Some short book reviews

It’s been a bit quiet here on the blog, not least because life has been like that too. Apart from the odd bit of hiking (with crappy visibility, so no pictures) I’ve been trying to make inroads in to the pile of books beside the bed, so here are a few quick reviews.

Po Toi

I had a great trip yesterday to the island of Po Toi, which for some reason had never really occurred to me as a place to go in my 10 years here. Which is a shame because it’s a beautiful place and somewhere to which I’ll definitely be going back. Apparently it’s very busy at weekends, and during the week there is only one kaito each way on Tuesdays and Thursdays (leaving Aberdeen at 10am and Po Toi at 2pm), but the main restaurant was open, and while we were there they had two other parties of gweilos as well – one from a yacht and one from a junk.

The journey by kaito is part of the attraction. These little ferries are part of the wonderful thing that is Hong Kong’s public transport system.

Kaito in Aberdeen harbour

(Click on any of the images to open a bigger version in a new window/tab.)

iTunes Political Correctness Gone Mad

This is utterly ridiculous… I just noticed that iTunes, in its wisdom, has replaced the cover artwork of The Pros and Cons of Hitch-hiking (Roger Waters) with a version where the woman has a black block across her bum, thus:

How ludicrous can political correctness get?

(The next bit is NSFW if you have the misfortune to work somewhere like iTunes)

A cracking read

Occasionally I pick up a book that holds my attention so well that it just gets read cover to cover in one sitting (fortunately my semi-retiredness means that staying awake all night isn’t a big deal). The latest such work is Craig Murray’s Murder in Samarkand (known in its American edition as “Dirty Diplomacy“) which I thoroughly recommend to anyone with an interest in the “War on Terror”, British diplomacy and politics, or Uzbekistan. (Apparently the US version names a few more names directly since it doesn’t have to deal with the UK’s over-protective libel laws.)

A great new restaurant in Tong Fuk

Having got bored with finishing our Lantau hikes at the China Bear in Mui Wo, my hiking buddy and I decided to check out the new(-ish) Eddie’s restaurant in Tong Fuk yesterday. South Lantau Road is between it and the beach, so its “beach bistro” tag is a little bit of marketing licence, but this is a very welcome option indeed for quality food at reasonable prices on Lantau.

eddie's restaurant in Tong Fuk, Lantau Island

We arrived only a few minutes after the 6pm opening time, and were greeted by the very friendly and competent waiter.

If you go down to the woods today…

… you’ll find something quite fascinating, if you happen to be on Section 3 of the Wilson Trail (at distance post 026, grid reference KK163701, just above Ma Yau Tong), as I was yesterday.

There is a large collection of brightly coloured sculptures featuring people (apparently of various races) and animals, many of them labelled in English, as well as a shrine with some sort of deity in it. The sculptures are getting a little dilapidated, but the shrine itself is still clearly maintained on a regular basis. Here are some examples:

A very big tortoise!

The stone bleeds!

At long last, after concerted and repeated efforts by huge numbers of their electors, and after a couple of brazen attempts to fudge the issue, the UK Government has finally done the decent thing and fixed the outrageous rules which denied thousands of people the right to live in the country for which they had fought and risked their lives.

Hubert van Es – RIP

Another page has turned in the history of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club (where I am but a lowly “associate”) with the death of Hu van Es, one of its best known members.

Extending the farce

Hemlock sums up the situation with today’s release of the detainees. Not content to quietly let a bad mistake fade gradually in the memory, the government has decided to make a big song and dance about their release. You couldn’t make this stuff up!

The Hong Kong Government Face-Saving Department swings into action today, led by its famous Molehill-Mountain Conversion Team and the highly capable Laborious Over-Dramatization Unit…

Brilliant!

Protesting the incompetence of the HK Government

I’ve decided that someone has to start standing up and making a noise about how absurdly incompetent the HK Government is in its response to one person testing positive for a mild form of the flu.

