X Factor Says No Place for Dictator

Better late than never. Although the film Downfall (Der Untergang) was released in 2004 and the various parodies and meta-parodies it spawned appeared several years ago, it took a typhoon for me to get my act together and produce the definitive Hitler parody.

Thanks to my daughter for twiddling the Moviemaker knobs and for mega damp-squib Nesat for giving us the day off.

The Novels of Virginia Woolf

As a child, I never managed to get past the first page of James Joyce's Ulysses when I picked up the copy that sat incongruously on my mother's bookshelf beside the Jilly Coopers, and reading three of Virginia Woolf's best known novels recently, I was revisited by similar feelings of confusion.

At first, at any rate, for once I had attuned myself to her wavelength (the word is well chosen - not only are waves a recurring motif in her work, along with gasometers, snail shells, lifts and cows, but the third of her middle period books is called The Waves), I found myself drawn into her world.

It is a bleak world, to be sure, made all the bleaker for the modern reader by the fact that it is impossible to read her work without the realisation that keeps rolling over you like a wave of its own that the woman who created it killed herself at the age of 58 by walking into a river, her overcoat laden with rocks. Her body wasn't found for three weeks.

Suicide is a theme of all three of the books on which her reputation chiefly hinges, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To The Lighthouse (1927)and The Waves (1931). In the first, Septimus Warren Smith, the lower middle-class protagonist whose life is told in parallel to that of the eponymous heroine, ends it all by jumping from a window (Woolf had tried that earlier in her life, but failed for lack of elevation), while one of the six friends (or are they merely acquaintances?) in The Waves also jumps, although if you blink you may miss it.

Suicide is also a theme of arguably her best known and best book, To The Lighthouse, essentially a story told in flashback of a family expedition from their summer home in the Scottish Isles to a nearby lighthouse.

The book ends rather abruptly when they finally get there, not so much, you feel, because Woolf wants to say that to travel is better than to arrive, but because the story isn't really about a lighthouse at all; it's about the purpose we try to give to lives that ultimately have little or no meaning. The beams that radiate from the lighthouse serve more to point up the darkness of existence than to illumine it.

Woolf's stream of consciousness style works best (and when it works well, it works brilliantly) when she gives herself some structure to hang it on. That is why her two earlier novels work better than the later one. Woolf appears to have known this. She writes in her letters and diaries about her desire to get away from "set pieces" - the fulcrum of Mrs. Dalloway is a dinner party she is giving, and then we have that outing to the lighthouse.

The problem with making The Waves a series of monologues is that the three women and the three men all sound like Virginia Woolf. To paraphrase Pirandello, it is Six Characters in Service of An Author. Woolf is at her best when she is setting down on the page the product of her female characters' internalised thinking, when she uses that device to explore the frailties of human nature, the darkness of the human condition. Virginia Woolf is Mrs. Dalloway, she is Mrs. Ramsay in a way that she never is Bernard, the prosaic male character who emerges from the pack as the major player in The Waves.

Reading Woolf, I was reminded of the work of a near contemporary of hers, Charles Williams, a lower middle-class man who might have served as the model for Septimus Warren Smith, had he not been possessed of unusual literary gifts of his own. But, while Williams's unique blend of mysticism and Christianity served to provide an anchor in his life, Woolf, who claimed to have been sexually abused by her two half-brothers, appears haunted by her past and ultimately as rudderless as the jetsam tossed about on her waves.

Dictator Offers Comfort to Gaddfi

I've lined you up some work for JP Morgan

Support the Intellexusally Disabled

Receiving a giant poster this afternoon from the Fu Hong Society promoting their Walkathon round the Peak next month, I was struck by the language used to describe the people (or "persons" as they are called) who will be the beneficiaries of this year's event – those "with intellectual disabilities and with autism".

Now, I know very little about autism, except that it exists as a "disorder" on a "spectrum", which suggests to my occasionally cynical non-medical mind that those who are charged with treating it (or, perhaps I should say, those who charge for treating it) haven't got a clue what it really is but are nonetheless certain that it is a medical condition rather than, say, a psychological one brought about largely by the very fact of having parents.

My own diagnosis would be that autism and ADD (plus its offshoot ADHD – are there any others yet?) are very rarely found in orphans or those fortunate enough to have been brought up by nannies. But I digress.

