successful: with about 90% of votes cast, Californians appear to have decided (by a small but big enough margin) to deny marriage equality to their gay and lesbian fellow citizens.

You might think that this does not matter much to an Australian. I come from a country where both major parties voted to change the language of federal marriage legislation to specifically rule out the possibility of gay marriage. Marriage in Australia is a long way off. Yet, the California ballot initiative is significant because this was the first time that voters had been given the chance to remove rights to a section of the community after they had been granted them. In other words, Californians voted to strip of their marriages those many thousands of couples who chose to marry following the May court ruling.

The probable success of proposition 8 sets back the cause of marriage equality all over the world. The idea of marriage was rejected by apparently liberal California and, even worse, it was rejected after many thousands had been married and many thousands had demonstrated that society's fabric had not been torn asunder.

Gay people, just like those in the heterosexual community, come in all shapes, sizes and dispositions. Some marry and some don't. Some sleep around and some don't. Some marry and still sleep around. Most find a happy median and take the opportunities offered by the state to find their own happiness, either in marriage or outside of it. It's not the state's business to judge the morality of their actions; only to provide the kind of legal protection and recognition that gives two consenting adults the security they need to make their ways in the world.

It's hard not to take rejection like this personally. It's hard to accept that people would judge my relationship as any less worthy or real or deserving of protection and recognition as a straight person's. Love, and the relationships that spring from it, are wonderful things. Mine is. I hope one day to be able to affirm that formally, if only people would stop voting against it.

Crimson Tide

2008-11-05T22:59:00.000+08:00

One of the Economist's election bloggers noted:

Also, I am embarrassed to report that I know for a fact that John McCain's exit music comes from the movie "Crimson Tide," in which a grizzled old sub captain, a career Navy man, is fought and bested by a younger, Harvard-educated black executive officer.

Ouch!

Also, the handshake and kiss between the Palins and McCains at the end of his concession speech did not seem warm at all. Sure, they'd just had their backsides handed to them on a plate, but there didn't even seem to be much of a consoling pat or hug.

Ouch again!

More live blogging...

2008-11-05T11:15:00.003+08:00

11:16 - Can't he win this thing already? The talking heads are running out of things to say!

11:37 - A special shout-out to my visitor from the Totaliser Agency Board. I got your message. You're wrong. It is hard. :)

Election night

2008-11-05T07:48:00.019+08:00

And so it begins! CNN is already annoying me, especially with its virtual congress and the constant reminders of the "best political team on television". If you have to keep saying it, it's probably not true.

Here's some interesting national exit polling data:

76% of the country believes it's off on the wrong track; Bush's approval rating is 27%; More than 60% say the economy is their top voting issue; 9 in ten say the economy is in bad shape; more than 80% are worried about their own condition next year; Change voters made up 35% of the electorate; 30% wanted someone who shared their values.

One in ten voters are late-deciders.

08:01 - Fox News' stats chic just said " Here I am over here next to my big tool". She wasn't standing near Karl Rove at the time, either.

08:05 - Vermont is in the bag for Obama and Kentucky is done for McCain. McCain's winning! We'll need to keep our heads about us if we're to make it through the day...

08:10 - Some of the Senate races are in: Virginia is now in Dem hands and South Carolina's retained by the Repubs. Georgia's race is too close to call.

08:15 - CNN is getting worse! Video screen links aren't enough any more, so now they're "teleporting" their reporters into the CNN election centre. Seriously. What the fcuk!

08:47 - Nothing is happening! Even after an extended breakfast break... My head will explode if Wolf Blitzer keeps up with his rubbish all night.

09:02 - 77 for Obama versus 34 for McCain. No surprises so far in terms of the called states. Indiana and North Carolina looking very good for Obama at the moment, too.

09:12 - Elizabeth Dole has well and truly lost her North Carolina senate seat. And Florida is looking very good indeed for Obama. Things are looking good!

09:26 - John Sununu has lost his seat in New Hampshire; a moderate Republican, this suggests that the rump that remains in the Senate may only be the more conservative southerners. Will we see a more extreme Republican party?

09:40 - Pennsylvania goes to Obama according to CNN. McCain's pathways to victory, already limited, have now grown fewer. I think we can put the fork in McCain now. He's done. Barack Obama will be the next President (if CNN's projection is correct, of course!).

09:45 - Not to be outdone by CNN, Fox News has just crossed to its "Balance of Power" room.

09:51 - James Carville, Dem strategist on CNN, is one scary looking man.

09:52 - My prediction about Georgia is not looking so good at the moment. McCain's up 62 to 38 at the moment. 24% of the vote counted.

10:02: My North Dakota prediction has proven to be somewhat rash. Oh well. CNN has it 174 Obama against 49 McCain.

10:17 - Karl Rove is wearing a hideous tie. Not offering much in the way of analysis: "If McCain is going to win this election, he is going to have win these states (sweeping his hand across the screen) and not lose too many of them". He's not got much of a screen presence, either. He's oozing evil.

10:20 - Fox has called New Mexico and Ohio for Obama.

10:30 - CNN's hologram teleporter has not made a re-appearance. That's a bit sad.

10:34 - And now Obama has carried Ohio according to CNN. There's absolutely no way McCain can win this election now...

10:56 - Virginia is about as close as it can be. I'm still thinking it is going Obama, though.

Election cometh

2008-11-03T21:42:00.005+08:00

I've decided that I'll be live-blogging the US Presidential election results on Wednesday morning, so if you're looking for ill-conceived, poorly informed and highly subjective analysis of the results you'll have at least two choices: Cantopopped and Fox News.

I went out on a limb a few months ago and predicted that the Sarah Palin nomination would bite McCain on the arse and I've been very pleased that my view has been vindicated. It's hardly going out on a limb at the moment to say that I believe Obama will be the next President of the United States. I thought I might be a little more daring and provide a breakdown of my electoral college predictions.

As you can see from the map below, I am tipping Obama to enjoy something of a landslide victory; picking up all of the states Kerry won in 04 plus:

Nevada (Obama is about 6-points up),
Colorado (Also a 6-point lead to Obama),
Montana (McCain has a 2-point lead at the moment -- Ron Paul is on the ballot in Montana and we can expect many of the state's Libertarian-leaning Republicans to cast a vote for him),
North Dakota (Obama's up by 3-points -- Paul also did very well in North Dakota (in terms of fund-raising) and although he's not on the ballot here, Bob Barr and the Liberterians may steal plenty of votes from McCain),
Iowa (Obama's 13-points up -- This is where Obama stole a march on Hillary by taking the straw poll during the primaries; Obama's ground game is reputedly very effective here),
Ohio (Obama's by 5.5-points -- he needs to retain big vote margins in the urban areas to insulate against his continued unpopularity in Appalachian Ohio (or 'real America' to the McCain campaign)),
Virginia (Obama by over 6-points)
North Carolina (Obama is only 1-point up at the moment, but the big African-American population should swing this state his way),
Florida (Obama up by nearly 3-points -- for once, this is not the one to watch on election night. So many other states are in play that Obama can lose this and still win comfortably elsewhere. Of course, if he does pick it up we will know the result of the election reasonably early),
Georgia (McCain ahead by 2-points -- this is my big limb-walk: I'm of the view that the very high turnout by African-Americans will swing this state to Obama, too).

(Polling data is taken from the current version of Pollster.com)

&amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;strong&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;a href='http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/campaign08/electoral-college/'&amp;amp;gt;Electoral College Prediction Map&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;/strong&amp;amp;gt; - Predict the winner of the general election. Use the map to experiment with winning combinations of states. Save your prediction and send it to friends.&amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;gt;

So my prediction: 374 for Obama versus 164 for McCain.

Make your predictions in the comments!

Nothing to say

2008-10-31T08:35:00.003+08:00

I was going to use this post to tell you about something that happened in my local MacDonald's last night, but I've decided it wasn't that interesting so I won't bother. I am rather embarrassed about the admission of eating that rubbish, though. I don't do it too often. Honest.

It's amazing how little I have to say at the moment.

Although, I am thinking about 'live blogging' the US election results on Wednesday morning. Is that a worthwhile task?

Oh, and 22 days left teaching. A bit longer left in HK.

More jobs

2008-10-29T10:24:00.002+08:00

I've just finished another job interview, this one for a position with some good money attached to it. Things went very well until right the end when they asked what I understood the role to be. That was a problem: not too sure. I made what I think was a reasonable answer, but the head of the panel followed up with a killer: did I do any research. Obviously my reasonable answer wasn't too convincing.

I love interviews anyway, because they give you an opportunity to swing things back in your favour if you stuff up. I was able to recover with an excellent closer (I asked to make a final summary) linking my own experience to the (only) key fact about the job that I remembered. I think this was a clever strategy because the panel seemed to respond well to this. The head of the panel told me that I had been selected for interview because I answered their criteria well in my application document and that my answers in the interview had been excellent, too.

We'll see.

Feng Shui

2008-10-28T09:28:00.003+08:00

Given the long and not so proud history in HK of Feng Shui practitioners and other mystics ripping their clients off in one way or another, you might think that rational people would stop and think twice about handing over $50,000 to one of these frauds. Unfortunately, however, some locals of my acquaintance were taken for a ride by one such woman. She claimed she needed the money to pay for an operation in Canada; the medicos in HK were too risky, apparently. They handed the money over without so much as even asking for evidence from a doctor or hospital.

The family in question are comfortably middle-class, but $50,000 is still alot of money!

Anyway, they had their illusions shattered the other day when they spotted Ms Mystic at a wedding they had both been invited to. She should have still been in Canada recovering from the surgery. Apparently, a Jerry Springer style confrontation did not ensue and they left the wedding early, lest they be seen by the fraudster.

They are, however, understandably upset at their naivety.

If I had the money...

2008-10-26T22:18:00.000+08:00

We're currently looking at property back home in a 'what-if', 'maybe' and 'probably not' fashion. We're debt free, have cash in the bank (though not as much as we would both like) and the incentives for first-home buyers in Australia at the moment make buying a home an attractive proposition. There are no transaction taxes (i.e. stamp duty) and a one-off A$21,000 payment from the government if we build our own home or buy an apartment that's never been lived in.

It's been fun looking at what's available in our price range (and even more fun dreaming about what's outside it). My mum sent me a link the other day to a beautiful house in one of Perth's inner suburbs (probably only a 10 or 15 minute walk from the centre of the city). It's going for A$1.25 million - about HK$6 million at current exchange rates - and so is well out of my price range. I wonder if that money in HK would get me anything like this?

