New Series: Everyday Survival. (Or surviving every day) 1.

I love stamps. China makes great stamps and funnily enough also North Korea. Or perhaps naturally emough? I suppose stamp design is one of the few outlets artists have over there for creating something not featuring Kim Jong-il or his dreary father.
I also love email. The speed! Having said that, receiving an email is not the same as getting a letter full of large colourful stamps and Par Avion stickers from foreign shores, especially if the sender is a beautiful dude.

But getting anything, anything at all, is better than getting nothing. That’s why I get a little bit excited each time my phone rings and an unknown number is displayed. I’ve won something! It’s a new customer! Or it’s the beautiful dude I gave my card to on the MTR last year and who’s finally summoned up the courage to call me!

So that’s probably why I get so incandescent with rage when I find out it’s some fucker cold-calling to sell me something (Sunday night at ten, say) or worse, a recorded message. Whoever came up with that idea? Does anyone ever, but ever, heed the call and run out to buy whatever it is the tinny voice is squeaking on about? They do not! They get incandescent with rage and hang up, seething with unreleased murder-lust, is what they do.

I tell you, I’m glad I have a Nokia. Because each time I get one of those recorded messages I get an irresistible urge to commit a violent act! I.e. throwing the telephone. With a Nokia you can throw it far and hard – it will separate into five parts but they’re easy to put together. (See Nokia Rocks.)

Anyway, the recorded messages seem to have disappeared recently. It was probably the hospitals who managed to stop the practice – too many people were being rushed in with heart attacks caused by apoplexy from recorded message calls.

Which brings me to Cold Callers and How To Survive Them. This is what I do every time. They keep their job but stop calling me, I get to vent my spleen and everybody’s happy.

Ring ring. “Wei?”
“Is this…(my number)?”
“Yes?” (You’re calling it so why ask me?)
“I’m from Crapulence Company, my name is Wong. Miss, we have a..”
“What’s my name?”
“Eh?”
“Do you know my name? Do you know who I am?”
“Miss, we have a…”
“If you don’t know my name, why in the innermost double-hell are you calling me?”
“….”
“Gotcha.” Click.

The problem with mobiles is you can’t slam them down satisfactorily, but at least it’s better than throwing them.

Stand by for our next instalment, which is: How to survive Lo Wu Shopping Mall.

Facial Hair

I left my homeland in 1988 to get away from facial hair and have never looked back. One of the great things about China is that men don’t have the follicular ability to sprout great mats of hair, facial or otherwise. Chinese men look like men should: As if their bodies are covered in skin, not some undergrowth of dubious origin.

People ask me why I hate facial hair, especially moustaches, with such unrestrained passion. Did something happen in my childhood involving facial hair? Was I perhaps molested by a gorilla? The three billygoats Gruff? Or Santa Claus?
Ha ha, I scoff. Why do people always have to read childhood trauma into everything? The reason is much simpler – I hate facial hair because it’s an affront to my aesthetic sensibilities.

Indeed, I hate all ugly things, but facial hair just triggers this insane hatred in me because it’s so unneccessary and because I like men and don’t want them to mar their faces with thicket. With all the good shaving equipment on the market today, why do guys choose, yes endeavour to, walk around looking like a throwback from 1974?

Moustaches nowadays are mostly found in Northern Europe, the Middle East and on 90% of all prisoners in the United States, so I can avoid them. Here in HK it’s the goatees that get my goat. I have come to think they’re even worse than moustaches because while moustaches are for criminals and religious misogynists, goatees are worn by so-called thinking men. What they’re thinking is that they’re hip, but they’re not.

The fascistic precision with which they have to shave around the little clusters of pubic-looking hair, makes the wearers look even less masculine than they fear they are not, because the only good-looking hair growth on a man is “forgot to shave for three days,” not “so ridiculously vain that I spend an hour with a pair of tweezers and a ruler each morning.”

And for god’s sakes, people, goatees do not, I repeat not make you look slimmer. They just make you look like a fat exclamation mark turned upside down. And a twat.

The Best Thing About HK Airport

You’ll never guess what this is? Oh, airport, dead giveaway. Yes it is Lower Russia (or something) seen through the window of the 06.15 flight from Trondhjem to Amsterdam. Mmm…early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

And bored! Seven hours at Schiphol Airport is incredibly boring and made me unhealthy (out of boredom ate the box of chocolates I had bought for my friend) not wealthy (spent all my euros on non-working face creams) and not wise (knew that face creams don’t work.)

