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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  • Wet and windy

    TyphoonThis afternoon the Hong Kong Observatory issued a typhoon warning (standby signal #1). From their website:

    This is a stand-by signal, indicating that a tropical cyclone is centred within 800 km of Hong Kong and may later affect the territory.

    Action – If you are planning an outing, remember that there is a tropical cyclone near Hong Kong which may affect your plans later. Listen to radio and TV broadcasts on the progress of the storm.

    If it gets any closer or changes direction towards Hong Kong, everyone will stop working and start speculating about the typhoon and the possibility of a day off. However, this one looks most unlikely to arrive here!

    The red star over to the left of the picture is Hong Kong, and the circle shows the area that might be affected, based on the current projected track of the storm. As you can see, the storm is not expected to come very close, but we may get some wind and rain. Fortunately we have plenty of advance warning from the Observatory – so stock up on instant noodles now, before it’s too late.

    tc_pos_09UPDATE: Typhoon Conson has headed off for Taiwan, so Simon (and Eric) will be disappointed. According to RTHK, Conson is the name of a scenic site in northern Vietnam.

    Not even any wind and rain in Hong Kong!

  • Everyone’s friend

    I think that “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” started on British TV after I fled the country, so I have never fully understood the hysteria that seemed to accompany the show.

    For some reason it caught the public imagination, and not just amongst the normal couch potatoes who watch ITV game shows, but amongst a large part of the population.  Almost everyone thought they had a chance to win (maybe not the million pounds but at least a few thousand), with the result that vast numbers of people called the (premium rate) numbers to try and get on the show. 

    Someone even trying cheating, but it was done so badly that he got caught and never got the money (his wife was very upset that he drew attention to himself by winning the top prize, rather than settling for a more modest prize). Now there are local versions of the show all over the world, including Hong Kong, but the initial hysteria has died down in most countries.  However, the guy who devised the format (previously a traffic reporter on a local radio station in London) must now be very rich after selling the format many times over.

    One novel feature of the show is that you can “call a friend” for help if you get stuck with a question you can answer. Needless to say, the definition of friend may be stretched somewhat to find the person who is most likely to know the answer, but I hadn’t realized that there were professionals who could help out! Now the producers of the Croatian version have banned a gentleman who has apparently been the “friend” for virtually every contestant who appeared on the show – and only got one answer wrong!  He charges a small fee, but obviously the contestants felt that it was worthwhile, and now the producers have got tired of paying out so much prize money. 

    I have to admit that I have never quite had the depth of general knowledge to be a good quiz contestant.  I did once take part in a quiz team, but I was more a squad member than one of the stars.  As I recall, we finished as runners-up and won a large quantity of cans of some undrinkable beer – which most of us then took to parties and abandoned.

    I vaguely know a couple of people who are experts in quizzes, and who managed to appear on a succession of different TV quiz shows in the UK.  However, most of the shows offered only modest prizes – the glory of appearing on TV was apparently enough.  Now people cheat and hire experts to help them out.   

  • How stupid can they get?

    The latest piece of idiocy from the people who run football is apparently an effective ban on shirts with stripes on the back. It will start the season after next (2005-2006) in the English Premier League, but presumably they won’t stop there.

    The reasoning is that the players names on the back of shirts (introduced a few years back) are hard to read when you have stripes. How did we all manage when not only did players not have their names on the shirts, but they were allocated numbers from 1 to 11 rather than having squad numbers. I suppose we used visual clues such as body shapes, heads, faces, hair styles and so forth. Admittedly the last one is now more difficult when the likes of David Beckham are always changing their hair styles, but even so – is it that much of a problem?

    Come to that, couldn’t they redesign the lettering so that it was easier to read? A dark outline if the lettering is light, and a light outline if the lettering is dark, that sort of thing. It’s hardly rocket science.

    If you agree that this is stupid, visit this website to register your support. Even fans of Manchester United and Arsenal are welcome.

