Heat II

Domestic advice from Cecilie!!! Never thought I’d give domestic advice. Another way to combat global warming: (If you, unlike me, don’t have time to sit slack-jawed in front of open fridge door or electric fan) Wash your shirt, T-shirt, underwear or whatever, in a really hard-spinning washing machine. Put on while still wet. Enjoy the feeling of air conditioning or breeze on your still wet clothes.
If your washing machine is only soft-spinning: Enjoy guys’ looking at your chest covered in a sopping wet shirt. You never know what will come of it.
Maybe tomorrow I will set my washing machine on non-spin…

Heat

As a Norwegian I used to semi-jokingly welcome global warming. Anything that can get the temperature above minus 20 degrees centigrades, I quipped climate-ironically.
Now, living in Hong Kong and seeing global warming right in front of me, I’m no longer sure.
Being an environment-saving kind of dude, naturally I can’t use air conditioning, so now that the quicksilver has been showing 34, 35 degrees for weeks, I feel a kind of listlessness. All my life people have been complaining about me having “too much energy.”
Now I often find myself sitting in front of the electric fan or open fridge door, just struggling even to think straight, or to read extremely un-taxing literature. (Like my novel Blonde Lotus.)

Damn! How could this happen, when I finally live the life I’ve always wanted; in a hot climate, near a beach etc?
I cool down by showering about five times a day, but the thing is, the water pipes are on the outside of the house so the “cold” water coming in is actually boiling. The only way to take a cold shower is to turn on the “hot” faucet, whose water comes from the inside of the hot water tank which has been cooling down in the shade of the bathroom. If that’s not IRONIC I don’t know what is.

And that abominable, burglar-welcoming hound Piles? Completely useless. He can walk about five steps if I take him out at 6AM, then he starts walking with a lateral gait before collapsing in a panting heap.
I have to get up at 4 to walk him, and then stay up till 23.30 to drag him around again. All because of global warming. A curse on you, evil carbon!

HK Government – Success At Last

What a ridiculous building. Yeah okay, so it’s a tribute to man’s ingenuity (no women involved here, evidently) and ability to put bricks on top of each other, but really?

I think the thing has 88 floors (8 being a lucky number in Chinese and nothing in HK is too official to indulge in a little superstition.) Iimagine working on the top floor, the amount of time you must spend in lifts every day! Nipping out for a coffee becomes, in meters, the equivalent of travelling three stops on the subway.

And this is only the beginning. In five years’ time every building in HK will be like this. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
But that’s not what I wanted to write about, no, I was drawn to this vista like a magnet yesterday because of the unusually blue sky.
The day before I had namely read in the paper that the last two weeks of constant sunshine and burning blue skies, as opposed to the toxic, greyish-brown soup we’re normally offered, is due to none other than The Royal Communist Hong Kong Government itself.

Yes! All those years we suffered in smog, fog and clogged-up air. there was nothing the government could do because all the pollutants originated in China. Now, however, it seems like the improvement in air quality is all the government’s doing. By forcing all taxis and mini buses to change to LPG, plus taking other mysterious measures not mentioned in the article, our heroes have saved Hong Kong and it’s now safe for everybody to come and do business here. Hooray! So the pollution did originate here after all!

I hope they remember that when the poisonous soup comes back. But I don’t really have any high hopes. The recollection of what inanities it dribbles from one week to the next, is an affliction with which our government is happily unburdened.

Penetrative Sex

Why is that the be all and end all for so many guys? It’s all they want to do, penetrate, penetrate, not caring about all the other interesting and charming things the human limbs, digits and organs are able to do.
The ideal romantic scenario for the average guy would be:

1. Handshake
2. Exchange of name cards
3. Penetration

Only raw muscle power on the woman’s part can prolong and vary this procedure somewhat. Is that why so many women flock to gyms? Fortunately I’m genetically lucky in being the offspring of two strong parents. Those muscles come in handy, oh yeah.

