Serena's All Class?

I don't know about you, but I feel sorry for the flowers.

And those shoes!

Cat's in the Cradle

The interesting discussion over at Joyceyland about the pros and cons of having children brought this song by Harry Chapin to mind. Poignant stuff indeed for those fathers who don't get to see their children grow up.

Making a Profit out of Poisonous Pickles

No, this isn't another post about Vegemite or even an enconium to the peerless Branston Pickle. It's a passage from George Eliot's towering novel Middlemarch about people who make a profit from pernicious activities while promoting themselves as public benefactors. I've no idea why the Hong Kong Jockey Club should come to mind each time I read it. Or the leaders of the People's Republic of China – not to mention their minions in a tiny satellite on the South China coast.

"[Dr Lydgate] may fairly claim approval at this particular stage of his career: he did not mean to imitate those philanthropic models who make a profit out of poisonous pickles to support themselves while they are exposing adulteration, or hold shares in a gambling-hell that they may have leisure to represent the cause of public morality."

Murray and Robson Fly the Flag for Britain

On the day after Aussie battler Lleyton Hewitt was dismantled like an IKEA bookshelf by Roger Federer, and Aussie fighter Sam(antha) Stosur was crushed like just another moth that had settled unwisely on the Plexicushion surface by Serena Williams, two Brits still wave the Union Flag. Or do they?

At 4.45pm Hong Kong-time, the Flower of Scotland (what a dirge that song is compared to the stirring "Scotland the Brave") Andy Murray will tee off against Rafael Nadal, while tomorrow Laura Robson (who turned 16 just last week) will play in the third round of the women's doubles.

Born in Melbourne to Australian parents, Robbo moved to England when she was six, but the English will claim anyone as their own in their attempt to find at least one person from a population of 50 million who can match the conveyor belt of talent that rolls off the Balkan production line.

While on the Caledonian theme, here's an excellent and totally politically incorrect parody of “Scotland the Brave” by the fellows who inflicted “Flower of Scotland” upon us:

Vegemite Flavoured Chocolate?

The King

That's the horrific prospect for lovers of the world's greatest chocolate, Cadbury's Dairy Milk, after the recent acquisition by Kraft. For the American food giant is also responsible for the execrable gunge called Vegemite, a rip-off of the King of Spreads – Marmite.

Marmite is so superior to the other stuff in so many ways that it seems churlish to list them. But here are just a few:

1) It tastes good.
2) It tastes of something.
3) It is the most eco-friendly of all foods, being made for many years from brewer's yeast scraped from the bottom of vats in Burton upon Trent.

A look at the origins of Vegemite – try saying the word with a straight face, by the way ... I told you, it's impossible – tells you all you need to know about a product that makes Nutella look like the kind of thing people who waste their money on sun-dried tomatoes, pine nuts, sea salt, organic oranges and free-trade coffee would give up their membership of Amnesty International to get their hands on.

It was shortly after the Great War and survivors of Gallipoli were looking around for something to talk about besides Winston Churchill. You and I, with hindsight, knew this wasn't going to happen, but these blokes were simple folk – Australians – and they thought "Why not get our own back on Winnie and the Poms by shipping them boatloads of stuff that looks like shite and tastes like what shite would taste like if shite were tasteless?"

Unfortunately, all the ships sank and Aussies have been eating the stuff ever since. Actually, as an article in the latest isssue of Change Agent, the magazine of market research company Synovate, tells us, with sales of Vegemite in freefall since 2006, it's one of those things Australians feel honour bound to like – like flip-flops, Holdens and Ned Kelly. (Even Australians draw the line at Nicole Kidman.)

Recently, in the least subtle marketing exercise since Janet Jackson hired Justin Timberlake to boost her flagging sales, Kraft attempted to revive its fortunes down under by getting the public to choose the name for a new product. After one false start – as if "iSnack2.0" would ever catch on – the company settled on the name "Cheesybite", as bland as the paste itself.

Kraft Australia spokessheila Greta Cooper is clearly shitting bricks just six months after the launch, since she declines to give sales figures and has recourse instead to telling us how many bottles have been manufactured.

"More than 3.4 million jars", she gushes, like the single-celled Kylie Minogue reading from an autocue prepared by sibling Dannii, who inherited the other two.

