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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  • Nothing better to talk about

    Today the Hong Kong Observatory lowered the “cold weather warning” that has been in force for more than 3 weeks.  Apparently that isn’t quite a record, as this warning was in place for 27 days in 1968, but normally it’s only in force for 2-3 days.

    In the past I have been rather scornful about this, but frankly it really has been quite cold for the last few weeks.  The problem is that apartments in Hong Kong really aren’t designed for cold weather (wooden floor, thin walls, single-glazed windows…), and some people feel an odd compulsion to open the windows just so that everyone knows that it’s winter.

    Shut the windows!!  Buy a heater!  Switch it on!

    Anyway, it’s getting warmer now.   

  • Rude register

    The problem with Talkback (the SCMP’s 2nd letter column) is that they clearly don’t have enough material, and so they will print almost anything, however muddled or irrelevant.  Yesterday there was a marvellous example on the subject of the dodgy photos “scandal”: 

    The widespread distribution on the internet of immodest photos of celebrities has generated controversy. I see this as an alarm bell, reminding us that we have to control indecent material on the internet.

    A lot of indecent material on the internet appears on websites that are popular with teenagers. To protect youngsters and prevent their minds being corrupted by what they see, we must take measures to control the uploading of this material.

    All website owners wishing to display any obscene material in Hong Kong should have to register first. These registered websites would have to indicate clearly that they contained indecent material, so that people were alerted and did not enter the sites unawares.

    This would minimise the confusion surrounding certain websites and also make it easier for concern groups to censor them. People running websites accessible to the general public would be legally responsible for monitoring the material on them.

    Unless a site was registered, the operators would have to ensure no obscene material appeared. It would be their responsibility to immediately delete any unsuitable material. Internet surfers could report any breaches of the regulations.

    Adolescents may have misconceptions about sex, and they want to know more about it. The government should not just get tough with obscenity on the internet but also promote sex education in schools, so that young people can develop a healthy understanding of sex.

    Emily Kong, Wong Tai Sin

    I don’t know where to start.  What can you do with someone who thinks that Hong Kong can control or censor what goes on the Interweb?   

    Not that the government doesn’t try.  Obviously websites outside Hong Kong are not subject to Hong Kong law, but it is theoretically against the law for a Hong Kong citizen to post a link to obscene material (which is bizarre when search engines will help you find whatever you want).  However, it seems that it is not illegal for the photographs to be sent by email, and presumably sending a link via IM would also be OK. 

    Could Hong Kong websites be required to register in order to display obscene material?  Not really, because the law in Hong Kong does not allow obscene material to be published.  Not that it matters, because everyone in Hong Kong can access websites that are based overseas and which would not be subject to these rules.  

    Ban the Interweb, that’s what I say.

  • Horrid images

    The funniest story of the moment has to be the one about appearance on the Interweb of some, er, candid photographs featuring several Hong Kong pop stars.  It’s even made it to The Guardian (Film star sex scandal causes internet storm in China), but here’s the SCMP:

    The photos that appeared on the internet last week are purported to be of Edison Chen, Gillian Chung Yan-tung of girl duo Twins, actress Cecilia Cheung Pak-chi and former actress Bobo Chan Man-woon.

    Would this be a good time to admit that I barely know who most of these people are?  Still less care about them.

    Today’s newspapers report a press conference on Monday given by Gillian Chung Yan-tung in which she admits to being “naive and very silly in the past” (Twins star apologizes to her fans).  A pop star being naive and silly?  Well, well, well.

    Fortunately the police have acted with commendable speed to deal with this serious crime, and have apparently traced the technician in a PC repair shop who found the photographs on a computer and then uploaded them.  Now they just have to figure out which serious crime he may have committed.

    Some cynics apparently think that the police only acted so quickly because celebrities were involved.  No!  Of course the photos have now been seen by almost everyone in Hong Kong, so all that police activity may all have been in vain.  Still at least they tried to help.   

    Meanwhile, the SCMP had an amusing angle on the story (Beware kids’ shattered fantasies, parents urged – subscription required):

    “Edison Chen has been portraying himself as a bad boy like James Dean so young girls who fantasise about him might not be as shocked,” [Baptist University social work lecturer and culture critic Bottle Shiu Ka-chun] said.

    “But for Chung’s fans, this is traumatic. Chung has been portrayed as an innocent young girl and the horrid images in these obscene photos may have killed some youngsters’ fantasy of her pure image.”

    Hong Kong pop stars roll off the production line complete with images that need to be maintained by their PR people.  Some may recall the huge fuss caused by some earlier photographs of one (or was it both) of the Twins changing costumes backstage in Malaysia, in which a bra was apparently visible.  Shocking stuff.   Well, maybe not.  