Pity the 'tard

2008-10-26T19:36:00.003+08:00

In terms of bad drivers, Britain may have its eponymous 'white van man' and Australia may have its road users from Perth, but none of these (un)worthies can compete with the average Hong Kong people carrier (minivan) pilot. The worst offenders are those to be found behind the wheel of Toyota's bluff-faced, and head-scratchingly weirdly named, Alphard (or retard as it's known in our household). Arguably it's not so surprising that most Alphards are so appallingly driven. Toyota does, after all, advertise them as 'your grand palace on wheels'. Perhaps the advertising slogans have gone to the owners' heads.

A more fruitful line of enquiry into Alphard drivers' abilities might be found if we examine the Alphard driving demographics. A half-assed and highly selective survey conducted by Cantopopped over the weekend revealed that most drivers were middle-aged men accutely aware of the humiliation associated with driving a heavy and expensive vehicle that's nothing more than a glorified van. It's no wonder they drive like the most frustrated men in the world. They've got something to prove: they're still manly men, despite appearing to be nothing more than a taxi service for their demanding, sour-faced wives and his geriatric in-laws.

By now you might be wondering what's prompted this tirade. And I'm glad you've asked. You see, driving up to the toll plaza of the Eagle's Nest Tunnel (the road network seemingly built for only three cars) I slowed as an Alphard was hard on the brakes in the AutoToll lane as it approached the bit you drive through to get the green light to proceed. If you have an AutoToll, there's no need to stop here: you just keep going. Indeed, if you don't have an AutoToll you don't go through that lane. The Alphard obviously didn't have one and, despite the fact that I was only 50 meters behind and already inside the witches hats keeping cars in their lanes, the driver slammed the car in reverse and started heading back. I'd stopped by this stage and still he kept coming, picking up speed as he went; obviously expecting me to reverse back too. I didn't and when I decided he seemed intent on hitting me, I blasted the horn. He stopped. Waited. Thirty seconds passed and, when a few cars had lined up behind me, he slowly moved forward.

I glared him out as I stormed past him (fast cars are fun) and confirmed the trend: middle-aged man driving; car full of geriatrics.

Anger soon gave way to pity.

Run to Madonna

2008-10-24T19:10:00.003+08:00

To borrow an Ellen joke (and then change it quite a bit), upon being recruited into the 'lifestyle' and signing the relevant contracts, gay guys are given the choice: Madonna or Kylie.

I chose Madonna; even if, to quote Guy Ritchie, she looks like a scary old granny.

Anyway, Gweipo is looking for good music to go running to and my advice is this one from Madonna. Get Together. In fact anything from Madonna's Confessions of a Dancefloor tour is great running music. Ray of Light is another good, high-energy song to get lost in.

Bad news (averted) and (definite) good news

2008-10-24T08:56:00.007+08:00

I didn't get much sleep last night, as I spent most of the evening convinced that I had been default listed by my Australian bank for failing to pay my credit card on time. This happened back in March, but I only discovered it yesterday. I rarely use the card; I maintain it only because I have a few subscriptions that get debited to it every three or six months and I'm too lazy to change the debit instructions. Apparently I was rather late paying A$45 and, when I went back through my pile of unopened Australian mail, I found a number of nasty letters from the bank. After a sleepless night, I called them this morning and found out that they had simply canceled the card. S18E of the (Australian) Privacy Act states that a credit default listing can only be made in a credit information file if a person is more than 60 days late paying. Apparently I was around 40 days late.

What's rather stupid about this is that I used to spend a great deal of my time, in my prior professional life, investigating people's complaints that they had been inaccurately listed as having a default against their names. I know the credit reporting provisions of the Privacy Act backwards and so I knew last night that if I really had been default listed, I would have had little chance of getting the listing removed.

Thankfully my incompetence stretched only to 40 days, rather than more than 60.

The good news is that yesterday I was offered the job I had the interview for last week. I have some more interviews for other positions coming up. I'm going to accept the job offer, but may take other better paying jobs if they come up, too. And this means I really am on final countdown for departure from Hong Kong.

An Australian summer awaits.

Transit socialism

2008-10-22T12:42:00.001+08:00

Michelle Bachmann, a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, recently caused a stir following her appearance on a cable news show where she questioned Barack Obama’s “anti-American views”. She deemed them concerning enough to be further investigated. I’m sure she can dust off McCarthy’s House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Anyway, back in August she sought to further define modern conservatism in the US. God, guns and a belief in American exceptionalism isn’t enough more. True conservatives, it seems, should oppose light rail, too.

"This is their agenda,” Bachmann states bluntly. “I know it is hard to believe,
it’s hard to fathom — but this is ‘mission accomplished’ for them,” she asserts.
“They want Americans to take transit and move to the inner cities. They want
Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, [and] take light rail to
their government jobs. That’s their vision for America.”

It turns out that her Democratic opponent for her congressional seat was a former Transportation Commissioner who was quite proud of a light-rail line that was built under his watch.

What does conservatism in America stand for these days when even worthy public infrastructure like mass transit is belittled as a socialist curse? How can anyone take the Republicans seriously anymore when this is the rubbish they come up with?

Lies

2008-10-22T09:20:00.003+08:00

I was asked by one of my students the other day how long I had been teaching at the centre where I work. I gave him the honest answer - about 7 months - and he told me that the admin staff had assured his mum I'd been working there for longer than 12 months.

Once upon a time I might have done something to support the lie, but this time I just assured him that I had only been there 7 months.

If they feel the need to lie, the least they could do is let me in on it so we're all working from the same page.

Oh well, I hope there's not long to go now...

What the heck do I know?

2008-10-20T21:24:00.003+08:00

I've posted quite a bit about the terminal state of T's family's company, but it turns out that things have been going reasonably well lately. Orders are about 30% down on this time last year, but T has managed to get margins back up and customers are actually accepting revised pricing. The company's even making money at the moment!

It seems the economic turmoil has convinced those still buying that higher prices are unavoidable. T is still certain the company's long-term future is bleak, but for now (and with their competitors in their particular toy-making field all having gone under) things are looking okay. I hope for the family's sake that Gweipo's prediction about global economic doom is wrong or, if not wrong, then the doom will be short-lived.

Anyway, the turnaround in the company's fortunes just goes to show how little I know about business/economics...

Grammatically awkward truth

2008-10-14T23:00:00.003+08:00

In light of Joyce's post about English education in HK, I thought I might share some prose from one of my students. He's in Form 2 and, unlike the vast majority of students, he does not come from a wealthy family. Indeed his mum, who sits in the waiting room as her son struggles to improve his English, has amongst the most tragically hardscrabble looks I've seen in HK. I like to project, so I often wonder what things the family goes without so that their son could come to these classes.

I still think the family is quite poor - but obviously not as poor as I thought - as a few weeks ago he wrote a paragraph about his trip to Singapore. It was, he wrote, "the first time that I travel to another country" (tense kills everyone in HK: rich or poor). This marks him as unique among my students, as most of the kids I teach go overseas every few months.

Another thing that makes him unique is his ability to deliver an honest (if grammatically awkward) assessment of his place of birth. I quote:

The third day night, we went to a night zoo. When we were waiting for a show, the people were very patient, they lined up one by one and were quiet. I think Hong Kong people should learn their patience because we are not as patient as them.

I hope this kid makes it out of HK's government-endorsed third world services economy. Non-cookie cutter thinking is what this place needs more of. And I'm sure it would make his chronically depressed looking mum happy.

Interview

2008-10-14T01:03:00.001+08:00

It's been a long time since I've had a 'real' job interview and I've got one over the phone tomorrow morning. I've usually done quite well in interviews and have a good strike rate. I've only bombed one of them and that was after the panel asked me a question that left me completely flummoxed. Instead of seeking clarification first, I launched a long and confusing monologue (think Sarah Palin responding to Katie Couric) before finally swallowing my pride and asking them to re-state the question. I think things had been going well up to that point.

I'm not usually nervous about interviews, but for this one I am. Even though this is not a job that I especially want, I feel that the stakes are high. This interview is about more than simply satisfying my lust for promotion: it's my ticket out of HK and, with the economy going the way it is (though Australia's is much better than most), I might not get many more chances in the coming months. I'm feeling the crushing weight of my own hopes and expectations.

I hope I don't blow it.

On the positive side, there is another job that I really do want - back in crime, excellent retirement benefits, 20% bonus and so on. I'm applying for that as well. I'll have to clear a rigorous security check before I get offered that one, so it might be a few months off in the distance yet...

UPDATE: I know I said 'tomorrow' above, but I really meant today. Just had the interview and I feel very confident. We'll see. This being a government job, it will take a few weeks to come through.

5 steps

2008-10-13T22:18:00.003+08:00

Sino Land, a leading HK property developer, is owned by Singapore's Ng Teng Fong family. The connections to Singapore, well known for its paternalistic and patronising political culture, may explain the following paternalistic and patronising notice observed recently in the toilets of a Sino-owned property in Tsim Sha Tsui.

Head splitting

2008-10-13T00:16:00.002+08:00

I had the headache from hell on Saturday and it freaked me out quite a bit. I had made it through one class after my lunch break and was about 10 minutes into my second when vision in my right eye decreased substantially. The field of view from my right eye seemed to be dominated by a pulsating, shifting and very brightly coloured semi-circle. It became so bad that, for a few minutes I seemed to lose the ability to see out of my right eye.

This freaked me out quite substantially, but just as I was about to excuse myself the problem disappeared and I got on with teaching. About 20 minutes later, I began to suffer a headache the likes of which I have never experienced. It felt like someone had gashed open the back of head. I felt like I wanted to be sick. I made it through the class and, luckily, had a break. I started to check the work of my secondary-school students and had a lot of trouble concentrating - not fun when I'm trying to decode their cryptic English utterances.

I guess that if I was working in a normal environment I would have gone home, but I made the mistake of going home early once before (when I felt like vomiting over everything in my general vicinity) and the weird passive-aggressive (not even a "goodbye" as I walked out the front door) vibes I got convinced me leaving early on Saturday wasn't worth it. So I toughed it out. I'm acutely aware that I was rambling to my students at one point. They wouldn't have noticed. British Leyland built Friday afternoon cars in the 70s and my Saturday 5PM class is the educational equivalent (migraine or not).

I was rather freaked out by the migraine. I'm someone who never gets headaches, so Saturday's experience was disturbing. I was relieved when I found on the net that what happened to me wasn't that unique. Interestingly, the left side of my head still feels a bit tender. It's like the membrane around my brain has stretched and needs time to recover...

Mob wisdom

2008-10-10T02:33:00.003+08:00

There might well be disrespect amongst Democratic supporters for their Republican rivals, but that disrespect is insubstantial compared to the hostility and hatred shown by conservatives towards Liberals.

Watch these videos and decide where the respect deficit lies in American politics.

