fashion beach

As most people know, Europe has "Protected Designation of Origin" laws designed to protect the names of distinctive local foods and drinks from being copied elsewhere. Champagne, for example, can only come from the Champagne region of France; and Newcastle Brown Ale could at one time only come from Newcastle, until its brewer applied in 2004 to cancel its protected status because they wanted to move...

The Guardian newspaper in Britain is so notorious for its frequent typos that Private Eye long ago dubbed it The Grauniad. Just now I Googled "Matt Driscoll" (a British sports journalist) after reading about him in a BBC story. Driscoll challenged his harassment and sacking by Rupert Murdoch's now defunct News of the World newspaper after he fell ill, and won a court settlement of £792,736 - good...

What's your brand called? "Nipple Silly". Yeah, sure.Even worse (sorry for the poor picture quality):This is one of the packets of tissue they give away free when you buy a newspaper. They probably have to give it away - would you purchase from someone who tells you "Our brand is BS...

Try this: Google "Epson scanners" and see what comes up first.Now if I type in "scanners", I don't mind Google taking money from HP to place theirs ahead of others. But when I specifically search for Epson, I don't want to see HP at the top of the list. In fact, Epson only comes 4th. True, Google identifies the first 3 entries as ads, but still...It doesn't feel right to me. What do you thi...

From a BBC story about the Korean robotics industry:The South Korean defence company DoDAAM is also developing robotic gun turrets for export which can be programmed to open fire automatically.Does this sound to you like the beginning of Skynet? And who are they exporting them to?Have these people never sen Dr Strangelo...

Shown on a screen on the Hong Kong side of the Lo Wu border crossing:Prevent influenzaWash hand frequentlyYes, but which hand - left or right? Decisions, decisions...And while we're on the subject of public announcements, who changed the MTR announcements from "This train will terminate at..." to "This train will stop service at..." Unless it's the last train of the day, it is more likely to go...

When setting the video recorder for another programme the other day, I caught a few minutes of Coach Trip by chance. For those who don't know this programme, it's a kind of "Big Brother on Wheels" - the idea is to dump a bunch of publicity-hungry strangers together in an artificial environment, in this case a coach tour around the sights of Europe, and hope to derive entertaining television from...

Since I often make fun of ATV News's errors here, it's a pleasant change to have a go at their rival TVB instead. Listen guys, when you're talking about the NFL (National Football League - or at least what Americans call football), it may not be a good idea to display the NHL (National Hockey League) logo on the screen. Clue: if they're playing on a green surface, it's not i...

One of the things that makes visits to China interesting is the signs there, either for their curious English , or for what they reveal of Chinese thinking. The last line of this direction sign in Jinan Airport, for example, tells you all you need to know about flying in China.Then there is this. "Bumf" originally meant bumfodder or toilet paper in English usage, but then came to be applied more...

What's up with the BBC these days? From a time when "BBC English" indicated the highest standards of grammar and punctuation, it seems to have declined to a point where not even its headlines get properly proofread. Here are some random examples of scrambled English found on the BBC News website today:Ohio animal Terry Thompson owner shot himself - policeThe uprising that eventually overthrew him...

Does anyone in Hong Kong really believe Rita Fan's claim that she knows little of what happened in Beijing in June 1989? Asked about the Tiananmen massacre, she said she was in Hawaii at the time and only knew what she saw on CNN. But considering that CNN was giving an almost literally blow-by-blow account of the events as they happened, does Fan really think she would have learned more if she had...

Sexy Hot Swedish Women - Mini Anden NakedMini Anden is an extremely beautiful and sexy Swedish model and actress. From Stockholm, Mini was born Susanna Anden and got her start in modeling at a very young age. At the age of 10 she started modeling and signed with Elite Modeling Agency at the age of 15. Anden has had a long career in modeling gracing the covers of magazines such as: Vogue, Marie...

Sexy Hot Arab Women - Carole SamahaCarole Samaha is an extremely beautiful and sexy Arab singer. She’s actually Lebanese. Although she has release 5 albums and has had a very successful music career, Samaha is no dummy. She has a master’s degree in acting and directing. For the fruits of her labor Carole was nominated for Best Arabia Act in the 2008 MTV Music Awards. It may be surprising that...

I went to the British Consulate in Hong Kong this week to renew my passport. The consular officer who processed my application (politely, quickly and efficiently) was wearing a Mickey Mouse tie.I'm sure this says something about the British government, but I'm not sure wh...

A couple of weeks ago, ATV News unwittingly gave a perfect illustration of why users of English need to pay attention to syntax."Several men were arrested following an investigation into cigarette smuggling by Customs officers" was their story. Unless Hong Kong's Customs officers are far more corrupt than I believe they are, I think what they really meant was: "Several men were arrested following...

Sexy Hot Arab Women - Amal HijaziAmal Hijazi is an extremely sexy Lebanese singer, model, and pop icon. Amal was born in Lebanon, but her family fled to France to escape political instabilities. She started her career as a fashion model and was extremely successful there. She soon grew restless and pursued an interest as a singer. That interest blossomed into a full-on new career. Her debut album,...

