Monty Python's Philosophers' World Cup

"Nietzsche accused Confucius of having no free will, and Confucius, he say, 'Name go in book'."



"But the Germans are disputing the goal. Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics."

Beats Kikimushroom videos hands down.

Game for a Laugh

It seems that everyone at the Hong Kong Jockey Club wants to be a comedian. First, there was American Bill Nader, the director of racing, with his "race horsing" spoonerisms. Now it's the turn of the club's chief executive, Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges (or "Hyphen", as he's known down Sports Road way), who's fond of quoting Winston Churchill's line about only trusting statistics you've made up yourself (full marks for honesty, by the way, Winnie, in a week when you, your chairman and your propaganda department are spouting more stats than an American football commentator on speed).

Winnie's latest gag is the one about the nag who ran at Royal Ascot. Thankfully, the gee-gee in question, Sacred Kingdom, can't talk, so after it was duly thrashed we were spared the kind of lame excuses for its performance that we have come to expect from the bipeds at the Jockey Club.

You'd have thought Winnie would have been delighted that none of Hong Kong's gamblers were able to lose their coat on Sacred Kingdom, which is what would have happened if the Jockey Club had got its way and broadcast the race, with accompanying betting. But, no, there's Winnie whinnying away in today's Standard about the disappointment felt by Hong Kong's unwashed hordes at the fact that they didn't have the chance to place, and lose in toto, their 10,000 dollar bets on a horse that came fifth. This they would have been delighted to do, it seems, as they love "to support their Hong Kong heroes taking on the world". Mmm, as Mark Richards might say.

If there's anyone on the Standard's staff I'd be willing to back to give me a laugh every time the stalls open and the hacks sally forth with their opinings, it's got to be the rag's composite editor, "Mary Ma". At a time when the Jockey Club is intensifiying its propaganda to almost Goebbelian levels, with full-page newspaper ads in the Chinese- and English-language press droning on about its philanthropy, Mary throws her weight behind the Club's two-pronged request for a) more race days (vital) and b) more televised broadcasts of overseas races [put forward to deflect attention from a)] like a mendicant at John Hung's prison cell, concluding her editorial as follows:

"Although there is a downside associated with more racing days, it should not be exaggerated. Instead, more weight should be given to the benefits that a few more racing cards and associated turnover can bring to society."

To discover one of the "benefits-cum-downsides" that allowing more people to gamble more of their money away on a Sunday afternoon can bring one has to look no further than p. 9 of Mary's paper, to a turgid item headlined "Drive for harmonious society unveiled". You see, by allowing more people to chuck away their money on horses like Sacred Kingdom, what you will get are more useless programmes like "FAMILY: A Jockey Club Initiative for a Harmonious Society".

The purpose of this HK$250 million plus project? To devise, in harness with gravy-trainers at Hong Kong University, "intervention strategies and programmes aimed at preventing family discords and promoting the '3Hs' – health, happiness and harmony".

You couldn't make this stuff up if you wanted to. Here's the Jockey Club encouraging people to gamble more so that they can use the money they gamble to intervene to stop them gambling so that they can stop fucking their families up. I'm not sure if you need to be German to come up with something as brilliantly efficient as that, but you sure do need a sense of humour.

Hung Drawn and Quartered

Whatever it is that one should call the opposite of the Midas Touch (the George W Bush Touch? the Gordon Brown Touch? the Donald Tsang Touch?), John Terence Hung, the former managing director of Wheelock, has it in spades.

Whether it was presiding over the swamp of overpaid employees and overpriced consultants that constituted the ultimate in useless quangos, the now defunct Sports Development Board, or entering in local Class 5 events horses that would prefer to be giving rides on the sands at Weston-super-Mare, Hung will now have plenty of time in one of Hong Kong's correctional institutes to reflect on how it all went wrong.

How he will be hoping that the screws will be out on strike when he takes the short journey in the Black Maria to Stanley Prison. Knowing Hung's luck, though, the Don will have patched up his differences with the Correctional Services Staff Association, awarding them everything they want under their grade-structure pay review, plus performance-related bonuses for bringing second-tier septuagenarian storekeepers back to earth from the planet Zog.

