A snippet that transpired in an email to an English friend

"... Starbucks does free refills? Another reason to emigrate. Totally moving to London, just for the free refills. No such thing in Hong Kong. I think it's because people are pretty unscrupulous here when it comes to saving the very last dime instead of saving face. I could totally see people passing on their Starbucks mug to their friend, and that that friend passing it onto the next, and the next... so that they could all drink for free. Although, there is something quite sweetly socialist about the idea, now that I think of it. Starbucks can operate on a smaller profit margin, can't it?"

Chris' interesting links

Wellp. This a guy who always has interesting stuff in the 'status' section of his gchat profile. This is a post dedicated the care he takes in selecting things to put in that sacred space.

W.H Auden's Poem. From this interesting link http://www.feer.com/tales/?p=893  

Hongkong 

The leading characters are wise and witty;
Substantial men of birth and education,
With wide experience of administration,
They know the manners of a modern city.

Only the servants enter unexpected;
Their silence has a fresh dramatic use:
Here in the East the bankers have erected
A worthy temple to the Comic Muse.

Ten thousand miles from home and What’s-Her-Name
The bugle on the Late Victorian hill
Puts out the soldier’s light; off-stage, a war

Thuds like the slamming of a distant door:
We cannot postulate a General Will;
For what we are, we have ourselves to blame.

AAaaaah. Auden is too good.

My mind is in the gutter ALL THE TIME.

Just a few thoughts on what I think my law school is... 

Our email system is called CWEM. Hur hur hur!!! It stands for Campus Wide E Mail, but by god, they need to put somebody in the IT department that knows dirty words. (errr qwim anyone? Or quim?)

Our head of faculty is known as the Koala Bear. He is a Koala bear that needs a bib. Awww can you imagine how cute that is? A koala bear in a bib! Not, however, if you're sitting in the front row of the classroom. I feel as if I oughta go to class wearing a fencing mask, so mighty is his froth. You know what I mean. You've had a prof exactly like this one. Large. Grey. Spits.

I have no friends in school yet. Boooo. Feels exactly like gradeschool all over again. Except, no playground. And no coathooks with out names and photos above. 

Some Laowai's Just Don't Get the Olympic Spirit....

UGHHHH!! Loretta, I don't know about you but i love love lovvvvvvvvve the Olympics. I get all teary eyed when I see the masses of athletes stroll into the stadium. I buy into all of the hype - camaraderie, love, peace, world unity, blah blah. And this year I'm even prouder because its BJ08!! While I don't think it's quite alright for China to misappropriate the occasion to announce it's arrival (or rather, after 400yrs, its return) onto the new world stage, I am still so excited!

Just saw on BBC World News that a bunch of foreigners (mainly American and British) were detained and later deported after staging an illegal protest for Tibet and for democracy in China. WTF. Chinese people didn't go to the Oscars protesting AmerBlogger: Banana Mamas - Create Postica's involvement in Iraq. They don't shit on our (haha, I can say that now that I'm an American!!) festivities! Of course, the Chinese people were smart and stayed away from these crazy foreigners. Who wants to get detained by the secret police and miss the chance to see Liu Xiang hurdle his way to glory for China or Michael Phelp's hot body do laps around us??? not me for sure.

Oh and come on, US cycling team. Wearing masks after landing?? WTF. That was so not an "accident." Why can't you be like other athletes and put the masks on when the cameras aren't rolling! duh!! It's only polite. If you were so scared of air quality probs, then you should've waited for London'12!

Haha, wow. I'm not being very sensitive to the athletes. Their bodies are very important to them and anything to pollute it would obviously not only affect their performance but also their overall health. woopsh. But for the protesters. come on. Even the Dalai Lama isn't raising a ruckus at this time. He knows that there is a time and place for everything, and the Olympics is not the time. I keep thinking that these foreign visitors are like bad guests who come to your house, without taking off their shoes, muddy up your carpet, drink straight out of the OJ carton and try to stage an intervention for your problems. blah.

I don't know what the coverage is like in HK. My parents get TVB via satellite but I'm not sure if it's like the Canadian news broadcast or straight out of HK, so I couldn't tell you for sure. How is it like in HK?

Retail Site with Good Music

I like shopping online sometimes, though not recently, what with lack of funds causing me mostly just to surf and drool. (If I were I guy, that would mean something completely different...)

Retail websites usually have the stinkiest music EvAr but I finally found a site that makes me want to buy their clothes because of their website creators taste in music, as opposed to despite of.

http://www.dollhouse.com/index_exp.html#/about_us

Mostly cheesy and naughty dance music, but people gotta dance sexy to something with a strong, proper beat , ye ken?

Poem for the night

I had a really fun night out with last weekend, and this week I've been editing a poem that I wrote about that night.

Good Old Men

“He looks like my grandpa,” you said

at Ned Kelly’s Last Stand.

Floating in the watery jazz,

I imagined a sunbrowned boy under Philippine sun,

the trumpet player before us speaking something

soothingly, as good old men do, in tagalog.

“I’m 22.” “You’re so young!”

And I suppose that makes you an old man.

I don’t know many old men. My grandfather,

a shoemaker, his back hurts from bending

over the shapes of other people’s feet.

There was also something said

about paper boats and that they were empty, but

with the night so full it’s incidental.

You joke about wanting to fuck me.

The siren before us has just married a man named Brett:

What an American name, how American.

For Brett is a name which celebrates itself,

announcing in a maleness like the light

glancing off the trumpet as it solos –

Brett is a man, and he is here.

Chip-in-shoulder feminist attacks The Standard's layout staff with a knife

On July 2nd's edition of The Standard, Hong Kong's free English language newspaper, I noticed something rather sinister... two articles concerning women, one about the rise in the number of affairs committed by wives and the other about females on average being more picky about their travel packages, were printed in pink coloured / pink outlined boxes. The fashion and gossip section are also titled in pink.

WHAT IS THIS, THE MATERNITY WARD??? PINK for the girls and BLUE for the boys??? If this happened in America, it would be on Jezebel! WOMEN OF HONG KONG, we must REJECT this outrageous gender stereotyping that implies MEN cannot be interested in fashion or gossip!

FREE THE FLUFF FOR MEN!!!! PINK OUTLINES IN THE STANDARD FOR HARD NEWS!!!