But - and here's where it gets interesting - when things settled down a bit I went into Google to find out what was happening and there were all these profuse apologies and statements that they were having problems - DUH! - in Hong Kong, and I noticed they were now re-routing Mainland China traffic through Taiwan instead of Hong Kong.
You will, of course, know what this is all about:
China's war with Google.
You will, of course, have been following the story in the papers ... although I must confess I've never read more than the first paragraph of any story because - YAWN! - nothing is more boring than computer news.
Except now, huh!
I'm guessing we Hong Kongers spent an entire day as victims of some sort of strange Chinese cyber-attack. I'm hoping to read ALL about it in today's SCMP when I finally go down and buy the newspapers. (It's freezing again today so I'm again in jammies and wrapped-blanket mode.) Naturally I will pass on anything interesting.
Honestly! China is SUCH a strange country. Although I do like Wu and Hu as people, or rather as they front up as people, I'm appalled at all this Chinese viciousness and bullying. Already they are being border-line unendurable in their dealings with Hong Kong, and now they're upping their vileness by doing this awfulness to Google, which they see as some US in-default, and we're becoming their victims in new and awful ways.
However, I think we should be understanding here because these poor Google folk are trying to retain their integrity and fight back.
You'll recall how Yahoo rolled and told - I so hope none of them can sleep at night thinking about the people they got killed and imprisoned and tortured - so I guess we should be supportive of Google in its attempts to stand up to this Chinese Communist Party bullying. However, I do wish Google would, you know, leave Hong Kong out of it because we definitely don't need them to add this much pressure.
We're under more than enough pressure as it is.
Hong Kong is a winsy-small SAR fighting its own hopefully-not-losing battle against a giant ill-intentioned nation that, I now must realise, means us harm. It's a David and Goliath situation, except we're not David. Or if we are David, we're David-the-Tinsy-Small-Fluffy-Baby-Mouse. And we definitely don't even have a slingshot to defend ourselves.
A zillion years ago, during my first degree at a university in Australia, we had a visit by some famous intellectual who was in politics - an oxymoron - whose name I've forgotten, who gave a lecture where he said lots of interesting things that are now haunting me: about how politics should not impinge on our lives; that politics, if done well, is something that we shouldn't even be aware of; to be wary whenever politics intruded or impacted in any way in our personal lives because then it was a sign that the politicians were getting it wrong and that trouble was afoot.
We naturally, back then, as young university tossers, attacked him and shouted lots of stuff about how he was wrong and that politics should be a big part of our personal lives and we should all be involved and ... Candy said lots of things that sounded very wise at the time and we all cheered her ... but now I'm thinking about his words and cringing about how brash and arrogant we were back then. So innocent and naive and frankly idiotic.
He was right. When politics stops me putting my film up on youtube, these politicians are definitely getting it wrong and trouble is indeed afoot.
So that's my choice for this week:
THREATDOWN
Remembering what a tosser you once were.
And that's a default
because you all know the real one.
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