fashion beach

What's happening to all the Hong Kong bloggers lately? Fumier has shut up shop, and now, as I learn from Spike (who's still writing), 962 has done the same (both their sites being immediately grabbed by usurpers, though the new 962 seems to have disappeared as well). Sash surprised herself by falling in love, and no longer tells us all the fascinating details of her sex life (though anyone who appreciates high quality erotica can still enjoy her old posts). And another blog that shall be nameless seems to have disappeared as well.

I hesitate to shout "I'm still here!" in case I also get afflicted by the Curse of the Vanishing Local Blogger, but...

“Everywhere Bush travels he has to erect a fortress to protect himself. What the hell is this man so afraid of? I’ll tell you what he’s afraid of—he’s afraid of the people."

"We were never there to help those people. I was ordered to bury the humanitarian food I was given because we were told, ‘We’re the United States Marine Corps we are not the United States Peace Corps."

"There was a complete disregard for human life that I witnessed, almost a bloodlust."

"Morale has never been so low in the military, and this is even coming from the top echelons of the military leadership."

"The Democrats have absolutely betrayed us. We voted them into power on an antiwar mandate and they have refused to confront Bush and to listen to the constituency that put them into power."

We hear a lot about the Iraq war from a political standpoint, but the voices of the ordinary American soldiers used as cannon fodder for Bush's illegal war get much less coverage. Here is one intelligent and articulate ex-Marine's take on the situation - well worth reading.

I came across mention of Mingle² in another blog - it's mainly a dating site (no use to me), but they will rate your blog as if it was a movie. Private Beach comes out as PG (Parental Guidance). They say:

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
sex (4x) dangerous (2x) gun (1x)

Since "dangerous" sets off alarms here, if I write about safe sex, will the two words cancel each other out, I wonder?

Spot the similarity between these two current news stories:

China's Hu warns of 'dangerous' time for Taiwan

Taiwan's complex diplomatic situation is entering a 'possibly dangerous period,' Chinese President Hu Jintao told US President George Bush on Thursday.

And from the front page of today's South China Morning Post online edition:

Mainlander made up plot against tycoon

A mainlander demanded HK$1.02 million to protect the family of a local entrepreneur from gangsters he said had been paid to attack his children, a court heard yesterday.

Get it? In each case, the only "danger" comes from the mainlander supposedly warning against it.

Long time English-speaking residents of Hong Kong will know that The Standard newspaper has been through quite a few makeovers in recent years. Originally the Tiger Standard, and once a long-established South China Morning Post lookalike, it found (as did the short-lived Eastern Express, another left-of-SCMP clone) that there was only room for one SCMP in the local market. It then went tabloid with a new trendy name, HongKong iMail, for a while, before again reinventing itself as "China's Business Newspaper" under its old Standard name.

Now in yet another attempt to find a unique market niche, it has announced that it will relaunch from next week as Hong Kong's first English-language free (i.e. advertising-supported) giveaway daily (there are already several such Chinese papers, mostly handed out in MTR and KCR stations).

It remains to be seen how this latest incarnation will work out; though the Post's market leadership has never been seriously threatened over the years, the Stock Exchange's decision that listed companies need no longer print announcements in the newspapers (pointless now they all have websites) must be worrying it a bit. And the Standard can take advantage of parent Sing Tao Group's already established free paper distribution set-up.

What surprises me is that no one (since the long-ago demise of The Star) has yet tried to fill the most obvious gap in the English media market: an English language equivalent of the Apple Daily. In other words a resolutely lowbrow paper combining a strong populist pro-democracy political stance with plenty of gore and gossip, celebrity, sex and scandal, sport and showbiz . Apart from the democracy part, this is pretty much the same recipe that has made Rupert Murdoch's The Sun Britain's best-selling daily. Any investors out there reading this?

What's wrong with you, Senator Craig? First you consistently vote against gay rights in the Senate over many years. Then you get arrested for soliciting gay sex and plead guilty. Then you announce that you're not guilty after all, and not gay. You say you do not intend to resign your Senate seat, then you announce your intention to do so. Now you are apparently reconsidering that decision. Do you even know what you're doing? Gay or straight, stay or go, just make up your damn mind!

Many years ago, long before the Tuen Mun Highway was constructed, we would sometimes take a bus via the scenic Castle Peak Road, which still winds its way along the shoreline, to the Ching Chung Koon Temple at Castle Peak for a vegetarian lunch and a wander around. Though the Temple and the nearby psychiatric hospital are still there, not much else from those days is now recognisable under the concrete sprawl of Tuen Mun new town. So as I drove around the area a few years ago, I was completely unfamiliar with the local roads, relying on a map to find my way around.

Anyway, I was tootling along merrily at 70 kph down a wide road with little traffic. As I recall, the road dipped under a bridge, and I emerged on the other side to find myself being waved down by a traffic cop. More officers stood around, stopping other unwary motorists and putting them through the same rigmarole: “Can I see your driving licence? Do you know you were breaking the speed limit? I will have to give you a ticket.”

Yeah, yeah. Useless to argue with these robots. Never mind that the road was nearly empty of traffic; that all the vehicles were doing the same speed; that there was no danger to anyone, and no pedestrian anywhere within sight. Just take the ticket, swallow your bitter medicine, and go on with your journey.

Most of the time, you can’t win when dealing with the traffic police, though I did once score a minor victory: parked in an unmarked space (the official spaces were all full) in the car park of the Lions Nature Education Centre in Sai Kung, I returned to find a ticket on my windscreen. Oops! The area is clearly marked as a private road, so I wrote in politely pointing out that the police have no authority to issue parking tickets there. Ticket cancelled!

But how many less attentive poor suckers just pay up without checking, so the cops can meet their monthly quota of victims? I wouldn’t be so aggrieved if they occasionally stopped some of the absolute maniacs I see every day driving dangerously on the Tolo Highway, zigzagging wildly across several lanes at once, instead of wasting time ticketing people who aren’t even causing an obstruction (Taipo Industrial Estate on a Sunday – come on…)

Anyway, back to Tuen Mun. As you can imagine, returning along the same road an hour later, I was carefully keeping my speed down to 50kph, not wanting to get another ticket, when a police motorcycle roared past me at over 80, way in excess of the limit. Gosh – what dire emergency could justify such reckless behaviour? What urgent mission of mercy could require such a rapid response?

A little further up the road, all was revealed. Our brave motorcycle warrior was indeed busily engaged in bringing relief to the afflicted … well, bringing lunch to his colleagues at the road block where I’d been stopped earlier, anyway. What could be more urgent than that?

As the ancient Roman poet Juvenal said, two millennia ago: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – who will watch the watchers (or guard the guardians)? Who indeed, I wonder.