  • Copies, copies, everywhere

    Never mind that Hong Kong is apparently awash with copies of everything from watches to soy sauce, American TV is soon to be awash with copies of ‘The Apprentice’. As well as the direct copies (one will feature that bearded bloke who runs Virgin, another that bearded bloke who used to own Spurs), there appear to be at least two about lawyers. No surprise that Fox are doing one, but David E Kelley is also getting in on the act, having overcome his earlier aversion to this genre. According to The Guardian (registration required):

    The move is something of a u-turn for Mr Kelley, who last summer launched an outspoken attack on network executives for commissioning more and more reality shows, which he described as "junk" and "trash". Mr Kelley said his change of heart was down to the strength of the idea for the legal reality show, which came from independent producer Renegade 83, the company behind the US version of Blind Date. "I’m not a big fan of reality television and I’m still not a big fan of those productions that pander to the lowest common denominator. [But] the folks at Renegade wanted to meet and discuss the series and I loved the idea," Mr Kelley told American entertainment magazine Variety

    OK, so it’s all about quality, and certainly not the money. Who better to bring us a law-based reality series than the creator of Ally McBeal and The Practice, two shows that were very true-to-life.

    Star World has just started showing series 7 of The Practice which, in the way of Mr Kelley’s shows, seemed to fall apart after the first few series, becaming increasingly over-wrought and melodramatic and rapidly losing its already somewhat tenuous grip on reality. It was widely expected to be cancelled after series 7, but instead Kelley fired most of the stars and carried on making it with a lower budget before it finally was cancelled at the end of series 8. However, one or two of the new characters introduced in series 8 are going to appear in a new spin-off, so the world will not be without a David E Kelley law drama.

    Meanwhile, on ‘The Apprentice’, they fired the fat bloke for being not very good at selling t-shirts in Planet Hollywood. It was all rather puzzling – the women’s team decided that the best strategy was to sell as much booze as possible, whilst the men (as usual) did a lot of boringly sensible things that kinda worked in a limited way. The problem with aggressively hawking booze to your customers is that it whilst the margins are good, it can be very unprofitable if just one person drives home drunk, kills someone, and then you get sued.

    Hence the fact that Planet Hollywood doesn’t follow this strategy, and the real-life managers were not happy. However, the rules of the show are very simple, and so the men lost for the fourth straight week, and Howie or Bowie, or whatever his name was, got fired. Next week the teams are changed around, so the men will not suffer the twin disadvantages of being four against eight and having to compete against the women’s use of sex appeal in every task. Now, about this new reality show with lawyers. Somehow I can’t get this old joke out of my mind: "What do you call one hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?" "A promising start" Well, how about one a week? A very modest proposal, I think you’ll agree.

  • A mystery solved

    I’ve been wondering where Simon had gone, and now I think I’ve figured it out.

    On Monday he took part in the cheese-rolling event in Gloucestershire. On Tuesday he popped over to Paris to watch Tim Henman win his quarter-final in the French Open, and tonight he has a secret assignation with Helen in London.

    Did you see that cheese-rolling nonsense on the TV news? I think it’s all a conspiracy to make Brits look daft. As for Tim Henman, all I can say is that he is in the finest tradition of English tennis players, and it’s bound to end in tears.

  • Americans fail to get the joke

    Least surprising news of the week is that NBC will restrict their remake of the The Office to just six shows, after the pilot was very badly received by viewers.

    Viewers of the pilot show gave it the worst sitcom rating in NBC’s history, saying it was “too depressing.”

    What did they expect? Friends-style hilarity with tanning machines?

  • Facts vs. Common Sense

    I was slightly surprised to find that Conrad had suddenly taken an interest in obesity and inequality, having rather mysteriously started reading liberal columnists in The Guardian for inspiration.