Anyway, about this flying thing. I don’t understand the world, and the people in it. A big thing in Norway now is to pay off carbon footprints. The more you fly and the more cars you buy (and use) the more money you can pay to … a third world country? Something like that. But the carbo hydrates or footprints or whatever are still there, aren’t they? Can not understand, as my Japanese students always used to say.

And another thing: The more people, countries, governments, know about global warming, climate change and the fast approaching end of the human race, sorry, life as we know it, the more they seem dead set on starting more airlines, encouraging people to fly more and, as is the case with China, India and South Korea, starting their own space programmes, putting people on – wow! – the moon!

I know nothing about space ships because it’s rocket science, but I presume rocket fuel is made from oil? And burning of fossil fuel creates more carbon footprints… no?
Are some countries speeding up the process of global warming on purposedoing things that are totally, 100% and completely unneccessary.
Geezers have been strolling around on the moon and in space for almost my entire life. Why do they have to prove it’s possible again and again? It’s possible! They’ve been on TV! Now set the bloody scientists to work to find alternative sources of energy instead of wasting any more time on useless crap.
But HK Airport, Chek Lap Kok (Red Some Kind Of Fish Point,) – isn’t it a wonder? I touched down at 09.15 and at 09.35 I was sitting on the bus on my way home after having waited for the bus for three minutes! Hats off, people! For after seven hours in transit I now know that the best thing about an airport is when you don’t have to spend time in it.

To Haddock

For those unfamiliar with the intricacies of the Norwegian language, here’s some linguistic enlightenment: In Norwegian, haddock is a verb. Of course it’s also a fish, in fact it’s probebly a fish first and foremost, but as a verb it is unparalleled. I’m haddocking as we speak. It means something like being stuck somewhere without any means of getting away and little opportunity to spend the time in a meaningful manner.
Waiting in a dentist’s office is a good example of haddocking, as is being stuck in transit in Amsterdam airport for 7 hours waiting for the flight back to lovely Hong Kong.

Yes I had to get up at 04.00 this morning and get to the airport before 5, just for the privilege of haddocking here.
Oh why, why did my parents elect to settle in Trondheim, Norway,  instead of somewhere with access to lots of international flights? Parochial bastards! Getting online is 6 euros for 30 minutes so I in a few seconds I’ll be

Politicians

Election day is looming in Hong Kong. The last few weeks have seen millions of column inches and thousands of square meters of tacky posters (“what you want is what I want. What you concern is what I concern”) dedicated to aspiring and more seasoned candidates “running” for district elections – a bromide to take people’s minds off the fact that we have no say in anything happening in our city and that the people we vote for will have the following amount of power: Zero.

It used to be that “the people running Hong Kong are Jardine Matheson, the Jockey Club and the governor, in that order” or something like that. Now it’s “Any property developer owned by Li Ka Shing and The Chinese Communist Party, in any order.”

But the politicians keep spouting stuff and appearing in “heated debates,” the most ardently anticipated being, for some reason, anything featuring Regina Yip. After a “stand-off” between her and grand old lady Anson Chan where Yip had been forced to face pesky questions about her support of fascist, anti freedom law Article 23, Yip uttered that she had been prepared for hostility but that it was okay, because she had “400 friends on Facebook.”

Not only super popular but cool and happening like young people! A true politician of our time.

She reminds me of that arbiter of good sartorial taste Joseph Estrada, disgraced former president of the Philippines. After his release from prison where he was serving a life sentence for plunder, he was not only pardoned but given a position in the government. You have to give it to old Erap (Estrada’s fond nickname spelling “pare” (pal) backwards) – he doesn’t hide his glory under a bushel, or bucket or whatever. Not content to be only boring old free and with a well paid job again, he strongly suggested that only a presidency was good enough for him now. Why? “Because I have been president.”

Right! Yes, that’s a reason as good as any, and certainly more rational than what the “leaders” of Hong Kong have to say for themselves, namely that “I should be in power because I exist.” With that solid grounding AND a facebook account, it’s world domination next.

Big Conglomerates Kill

You don’t have to be a smoker to have noticed those new warnings against using their own product that cigarette companies have to put on each packet nowadays.
Deciding that a discrete “Would you mind if I told you that smoking can be rather detrimental to the old health?” message wasn’t enough, even the indecisive and big business-loving HK government have caved and agreed to use colour photos on cigarette warnings, showing in graphic detail what can happen (all right, does happen) when you smoke.