Hung was yesterday sentenced to two years in clink for soliciting and accepting HK$450,000 in bribes in his botched attempt to aid and abet that most familiar of Hong Kong crimes, helping pushy nouveau riche to queue jump. Some may cavil at the price, but what's 60,000 US to someone whose self-image is dependent on the transition from racing member of the Hong Kong Jockey Club to full member.

The race for Quote of the Day was a cracker, with a photograph required to separate the first two past the post. Deputy District Court Judge Anthony Kwok Kai On staked his claim early, expressing his disgust at Hung for "opening a back door" for diminutive Mainlanders wearing Gucci suits two sizes too big for them and driving a black Mercedes S-Class with Guangzhou license plates who were desperate for easy entry.

Under its Churchill-quoting chief executive, Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges, the Jockey Club has become the repository of the astonishing quote, and the boys and girls in the PR Department were not going to let punters down on this occasion. Barely choking back the tears of laughter, a spokesperson managed to keep a straight face just long enough to spit out the eleven-word mantra they'd been memorising for the last few months: "Integrity and honesty form the foundation of the club's core values".

Five days after Hong Kong's best sprinter, Sacred Kingdom, was thrashed at Royal Ascot, it was the least the Club could do to give the poor bugger in the propaganda department the rest of the week off for their only truly world-class performance of the week.

As the Jockey Club's American director of racing with the penchant for Spoonerisms, Bill Nader, might have said: "This was indeed a dark day for race horsing and horse race owners everywhere".

Oh What a Night!

Never having met one another until the last minute, denied the opportunity to mug up on the oddity of the whiptail lizard or the speed of the Mako Shark, only the inability to tell our Sun Yat Sen from our Chiang Kai Shek stood between the band of misfits and ne'er-do-wells that our very own, if slightly ageing, David assembled in the cave of Adullam, known also among the heathen as the Dining Chamber of the Hacks, and the runners-up spot in the resuscitated FCC quiz.

Notwithstanding all that, we still had the consolation of finishing five points ahead of the Webbmeister and his merry Mens, proving in the process that having an IQ of 160 is no use if you can't even remember that Christopher Plummer played old Nosey against Rod Steiger's Boney in the epic 1970 version of Waterloo, the film that launched a thousand Abba hits.

And note to Wendy, the otherwise excellent quizmistress: it was Trevor Howard, not Marlon Brando, who played Captain William Bligh in the 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty.

SCMP Takes the Cake

Picking up a copy of the South China Morning Post that had been discarded by a previous diner, I noticed with amusement that the subs there are still not picking up the solecism pointed out in these pages a couple of weeks ago.

This time, if you're unhappy with the free "dessert cake" ( I wonder which other types of cake the Post have in mind) you can get by cutting out the coupon and taking it to caffé Habitu, you can call the paper's Customer Relations Hotline "for enquiries" – in case you want to get the recipe, I suppose.

Sadly, I won't be able to avail myself of the opportunity to enjoy a slice of fruit cake, as I'll be heading to the Foreign Correspondents' Club to spearhead the challenge to David M. Webb's Mensaites at the famous quiz that has, like Lazarus, risen from the dead.

Stand by for a report on the outcome tomorrow; unless, of course, we lose, in which case I'll invisibilise it like a government-commissioned grade-structure police pay review.

Night Rider

"Son, what do want to be when you grow up?"

"Dunno, dad."

"How about a bus driver, son?"

"Done that already, dad."

Mucking out Stables, Mucking about with Tables

After returning from a very serviceable brunch – shame about the coffee, though – at Grande in Sai Kung (a stone's throw from Jaspas) on Sunday, I turned on the tube to hear that Paul O'Sullivan had received the award for "Best Stables" from the club everyone wants to join so they can make a bit on the side as a voting member, the Hong Kong Jockey Club.

It appears that the Kiwi handler's mafoos had gone crazy overnight, like a bunch of latter-day Heracles. Unlike the Greek demigod, however, the little fellahs in yellow and blue had to rely on their brooms and spades after an attempt to reroute the Shing Mun River to wash away the dung actually created more filth in the yards and not less.