The Economist, not normally given to hyperbole, observes:

Add these two scenes, in your minds, to the racial slur and "kill him!" seen in Ft. Meyers, Florida. Add this scene, in New Mexico, where John McCain asks who "the real Barack Obama" is and someone screams "terrorist!" One after the other after the other. Around the country. Boldly, stepping out to vent at a political rally in front of cameras, not being sought out in their communities.

Mr McCain and Ms Palin are not playing with fire. They are handing out fire to drunken, angry crowds. If someone's house gets burned down they will point to the fire-safety pamphlet that was free for the taking at the entry to their rallies. (Ms Palin: Sure, Mr Obama is not a terrorist but "This election is about the truthfulness and judgment needed in our next president.") Would you accept that as a defence?

Family matters

2008-10-09T02:52:00.001+08:00

I've captured and uploaded this report to Youtube for my brother, whose nerves need soothing over the state of the Australia economy.

Hopefully it makes you feel a bit better...

Safety orange

2008-10-08T23:58:00.004+08:00

I felt terribly bad actually taking this photo, which explains the awful quality. I got the snap as quickly and discreetly (and as it turns out, as crappily) as I could.

Bad quality notwithstanding, I think we're still entitled to ask how the man in the Peugeot didn't see the bus that he's driven into. Unless it was one of those classic HK lane-change games of chicken? Peugeot driver seemed to forget that, despite his safety-orange colour scheme, he really should give way to something 20 times larger than he is...

As I walked past the scene it seemed like the bus driver and he were exchanging some choice words through the wedged-open bus door.

Overtaken by ugliness

2008-10-08T10:55:00.000+08:00

An interesting piece in the Washington Post about the ugliness now overtaking McCain's campaign.

Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

The article continues.

"One of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers," she said. ("Boooo!" said the crowd.) "And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,' " she continued. ("Boooo!" the crowd repeated.)
"Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.

The rest of the article makes for excellent reading. Thankfully, it seems like the Palin schtick does not go down equally well with all audiences.

Unsafe at any speed

2008-10-07T22:19:00.003+08:00

This past weekend brought proof - not that any was needed - that Hong Kong's taxi drivers are not especially competent and that their vehicle of choice, the Toyota Crown Comfort, is not especially safe.

A few weeks ago, during an especially white-knuckle journey to my home from the airport, I observed that the Toyota Crown's steering wheel seemed less like a mechanical control to change the direction of the front wheels and more like a rudder. There was a noticeable boat-like delay as each steering input was met with a brief pause before the car, lurching on its suspension, jerked from side to side as we careened through the traffic and across multiple lanes. It seemed like only a tenuous connection existed between the steering wheel and the front wheels.

Of course, the humble Toyota Crown is hardly the pinnacle of modern mechanical engineering. The Crown Comfort, which accounts for around 90% of Hong Kong's taxi fleet, is based upon 1987's S130 model and much of its underpinnings date from even earlier. Being a product of the 80s means that the Crown Comfort doesn't benefit from technology now found on even the cheapest Korean cars.

There's no stability control, anti-lock brakes or airbags. The suspension is an unsophisticated straight axle built for comfort (no surprise given the 'Crown Comfort' moniker) and not handling. Most of Hong Kong's taxis, dating from before 2004's update, have only three-speed automatic transmissions. And when the car does crash, it crashes like one would expect of an 80s vehicle: badly. That passenger cell is built for space, not survivability.

All of which is to say that, given the obvious mechanical, safety and handling limitations of the vehicles, you might expect Hong Kong's taxi drivers to drive them with the care and attention required to ferry passengers from place to place.

Of course not.

And so taxi drivers do stupid things simply to beat red lights. They speed up going down a steep off-ramp at the bottom of which is a sharp right hand turn enforced by a solid concrete barrier. They realise too late that they are going too fast and they stamp on the brakes, locking the wheels and ensuring that, unless they modulate their brake pressure, they'll continue going straight, even though the front wheels are pointing right. The dynamic limits of the vehicles are almost as low as the skills level of those driving them. And so the brakes remain stubbornly locked until the concrete brutally ends the taxi's forward momentum.

Coolant leaks from the now broken taxi and Hong Kong's concerned motorists react to the scene and, more importantly their delay, the only way they know how: by using their horns.

Luckily, the taxi lost enough speed before impacting at an off-set angle on the front left, which meant the driver and sole passenger were able to walk away with (it seemed) nothing more than a bad scare.

Dollar sweet

2008-10-07T02:01:00.005+08:00

Nine weeks ago, one Australian dollar was buying 98 US cents. As I type this, it is hovering just above 70 US cents, or 5.47 HKD.

This is good news for us, as the value of our Hong Kong dollar savings keeps going up. It's also bad news for us because, alarmed by the rise in the value of the Australian dollar a few months ago, we transferred a big (ish) chunk of our savings into Australian dollars. That turned out to be a bad idea.

So now the fear is that we will transfer too early. I wonder how much further the Aussie dollar has to fall? Pundits are tipping a 50 basis points drop in official rates tomorrow, but I wonder if the market has already factored that drop in to their current pricing of the dollar (or am I being silly by assuming markets are factoring anything other than fear into their considerations)? Being an economic ignoramus, I'm not sure if my worry that the dollar may rally in response to the rate-cut is well-founded.

I guess I will find out tomorrow.

UPDATE: Australia's Reserve Bank dropped rates by a full percentage point. About 10 minutes after the cut was announced, the stock market is now in positive territory and the Australian dollar has dropped more than 1 US cent.

Interesting times.

UPDATE 2 (15 minutes after the last one): And now the f**king currency has gone back up again... Goes to prove I know nothing about this stuff! I should have bought AUD last night when it was very low!

Light at the end of the tunnel

2008-10-04T08:31:00.003+08:00

I received a very welcome phone call yesterday asking me to conduct a phone interview next week for a job I applied for back in Australia.

This is great news for my confidence and confirms that things are moving forward. It seems like it's not long until we're out of here...

Yay.

He's here to extinguish your fun

2008-10-01T01:44:00.006+08:00

Can you imagine the pre-work checks these guys go through before heading out on patrol?

Bright orange safety vest? Check.

Fire extinguisher? Check.

Anti-wax burning hot line fully staffed? Check...

A reason not to move back home

2008-09-30T22:15:00.004+08:00

I apologise for the lack of posts over the past few days. Unfortunately, I don't have any particular excuse to offer. I've been busy.

Anyway, it seems like the usual God-bothering suspects in my hometown of Perth are outraged following some comments in support of teh gays by the Lord Mayor. Perth's monopolist ~~toiletpaper~~ newspaper has been reliably stoking the fires: few papers are better in touch with the prejudices of its readers than the West Australian.

“She says ‘gay, straight, who cares?’ Well we do care for families and I don’t think it should be promoted that way,” Mrs Court said.

Teh gays: destroying families again. Sometimes I wonder about the point of religion. It seems to exist only to organise hate against those who don't conform. And if it can't convince enough people to hate, it'll try its hardest to legislate against the things it disapproves of (or ban the books from the library).

Here's my letter to the editor in response to all this rubbish, let's see if it gets published (is it too long - I'm not much of a letter to the editor writer).

It is my understanding that certain comments from Perth’s Lord Mayor, Lisa Scaffidi, to the effect that she would like to make Perth into a gay friendly city have resulted in a backlash from certain members of Perth’s religious community.

Leaving aside some of the logical fallacies being touted by Ms Scaffidi’s opponents – perhaps Mr. Barnett can explain how a city’s openness to non-traditional notions of family detracts from its overall “family-friendly, nice, easygoing” vibe – there are some important economic considerations to the Mayor’s position.

Writing in the Journal of Urban Economics in 2002, four economists found a direct correlation between the quality of a city’s amenities and the size of its gay population. As gay and lesbians have fewer children, their disposable incomes are higher, which prompts the development of a more vibrant social and cultural scene. In other words, if you value your cafes, restaurants and theatre, you should also value your gay and lesbian residents.

Far from condemning Ms Scaffidi, Perth residents should be applauding her for encouraging the development of a livelier city: a city confident enough to indulge the interests of its myriad residents – families, gays, straights and singles. Ms Scaffidi’s question is apt: who really cares?

Do you know Jesus?

2008-09-25T20:13:00.004+08:00

Jesus is the dude who keeps witches away from Sarah Palin, apparently.

Oh yeah... let's see what other whacked out shit she's into.

McCain's asking me to suspend more than my disbelief

2008-09-25T09:33:00.002+08:00

McCain mistakes audacity for ability. His campaign has been coming apart over the past few days as questions about Palin stack up and as Americans' attention return to the economy. His polling numbers have been getting worse and Obama has been doing well in states that Republicans have previously held, including Virginia and Colorado.

Early indications are that McCain's decision to suspend his campaign is not playing well. Indeed, the suspension in the face of crisis makes it easy for Democrats to question McCain's ability to handle crises if he makes it to the White House. Of course it's a stunt and the real danger for McCain is that people will recognise it as an act of a desperate politician, rather than as an act of putting 'country first'.

Perhaps McCain was pre-occupied by his running mate's dismal performance with Katie Couric on CBS (it should be going to air soon)? Who needs dirt on Palin when her every public utterance - few though they are, as McCain won't let her talk to the press much - further displays both McCain's recklessness in choosing her and her own unsuitability for the job?

Couric: You've said, quote, "John McCain will reform the way Wall Street
does business." Other than supporting stricter regulations of Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac two years ago, can you give us any more example of his leading the
charge for more oversight?

Palin: I think that the example that you just cited, with his warnings two
years ago about Fannie and Freddie - that, that's paramount. That's more than a
heck of a lot of other senators and representatives did for us.

Couric: But he's been in Congress for 26 years. He's been chairman of the
powerful Commerce Committee. And he has almost always sided with less
regulation, not more.

Palin: He's also known as the maverick though, taking shots from his own
party, and certainly taking shots from the other party. Trying to get people to
understand what he's been talking about - the need to reform government.

Couric: But can you give me any other concrete examples? Because I know
you've said Barack Obama is a lot of talk and no action. Can you give me any
other examples in his 26 years of John McCain truly taking a stand on this?

Palin: I can give you examples of things that John McCain has done, that
has shown his foresight, his pragmatism, and his leadership abilities. And that
is what America needs today.

Couric: I'm just going to ask you one more time - not to belabor the point.
Specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation.

Palin: I'll try to find you some and I'll bring them to
you.

Volunteering in HK

2008-09-25T09:22:00.004+08:00

Confirming my suspicion that was worse than the T9 we experienced last month, I arrived at work yesterday morning to find half a tree in the front courtyard blocking the doors. The school's owener had called the Environment Department looking for some assistance, but they told him that as the tree was on private property there was nothing they could do to assist. He called 999 instead and, much to my surprise, a van full of police arrived a few minutes later and helped remove the tree. In Australia, he probably would have been in a bit of trouble for calling the emergency line in a non-emergency.

