And tonight I found this in iTunes:

Really Steve?  One of the greatest albums of all time by almost anyone’s standard and you felt that you had to censor the title?  You can display the title in the cover art but not in the text?  Our children need to be protected from the word “Bitches”?   It’s sad.

The only pleasant thing about Cyberport is that, as a smoker, I can walk just a few steps outside of my office and sit at a picnic table in a garden area to enjoy a smoke or three.   The shopping mall is a disgrace by any standard, lacking any kind of shop that provides anything useful (except Park & Rob).  There’s no 7-11 or Circle K.  No Watsons or Mannings.  No optician.  No electronics store.   No bank (just an ATM).  The worst book store I’ve ever seen in my life.  Some of the most horrible restaurants I’ve ever eaten in anywhere.

If you look at their listing on Wikipedia, it reads as if it was written by their own marketing department.

Focusing on enterprise and professional development, Cyberport helps commercialise creative ideas and incubate start-ups. The Cyberport Digital Entertainment Incubation-cum-Training (IncuTrain) is the only incubation facility focusing on digital contents in Hong Kong. To help develop human capital and market, the Cyberport IncuTrain Centre collaborates with various organizations and platforms internationally to provide entrepreneurs with technology, training opportunities, business matching and networks support.

Cyberport is Hong Kong’s unique Creative Digital Community, with a considerable scale and size of tenant mix. Cyberport is home to an energetic community of ICT and creative digital content tenants who enjoy synergies from co-locating with each other. Interconnected by a state-of-the-art broadband network, the Cyberport community is home to four grade-A intelligent office buildings, a five-star design hotel, a retail entertainment complex and about 2,800 deluxe residences.

Cyberport is a hybrid of public ownership and commercial operation. Cyberport has the public missions to create a strategic cluster of quality ICT and ICT related companies so as to spearhead the development of the digital media & lifestyle and related industry in Hong Kong.

Now let’s add insult to injury:

Conveniently located on a 24-hectare site at Telegraph Bay in the Southern District of Hong Kong Island, Cyberport is easily accessible to the city’s financial and business districts.

Conveniently located?  Yes, there are buses that go there.  The surrounding roads are all single-lane, heavy traffic passing residential areas, schools and hospitals.  The only way to get to the main road from there is by bus or taxi.  The Wikipedia page says there’s going to be an MTR stop there – I’d heard that the MTR was going to bypass them, can’t find anything on the MTR’s web site about their new projects that mentions this.

The entire place is a joke that’s not funny.  They do have a few high profile tenants there – Microsoft, us, some others – but mostly it’s a ghost town and a playground for the people who live in the neighboring Bel Air, which is where PCCW’s real profit came from when they built this.

So they’re supposed to incubate start-ups.  In four months, I have yet to see any evidence of this kind of activity taking place.  However, BootHK is starting up.

Hong Kong’s New Home for:

• Coworkers
• Startups
• Makers

We want to ignite Hong Kong’s entrepreneurial community by giving people a social place they can work and meet up.

The long term vision is to create a network of spaces throughout the country that provide different environments such as hackerspaces, workshops, and social meetups for artists, entrepreneurs, and technologists.

Our first space in Sheung Wan will be a place to bring everyone together and to provide space for coworking.

Did ya notice their space is in Sheung Wan, not in Cyberport?  I’m meeting with one of the founders next week and I’m curious about the answer to this question.

And wondering why our government doesn’t demand REAL management that turns Cyberport into the REAL tech hub that it was supposed to become.

I was bored by Legion but offended by Nine.   Look, Fellini’s 8-1/2 is one of my all time favorite films, it’s a fucking masterpiece in my book, okay?  Why someone thought that would make a Broadway musical I can’t say and apparently the stage version did well enough that they could make a big budget film out of it, directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago) and starring, of all people, Daniel Day Lewis.  Okay, you get to see Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Kate Hudson and even a woefully miscast Nicole Kidman looking pretty damned sexy.  And you get Judi Dench and Sophia Loren.  And a fat Fergy as the hooker on the beach.  But the whole time I was watching this, I was aware that Fellini’s film was an intensely personal work – the kind that film maker’s rarely get to do any more, at least within the studio system – so much of his life and his interior thoughts were up there on the screen for us all to see.  But this?  It was just work, pure and simple.  I didn’t feel Marshall had any personal connection to this, it wasn’t his life, it was Fellini’s life godammit and Fellini already filmed it so why do it again?