    Polly Toynbee’s column was one of dozens (if not hundreds) in the UK on the subject of obesity, which seems to be a current national obsession – well, not really, but it fills up column inches in the newspapers. Ms Toynbee’s angle on this is that it is inequality that leads to obesity, and so we should be attacking the real problem and not the symptoms. She backed this up with statistics that purport to show that the rich countries with the highest level of inequality (USA & UK) have the biggest problems, whereas the social democracies of Scandinavia have less of a problem.

    Her argument is that if people are poor and have little self-respect (because they can’t see any prospect of things improving), eating gives them a form of instant gratification. If their lives were improved, they would also take more care of their health, including eating less and exercising more.

    It’s pretty much exactly what I would expect from Polly Toynbee, and I am sure it goes down well with the social workers and teachers who read The Guardian. In fact, I’d guess that most of the people who read the column already share Ms Toynbee’s view of the world, and those who disagree probably don’t waste their time.

    However, Ms Toynbee has obviously touched a raw nerve by saying that "America has by far the most unequal society", which has provoked some right-wing bloggers to respond. They have found something called the Gini index that ‘proves’ that "Latin American and African countries have the most unequal societies – by far."

    This, of course, totally misses the point. Anyone who read Polly Toynbee’s article would have realized that she was talking about rich countries in Europe and North America, and making a comparison between the US at one end and the Scandinavian countries at the other end of the spectrum. Poor countries have different problems, and obesity amongst ordinary people is not one of them.

    Conrad jumped on this bandwagon on Monday, with the following piece of cleverness:

    The nation with the greatest income inequality in the world is Sierra Leone, where UNICEF says "malnutrition is very widespread" and where, when I visited a few years ago, I did not encounter many corpulent Mende tribesmen. Ranking second in the inequality tables is the Central African Republic which, according to UNICEF, also suffers from hunger and severe malnutrion.

    Scanning the Gini table, one learns that income inequality in Thailand is almost precisely the same as in US, yet one rarely sees a fat Thai. Vietnam, a nation hardly renowned for its lumbering porkers, is less equal than either Britain or Australia and the most equal country on earth is Belarus, where lardassness abounds.

    Oh dear. How easy it is to demolish an argument when you willfully misunderstand it. Anyone who thinks that Polly Toynbee was arguing that inequality in Sierra Leone or Thailand was a cause of obesity just isn’t paying attention.

    UPDATE: Another viewpoint on this comes from Mark Steyn in The Daily Telegraph. Incidentally, in case it’s not clear, I am not expressing an opinion on Ms Toynbee’s article, just on Conrad’s choice of examples to refute it.

  • I say Guangzhou, you say Canton

    I expressed some surprise that a UK journalist wrote about Canton rather than Guangzhou, but someone has posted a comment defending that usage, saying that Guangzhou is too Mandarin. Well, maybe it is, but to a cloth-eared gweilo it doesn’t sound much different from Gwong Jau, which is the Cantonese version (I think). Either is surely preferable to "Canton", which is a real dog’s dinner – it appears to be derived from the English interpretation of the Cantonese name for the province, Gwong Dung, romanized as ‘Kwang Tung’ and then mis-pronounced.

    I remember when the BBC switched from calling the Chinese capital ‘Peking’ to calling it ‘Beijing’. I suppose that this was when the Chinese government was pushing to get Putonghua adopted as the national language. I’m not totally sure how the earlier pronounciation came about, but I guess it is a mis-pronounciation of the Cantonese name, Bak-ging, so it is understandable that a correct pronounciation of the Putonghua version was preferred.

    I suppose it’s unusual to make a change like this, but reasonable when the original was basically a mistake. Other changes have come when colonies gained independence and adopted names in their local language (Ceylon became Sri Lanka, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe and Salisbury became Harare, etc.), or where the old regime was overthrown (Persia/Iran, Burma/Myanamar), though these tend to be more controversial – The Daily Telegraph stubbornly carried on calling the country Iran Persia, long after the downfall of the Shah, and many people still refuse to use the name Myanamar because they disapprove of the regime. However, I can’t think of any other examples where the name of a city has stayed the same in the local language but the official English version has changed.

