A'Capella!

Baby Jane is currently bonkers about a'capella singing and has just sent me this:



Goosebumps, right?

Nonetheless, I have to say she's not selling it because I AM NOT JOINING HER AT THE A'CAPELLA WORKSHOP!!!  And I have such a lousy voice, folks should thank me for my adamant stand on this subject.

And if you want proof of how lousy it is, let me tell you a little story:  Bumped into old friend Jimmy one day in town and he said "We're recording a track this afternoon for the new album and we need a woman's voice for a line.  Are you busy?"
I said "Jimmy, I can't sing."  
Jimmy said "Nonsense!  Everyone can sing!  It's only one line! And easy as pie! Nothing to be scared of!"
I said "Seriously, Jimmy.  I'm not turning you down because I'm scared.  I'm turning you down because I can't sing!"
Jimmy replied. "Oh come on!  One line!  Anyone can do it!  Here!  This line.  Sing it like this!"
And he gave me the line and I sang it and ...

"You're right.  You can't sing!  Offer retracted!"

So, seriously, the world will thank me for NOT doing a'capella workshops, no matter how good they're supposed to be.

The Social Network

Saw The Social Network last night.  Full house.

 

Have to tell you it was a great film, almost a psychological thriller in a way, and definitely a wonderful study of Aspergers Syndrome in action, but I'm sure you can read reviews of it anyplace so nothing I can say about it will add anything worth anything ...

... except ...

... watching films in a cinema surrounded by Chinese is always interesting, particularly when there's an Asian character in it, and The Social Network has Christine (Brenda Song), the drop-dead gorgeous sociopath.

And I have to tell you that when, in the film, at that very sad Caribbean party at Harvard's Jewish Frat-house, where the only women were Asian ... when Eduardo commented that Chinese girls were really into nerdy Jewish guys, there was an angry intake of breath from the entire cinema.

I've already told you how shocked I was watching "Sex and the City" when everyone around me went rigid when Charlotte's daughter Lily appeared on screen, and also how there was all this angry muttering from across the cinema while she was proving herself to be such a prissy-missy princess-type and there was definitely a subtle angry hissing through teeth when she stole the phone and screwed up Carrie's wedding.  And you should have seen the angry faces as we all left the cinema.  It was very much like they saw nothing else but this in the entire 90 minutes.

And when Cho Chang betrayed Harry Potter in, gosh, which one was it, there was a LOT of rigid anger from the entire cinema, and a lot of that angry teeth-hissing, but that could be because her parents are Hong Kongers and they were identifying and they certainly didn't want to identify with that.  Oh, and when the costumes from Harry Potter arrived in Hong Kong for the tour, thousands of Chinese went to look, as did I, and I have to tell you it was a particularly easy exhibition to get around, despite the crowds, because the only costume anyone was interested in, apart from Ron Weasley's hideous family tuxedo, was the cheong sam Cho Chang wore to the ball.

However, on the other hand, in Die Hard 4,  there was much cheering when Maggie Q was killed so violently and spectacularly, although that could be because she's American/Eurasian/Vietnamese - take your pick! - rather than Chinese.

And as for Christine, the well-presenting seriously-scary sociopath in The Social Network?  Well, yes, everyone went rigid when she first appeared on screen, as per usual, but then they settled.  Well-spoken, seriously cool Chinese lass at Harvard?  Yeah, they were definitely cool with that!

But then came the sex scene in the toilets?  Immediately, yes, there was the usual stiffening ... but it never developed into real rigidity because, I think, they factored in the fact that Brenda Song's mother was Thai and "What else do you expect from those sort of people." came into play.

So, by the time we were all aware that Christine was mad as a meat-axe and twice as dangerous, everyone was fine with it.

Interesting, huh!

Our friend Pete from Blacksmith Publishing has, only days ago, released a book of photographs called "The Eurasian Face" ...

LATEST PUBLICATIONS The Eurasian Face In these globalized times, people are thinking internationally  and no one represents this move towards diversity better  than Eurasians – those individuals with a mix of Caucasian  and Asian heritage. Once a source of shame, the Eurasian  face has become the face that sells. It is the face with which  everyone can identify. This book of interviews and portraits  reveals how Eurasians see their place in the world today.

 ... which, as you can read above, claims that this face connects with everyone on the planet and thus is the face of the future. 

However, I'd like to say this. Although it's definitely true about the Eurasian face connecting with the world, it's more likely that what it gives everyone is the Luxury of Deniability and Disownership. "That's her Irish side coming out!" or "That's her Polish side" or "Of course he's a baddie.  That's his Thai side."

So, yes, I agree that this is the face of the future because, frankly, with one of these the world's film-makers and advertisers can get away with ANYTHING!!! 

But back to The Social Network.  Great film.  Great script.  Great acting. But mostly worth seeing for Brenda Song's great turn as the psychopath Asian girlfriend.

The Bali Bombing

Baby Jane intends to go to Bali shortly for an A' Capella workshop - her new big thing - and has asked me to join her.

Well, no, I won't.  Not for the workshop.  But Bali?  Bali is another story.

I've never been to Bali.  Always refused to go because it's such a touristy-type destination and I already have one of those:  Fiji!  My beloved homeland! And choosing Bali over Fiji always seems a betrayal because I'd rather my holiday dollar went into the pockets of people I know and love.

But the film "Eat, Pray, Love" changed all that and the Bali segment gave me a longing to see the place, and being there with Baby Jane would be a special kind of bliss, even if she is off the whole time with that singing-thing!

Naturally, thinking about Bali has raised all those memories of the 2002 bombing.  It came very close to home because a couple of Keith's students lost their mothers at the Sari Club.  Mind you, their mums had gone off to Bali because that's where lots of Australian football teams were on a R&R bonding-holiday, and these were ladies who liked bonking footballers and who were in competition to see who could score the most, and even had their check-lists of intended intendeds ready before they left ... so it wasn't like they were Solid Mumsy Types and those students were already raising their siblings on their own.  But still, losing your mum is a pretty hard thing to do ...

... which made it particularly shocking that two days later, all our students, including Keith's other students in that particular class, were saying "Oh, shut up about the Bali bombing already!  We're sooooo over it."  And that's even before the girls had their mums'  bodies returned!

Gosh, for me that was the final straw. I was soooo detesting Australian teenagers by that time, and you can see why I was glad to finally get out of teaching!

If you've never seen what happened, here's shots of the aftermath:



However, over the years, I've met several folk who were actually there.  Mostly, they were the ones who now talk about "getting a strange feeling" that something bad was about to happen and so returned from Kuta to their hotel.  Or the mother whose kids were out partying in Kuta who, back at the hotel, was suddenly overwhelmed by "the strangest undirected panic" "something to do with my kids being in danger" and who raced into Kuta to drag them out of the Sari Club, embarrassing them completely, and they were all back at the hotel, complaining profusely about their mother's craziness, when the bombs went off.

However, I have also met a fellow who was actually in the Sari Club when the bombs exploded and his story is the strangest one of all.

What he says is that everyone now says that the song "Murder on the Dance Floor" was playing - and it has almost become part of the mythologising of that awful night - perhaps because of the irony - but that isn't what actually happened.

He says that, yes, this song was playing, and he was out there on the dance floor, dancing away ...



... but then that song ended and Cher's "Do You Believe in Life after Love" started ...



... and suddenly, for no reason, although this was one of his favourite songs, he took Cher in aversion and felt an urgent need to get away.  And he was at the bar, with solid wood in front and lots of people off to the sides and back of him, when the bombs went off.  First the one across the road, at Paddy's Bar, which made everyone in the Sari Club freeze.