Back at the office, begging letters continue to pile up on my desk pleading with me to part with my company's hard-earned on an endless variety of equally meaningless awards. We've had Spikes, Effies, Primes, Webbys, Daveys and Stevies.

The latest mendicant to shove his begging bowl into the corporate trough is a cowboy unit from Malaysia that is not only asking US$250 per award entry – well above the market rate – but also trying to pull a fast one by reserving for the small print the message that it will only give awards out to "the recipient who receives the Award from the Guest of Honour during the Awards Ceremony". (Yes, this outfit unsurprisingly also belongs to the "For enquiries" school of mangling the English language.)

And the cost of attending the Awards Ceremony (so grand it gets its own capital letters)? This wasn't published, of course, but a little detective work by my secretary revealed that an evening listening to pompous Mal-ay-see-ans drone on at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre would set a sucker back "HK$30,000 to HK$50,000" for a table for ten.

"So what do you get for the extra 20 grand?" I asked her.

"A book signed by Mahathir Mohamad," she replied.

I'm still not sure if she was joking.

Courts Losing Patience with Lily Chiang

Like a recalcitrant schoolboy who keeps running off into the woods to capture wasps, take the sting out of them and then fly them in teacher's face on a leash of invisible cotton, Lily Chiang Lai Lei is severely trying the patience of Hong Kong courts with her foot-stomping refusals to face her examiners.

Not since James Stewart triumphed over crooked politicians with a 23-hour filibuster in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington have we seen the kind of delaying tactics which Lily and her gang of lawyers are resorting to in their increasingly desperate attempt to put off the day of judgment.

Lily's latest application for judicial review has foundered on the rock that is Mr. Justice Alan Wright, whose judgment is replete with the kind of dry judicial wit followers of Rumpole and Morse have come to know and love. The seven-page document leaves the best till last, Wright rolling his final paragraph around his palate like a drop of the finest claret as he fires this warning shot across the bows of the bold buccaneer swimming in shark-infested waters: "I find it unnecessary to deal with the contention by the prosecution that these proceedings themselves constitute an abuse of process, as attractive as the submission may be".

Senior Counsels Daniel Fung and Johnny Mok, brought in to aid Lily's original champion, Hectar Pun, and to add weight and intimidating initials to the case, have been left in no doubt as to the feelings of the judge who dismissed Lily's first judicial review in February and has now killed off the second attempt before it even sees the light of day: "Back off, boys, or face the consequences of attempting to hold the court in contempt".

Mr Wright adds insult to injury by making Fung, Mok and Pun stand in the corner for the transparency of delaying tactics which attempt lamely to raise as a separate issue now "a matter which both could and should" – for the most "self-evident" of legal reasons – "have been raised in the previous proceedings", launched more than a year ago. Ouch!

The flagrant use of all these Fabian tactics lends support to the growing feeling among the legal fraternity that the ICAC, like Jimmy Stewart, is set to notch one up for the people over the powerful and the privileged – even if they do sometimes behave like men in dirty raincoats in an X-rated Soho fleapit, determined to take the auto out of autoeroticism when a girl just wants to fly solo.

Monty Python's Philosophers' Song

I'll be performing this lesser known Python gem as Bruce No. 2 at the Welsh Choir annual knees-up next Friday.

"John Stuart Mill of his own free will
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill" ... nice

Ulaca to the Rescue

Sadly, not quite, as there's been another regrettable fall unto death, this time at a factory in the Tai Po Industrial Estate. But someone at the Occupational Safety and Health Council (OHSC) is clearly an avid reader of this blog.

The Labour Department's report, "An assistant foreman fell from a roof while inspecting exhaust air ducts", in the latest edition of Green Cross has taken in the spirit in which they were intended comments of mine which other less gracious, more over-sensitive, types might have construed as mocking or contemptuous.

Commenting on their report in the previous issue of Green Cross on the untimely demise of a lorry crane operator, I pointed out the Pythonesque absurdity of writing about a "deceased person" jumping from the platform of a lorry onto a forklift truck.