    Why do I feel happy to say ‘Cantonese’ for the language but baulk at calling the city ‘Canton’? I suppose it just doesn’t sound right to mix the Chinese name with the English suffix (-ese). By the same token, I wouldn’t say ‘I speak Francais’ – well, probably I shouldn’t claim to speak French, full stop, but that’s another matter.

    Actually, there is very little consistency worldwide when it comes to how to pronounce foreign cities, and I suspect that again it often comes down to little more than what sounds right. For example, I think most Brits would pronounce Paris as an English word (rather than saying ‘Paree’ as the French do) but Lyon in the French way (not ‘Lions’ as per the English spelling, Lyons). When Ajax Amsterdam were one of the leading European football teams, some people pronounced it as it spelt, but others thought that sounded odd – perhaps because there was a well-known brand of cleaning liquid with that name – and used the Dutch pronounciation ("Aye-yaks") instead. Is it pretentious to use the local pronounciation? Maybe it is if you are not consistent, just picking and choosing a few foreign names and sticking with English most of the time.

    Pretentious, moi?

  • Self-interest rules (pt 94)

    Last Friday there was another demonstration by transport operators who want to protect their own interests and prevent new railway lines being built. The Standard reports that taxi and minibus drivers and owners are against the proposed South Island and West Island MTR lines.

    Noting the HK$5 million daily loss incurred by the Kowloon-Canton Railway Corporation’s West Rail, the transport industry representatives said the proposed railway would end up following the same pattern as a result of inadequate demand. They also said the railway would make it extremely difficult for them to earn their living on Hong Kong Island. If the railway became reality, they claimed the public would face less choice and end up paying more.

    Bus companies are also against the new lines, claiming that the passenger numbers projected by the MTRC are not realistic. Lyndon Rees, managing director of both Citybus and New World First Bus, is not keen on competition:

    Fares for bus routes on Hong Kong Island now average around HK$5 per trip. Rees said 300 buses and more than 1,000 staff belonging to the two franchised bus companies might face redundancy, if the proposed rail lines became a reality. He said the two companies’ existing bus services could only bring marginal profits and further contraction could make the viability of their operations questionable.

    Oh, right. Building two new MTR lines might mean that the bus companies would be forced to close down all their operations on Hong Kong island. Makes you wonder how they manage to compete with the existing MTR Island Line. What a load of old nonsense.

    It’s not surprising that West Rail should be used as evidence here. However, there is a big difference. WR was built partially to cope with a growing population in the NW New Territories, and growth has been slower than government projections, whereas the two proposed MTR lines on HK Island are being built in areas where few new developments are planned and the population is stable. So even if we accept that mistakes were made in planning West Rail, different considerations apply here. Yes, of course it will take traffic away from buses, minibuses and taxis, and it will reduce private car usage, but that is line with the government’s transport policy.

    Residents and business owners in the area want the new lines, and we have to hope that the loud noise created by a few self-interested competitors will not influence legislators or the government when it is time to make a decision.

  • 2 for 1

    Surrey haven’t made the best of starts to the cricket season. In fact, until a week ago they hadn’t won a single game in any competition, and had been beaten by Ireland in the Cheltenham & Gloucester Trophy (if you don’t follow the game it might seem odd that an English county should play a whole country – and be strong favourites to win – but that’s cricket). Then they won a game in the Totesport League Division One (what used to be called the Sunday League).

    This week they have been playing in the County Championship against Kent, who were top of the table at the beginning of the week. Surrey had a terrible start, losing two wickets for just one run, and it looked as if they were heading for another defeat. It was not to be, and they recovered to score 479, forced Kent to follow-on, and won fairly easily. Tough luck on Robert Key, who scored 199 for Kent but to no avail.

    Remarkably, Surrey are now 3rd in the table, just 5 points off the lead, so perhaps this season isn’t going to be too bad after all.