But almost immediately the world changed and there were explosions and flying debris, flying people and smoke and fire all around and in the brief silence before the thatch caught fire and the screaming started there was Cher's voice singing "Do you really think you're strong enough?" and the thought "Bugger it! Yes, I am!" galvanised him into action.

The incident, he says, has made him very thoughtful about Fate and WHY!??  He says a lot of people left the floor when that song came on and they all survived while all the people who loved Cher and who stayed dancing or who raced out, cheering, to dance when that song came on, were all the ones who died.  He says Loving-Or-Hating-Cher must be the strangest reason Fate has ever chosen for selecting who would live and who would die! 

And so he had lots of questions about it:  Cher as Kali? Cher as Shiva, bringer of death?  It's all something he has a hard time getting his head around anyway.

But I think it's all chance, although it's strange that some folk had premonitions and others didn't, included two certain ladies with their check-lists ready to be ticked off, determined to beat the other in seeing who 'got the most'.

Now THAT is a scary, scary take on FATE!!!

Duke's My Saviour!

Feeling guilty about my recent post "Story for Kele" when I told you about my German Shepherd, Duke, running away from home when Beer Baron's jungle detritus ended up in our house, because it gives the impression that Duke was a coward and useless but that sooo isn't so.

To set the record straight, he didn't run off right away.  It took weeks of endless assault by our newly arrived wildlife.  And I do think he took off because he lost out in some face-off with that strange and sinister giant feral cat we named Ghost, because his doggy-ego couldn't handle it. Although I didn't witness anything myself, I guessed something must have happened because, whenever I dragged him back from wherever his latest hiding place was, Duke would never go into the room chosen by Ghost as his home; obviously chosen for the sunlight through the window and the ledge he could sit on to watch the world and decide who would be his latest prey!

And after the Possum Wars got underway, we were so fed up that, as far as we were concerned, Ghost could take whatever he liked - particularly after he killed Mad Max - provided he left the frilled-neck lizard alone, and if we ever saw him even think about taking down the Delicates, an endangered species, we were on to him with the broom ... but the rest of the jungle-life was his for the stalking.

And don't think we didn't complain to Beer Baron Billionaire about what was happening.  We all did.  The entire neighbourhood. Never once did he turn up to watch the progress of his destruction of that wildlife haven without a bunch of us turning up to crowd him out with angry complaints. All to no avail. He was such a vile man, sincerely, and even the single person who was on his side and always stood up for him in neighbourhood meetings - if only because her daughter was currently backpacking around Canada with his son - gave up on him after one of his screaming rages about "You poor people have no right to complain to me.  If you don't like what I'm doing, get your lawyers to contact my lawyers !"  and since our entire hill was populated by Professorial types connected with the nearby University of Queensland, I don't think any of us were used to being dismissed as "You poor people!"

I did suggest we wait until he moved in and then, exercising the right of poor villagers everyplace, form ourselves into a lynch-mob to storm his house with flaming torches, like in all those films, but none of those scholarly souls were into it ... although the suggestion did get a lot of grim laughs because we were definitely all thinking along those lines!

Gosh, that Beer Baron was a horrible man! And, oh boy, did I laugh when I read, about fifteen years later, that he'd gone bust!  But I did feel somewhat sorry for our entire former neighbourhood when I later read that he'd sold that monstrous mansion to India's biggest Porn Distribution King!  Imagine sharing a hill with that neighbour-from-hell!

But that's all by-the-by because the story I really want to tell you about is one about my dog; one that shows how Duke was a wonderful, loyal, forgiving and faithful darling, brimful of courage-to-burn, and that I should remember him with a great deal more fondness and respect than I do.

It was early in the piece, when the first of the animals began their escape from the Beer Baron bulldozers to find refuge in our jungled garden - which I didn't mind - but also our house, which I did mind and a great deal too!

The Possum Wars had been going on every night for over a week, with crazy-angry possums fighting in the trees, on the roof and coming through the bedroom window to continue their bloody feuding right on our bed, and so I was exhausted and angry from lack of sleep when, one morning, I was in the utilities room at the back of the house doing the laundry, trying to get possum blood off the doona and sheets.

Duke was with me.  Back then, he was my dog and went with me everywhere, part protector/part pal, but this particular morning he was behaving very strangely, like some crazy-dog-hell-fiend, and, while I was loading the washing machine, he kept snapping at my ankles and lunging at my feet, biting and snapping.  I was in no mood for his games and kept shoving him away but he kept it up until, finally, I was so angry I kicked him in the head ...

... and it was only a second later that he lunged between my feet and grabbed something.  The most enormous snake I have ever seen.  EVER!  Huge!  And he then shook it to death.  Then laid it at my feet. Like an offering.

Unnerving, right?  Having a snake right there! Alive, it had been right at my feet the whole time and I hadn't noticed because I was carrying the load of laundry in front of me.  Oh man, my heart was beating so fast and I was shaking so hard, I thought I wouldn't survive the shock!  And I couldn't stop hugging Duke, my wonderful, gorgeous HERO!!!

Back then, I couldn't tell one snake from another and had only ever heard stories about what was what, and looking at that massive snake right there, dead at my feet, to stop myself from shaking so hard I started that self-talk, trying to "logic" myself out of the knowledge of how close I'd come to dying horribly, "I wonder if it really was dangerous?  I wonder if it really was deadly?  Only taipans and eastern and western browns are into unprovoked attacks and death-in-minutes!  It surely can't be one of those!"

So that's when I put the snake into a plastic bag and took it to a herpetologist-hobbyist neighbour for identification.

A western brown!  Yup, that sucker was one of the nastiest and deadliest of all Australian toxic wildlife.  And a mean one too, that attacks without provocation. Not nearly as dangerous as a taipan, sure, nonetheless this one kills even large-sized men almost immediately, with practically no time to get to help and rescue.

So that's what Duke saved me from.  A horrible almost immediate death!  And saved me from too AFTER I kicked him in the head!  What an amazing and beautiful animal!

Thank you, Duke, my wonderful Saviour!

BBC's Challenge.

British Broadcasting Commission made the outrageous claim that very few had read more than six of the greatest books ever written.  Here's the list - and I really do dispute some of these being on this list - Possession for instance - gosh that book was bad! - but I definitely dispute that I've only read six of them.

OK, here's their list, and the ones highlighted in bold are ones that I've read, and the ones in italics are the ones I've started but not being able to finish, and the ones with asterisks are the ones I absolutely adore, rated out of three:

1  Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen  ***
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien *
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte  *
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all) ***
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee ***
6 The Bible  *
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte *
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell **
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens *
11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott *** (I read it as a kid, so don't blame me)
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien **
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger *
19 The Time Travellers Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell *** (I was a teenager)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald *
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams ***
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh *
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath –  John Steinbeck *
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen ***
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen *
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis *** (The kid thing again!)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini  **
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - William Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne ***
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell ***
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far from the Madding Crowd -  Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding  ***
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martell
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen **
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens *
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck  *
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On the Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding  *
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson  *** (the kid thing again)
74 Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson **
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath  * (my angry teenager phase!)
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle  **
90 The Faraway Tree collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad  ***  (The kid thing again, but this time not ashamed of it)
92 The Little Prince _ Antoine de Saint Exupery ***  (Ditto)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie & the Chocolate factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Jake Shimabukuro, Ukuele Whizz!

