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!!!

Cleaning Up to Find "Love"

Sorry loklok. I didn't get your permission before posting this. woopsh.

I was cleaning out my laptop bag and I found a manila envelope with a few of your poems in it. I'm not sure how I got it, but I did. I like this one the best. It's called "Love." It's kind of appropriate at this time, since we've been talking on the phone and over gchat about such a thing.

Loklok, perhaps you should write more poems. I liked the ones you did for your portfolio.

Love

To Resolve bodies into planes and no further.

For, to suppose, that a body, a magnitude,
is divisible, through and through,
that division is possible, involves a difficulty.

What will there be,
in the body which escapes division?

Let it
have been divided.

What then will remain? A magnitude?
No, that is impossible. Since there will be
something not divided.

But, if it be admitted that neither a body, nor a magnitude
remain, and yet division is to take place,
the constituents of the body will be points or nothing.
An absurdity without magnitude.

For when the points were in contact,
to form a single magnitude, they did not make
the whole any bigger.

But suppose that, as the body, beign divided,
a minute section - a piece of sawdust, is extracted
evading division

even then the argument applies.

For in what sense is that section divisible?
For what came away was not a body but a separable form or quality.
Every contact being always a contact of somethings.
There is always something, besides the contact,
or the division,
or the point.

How much I hate Hong Kong and think everyone should abandon it's ship

As I was walking away from my driving class the other day, I thought of "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats. There are times when I cannot stand to look at all the ugly, ugly housing estates and apartment blocks in the lousier parts of town. I know I am of privileged stock, and saying all this can and will make me ridiculous and pompous, but people were not meant to live like this! If I have children, and bad luck befalls them, is this how low I want them to fall? Living in a Hong Kong housing estate isn't thoroughly hell, it's better than a slum, though there is still niggling at the back of my mind a constant sensation that I can't accept this for myself or any of my loved ones / progeny. This is wrong wrong wrong.

I want there to be a Second Coming for Hong Kong. I want there to be a crazy person, a person full of "passionate intensity" that would rip Hong Kong apart and cause a seismic shift in the whole damned city. I would like to feel that his thighs are lumbering towards Matilda International Hospital to be born. I think that she / he would be a bit like Shishigami in the Studio Gibli film "Princess Mononoke." If there could be somebody whose vision could explode over the whole of Hong Kong in a sort of idiotic death-sacrifice (there's this one scene in the film... ah, you should go watch it, it's lovely,) I think I would love Hong Kong again.

Jen, Hong Kong is already pining for your return...