What Kills Us This Week!

I'll have to read the papers to be sure, but I think yesterday Our Margaret and I may have very narrowly escaped an acid attack. Seriously!  Like, we were right there! Gosh, Starbucks may again have saved my life; OK, maybe not my life this time, but certainly my clothes, and maybe even my skin.

What happened is that Margaret and I were stomping around Mong Kok, doing the shopping we had planned to do up in China except Margaret didn't get a visa, when Margaret insisted we stop off for a coffee.  Brand new Starbucks right there so I said blah blah blah ... then Margaret said something about not wanting to support American multinationals blah, blah, blah ... and I said that twice now a Starbucks had literally saved my life - once when their waiters rescued me when that angry crazy man tried to strangle me and then when they took care of me after I was robbed in Guangzhou - so they were totally in my good books ... so she agreed to come in and grab a cuppa but only one-to-go.

The place was packed, but just as we got our order two people left and this lovely young waiter grabbed the seats and signaled to us to come sit down. He looked so proud of himself it seemed churlish not to accept, so we took the seats and remained in Starbucks for about twenty minutes.

But when we walked out, the entire street was full of ambulances and police-cars and folks madly rushing around and all-go-go-go-surveillance-action and it was all so creepy, even vaguely apocalyptic, Margaret was going "What happened? What happened?"

To me it seemed like we'd just missed another acid attack. And one that happened right there, in the street we were in, immediately around Starbucks, probably only minutes after we went inside, and most probably just as we would have been coming out if that so-lovely young waiter hadn't stopped us leaving.

I think we have an angel! Yes?

Do you know about these HK acid attacks?  That, for the past three years, someone has been throwing acid-bombs onto shoppers?  The attacks used to happen only in Mong Kok but the latest two have been in Sogo in Causeway Bay; both Mong Kok and Sogo being statistically the busiest shopping areas in the world.  He's bombed 219 people so far, with a significant proportion having to be hospitalised, and it's becoming increasingly a major public concern, with the reward for his capture now up to nearly HK$1 million.

Only two days ago,  HK police published the Profiler's Report which said it was most likely being done by a 28 year old anti-social computer nerd type (which was what I thought too when thinking about the type of person who'd do something like this) and that these attacks were no longer about vengefully hurting people and had become, because he was consistently getting away with it, about taunting the police. It also said that the attacks were about to escalate.

When I read the account I did actually think "He's going to attack again immediately in revenge for this report." but, because the latest attacks had moved to Sogo, I thought that we'd be fine shopping in Mong Kok.

And we were.  Yes, thanks to that very sweet and charming young waiter grabbing and holding two seats for us, we were just fine.

So that's definitely my choice for this week:

THREATDOWN

Angry computer nerds taking offence

at what a Profiler has to say about them.

Or ...

a police excuse to raise HK's

surveillance levels to seriously invasive

without the public objecting.

Later:

There was an acid attack yesterday but it took place in Tuen Mun and not in Mong Kok, so it looks as though yesterday's "strange incident in Mong Kok" was just something triad-esque and normal.