Keith went last night to a ukulele concert. Can't believe I got through that sentence without laughing!

I did however burst into derisive laughter when he asked if I wanted to go too!

I have issues with the ukulele. I know it's a Pacific Island invention and I should respect it even on those grounds alone but nope, not a chance! I think it's the worst instrument ever created and that it trivialises songs and that pinker-pinker-pink sound brings out my inner-GRRRRRR.

Mind you, that's probably exactly why Keith put together a ukulele band a decade ago, and when he found out I hated banjos almost as much, they added one of those too. Passive-aggressive gits! And they used to rehearse on our veranda. For HOURS!!! 

AND can you believe it? They actually got work! Not much, but a couple of gigs! A couple too many is what I think!

Anyway, I've already told you all this, and about how, back then, I blamed Seasonal Affective Disorder brought on by the four month long heatwave, however he's now back to banging on and on about the ukulele and what a great instrument it is, and, this time, since weather in Hong Kong has been totally perfect for weeks, I can't possibly find an excuse for it!

And now here's Jake Shimabukuro arriving from Honolulu to do a series of concerts at Poly U or something, just in time to encourage him.  AAHHH!


Anyway, Keith got home from the concert last night and raved about how fantastic Jake Shimabukuru is and said I missed a great night.  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah!

He also said I should find Jake Shimabukuro's "Bohemian Rhapsody" before I pass judgement, so I'll do that now:





OK, I can see what Keith means about Jake being a very charming young man ... and that isn't a heinous version of that very great Queen song ... but, for heaven's sake, IT'S A SODDING UKULELE!!!!

Christmas Goodwill!

Intend to use this as my e-Christmas card this year, so ...



... am pasting it here so I don't lose it again!

Best Make-Out Song!

Dan Savage, sex advice columnist extraordinaire, was asked what music was the best to make-out to.  He chose these two songs:

DAN SAVAGE'S #1 MAKE-OUT SONG!!

DAN SAVAGE'S #2 MAKE-OUT SONG!!

Unless Dan Savage has some very strange and severe issues, methinks this lordly fellow is "having a lend", as they say in Australia, of those vanilla co-eds who asked.

However, it got us thinking of our favourite make-out songs and it seems everyone has at least one.

Keith chose ...

I know Keith once had a ukulele band himself, but he can't be serious. I suspect he's just "doing a Dan Savage"!  Although, I must say that clip is downright hilarious and I notice they're actually a club from Cambridge, the birthplace of a great many strange eccentricities, and I'm a great fan of those.

Putting the question out there, I have to say the replies were pretty cohesive, although that could be because most of the folk I asked were around my age.  Maybe they'd be different songs for a younger and older generation. Wonder what songs they made out to during, say, WWII?

Wendy, however, chose one entirely unexpected:

When I told Keith this was Wendy's song of choice, he said "She always says she has sex like a man.  Now I believe her."  and, yes, this really is a man's choice because it's really wham! bam!  unsentimental.  Like, where's the romance?

Mostly, yeah, it was Dire Straits, Dire Straits, Dire Straits, Dire Straits!  This song in particular:

Honestly, I'm convinced those songs, AND Mark Knopfler's guitar playing, are deliberately designed to produce pheromones when they come into contact with estrogen!

Same goes for Barry White's voice, and this song came up several times:



Also his "Practise What You Preach", but you'll have to find that one for yourself.

Joe Cocker was another favourite, particularly this:



Pheromone releaser, yes?

And this one too!  Oh man, it's gorgeous!  Seems Pete Townshend wrote it for Bette Midler but she didn't like it so he did it himself:



What was Bette thinking???  It's pure pheromonic! Sometimes we Pacific Islanders don't have a clue, do we!

Some of the other suggestions I regret to say I pooh-poohed!  I know I've run a mile when someone's put on Enigma's Principles of Lust!

And the same goes for Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing":

Some songs are just too blatant and obvious and I think subtle is a prerequisite, yeah?

Renn suggested "Sex" by the Neck ... but trying to find it took me into some pretty icky sites on youtube so don't go there.  He also suggested this one:

And a gay woman swore by this one:



 And a few souls mentioned this one:




All great choices, yes,  but the prize, at least for me, must go to this one:

DENISE'S #1 MAKE OUT SONG

All-Time Favourite Song!

Asked what my all-time favourite song was and after giving it much thought, I have decided it would have to be this one:

Letter from 2004

Since there is nothing happening at the moment, let's grab another old letter at random:


Goss! Goss! Goss! Discovered something downright mmmmmm-ish today. You know the odd fact that the Jardine Mathersons had a godown in Causeway Bay way back in the 1830s, before HK was even a twinkle in UK's eye? Well, I just assumed that "godown" was Cantonese for "warehouse" ... but it isn't! It's the Hindi word for "opium processing factory." and the J.M.s had a "godown" in the Bay of Bengal as well, so it's the SAME WORD MEANING THE SAME THING in both cases.

I knew it!!! I knew they had to have an opium connection somewhere in their origins. I've long suspected these guys were the ones who started the Opium Wars and HK was acquired by UK mainly for their benefit ... and now I'm planning, as soon as I've finished writing these M.A. pieces, to read up all I can find on these wars and this family and uncover this mystery once and for all.

Actually, I don't have anything against either of these families. Not even slightly. When a couple of them were in Fiji back in the mid 70s (they were worried about what would happen after the Handover and were trying to come up with Plan B) I found them unutterably charming and NICE. In fact, I'd even say the madcap female one who was crazy about parrots is probably up there with Jessica Mitford and Lloyd Georges' daughter as the most interesting and lovely women I've ever met.

But this isn't really about them at all. It's really about me wanting to know what actually happened and how a family rises up from nothing to become so vastly major in the world of business. There could even be a mini-series in it someplace ... although I think they'd hate me for it.

Oh, and the other thing I discovered is that among the names the J.M.s use to hide the full extent of their wealth are: Yee Wo (it's the name of a major HK street) and Ewo. AND you may not know that Ewo is the major shareholder in all the biggest cigarette factories in China. Gosh, can you imagine having the lion's share of Mainland China's tobacco revenue? The way the Mainlanders smoke, the Jardine Mathersons must be among the richest families on earth.

 Oh, I do so love having a mystery to solve. I want to get onto it immediately. I wonder if they'll let me hand in my M.A. pieces very, very late?




2010 Update:  Solved this one by reading the most extraordinary book "Opium: A History" by Martin Booth which answered all my questions plus added a great many new ones. Most fascinating subject, opium ... and the Jardine Mathersons too!

Story for Kele!

This post is for Kele, recently in Hong Kong, who said he remembers something from when he was a very young boy, that he finds so strange he now thought he must have dreamed it. Rats! Fridge! Screaming! Hysteria! More screaming! No, Kele honey, it was no dream because I well remember it too.  And here's what went down!:

In Brisbane, when we were Post-Grads at University of Queensland, 1984 (?) (many years ago anyway) we were living in Gailey Road in Toowong.  You flew out from Fiji to stay with us shortly after Brisbane's Big Beer Baron Billionaire bought the block of woodland on the hill immediately behind us and promptly sent in the bulldozers to rip the whole forest out.

And that's when 13 acres of wildlife promptly scuttled down the hill and took up residence in our humble quarter acre. In our house mostly!