And if you’re gonna do it again and you’re gonna do it in English, why keep it in Italy?  Why keep it a period piece?  Why not really remake it, remodel it, update it, personalize it?  I guess that would take a bit more talent or ambition.  The film is awkwardly structured, with scenes intercutting between locations and sound stage for no good reason.  And they EVEN CHANGED THE FUCKING ENDING.

Maybe if you’ve never seen 8-1/2 you’ll like this – you do get to see Penelope Cruz looking freaking hot so it’s not a total waste of time.

Modern Family is a sitcom that I never watched.  But it just won the Emmy for best sitcom so I thought I’d check it out.  Here’s the deal – you get Married With Children’s Ed O’Neill married to a freaking hot Latina lady (Sofia Vergara) half his age.

(Yes, I know, for many of you, the picture above alone is cause to watch the show, though she doesn’t dress like that, at least not so far.)  There’s her 11 year old son from her first marriage.  And O’Neill has two kids – each grown up with a family of their own – in one case a traditional husband & wife and three kids, in the other a gay couple with a newly adopted baby from Vietnam.  It’s done in an ersatz documentary style and Ty Burrell’s character is clearly going for the Ricky Gervais cringe school of laughs.

It’s not howlingly funny – but then again one can never judge a sitcom by the first episode.  The writers and cast need some time to explore the characters and bring them to life.   My problem was the voice-over narration at the end of the 20 minutes, telling us about the lesson learned.  I fucking hate that in sitcoms, Wonder Years being a prime example.  I don’t want freaking life lessons from some 22 year old hack writer straight out of college waiting for his big break to make Adam Sandler movies.  I wanna be entertained and I want the Seinfeld “no kissing, no lessons learned” at the end of my entertainments.  But I’ll probably watch a few more episodes and see where it goes.

On the other hand, Louie, on the FX network in the US, is as original a series as I’ve ever seen.  It’s written, produced and directed by its star, Louis C.K.  (Sometimes he gets an editor credit too.) (His real name, in case you’re wondering, is Louis Szekely.)   It’s probably worth noting that Louis’s real life dad was mixed Mexican Catholic/Hungarian Jewish and his mom was Irish Catholic.

His previous series, Lucky Louie on HBO never really caught on with me – it struck me as a sort of I Love Lucy with almost-hardcore sex, there was frontal male nudity – and it only lasted one season.

This show on the other hand is a mindfucker.  You really never know what you’re going to get from one week to the next.  Ostensibly it’s about Louie, an over-40 stand-up comic, divorced with two kids, trying to make it in New York.  You get the stand-up bits like Seinfeld but he doesn’t have a real circle of friends.  He’s sad a lot.  Not sitcom sad, sad.  Sometimes the comedy is over-the-top funny and twists at the end and sometimes it doesn’t.

There’s an episode with some great jokes about flying in the US, including a bit where he’s convincing airport security to let him keep his little jar of lube because he’s going to need it to help him masturbate once he gets to his hotel, leads to him vaguely bombing doing his stand-up in the south, and then he’s in a diner where he meets a woman who’s a big fan and whose brother gets pissed off that Louie doesn’t want to sleep with her, pulls a gun on him, gets cold-cocked by a sheriff who later tells Louie that he’s not gay but thinks a kiss on the mouth as a thank you might be nice and  ….

Then there’s last week’s episode.  Sorry for spoilers, but I gotta give you an idea of what’s going on here.  Louie’s at a gas station and goes to use the toilet.  The urinal’s ripped out of the wall, there’s a hole there and someone’s scrawled “Heaven” next to the hole.  Louie moves over to the toilet, some older guy in a suit comes in, sees the hole and starts unzipping.  Louie asks him if he’s really going to stick his dick in there.  ”Well, it says heaven.”  But what if something awful happens?  ”You gotta have faith!”

Which then leads into him doing stand-up comedy, a bit about God being an asshole and a re-enactment of the whole Abraham-Isaac thing featuring God obviously drunk and coming up with this idea.

And that leads into a 20 minute segment that plays as if it’s based on a real event, laugh free, very intense, about how Catholic school managed to traumatize him as an 11 year old kid, ending with his mother telling him that if she knew they were going to teach him that crap she never would have sent him in the first place.

It is without a doubt the most anti-organized religion 20 minutes that I can recall ever seeing on network TV.

It’s not your usual sitcom is what I’m saying.  It’s not completely successful.  But it’s taking chances I don’t see many other shows take.  And I hope it sticks around for a long time.  It has already been renewed for a second season.

Oh, and unlike Modern Family, Ricky Gervais appears in a couple of episodes here.

Okay, kind of a rambling post.  To cut a long story short, avoid Nine and Legion, give Modern Family a shot, you gotta check out Louie.

Here’s one you might not know.  Did you know that North Korea is making video games?  And in 2007, they made two mobile video games based on Big Lebowski and Men In Black.  ”They” being programmers at the North Korean government’s General Federation of Science and Technology.  These were then distributed in western countries by a shell company called Nosotek Joint Venture Company and Fox Mobile was the publisher in certain territories.

Did Rupert know?  Is he so willing to abandon his conservative, anti-terrorist ideals to make a little extra profit?  We’ll probably never know for certain.  Any finger-pointing would be mere conjecture on my part.  (But you can probably guess what I’m thinking.)

Here’s the full story from Games Industry (which I’m quoting in full assuming that many of you will be interested in this but won’t want to create the required account at that site):

News Corp subsidiary Fox Mobile published two games made in North Korea, it has been established.

In 2007, programmers at the North Korean government’s General Federation of Science and Technology created Java-based mobile titles using the Big Lebowksi and Men in Black licenses, which were then distributed in the West by Nosotek Joint Venture Company.

Nosotek claims to be “the first western IT venture” to originate from Kim Jong Il’s iron rule, and is prepared to launder invoices through a Hong Kong or China-based subsidiary, as well as “skills, secrecy, dedication.”

Fox Mobile was formerly known as Jamba, which News Corp acquired in 2006 for $188 million. However, the Jamba subsidiary – Ojom GmbH – which nominally published the titles was closed in 2008.

Business deals with North Korea are technically legal under UN rules, unless related in any way to the weapons industry. However, there have been concerns that fuelling the country’s IT knowledge and infrastructure might aid its cyberwarfare capabilities.

“Any sort of transaction that gives cash to the North Korean government works against U.S. policy,” James Lewis from Washington policy group the Center for Strategic and International Studies told Bloomberg.

“The coding skills people would acquire in outsourcing activities could easily strengthen cyberwar cyber-espionage capabilities. Mobile devices are the new frontier of hacking.”

South Korean officials have previously claimed that North Korea has already attempted cyber-attacks on the US, while August saw President Obama increase sanctions against business with the nation.

However, Nosotek co-founder Volker Eloesser dismissed concerns that game development might increase the risk of attacks upon the West. “Who could train them, as neither me nor the Chinese engineers who are cooperating with the Koreans have those skills ourselves? Training them to do games can’t bring any harm.”

By contrast, Paul Tjia, director of Rotterdam, Netherlands-based GPI Consultancy, told Bloomberg that Western firms outscouring software development to Korea may help the notoriously closed and poor nation to escape its government-imposed isolation.

Fox Mobile’s Juliane Walther confirmed that the subsidiary had “extensive partnerships with content producers in all areas, with operators, and with the biggest media companies worldwide, including various Asian companies.”

No further confirmation of links to North Korean software development was provided.

Carina Lau hasn’t exactly followed this path.  Her first film was in 1984 and she was talented enough to become part of Wong Kar-Wai’s repertory crew.  I developed a serious crush on her after seeing her in the 1996 film Forbidden City Cop, where she not only co-starred with Stephen Chow, she managed to steal almost every scene she was in.

In 1990, she was reportedly kidnapped and held for a few hours for refusing a role in another film.  And during this time, the kidnappers reportedly took nude pictures of her to use as blackmail.  And then in 2002, those pictures turned up on the cover of Eastweek magazine.   She finally married her long time boyfriend, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai in 2008 and since then the press has been rife with rumors as to the health of their marriage.

No particular reason for any of this except I’m home today and there’s a bunch of pictures of her showing up on various blogs because she’s doing the red carpet thing at the Venice Film Festival.  She’s going to be 45 years old this year and I think she’s still got it.

Crosby Stills and Nash are back in the studio, this time doing an all-covers album with producer Rick Rubin.  They’re also said to be working on an album of performances collected on the 1974 CSNY tour.

Jerry Lee Lewis turns 75 later this month and has a new album out, Mean Old Man.  He’s using the old trick of bringing along a bunch of more famous names to get attention but the fact is that even though Lewis’ popularity peaked in the 60s, he’s made a lot of worthwhile music since then and this is going to be worth at least a listen.  Famous name guests on the album include Ronnie Wood, Kid Rock, Slash, Mick Jagger, Tim McGraw, Eric Clapton, James Burton, Sheryl Crow, Merle Haggard, Ringo Starr, John Mayer, Shelby Lynne, Keith Richards, Solomon Burke, John Fogerty, Gillian Welch, Willie Nelson, Mavis Staples, Robbie Robertson, Nils Lofgren.  When The Killer calls, you don’t say no.

In Shenzhen on Monday, he found time for a private meeting for Li Ka-CHING! but apparently couldn’t find the time (or reason?) to have a similar meeting with Lord Donald.

Let’s try to predict the future, shall we?  Let’s turn the clock ahead one month.  One month from now, real estate prices will still be out of control, pollution will continue to get worse, the gap between rich and poor will continue to widen, construction will continue on Tsang’s monument to himself at Tamar and his ratings will have plummeted back to pre-”crisis” levels.

Which begs the question, who are these 7.5 percent who have flipped from negative to positive on Tsang’s performance due to his momentarily non-handling of what is, really, just a blip?  What kind of loco weed are they smoking and where can I get some?

Lunch today.  In the wasteland known as Cyberport.  One place that I thought was okay the one time I’d been there was the grotesquely named Wine O’Clock, which was a Thai and Vietnamese restaurant.  But now the menu says French & Chinese.  They’re doing a set lunch buffet now – two different soups, a salad bar that was 6 different variations on lettuce and no protein to be seen, a dessert bar, coffee or tea for $68.  Add another $20 for one of the dozen or so choices of main dishes on the menu.  I went for Sichuan Chicken and got a bowl that looked nice but was close to inedible.  The few bits of chicken in there were literally skin and bones and then some meager vegetables drenched in an extremely unspicy Sichuanish sauce.  A friend tried the spaghetti bolonaise, which I don’t think qualifies as either Chinese or French, and was apparently completely lacking in flavor.

When the manager came by to clear off the table, he noted that my bowl of “chicken” was almost untouched.  ”Finished?”  Yeah, I didn’t like it.  ”Too spicy for you?”  No, it wasn’t bloody spicy at all.  And there was no meat in there, the chicken was only skin and bone.   So did he offer to give me another dish?  Did he offer to take the $20 off the bill?  You know the answer: of course not.  He merely said, “Next time, next time.”  As if.

Dinner tonight at another long time Wanchai favorite, Sabah.  Beef satay, beef rendang, dry fried chicken curry, morning glory with sambal and prawn, two orders of roti, two mango-coconut shakes and a diet coke, $430 for 3 people and we had left-overs.  Every dish was satisfying.  We actually kept eating long past the point that we were feeling full because we enjoyed everything so much – especially me, after my non-lunch earlier.  There’s a reason this place is busy every night and continues to win awards on Openrice every year.  And it doesn’t hurt that no matter how busy this place gets, the staff are always super-friendly and nice.  I find that sometimes they’re a bit heavy-handed with the salt here but otherwise I rarely have any complaint and almost always leave here feeling very happy.