    Au Wai-kwong, team leader of the Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs Association of Hong Kong’s Sham Shui Po district youth outreaching social work team, said he had yet to receive any calls for help from youngsters distressed by the images. But he said teenagers had expressed concern about how the internet is used. “They are very confused by what police have been saying,” Mr Au said.

    image Are Hong Kong youngsters really so naive as to believe that the public image of these pop stars are anything more than the work of their management companies?  Possibly not. If Gillian Chung Yan-tung was “rumoured to be romantically linked to Chen” (as the SCMP put it) what do the fans imagine they were doing together?  This could explain why no-one was distressed by the images (but there is no news on how many people were distressed by the amount of coverage given to this non-story).

  • Follow the money

    Has the Premier League gone mad?  They have apparently decided that what they really need is an extra 10 extra games added to the season, and to play them overseas in January (Top clubs consider overseas games):

    At a meeting in London on Thursday, all 20 [Premier League] clubs agreed to explore a proposal to extend the season to 39 games.

    Those 10 extra games would be played at five different venues, with cities bidding for the right to stage them.

    It is understood the additional fixtures could be determined by a draw but that the top-five teams could be seeded to avoid playing each other.

    So, in the middle of the season, players will have to travel thousands of miles to play one game at a neutral venue, and then travel back to England to continue the season.  Good thinking.

    I can’t imagine them playing a midweek game and then rushing to Heathrow to catch a flight to Sydney or wherever, and it’s hard to believe that they’d get back in time for the following Wednesday, so this seems likely to cause severe disruption to the FA Cup and League Cup (which occupy most of the midweek slots in January). 

    Well, yes, most of the bigger clubs field reserve and youth team players in the cup competitions and could theoretically manage it, but we have to maintain the fiction that they pick their strongest possible team, so the games would have to be re-scheduled.  Or maybe they’ll just abolish replays in the 3rd and 4th rounds and make the semi-finals of the League Cup into one-off games.  Not good for the smaller clubs, but who cares about them?

    After the success of the Barclays Asia Trophy in Hong Kong last summer, it seems like a fair bet that we’d be seeing two of the games here.  The winning cities are likely to be the ones where the Premier League is already popular, and after PCCW paid a reported £100m for the Hong Kong rights they would probably be willing to fund a live game here (and would be able to attract other sponsors).  In addition, there may be bids from rich states such as Dubai.  Yes, it really is all about money.   

    (more…)

  • Kung Hei Fat Choi

    Nothing to add really…

  • Blu-Ray is too good

    Spike’s column in BC Magazine this week muses on one possible reason why HD-DVD & Blu-Ray have failed to take off:

    And, to be honest, my suspicions are that the general public either doesn’t give a shit about the increased quality offered by HD DVDs or doesn’t want to invest the money in new players, TVs and audio systems required to get the most from this new format.

    I believe that DVDs succeeded in no small part because they physically looked completely different from what had come before while Blu-Ray discs look essentially like standard DVDs.

    Well, maybe more than just looking different – DVDs replaced video tape and (in Hong Kong at least) laser discs because they were  smaller and more convenient.  The picture quality on laser discs was good, but after lugging two quite heavy discs home you would need to get up from your chair at least twice to turn over and then swap the disks.  No need to do that for a VHS Video tape, but they were easily damaged and had to be rewound after use.  In Hong Kong, DVDs had another advantage – multiple languages and subtitles.

    HD-DVD and Blu-Ray don’t offer any equivalent advantage over DVDs (apart from the box being fractionally smaller), so it’s all about picture quality.  And maybe Spike is correct and people don’t care too much about that:

    Higher definition audio formats, both SACD and DVD-A, were both met with total indifference from the general public; why should there be general acceptance of a higher definition video format when most people think that standard definition DVDs are good enough?

    In a world in which most people are happy enough with the fidelity offered by compressed MP3s or the low resolution images on YouTube, why do they need high definition video?

    This idea smacked me in the face recently when a friend told me how happy he was to find the film 2001: A Space Odyssey on VCD. VCD is about as low fidelity a medium as you could find. And the thought of watching Stanley Kubrick’s meticulously filmed images on a smeary VCD rather than a super-sharp Blu-Ray was like comparing a Big Mac with Kobe beef. But, let’s face it, more people eat Big Macs than Kobe beef and are quite happy to do so. For this friend, VCD will be good enough.

    Ah, VCDs.  Pretty much an Asian thing as far as I know.  As with laser discs, a complete film will not fit on one disc, and the subtitles are not switchable (though you can have a choice of two audio tracks), but the picture quality varies from murky to poor.  However, if you only plan to watch a film once (particularly if it isn’t going to win any awards for cinematography – i.e. most HK movies) why not save money?  

    Which certainly doesn’t auger well for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.  Presumably the strategy (if there is one) is that they are currently for ‘early adopters’ only.  Then in a year or two the prices of discs and players will fall and they will move into the mass market, gradually replacing DVDs.  By which time we’ll be downloading whatever we want to watch from iTunes or its competitors.   Great strategy, guys.

  • Chinese news in English

    Tau Tiul Yat Bow has a very simple concept – take the top story from HK Headline News (a free Chinese language newspaper) and translate the headline into English.