There is the lung with the darkened space and pointing arrow of course, but that’s too abstract – after all the lungs are on the inside and therefore don’t exist until you cough them out. No, what’s inspired me to finally pack in the pack and stop being a “social smoker” (kidding myself into thinking it’s okay to smoke only when I drink and then only in China) is the legs.
You walk past a newsagent’s or 7-eleven, or just look down occasionally as you hasten through the smokey hell-hole of Hong Kong and you will see them: Unopened or discarded packs of Marlboro Light, Kent or whatever, with garish colour photographs of legs rotting, as it were, on the vine. Trench foot! Blown off a suicide bomber! Bubonic plague! all don’t look half as bad as your leg will if you don’t refrain from dragging on those fags. Black, purple, swollen and with festering sores – wah! It’s enough to make even me believe the nay-sayers are actually right.

But there is a bigger danger in society today and it’s Big Business. (Of which tobacco companies, of course, must be said to play an active part.) Chain restaurants, to be precise. McDonald’s and Pacific Coffee (and, without doubt, Starbucks) to be even more precise.

It’s Chinese New Year 1996. I’m hung over, starving and there’s nothing to eat. In the HK of 1996 people still followed the quaint tradition of taking time off during Chinese New Year, and so both supermarkets and all restaurants on my island are closed – for three whole days. Only McDonald’s is open. At that time I had visited McDonald’s twice – in my life. Once in the US and the second time in Tokyo, forced to go there by a kindness-killing family. The first time I swore never again – let’s be honest, apart from the political and eco-socio-cultural aspects of McDonald’s, their products really taste like crap! How they manage to make potato chips taste like crap is beyond me but there you go.
Anyway, I have no choice. Oh but how it hurts me in my principles! I stand outside the dreaded edifice packed with Chinese families, weighing up pros and cons in my mind, putting off the moment when I have to step inside and smell that awful fast food smell. A frisky gale is blowing and my jacket pockets are shallow – mostly for decoration, really. Suddenly the $200 I have brought with me to buy breakfast fly out of my pocket and out to sea! never to be seen again.

I had to live off old scrape-downs from inside the fridge and oven that day, and have never set foot in a McBastard outlet since.
I hate Pacific Coffee and Starbucks with almost the same passion although they do have chairs that aren’t welded to the floor – but sometimes I have to go to these creators of mountains of rubbish to see clients. On Tuesday I was coming out of Pacific Coffee in Wellington street, walking in a completely normal fashion you understand, when I sprain my ankle with a big crunch as well as dropping my bag with my laptop in it so that venerable instrument was shot to shit.
I ask you, doesn’t this show that big business kills? My foot now looks like a cigarette anti advert and it takes me 15 minutes to walk a hundred meters.
Boycot these money-stealing, health-killing global giants! Death to McDonald’s and Pac Cof! (but I’ll return to the latter when they start serving everybody coffee in porcelain cups instead of cardboard, and use metal cutlery instead of plastic. And promise not to play Christmas music.)

Not Chinglish, not Manglish, just Badlish

I’ve just finished reading a highly amusing but also scary book by John Humphrys called Lost For Words, about “the mangling and manipulating of the English language.”

The same day I chuckling read the last lines, this job advert from Standard Chartered Bank somehow found its way into my inbox:
The incumbent will be responsible for monitoring the daily corporate action operational activities to ensure delivering of high quality customer services.

And more in the same vein. I read, reread and re-reread the ad, but couldn’t find a word about what kind of position the “incumbent” would actually fill. Was it that of secretary? Doorman? Managing director? Toilet attendant?

I used to be on the look-out for Manglish – fun and charming menus and signs translated from Chinese into classics like “The slippery are very crafty” and “Welcome bedraggled, forgive we cannot reception.” Manglish is great and puts a smile on the most curmudgeonly grumbler’s face, but this post-modern confuso-speak is just irritating and meaningless.

I wrote to the bank asking what the ad meant but have received no answer. I fear that this isn’t the last Badlish posting you will see on this blog.

Blog Victory … of a sort

Wow! This blog is really working. A couple of months ago I lamented, in “Opium for The Non-Religious,” the abundance of “Welcome,” whether it be on handwritten signs, on massive digital orange-glowing monsters or shouted into one’s ear by screeching heluim-voiced bint as one enters, say, a 7-eleven outlet.
One of the examples I used, in jest, was “welcome to the bus.”
Well, what do you know? Yesterday on the very bus nr. 4 from Mui Wo to Tung Fuk, there it was: A huge orange-glowing digital sign on the inside of the windshield where the word Welcome rolled sedately across the screen again and again. No Chinese this time – bus nr. 4 trusts its customers to be educated. As the driver tore through the bends on two wheels so my oranges fell out of my bag and rolled cheerfully down the aisle, I felt thoroughly welcomed.
However! That bus is also not without dangers. On the back of the seat in front of me I was alarmed to see this sticker: