Ordinary Gweilo

It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writing (mainly) about Hong Kong

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Month: Sep 2004

  • Underground cinema

    This is a rather strange story from France that doesn’t seem to have been mentioned in the SCMP. Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital’s chic 16th arrondissement. Officers admit they are at a loss to know who built or used one of…

  • A little clearer

    Just to end the week on a positive note (and at the risk of being accused of being “Pooterish” by the man with the big yellow blog). The last few days have been fairly horrible in Hong Kong, with an all too obvious blanket of smog almost everywhere. I was starting to wish for a…

  • Spike – what went wrong?

    Wednesday’s Standard had a more detailed piece about the closure of Spike magazine: Spike’s demise had been predicted among the territory’s small expatriate journalist community ever since it opened. Spike was launched last November and was supported by nine investors – individuals and companies – among them staff and contributors. The magazine set out to…

  • Long Hair and Hemlock

    Via Simon, an interesting piece in Slate about ‘Long Hair’ Leung Gwok Hung, by a journalist who also interviewed Hemlock. “Long Hair” feels that the election results were not as bad as they were portrayed: “The results aren’t a setback for democrats; we won something like 60 percent of the vote. But it was a…

  • Making sense of it all

    Some interesting analysis of the opinion polls from ESWN (via Simon). I wasn’t aware of this, but it seems that the DAB’s share of the vote is consistently under-estimated in opinion polls. This is not a new phenomenon, and interestingly, there’s a piece in this week’s Economist about the differing results from opinion polls on…

  • Spiked

    Spike has apparently ceased publication. Good news for George, but disappointing for the rest of us. UPDATE: Here is the story from Wednesday’s SCMP An errant investor has forced satirical magazine Spike to be, well, spiked. Publisher Stephen Vines confirmed yesterday that, following a key investor’s failure to deliver promised capital, the publication was finished.…

  • LegCo elections

    I was mildly encouraged by the results of the LegCo elections (as already covered by Phil, Simon and others). The turnout was up, and considering that this was election to select an opposition rather than a government it was amazing that so many people bothered to turn out. If you compare the turnout on Sunday…

  • Poetic justice

    Marvellous – the ‘junk mail’ filter in Hotmail places an email from Microsoft into the junk mail folder. It’s obviously cleverer than I had thought!!

  • A difficult choice

    Anyone living in Hong Kong will be aware that the elections for the Legislative Council take place tomorrow (Sunday). I don’t have a vote this time, so I have four more years to make up my mind who to support in the next elections. In truth, I’m not sure I’ll have much more of a…

  • More Weasels

    Warning: even by my low standards, this is fairly boring stuff. Like most people, I guess, I get annoyed when telemarketing people call me. Not so much because they are trying to sell me something, but rather because what they say is entirely scripted. I hate having to listen to their pathetic attempts both to…