    “Staff have no right to ask for alcohol test”
    職員 ( jig yuen ) = staff
    無權 ( mo queng ) = no right
    要求 ( yau qui ) = request
    吹波波 ( chui ball ball ) = alcohol test
    黃宏發 ( wong hong fat ) = 1997 legislative council member
    醉 ( zui ) = drunk
    鬧 ( now ) = disturb
    港鐵 ( kong tit ) = MTR
    站 ( zhang ) = station
    http://www.hkheadline.com/news/html_wnn/html/2008/1/25/wnn43270.html?section_name=wnn

    Apologies, but I’ve forgotten where I saw this mentioned.

  • Late delivery

    The SCMP likes to think it is a serious important newspaper.  In truth it’s a local newspaper that prints lots of agency stories.

    Here’s one of the letters published in today’s ‘Talkback’ about a matter of great international concern (subscription required):

    I would like to complain about the poor service of Plaza Hollywood ParknShop.

    My wife bought a number of items on January 17 and asked that they be delivered to our home. However, the days passed and still there was no delivery.

    On a number of occasions we called the store but nobody answered. On four occasions, we actually went to the store and were given different explanations each time we approached a member of staff.

    We were told they had the wrong address, that nobody answered at the address and that the delivery vehicle had broken down.

    Finally, on January 23 the goods arrived. I do not believe I should have had to wait for so long, six days, for the delivery of my shopping.

    Joe Fung, Choi Hung

  • Down as well as Up

    I have no idea what to make of the Hong Kong stock market.  In the last few weeks it seems to have become routine for the HSI to go up or down by hundreds of points for no reason at all, so in response to a general fall in stock markets all over the world, it wasn’t all that surprising that it contrived to fall by 2,000 points (8%).

    HSI chartThat means the index has fallen by 14% in two days.  Yes, the prospect of a recession in the US is a worry, but is the average Hong Kong company really worth 14% less tonight than it was on Sunday night?  Don’t think so.  On the other hand, the earlier rise to nearly 32,000 was clearly absurd – and current levels do seem more reasonable.  But, hey, I know nothing, so I’m not going to risk a prediction. 

    One thing I can confidently say is that lots of so-called experts will give us their predictions, and we will hear much about 200 day moving averages and key support levels and other variations on gibberish.  But the fact is that they don’t know whether the market will fall another 1,000 points or rebound or just becoming boring again (though I have to admit that the latter seems the least likely of the three).

  • All made up

    About a week ago, I came across a strange story about a pair of twins getting married.  I think it first surfaced on the BBC website (Parted-at-birth twins ‘married’) – where the use of inverted commas around the last word indicated that it was not a verified fact. 

    This all seemed a bit too much like an urban myth, so I was rather surprised when it was then picked up by most British newspapers, who were only too happy to add some extra detail to help things along. 

    When I say "add", of course I mean "make up".  Because it’s all based upon nothing more than a rather vague statement made by a politician, who admitted that he had no first-hand knowledge of the case.  So no-one could verify exactly whether it was true or not – though a few simple enquiries might have helped to establish that it probably wasn’t.

    In spite of this, the story was spreading all round the world, even making it on to Reuter’s "Oddly Enough" where at least it was reported without any embellishments, and with a worthwhile caveat:

    Alton could not immediately be reached for comment and no further information was available about the twins or where they were from.

    So hats off to Heresy Corner, a blog that wondered what exactly was going on here (Lord Alton’s Tall Story): 

    The story of the twins who allegedly got married, only to discover their relationship and seek a High Court annulment, continues to be reported uncritically by news organisations around the world. BBC News gave it prominent coverage on all its major bulletins last night, and the sensational tale has been reported as far afield as India and New Zealand.

    So far, however, there remains only a single source for it: a speech by Lord Alton in the House of Lords. Since this story made international headlines yesterday, it’s a little surprising to discover that he made the speech, in a debate on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, a whole month ago, on December 10th 2007. Anyway, this is what Lord Alton, a former Lib Dem MP who is now a cross-bencher, told the House:

    I was recently in conversation with a High Court judge who was telling me of a case he had dealt with. This did not involve in vitro fertilisation; it involved the normal birth of twins who were separated at birth and adopted by separate parents. They were never told that they were twins. They met later in life and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences of the marriage that they entered into and all the issues of their separation. I suspect that it will be a matter of litigation in the future if we do not make information of this kind available to children who have been donor conceived.

    That’s it. No names, no dates, no context, no evidence. And that is where it might have remained, buried away in the pages of Hansard.

    Except that some eagle-eyed journalist (come forward and take your bow) happened upon it. As it sped around the world, it became, as such stories tend to, steadily more specific in its details, until the News of the World, in its appeal for information, is able to claim,

    Their marriage was annulled at the High Court at a special hearing held within the last 12 months.

    What’s their source for this assertion, I wonder?

    A vivid imagination, I fear.

    (more…)