Sexy Hot Swedish Women - Victoria SilvstedtNow, you cannot have a blog dedicated to hot Swedish women without talking about Victoria Silvstedt. She is notorious for being one of the most bodacious and beautiful Swedish women alive. Now, you may know her from her Playboy photo shoots (and what nice shoots they are), but Victoria did have a more wholesome start to her career. She actually ran for...

Some LegCo members have recently been objecting to the government's policy of granting land for development by the MTR Corporation to fund the construction of the South Island Line. The problem with this is that they don't seem to be offering any alternative.No one who observes the air pollution and traffic congestion in Hong Kong can doubt that the territory's railway network needs to be extended....

Being out of England for most of the time, I tend to notice small changes when I'm there that may be imperceptible to those who live there. One of these is the creeping Americanisation of the English language. Not only do we have a whole generation who use American spelling because they've never bothered to change the default spell checker in Word to British English, but American vocabulary is gradually...

Sepp Blatter's statement that FIFA - world football's governing body (that's soccer for American readers) - is "not in crisis" is about as credible as Muammar Gaddafi's claims that all the Libyan people love him. Nevertheless, Blatter's re-election as head of FIFA was entirely predictable - and not just because his only challenger was conveniently accused of corruption and sidelined before the vote.In...

A "shock, horror!" headline on the website of British tabloid The Sun claims "Third of rapists and killers 'are foreign'". Except they're not. When you actually read the article, this figure is only true in a few police districts. The figure across the UK as a whole is 1 in 7, or less than half the quoted proportion.Further evidence that The Sun is engaging in racial scaremongering is that in three...

During a recent trip to Europe, I spent nearly a month without following the news. I didn't feel I'd missed much - when I got back, most things were going on exactly as before.Two stories did filter into my consciousness - the death of Osama bin Laden, and the wedding of Prince William, at which time I was in Britain. I'm no monarchist - far from it - but this did at least demonstrate that a country...

The 1978 movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is generally regarded as a good-natured spoof of the science fiction genre. Now today's BBC news site has a deadly serious headline: Deadly cucumbers claim more lives. We really are living in a science fiction wor...

What is this craze that some people seem to have for changing their names in Facebook? You log in and suddenly find you have a whole lot of friends you never heard of. Wei...

I never set out to make this blog an exercise in ATV-bashing, but they do set themselves up for it. They are currently filling the gaps between programmes, when they don't have enough commercials, with little snippets of information under the title "The World at a Glance". Nothing wrong with that, but the one asking "Are You Prepared for St. Patrick's Day" was still being run as late as 22 March....

Q. What's the definition of stupidity?A. Building nuclear power plants all over one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world when you're sitting on a vast reservoir of free geothermal energy that you could use instead.And a really bad joke:Q. What do you call a tiny tsunami?A. A microwave.Yeah, I know, it's not funny. And incidentally, why is Iran so insistent that it needs to develop...

Sexy Hot Arab Women - MarwaMarwa is an extremely popular Lebanese singer. She’s also very sexy and very big breasted. Don’t let her looks fool you, she is the whole package. She started her musical training at the age of 8 in school where she learned to play the accordion. Later, she found her groove in the art of singing and performing arts. She made a name for herself when she was on a local...

Sexy Hot Swedish Women - Elita LofbladElita Lofblad is an amazingly sexy Swedish model and reality show actress. Elita was actually born in Chile, but she made her way to Sweden as quickly as she possibly could. This is amazing because the two types of women that I think are the most sexy and most beautiful are Latin women and Swedish women. Here, you really have a mixture of the two. She was...

Hong Kong readers of the South China Morning Post online will be aware that unless they have a paid subscription to its website, clicking on a link on its main page will only bring up the first couple of sentences of a story, with the rest supposedly available to subscribers only. But try this:Copy the headline of a story (I did it with "China's mappers take on world and get lost today.) and paste...

The South China Morning Post reports that "newly elected Republican lawmakers are itching to act against what they see as an undervalued yuan that is costing American jobs".They are unlikely to have any more success in changing China's course on this matter than the previous Democratic majority did. All they are doing is displaying both their lack of understanding of China and their simplistic ignorance...

The Hong Kong government's decision to implement a pilot project for glass recycling in East Kowloon is a waste of time. The fact is there is absolutely no need for a pilot scheme when glass recycling has already been proven to work well in countries such as Britain and Canada for more than two decades. What we need is not a timid pilot project but a full-scale recycling scheme for the entire SAR...

I use Firefox as my default browser, but I also use Chrome quite a lot (and IE only for those few sites that insist on it). This morning my PC crashed. When it recovered, all my Chrome bookmarks had vanished - many of them marking sites from which I planned to download files. The backup bookmarks file (.bak) was also empty and therefore useless.When I went to the Chrome help page for a clue on...

First of all, let me wish all my readers (who seem to have increased dramatically in number recently for some reason) a happy, peaceful and prosperous New Year.The start of 2011 was saddened here in Hong Kong by the news that Szeto Wah died today. Szeto was a leader of the movement for democracy in both Hong Kong and the mainland who earned respect on both sides of the political divide for his steadfast...

Further to my post about the absentees from the recent Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony, it later emerged that the Philippines was also among those countries refusing their invitations to attend - one of only three democracies to do so (the others being Colombia and Ukraine).It is hardly necessary to comment on the irony of this decision coming from the son of a father who was murdered for opposing...