One doesn’t often see westerners running in HK elections, but it’s not the first time.  And I’ve actually heard of Zimmerman.  He’s a frequently-published letter writer to the SCMP, generally writing on environmental concerns.  A Hong Kong resident for 26 years, the affiliations he lists on his website pretty much tell you where he’s coming from.

• Business Environment Council, Coalition on Sustainable Tourism,
• Civic Party, Professional Commons,
• Harbour Business Forum, Conservancy Association,
• Heritage Watch, Save The Street Market,
• Clear the Air, Friends of Sai Kung,
• Hong Kong Political Science Association,
• Hong Kong Public Affairs Forum, American Institute of Architects,
• Society of IATA Passenger Agents,
• Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport in Hong Kong

“Savantas Policy Institute honorary financial adviser” Ellis Lau is new to me but a quick google reveals that he considers Regina Ip as his mentor.  And I’m not much of a fan of Ms. Ip.   The signs that Lau’s followers were holding seemed to suggest his positions on the environment in Pok Fu Lam were similar to Zimmerman’s – but as far as I’m aware, Zimmerman has been an activist in this area for years while Lau, a young Oxford-educated banker, hasn’t had much of a profile in this area.

There’s more on the campaign in a thread over at GeoExpat.

Things got hot over the weekend just before the election.  The SCMP reported:

A dispute broke out between Zimmerman, 52, who was with three supporters, and the campaign team for his opponent Ellis Lau Ying-tung, 26, from the Savantas Policy Institute, shortly after 10.30am.

As the opponents canvassed at the roundabout at the junction of Sassoon Road and Victoria Road, a row broke out over a campaigning spot. Yeung Hong-kit, a volunteer in Lau’s team, was admitted to Queen Mary Hospital after he was allegedly pushed to the ground by Zimmerman. He was later discharged.

Last night [Zimmerman] said the allegation against him was false. “It was the best place to say hello to citizens. I was waving at cars there. Then about 10 people from Savantas came pushing for space … He shuffled in front of our banners and when I touched him on his shoulder, there were all sorts of yelling and screaming, including foul things.”

Lau’s team later uploaded a video onto YouTube, showing Yeung on the ground and Zimmerman laughing. “I was laughing because it was all fake. He just lay down. The doctors found no scratches on his body.”

Lau said Yeung had bruises on the elbow and scratches on the leg. “Not only was Mr Yeung injured, when he fell, an easy-mount frame also dropped onto the ground and snapped. You can tell how hard he pushed him. We have left the frame at the police station as evidence.”

At any rate, Zimmerman won the election, with 1,183 votes to Lau’s 792.  Only 23 percent of eligible voters turned out for this.

With loud heckling between the opposing camps at the junction of Sassoon Road and Victoria Road, the scene then became chaotic when several vehicles carrying about 10 youths arrived. The youths circled Zimmerman’s group, carrying a white cloth reading, “Against election violence” and “Zimmerman beats”.

The group left before returning several times to continue their harassment. Lau’s key supporter, legislator Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee, said the youths were not part of her camp.

Zimmerman was arrested for allegedly pushing one of Lau’s campaign workers to the ground, which he denied. He was freed on police bail of HK$500.

Also yesterday, the Civic Party lodged a complaint with the Electoral Affairs Commission claiming that Lau’s “fabricated and misleading description of the row” had interfered with Zimmerman’s election campaign.

I always miss the good stuff.

And please note, I’m not criticizing either Mr. Lau or Mr. Zimmerman or the process.  The limited democracy that we enjoy in HK is still a relatively new thing and there are bound to be growing pains along the way.  It would have been nice if the voting turnout had been higher but given the kind of election this was, it’s probably to be expected.