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Mooring bollard

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Semi-abandoned dining chairs

Cancer World

Review of “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” by Siddhartha Mukherjee: newyorker

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Unknown

Mylene Farmer: Déshabillez-moi

For the weekend, a guilty pleasure.

France's biggest music star, Mylene Farmer takes Juliette Greco's 1967 hit and makes it her own  . . . (with English instructions) . . .

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Pergola

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Weatherwise, a gorgeous day; at lunchtime: 22C, humidity 40%, a light breeze

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The Other Side

Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital, pharmacy

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Dai pai dong

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Tung Wan Road

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Sunday afternoon

Weiwei Wuu: Pavane pour une infante défunte

For the weekend, a guilty pleasure.

Maurice Ravel composed this work for solo piano in 1899 and then published an orchestration in 1910. Now we have a version featuring the erhu . . .

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Tung Wan Beach

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Tung Wan Beach

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Late night, waterfront cheung fan stall

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Late night, waterfront

Typhoon Megi

The Philippines gets hammered: typhoon Megi (known locally as Juan)

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Funeral wake: burning of paper car, house, other stuff

Max Richter: Vladimir's Blues

For the weekend, a guilty pleasure.

From the album The Blue Notebooks . . .

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Late night, herbal tea

Wendy Bucklew: Buckets of Rain

For the weekend, a guilty pleasure.

Sony Records recently went through youtube with a fine tooth comb. Gone are clips by Bob Dylan. Still, the song and danceman still has a presence.

From Dylan's 1975 album Blood on the Tracks . . .

broken dreams

A gnashing of teeth and rending of garments has broken out in a corner of a little island in the South China Sea.

Why so?

Mister B is no longer able to send email attachments out.

Nor upload photos to the blog.

No idea why.

Tried all the usual: checked all the cables, checked all the settings. Googled to find out what the error message means.

Finally spoke to one of Netvigator's tech support. We spent an hour going this way and that. He was really good, knew his stuff. Yes, I'd even already tried doing a System Restore from a week ago.

So in the end he suggested what I dreaded: reinstall Vista.

Oh, that I might. Reinstall Vista, that is.

Why so?

A good friend went to Wanchai Computer Centre 12 months ago and got me this laptop. Everything has been tickety-boo until now. Now, I discover that I can't find the receipt (and hence the name of the shop).

This, it turns out, is important. I need to change the Vista install cd, the one I have is in Chinese and I can't read Chinese (my bad) so I won't be able to follow the instructions..

So I am stuck for the moment.

Mightily stuck.

grhhh!

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Enda

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Happy Mid-Autumn Festival 2010

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After the deluge

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Tropical Storm Fanapi made landfall a few hours ago well to the east of a little island in the South China Sea.

According to Hong Kong Observatory, Fanapi is about 180km north-northeast of here and is forecast to move west or west-southwest at about 20km/hr across Guangdong province.

There was some really, really heavy rain around six pm since when it has just been continual but lighter rain.

So it goes.

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Tin Hau Temple

Michel Legrand: Les Parapluies de Cherbourg

For the weekend, a guilty pleasure.

Opening credits of the 1964 Jacques Demy film. Yes, even more umbrellas . . .

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First back street

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Noodle shop

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A dry spell

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Outdoor restaurant

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It's Monday; the rain stopped, the sun shone

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A weekend of rain

Chile: The Other 9/11

Chile, September 11, 1973: globalresearch

and also Project FUBELT

Burial: In McDonald's

For the weekend, a guilty pleasure.

Lowkey London dubstep meets the McDo scene in Wong Kar-wai's film Fallen Angels . . .

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Tung Wan Road

Moon watching tips for Mid-Autumn Festival 2010 (21-23 September 2010)

It's too soon to forecast if the nights will be cloud free, but here are the times of moonrise, transit and moonset during the Mid-Autumn Festival 2010: Hong Kong Observatory

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Waterfront

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Dai pai dong

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Afternoon

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Sunday afternoon

Tony Blair's book A Journey is a dark fantasy?

Back in the motherland, there is disagreement about where in the bookshop belongs the venal Tony Bliar's book, A Journey: Daily Telegraph

Sun Ra: That's How I Feel

For the weekend, a guilty pleasure.

What it says on the label . . .

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Rain on the window pane

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On the waterfront

Laurence Sterne: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Unwinding the clock: Time in Tristram Shandy

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The girl with the dragon tattoo (or something)

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Fox News is either evil or stupid

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Parent Company Trap
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

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Trawler flag

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Late night diner

Konono No.1: Lufuala Ndonga

For the weekend, a guilty pleasure.