Our German Shepherd, Duke, couldn't handle the inundation, let alone the sinister slinking presence of The Ghost, so took off,  hying himself off into the great wild yonder, right when it became illegal for dogs to wander alone through the streets, and so, after many individual search-and-rescues and dragging him behind me because this was one animal who simply didn't want to be in our Crazyland, when I found he'd made himself at home with the sweetest old lady who clearly loved him dearly and was such a sweetheart I wanted to stay with her too, I surrendered all his doggy paraphernalia to her and left him there.  Bye bye Duke!

Duke was smart to leave. It was months of hell-on-earth with a house full of hundreds of possums and snakes and giant bush rats and a lone charismatic frilled-neck lizard, all followed by the strangest and creepiest giant albino blue-eyed feral cat we promptly named "Ghost", because it looked like no cat we'd ever seen before, and when it scratched Louise's cat, Mad Max developed the worst ever rampant infection around the wound and, even with constant vigil by our vet, died within 26 hours ...  so Ghost was one evil cat we stayed a zillion miles away from, despite the fact that, for some unfathomable reason, he took up residence atop our phone and so we went months never answering calls.

And there were The Possum Wars every single night as hundreds of those suckers vied for territory in the loudest imaginable way, and every morning we'd find dozens of newly squashed possums all over Gailey Road outside our place, as the losers were driven out of our garden to find a new home. And after so many, many sleepless nights ... we didn't care!

And we had a houseful of those winsy-small almost-extinct marsupial mice called Delicates, about 50 of them, who behaved in ways that were really quite unearthly, like they had some big One-Mind thing going on, and I've wanted for years to find someone to give a report to because, well, they're almost extinct and no one apart from us seems to have any idea of how they behave ... but I've never found someone who works in that field nor even anyone interested so ... whatever!

And there were those snakes everywhere that we co-existed quite happily with until I got the book "What Snake is That?" and discovered they were all deadly and, even though none of them were the heartless attack-killer kind, after that I found them too creepy to be endured ... and I have particular memories of being in my study with five of them around me and a seminar paper that had to be delivered in four hours so having to pull the table into the centre of the room and sit on it, cross-legged and trying to keep as small as possible, to finish typing it up.  And what made this particularly ironic was that the paper was on "how Australia forged a sense of national identity despite the tyrannies of distance and toxic wildlife."

But the incident you remember is the Didi thing, right?  When you came to stay with us, Julia sent Didi down as well so the two of you would get to know each other!  Anyway, Didi noticed the noises coming from behind the fridge and kept asking about them.  I said I didn't know what was there but to just ignore it and to stay well away because they were probably snakes. Didi, however, being the most disobedient little girl, saw that as a reason to be naughty so, the minute my back was turned, stuck her head around the back of the fridge ... and a giant bush rat ran down her face.  She screamed herself into a state of hysterical paralysis and fell onto the ground.  I was cross and kept saying "For heavens sake, get over yourself! It was just a bush rat running down your face. Big deal!"  ... and then, as I was saying it, another bush rat leapt off the top of the fridge and ran down my face ... and I started to scream hysterically too!

Couldn't help myself.  It was the creepiest, nastiest thing imaginable!

And that's the incident you were asking about, right?  That you distinctly recall from when you were a boy? And, yeah, yeah, you're right, it is surreal, nightmarish but mostly FFFUUUUUNNNY!!!!

Just recalled there was also a great deal of hysterical screaming when our frilled-neck lizard did his neck-whoosh at her!  Man, that girl had a set of lungs on her!

What happened at the end?  Nothing really.  When the jackhammers started up the hill, building the foundations for Beer Baron Billionaire's ridiculously massive mansion, all our wildlife slowly made their way further down the hill, losing many to the Gailey Road NIGHT SQUISH, until there was just we humans left in the pink house on the hill you remember so well.

What Kills Us This Week!

HK is in a snit at the moment regarding Christmas decorations.  Word, undoubtedly straight from Beijing's polit-buro, is that "Chinese have no culture of Christmas so it doesn't belong here." which has led to HK intellectuals saying "None of the symbolism relates to us in any way." and so, in consequence, this has trickled down to HK designers now saying they want to do away with reindeers and Christmas trees and all that jazz and instead choose their own symbolism.

OK, I get it!  I'm even a little on their side, despite thinking HK has, over the century and a half, done the most amazing job of hybridising of the day, calling it "Family Gathering and Gift Giving Day" and distributing gifts by "Papa Whiskers" or their own God of Abundance, Luk ...

... BUT Beijing has spoken and so it's now all off ...

... and I must say I find ...

... some of the ideas they are currently setting up as a brand new type of STUPID!!!

Like this one that went up last week in Times Square:

Say wot?????  Spray cans as Christmas symbolism????

Apart from everything else, yes, we all agree that HK has no organic relationship with the Culture of Christmas ... but even moreso that it has less relationship with the Culture of Graffiti!

HK doesn't have graffiti ... apart from that wonderful calligraphy by the old man, recently dead, who wrote letters all over doors and mailboxes to world figures in the most exquisitely formed Chinese ideograms, pleading for their help in getting him a visa so he could return to China to die, and who always signed himself as The King of Kowloon ... and whose graffiti-ed doors and mailboxes et al are now sold by Christies at auction and getting prices like US$55,000 a piece.

However, what we don't have are teenage gangs who roam the streets with their pants down to their knees and their caps on backwards, spraying graffiti tags all over the place, like dogs with lamp-posts, and it's that Graffiti Culture that is being celebrated here.

Seriously, WHY???  Why would anyone replace something they say has nothing to do with us, with something that has even LESS to do with us!

So unless this Times Square display is intended as ironic,  I have to say that sometimes I really don't GET Hong Kong.

There's currently other OUR OWN CHRISTMAS symbolic displays going up around town but I haven't seen them yet.  I'll go around town over the next few days and photograph them too ... and let's just hope that the others aren't getting it all so terribly terribly wrong!

So that's my choice for this week:

THREATDOWN

Replacing inappropriate cultural symbols

with things that make you go 

AAAAHHHHHHHH!!!

Baby Jane Writes!

Baby Jane has just sent me a poem which I think is hers. 

After the clouds the sunshine

After the winter the spring

After the shower the rainbow

For life is a changeable thing

After the night the morning

Bidding all darkness cease

After lifes cares and sorrows

The comfort and sweetness

Of peace

 

No, I don't think she's suicidal.  She simply runs an Old Folks Home and so loses friends on a regular basis.

COLOUR!!!

For those of us in the know, look what The Colour Goddess has just put out:

 

Trish Guild, for those sad souls who aren't already into her, has absolutely the BEST eye for colour I have ever come across.  I even once sat through an entire film, "Copy Cat", despite it being desperately stupid and offensive - how can anyone not know that killer-heels are called 'killer' for a reason, and how can they still believe that women just stand there going "Oh, oh, oh!", like they're in "Perils of Pauline" or something, while they're being murdered - simply because the Sigourney Weaver character's house was decorated in Trish Guild fabrics.  

No one EVER has put together colour combos in such a way as to make me literally ache the way Trish Guild can!  I ADORE her!

Anyway, am busy today so ...

Busy, Busy, Busy!

Family in town at the moment and so I may not be in here often.  And today, instead of a post, let me download my most recent set of photos and see if I can post them.

Ah, cute!  There's a restaurant in Wan Chai very famous for it's chicken soup ... and look what I spotted there last night.  Oooh, they are such CHEATS!!!

What Really Kills Us This Week!

Have you heard?  This one would be hilarious if it wasn't just so sad.

