There is something not right this Monday morning. Normally, I step out onto a silent and empty street, with only the warm welcoming glow of the 7-Eleven on the corner offering any sign of life. Today, dawn finds the neighbourhood’s Western-style bar-restaurants as open and crowded and raucous as on a Friday evening.
It’s the Super Bowl – one of those rituals everyone gets tremendously excited about 
because they’re supposed to get tremendously excited about it. One third of all Americans sit and watch the broadcast. It is of course an excuse for a party. A special sort of party where people come together to stare at the TV. In an attempt to bring meaning to the occasion, everyone pretends to be intrigued by the amount spent by the biggest advertiser.
On a different plain of pretense, of course, everyone is in theory there to watch the game. Football: all the waiting-for-something-to-happen of cricket, combined with all the invisible-thing-briefly-happened-in-corner-of-screen of golf. Strange how something so mind-numbing to watch can nonetheless cause brain-damage in players. Why not watch boxing, where other people’s head traumas are at least exciting?
But let’s put it another way: two thirds of all Americans are doing something else. And, unlike those in Hong Kong, they don’t have to drag themselves out of bed at some crazy hour to do it.
Passing the local Super Bowl fans loudly swigging their orange juices and coffee ahead of a long day still to come in the office, I grab a newspaper and see…
Former Security Secretary Regina Ip hints at taking part in the Chief Executive election in 
2017. Any comparison is tortured, but since we’re discussing things American, it’s interesting to note that Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin have both pretty much abandoned hope of going for the Republican nomination in the 2016 Presidential race. Romney has too much out-of-touch elitist baggage, while Palin’s idiocy-as-populism thing is finally passé. Regina is (in a Hong Kong context) trying to re-invent herself from the former to the latter. Everyone must know that, however the 2017 selection process works, this is doomed to embarrassing failure – except, of course, her. A well-trodden hubristic course: from take-self-too-seriously, all the way to flat-on-face. Should be entertaining, at least.
She’s like a dirty old t-shirt you keep trying to chuck out but somehow keeps on ending back in your wardrobe.
When she finally disappears it will be to the screech of “I’m melting….” followed by the gleeful chorus of the midgets of Oz “Ding Dong the witch is dead…”
Assuming that this is all a big show to spare the eventual CE the humiliation of running alone, she will by duly rewarded with ministerial position. Unlike Mitt Romney, she won’t retire into obscurity, and unlike Sarah Palin, she won’t be contained in a relatively harmless if obnoxious venue like cable television.
According to the poll in today’s Xinhua Morning Post 77% says ‘No’ to the bitch.
But it doesn’t really matter to her. She is playing the game because she has nothing else to do in life. And she hopes that somehow it will produce some sort of job that will provide a few more years of attention for her and a leg up for her proteges.
Something else: I was at the march yesterday. I saw Long Hair, the Bull (took a picture with him), Audrey, Alan Leong: all good, decent folks.
No, Christine wasn’t there, in case you are asking. She was having high tea with Letitia Lee and Pamela Pak at the Peninsula. You know, girls having a good time.
Vagina let’s recap. The sixth (out of seven) most “popular” of HK Island Legislators (30,000 votes) and unable to garner the required 1/8 of the votes required from the 2012 Election Committee due, probably to her being seen as a considerable reason for the size of the 2003 mass demonstrations. Over appointed in the civil service and fell flat on your face with your inane patronizing views and comments. Went to study in the U.S., learnt nothing, but got the badge. The CE is Beijing’s call so how is exactly is she planning on getting their anointment ? Isn’t going to happen let’s move along. Who won the Superbowl?
Elsie Leung is still cheerfully parroting away at about a hundred and twenty so we probably have 50-odd years of Vagina still to come.
Joe Blow, did Christine Loh turn you down for a date or something? I get it, I really do, but every day without fail?
@Headache: you betray the cause, you will pay forever. Let there be no misunderstanding about that.
“Doomed to embarrassing failure… Should be entertaining, at least.”
How surreal to see Regina mentioned in the same sentence as a CE election. It falls to Hemlock to make THE conclusion of this silly possibility!
Not sure why Christine Low is being bashed for betraying democracy when it was never something she promised anyone. Now, compared to Emily Lao and co, she’s done more to address livelihood issues for the common man, but anyone who could write a history of the CCP in Hong Kong and ran Phibro’s trading operations in China isn’t some one who’d waste energy doing destructive futile acts that are two steps backward for zero steps forward. Those kinds of useless heroics should be left to those who are useless in life anyway. It’s clear waiting to inform legislation on the floor of our dear CE’s chop shop is way too late in the game, much as it was too late under the British as well.
Harvey Stockwin is usually more wrong than right, but he’s nailed both Occupy and the old guard Democrats to a T today. Politics is the art of the possible.