Love falls as easily on a turd as on a lily, as we say in Norwegian. But has ah-Mok really deserved to be loved by such a vulnerable and virginal female cousin on the mother’s side? We’ll never know, as his past comes back to haunt him … and more.
Monthly Archive for October, 2009
Because it’s Friday I decided to do a good deed and let somebody else’s video on my blog for a change.
Watch and watch out! When I see and read about what’s happening in Europe, I’m happy to live under the protective umbrella of the Chinese Communist Party, who, for all its shortcomings, will never allow islamo-fascists to take over its country unlike its European bending over backwards self-destructive counterparts.
Now the Netherlands is putting Geert Wilders on trial for speaking out against the islamisation of Europe, and Ireland has made it illegal to “criticise religion” (I think we all know which one.) For shame. Well, Europeans, when you’re walking around the streets wrapped in a tent (if you’re allowed to go outside that is) ten steps behind your husband whose beard is trailing in the dust behind him because paved roads aren’t allowed, you only have yourselves to blame.
Language is under constant attack but then it probably always has been. And I suppose “under attack” isn’t the right term - English seems to be thriving to the point that some of the people using it have turned it into something new and wonderful, so far away from the original as to always amaze and enchant - and confuse!
The beef I have with modern people’s take on English, apart from the awful abbreviations (u, b4, lol) is the increased use of capital letters and apostrophe before plural s (”I prefer to take Taxi’s, lol”).
Slack upbringing! Bad teachers!
Yes yes, I know. Nothing terrible will happen if you write “I never read Book’s.”
Everybody can understand, and communication is the most important, blah blah. But it’s damned irritating all the same. Hand in hand with this misuse of apostrophes and capital letters comes the puzzling insertion of inverted commas in the strangest of places.
I thought inverted commas were meant to indicate irony or that you doubt the validity of the word (Donald Tsang is a “great” leader, “admired” by “all.”) or for the title of a thing or something that isn’t real (She picked up the 1000 page volume “Great Thoughts of Donald Tsang”)
But now people put inverted commas everywhere: “Let’s go for a “bite”!” (But you’re actually going to take in the food intravenously?)
“Last night I had a “great time” with the “gang”!” (You had a terribly time by yourself?)
“When you want to get “physical” with a woman …” (But what you’re really doing is sitting in a different room communicating with her spirit by telepathy?)
Here’s an example from Shenzhen so OK, maybe their English isn’t so good. But the poster is stuck to a shop window and shows a woman shopping. So what’s the irony here? Do they mean not shopping? She’s actually been stealing the stuff?
As usual, there are two types of people in this world; those who care about this kind of thing and those who couldn’t give a flying teapot. Guess who rules the world. But then they would, wouldn’t they?
We put the FUN back in mental!
The Forum, Exchange Square, Hong Kong. Until last month one of the few places in the city where it’s possible to sit outside without swallowing the outpourings of ten thousand bus and car engines with your coffee. High above the traffic and with a charming fountain and sculptures of a water buffalo and an tai-chi performing fatty, it was crawling with office workers at lunchtime, soaking up the rays and engaging in that increasingly rare HK sport: Alfresco scoffing.
Now it is no more. The outside tables and chairs have been taken into La Fontaine, the Japanese restaurant next door, Starbucks and the upmarket fast food restaurant O something, filling these already full places to bursting. Why? Here was a place where the dreaded alfresco was unlikely to irritate that most sacred of HK’s many sacred cows, the private car driver. There was no pavement to obstruct. No, apparently, “for your own safety” crap.
So why? Why?
According to one of the waitresses in La Fontaine, a diner at O something had brought his own fast food to sit and eat outside this fast food restaurant. Told off by staff for this transgression (the fool should have gone to La Fontaine instead; the famously lax staff at this establishment don’t mind if you bring your own three course meal eaten off your own dinner service) he decided to get revenge by complaining to Hong Kong Land (or whatever Li Ka -shing company that currently owns Exchange Square) about people engaging in alfresco dining. This civic-minded company then does the right thing after receiving one complaint, and pulls the plug on the entire outside dining “experience.”
But of course. We can’t have one pissed off customer, now can we? (Again, this is all according to one waitress. It does coincide, however, with the threatened ban on outside dining which the government announced in July following a complaint about Times Square so could be part of the whole grand plan of taking away the last little remnant of what’s good and enjoyable.)
So if one alleged complaint is enough to shut down a whole square, does that mean that I, as one seriously disgruntled citizen, can stop for example the tearing down of the Graham and Peel street markets? Can I lodge a complaint and stop the building of that ridiculous white elephant, the Zhuhai Bridge? The vandalising of Central’s waterfront to build a six lane highway to nowhere?
