First, thinking about food.

When you’re a kid, you believe that your mother is the best cook in the entire world. It took me years to find out otherwise. My mother cooked meat 5 nights a week – steak, roast, brisket, meat loaf, lamb chops, veal chops and so on. The sixth night would be either roast chicken or some sort of fish casserole. Let’s put it this way, my mother’s fish casserole was so pitiful that I grew up thinking I didn’t like fish.

On the seventh day, we’d eat out. Sometimes a kosher deli, sometimes a diner, sometimes “Chinese food.” We’d go to the same restaurant and order the exact same dishes each time – wonton soup, egg rolls, spare ribs and fried rice – none of which looked anything like the Chinese food in Hong Kong. It was the 60s and this was American Chinese food. (I have to confess, I sometimes feel a nostalgic pang for this stuff.)

When my father retired, he pushed my mother out of the kitchen and took over cooking for the family. The menu didn’t change much but at least my father knew how to cook fish.

I was thinking how, if I grew up on such a limited diet, did I turn out to be someone with such varied tastes and so willing to try almost everything? (And by almost everything, I’ve eaten raw horse, barbecued squirrel, snake, raw whale, fried bees, fried worms.) At any rate, I figure my life is a hundred times better because of that. And I’m quite lucky that T shares the same wide range of tastes and same curiosity.

In the past few days alone, had seafood at Lamma, Australian rib eye at Quarterdeck (those were both business-related meals), Mongolian-style hotpot at Little Sheep, Indian fusion at Maya dinners and so-so Vietnamese and Thai lunches. Sometimes good, sometimes not-so-good, but at least a wide variety.

By the way folks, if you haven’t been to Little Sheep, you really gotta go. It’s a chain that has probably hundreds of locations throughout China, including 2 or 3 in HK. (The one I go to is in Causeway Bay Plaza.) Unlike other places, Little Sheep does not offer any sauce for dipping your food. That’s because their soups are so tasty that you don’t need any other sauce. The beef and lamb are incredibly fresh and beautifully marbled. They have an English menu but be careful – you get a preprinted slip to mark off what you want, but they changed the numbering on the slip but didn’t update the menu – so if you don’t read Chinese, better to call over a waiter and have him mark it off for you.

The price is quite reasonable as well. We went with the “premium” beef and lamb plates, plus a dozen live prawns, cuttlefish paste with roe, shrimp balls, shitake mushrooms and golden mushrooms, corn on the cob, a 32 ounce Carlsberg and a pitcher of watermelon juice. It would have been enough for three; we did our best. A veritable feast for $560. They’re open till 1 AM and the place can be quite busy at peak hours but it’s a big place and worth the wait.

We stopped off at Bar 109 on the way home. They’ve got hookahs now and can set one up for you to smoke at your table. Mango margarita, yum. Walked past Bridge and noted some half naked white guy standing outside while his friends (?) inside were pouring pitchers of beer on him.

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One other Wanchai note: Strawberry’s is gone, replaced by Galaxy, the opening party was Saturday night, free food and drinks. It looks like they spent all of 2 cents renovating the insides and maybe 3 cents on the band. But longtime Neptune customers will recognize most of the staff there. The place is being managed by Sammy, who ran Neptune for years and more recently was at Boracay and who is vowing to make the place “better than Neptune.” Strawberries died a slow death the last year or two and I guess it remains to be seen whether people will hike over there but there was a good crowd for opening night.

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Decided to reorganize and upgrade the hard disks on my main PC. Purchased a 320 gig for my “main” drive and a 500 gig for music and photos. Again, in a vaguely nostaglic mood, as I purchased over 800 gigs of storage for well under US$400, I thought of how excited I was back when I upgraded my Atari from a tape drive to a floppy disk – I think at the time I thought things couldn’t possibly ever get better than that.

The thing is, for some reason, I spaced out at the computer mall and asked for Serial ATA drives instead of IDE drives. Got home, opened the first one up, and looked blankly at the back of the drive, thinking “what the fuck?” Examined the motherboard – luckily my motherboard had two sockets for S-ATA cables.

But I was still caught in “what the fuck” mode, because the instruction sheet that came with the drive showed the ATA plug on the back and the usual 4 pin connection for power, but the drive itself didn’t have that. I had to go to the Maxtor web site and hunt around and finally found a proper diagram and instructions. Then checked my power supply and thankfully it had two plugs that would fit the drive.

The drives don’t come with software but the instruction sheet said one needed to go the Maxtor’s website and download their “maxblast” software to get the drives set up. How incredibly fucking cheesy.

The software itself seemed fine with one exception – there was an option to make the drive bootable and copy over everything from your existing C: drive. And I ticked that option, waited the hours for the files to copy over, then rebooted to find that my computer wouldn’t boot off the new drive and that Explorer still thought the drive was unformatted. So hours wasted.

Norton Ghost to the rescue. Files, including master boot record, copied over, reboot and yes, it’s working the way it should. Still have shitloads of stuff to copy over from the old D: drive, which I’ll do overnight. Then will recycle either the old C: or the old D: as a back-up drive.