So, as Harry Redknapp would say, full credit to the lads at the Labour Department and the OSHC for taking it on the chin and revising the first paragraph of this month's cautionary tale to read as follows:

"A worker (later on the deceased person, i.e. D/P) was found lying on the ground next to staircase no. 7 of a food factory in the Tai Po Industrial Estate."

It's days like this that I feel it's somehow all worth while. I think I'll find a youtube to celebrate.

Same Asylum, Different Loonies

As well as being surprisingly sarcy when he wanted to be, which for Augustine, largely meant when he was mocking the Romans for their superstitious belief in the gods, the great man from north Africa had a notebook full of excellent quips from other writers.

Here he dips into Annaeus Seneca, who is handling that well-known everyday subject of men who castrate themselves to propitiate the gods:

"If anyone has leisure to investigate what such men do and what they suffer, he will find things that are so indecent for men of honour, so unworthy of free men, so unlike those of sane men that, if their number were fewer, no one would doubt that they were mad. Now, however, the number of the insane is the defence of their sanity."

Fast forward two thousand years to Hong Kong and we here we are led by a superstitious eunuch who was handed the keys to the asylum by octagenarian nutters in Beijing.

As the good book says, there is indeed nothing new under the sun, even if you can barely see it for all the smog.

Infesting Their Whole World

My light reading of late has consisted largely of that fifth-century potboiler by the Harold Robbins of his day, Augustine of Hippo, The City of God Against the Pagans.

I seem to remember that one of Robbins's books was called The Pirate, and Augustine devotes part of his bestseller to an exposé of the impunity enjoyed by pillagers merely on account of the respectability they have attained. I have to say, I couldn't help thinking of Stanley Ho, Li Ka Shing et al.

Here he goes from Chapter 4 of Book IV:

"Justice removed, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers? If, by the constant addition of desperate men, this scourge grows to such a size that it acquires territory, establishes a seat of government, occupies cities and subjugates peoples, it assumes the name of kingdom more openly. For this name is now manifestly conferred upon it not be the removal of greed, but by the addition of impunity. It was a pertinent and true answer which was made to Alexander the Great by a pirate whom he had seized. When the king asked him what he meant by infesting the sea, the pirate defiantly replied: 'The same as you do when you infest the whole world; but because I do it with a little ship I am called a robber, and because you do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor'."

Nothing is said of the buccaneer's fate, but I imagine he was forcibly separated from his parrot and left to die a horrible death in Victoria Harbour.

Hail Hongkong Bank!

You have to hand it to those CSI types who work behind the scenes at HSBC.

It's nearly 20 years ago now since the holiday my wife to be and I were enjoying in Italy turned into a nightmare when we were robbed in the Piazza Navona. The Roman cop we turned to for help seemed more interested in pulling the birds than sending us to the right place, and when we finally joined the queue at the "foreigners' police station" of those who'd been robbed and mugged, things only got worse. The telephone number for stolen credit cards given to us by the person who handled hundreds of these cases every day turned out to be as much use as a one-legged man at an arse kicking competition. When we got back to Hong Kong, insult had been added to injury in the form of a very long credit card bill.

Step up the boys from the security section of the bank. One interview with us and a bit of undercover work by their boys on mopeds in the Eternal City later and we'd been refunded in full.

This time they've come up trumps again after some numbskull who will remain nameless decided to book tickets for a Premier League match online. It took the HSBC Cardholder Dispute Section just a couple of months to, as they put it so nicely, "successfully charge the transaction back to the merchant's banker", believed to be skulking somewhere in Andorra.

Andy Lau, Matt Damon, Lieutenant Dan and the bloke with red hair from CSI Miami should get together and make a film about this lot. Brilliant.

HK Electric in Meltdown Mode

I return from my travels to find I've been added to yet another magazine mailing list, this time that of the company I've always thought of as the train-set Li Ka Shing keeps in the attic, HK Electric.