It was the "intellectual disabilities" bit that interested me most. I've noticed that this formulation has been gaining ground at the expense of "mentally handicapped", which is a pity, in my opinion, as "mentally handicapped" has a nice ring to it and is easily abbreviated to Mencap. What old Brian Rix makes of all this, with the charity he made famous facing the grisly prospect of being re-abbreviated to Telebil is anyone's guess.

I met one of those persons who may be benefiting from this year's fundraising on Tai Po Road this morning. We actually met in the Route 81 bus stop lay-by after he'd decided to move from the inside lane to the outside one without looking.

"But I indicated!" he offered rather feebly as he passed over the necessaries for touching up the paintwork above my nearside rear wheel.

"Yes, but you're meant to do that before you change lanes," I thought to myself – such wisdom is wasted on a MVP driver, "and even then it's a precondition for moving rather than sanction for doing so."

So, spare a thought for intellectually challenged Lexus drivers and give generously on 22 October.

Take Me to Le Jardin of Robuchon, Mate!

Come rugby world cup time and I love Australians. So long as the New Zealanders don't win it, I'll actually support anyone, even South Africa (even though they have a sniff of winning it) and, my God, even Wales ('though only because they are total no-hopers).

Despite impersonating England for 80 minutes against Ireland, and playing a bloke at prop who looked as if he should have been playing at fly-half and who kept falling over and giving the Irish three points, the green and yellows have a real chance of upsetting the odds and beating both South Africa and the Kiwis because they've got fast fellows who know how to pass and catch the ball, not to mention a coach who's not afraid to keep picking a little magician at No. 10.

Quade Cooper is his name, and, because he had the audacity to be born in New Zealand and then cross the Tasman Sea when he was 12 years old, he's hated by New Zealanders with the type of passion normally reserved for English referees who make a few dodgy calls against them or South African chefs who poison their food before the final.

The biggest cheer of the tournament so far occurred not when the host country ran in a bucketload of tries against mighty Japan, but when Mr. Cooper tried to amend for an earlier flip pass behind his back – which went wrong – by attempting another one with his side just minutes from defeat – which went disastrously wrong – as the men in green intercepted the ball and charged upfield with it to make the game safe.

So, I'm willing to forgive the odd Australian (is there any other type?) who comes to this site by performing a Goggle search for "Le Jardin of Robuchon". Rather than excoriating him (or her - the Sheilas down there are pretty dumb too) for his inattentiveness in French class, I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt (like I did when Mike Tindall buried his head in that beautiful blonde's boobs) and, to use a bit of Robbie Deans coaching-speak, try to take the positives out of this sorry situation.

The Melbournite may not know the French for "of", but, crikey! he's up to speed on his definite articles.

Moby Dick

Moby Dick, the book by Herman Melville, occupies a hallowed place as "the great American novel", a title bestowed upon it lovingly by those, one suspects, who have never read it. Having just ploughed through it, my verdict is that the veneration accorded to a mishmash that is part novel, part treatise on whaling, part attempt to write a play, would appear to owe more to the fact that the British critics panned it when it was published there in 1851 – the year of the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, which was probably a lot more exciting.

One of them described it as:

"an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed."

a criticism that has stood the test of time better than its target.

Melville, who had worked briefly on a couple of whalers in his twenties, was emboldened to write what he intended to be his magnum opus by the success of two shorter books, Typee and Omoo, that were based on his maritime adventures in the south seas. While I haven't read these, it is instructive that Moby Dick works better in the early chapters, set in Massachusetts, in which we are introduced to the cannibalistic harpooner Queequeg and some of the other main characters, than in the bulk of the book, where author, reader and whale are frequently all in the same boat, that is, all at sea.

Other books that attempt a kaleidoscopic, digressive approach (one thinks of Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Les Misérables - with its extraordinary Parisian sewerage section – and even Montaigne's Essays) work so well because of their overarching unity of style and the broad sweep of their canvas. By contrast, Melville (a minor writer if ever there was one) is little more than a one-trick pony with a little Shakespeare and a lot of Bible thrown in.