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Back to food, we watched Tampopo tonight. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a Japanese film from 1985. The story concerns five strangers coming together to help a middle aged Japanese woman create the best ramen shop ever. It’s equal parts Kurosawa, John Ford and Luis Bunuel with a touch of Chaplin to boot. (Look for a young Ken Watanabe in a supporting role.)

I had to special order it from Rock Gallery and Kung had a hard time finding it, but of course he came through. I showed the box to T and said that we had to watch it tonight, that I thought she’d like it because it’s Japanese and all about food. She asked me if I’d seen it before – yes. “Then why you buy????” “Because I thought you’d like it.” She stared up at me for a few seconds and then kissed me. And yes, she enjoyed the movie quite a bit.

Since that went well, now I have to hunt down The Chinese Feast, a wonderful comedy directed by Tsui Hark and starring Leslie Cheung. Used to have it on VCD but that’s one of the things that left with the wife.

Other food movies? Not just an eating scene like in Tom Jones, but movies devoted to food? I don’t think T will go for “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” or “Grand Bouffe.” “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeiosie” would maybe be a stretch, maybe not.

The week is finally over. Most of the company brass has left town; my boss is gone tomorrow. I am satisfied; I accomplished what I needed to get done and maybe even a little bit more.

The highlight of the week was undoubtedly the resignation of the managing director of a key territory, someone who had been with the company for five years and, despite constantly delivering where it counted, was widely disliked because he insisted on being an individual, not playing politics and saying what was actually on his mind. People in the head office tended to refer to him as a “fuckwit” even as he continued to manage one of the few territories that consistently delivered above expectations.

We sat down and talked for about an hour. Our relationship had a rocky start five years ago and took about a year to get on an even keel. This year we’d actually started to be friends. The last time I’d seen him, he’d asked me, “so why does everyone in the home office hate me?” I said, “You don’t really need me to answer that, you already know,” and he laughed.

Even so, he surprised me last night when he said, “I always respect your insights. You’re smart and you say what’s on your mind which is why you won’t go far in this company.” (Okay, it’s my blog, I can have a wank here every now and then, no?)

They tried to stop him but he insisted on making a farewell speech. First he mentioned the previous president of the company and said, “every time I had to talk with him my eyes would look like those of a dead fish.” Then he mentioned the previous number 2 in the company and said, “we had a relationship that began with my middle finger.” He then launched into a personal story and, with several lawyers in the audience, was getting perilously close to a sexual harassment lawsuit. His boss got on stage and basically took the mike away from him before it could get really interesting and before he could circle back to insulting current management.

Moments like this are too few and too far between.

Tonight a very pleasant team dinner at Quarterdeck. Sitting there outside by the water, view partially blocked by barges, an almost-clear night and moderate temperatures, it was really relaxing. Watching the underwhelming light show that passes for a nightly tourist attraction, I was struck again by how HK has missed the potential of its waterfront as a true tourist attraction and a way to improve quality of life for its residents.

Following that, over to Bar 109, which was having a 2-for-1 special on mojitos. DJ Tiny Todd remembered last week, when he was playing “Across 110th Street,” I’d told him how the song put me in the mood for some Norman Whitfield, and tonight he brought out an extended remix he’d done on “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” followed by some Isaac Hayes and Barry White, then a whole lotta Motown before segueing into some late 70s funk.

Our group had thinned out and some were in the mood for something less laid back. I walked them over to Joe Bananas, stood inside looking around for 5 or 10 minutes, realized I had no reason to be there, said good night to all and made my way home.

Have been working quite hard all week and somewhat distracted. I’d taken a scroll through the blog and thought to myself that it had become too impersonal and, in a moment of irrationality, decided to do something that several months ago I said I’d no longer do – posting personal details here.

The result was exactly what I should have expected. Comments making judgements about my choices from people who do not share the same morals or philosophy and who are somehow convinced that their way is the only way. Comments telling me what I need or what T needs from total strangers who for some reason seem convinced that they hold the keys to the mysteries of life. The blog equivalent of a drive-by shooting – some stranger “driving past,” stopping to take a look, taking a minute or two to leave some comment that more often than not makes it seem that they misunderstood something I wrote. Or not.

Naturally, the only person who is to blame for this is myself. By putting myself on public display, I’m leaving the blog open to all commenters, linked, nicknamed, anonymous. By being a poor writer, I’ve left things open to misinterpretation and assumption. I temporarily forgot that my view of the world is not universally shared.

Actually I’m grateful to everyone who took the time to post a comment. I believe that each of you thinks you were trying to help. I recognize the validity of your opinions and choices even as you do not recognize mine. I took the time to read each comment carefully. However, I choose not respond individually and I remained essentially unmoved by almost everything that was posted.

I recognize that I’m not perfect and that I don’t always make the right choices. And while I do believe that much of life is learning from one’s mistakes, you and I may have different ideas of what constitutes “a mistake.” I think that by and large I don’t repeat the same mistakes too often, though I do find there is no shortage of new mistakes out there for me to make. I realize that I have some decisions to make. And that attempting to work them out by posting the issues here does not provide a solution.

