What Kills Us This Week!

An old lady broke her foot in "the gap" this week and so naturally HK is in an uproar and demanding the MTR (our sublime mass transit railway) do something about 'closing the gap'!

Of course this is very stupid because 'the gap' is between the train and the station and it's this winsy little two-three inches max, and closing it would go against the Law of Physics, wouldn't it? Something about generating friction or whatever, having the train actually touching the station! Fires? Wear-and-tear? Yadda, yadda, yadda!

Stupid, anyway!

And besides, "the gap" is a HK icon. In fact, it probably is the most famous negative space since ... mmm, The Grand Canyon? And it's rightly famous too. In fact, when HK voted, a few years back, on what was the Quintessential HK Sound, everyone - the entire city - picked two:
1) jackhammers
2) the lady who talks about 'the gap'.

Ask anyone who has ever lived in HK about that lady and they will smile fondly and say "Ahhh!" in tones of greatest pleasure, because she's burned into all our heads. At every station on the MTR line, a recording says in three different languages - Cantonese, Mandarin and English - "Please mind the gap between the train and the station." and, trust me, this lady has THE BEST voice imaginable. All honey and golden and Ahhhh!-inducing. You never get tired of it.

I really should go down and take a ride so I can record it for you, so you can enjoy her too. But I won't. I think she's a very special pleasure you should come to HK to enjoy.

And now they want to close the gap? Without that gap, we don't get that voice and our lives would be so much the lesser!

And speaking of fabulous voices, HK Council is also complaining that there have been 32,000 unnecessary night calls to Emergency Services already this year. I don't want to get anyone into trouble here, but there's a reason for those calls: that man who answers the phone at night has the most amazing voice; all honey-golden calm reassurance with a large dollop of Barry White and the effect is totally SEXY! I called once, at 2.00 am, when I woke with our apartment full of smoke and wanted to know if we should evacuate - no need, since the fire was at the apartment block across the road - and now it's all I can do not to find a pretext to phone again just to hear that voice again. Damn, it's something else!

Not that I'm suggesting you should phone HK Emergency at night just to hear that amazing voice too! HK Council is very cross with all of us because, well, I guess from their recent complaints, that 32,000 others don't have the resistance I do!

So what is my choice of Threatdown for this week? Well, I don't think I really have one! How can a fabulous voice be any reason to cause panic? No, wait, this is HK; we can turn ANYTHING into a reason to panic, and 32,000 thousand folk obviously already have.

So:

THREATDOWN

An Astonishingly Fabulous Voice
you want to hear again and again
on the other end of
An Emergency Number!