If it strikes you as odd that a book about the merciless killing of one of the most majestic beasts on the planet, the sperm whale, should have been so romanticised during the last 150 years, this is as much a testimony to our incorrigible irrationality (recall Karl Popper's dictum that "rationality is not a property of men, nor a fact about men. It is a task for men to achieve") as it is a function of the sordid grab for Californian gold that was taking place at the time Melville was writing and served to encourage the human tendency to hark bark to a Golden Age.

Verdict: watch the film, which, for all Gregory Peck being as wooden as Ahab's peg-leg and the White Whale being even phonier than Jaws, is mercifully free of the prolixity of a tome which, to paraphrase the author, "expands to its own bulk".

Law Reform Gets off on Wong Foot

I'm indebted to my legal mole at Hong Kong University, who took time out from the staged visit of Chinese vice premier Li Keqiang to his place of learning and the even more staged fallout thereto, to pass me details of a legal jamboree he made a point of not attending over the weekend dubbed the ONC Conference on Law Reform.

The invitation he received from the organisers, the eponymous Hong Kong law firm formerly known as Or, Ng & Chan, caused him great amusement and more of an eye-opener into how the local industry operates than any insight he might gain by listening to the likes of John Bacon-Shone, Margaret Ng and Johannes Chan droning on while his beloved Ireland were putting one over on the Australians at the rugby world cup.

It is indeed so good that it is worth quoting in full:

"Dear Friends,

Although it is generally acknowledged that Hong Kong has a superior legal system. Many academics and professionals are of the view that in many key areas of our laws, reform has been long overdue but progress has been very slow. The ONC Conference on Law Reform to be held on 17th September 2011 at The University of Hong Kong explore the issues concerning our law reform process and how it could be reformed to better serve the social and economic developments of Hong Kong. Eminent international and local experts have been invited to speak at the conference and the Secretary of Justice Mr. Wong Yan Lung will give the opening address.

Partners

ONC Lawyers"

It's not just reassuring to know that the people who are spearheading efforts to bring greater clarity and equity to the legal process believe that if a string of words contains the word "is" then it qualifies automatically as a sentence; it's especially impressive to see that they believe in starting the business of reform on their own doorstep by retitling the head of the judiciary as the "Secretary of Justice", when everyone else calls him the Secretary for Justice.

Go to ONC's website and they have another gem for us, as they reflect (okay - get as close as they will every get to reflecting) on Hong Kong's legal system:

"However, as we grabble with it every day, we are deeply troubled by its many inadequacies and particularly by the slow progress of law reform in Hong Kong."

It was Cicero who asked "Who will guard the guardians themselves?" Where, I wonder, is the modern-day orator, writer of impenetrable prose and colossal bore who is going to ask this bunch of jokers, "Who will be able to grabble around at the bottom of the legal practitioners' heap when it's already chock-full of Ors, Ngs and Chans?"

New Danish PM Takes First Executive Decision

No, Stephen, you're not coming out

Depardieu Spills Beans

Mon dieu! On Bangladesh Airlines I would be thrown off for using a bottle and not ze floor

Serena Hit with $2000 Fine

Serena has told us to inform you that she's not bigger than the game

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Something Serena Williams needs to learn to show - and perhaps even to actually feel - before she can be spoken of in the same breath as great champions like Margaret Court and Steffi Graf.

The first rule of all sport - respect the umpire - has somehow been lost on this woman. A suspension by the tennis authorities will teach her that no one is bigger than the game. No one.

Cameron Star of the Show

Apparently, they think they're watching Jim'll Fix It

Kiasu Kultur

I suppose it was just another ordinary day in Hong Kong, but following hot on the heels of yesterday's discussion of kiasu (what Lau Siu Kai - one time Professor of Banality somewhere in the New Territories and for ten very long years head of Donald Tsang’s execrable Central Policy Unit- once called in his book The Ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese the "egotistical individualism" of his people), my lunchtime ramble with Sharon the IT lady to the local cha chaan teng took on the extra significance that heightened awareness tends to give to even the most humdrum event.

The first occurence of the syndrome took place when we were passing through the car park recently immortalised by the Lady of the Umbrella. As we approached the double swing doors into the mall, there were two groups of two ahead of us. As they got closer to the exit, the couple immediately ahead of us suddenly sped up, closing the gap between them and the couple ahead of them.