I observed that there were a number of volunteer civil emergency organisations in Australian cities that would have handled the same job. The State Emergency Service (SES) can be found in all Australian states, and although funded by government, is mostly a volunteer organisation. The boss told me that such an organisation would never work in HK as people don't have the time or inclination to help others.

I'm not so sure of that. I agree that most locals don't have the time, but I think people here do volunteer when they can. In Australia, employers are required by legislation to support employees who volunteer in the civil emergency organisations (including volunteer fire brigades). I could never imagine similar legislation being supported in HK. And I guess that means people don't have the financial or job security required to volunteer with these organisations.

It's telling me something

2008-09-24T09:28:00.000+08:00

I feel the biggest challenge I faced, as I moved out of a traditional office job and into a teaching role, was the sudden lack of flexibility that I had to contend with. I've never really had a job where I was expected to be at work at a certain time, to stay there for a pre-determined number of hours and then leave once the hours had been completed. In previous jobs, I more or less came and went as I pleased: work at 5AM or 10AM; no one seemed to care as long as the work was getting done and I wasn't missing any important meetings. This was perfect for me, because I have always been a weird sleeper. I tend to find my second wind at 10PM and, when I should be sleeping, I'm suddenly reading or watching movies.

And, well, if I was sleep deprived and miserable, as I usually was on Wednesdays and/or Thursdays when the lack of sleep caught up with me, I could at least sit in front of my computer, ignore the world and work my through my tasks list ('review our holdings on blah, write that threatening letter to the bank and tell them to give us what we want...'). Blessed independence.

Teaching kids, though, I've got to check the miserableness at the classroom door. I've got to walk into the room and literally turn my frown upside down. My job might be intellectually numbing, but it's the soul destroying requirement to pretend to be happy at seeing the disrespectful, noisy and rude little brats that leaves me feeling exhausted at the end of the day.

And that's not to say, of course, that I hate the kids. Many of them are great. Would you believe my favourite hour of the week involves being stuck in a small room with five 7 year old girls? They're great fun. They're not that bright, but they try hard, they're not rude and they haven't threatened to kill me. Physical threats from many of our younger students are not uncommon. Of course we don't take them seriously, but the kids' words regularly display the contempt that they hold most people in. I can only imagine the trouble they give to their maids and it makes me wonder at the example the parents set. I know nothing about children or raising them, but I think that most kids just mimic their parents at that age.

I especially enjoy observing the group dynamics on display when a rich, only child thinks he or she is missing out. These kids' favourite refrain is a sulky/whiny 'give me' as they make a lunge for whatever thing it is they think they're missing out on. Of course, I know selfishness is a trait shared by most children (rich or poor, Chinese or Western), but it is fun arranging the distribution of equipment (scissors, pencils etc) in such a way as to ensure the rich, spoiled only children in the group are forced to wait. I'm happy to keep teaching these kids lessons their parents won't or are incapable of (I suspect it's the latter; how can you teach patience when it's such an alien concept to most people here?).

It's the small pleasures that make the day bearable and that mark the passage of time.

It's the passage of time that kills, too. We're not allowed out of the centre unless it's lunch time (not even to the coke machine next door), so the days drag by (no internet connection either). I miss having an even remotely stressful day at work. It's amazing how a deadline makes the day both fast and fun.

It's even more amazing how teaching is making me long for stressful days in the office. That probably tells you something. It definitely tells me something.

Hagupit update

2008-09-23T23:30:00.004+08:00

I don't know what it's like elsewhere, but out in Tai Po this typhoon is proving to be much wilder than the T9 we had a few weeks ago.

It's getting very windy out there now...

It's a shame it looks unlikely to give me the morning off.

UPDATE (12:50AM): The wind has been gusting all night more or less parallel to the road directly under my window. The highlight of the evening, therefore, was seeing a gentleman riding his bicycle with the wind at his back and literally being propelled ever faster with each gust. It's a pity that one particularly powerful gust resulted in him losing control and turning the bike perpendicular to the wind, which knocked him over face first almost immediately.

I do enjoy seeing people being rewarded by the predictable outcomes of their stupid behaviour.

Green is no religion

2008-09-23T11:44:00.000+08:00

Michael Costa, one of Austrlia's more interesting politicians and the former state treasurer (finance minister) of New South Wales, is resigning from politics after being forced out by resentful colleagues. Costa's a fascinating figure, not least because he seemed to make enemies at the same rate Honda makes cars. And he didn't seem to care one bit.

Take, for example, his parting comments to the press:

Mr Costa was reluctant yesterday to list any major achievements of his time
in charge of the state's coffers. "I'm more proud of the fact that silly
decisions were stopped than of anything positive," he said. "I managed to
diminish the gap between revenues and expenses".

And, well, here's another reason why I like him:

But Mr Costa did not spare himself when it came to stinginess with the
public purse. He did not use a business card or a driver and never took a
taxpayer-funded trip overseas.
A former union boss who ended up reviled by the unions, Mr Costa, 52, will qualify for superannuation worth about $90,000 each year when he turns 55.

I don't share his overt environmental scepticism, but I rather love his parting shot at the Greens:

He dismissed the idea of writing a memoir -- claiming he did not have the
requisite "sob story" for chapter one -- but repeated his threat to write a book
called I'm Fat, Stupid and Ugly -- What's the Government Doing About It?

And what about a last piece of advice for the NSW Greens, with
whom he exchanged many barbs during question time?

"If they're going to practise religion, they should pick one of
the big three," he said. "Those are going to be around a lot longer than their
brand."

I think this is a left-wing politician that even our very own local reactionary might like.

Recycling

2008-09-23T09:03:00.002+08:00

The women standing at the exit gates to MTR stations waiting to take passengers' unwanted newspapers seem to be growing more numerous - and younger. Is it a sign that things are getting even tougher for HK's underpaid underclass (as if that were possible)?

Interestingly, they seem to be getting more aggressive, too. One of the newer women at Mong Kok actually snatched a paper out of one lady's hands the other day. They haven't tried that on me yet. I always feel guilty as I attempt to escape their probing stares. I like to keep the paper to read at lunch and so, as much as I want to support their money raising efforts, I look the other way and keep on walking, clutching my paper tight as I go.

It's a guilty way to start the day.

Safety last

2008-09-21T23:56:00.003+08:00

I spotted this guy removing bamboo scaffolding high over Kings Road in North Point yesterday. You'll be relieved to learn he was wearing a harness...

...that wasn't attached to anything.

Digging myself deeper

2008-09-21T23:11:00.002+08:00

Marc Ambinder, 19 September:

Sarah Palin continues to draw enormous crowds and continues to overshadow her running mate to some degree. The bloom is off the rose (the fur is off the moose?); we know the basic outline of her political footprint; Palin helped with the base and not so much with anyone else.

Me, 8 September:

She's still a liability for McCain with the majority of Americans who have been unhappy with the past 8 years and who vote on something more substantial than religious identity.

I think I'm going to start re-stating my view every week. A lot of religious nuttery is not going to be enough for McCain to win this thing. Thank ~~God~~ the common sense of the American people.

Post of pessimism

2008-09-21T19:26:00.002+08:00

Things have been in something of a tumult of late following our decision to head back to Australia earlier than previously planned. I've been doing a great deal of talking with friends and family (and even more thinking in private) about what we should do and when we should do it. My happiness at the thought of going back is tinged by a wide range of uncertainties regarding where we should go, what T is going to do and, ultimately, what I'm going to do.

An old boss of mine had a wonderful saying about the job it was that we did: we manage other people's expectations.

Recently, I've been busy trying to manage my own expectations and, in the process, I've been having some wild swings between pessimism and unrealistic ambition.

Let's deal with the pessimism first. Because of the financial problems encountered by his family's business, T has been unable to save the money he needed to establish his coffee shop/cafe back in Australia. In fact, things have been so bad for the company that he has only been paid twice this year and has already given his mum a very large percentage of the money he had been saving. We have been using my, already meager, salary to get by on and that means there hasn't been much room for me to save - especially when the trip to Bangkok is factored in. Overall, HK has been a financial disaster for me personally: I was unemployed for my first 7 months here and then, after I was employed, it was on a salary around 40% of what I was making back home.

This didn't necessarily need to be a disaster. T's salary was not small and it made sense for us to come here on the promise that he would receive it at the end of each month. He could bank most of it and then take it back to Oz to start his business. That, of course, has not come to pass, which means that thoughts must now turn to finding work in Australia.

I'm not really going to go into specifics on the blog, but I will say that I worry about T's happiness working in Australia and I worry that he may be something of a 'job snob': unwilling to start at the bottom of his chosen profession and work his way up. And, well, perhaps I am a martyr, but I don't want T to feel in Australia the way I feel in HK. It could be difficult for him and I hope it's not.

I hope that he discovers the joy of independent earnings, of not owing his living to family and of looking at the things he achieves and appreciating that he alone is responsible for them. Given my exposure to similarly privileged offspring in HK, it seems an experience that most are not keen on. If they'd only give it a go, I'm sure they would find it... liberating. (I should probably say T is much independent than most, so I believe he will manage to do it).

Of course, I have my own worries on the job front. Teaching is the easiest job (intellectually) that I have ever taken on (I'm going to write more about my experiences this week, as I find this an interesting topic), and it's hardly relevant to me back in Australia. I will withhold judgment for now, but in my pessimistic moods I can't help but feel that HK has been a disaster for my career and employability, too. It's hard to say, of course, because I haven't really applied for many jobs yet, but it seems unlikely to me that I will be able to go back at the same level and pay that I was on before I came here.

That being said, I have found some good jobs to apply for; jobs that I feel I am more than capable of doing well. The challenge is to convince the people doing the hiring...

Maybe I'll leave the unrealistic ambitions to another post for another time. Writing this post of pessimism has been rewardingly cathartic and I've got a few more applications to finish.

Old birds

2008-09-19T23:44:00.002+08:00

Qantas takes delivery of its first A380 today. The plane has been named in honour of Australian aviation pioneer Nancy Bird-Walton. It's a pity, then, that whoever applied the name to Qantas' shiny new jet put that hyphen in the wrong spot.

Nancy-Bird? (It's a great photo - the Qantas A380 is the best looking yet).

That's a bit disrespectful to the, err, old bird.

Turtle jelly

2008-09-18T09:20:00.005+08:00

Yes, yes... cultural differences and all that: it's good, but it's not enough to explain the turtle jelly advertisement currently bombarding patrons of the MTR East Line. It starts off conventionally enough - a pretty young thing talking to some dude as they sit, relaxed, on a cheap looking set. But what's up with the dude? Why does he look like a middle-aged pr0n director, pencil thin waxy moustache and all? And the pink shirt under the white linen jacket doesn't do much to allay my suspicion that when he's not boiling turtles, he's directing pretty young things on a set similar to the one in the ad...