Gaddi Chef Sets up Shop in Mei Foo

It may only serve a maximum of 11 customers at a time, but Mia, tha latest addition to the culinary options in Mei Foo, is something of a gem. That this should be the case is hardly surprising given the fact that the chef, Lau Ming Kai, cut his teeth at Gaddi's at the Peninsula Hotel and won Gold in the Western Cuisine category at the 2004 Hong Kong Culinary Awards.

Since my first visit last month, there's been a modest price rise, but the set lunch still remains pretty good value. Yesterday, my friend (the company IT girl – so very important to keep in with her) had the stir-fried spaghetti with mushrooms and parmesan cheese and I tried the risotto with seafood in parmesan cheese sauce. Having tested a bit of each other's, the verdict came down in favour of the risotto. Each was pretty filling, testimony both to the goodly size of the portions and the effects of the cheese and, in the case of the pasta, the olive oil.

Prices for the four sets, which are adjusted from time to time (the pizza with potato salad on next door's table looked particularly appetising), range from HK$48 (spag bol) to HK$62 (risotto and pizza). For your money, you get main course + coffee (the milk was warm, but unfortunately so too was the coffee); for salad or soup, you pay HK$12 extra, for dessert another HK$15. There is an a la carte menu, but it's not much of an advance on the set, items wise.

Mia is called a trattoria on the name cards they give out. Reading that appellation took me back to England in the 70s, when trattorias (prounonced in estuary English, of course, with a glottal stop replacing the double "t") filled the gap between the Wimpey era and the wine bar era. Those wishing to sample the pasta, rice and pizza on offer are advised to book. The number is 3487-1288 and the address is Shop 65C Podium Floor, Glee Path, Mei Foo Sun Chuen, Kowloon (Exit A Mei Foo Railway Station [Tsuen Wan Line], up the steps and it's on the right).

Zheng Jie Frenching It

The number one rule in sport – keep your eye on the balls

Having started off the tournament with a bagel, dropping the first set 6-0 to compatriot Peng Shuai, Sichuanese hottie Zheng Jie is carrying all before her down under, disposing of a Spaniard who makes up for having four of the commonest names in Iberia by insisting on listing all of them on the scorecard.

Next up for the petite Chinese with the signature black sock is a third round match-up against the eleventh seed, Marion Bartoli, who caused a sensation a few years ago by becoming the fattest person to get to the final at Wimbledon. Well, technically to play in the final at Wimbledon, as, for many women in middle England, the Wimbledon fortnight represents the only time they turn off the telly and get off the sofa.

With chokers Jelena Jankovic and Dinara Safina in her quarter of the draw, Zheng and her mokkels have a great chance to reach their second grand slam semi-final – at which point they're guaranteed to be blown away by whoever they meet, be it Henin, Clijsters, Wickmayer or Kuznetsova.

Opera Gets BDSM Twist

I want to play a hanging judge, he said.

No problem, I replied. Which way do you want it to hang?

The lady at the centre of the Fetish Fashion brouhaha – FF was the sadomasochism club in Cochrane Street that whipped barristers, accountants and policemen into various shapes in the early naughties – the dominutive Brenda Scofield, AKA "Decima" ... I'm not making this up ... for those not versed in Greco-Roman mythology, Decima "measured the thread of life with her rod" – presumably a strap-on ... where was I? Oh, yes, Brenda Scofield is appearing in Donizetti's Fille du Régiment at the end of the month.

Old habits died hard, they say, so unsurprisingly our Brenda is playing the role of the Duchess of Krackenthorp, a character who could have been based on Jane Austen's very own dominatrix, Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Meanwhile, rumours that six of Hong Kong's finest have infiltrated the chorus and have agreed to be tied up on a wooden saddle and have their bottoms whipped and waxed have been denied by Senior Superintendent Sit On-top.

Gino Does Oprah

Besides supporting wife Lily Chiang Lai Lei in the merry dance she is currently performing with the Hong Kong judiciary, Gino Yu has been blogging at the Huffington Post. According to his biodata, Gino's busy developing "meaningful" video games at the Poly U – who exactly is left to develop the meaningless ones you see everyone playing on the MTR is not mentioned.

Not content with all this on his CV, Gino has founded the Asia Consciousness Festival, with its flagship event the Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference. And it's not just your common-or-garden variety of consciousness that Dino is stumbling towards a science of: his burning research interest involves the application of media technologies to "promote enlightened consciousness".