Here we go again!

I hope to address the current institutionalised panic in more detail when I have time later. But I just have to say that the government’s imprisoning of 300 people against their will in the Metro Park Hotel for no rational reason whatsoever is a gross violation of their human rights, and I hope that they were take appropriate legal action for false imprisonment when they are released. I hope that a good number of them are foreign citizens who will be fully supported by their governments in this.

It is a crying shame that Hong Kong has been made the laughing stock of rational people worldwide by the actions of the administrative class in Hong Kong. These people were very well trained to administer the city under other people’s leadership, but they are totally and utterly out of their depth intellectually when it comes to providing the leadership which this city has been so sadly lacking for the last 12 years.

Obama on faith & values

It is so refreshing to have a US President who isn’t under the cosh of Christian fundamentalists, or indeed of religion in general. The Heresiarch has written an excellent piece analysing and contrasting the speeches of Messrs Obama and Blair at a recent event; it is long but well worth the effort. It is great to see that not only does Obama make a point of reaching out to all faiths, he explicitly and repeatedly includes humanists in his comments and explicitly acknowledges that a decent moral code does not require a religion.

Clearly it is still very early in the process, but could Obama’s election possibly mark the being of the end of the period (short in the history of mankind) during which religious delusionists have been the major force in the world? We can only hope so.

Summers will never be the same again, again

For those of us of a certain age who spent our school summer holidays listening to Test Match Special one of the last links with those days has been broken with the quite sudden death of the Bearded Wonder. The commentary might have been from John Arlott or Brian Johnston, and the “expert analysis” from Fred Trueman or Trevor Bailey, but the person who kept them all on the straight and narrow for more than 40 years when it came to facts and statistics was Bill Frindall.

Ignorance is no defence

Evidence that the UK is going “tit’s up”, part 73…

Digital Enhancement

I was intrigued yesterday (yes, I’m behind with my reading) by this article from last week’s Economist. Apparently, for men at least, the relative length of your first and third fingers (known in scientific circles I now discover as 2D:4D or digit ratio) is a good indicator of your potential prowess at competitive sport or financial trading.

Genital Mutilation

It is good to see from the Beeb that Denmark (my paternal ancestral home) is taking a lead and finally prosecuting people for genital mutilation of their children.

It is unfortunate, however, that, so far at least, they have a sexist application of this law. I look forward to the day when god delusionists of various types are up in court for mutilating their sons.

A bizarre old Chestnut

After recommendations from various friends, Mrs smog and I decided to try out Le Marron last night. We had been told that it had good French food in a quaint environment, and the menus on the website looked promising; we were also tempted by the $40 corkage charge.

Blog stats

Just as an aside, I do find it quite surprising that this post has got more than twice the number of hits of any other page on this blog. I guess that I need more, in the words of the incomparable LT, “lesbian sex with cantopop tartlets”. But in the absence of that I’d just like to mention that Vivian Chow is utterly mad to want to marry Joe Nieh

A Canny wee place in Wanchai

A common complaint heard about Wanchai is that there are few bars where one can have a drink or two, and maybe a bite to eat, and yet be able to have a conversation at a normal volume, free from the attentions of working girls hoping that you might be up for another type of intercourse later.

So I’ve recently been going more to The Cannyman and it really does live up to its marketing slogan of “An Oasis in Wanchai”.

Food & Drink labelling in Hong Kong

My rant for the week is about both the poor requirements of food labelling in Hong Kong and the lax enforcement of such standards as do exist.

Firstly ingredients: the Government in its wisdom recently introduced new food labelling regulations for Hong Kong. Not content with accepting that if, say, the food was labelled adequately in English for the US, EU or Australian markets then that would be sufficient, they insisted on imposing their own rules and hence requiring almost all imported foodstuffs to be relabelled specifically for Hong Kong, thereby imposing a significant cost increase on the suppliers or distributors and thence price increases on the consumers.