Anyway, the turtles.

Turtles make my cute list. I'm not too embarrassed to admit that I have a cute list or even that the humble turtle is on it. Of course, simply being on the list doesn't protect an animal from my carnivorous cravings, but it does mean I'll enjoy eating it much less than I would otherwise.

It's not so much the eating of turtles that freaks me out, by the way, it's the advertisement itself.

After leaving the set, pr0n man and the PYT are on location in what appears to be a turtle farm, as the cute animals do cute things. Pr0n man picks up one of the animals and flips it over, no doubt pointing out all the meaty goodness that will soon be extracted. Before we can shed a tear for what is about to befall the turtles, we're in a factory and the turtles, now dead, have been chopped open. Pr0n man has picked up a shell and is explaining to the PYT - still smiling, still pretty - more about the meaty goodness. The camera lingers on the meat encrusted shell and the scene fades, replaced by a shot of a large vat filled with turtle shells floating in a greenish liquid. A lab coat equipped worker is stirring the shells around with a large ladle.

Yummy.

The final scene of the advertisement must have been directed by pr0n man himself - it's definitely the money shot. Hundreds of little bowls are filled by high pressure shots of... turtle juice. It's an ejaculatory triumph.

It's not that I think we shouldn't eat cute animals. It's just, well, I don't know of any other place in the world where they would show in an advertisement - in so much detail - how they turn cute animals into (allegedly healthy) snacks.

Moon cake avoidance

2008-09-17T15:01:00.000+08:00

Fumier might poke fun at the Mooncake festival family obligation obligations, but for those of us with independent other halves (like mine), the mid-Autumn festival was great. T successfully avoided family gatherings, so we headed into Mong Kok on Sunday night and it was wonderfully deserted. Sure, a few of the stores had closed early, but many were still open (and surprisingly empty). What’s more, there was no wait for a table at our favourite Japanese restaurant – the first time that’s ever happened.

Hong Kong needs more of these festivals in order to get people off the streets and make life better for those of us who can dodge obligated attendance at dinners!

Economic crisis

2008-09-17T12:58:00.001+08:00

I’ve recently discovered a useful measure against which I can judge the severity of the shocks currently besieging the international economy – my neighbour’s television viewing habits. The neighbours had Bloomberg locked in (loudly) until very late last night. No doubt they were freaked out by the 5% fall in the Hang Seng. I’ve noticed that they only tend to watch the finance channels when share markets have had bad days, so they serve as something like my financial advisors these days – if all is well, they’ll be playing their assortment of musical instruments; if all is not well, they’ll be watching Bloomberg.

I don’t know why, but I was surprised when I first heard Bloomberg coming from their apartment a few months ago. I had just supposed that everyone living in the apartment complex was poor, given the low rent, and couldn’t afford to dabble in shares. My view was obviously a little naïve.

Palin going as cold as her state

2008-09-16T23:12:00.002+08:00

I know that my earlier prediction about John McCain had lost the election by choosing Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential nominee may have seemed a bit rash, but I stand by my initial argument and note this:

The Research 2000 poll now has Palin's favorability-unfavorability scores at 45-44 -- just a +1. Six days ago, when the poll, launched, she was at a 52-35, a +17.

Now that America's getting a closer look at her, I think the voting public are beginning to re-assess their enthusiasm.

Don't worry

2008-09-12T11:09:00.000+08:00

Marc Ambinder, possibly the best election blogger out there, is reporting that the Obama campaign thinks everyone should calm down. If you're panicking about the election, then perhaps you should have a read and make yourself feel a little better.

Chicago Democrats notice that John McCain is doing better in traditionally Republican states outside of the West; that an engaged Republican base changes the map, that Obama is winning right now in every state that John Kerry won plus Iowa and New Mexico, and that the remaining electoral votes he needs could come from Nevada. Or Colorado. Or Montana. Or Virginia. The fundamentals are strong; the election will turn back to the economy; everything is OK. The campaign is about Barack Obama versus John McCain, and on November 4, it will be about Barack Obama and John McCain.

Has the Large Hadron Collector destroyed the world yet?

2008-09-12T08:39:00.000+08:00

For those of you, like me, who are deeply concerned about the Earth's destruction at the hands of the Large Hadron Collider, this website is an indispensable tool for keeping updated on the status of the planet.

The people at that website are doing important work.

Dollar tank

2008-09-11T22:53:00.002+08:00

The Australian dollar's continued fall in value against the local currency is good news for my morale - my current salary looks slightly less awful compared to my old salary back in Oz. Even better, the price of my Thai holiday keeps getting lower, because I paid for it using my Australian credit card back when the Aussie dollar was worth much more. It's also nice because my savings for my eventual return home keep going up in value...

Speaking of the return home, there has been much discussion on this front of late. We're still undecided, but recently agreed we will leave no later than March next year and possibly much sooner depending upon the financial performance of T's company.

The Palin reading list

2008-09-11T21:01:00.002+08:00

I don't have a guilty conscience, incidentally.

Straight lines

2008-09-11T09:22:00.000+08:00

Casting back the curtains in my spare room yesterday morning, I was confronted by this mass rally at the local secondary school. Look at them: triumphant in their will. They were standing there for a surprising amount of time, too, which was an impressive accomplishment given how uncomfortably humid it was.

Obamarama

2008-09-10T13:22:00.000+08:00

I make no apologies for the blatant Obama-worship this blog is now indulging in.

Would you live here?

2008-09-10T12:32:00.001+08:00

Couldn't they have checked the English meaning before naming their new complex?

Enriching the enriched

2008-09-10T08:21:00.000+08:00

David Frum, writing in the New York Times has made some observations about how voting patterns in the US are affected by income inequality. This paragraph stood out in particular and seems to have some correlations with life for the poor (and the rich) here in HK:

It's widely understood that abundant low-skilled immigration hurts lower America by reducing wages. As the National Research Council noted in its comprehensive 1997 report: "If the wage of domestic unskilled workers did not fall, no domestic worker (unskilled or skilled) would gain or lose, and there would be no net domestic gain from immigration." In other words, immigration is good for America as a whole only because -- and only to the extent that -- it is bad for the poorest Americans. Conversely, low-skilled immigration enriches upper America, lowering the price of personal services like landscaping and restaurant meals. And by holding down wages, immigration makes the business investments of upper America more profitable.

Jealous

2008-09-10T03:33:00.000+08:00

The [New Zealand] Air Force has made an embarrassing apology after an Australian C-17 transport planes was vandalised.
The Globemaster was parked at Whenuapai Air Base when it was tagged with a Nazi swastika last week.
The Air Force has admitted the security blunder after a photo of the jet appeared in the New Zealand Herald.
Squadron Leader Glenn Davis says it is clear the level of security at the base is not up-to-date and a review is underway. He says police are taking the incident very seriously.

The Kiwis are just jealous because they don't actually have an air force any more.

Plonkers with popped collars

2008-09-09T21:17:00.003+08:00

I seem to recall that popped collars were popular with males aged between17 and 23 for a few months back in 2003. As these candidates from the Civic Party are not within that age group - and this is not 2003 - I am at a loss to explain why they would choose to make themselves look like such plonkers (to borrow a Cecilieism) in their campaign material.

Safety first

2008-09-08T19:57:00.004+08:00

Angle-grinding, welding and jack-hammering are just a small smattering of the wholesome activities you can find every day on Hong Kong's sidewalks. Anywhere else in the world might consider these activities a little unsafe for the throngs of people clambering by, but HK's manual labourers are the safest available, able to deftly control their equipment in ways no others can.

Indeed, their commitment to safety is ably demonstrated in this picture below. Note the planks of wood carefully placed in the middle of the sidewalk and note, too, the rusty nails protruding upwards just waiting for your foot, or someone else's, to impale itself on.

On fire

2008-09-07T09:41:00.001+08:00

Let's have some Joe Biden goodness this morning, as he lays into McCain-Palin.

I need some cheering up after the results of Western Australia's election yesterday...

What baggage?

2008-09-05T23:07:00.002+08:00

Ulaca asked "what baggage"?

There's too much whacked-out religious weirdness associated with this woman for her to appeal to those outside the 'base' of the Republican party. In these two video clips you can see that she clearly believes that all governing matters are simply a task of interpreting God's will. Even oil companies' plans to build pipelines become issues through which 'God's will' can be assured through praying.

Is this woman serious? How does she deal with political reality when it deviates from her (or her church's) interpretation of the will of God? We've already had eight years of a president who has trouble coping with reality when it turns out to be a whole lot less rosier than he had been led to believe, and we know (most) Americans don't want more of the same.

I know that many would argue that overt religious fervor does not count as 'baggage' in the US political system, but that's only true up to a point. Some of the things they talk about on stage are pretty weird: Alaska to become a refuge for the lower 48 following the rapture. Does this mean Palin will lobby for the funding of refugee shelters in her home state?

I think Lexington nails the other problems with Palin, so I'll link to the Economist and go to bed...

Palin

2008-09-05T08:46:00.006+08:00

Marc Ambinder is reporting that the Obama campaign raised US$8 million in the hours following Palin's speech. Yes, she has fired up the hard-core evangelical base of the Republican Party, but she will probably do little to appeal to those moderates and independent voters who remain undecided. And, regardless of her broader appeal, she's definitely fired up the Dems. In many ways McCain's choice of Palin shows very clearly the difficult position he found himself in. Widely despised by the Republican 'base', he's had to find a way prod them into supporting him. Palin is the way he intends to do this.

Firing up the base was the way Bush won in 2000 and 2004 (it's why his margins were so small - he did little to appeal to anyone else), but it's silly to think that this strategy will work again in 2008. Most Americans think their country is on the wrong track and if Obama can keep painting a prospective McCain presidency as merely a third Bush term, then I think he stands a good chance of winning.

I still think that Palin's choice as VP candidate will do wonders for Obama simply because she comes with plenty of baggage that McCain's people were not aware of because she wasn't put through a vet of her background. How's that for informed decision making?

And my pick for speech of the convention season is John Kerry's effort at the DNC last week.

Half froth, half shit

2008-09-04T23:30:00.004+08:00

Obviously, I got a little carried away a few weeks ago when I suggested that something earth-shatteringly surprising had happened: Pacific Coffee had employed someone capable of making drinkable coffee. I had only just grown accustomed to sipping an adequate latte in the morning, when the talented barista was shipped off to parts unknown and replaced by a fearsome looking duo (kind of like the McCain-Palin pairing) incapable of making coffee. Not good, I'm sure you agree, when remembering that they work in a coffe shop.