And how much use is an enlightened consciousness unless it's promoted, you may well ask? About as much use as a light under a bushel, Gino obviously reckons, because his latest venture sees him turn his hand to the advice column. Again, not your common-or-garden variety of advice column, but an outstanding example of the stream of consciousness sub-genre. Gino truly puts the "agony" back into agony aunt.

The first paragraph gives us a frightening entry into the mind of the author:

"I found myself consoling a friend who recently had his divorce finalized after his wife had left him. I felt disheartened to see his normally happy and engaged demeanor become numb and desensitized. 'I've been like this for the past eight months,' he told me. His situation reminded me a difficult break-up I experienced in college that let me to explore social relationships and the mind."

By the fourth, I was starting to hallucinate:

"What really happens when the stories that we live by change? If a loved one dies, our story changes to reflect a material loss. However when two people end a relationship, what other than the story actually changes?"

When I got to this in the fifth, my brain imploded like one of those computers in the movies that someone has sabotaged by punching in a code that makes it go up in smoke:

"At first thought, it would seem that the only difference is that perhaps some brain cells in your head and in the head of your ex-significant-other are now wired differently. Neural connections made during the relationship have perhaps become undone, or maybe a new over-riding connection is made."

And we wonder why those coming out of the Hong Kong university system, comic book in on hand and Nintendo PSP in the other, can't hold down a decent job.

Chinese Wisdom

"The Year of the Tiger – what's in it for you?"

Thus reads one of the flyers that fluttered out of the latest Pinkun, the magazine of the Hong Kong Cricket Club. For a mere $198 (not $188, strangely enough – I suppose getting the magical double-eight into the equation isn't quite so auspicious when it means slashing ten bucks off your profit per head), people who believe in the eight trigrams, the 64 hexagrams and the theory of divination can listen to huckster, AKA "Feng Shui Master", Albert Cheung, sounding off on this guff as they munch on their set dinner.

I can only assume Albert has fallen on hard times – the kind of hard times that have afflicted the tiger in the last hundred years. Less than a year ago, he was charging the gullible more than a thousand bucks to learn all about psychology and synchronicity. This time round, he'll be telling those desperate enough to attend "how to foster Good Luck and avoid misfortune using Chinese wisdom". He'll also be making predictions for personal fortune using "Purple astrology". (Albert is a devotee of the mantra that says, "Always put the word in capital letters when it is devoid of meaning".)

I will allow myself one prediction for the New Year. Albert Cheung will achieve absolute synchronicity with the few remaining Chinese tigers by disappearing into oblivion.

Turning the Other Cheek

In a city renowned for its bizarre goings-on in court, an acquittal took place yesterday which put it in the early lead for Hong Kong's Most Ridiculous Cause of Action cum Waste of Court Time Award 2010.

A woman – unnamed – accused the former headmaster at her 6-year-old daughter's primary school ("former", I assume, because the woman launched a court case against him) of touching her buttock. Well, that's the bottom line, but 57-year-old Luk Lee Ki also stood accused of continually touching the back of the woman's hand at a school open day.

And there's more.

"As she was leaving" – I'll let the South China Morning Post pick up the story – "he [that's Mr Luk, the ex head] patted her shoulder and swept his hand against her back and buttock."

Now, I know what a lot of you are thinking – which buttock precisely? And that's exactly what magistrate Don So wanted to probe in Fanling Court yesterday. And probe he did. What came out was enough to see Mr Luk walk from the New Territories a free man, if not an employed or employable one.

After telling the police that she had been swept on the left buttock, the unidentified woman told Magistrate So that the sweeping had actually occurred on the right buttock. Somewhat predictably, Don took a rather dim view of this, and gave the woman a good spanking.

At least, one hopes so.

Lawyer Cites Blue Peter Defence to Prove Kissel's Innocence

Here's one she made earlier in self-defence

Tosh, Tosh, Glorious Tosh!

La Scala in 2007, the Met in 2008, San Francisco in 2009. It seemed only a matter of time before the hottest property in the operatic repertoire would be heading for Hong Kong. La Fille du Régiment opens at the City Hall Concert Hall on Friday 29 January, running until Sunday, with two performances on the Saturday.