Beautiful Dudes III

The Beautiful Dudes series has been a bit non-existent lately. I see them around but they’re always surgically attached to some bint or other, and it seems too much trouble to disentangle their intertwined tonsils.
But good old China always delivers the goods. This one, Mr. Wong, is a captain in a restaurant in Shenzhen. Oh! A little bit shy – I love that. Hair a bit 80’s, but nothing that a shower together couldn’t fix. Hm. Is that another appetite I feel coming up?

Will Anybody Stop These Insane Vandals?

Just when you thought the clinically insane Hong Kong government couldn’t do any more damage to the already wrecked city (the demise of the Star Ferry and Queen Piers, the decision to cover the entire Central waterfront with a six lane highway AND build a monument to their, the government’s, greatness, a massive Central Government Building on the last bit of space from where one could see the other side of the dwindling harbour) up they come with another plan to fulfill their legacy: Raze everything good about Hong Kong to the ground.

This time they have cast their destruction-hungry eyes on one of the, no, THE most endearing landmark of Central: The old outdoor wetmarkets in Graham and Peel streets. These streets will be well known to anybody who’s ever watched a Hong Kong movie. Narrow and stair-filled, they symbolise everything that’s Hong Kong: Packed with people, fcovered in colourful awnings and overhung by signs with Chinese characters, full of proud artisans carrying out the dying arts of cobbling, umbrella making, soy sauce- and pastemaking, knick-knack and weird things-selling, tea-making, noodle-making and just plain old vegetable, fruit and flower-selling.

To satisfy the needs of property developers, crying for help now that almost all premium land has been taken – by them – the government has decided to tear down the last indigenous old buildings of Central and build – guess what – office and residential towers. Oh, but it will be so nice! So new and clean! No more pesky staircases to negotiate for the put-upon inhabitants; from now on they will have spanking new lifts and easy-to-clean flats. Yeah, right! As if those people will ever be able to afford living in any of the jumped-up, steel and mirror-windowed, 80 floor monsters.

Oh, but they won’t have to walk anymore, now the government is planning to open up those narrow steps for the sacred car! Forget about the locals and tourists who actually enjoyed walking up and down those charming steps, savouring the sights and smells, shopping for normal-priced items in an iconic area still untouched by disneyfication. Now they will be able to drive to Starbucks and McDonalds and take the lift straight up into their $140 000 a month flat with its two centimeter view of the harbour. Until of course another monster is erected two centimeters away from their window.

We must put an end to this! People of the world, Hong Kong needs you in its hour of death! Please visit www.savethestreetmarket.com to get involved and let your views be heard! Don’t let the vandals destroy the last little interesting thing we have left.

Good Sense

Meanwhile, at last some good news from Beijing. They have decided to remove Starbucks permanently from The Forbidden City.
But you have to ask: What the hell compelled them to let that faux-cosy, glorified McDonalds into there in the first place?
I mean: The Forbidden City! The holiest place in all of China and they let STARBUCKS have a go? Makes you wonder about greed sometimes.
Well done Beijing! Now get rid of all the other blights on the landscape.

Nokia Rocks

People are so fickle and never satisfied. I used to complain about my Nokia mobile because of its awful graphics (I don’t want to look at pictures of insanely smiling cartoons, I just want to make calls) and the fact that although fancier, it wasn’t as well designed as its five year older predecessor.

While complaining, I had totally forgotten how awful my two other previous phones, Ericsson and Motorola, had been, to the point where I let the Motorola quietly drown one day when I realised it couldn’t even pick up the signal when I stood right in front of the Motorola Signal Shop, let alone at home, on the ferry or anywhere vaguely built up. The Ericsson functioned only in Swedish or something, AND didn’t pick up the signal unless I stood on one foot, leaning out of the window with the phone in my outstreched hand.

So with these telecommunicative disasters in fading but not unfresh memory, I should have shut up about my new Nokia. It worked, sometimes even inside lifts, and that should have been enough for me. And today my Nokia proved itself to be the phone over all phones.

I was coming down the stairs of one of Hong Kong’s landmarks, the longest outdoor escalator in the world, when my Nokia beeped. Or is that “bope?” I sat down on the steps to dig the phone out of my voluminous bag, and as I got up and started texting the answer, I somehow dropped the phone over the edge of the escalator and down on the pavement below. If you know Hong Kong, it was just some steps down from where the Dublin Jack pub used to be – at least an 8 meter drop. I “coolly” alerted people on the pavement, none of whom had actually been hit by the falling object, to guard it while I dashed down swearing “softly” to myself. Anything for a lull-less life? Not!