I thought perhaps they were together (have you ever noticed that you can have people ahead of you in a queue in Hong Kong for ages before they give any indication that they are together, say, members of the same family?), but no. The second dyad had suddenly seen their chance not only to get through the swing doors without having to touch them, but also to make sure we couldn't follow them by expending only minimal effort.

To manage this, the couple had to perform the Hong Kong Door Dance, which involves twisting your body in a variation of the limbo – one that takes place on the vertical plane.

Door negotiated, we made our way to the restaurant, which is always crowded. As luck would have it, three seats were free over in the corner, which is considered a desirable spot as a) you're in a cul-de-sac and so can't have soup tipped over you by a waiter and b) you get a window-style table with high seat backs.

Having negotiated our way past a punter complaining that he'd been brought the wrong order and two builders who'd decided to keep their torsos on display for the delectation of their fellow diners, we arrived to be greeted by the occupier – who resolutely refused to look at us – and by his three bags, which were occupying the other seats and seemed more friendly, even if they had nothing to say.

"Watch this," I said to Sharon, keen to demonstrate one of the tricks I had learned during my quarter-century acculturation process, proceeding as if to sit down on the fellow's Wellcome shopping bag.

As if by magic, with neither of us looking at the other, the bag was whipped across the table and deposited next to his other shopping bag. In a further swift manoeuvre, the laptop bag was snared and put to rest beside its owner next to the wall, allowing Sharon and I to sit down and order.

One more kiasu moment awaited me, but I was prepared. I'd already built up roughly a 50% success rate at this procedure and was determined to improve my record in front of my colleague.

In common with many other cashiers in Hong Kong, the woman in charge of the till at this chaan teng takes her job very seriously and has established a ten-square-feet mini kingdom of her own. Anyone wishing to leave her realm unharmed and without having been put under a hex must play by the rules, one of the most important of which is to take your change from the little metal plate into which she insists on depositing it, especially when a customer holds out their hand as an alternative receptacle.

I must say that perfecting the art of getting the cashier to drop the coins in my palm rather than in the tray took a fair bit of work, several of my earlier attempts having ended up in mid-air collisions which saw coins bouncing around on the floor on either side of the border.

But, I have learnt that, like everything else in Hong Kong, unflinching resolution and adamantine stoutness of heart is required. Having proffered her the banknote, I wasted no time on subtleties, merely shoving my paw over the entire extent of the plate, and not so high above it as to allow her to dip in between flesh and metal to accomplish her mission.

It may take time, it may require flouting of those chivalric customs with which you have been brought up, but the reward for knowing that you have taken on a champion on their own turf and emerged from the field victorious is a feeling like no other.

Cracking Up

Reading Hemlock’s piece on nutjob Cynthia Sze and his discussion of the dog in a manger syndrome that is so prevalent in these parts that the Chinese have coined an expression for it, "kiasu", my mind went back to one pre-Handover evening on Gloucester Road.

In those days, I was the proud owner of the car with the world's worst road-holding capability, the Mazda 929, a sleek brute of a motor that I had picked up from an Indian fellow for HK$27,500, a snip for a model that retailed for around 400k.

The car's most vaunted feature was 4-wheel steering – a con if ever I've seen one – which basically meant that whenever it had just rained, each of the four wheels would go on its own merry way. I remember one time sliding into a crash barrier on the old approach road from Tai Wai onto the Tai Po Road at the junction with the Shatin Inn. I haven’t been so embarrassed since I tried to carve out a new parking space adjacent to the car park of the Belvedere Arms on the road to Ascot.

I can’t really blame the 4WS for my mishap on that evening 15 years ago as I was queuing up for the Cross-Harbour Tunnel, since the road was dead straight and we were moving forward at a snail’s pace.

As a result of an encounter with an underground car park wall, my front number plate (EZ something or other) had a crack in it. Actually, buying a car with a registration number starting EZ was another bad move on my part given the incalculable amount of time I lost telling people on the phone, "No, it's EZ – that’s all. Period." I could never get past those confounded letters onto the four digits. Every sodding time, my interlocutor would interrupt me by saying "EZ what?", since the local pronunciation for "Z" is neither "zed" or "zee", as in the rest of the civilised world, but "ee-zed".