The cover story of the latest issue of Contact is devoted to a bunch of Mr Li's fellow old-age pensioners, who stand beneath a headline that reads "Enriching Life Inspiring Future" looking suitably bemused, as they try to work out what it means to have just taken part in an event called the "Outstanding Third Age Citizens Award Presentation Ceremony Cum Completion Ceremony for U3A 2008-2009".

It's not often that officials at these type of gigs tell jokes, and I know a lot of you are going to say this event was no different when you hear what Christine Fang, the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Council of Social Service, came up with in her speech-cum-stand-up-routine.

"Noticing the unity of third age citizens who were all wearing windbreakers", Ms Fang (giving it her toothiest grin, no doubt) said the old codgers "could still make many breakthroughs in learning and contributing to society".

Realising that it wasn't going to be easy to cap Fang's one-liner, HK Electric's MD, Tso Kai Sum, decided to up the ante in his message to readers, launching right in with the stunning news that "Despite the global economic meltdown", HK Electric's earnings from international operations had surged by 41.6 percent.

One only hopes Mr Tso wasn't making an oracular-cum-prophetic utterance concerning the Mainland's burgeoning nuclear power industry.

Away for a Few Days

I'll be out of commission for a few days, but should be back with my questionable insights by the end of the week.

Candlelit Vigil Credit to Hong Kong

On the day when Apple Daily faithfully reported the comments made 20 years ago by those such as Li Ka Shing, Henry Tang Ying Yen and Leung Chun Ying, who all criticised the Government of the People's Republic of China after the 1989 Beijing massacre, a sizable number of Hong Kong people reminded not only that government, but also their own, of the merits of the open society and their attitude towards its enemies.

In the same way that Regina Ip Lau Suk Yee may take much of the credit for mobilising around half a million people to demonstrate on 1 July 2003 against reinterpretation of Article 23 of the Basic Law (which would among other things have effectively prevented journalists from performing their role as watchdogs in society – helping to keep it open, in fact), this time round it was Hong Kong's Chief Executive, Donald Tsang Yam Kuen, who deserves a pat on the back.

Tsang, who reaches retirement age in October, last month told Hong Kong's Legislative Council that his "view represents the opinion of Hong Kong people in general", as he urged those he is supposed to represent to make a more "objective assessment about the event" (his way of referring to the order by the Communist leadership to the People's Liberation Army to kill its own people).

Well, last night an estimated 150,000 people did just that, remembering those who were killed at the command of their own government and those whose lives were devastated by senseless loss, as well as seeking the establishment of such institutions in their country as will be able in the future to act as a safeguard to prevent such harm ever being inflicted again.

In Memoriam

For those who were killed in the massacre that took place in Beijing from 3 June 1989 and for those who are left without family and without answers.

Hong Kong Cricket Association Lurches from Fiasco to Farce

First we had the PCCW share-splitting scandal. Now, the major players in the Hong Kong cricket community have tried to get in on the act by effectively divvying up their holdings in the Hong Kong Cricket Association and doling them out before the Annual General Meeting. Tried, but ultimately failed, in a shambolic series of events that the HKCA will attempt to clear up by the end of the month.

Hong Kong cricket has long been a powder keg waiting to explode and the job of successive committees has been to ensure that the sparks are kept away from the explosives. As in the wider world, where the traditional powerhouses, Australia and England, have had to cede power to India and its subcontinental neighbours, as the "Indianisation of the ICC" follows its inexorable path, so locally the traditional clubs, Hong Kong Cricket Club and Kowloon Cricket Club, have been facing a growing challenge to their dominance from the so-called independent clubs for the past 15 years.

HKCC and KCC may have the grounds, but the likes of the Pakistan Association, which begins its meetings with prayers from an imam, and Little Sai Wan Cricket Club have the numbers. These days it's not unusual for all members of a Hong Kong representative side to be drawn from players with a subcontinental, overwhelmingly Pakistani, background. It's not stretching things too far to say that the one thing that has prevented the independents from mounting a successful assault on the top positions at the HKCA thus far has been their genius for infighting.