On the ground I met a sorry sight: Old Nok in five pieces: Back, front, touchpad, battery and SIM-card. And a lot of people staring, as well as a smarmy, smirking bastard going: I think that phone is a write-off.

Ah yes, or it would have been if it had been one of your hyper sensitive Mulberry or Raspberry with in-built bar and servant, camera and email. As it was, I pressed all the pieces together with great force and: Without a scratch! Good as new! With message still in it!!!
Ha ha ha. Well I deserve it, having lost so many bloody items recently.
Touch wood.

Heung Gong. I Love You

Unreal! View from the 59th floor of a little pad in Mong Kok. Which is actually Wong Gok in Chinese. Yes Hong Kong can be like this, I realised when I came back from my holiday in China. I was actually a little bit sad because China is so exciting and Hong kong so normal… but then I read the news in the South China Morning post and realised Hong Kong is still itself:

A designer called.. something, felt her bag was so interesting that she could sell tickets for people to come and buy limited anounts of said bag, bearing the logo: I Am Not A Plastic Bag. This attracted all the environmentally friendly la-la women of Hong Kong who snapped up the exclusive tickets for the stratospheric bag launch and took time out from their busy schedule to queue up outside the shop from 3 am to get in there first. The bags, pretty tacky as far as I could tell, cost HK$ 120.

Unfortunately a lot of undesirables had caught wind of this, and so a melee happened outside the shop where environmentally aware women fought with the lesser non ticket-holding human beings. How dare they! They hadn’t been invited!
The result was that the shop didn’t dare open its doors and a lot of ladies who lunch had to go home without the coveted bag. And “ironically” those environmentally hysterical people left so much rubbish outside the shop (empty water bottles, empty lunch boxes, plastic bags…) that the rubbish collectors had to send a special van.

Yesterday the ticket holders were summoned to a lower class supermarket to get the bags which were their due. And what do you know – those bags came wrapped in three different plastic bags!

So yeah! Hong Kong is still going strong. As if there was ever any doubt.

Happiness Is A Warm Dog

This is an advert for dog meat. When my friend Lee saw it, in the middle of a pavement in Kunming, Yunnan province, along with other adverts, he spat in disgust. Metaphorically, as he doesn’t do spitting. “Pha! How can they show a cute dog, man’s best friend, in an advert for DOG MEAT!!!” (And he’s not even too fond of dogs.)
But hang on there. Don’t we use images, drawn or photographed, of the live animal to advertise all other forms of meat? Especially chickens and cows? And not least, pigs?

All right, so they’re called beef and pork once they’re on the plate, but no matter what we call them and how we vacuum pack them without any bones or staring eyes, the fact remains that what we’re scoffing down is the dead flesh of what could be Man’s Second Best Friend(s) if we only had more spacious flats.

I’ve eaten dog meat on more than one occasion and it tastes all right, if a bit sinewy and with many small and irritating bones. And I used to say that if you’re going to eat meat anyway, why not dog? It’s not as if it’s an endagered species or anything. Where I live, for example, there are so many dogs that we can hardly see the ground for the mass of heaving brown and black bodies and lolling tongues.

However! Then I heard how dogs are killed in China and Korea and presumably other places where Fido is on the menu: By hanging them upside down and slowly beating them to death.

Now, that is clearly too much.

I’m not saying I would hesitate to eat my dog Piles if we were stranded on an island without a Sichuan restaurant and I was hungry enough. But I’d certainly kill him in a quick (“humane”) (now there’s a funny oxymoron) manner – none of this torture crap. And I won’t actively seek out dog meat in a restaurant. I feel sorry for the bastards I suppose. And I also feel sorry for cows, sheep and pigs. So I’m heading for vegetarianism again – but please can I enjoy the occasional egg?

By the way, when the collar is off and the chips are down, this is what dog meat really looks like. Arf arf, enjoy!