Hong Kong satire

"Rags was beginning to clear the table.  His cynical light eyes took in every detail of Finch's attire.  They said to the boy, as plainly as words: 'Ho, ho, my young feller!  You've decked yerself all up for the occasion, 'aven't yer?  You think you've made an impression on the lidy, don't yer?  But if you could only see yerself!  And just you wait till the fmaily catches you in your Sunday clothes.  There won't be nothink doing, ow naow!"--Jalna

Robbery scene: "Shit, you're just a boy!"

Blam! "That's just your knee!"

--The Wire

I've started reading A Concise History of Hong Kong.  But I also bought an Ebook by Larry Feign, who did the satirical Hong Kong comic strip The World of Lily Wong in the late '80s and early '90s for The South China Morning Post, until they dropped it because Beijing didn't like it. (Feign is a good name for a satirist...) In 1997 he revived the strip for the British press to cover the 100 days before the final handover to Chinese rule, and I've brought the reprint, titled Let's All Shut up and Make Money! which could be the Hong Kong motto.

But there's a catch.  It turns out that after I've read a few episodes, my Kobo software chokes and I get that spinning iris so the only thing I can do is turn the power off and restart!  I've solved the problem--I think--by only viewing one episode at a time, and quitting Kobo in between.  So now I have a system where I alternate between reading a section of the Concise history and an episode of the comic strip.

The neighbourhood was pretty noisy last night what with the Italy vs. England soccer game. (I had to close my windows and even pull down the shutter!) I heard a huge roar when Italy scored a goal.

I've finished the last episode of the last season of The Wire.  I think we'll try The Handmaid's Tale one of these days.

Snip, snip!

Wednesday morning the Toronto barber shops reopened and I got my first haircut since November!

Next week is the History Meetup event discussing the Seven Years War so it's time to think about the August event.  I want to discuss Hong Kong and Macao, but my difficulty is deciding on the background book.  I tend to be the only one who reads it, which I don't mind--it's just a suggestion--but I still make sure to name one that has several copies in the library system in case someone else does want to read it.

In this case, the two finalists are John M. Carrol's A Concise History of Hong Kong and Steve Yang Yui-Sang's A Modern History of Hong Kong.  One concern is that I tend to buy the Ebook. (I could order a library copy, but I don't know how long it'll take to get to me.) Both of these books are for sale in that format, but Carrol's a lot pricier.  On the other hand Carrol's the shorter of the two, so I think I'll choose that one.

Just the other day in that history of 1759 I was reading about the Battle of Minden and how Lord Sackville got in the soup for being petulantly slow in backing up his German commander.  That interested me because my New Brunswick hometown was named after him! (He went on to be Colonial Secretary during the American Revolution, and got in the soup again...) Now I'm reading about the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.

We've started watching the fifth and last season of The Wire.  This one puts a new focus on the newspaper world.  McNulty, the boozing, womanizing shit-disturber, stepped down from detective to patrolman and seemed to have straightened out the previous season. But now he's back to his old vices and scheming to plant evidence on homeless corpses to look like a serial killer's active, so that the under-budgeted Baltimore cops will be given more money to catch the real murderers they're after!

I'm past Episode 400 of One Piece.  In the previous arc the superpowers of warlord Kuma got the whole crew blown away to different places around the world, and Luffy landed on an island of bikini-clad amazons, which was pretty lame. (Their queen wanted to kill Luffy, but ended up falling in love with him--how original!) But now I've come to a better story, with Luffy sneaking into the big World Government fortress, Impel Down, to bust out his brother Ace from death row.  The place has lower and lower levels like in Dante's Inferno, with Ace at the bottom.  Buggy the Clown is another convict there, and he and Luffy have become allies!