Anyway, I'm behind this truck which is painted blue and has loads of polystyrene boxes on it, plus hosepipes and water tanks, because it's what people here use to make sure that the fish you choose at the market arrives there in the same state of pollution that it was in when it was extracted from the local seas.

And I hit it. Not very hard, but hard enough that I didn't get away with it. The driver, or his mate who was hanging out of the passenger window with his cigarette and orange-dyed hair, had felt the impact and they sensed blood. Or money. Or a satisfying argument that would hold up traffic on Route 4 for an extra 20 minutes during rush hour.

Getting out of my car to inspect the damage, I noticed at once that the truck’s bumper was a patchwork of criss-crossing scratches and different colours that had been left there from previous collisions. Turning to my own car, I saw the cracked number plate and had a flash of inspiration which I reckoned could get me out of this mess quickly and without the need for recourse to police, insurance companies or wallet.

"Oh, no!" I wailed, giving it my best Wu Fung impression as I crouched down on my haunches to inspect the damage.

By this time, I’d got their attention, so I decided to milk it.

"Oh, God, Oh no! Broken, it's broken," I moaned, one hand on head as I pointed with the other to my front bumper.

The driver and his mate burst into fits of laughter, ran back to their truck and drove off. I had learned one more invaluable Hong Kong survival lesson.

Microsoft Boss Claims Defamation

"Micro-soft"? More like Macro-hard, ladies!

Meanwhile, the young woman at the centre of the allegations, Toni Knowlson, has broken her silence.

"I have no recollection of anything else that happened at the nightclub and specifically, I do not recall kissing Simon Negus. I assume that my memory loss was due to the quantity of alcohol I had consumed during the evening."

Ms Knowlson is Australian.

Bruni Baby Won’t Be Exposed to Media Spotlight

I'll brook no competition*

* tits out

Jade Richards: Solid Gold or Mere Adelotry?

The eighth series of The X Factor has so far proven to be an improvement on recent versions both on- and off-stage.

Out have gone unicellular Melbournite Dannii Minogue, feisty Geordie WAG Cheryl Tweedy Cole – with the speaking voice Yanks can't understand and the singing voice nobody gets – and Simon Cowell, who had been playing himself with an ever increasing degree of hamminess until the only remaining remedy was to inflict his own show on the Americans.

In their place come two girl group lipsynchers, Tulisa the Greek from Camden Town, who provides the fireworks, and Kelly Rowland, a thirty-something lass from Atlanta who was canny enough to ride Beyoncé's wave to stardom, who provides the velvet.

Into the Cowell hotseat, with his trademark "I'll look at you over my left shoulder" pose, has stepped the lead singer of Take That – well, whenever he can get the microphone off Robbie Williams – Gary Barlow. Gary has so far proven to be the find of the season, his lack of moronic banter with idiot Irishman Louis Walsh making you actually look forward to the latter's contributions, even when you know he's going to say "A million times – yes!", jab manically at the air with his pencil to underscore a point or have his face light up like a Christmas tree when the next contestant says she comes from Ireland.

This week's jewel waiting to be unearthed came in the shape – many shapes, actually – of Jade Richards, who did her best to ensure hometown support when it comes to audience voting stage by decribing Fife as a "dive".

The girl can clearly sing, but time will tell whether she is more than a mere Adele Laurie Blue Adkins impersonator.

Butch for Men

Oh for those glorious days of yore when you could watch fairly crappy programmes, in all honesty, like The Goodies, which contained the occasional gem, like this spoof of a St Bruno pipe tobacco advertisement of the early 1970s, which had the tagline "St Bruno – the tobacco for men".



In memory of my Dad, who actually smoked the stuff, that’s St Bruno (Rough Cut, never Flake) ... not Butch for Men.

Microsoft Boss in Steamy Sex Romp

Well, Windoze GM Simon Negus kissed an employee at a party, allegedly, and another co-worker says he asked her to "flutter her eyebrows (sic)".

What everyone really wants to know, though, is who'd want to work for a company that serves vodka and Jagermeister at its shindigs?

While it sounds like Mr Negus has been more shafted against than shafting, expect this case to cast more light on why one in 12 British men – and women – are binge drinkers, why the economy - not to mention half the teenage population - is up the spout, and why Brits make such lousy lovers - present company excepted, of course.