You know that British Prime Minister,  David Cameron, is currently in China on trade talks, right?

Well, yesterday was 11/11, Remembrance Day, when you wear a poppy in your lapel in memory of the soldiers who died in World War One, and also all other soldiers who have fallen in battle.

And you already know that the poppy-wearing stemmed from the aftermath of The Battle of Flanders, when countless millions died horribly, yet within weeks millions upon millions of poppies sprung up where they died.  In those dark, dark days, this was seen as a sign and a blessing ... so people began wearing the poppies to remember those fallen soldiers.

Nothing whatsoever to do with China, right?

Anyway, yesterday, David Cameron and his posse were visiting with all sorts of important Chinese types and it turned into a right pouty snit-fest and the Chinese demanded the British visitors take the poppies off.  The British refused and now it's all bad blood all round.

As it turns out, what happened was that the Chinese saw these poppies as the British taunting them.  Saying, in effect, "Hey guys, WE won the Opium Wars!" and they were furious!

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next with this one.

So that's my choice for this week:

THREATDOWN

Cultural misunderstandings

threatening trade agreements,

and then some!

What Kills Us This Week!

Not up to much today.  And there could be a reason.



Need I say more!

The Road in the East.

Reading about Hillary Clinton's attempts to woo Fiji - because of its role as the hub of most everything Pacific - in order to counter the rising influence of China in our area, and about how she is annoyed that Australia and New Zealand have been so nasty to us since Varaq's Coup that they are in no position to help her win friends and influence people.

Tee hee!

Isn't it astonishing that the rest of the world is only just now realising that they can't continue being so mean to Fiji. Nor can they continue to be so ignorant of our vanualoma.  We truly are the nicest folk on earth, and Varaq may be a democracy-hating dictator, sure, but he's really a very good and righteous fellow with a heart in the right place and with a determination to serve Fiji's best interests.  Although I must say I really don't like that he's allowed that American casino into our country nor that he is in discussions about letting America have land for a US naval base.

Shudder!

This US naval base has been on and off the drawing boards since 1986 and everyone is now noting crossly that the Rabuka Coup happened around the time it was first proposed.  I'm sorta going "Mmmm, no, I don't think so!" because I have other theories about that coup, but I do think these other folks' theories shouldn't be totally dismissed because, well, what was particularly strange about the Rabuka coup was ...

... the land in Vanua Levu the US wanted to build their naval base had dad's land slap in the middle and one of the acts of this coup was to confiscate all our acreage. Strange, right? Like, why it would even be on their coup radar? And then the Yanks were finally turned away and dad heard nothing more about the confiscation and had to take it to court to find out whether or not he still owned this land. And, as it turned out, he did! No problem whatsoever! Very strange, right?

Things that make you go mmmmmmph?

But anyway, I just HATE what America does to any country it touches so I'm hating that Varaq is actually letting them in. It's just wrong!  

JUST SAY NO, FRANKIE!!!!


However, I'm not siding with China either.  They are one hellva scary nation, even while they're trying to be so nice to us.  And they are being incredibly nice to us at the moment.

We had this enormous eye-opener on the power of China and why you don't want them in your country only a few years back, when I was last back in Fiji.

What happened was it started out with me just being me.  I'd recently read that British artist Vanessa Bell's masterpiece - wall-panel murals of the story of the life of Christ all done with Pacific Islander figures in traditional clothing, including Christ, and in a tropical setting - had not been seen since WWII ... but I recalled as a child seeing a set of murals that exactly matched this description on the walls of a cathedral in either Northern or Eastern Viti Levu. Along Kings Road anyway! Naturally, I was very curious, so, back in Fiji, when Molly asked me what I wanted to do that holiday, I told her I'd like to find that Cathedral and look again at those paintings.

Not remotely a problem ... or so we thought!

Fiji's main island of Viti Levu is circled by two roads:  Queens Road in the South and West and Kings Road in the North and East.  Should I find a map to explain?  No?

Anyway, Queens Road between Suva and Lautoka is a real highway while Kings Road, back then, was little more than a dirt track. The upshot of this was that Fiji's main island had very unequal development, with everything modern, infrastructure-ish and comfortable situated in the South and West, while, because the North and East were so difficult to navigate, that side of the island remained a sad little backwater, all jungles, deserted beaches, poor little villages, rotting old colonial buildings, decrepit plantation houses, and shabby sleepy little towns.

However, about four years back, dah dah!, along came China.  "Let us build you a highway in the East" it said.  "Oh, OK!" said Fiji. But then the arguments started.  China wanted to bring in its own team while Fiji wanted them to hire Fijians for the job.  Big stand-off!  Finally it was decided that Fiji would start at one end at Lautoka while China would start at the other at Nausori and they'd meet in the middle.

So this is what was underway when Molly and I drove along Kings Road to find the old cathedral.

Nadi to Lautoka was a journey we'd done often since they were on Queens Road, so no surprises there. But after we left Lautoka and hit Kings Road it was much more unfamiliar territory.  We hadn't been anywhere near the North since the days when we used to holiday, as children, with the MacDonalds on their island of Nananu-i-ra off the coast of Raki Raki.  Since this was the way we always came, we vaguely knew this stretch and it was so nice seeing it all again.

In fact, the new highway was so nice, we felt very proud of the job Our Fiji Side was doing. And already it was opening up the North.  New buildings. Development. New subdivisions.  Fiji Water bottling factory.

The formerly sleepy little town of Ba, when we passed through, was actually bustling. However, although there were churches and temples, there wasn't the cathedral we were after.

Then came the little town of Tavua and it was just so sweet. We were astonished that we didn't know the place better; that it totally wasn't on our radar. Such a glorious old hotel, such stunning views, lovely old buildings, really very lovely.  "You know, I'd like to get land out here for a retirement house." we both said simultaneously.

Then we passed through the even smaller town of Raki Raki and again it was lovely.  "Fiji really is very beautiful." we both decided.  But, again no Cathedral.

Beyond Raki Raki was very unfamiliar territory.  Our only jaunt through the east EVER, apart from those many times we went to Lodoni, near Korovou, to catch the ferry across to Levuka, when we always took the south road, was a single three day journey we took as a family when we kids were very young; a camping holiday when I was six or seven.  And trying to recall how young I was when I saw the paintings - scratching through shards of little memories, visualising myself walking in the interior of the dim cool cathedral, sea breeze coming through the side doors, marveling at those paintings on the walls, trying to get my mind around the concept of 'Christ the Fijian' - it felt about right; that, yes, I would have seen them when I was about six.

So, YES!!!  We were on the right track.  Somewhere along this eastern stretch we'd find our Cathedral!

What a lovely time we were having. Gorgeous weather.  Everything exactly right.  Exactly what I love.  A quest. A mystery. Beauty so profound it practically hurt.  Tiny tingles of things remembered. Lots of "Hey, isn't that the beach where ...?" Not yet a Cathedral, sure, but the fabulous new highway was making our search so very easy.

But then just past the village of Borutu, the highway suddenly ended.  Bam!  No road.  Just like that. And, to make it much worse, where the road had once been was suddenly a swamp. Seriously.  And then we noticed that this former-road and current-swamp had been planted out with taro.  "Typical Fiji!" we both said.  "When life hands you lemons, plant dalo!"

We slowly and carefully drove through the centre of the new swamp over the sharp rocks placed to give traction and it was truly awful.  Bumpy and dangerous, a single misjudgment and we'd be bogged and walking, and with those sharp shards we were definitely in fear for our tyres. It was all so unpleasant we were angry within minutes, which was a shame because we were traveling through the mountains, alongside the upper reaches of Rewa River and it was all so very pretty.