The XY half of this duo is a truly astonishing creature - a fine example of a local who thinks all communication must be conducted at maximum decibels. His uncanny resemblance to Loud Howard of the Dilbert comic strips is an added bonus.

The XX half, the coffee wench, dished up this to me this morning:
A latte where half the cup was air-bubble infested froth (they can't even do froth right). After scooping it onto the saucer (and taking the photo), I took the coffee back and politely suggested that perhaps they had accidentally served me a practice coffee. Loud Howard looked pretty pissed at me, but I got a new and better coffee.

And I was nice and polite about it, too. The stupid old western women I see around the place all the time could learn from my example!

Privacy

2008-09-03T12:47:00.000+08:00

Even though it’s been an issue that I’ve been aware of for some time, it was recently made very obvious to me the lack of privacy afforded to people living in Hong Kong. The ever present security guards in my building are a good example. Whenever friends come over, I’m always subjected to a scrutinizing glare and if T is with us, he will be asked to identify the new arrival. Is it really any of their business? If the guest is clearly accompanied, do they need to ask questions? And what do they think the answer is going to be – “Oh no, I don’t know this guy, but he told me he’s here to terrorise the old folks on the 22nd floor”.

The lack of privacy has been further reinforced during recent visits to Deer Hill Bay where security reaches paranoid levels of ridiculousness. Guards surround cars when they approach the front gates and walk patrols around the grounds with menacingly large German Shepherd dogs. A visit to the parking office, which seems to double as security HQ, reveals an alarmingly large number of security cameras through which guards can observe residents. I’d think long and hard before taking a romantic stroll around the place, given the possibility of the voyeuristic guards monitoring my progress.

I was recently talking with one middle-aged local woman who told me about the dangers of owning a standalone home in HK, what with all the ‘IIs’ (illegal immigrants) lurking in the jungle waiting to attack unsuspecting rich people. It’s not only those living out the in the sticks who seem worried, however. Walking through Kowloon Tong recently, I was shocked by the number of housing compounds surrounded by high walls topped with layers of barbed (and possibly razor) wire.

It all seems a bit silly if you ask me.

Tiled exterior

2008-08-30T01:38:00.002+08:00

I'm drunk and have been awake since 5:30 on Friday morning (and have work very early this morning), but did McCain just do what I think he did? Has he, in fact, just handed Obama the election? A few days ago, I was willing to agree with Spike's conclusion that McCain was on his way to winning, but now I'm not so sure. I think he's blown it by choosing a vice presidential candidate solely on expedient political opportunity. A Harriet Miers moment, as Andrew Sullivan is saying.

In other news, we partied this evening at the supposedly luxurious Deer Hill Bay in Tai Po. Sure, a house there might cost HK$70 million (so I am told), but it's still a "bathroom-tile-plated 3rd world shantytown" (an observation so astute, it needs to be elevated out of the comments section). Someone - anyone - please explain HK's love for the tiled building exterior, especially when it doesn't seem to weather so well in HK's humid climate.

While you're at it, explain why McCain thinks he can win with Sarah Palin at his side.

Travel

2008-08-29T12:27:00.003+08:00

Here’s some pictures from my recent stay in Bangkok. As a Friday bonus(?), I’ve included the clearest picture of myself yet to appear on this blog as well as the first appearance by T (although he is wearing those unfortunate pants provided to immodestly dressed tourists at the Grand Palace).

Our time in Bangkok was mostly about relaxing and catching up with some old university friends. It was the first time I had been out of Hong Kong in over nine months (excluding brief excursions to Macau) and my first break in four months from working six days a week. You might think, incidentally, that taking three days off (unpaid) would not be a big deal, but one of my Chinese co-workers seemed most unimpressed that I would dare to take time off before the conclusion of my 12 month contract. Really – the sooner I’m working in the civilized world again, the better.
Anyway, my time in Bangkok left me convinced that HK has a few things to learn from its southerly neighbour:

-Colourful taxis rock. The taxi stands looked like giant bowls of fruit mentos, with purple, green, blue, pink and many other colours. The taxi drivers are, however, even scarier than their HK counterparts, although still better than those in the mainland.

-Shopping malls that sell things for the average man are rather useful. Shopping in HK is usually a depressing experience if you’re not interested in buying ‘luxury goods’. Thankfully, Bangkok had heaps of reasonably priced stores and goods in the couple of malls we went into. We spent up big.

-Big department stores are also rather useful. I actually managed to buy shoes in my size that weren’t hideous American hip-hop rubbish. I’ve documented my struggle to find nice shoes in HK on this blog in the past, so regular readers will probably appreciate that the purchase of shoes was alone worth the trip to Bangkok. This raises a bigger question – does HK deserve to retain its crown as an alleged shopping paradise?

-Outdoor dining is fantastic. Come on HK, the outside isn’t that scary!

-ATMs everywhere willing to dispense cash when needed! Amazing technology.

I’m sure nobody is surprised to learn that the Peninsula was fantastic in most conceivable ways. So fantastic, in fact, that a birthday cake for T was waiting when we returned to the room on Monday evening. I’d meant to ask for a cake before arriving, but had forgotten to do it, so the appearance of the cake made me look like the best boyfriend ever. I am always very grateful when somebody else does all the hard work of making me look good.

Joyce, now that your blog has turned into an employment agency for journalists, find me a travel writing job!

One night in Bangkok

2008-08-25T09:53:00.003+08:00

I'm in Bangkok for the next few days, so posting may be intermittent.

The airport was still a bit of a nightmare yesterday morning and I was doubly glad I was flying business class. The queues were much shorter and everything went very smoothly! We were in one of the old business cabins, which was both good and bad, as the old cabin seems to have a nicer layout but everything inside seemed a bit warn out. The service was rather strange, too. We had a European woman (French I think) who seemed a bit unsure of herself; she kept dropping things and seemed a bit disorganised. I'm increasingly underwhelemed by Cathay and the business class experience reinforced my view.

Bangkok itself is great, so far. The people are so friendly, the food is great (though my peanut problems are limiting our choices) and the nightlife rocks. I think we're going to have a lot fun.

Pictures to follow.

Typhoon

2008-08-22T11:28:00.003+08:00

It's starting to get rather windy out there. I just (stupidly) went downstairs to the Park'n'Shop (still open) and some little old ladies were having heaps of trouble getting the door into the shopping centre open. The wind gusts were much stronger than their biceps.

Unfortunately the shelves were pretty bare in the supermarket, so I've had to make do with some rather crappy bread and a Twix bar.

Anyone else's local shops still open today?

Too tattooed to be respectable

2008-08-21T08:37:00.002+08:00

In addition to promising a few weeks ago to tell the tale of my brush with local organised crime, I also promised to relate the time when an attempt to intimidate a colleague and I was made by some members of an organised crime group. But now that I’ve typed the epic out, it seems to me like my re-telling doesn’t adequately convey the weirdness of what happened or how unsettled I was afterwards. Anyway, now that I’ve written it, I think it would be a waste not to post it, so here is my Australian brush with organized crime:

Before moving to HK, I had the rather more enjoyable and intellectually stimulating (and financially rewarding) job of working on organised crime investigations. I wasn't a cop, but I did work for a federal agency that coordinated investigations of serious organised crime groups. I had moved into this job after relocating to Sydney and had hoped that, if I had been able to work there long enough, I would have been in good stead to find a job here in HK. Unfortunately, we moved here much earlier than planned and that left me without the necessary skills, experience or contacts required to break into the security industry here.

I worked mainly in the serious and organised fraud area. My main responsibility was to pre-empt requests from our operations guys and get out amongst Australia's corporations and collect the kind of data that they were looking for. Sometimes we would serve warrants to get what we wanted (always fun) and at other times we would build up a more informal relationship by serving as conduits for information. I had been in the job for a little while and had been working my way down the list of big victims of fraud - banks, insurers and telcos.

We had received the message from on high that our big-wigs wanted better relationships built with the retail sector, and so I began to put out feelers to various fraud managers at a number of companies. Things went quite well until I established contact with one particular company's fraud manager.

I think it's fair to say that particular ethnic groups tend to be over-represented as perpetrators of certain crime types. In Australia, organised fraud efforts tend to be the domain of certain people from one Middle Eastern country. I was quite surprised when I first spoke to this company's fraud manager to discover that he was from the region. We organised for a colleague and I to come to the company's head office, which was in Sydney's CBD, and have a chat about our organisation and its role in combating serious fraud activities.

The morning of our meeting, I received a phone call from the fraud manager asking if it would be possible to change the location of our meeting to the company's old head office above one of its stores in Sydney's west. This didn't seem like a major problem and I agreed to the request. I even joked to my colleague that being so far away meant we could spend more time out of the office (I always think like a public servant!).

I should probably add that my colleague was a short, tough woman of Greek extraction. A former NSW police officer, she had worked on several organised crime investigations and was an experienced officer.

We made our way to the store and identified ourselves (we were 'credentialled' and, yes, I did have a badge). We were asked to wait, so we began to browse around the store. As we moved further from the staff members, my colleague warned me that there appeared to be several motorcycle gang members casting more than a casual eye over us. I joked that I didn't think it was my blue striped tie they were interested in. My colleague didn't laugh.

Eventually, we were met by the esteemed fraud manager. He was about as tall as me, in his late 20s, a little too tattooed to be entirely respectable, and hugely muscular. And then the fun began. He explained that they had only recently moved to their new offices in the city and that he and and his colleagues were needed at the old location to sort out files. This, apparently, explained the sudden venue change.

We walked upstairs to a dark and deserted maze of office corridors. Papers were scattered on the floor and old office furniture had been left upturned all over the place. After taking us on what seemed like a highly circuitous route through the dark corridors, we arrived in the conference room and were greeted by three other rather tough looking gentlemen. Once again, there were too many tattoos and open necked shirts on display to suggest that these guys were respectable.

Once we had sat down, the fraud manager asked to see our ID, which we presented to him. He wrote down our badge numbers and then asked to see our drivers’ licenses. My colleague asked him why he wanted to see them and he replied that he wanted to record further identity details. We refused to hand those over (Australian licenses have addresses on them) and my colleague suggested that if he was not satisfied we had adequately identified ourselves, we could terminate the meeting and uniformed representatives could come back at a less convenient time.

I was rather hoping that he would agree to the suggestion. It’s hard for me to adequately convey the strangeness of the situation we had found ourselves in. We were in conference room in a deserted and darkened office, there were some rather mean looking heavies standing around below and the people we were meeting with were clearly not happy to see us. Even the exchange of business cards had been quite odd. Two of the gentleman present literally through their cards at us.

Normally, fraud managers – especially those working lower down the corporate world (i.e. the medium size retailers) – were happy to see that law enforcement was taking an interest in their problems. These guys were hostile. Their demands for further identification were just the beginning.

