Carrie reaches out to the kids

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam offers university students some Reach Out and Engage ‘listening to the young’ tender-love-and-care Sincere Dialogue. Did she do this because she thought it would make her look good if they said Yes? In which case she’s an idiot. Or did she do it because she thought it would make her look good if they said No? In which case, she’s also an idiot.

It seems Hong Kong still has some mileage as an international news story. The Washington Post opines…

The militancy is a direct result of China’s gradual but inexorable tightening of the screws on Hong Kong … China’s leaders, who supervise the Hong Kong executive, have no one but themselves to blame for the opposition’s hardened attitude.

Maybe the spotlight now switches to Wuhan. (There will be a march in Kowloon this weekend leafletting Mainland tourists, explaining what’s happening here and urging solidarity with Wuhan. Not sure what the shoppers will make of it, but it’ll freak out Beijing officials. Maybe the uprising will spread over the border – and Beijing will ban outbound travel to Hong Kong. A ‘win-win’!)

I declare the weekend open with the slightly strange story – complete with the music – about how a French guy invented a fake Chinese punk band in the early 80s, among other things. Apparently, this makes you a ‘post-modernist trickster’.

I wonder if he was born into a household full of 1950s National Geographic, Scientific American, UFO magazines and Mad – plus a 10-volume 1920s children’s encyclopedia. The nuns at my convent school focused only on the three Rs plus Holy Roman mysticism, so these glossy publications formed my early worldview. I didn’t distinguish between them much: they all seemed equally dependable and illuminating sources of knowledge. But in retrospect, I owe most to Mad. So RIP, basically…