And this went on for several miles until we discovered the reason for the swamp.  While they were cutting back a cliff to widen the road, Our Fiji Side had sheared through natural feeder lines for an underground water supply and the cliff face was now a series of harshly spurting waterfalls that were washing away what was left of the road and sweeping it into the now muddy brown river.

There was so little road left for a brief moment we thought of turning back until our "What the hell!" adventurous spirit kicked in.

Skin-of-our-teeth time, but, tah dah!, we made it!

After that obstacle, we came across another one.  All along the swampy-road were the giant yellow road-building machines.  Our Fiji Side had clearly just walked away and left them ... except they weren't deserted.  Naughty teenage boys from a nearby village had obviously hi-jacked the machines and were playing all sorts of games with them, scooping up the road and either making mud castles or driving at each other and dumping the load on top of each other.  "Bloody TYPICAL Fiji!" we said, although we had to smile at all the cheerful laughter and calls of "Bula!" as we inched our way between them.  These boys were having a lot of fun and it was infectious!

Ah, so cute! When life hands you a lemon, just play, play, play!


Beyond that, we had many more miles of infuriating, bumpy rock-filled, taro-filled swamp until eventually the road hardened again.  "You do realise we passed the Cathedral several miles back." said Molly once her temper was restored.

"Whhaaatttt?" 

"It was on the ridge, up the side of a mountain above that big village we passed."

Ridge!  Mountain!  Looking down on a village below!  It all suddenly came rushing back; the afternoon I saw those paintings!

"That was it! Why didn't you stop!"

"Because I just want this whole nightmare to be over!"

"But you've just made this whole journey pointless!"

"Tell someone who cares!"

And she definitely wasn't turning back. 

Very cross, I didn't notice for miles that there was something very mysterious afoot all around us.  At each village and at all the Indian shops and service stations, white guys in aloha shirts driving rented 4X Land Rovers appeared to be interrogating people!  And everyone local seemed unnerved but conning their way out of it by playing their "No Engaleesh.  No Engaleesh." card.

At first, we wondered if these were Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses, except everything was wrong about them.  Men with obvious body-counts and army training don't join religious organisations, do they?  Or at least not in large numbers!  Besides, these guys had different mana!  A horrible mana!  All dark, mean and callous energy.  Those bottom-line, what-ever-it-takes sort of men who tend NOT to have religious affiliations ... unless, you know, they're Catholic Cardinals or something!  

Curious, we stopped off at an Indian service station that had one of these cars parked in front, and went in.  The white guy, obviously trying to pretend he was a simple tourist and failing miserably because he was so creepy and scary, appeared to be questioning the Indian guy who obviously hadn't played his "No Engaleesh.  No Engaleesh." card in time and was now obviously in a situation that was making him very uncomfortable.  If they had been Chinese, I'd have thought this a Triad shake-down, because that is exactly what it looked like, but in the brief seconds before he saw us and it instantly all shut down, we noticed the man had a strong American accent.

"What do you think?" I said as we got back into the car after filling the tank. "American Mafia or C.I.A.?"

"Same thing really." shrugged Molly.

 "But what on earth would they be up to?"

"Just being American is my guess!"

She wasn't wrong but there had to be a lot more to it, but what that was I still have no idea, although what happened only several miles later, just outside Tailevu, may have had something to do with it.

It was terrifying.  Marching side-by-side in absolute perfect unison, were about 30 men who were clearly Chinese Red Army, not armed but looking like they should and could easily be, spread out and looking menacing right across the road and beyond.  Behind them came a row of giant yellow machines, again totally and precisely in unison, scraping out a huge swathe of new highway, and behind them was a row of giant yellow gravel spreaders, and behind them came the row of steam rollers, and behind them were the giant yellow tar-spreaders, again in perfect alignment and moving in unison, and behind them was the new highway, stretching back in a straight line as far as the eye could see.

Totally intimidated, we drove off the road and waited for this giant juggernaut to pass us by and were shocked at the stony faces and the complete lack of anything resembling even the smallest sign of humanity.  Machines and people who act like machines! 

It was all raw and intimidating POWER!  And if this is how Chinese build highways, no wonder they didn't want Fijian crew.  No way on earth could we have given them that frighteningly robotic performance. And also, let's admit it, it's undoubtedly why Mainland China has so many millions of miles of truly great highway. 

However, what we witnessed that day was that China is clearly not a good fit for the Pacific.  We do things differently and that's the way we want to stay.  And if only the Americans had stayed out of it and, whether Mafia or C.I.A., not showed their harsh, scary, interfering and also-wrong-energy selves to Eastern Viti Levu, that frightening Chinese road-building juggernaut passing through our lives, would have meant Fiji would have realised exactly whose side they should be on.

And after that, it not even worth talking about.  It was, we must admit, a great highway, and we were proud to be its first-ever travelers. Tailevu.  Korovou. Kasai. Nausori.  All without a single problem.  And then finally Suva and our stop for the night.

So that's really what Hillary Clinton should know.  Really, if she just keeps America's ugly face out of our lives, we will always choose her over China, no matter what lovely things they do for us.


Later:  Fiji Museum has so very kindly linked me to the photos in their album taken at the site of this church we were hunting for.

I'm told that the cathedral is St Francis Xavier's Catholic Mission, above the village of Naiserelagi, outside the township of Ra.

 St Xavier's Cathedral!

One of The Black Christ murals 

NOT painted by Vanessa Bell.

Random Letter from 2004!

 Since absolutely nothing is happening in our lives at present, for today's offering, I'll find another old letter:


Ah, here's one from just after our return from Saigon, when I got the TB bacillae in my gums from using the hotel tapwater to clean my teeth:

You know, I've come away from all this with the deepest and most
profound respect for Dr Yap. I realise now that that consultation I had about the Saigon Sewerage Bug was the most incredible thing I've ever witnessed.

It was all so different to what usually happens.

Right at the start, when he took all those different pulses in my wrist, I thought "Gosh, how incompetent he must be that he has to fumble to find my pulse." so I asked him if he was having trouble finding my pulse because I had low blood pressure or something, he said "Chinese medicine tests six different things at the pulse."

Well, immediately after, he asked me to lie down and he felt my spleen and asked me if it hurt and it did ...

... can you see how clever that is? There's me with a big red swollen balloon-face and he goes straight from pulse to spleen. He knew. I can see that now.

Genius! Amazing! Perfect hybrid synthesis of eastern and western medicine. And he sooo knows his stuff. Both his stuffs. Anglo-stuff/Sino-stuff!!!

And he sooo looks like the wise old  Chineseman-come-"British
gentleman" you'd want to have at your back in a crisis! He's in his
70s, and he wears a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows.

Isn't that soooo the person you want as your doctor? And he's soooo like my parents in that he doesn't believe you should tamper with your body, seeing it as a perfect machine that doesn't fail you
unless something is amiss, and he goes straight to the heart of the matter.

And he works just around the corner from where we live now.
How lucky is that? Love, love, love him!!!

Can't thank Bernie-the-Bored enough for recommending him!!!

Let you know when the tests come back.

 Denise

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec!

Hong Kong is all damp, rainy and cold at present so, late yesterday afternoon, we decided to say "Goodbye Cruel World" and vanish into a film.  Any film! So we walked down through the rain to the cinema in Admiralty ... and there was nothing we wanted to see. You would not believe the crap showing at the moment. The only thing that appeared vaguely watchable was the Swedish film "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" however it was full. Not a single seat available.