They were very reluctant to talk to us about their company’s experience of fraud. I can remember telling them at one point that their reluctance to disclose during our meeting was irrelevant as we would likely be back with a warrant later on. They got quite uppity about that but I didn’t especially care. It was nice to hit back at them and they obviously were too stupid to realize that their behavior had only helped to generate the suspicion of the agency for which I worked.

Eventually, after talking in circles for a while, the meeting ended and my colleague and I got the hell away from there.

When I got back to the office, I reported the incident to my senior manager in Canberra who set in motion some background checks of the gentlemen we had just met. It turns out the NSW Police had had a few unfortunate encounters with the fraud manager and, indeed, his record noted that he seemed pre-disposed to disliking police (as well as working ‘security’ for some unpleasant types). We had, rather inadvertently stumbled upon a little haven of some nasty organized crime groups.

Now, you might think that we would have checked this guy’s background before meeting him, but I had spent the previous six months going to meetings very similar to this one and had never encountered any trouble. Indeed, the company he worked for was not particularly small and is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. We just didn’t expect this to happen.

Unfortunately, I don’t really know what happened in the end. The investigation was ongoing when I moved here.

This is a rubbish post

2008-08-18T03:33:00.000+08:00

I wouldn't normally bother posting the following picture of a simple mistake with a preposition on a sign in the car park under my house. But, as you can see, whoever created the sign got the preposition right on one side (while stuffing up the singular/plural) and got the preposition wrong on the other (while getting the plural correct).

And that makes no sense!

Spot the errors

2008-08-17T20:07:00.004+08:00

Being only an intermittent reader of the SCMP, I'm not sure if today's effort in the letters' page is a rare occurrence or if the incoherence and terrible grammar displayed by this letter is something that sneaks onto the pages all the time.

I like millions of others am watching TVB's coverage of the Olympics.

I cannot express enough how disappointed I am with the station's commentary in English. I know your the commentators are doing the best they can, but they are not up to this monumental task. I implore TVB, before it is too late to get the American network feed. The American commentators do the best job in the world.

They bring in experts from different sports who are able to give viewers background and also tell people about different events and individual athletes. With the commentators we have we are often left in the dark. This is a TV station location in the SAR in China.

It should be providing better coverage.

We are not doing justice to China's spectacular staging of what is turning out to be a spectacular Olympics. What does that say about us? What we need are commentators who can tell us the stories of these great athletes and give us the detailed background we need on each sport.

That can only be done by professions in these different sports. Please, TVB, before it is too late buy the American feed.

There's also the problem of the actual content of the letter - I wonder if Mr Loeb has considered the fact that NBC, alleged providers of the world's best Olympics coverage, do not show the games live is the US, so the chances of getting a live feed here would be rather remote.

Anyway, if this is the standard of the editors working at the SCMP, then maybe I should send them my CV? I'm hardly a 'grammarian', but I think I know my way around a well-placed comma (which is something that this letter could use, at the very least) better than the people who allowed this to get published!

Strange, intolerant women

2008-08-14T20:52:00.002+08:00

If I was going to develop a list of things that I might give a shit about, I think the integrity of my local supermarket's fruit juice aisle would rank fairly low compared to, for example, Bottega Veneta's latest collections (pretty low, in other words). Unfortunately for a poor employee at Kowloon Tong's Taste this evening, one European woman does very much give a shit about her local juice aisle.

So much so that she was getting very red faced as she kept repeating "this isn't juice, it's vinaigrette" to the employee. The poor girl she'd cornered just gave her a blank-faced stare, which seemed to anger the woman even more. As I left the aisle (I didn't want to stare too long) the enraged one was removing the bottles from the shelf and putting them on the floor.

How do these strange, intolerant women end up here?

This will keep things clean

2008-08-12T21:51:00.003+08:00

This is the ubiquitous anti-money laundering poster that I was talking about recently. It's prominently displayed at all of the entrances to the housing estate where I live.

It's a rather bizarre thing to be advertising all the way out here in the New Territories, so I am willing to assume that there's some kind of problem with local poor people supplementing their incomes by laundering money for the local crime syndicates.

Olympic bush

2008-08-11T20:14:00.003+08:00

Not long to go now, world.

Inane olympic coverage

2008-08-10T21:52:00.002+08:00

I'm afraid that I'm not one of those sneering bloggers who dismisses the Olympics as an irrelevance or as a diversion for the lower classes. I rather enjoy the Olympics; the spirit of competition they embody and the striving for excellence that they represent.

Naturally, I am put off by the Chinese government's rhetoric and I wonder why, if the Games are only about the games and political messages are off limit, the Chinese government seems determined to use the Olympics to make a massive political statement about the country's 'arrival' on the world scene and its growing power and influence.

These are, of course, not original thoughts about the Olympics and so I won't bore you with my opinion on these matters. Smarter people are writing more cogent analyses than I am, so consider my rumination on the Olympics over.

Instead, I think I might complain about the commentators on TVB. Watching the trap shooting today, three of them talked and joked their way through the competition without really providing any meaningful comment on what was happening (according to T). I've noticed this when flicking between the channels - the Chinese commentators seem unable to leave a quiet moment hang. All air time must be filled! No comment is too inane.

At Cantopopped, the same is true for the posts.

Shocked

2008-08-08T08:48:00.004+08:00

There's been a shocking development at the Pacific Coffee in Mong Kok where I regularly go for my morning caffeine hit: a person has been hired who knows how to make good coffee and, I suspect, who may actually drink coffee in his spare time.

What next - democracy for HK?

Toiling in the typhoon

2008-08-07T12:38:00.003+08:00

Here's what I don't understand about typhoons and working in HK:

If it's too dangerous for office workers to go to the office and for kids to go to school, why is it safe enough for those in the retail or restaurant business to go to work? My local Park'N'Shop was open all day yesterday, as were the many restaurants in the shopping centre downstairs. Talking to a waiter at the Japanese restaurant where we had lunch, he said that he was called to come in and given a $50 taxi voucher to cover for the lack of buses. He received no bonus for his trouble.

Yet more proof that it sucks to be a member of the working poor in HK. If you want decent working conditions and pay, kids, best to get yourself into university (pity your government won't fund enough school places to make it possible, though).

Seriously, does anyone know why this double standard (yet another) exists?

Enthusiasm dabbed

2008-08-06T20:33:00.000+08:00

My mother-in-law loves routine. So much so that her weekends appear a little too much like a real life version of Groundhog Day. On Saturdays and Sundays at exactly 1PM, she and the family can be found at one particular restaurant here in Tai Po having dim sum. Everyone, including m-i-l, agrees that the restaurant is terrible. The food is not especially nice, the waiters look a little too much like toilet cleaners who simply change uniforms when they turn up at the restaurant, and they always deliver the wrong dishes and drinks to the table. In fact, any sophisticated(?) HK Island resident who ate there would likely have their New Territories prejudices confirmed.

On Sunday, there was an ancient gentleman at the table behind me who had been wheeled out by his kids for some good ol' fashioned Chinese family obligation giving. Still in his pyjamas, he really looked like he should have been left at home, and after he started to cough up most of his right lung, he really sounded like he should have, too.

There are a few things about this insistence upon routine that I (and also, thankfully, T) don't get. Firstly, the restaurant is rubbish and everyone agrees. It's not even especially cheap, yet every weekend they go there at least twice and any suggestion that they go somewhere else is met with a raised eyebrow of suspicion. Secondly, the m-i-l won't be budged from her ways. The family wastes most of its weekends sitting around waiting for 1PM and then they go to the restaurant, spend a miserable hour eating the even more miserable food, and realise that most of the day has already gone.

As if the bad food, dodgy service and questionable clientele were not enough, I now have one more reason to avoid going there: the entire place was festooned in Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of HK (DAB) (the local pro-Beijing party) posters and banners. Non-HK readers might not know that it's election season here at the moment, with multiple parties jockeying for votes and seats in the legislature. If you were new to HK and you happened to only look at this one particular restaurant, you could be forgiven for thinking that there was only one political party here, such is the restaurant's enthusiasm for the DAB.

Not coincidentally, my enthusiasm for never eating there again has never been higher.

Transitioned to toilet cleaning

2008-08-05T21:33:00.004+08:00

Despite being a reasonably wealthy place, HK does seem to enjoy hanging onto a few unfortunate traditions from its less prosperous past. You see, there aren't enough spaces in HK's secondary education system for all the students who are both willing and able to study for university entrance exams in senior secondary schools. This, I always thought, was the hallmark of African countries in the 50s - Upper Crapcrackland can't afford to educate everyone, so it sends its best and brightest off to Oxbridge in the hope they will return to enlighten the rest of the population.

So, 106,770 students sat the exams earlier this year. 55,260 of them achieved results that would enable them to move onto senior secondary school. Unfortunately, there are only 32,620 places available for students. Bad luck to the the 23,000 or so who are both willing and able to keep studying: their government won't facilitate their transition from HK's third-world services economy by providing them with the education they need to get a decent job. Instead, they'll be serving grand-day lar-tays in Starbucks until they transition to cleaning toilets in malls designed for HK's ever dwindling (though ever richer) supply of uber-wealthy.

Isn't education about levelling the playing field? About giving people the opportunity to improve their lots in life? Why would any government limit these opportunities by not meeting demand with adequate supply? Or am I missing something entirely? Is this all part of some clever plan?

Funds funnel

2008-07-31T22:23:00.004+08:00

Anti-money laundering posters have recently appeared in the various entries to my housing estate. I'm forced to wonder why they need them unless there's some kind of problem with money laundering around the place.

The pattern of criminality here in HK is becoming clearer the longer I stay here. Suddenly, I know what all those indolent gentlemen who play 'go' in the communal areas at night do during the day: run service businesses and quietly funnel money back to the bad guys.

Or am I reading too much into this?

Clearer now

2008-07-30T22:53:00.003+08:00

Right, well, now that that issue's been (err) clarified by the ~~propaganda office~~ boffins, I guess the athletes can (double err) breathe easy now.

Here's a question for you: who on Earth actually buys the China Daily? I would guess that the only Westerners interested in reading it would be the China analysts (in government and in the private sector) trying to discern the government's position(s) on matters great and small.

Breathe this!

2008-07-30T22:25:00.006+08:00

My non-HK readers may not know that we endured the most pollutingly bad day, like, ever on Monday. According to the politically controlled boffins at the Environmental Pissalloverit Department (that would be the EPD), we suffered through a reading of 202 pollutions at one point.

Here's a photo taken from my place on the day. Behind the buildings, you should be able to see the blue sea and, beyond that, lush green mountains.