One would think so. But no. Not one, not ten thousand complaints will do the trick there. Also the government seems to have no power at all when it comes to many people complaining about illegal dumping of rubbish and road building in the New Territories. It makes one wonder … and wonder. But doesn’t surprise one.
O - oh, I’m an avian/I’m a Scandinavian, I’m a flu victim in Hong Kong …
So ill …. quack quack … ill… Quack quack. Or indeed, oink! Don’t know if it was bird or pig flu I had this week, but it was so nasty it must have come from some kind of animal. Snake, maybe.
And it was a direct result of that sub-human ruining my hair last Friday! (scroll down two posts to “From the Depths of the Arsehole Of Despair.” No I can’t link to it, lazy-fingers, as it’s on the same page as this. )
For behold: If that total sponge-fcuker hadn’t ruined my hair, I would have been out of there at 4.30 as planned instead of almost 9. I would have reached Shenzhen at 8, happy, instead of past midnight full of murderous intent. I would have gone to bed at a normal hour, not at 02.00, thereby strengthening my immune system, not weakening it.
The consequent evening I would also have drunk less and gone to bed at a reasonable hour, and generally engaged in less debauchery and mayhem, thus strengthening etc, if I had been able to look at myself in the many reflective surfaces. But each time I caught a glimpse of that neon yellow fright wig, I turned screaming to the bottle, cards and men.
I wouldn’t have had to go to another salon on Tuesday to pay $1500 to try to salvage the havoc which the slavering gollum had wreaked, and I wouldn’t have had to sit down for three hours in 17 degrees with only a thin blouse between me and Nansen, Amundsen and Scott.
When I got up from that chair, with hair colour almost normal albeit cut in a somewhat Hitler Jugend fashion, I was shaking so hard I couldn’t sign my name on the release form. Straight to bed I went (the blanket which the guys on the ferry home covered me with to stop me shaking and calling out in pain also strangely reminiscent of things Hitler - this time the concentration camps) and I’ve only now, six days later, got up.
it’s so boring to be sick! I didn’t realise. Haven’t been sick for this long since primary school. Normally I feel a bit of a muscle pain coming on and tell my boys in the immune system: Go get’em! then sit back for two hours while they do their thing. But this?
It must be karma. How many times have I laughed scornfully at the government’s incessant and heroic fight against swine and other -flus? Ha ha ha, I’ve laughed. Chop down acres and acres of forest to fill in those forms - for what? It’s just a flu!
But now I’ve been punished for filling in not only the wrong name, but the wrong everything.
I still say it’s just a flu though. It is. And I still say it’s all that hair fkucker’s fault.
I just think the flu is more vindictive and petty than hitherto thought. It’s like it’s waging a ji-fluhad against me just because I dared to say it was just a flu, and also to mock it and its henchmen. Well, I’m back! And I’ll keep saying it’s just a flu until the chickens come home to burst.
Damn you, Cutting Venue.
You know I seldom give advice. OK, always. But I seldom give “shopping tips” and “beauty tips” (except never have facial hair)
But now I feel compelled to give not only a piece of BEAUTY ADVICE but a … well, share the kind of knowledge that will one day save your life.
Whatever you do. Ever. Ever. Ever. DON’T HAVE A HAIRCUT OR ANYTHING TO DO WITH HAIR, HEAD OR SOUL, IN THE SALON ” CUTTING VENUE ” IN STANLEY STREET, CENTRAL, HONG KONG, THE WORLD.
I came in for blonde highlights, apparently not the proverbial rocket science as I’ve had it done before: They put some kind of bucket over your head, pull out strands of hair and do something to them with goo. Then you walk out quite happy and light-hearted.
Why oh why didn’t I tear myself away when this bint started slathering my whole head with bright white goo? I should have put my head under the shower and walked out of there semi-unscathed. I kept saying to the stylist: I only asked for highlights, not full bleach! I need the bucket, the pulling out of strands!
He said yeah, in the other places they do it like that (disdainful laugh) but don’t worry, trust me la etc.
I nearly screamed when they washed it out. Early Annie Lennox meets … Russian whore, doesn’t even begin to describe it. But “don’t worry, it’ll all be all right when I put in the colour” the abominable cretin kept quacking. “And the lowlights,” he ominously added.
Eh-no. As I staggered into Sa-sa to buy some hair product as the guy also didn’t know how to blow dry I saw the full damage in the shop mirror. Bright sub-yellow/orange … and purple stripes!!!!