The build-up to this year's AGM last Friday (29 May) was especially spicy, with Sri Lankan-born SCMP cricket writer Alvin Sallay stirring the pot with a piece on 23 May in which he reported long-standing HKCA president Terry Smith as saying that the bid of candidates from the independent camp for the posts of president and chairman was a "naked grab for money and power". In their turn, the men from the Pakistan Association and LSW were unafraid to play the race card by saying that their bid was driven by their desire to stop a "growing divide" in the game.

If the seeds for recent events were sown many years ago, they were watered in April (appropriately enough on April Fool's Day) when members of the Association were notified of an Extraordinary General Meeting to be held at the end of the month. The main purpose of the meeting was to bring the HKCA's Articles of Association fully into line with the companies ordinance. This gave everyone the chance to reacquaint themselves with one of the most important parts of the Association's de facto constitution, the clause which states that only those who are members when the agenda is sent out with the required 21 days' notice will be entitled to vote at the AGM.

Blissfully unaware of this, the two sides embarked on the mother and father of all membership drives, one to put Democrat registration of black voters at the last US election to shame. HKCC were the first to submit their bulk application (coming up with 161 new cricket fans), while the independents amassed 230. At HK$420 a head, this represented quite a windfall for the HKCA, still reeling from their HK$1.8 million loss at last year's International Cricket Sixes.

But it appears that the clubs were not the only ones to be ignorant of the rules. The same applied to those who are paid to manage and run the HKCA from their offices in Olympic House. Accordingly, they announced on the HKCA's website that the deadline for membership applications for the AGM was Friday 22 May, a week before the meeting. No less an authority than HKCA treasurer, Dinesh Tandon, was confirming this in the SCMP as late as 26 May: "Anyone who is registered [by 22 May] and is a fully paid-up member can vote at the AGM".

The next day, long-standing HKCA secretary, John Cribbin, stepped in with a letter to members in which he finally apprised them of the rules before informing disappointed would-be new members that they could have their money back or wait until 2010 and "have a vote" then. Less obvious was why Cribbin felt the need to share that around 200 membership applications had been paid for in cash, adding that such bulk payments were "somewhat unusual".

After all that, the meeting itself was something of a damp squib, as a back-room deal ended up with the all-important chairman's position remaining unfulfilled as both incumbent and challenger withdrew their nominations, leaving the executive committee to decide who the next chairman will be.

According to Alvin Sallay, Dinest Tandon is hot favourite for the post. Perhaps someone could lend him a copy of the Articles of Association in the meantime.

Sorry Seems to Be the Easiest Word

Breaking and Entering, a film directed by Anthony Minghella, who brought us The English Patient, stars Jude Law, Robin Wright Penn with a Swedish accent, Juliette Binoche with a Bosnian accent, and Tim from The Office – with a beard. It's rubbish.

The film interweaves various story lines, which share a certain consistency inasmuch as they're all feeble and all clichéd. We have Bosnian Serb bandits rubbing shoulders with Russian prostitutes, autistic teenagers vying for attention with heart-of-gold cops. As if this wasn't bad enough, we are treated to vacuous theorising about the inner city – London's King's Cross, to be precise. Hence the hookers.

In a film for which the word nadir might have been invented, the super-nadir is reached in the sub-plot where Tim from The Office lusts after the black cleaner. Naturally, she's not your average third generation Jamaican brillo pad, but a Ghanaian princess who quotes Kafka. The symbolism may be heavy-handed but at least it is clear: this is a new Dawn for Tim.

It's difficult to top Juliette Binoche's tits – she doesn't – and sure enough it's all downhill from her appalling "love" scene with Law. As the dialogue disintegrates, there's nothing for the characters to do but mouth "I'm sorry" and "Look, I'm so sorry" at each other until Law shows his commitment to his long-term partner with the platinum blonde rinse and the Swedish accent by parking his Range Rover on the wrong side of the road on a double yellow line, negotiating his way through the dog turds that line the inner-city pavement and asking her to marry him because Binoche is buggering back to Sarajevo.

Install and Equip

Poser of the week: why do people insist on confusing "install" and "equip"? If I have to read how yet more minibuses have been installed with television sets, I swear I'm going to do something. Like equipping myself with a screwdriver and de-installing them.