Although the signature challenge goes to the tenor, Tonio, who must nail the nine High Cs that launched Pavarotti to superstardom at the Met in 1971, the main character is Marie, the bastard daughter of a Marquise – although she doesn't know it – who has been adopted by a regiment of soldiers. (Even by the very low standards of the comic operatic sub-genre, the story of La Fille du Régiment is utter tosh.)

Fortunately, though, the work includes some of the best music written in the grand opera tradition. One of the highlights is the jingoistic "Salut a la France!" – the Italian Donizetti knew what would go down well with the Froggies during his stint in Paris – here sung by Natalie Dessay, complete with mutant pigtail:

Judges as Late Learners of the Nature of Injustice

On the day when Andrew Li Kwok Nang delivered his parting shot as Hong Kong's Chief Justice, I am grateful to a reader who points out that one of the problems of the poacher-turned-gamekeeper situation common to jurisdictions such as Hong Kong, where judges are drawn from the field of practicing lawyers – predominantly barristers – was alluded to by Socrates through his amanuensis Plato 2,400 years ago in The Republic.

Replying to his straight man cum patsy, Glaucon, who has been led into saying that it is the most shameful thing in the world for well-educated men to have to rely on justice "imported" from judges since they themselves lack discernment, Socrates replies as follows:

"Is it? Or is this still more shameful – when a man not only wears out the better part of his days in the courts of law as defendant or accuser, but from the lack of all true sense of values is led to plume himself on this very thing, as being a smart fellow to 'put over' an unjust act and cunningly to try every dodge and practice, every evasion, and wriggle out of every hold in defeating justice, and that too for trifles and worthless things, because he does not know how much nobler and better it is to arrange his life so as to have no need of a nodding juryman?"

A few pages on, and Glaucon is dutifully doing the spadework for his master by agonising over the problem of how you can keep a prospective judge away from being corrupted by bad influences in his youth while ensuring that he doesn't turn out so hopelessly naïf that he falls easy prey to the deceptions of those of a more worldly disposition. As always, Socrates is ready with his answer:

"Therefore it is that the good judge must not be a youth but an old man, a late learner of the nature of injustice, one who has not become aware of it as a property in his own soul, but one who has through the long years trained himself to understand it as an alien thing in alien souls, and to discern how great an evil it is by the instrument of mere knowledge and not by experience of his own."

Pie in the sky? Not at all. For, even today, not all countries adopt the common law system of letting someone who has dedicated 20-odd years of their life to winning a case by hook or by crook – metaphorically speaking, of course – graduate to passing judgement on cases featuring their mates upon reaching that time of life when they're comfortable enough to wish to swap the big bucks of adversarial work for the prestige of the bench.

One example is Germany, where judges and lawyers do a common preparatory training, which includes an apprenticeship spent clerking for judges and working for lawyers. Crucially, though, once the certification process is complete, judges and lawyers go their separate ways.

One imagines it is for the simple reason that the leopard cannot change its spots that Socrates would throw his weight behind such civil law systems, which allows the poachers to keep doing what comes naturally.

No Natural Rights, Just Natural Claims

Thought-provoking stuff from the philosopher Samuel Alexander's 1920 sleeper hit Space, Time and Deity:

"There are even claims which must be called natural, though there can be no natural rights. Such are the elementary claims for freedom and life, which no society can refuse to turn into rights without compassing its own destruction. They are distinguishable from claims which are themselves of social origin, such as the claims of certain classes to the franchise." (p. 283)

Alexander can be considered, if not an influence on, then at least a forerunner of, such heavyweights as Ayn Rand, C.S. Lewis, Karl Popper and Thomas Sowell.

Hong Kong's Judges: Too Many Benchwarmers?

Football has a word for players who are not part of the starting eleven but are habitually named as substitutes – benchwarmers. In the old days, you didn't get so many of these due to the fact that only one substitute was allowed for many years since Keith Peacock came on as the first substitute in English football in the early 1960s. These days, though, with sides allowed to name seven substitutes, the upshot is that you get many more footballers who get paid handsomely for doing very little besides keeping the subs' bench warm. There are occasions when one wonders if it isn't a similar story for Hong Kong's 160-odd judges and magistrates.