Time for some Kongotronics . . .

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Island declaration

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Noodle shop

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The night before last

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It's the 15th night of the seventh month in the traditional Chinese calendar: Hungry Ghost Festival.

Time to light some incense and burn paper offerings.

Manila hostage debacle

Philippine police say hostage rescue team ill-prepared: reuters

Other than that . . . what else is there to say except: condolences to the families, friends and colleagues of those who lost their lives in Manila.

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Night worker

Hong Kong vs. Pakistan flood

Nifty, huh? To see what the Pakistan flood area would look like elsewhere on the planet, punch in the town/city of your choice: BBC Dimensions

Also: The Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch

Charlie Chaplin: Modern Times

For the weekend, a guilty pleasure.

Chaplin and Paulette Goddard set off down the road to Happy Destiny . . .

Pakistan: A Lifetime, Washed Away

Read this poignant article by Daniyal Mueendin and you may want to reach for a donation button: NYT

Here' s a couple:
Hong Kong msf donation online
Oxfam Hong Kong donation online

By the way, Hong Kong Government's Disaster Relief Fund has in the last couple of months approved grants for flood relief in Gansu province, China of approximately HK$22.33 million and is now seeking to provide a further HK$50 million.

To date, the Disaster Relief Fund has approved grants for relief in Pakistan of HK$5.3 million.

Now the impulse to aid "compatriots' is understandable.

But given the fact at least eight million 15+ million Pakistanis are now wholly destitute, that many find themselves with little or no shelter, hungry, bereft of a safe supply of drinking water while vulnerable to water-borne diseases, that five million dollars is not going to go very far.

These are at least eight million 15+ million people who have lost homes, chattels, property, and loved ones. Their infrastructure has been washed away and they are saddled with what is, in the main, a venal, corrupt, incompetent political class.

"The loss of property, however, is catastrophic. It is as if a neutron bomb exploded overhead, but instead of killing the people and leaving their houses intact, it piled trees upon the houses and swept away the villages and crops and animals, leaving the people alive."

Eight million Fifteen plus million people are living among ruins, their own lives ruined. So, perhaps the DRF could look at quickly increasing the amount of money it is feeding to relief agencies who are on the ground in Pakistan.

Yes?

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Waterfront

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Pak Tai Temple basketball court

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Dai pai dong

Lifestyles of the Rich and Tyrannical

An occasional series.

South China Morning Post's edition on Sunday featured a front cover photo of the corrupt, brutal and murderously ruthless president of the broken country of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe.

Watched over by some of his own barrel-chested goons as well as sharply-dressed members of the Hong Kong Police VIP Protection Unit, Mugabe was apparently buying some shoes in a store in Harbour Centre, Tsim Sha Tsui.

The shopping tour followed a visit to Beijing for "talks" and Shanghai for the World Expo.

No mention of where he is staying, but probably it's a five-star hotel rather than the high-end property at House No 3, JC Castle, 18 Shan Tong Road, Tai Po. The house is one in in a development put together by the also unsavoury entertainment/property/darkside tycoon Albert Yeung.

Mugabe is reported to have paid HK$45.24 million (US$5.8m) in June, 2008 for the house in the New Territories. A daughter Bona is studying accountancy at City University of Hong Kong.

Mugabe is reported to be paid US$58,000 per year as president.

No mention in the SCMP of Mugabe's wife, "Gucci" Grace. Perhaps she's keeping a low profile. One wonders why. She was, after all, let off the hook by the Hong Kong Government last year after she decked a British photographer.

Mugabe and "Gucci" Grace are among a number of high-level Zimbabweans who are persona non grata in the EU and US.

But the world is wide and Mugabe is welcome in places like China and Hong Kong.

The author W Somerset Maugham once characterised the principality of Monaco on the Côte d'Azur as a "sunny place for shady people".

Mugabe's visit to Hong Kong, a place that has its own undoubted advantages and charms, is a reminder that it too is, among other things, also a sunny place for shady people.

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Sunday cloud patrol

Roger Ebert: Traveler to the undiscovere'd country

American film critic Roger Ebert on Christopher Hitchens, illness, medicine, religion, and death: Roger Ebert

Ebert's title "Traveler to the undiscovere'd country" is inspired, of course, by a couple of lines in Hamlet's famous soliloquy in William Shakespeare's play The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: Act III, Scene I

Will Powers: Kissing with Confidence

For the weekend, a guilty pleasure.

Dancing for Mental Health . . .



Kissing with Confidence

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Cloud patrol