bobbylee

A 23-year-old writes, and it should be required reading for everyone who isn't comatosed:

http://sprintingtohell.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/leave-me-alone/

"You've reminded me of a journalism professor who rebuked me for writing: The school's doors were chained shut. With little mercy, and in class, he instructed me that inanimate objects have no power of possession. I fight that tendency still today, 30 years later."

(Suzanne Royce, email, 22 Feb 2009)

Read Helen Cowie's blog post "Chicago" on the kind of administrative insolence that visitors to the USA have put up with (link below).

http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/helencowie/entry/chicago/

If the tables were turned on the Americans when they go abroad, they would nuke us to hell and back. (All of the Americans I know say this kind of behaviour is way out of order and makes the rest of the world resent America. And how bloody true that is.)

The first entry for the new year (2009) is not an entirely happy one. First of all, the winter has been rather chillier this winter than usual. I actually had to wear my overcoat, which really speaks volumes for someone like me who grew up not being afraid of the cold. But that's not important.

This winter is the winter of our discontent. Our collective discontent in Hong Kong. Day after day, there's some piece of new on TV or in the newspaper of a company going belly-up because of the 'financial tsunami.' (I wish they would stop calling it a tsunami: no one survives one of those things.) Big companies gone bust, small companies gone bust. Every day. Blood is not in the streets yet, but it's slowly dripping away from like a haemophiliac with a big wound. The government here has gone almost brain-dead and trying very hard to dismiss things as non-existent. But it's having a tough time pretending because the problems are so phenomenally obvious even to the most apathetic. I think by the end of the year, only I and the people who actually bother to read my space here would be left standing with any semblance of an income.

This really is the winter of our discontent.