Recent effusions from Hong Kong's judicial officials that have given cause for concern include those of District Court Judge Stanley Chan Kwong Chi, as he found lorry driver-cum-Taoist master Au Yeung Kwok Fu guilty of procurement by false pretences. Apparently ignoring the fact, which had come out in court, that the pseudo model the trucker managed to persuade to have sex with him had already had two abortions long before meeting him, when she was aged 12 and 13, Chan swapped gown and gavel for priestly vestments to pass judgement on the pregnancy caused by Au Yeung. It had, the judge intoned, in his self-appointed role as guardian of the morals, "resulted in the loss of a human life", although what that had to do with the case at hand eluded most observers.

The case of the Taoist master throws up plenty more food for though, not least, as Smog points out, because the law under which he was charged and convicted, "Procurement of an unlawful sexual act by false pretences" (Crimes Ordinance, Cap 200, s 120), is worded in such a way that it raises many more questions than it answers. The law states, in essence, that it is an offence for a person to procure "another person, by false pretences or false representations, to do an unlawful sexual act".

The major, and very serious problem, with this is that "unlawful" is smuggled in rather than defined, which lends a certain circularity to the law. Moreover, the addition of the word "unlawful" strongly implies that there are circumstances in which sexual intercourse under false pretenses is lawful, and yet these circumstances remain, like the "unlawful", undefined.

Returning to judicial effluence, there can be no better starting place for the interested than a book by former Hong Kong Court of Appeal judge, Benjamin Liu Tsz Ming, perhaps the single most extraordinary book I have ever read. Given that the author was a judge, you would be forgiven for thinking that How Are We Judged? refers to Hong Kong's judges, with a nod to Juvenal's famous dictum "Quis custodiet custodes ipsos?" But you would be wrong, as the book is actually about the way in which judges judge lawyers. Sounds bizarre? I promise you, not half as bizarre as the farrago of non-sequiturs, banalities and babblings that somehow manages to captivate the reader for 242 pages.

The following extract from the chapter called "Judicial indiscretion and calibre" gives a taste of the kind of prose you'll be contending with:

"Judicial appointments have never been known to be truly fair or perfect. Cliques and coteries aside, it is usually not the best but a more agreeable candidate who is successfully nominated. The less than rigid means of selecting judges is not necessarily repulsive. Flexibility is an inherent nature of the common law system. It is imperfect largely in the sense that it is not uniform. Both sound and less sound judges may be appointed." (p. 70)

Was Liu, I wonder, responsible for drafting Cap 200, s 120?

As for putting benchwarmers out to pasture, Liu is refreshingly candid in that patristic, my-way-or-the-highway, manner of his:

"Between an incompetent judge and one who is or appears to be difficult to cope with, the lesser evil is decidedly the latter. Once appointed, a judge is virtually irremovable." (p. 181)

Coach's Daughter

Watching Cheers on DVD recently, I got to wondering what had happened to American comedy in the last 20 years. In many ways, Cheers is remarkably similar to British comedy, inasmuch as the six leading characters are all "losers", the four men in particular.

The humour to be mined from the celebration of failure and human weakness runs in a deep vein, as shown by Fawlty Towers, Blackadder and The Office. The rawness of some of that humour allows for moments of great pathos, none more so than in this early episode featuring Coach (Nicholas Colasanto) and his daughter Lisa (1.50-3.30):



Cheers says more in 100 seconds about coming to terms with your appearance than the anodyne Ugly Betty could manage in 100 episodes.

Lilies that Fester

I am indebted to the Bard of Avon for the title of today's offering, to the last line of his 94th sonnet, to be precise, one in a series of 14-liners devoted to a young lady who was proving to be a bit of a handful.

Two years after being charged with fraud, ex Chairwoman of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, ex member of the ICAC's Ethics Development Advisory Committee, ex Executive Committee member of the Liberal Party and Legislative Councillor-in-waiting, Lily Chiang Lai Lei, is still fighting for the jury trail that she reckons she is owed by her "constitutional rights".

Quite why Lily would prefer to have her future decided by a bunch of seven disparate and impressionable individuals with no legal knowledge or training and with no experience or understanding of the ways in which company directors can fiddle shareholders, the Securities and Futures Commission and The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited, rather than by a judge who is expert in just these sort of things, I don't know.

A hint at the way Lily's brain is working is provided by white collar crime expert, Simon Young Ngai Man, prosecutor turned academic, who points out that "many District Court judges are former magistrates who don't have much time for 'high-priced lawyers and legal niceties'." The significance of this is that if Lily fails to get her jury trial, her case will proceed in the District Court.