There were seats in "The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec".  "It is an extraordinarily silly romp. And in French too." says Keith "However, it appears the best of the rest."  and so we went in.

And let me tell you that "The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec" is indeed an extraordinarily silly romp, but of the very best kind.



It's a female Indiana Jones, all sangfroid and chic, and just a rollicking good yarn.  I now plan to see it again while it's still showing in the cinemas.  I also may get it for the kids for Christmas, despite it being in French.

About four Christmas's back, I sent them the film "Pan's Labyrinth" despite it being in Spanish and ....



... well, Baby Jane rang me in a right hissy fit.  "What on earth where you thinking?" she yelled at me.  "These are just kids. It's a horrible, horrible film."

"Have you watched it?" I asked.

"No, I only saw the bit where they shot the rabbit poacher."

"Well, you watch the entire film and then you ring me back and then you can scream at me."  I told her.

Several hours later, she rang me back.  She was crying.

"It's the most beautiful film I've ever seen in my life." she said.

OK, "The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec" won't have that effect on you, but it's just a great deal of fun and I can highly recommend it.

Dubai Fountain!

Am loving this at the moment:



You need the sound on to appreciate it, however.

And They Wonder Why the Rest of the World Doesn't Like Them!

I am flabbergasted.  It is beyond my comprehension that this should have occured.

 

Have you heard about it?

 

Radio New Zealand : News : World : Clinton congratulates wrong Pacific nation

www.radionz.co.nz

 

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has congratulated Tonga on its celebrating 40 years of independence, despite Tonga never being a colony.  AHHHHHH!  

 

I mean, don't these people have advisers?  Or even fact checkers?  Even if they don't know these things themselves - and being in a position of authority, you'd think they would have a little general knowledge - you'd think at least ONE person somewhere in their vicinity would at least have an inkling of an idea about the rest of the world?  Or at least check before letting some idiot open her mouth on a subject!

This is like an exercise in How to Offend Other Nations.  Tonga is a kingdom, and proudly so, and never ever allowed itself to become a colony, so the fact Clinton didn't know this about them is such a slap in their face!

And to confuse Tonga and Fiji?  Two nations with several thousand years of rivalry, raiding parties and war between them!  BIG ERROR!!!

 

We all know she meant Fiji!  It's our beloved vanualoma that's just turned 40.  And we also all know that Fiji became a colony because it was under threat from America, who wanted it so to grow cotton and had already begun slaughtering entire villages of Fijians to make way for planations, and so gave itself to Queen Victoria for one hundred years to protect it from spurious American interests. 

 

And thus it is WE who have been Independent for 40 years.

And to think America doesn't even remember what it did to us back then!  Do they really think that intending genocide of another sovereign people is something so ho hum that they can simply FORGET!

And have they also forgotten they are currently trying to get a piece of Fiji to build themselves a naval base?  (Please, please, please Fiji, don't let them do this!!!)

 

And besides every other consideration, do you know what this stupid mix-up has just done?  By amply demonstrating how little these people know about us, it's alienated the entire Pacific!  And right at the moment in history when China is attempting to woo our islands for their own possibly nefarious purposes!  Bad, bad, bad timing, Hillary!!!!

 

 

The Ghosts of Diwali Past.

Happy Diwali everyone.  And here's wishing the Goddess Lakshmi finds your home sparkling clean and so showers you with abundant blessings for the next year.

I love Diwali.  In Fiji, it's a major festival and, frankly, so much fun that everyone, regardless of religion or race, celebrates it.  And seriously, what's the harm in spring-cleaning your entire world, making sure that there's not a speck of dust, dirt or untidiness in a single part, even those parts you don't normally see, because the Goddess sees all.

And because it's a celebration shared by everyone, it's taken on a range of different features and thus evolved into a real Fiji-bhat hybrid probably unrecognisable back in India.  The Fiji bamboo cannons for example.  Every year, Fijian villagers make cannons out of bamboo and, down on the beaches and hills, use ghee and kerosine - I think - to make explosions that boom and echo all over our fair land. And they throw flour and water over everyone, which you have to wash off as soon as possible because it quickly turns into rock-hard cement.  Good fun, but certainly not part of the festival as it was originally.

And the lights.  Whoever can forget those lights.

When we were little, every Diwali we'd all put on our sweet frilly white party dresses and mum would pack us into the car and we'd drive around all our Indian friends where they'd give us wonderful sweets - jelabi and gulagula and lakri and bharfi and those wonderful Turkish Delight-like things only I've forgotten what they're called - and then, after dark, we'd drive around Suva to see all the lights.

When I was very young, everyone used simple clay lamps lining every inch of their house and garden - Lakshmi must be able to see everywhere properly - but as Fiji got richer, the wealthy Gudjaratis decked out their homes in Christmas lights, while among the poor the clay lamps evolved into these truly beautiful crepe paper lanterns ...

Thanks Maria!

... four bamboo spikes wrapped with different coloured paper with a candle in the middle - which always looked amazing.  Or the brown paper bag lamps which I continued to use every Diwali when I lived in Australia.

These are exquisite.  And so simple too. To make them, you just get a few dozen of those old fashioned, delicious smelling brown paper shopping bags, quarter-fill them with sand, line them up in a row someplace where they won't burn down your house, stick a lit candle in the middle and VOILA!!!  I promise, this is the most beautiful gentle light-show imaginable, and an idea stolen from the poorest of the poor in Fiji.

Yeah, I continued to celebrate Diwali when we lived in Australia, if only so my house always got a much-needed yearly scrub-down, however, after we moved to Townsville, those paper bag lanterns were also brought out every Christmas.  Had to. We lived on Christmas Light Street - the nickname - because we were the street where, every year, everyone went overboard with the Christmas decorations and thus we had our street blocked off to become a pedestrian mall so families could walk around seeing our neighbourhood light show.  Except for us. 

 Not our house!

I refused to go all competitive and commercial - but mainly to that much trouble - and when the neighbourhood pressure got too great, I broke out the Diwali paper bag lanterns and left it at that.  Everyone thought of us as "the poor house" but that was fine by me!

You know,  I think I've told you all this before.  Let me check.

Oh dear, yes I have.  So, if you're interested, last year's memories of Diwali are here, but what do you know, this year's memories are pretty much the same.

But nonetheless, Happy Diwali everyone, and may your house be so sparkling Lakshmi is pleased with you!

Stomping on the Hand of God!

Yesterday, I made a stab at getting Jay and Reuben together, thinking that, since they both want to head out in the same direction, that they'd be great partners on an interesting and idiosyncratic journey. But then, last night, I remembered I've been promising myself for years to STOP DOING THAT because it so often ends up with screaming, and, worse, with Well-Meaning Denise being The Bad Guy!

However, that's only because other people are so endlessly, abjectly and infinitely STUPID!

The magnificent and incomparable Carl Jung once said "It is in co-incidence and synchronicity that one sees the hand of god.",  and I seem to have spent most of my life in god's hands because co-incidence and synchronicity appear as constant visitors in my life.  And when they turn up, I always go along because most of my life's great journeys have started with the hair rising on the back of my neck! 

However let me tell you only a few of the stories of what's transpired when I've introduced other people to these Old Friends during their visits:

*  Like the time at a friend's wedding, when the young man sitting next to me started telling me about the clothing design degree he'd just got and ended with the line "But my real dream is to design costumes for the opera!"