There they were. Bright purple stripes weaving playfully in and out of the other neon colours. I cancelled my next appointment (unfortunately not with a woman but three young guys whose reaction was: Purple? Cool!) and kind of not leisurely went back into the salon. Where the “stylist” immediately started blaming me.
He did admit, however, that nobody had asked him to add purple. Ah! Creative impulse! Oh and he would put my hair back to normal free of charge. Talk about crying with gratitude? That was the first time I didn’t hit him. I mean, I really wanted to hit him but restrained myself. I did call him a moron though.
The last time I saw colours like that was … last night actually, in a fright wig shop in Pottinger street
None of the colours i saw in the mirror has ever been seen on a human head - at least not with the owner still breathing and able to put up a fight.
So another trip under the goo-cover it was until I discovered that my face looked strangely dirty. It was specked with goo from the DARK BROWN HAIR COLOUR he was putting in. Darker than George Clooney but without the lightening grey. Not as dark as Chinese communist party leaders though, but then again that colour is so dark that salons don’t even have it.
That was the second time I didn’t hit him. The third being when I had to tear the hair dryer out of his awful, spindly little fingers when he wouldn’t stop drying and drying my murdered hair, saying it would get back to blonde again as soon as it was dry. It didn’t. Think … yeah, Catherine Zeta Jones at her darkest. That’s how blond it became when it dried. Then I cried.
Stupid, over emotional woman right? It’s just hair! I think it was the way he still kept blaming me. I had asked for blonde highlights, then questioned his authority
, so what could I expect? Dark brown it is! …And combed down hard, in a style Hitler would have given back Poland to achieve. When I said I would rather eat warm toenail clippings than have dark hair, he started rolling his eyes, holding his forehead and stamping his feet like Basil Fawlty.
As I write this, the boss of the salon, a normal man with normal customer skills who thinks what I want is the important thing in a hair salon, is trying to do some damage control.
We’re down to light carrot-coloured now. I think one day, probably within the next five months or so, I will be back to normal. If the follicles aren’t burnt off.
CUTTING VENUE IN STANLEY STREET. CUTTING VENUE IN STANLEY STREET. NEVER GO THERE. To be on the safe side, never even walk past it.
Now I look like Hu Jintao who’s decided to go Chinese Blond. I suppose it’s the best I can do under the circumstances.
Woo-hoo! 60 years of glory and the commies are going at it hammers and tongs. Nowhere is the excitement at the world’s greatest milestone-reaching more palpable than in sleepy backwater Pui O, where local villagers have erected three huge posters proclaiming the coming of the … what’s the opposite of apocalypse? And this morning a whole villager was watching tv in the caff where I had breakfast ( the others being glued to the screens at home no doubt) transfixed or something by the sight of thousands and thousands of identically, I mean to the millimeter, tall soldiers marching down Chang An Avenue with the precision of schools of fish on the Great Barrier Reef.
Or maybe the singlet and shorts-clad geezer was thinking, as he semi-tapped along to the rhythm of the rousing military music, that he was sitting in that very restaurant and not for example in a labour camp, because his parents at one stage swam across perilous waters to get away from that very thing Pui O is celebrating with such force?
Make no mistake, I also hoisted the national flag on my roof. I was even going to watch the extravaganza on tv this evening, if I could find a tv … but ended up doing something completely different, namely shooting a film. Never mind. It would only have been interminable communist speeches followed by hysterically happy ethnic minorities (notably Tibetans) dancing anyway.
But those soldiers on the morning show: Wah! There were all sorts of uniforms and headgear, and I’ve never seen live people looking so much like computer-animated special effects. The impression of an awesome military might was somewhat ruined (for me anyway) however, when they trotted out these … whores? No, female soldiers, in mini skirts! Really, really short miniskirts and boots of a kind that wouldn’t look out of place in a fetish shop. They must have raided the whole country to find that many tall women - of identical height, naturally - who could also march with such robotic precision and lift their legs that high without their undies showing.
Safe in the knowledge that 60 years of non-stop glory has now been celebrated in such style without a hitch and assuming that none of the new tanks and other military hardware trotted out for the occasion didn’t crash (I stopped watching after about the 120 thousandth soldier) I can now go to bed.
Eat your heart out, for example Norway! On that boring old country’s national day, what do they parade? Children in new clothes, smiling and waving flags. And singing.
No tanks. No security. Not even a tiny fighter plane. No rounding up of dissidents. Anybody can watch the parade from wherever they please, even coming out on their balconies without being shot. Call yourself a national day?
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