With Monday likely to be write-off before the Lunar New Year zombie-time, I declare what looks set to be an unprecedented six-day weekend (possibly, at a stretch, a nine-day one) open – with a modest handful of diversions.
The Taiwan Sentinel on how China’s leaders’ paranoia is starting to look downright Soviet, as Mainland censors ban TV palace dramas and guys’ earrings.
Nobel economist Martin Feldstein on the US-China trade dispute: it’s not about soybeans and steel (have we told Trump this?), but tech and cheating. (I was once sent, in my capacity as Company Gwailo, to pick Prof Feldstein up at his hotel and escort him in one of the gleaming corporate Mercedes to the HK Monetary Authority – all because the Big Boss was mesmerized by the Nobel thing and was desperate to get in the great man’s face, by proxy at least. Slightly awkward, out-of-my-depth, conversation.
And for the differently attention-spanned, a nice series of student-made videos over at HK Free Press: ‘Hong Kong Humans’.
That’s it ‘til Pig Year.
*. . . the thing done to me underground
By Hell and all its brood*
– Robert Browning ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’
About the Shatin-Central Link
There is a now-familiar stink.
The latest things will just compound
*The thing done to me underground*.
We know quite well about the MTR’s
Inattention to some platform bars
Fitted wrongly. The workers then resort
To remedial action: Cut them short!
But now we hear that, like destructive moles,
Sinister and secret in their holes,
They didn’t build the tunnels as designed,
And the documents concerned – they cannot find.
The Government knew this several months ago,
But only now are we allowed to know
The dirty story no-one cared to tell.
*The thing done to me underground by Hell*.
Sinister moles, perhaps, are working on that railway line;
Or could it be the Devil and a brood of imps malign?
Underground and underhand they subtly do their worst
Tinkering and tampering, until the line is cursed.
Now fearful men approach the tunnels in a sombre mood.
*The thing done to me underground by Hell and all its brood*.
Knownot – I’m uncomfortable contemplating the kind of mind that can produce your poetic expostulations, but I sure do dig them!
Stanley Lieber –
Thank you. I’m uncomfortable myself.
Well that’s fitting that China should be looking downright Soviet…what with their bum chum relationship with Russia and Israel and the plundering they all greedily eye ahead.