Since charges were first laid against her in January 2008, Lily has unsuccessfully mounted two separate judicial review attempts, one against the prosecution for applying to have her case transferred to the District Court and the other against the magistrate who ordered that the case be heard there. In terms of the great procrastinators, Lily Chiang Lai Lei makes Fabius Cunctator Maximus look like Usain Bolt.

Outside court yesterday, though, Lily proved she's much more than a mere filibusterer. Like all the best comedians, Chiang is possessed of that most priceless asset for the funnyman – timing. Her parting shot yesterday was worthy of Groucho Marx himself:

"I'm not doing this for myself. I'm doing it for Hong Kong."

In the meantime, Lily has just one more delaying tactic left to play – a direct application to the Court of Final Appeal. I think we can be pretty sure that that application will be made, sooner or later. Well, probably not sooner, come to think of it. For Hong Kong, of course.

Joplin Remembered

Pacific Coffee's "Thought for the Day" yesterday was a quotation attributed to Janis Joplin:

"Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got."

An interesting choice, as the Hong Kong Government attempts to sell its half-baked scheme for drugs testing schoolchildren. This year marks the 40th anniversary of Joplin's death from a heroin overdose at the age of 27.

The Prisoner

I've just finished watching the 17 episodes of The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan's very personal take on freedom and the individual. It's a kind of rule with television series that the best episodes are the tightest, those that take place within the confines of the main set or those that feature the core characters. Thus, the best episodes of Cheers, Blackadder, The Office and Fawlty Towers are the ones that stick to the tried and tested.

Much the same goes for The Prisoner, which is good, but not that good. Certainly not uniformly good. Like all good things British, it has attracted a large band of fanatics from across the Atlantic who have dedicated their lives to outdoing one another in explaining away all weaknesses in the show. Given the nature of the material, which features unfathomable conspiracies, mind-altering drugs, impossible medical breakthroughs, a bubble that doubles as a ruthless and inescapable killer, and a hero (or is it anti-hero?) breathing defiance and sarcasm in equal measure, it's not hard to make a case for everything being possible, anything being intended, in The Prisoner.

It is perhaps no coincidence that many of the best TV series comprise only a dozen half-hour episodes (Blackadder's 24 are spread across four incarnations and six years). As The Prisoner progresses, the makers resort more and more to the violent and the bizarre. Two pairs of episodes epitomise the problems the creative team is coming up against. The two identity-switch episodes ("A Change of Mind" and "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling") are unconvincing, while the two episodes that take the former agent back on assignment ("Living in Harmony" – set in the wild west – and "The Girl Who Was Death" – which foreshadows the final episode with its tower-cum-rocket motif) are pretty vapid.

One of the recurring themes of the show is the psychological warfare waged between Number Six and his various Number Twos – there's a different one in most episodes. Indeed, the essence of the story is how Number Six turns the tables on his tormentors, reducing them to nervous wrecks – or worse – as he wins the mind games.

At times, the credulity is strained to Batmanesque levels, as for example when the surveillance cameras that pick up everything else unaccountably fail to spot McGoohan pouring his spiked tea into a flower vase. Another debt to 1960s' kitsch is the Mission Impossible-style music (serving to remind us of the debt The Prisoner owed to McGoohan's straight role as John Drake in Dangerman, or Secret Agent as it was known stateside), which sits incongruously alongside the sinister riffs and the ambiguous use made of nursery rhymes and traditional British airs such as "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean".

One of the joys of watching the series again after all these years is that it gives those of a certain vintage the chance to test themselves by seeing how many British character actors of the 60s and 70s they can name. They're all there: Rodney Bewes, Peter Wyngarde, Derren Nesbitt, Paul Eddington, Nigel Stock, Leo McKern (okay, he's Australian).

I even made a sighting of dear old Donald Sinden, the Wu Fung of the British theatre, who even now I can imagine booming out for the camera:

"I am not a number ...... I am a frrrree man!"

SCMP - Starting the Year How They Mean to Go On?

You've got to hand it to the South China Morning Post. Which other newspaper could misspell one of its own headlines?

The front page of yesterday's City section, dedicated to Operation Santa Claus, proudly announced that:

With cash still rolling in, fund-raising drive is well passed its HK$8 million target

Has the Possed past its sell-by date, I wonder?