Oh wow!  The hair rose on the back of my neck because only ten minutes earlier I'd been chatting with another guest, a director on the board of one of the world's great opera companies, who'd been telling me that they had just got funding for a trainee costume designer and were about to start looking for a suitable candidate.  And here's this little boy telling me ...?

Hand of God, yes?

Anyway, I immediately grab his hand and race him across the room saying "Here's someone you really MUST meet!"  I introduce them and while I'm telling her about the young man ... he steals the cocaine stash from her open purse and races off to the bathroom.

Very fraught half an hour with much screaming and abuse and me being The Bad Guy, and after it's sorted, I take the boy out onto the balcony for a ciggie and a long angry rant about the opportunity he's so callously stomped on.  And that's when the screaming really started "But you didn't explain! I had no idea. This is all your fault." says the enormously stupid young man!

Yup, I'm The Bad Guy!

*  And then there's the time I'm sitting in a cafe with a casting agent who's talking about the trouble she's having casting a certain kiddy role in a film ... when, right at that moment, one of my students passes by.  The hair rises on the back of my neck because he was the cleverest little actor who'd often told me how much he wanted to work in films and, best of all, he had exactly the right look she was after.  So I call out to him, get him over and introduce them. "Oh my!" says the casting agent.  "I see distinct possibilities here.  And you say he can act too?"

"He's a great actor." I promise her.

"I'd like to get something on film." she says to him.  "Can you come along this afternoon to audition?"

And the boy replies - and I still can't get over this! - with a hair toss, his nose in the air and a voice heavy with the utmost arrogance "I'm a star.  Stars don't audition.  If you want me for the role, just give it to me."

And this from a simple high school boy who'd never been in a film before!

Casting agent instantly cold shoulders him and me as well and I realise I've just lost a useful friend.

And back at school, several days later, I take the boy aside for a long angry rant about the opportunity he's so callously stomped on.  And, yup, that's when the screaming really started "But you didn't explain!  I had no idea. This is all your fault." says another enormously stupid young man!

And again, yup, I'm The Bad Guy!

*  And then there's the time Marilyn asked me to proofread her PhD thesis on different types of learning remediation from around the world. I'm near the end and reading about how, in Russia, she learned an amazing "unscrambling the synapses" technique for a very rare learning disorder wherein the brain scrambles words into numbers, except she can't put it to the test because it's so rare - 1 in 6 million - and thus she's never found someone to practice it on.

The hair rose on the back of my neck because I had one. Yup, 1 in 6 million and in my classroom at that exact point in time I actually had one.  The dearest sweetest little boy and so very clever ... except he had this profound problem with the written word I had never seen before.  And here's Marilyn exactly describing it, and then talking about a technique not previously known outside Russia to realign the synapses to sort it out forever. And she can do it in only 6 one hour sessions.

Hand of God?

Instantly I'm on the phone to her and she's so excited "My thesis is due in a month.  I just have time to do it." she says. Beautiful, right?  Yes, it's so all hand-of-godish and amazing ... until I actually try to organise getting the two of them together.  

"No!" says the principal.  "We already have remediation in place."

"But regular remediation doesn't work with these kids.  It's a problem in their synapses. This is the only chance this boy has to sort it out." I plead with him.

"I think you'll find that isn't the case." says the principal before turning his back on me. "This remediation team is very good."

The opportunity is too good to pass up so I ignore him and go straight to the remediation people.

"No." say the remediation people. "This is an insult to us. He's ours. You stay away from him."

So I ignore them and go straight to his parents. "No." say his parents.  "You're not practicing some weird Russian brain technique on our son!"

I tell Marilyn what's happening and she says "Look, I'm not going to do it if it's this much trouble. I don't really have time to do it anyway.  It's better we just leave it."

And so the years pass and, no, regular remediation never sorted out his problem, and so this darling little boy just got fatter and fatter and constantly more angry and confused, until, today, he's a no-hoper dropout who smokes a lot of dope and hates everyone.   And Marilyn is a professor at an important university and well out of our reach, and to this day, I'm still so angry about all those filthy egos and abject stupidity, I too hate everyone on his behalf.


*  There are so many different levels of illegal in this next story, I'll change all the names etc so you can't identify anyone.

Old friend, Penny, had a husband - let's call him Tom - who went barking mad and was dangerously violent too, so she divorced him.  Then, right in the middle of the custody battle, he kidnapped their son Mac and vanished into thin air.

Then, about eight months later, Keith and I are traveling somewhere at the farthest ends of the earth when who should we see but ... Tom and Mac.

Hand of God?

Immediately, we're on the phone to Penny telling her and she's immediately on her way with the plan to kidnap him back again.

Keith-the-Straitlaced wants nothing to do with any of this, so I'm on my own, killing time while waiting for Penny to arrive by doing a bit of undercover work; information gathering etc. 

With very little effort, I find out where Tom and Mac are living and am doing a lot of sinister lurking in a shop across the road, spying out through the window, trying to see what I can find out that will be useful for Penny when she arrives.

Then, as I'm lurking, I see a young woman come out of the flat below Tom and Mac's place and she heads straight for the shop; straight towards me.  OK, she's not the most salubrious-looking soul since she's all butch, tattoos, piercings, shaved head, but when she gets close I notice that, as well as being tall, large and overweight, beneath the fat are great big muscles and, most importantly, she's got very kindly and intelligent eyes ... and so, when she's at the counter buying her cigarettes, I take a big chance and start casually chatting with her.

It's unbelievably wonderful.  We have an instant rapport and she's all open and honest with me and starts telling me, with very little prompting, how she hates the guy upstairs because she thinks he's dangerously insane - see, I said she was clever! - and that she's very worried about the young boy he has with him and has tried to talk to him many times to find out his story, but he's forbidden to talk to anyone and too frightened of his father to disobey.

And because we have this trust between us, I tell her about Penny being on her way and the proposed kidnapping attempt ... and this lovely lady says "Count me in!  I'm in the perfect place to be your inside man! Whatever you need!  Whatever way, shape or form you think I can be useful, I'm in with you 100%."

Penny eventually arrives and I arrange for our new friend - who I actually explained to Penny as "our very own heaven-sent inside man" -  to drop by to meet her.  "I'd like to introduce you to our new best friend."  I say to Penny ...

... Penny takes one look and her face fills with contempt and disgust, rakes her gaze up and down the length of the lovely lady's body and she says "Yuck!  Why would we want to be friends with THAT!"

No, I'm not kidding.  That's exactly what Penny said.  Accompanied it with a lot of shuddering too.

And that's when our inside man, with great dignity, gets up and says "It was nice meeting you, Denise.  But please never call me again!" and she stalks out!

Fury!  Never have I ever felt such abject fury!  In white hot rage, I tell Penny in no uncertain terms what she's done - the real heaven-sent gift she's so callously stomped on ... "But you didn't explain!  I had no idea. This is all your fault." she whines at me.

I won't tell you any more about this proposed kidnapping attempt mainly since I don't know a lot since I too walked out, too incandescent with rage to want any part of it, but I do know it went horribly awry and it was Penny who ended up in a foreign mental institution!

Yup, again I'm The Bad Guy!

There are more stories, a great many more stories, along these lines.  So many, many stories about the times in my richly blessed life, when I've tried to spread around the largess, everything goes horribly askew and always it's due to the achingly abstruse obtuse stupidity of other people. 

Stomping on the hand of god!

Yup, I really have to stop doing this!