Oooh - I like how the haze blends in with the white background of the blog. Where does the photo begin and where does it end?? UPDATE: At the border blogger puts around the picture, I suppose...

Insecure tycoon

2008-07-30T09:37:00.004+08:00

Hong Kong's insecurities have not gone unnoticed it seems. Last week, the SCMP's business gossip column (Lai See - possibly the worst such column I have ever read) was relaying the thoughts of an unnamed tycoon on the latest Batman film. The tycoon laments that he was not given any acknowledgement in the film's credits (I'm not exactly sure what the tycoon thinks his role was!) and then complains that HK's more "spectacular buildings" were only on screen for a few seconds. I think the tycoons should be grateful that none of the plentiful craptacular buildings they insist on constructing here were given prominence. They might have had something to complain about if Batman had been jumping from the roof of a housing estate development in Kowloon.

To cap it all off, the tycoon then complains that HK security forces are portrayed in the film as stupid. I thought everyone just accepted that the HK police force is stupid. You can't blame the film for portraying the police in its natural state.

I ignored the original Lai See column, but thought it rather interesting when it was picked up in Business Week. Nothing like broadcasting your insecurities to the world!

Distracted driver

2008-07-28T18:48:00.003+08:00

I think it's safe to say that I just survived a taxi ride with the most distracted taxi driver in Hong Kong. He seemed to be somewhere else, as every time the lights turned to green there would be at least a two or second pause before his foot hit the accelerator. His relaxed attitude to braking was more concerning, however, as he seemed shocked every time he had to stop. We had a few lurching, screeching halts following some close calls with red lights and other traffic...

Am about to watch Wall-E, the new Pixar film. I hope it's as good as I have been led to believe.

UPDATE: Not so good, unfortunately.

The Chinese way

2008-07-26T20:43:00.004+08:00

So here it is. My organised crime story that I promised last week.

As the 'head teacher' of the Spoilt Brats' English Academy, I serve as the interface between the school's owners and fellow teachers. It's usually not too difficult. A few weeks ago, however, one of the teachers called in sick a few times too many and this raised the ire of the owners. He was nearing the end of his contract and he was suspected of 'chucking a sickie' (as we would say in Australia). When the employee presented his medical certificates, the managers compared his most recent certificates with ones that he had handed in earlier. It was quite clear - even to me - that the certificates were fake. The owners, however, did not know what to do. They had never been particularly fond of him and, in the end, they paid him out of his contract a few weeks early in order to get rid of him.

My advice had been to confront him and find out what had gone on. I had been unhappy with his conduct in relation to some other earlier staffing problems and would have been happy to send him on his way, but I was told that this was not the Chinese way. I couldn't help myself, though, and walking with him from work on his final day, I confronted him about the medical certificates, just so that I could have closure in my own mind. His evasive answers confirmed my suspicions and I left it at that.

A few days later, I was talking with the owners and the subject of the now departed staff member came up. They were quite shocked when I told them that I had confronted him about the certificates ('Australians do things differently'), but were interested to learn that the staff member's responses had more or less confirmed our suspicions about the forgeries. Up until this point in our conversation, things had been going quite normally.

I quite like the owners and I've found them to be quite friendly, although I think they have trouble appreciating that their non-HK staff members have rather different attitudes to and expectations of work than their local employees.

After I had confirmed that our suspicions seemed to be true, the tone of the conversation changed. The owner told me of his other business and the man with whom he is in partnership. That man, apparently, is connected (I forget exactly how - son or brother of the boss) to the second biggest organised crime group (or triad) in HK. The owner told me how the now departed teacher was a 'cockroach' and that he had thought about talking to his business partner to have some heavies pay a visit. The heavies would, the owner told me, then let him choose which leg, right ot left.

I sat there at first in some level of disbelief, but a few earlier comments from others fell into place, as did some information about his past that he doesn't know that I know of, and I was soon reasonably certain that he was telling me the truth. Perhaps he wasn't being truthful about his thoughts of violence, but I could certainly believe he was connected to some unpleasant people. My disbelief quickly gave way to anger. Firstly, I was angry that he would believe that it was okay to ever talk to a staff-member like that and, secondly, that he seemed proud of his closeness to people who derive profit from fear and exploitation and from peddling in others' misery.

I told him that if he was reluctant to have fired the staff member for his transgression, then he should have been even more reluctant to arrage to have his leg(s) broken. What particularly galled me, however, was the hypocricy: who is the real cockroach and whatever happened to the Chinese way? If it's un-Chinese to confront someone, then I'm not convinced that it's Chinese to have someone's leg broken.

Of course, what made this even funnier was that he knew I had worked as an organised crime investigator in Australia and my rather stern reaction to his words had him trying to take them back. Ultimately, even he seemed to realise that he was unconvincing and he left the room without really attempting to come to a natural end to our conversation.

Sometimes I wish that I could make this shit that I write about HK up, but unfortunately it's all real and it's all just a bit iffy.

Mean and tricky

2008-07-24T20:23:00.003+08:00

British people, I was told today by a local acquaintance, are very 'tricky' and should not be trusted. This was not the first time that a local business person had shared this insight with me about the Brits. Indeed, it was just one more racial-observation to add to the ever growing pile of racist bullshit that gets spouted in my vicinity most days. The racism, I might add, is never actually directed at me or any single person. It's always made in the form of general observations about whole countries or ethnicities.

I don't know why so many of the local business people I meet feel so willing to share with their observations of the world's various cultures and, in doing so, reveal themselves to be hypocrites. You see, there's never a hint of irony or self-awareness from those warning me about the Brits and their alleged chicanery, despite the regularity with which those imparting their advice flaunt the laws and regulations designed to regulate their businesses.

In a Hong Kong business person, trickery and sneakiness are virtues to be celebrated and rewarded. In anyone else, these qualities are proof of the moral and ethical inferiority of foreign lands.

Hong Kong people are hard working (or 'very hard working' depending upon the enthusiasm of the speaker) and independently minded. This means, by extension, that everyone else is not. Americans are naive and aggressive. Australians: hard working and dumb. Canadians are unreliable. Japanese: two-faced.

And, yes, I've actually had someone tell me to my face that Australians are dumb. Our women sluts and our men don't wear shoes in cities, apparently.

Slack

2008-07-22T21:43:00.003+08:00

Sorry that July's been such a slack month for posting. I haven't had the energy levels.

The truth is that there have been several blog-worthy things happen recently. Unfortunately, I don't especially want to blog about them just yet. I will say, however, that like all the good stories in my life, they involve real-life brushes with organised crime. How's that for a teaser? More later, perhaps.

Also, I kind-of had a sort-of job offer today from a (written) media type. It's about as tenuous as Donald Tsang's connection with reality and I doubt anything will come of it, but I have my fingers crossed.

More interesting stuff later.

Do this

2008-07-22T21:23:00.004+08:00

Go here and make my brother happy.

He is leading a life of hedonism in Spain at the moment and is trying to find creative ways for other people to pay off his mortgage so that he doesn't actually have to work for a living.

He also wants to keep traveling so he can take more pictures like these:

Help him. He's unemployed and wants to stay that way for a little while longer.

Bastard.

(You don't actually need to do anything other than click - by clicking, you increase his 'Google page rank' and a big number is a good thing, apparently. So go crazy).

Cool air, hotter planet

2008-07-20T19:55:00.003+08:00

It was of those rare days today that allowed everyone to remember that, free from the noxious layer of toxic air under which we usually suffer, Hong Kong can be a rather beautiful place. Especially when the sun reflects off the city scape from an almost pristine sky. Unfortunately, given the lack of environmental consciousness from Hong Kong's general population, government and business, it is easy to believe that day's such as today will be increasingly rare.

And strangely today I was provided with a perfect example of what's wrong with locals' attitudes toward the environment and why we don't get days like today very often. As we waited for a taxi in the TST ferry terminal, I noticed that there were a number of large room airconditioners spewing chilled air into the un-enclosed space. The effect they had was minimal, as there were only tiny puddles of cool created, but I'm sure the energy (and dirty coal) they were chewing through to provide this minimal relief was rather more impressive.

Something similar happens at the Mong Kok KCR station, which is also not enclosed. Here, airconditioning is piped in and littles pockets of cool are created. It's great if you happen to be standing right underneath a vent, but for the 95% of the people waiting on the platform who aren't, fans would be a better and more environmentally friendly choice.

Batman

2008-07-18T19:44:00.002+08:00

Forgive me while I attempt to get serious and provide a review of the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight.

Edison Chen is most certainly not the star of The Dark Knight. He gets only a few seconds of screen time, and even that is mostly out-of-focus background work, although it’s enough to recognise his dim-witted, foppish looks. Amusingly, there was a hushed gasp of recognition from the audience in the cinema last night as his face flashed on screen for those brief seconds. Perhaps they’d forgotten what the top half of his body looks like?

Heath Ledger is not really the star either. Sure, he gives one hell of a performance and he certainly brings deranged energy to the role of the Joker, but for all the skill he brought to the role, I found Ledger’s Joker more annoying than engaging. Perhaps that was the point? Certainly, he’s a very effective villain and any traces of comic book pastiche have been removed from his portrayal.

Christian Bale is as effective as ever as Bruce Wayne – suave, confident and moving with purposeful muscularity, Bale’s Batman exudes the cool control we expect from the character. That makes the moments of vulnerability later in the film, when Batman’s assurance begins to disappear, even more compelling. For all that, however, Bale is also not the star of this film.

That honour would have to go to Christopher Nolan’s direction, which conveys a sense of urgency and building chaos, especially early in the film, better than any recent movie I can remember. It seems like the camera never stops moving, sweeping the audience along in the rising tide of violence, danger and, ultimately, the uncertain moral choices faced by the characters in the latter part of the film. Every shot looks delicious, and I doubt that Hong Kong has ever looked so good on the big screen before.

I particularly appreciated that Nolan resisted the temptation to waste valuable screen time with annoying sweeping shots across computer generated landscapes. I found the tendency of Peter Jackson to do this in the Lord of the Rings films trying, and I’m glad that Nolan is an economical director. Yes, he keeps the camera moving, but never with a pointless “be impressed by my CG” shot. It seems like every frame of film counts for story or mood development and I appreciate that, especially when so many directors attempt to compensate for lackluster stories or story-telling ability with CGI.

The film, close to perfect though it may be, falls flat a little in the middle act and here, I could argue, Nolan doesn’t make every frame count. Perhaps it’s because the opening is so strong, or perhaps it’s just because the plot becomes a little muddled as Nolan sets up his final act, but there’s a feeling that the pace – and the danger – have been lost.

It’s a good thing the ending makes up for this deficiency, because it provides a rousing finale full of themes that resonate deeply with the real world (has there ever been a better film-representation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma?). Not bad for a mere comic book movie.