So thanks to one and all. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Stayed up till 4 AM, thought I could sleep in today, but woken up at 8 and in the office by 9. Still “calm before the storm” in a manner of speaking, but found time to install Firefox 2.0 (not on the Mozilla page but on the ftp server), too soon to tell anything about it.

Comments on previous posts all well and good but received an email from someone closer to the actual situation that shed a lot more light on things and left me feeling both happily optimistic and horribly pessimistic for reasons that I don’t care to go into.

Sorry, I know the above paragraph is an example of something I really hate when I encounter it in other blogs. “Oooooo, I ‘ad a really good day today, ‘ope all my lovely readers did too.” (Hey, Firefox 2 is doing spellchecks. Now I got tons o’ words underlined with red dots. Hmmm … center or centre? Color or colour? Aha, I’ve got American English, good.) Anyway, I fucking hate when people do that and I’ve just done it and well, that’s that. Add me to the list of bloggers I hate.

I expect that I’ll be smoking a lot today and possibly drinking a lot tonight.

Still pondering the personal post. Something that caught my eye today in the SCMP is an article on Page 3 titled “Last-ditch bid to prevent Al Gore’s climate crisis film being frozen out.”

In the article, it says that the distributor has been trying to “prolong the life of the movie on Hong Kong cinema screens.” The film has grossed almost HK$2 million in two weeks, a respectable showing for a documentary here. The distributor was hoping that corporations would buy tickets for staff, that schools would buy for students (and 7,000 seats were purchased in this way). However, grosses are dropping off and it will probably be out of cinemas soon.

The article makes no mention of the fact that the movie was legally screened on HK’s flagship airline, Cathay Pacific, more than a month before it appeared on HK movie screens. I watched the movie when flying to Sydney in September. This scheduling mishap represents clear incompetence by either the local HK distributor or the global rights owner.

The article also doesn’t mention that the DVD will be released in the US on November 21st, which means it will be available in HK in a fair number out outlets starting on or about November 7th, just two weeks away.

But the funniest bit is a quote from Regent Lai, local manager of Intercontinental Film Distributors. No, the funny bit isn’t that some woman thought that “Regent” would be a good English name for herself. The funny bit is where she is quoted as saying, “… it doesn’t really help a film that fundamentally lacks entertainment and content for the masses.” When the person in charge of distributing a film can’t work up enthusiasm for it herself, how does she expect to successfully market it?

The City section also has an interesting follow-up article on a recent tour guide scandal – a guide abandoned a group of mainland tourists after they did not purchase enough garbage at some shop. The article says that the tour guides, who are working for tour agencies, are not paid a salary and frequently have to pay in advance for bus drivers and meals, and that the only way they can earn this money back and make some income is by conducting tours that consist primarily of taking people to places to shop where the guides receive commissions.

A guide confesses that he has told tour groups things such as “no accommodation for the night, or no meal, or they will be left in the middle of nowhere” if they don’t each spent a certain amount in these stores, and that he did this on orders from his “employer” (is it really an employer if it doesn’t pay you a salary?).

So apparently people are so hard up for work that they are willing to work for nothing in the hopes that they can bilk innocent people out of their hard earned money. And this is all legal.

And Hong Kong, a territory where the tourism industry represents a huge chunk of the economy, is now getting a reputation in China, our number one source for tourists, as a place that routinely rips off tourists.

And apparently the Travel Industry Council is okay with this, because when a tour guide abandoned his tour group, there was no fine, the company was not shut down; they “issued a warning letter.” Fuck me sideways.

While I’m pondering a post of a more personal nature, this bit from Think Progress caught my eye:

BUSH: We will stay the course. [8/30/06]

BUSH: We will stay the course, we will complete the job in Iraq. [8/4/05]

BUSH: We will stay the course until the job is done, Steve. And the temptation is to try to get the President or somebody to put a timetable on the definition of getting the job done. We’re just going to stay the course. [12/15/03]

BUSH: And my message today to those in Iraq is: We’ll stay the course. [4/13/04]

BUSH: And that’s why we’re going to stay the course in Iraq. And that’s why when we say something in Iraq, we’re going to do it. [4/16/04]

BUSH: And so we’ve got tough action in Iraq. But we will stay the course. [4/5/04]

Followed by:

STEPHANOPOULOS: James Baker says that he’s looking for something between “cut and run” and “stay the course.”

BUSH: Well, hey, listen, we’ve never been “stay the course,” George. We have been — we will complete the mission, we will do our job, and help achieve the goal, but we’re constantly adjusting to tactics. Constantly.

Part of the day spent at Shenzhen today. Didn’t venture too far beyond the Lo Wu shopping mall. This sign shows you that only the finest crap is available there:

Actually, inside, it seems like the hottest items right now are fake iPod Nanos and knock-off Sandisk SD cards.

I was hoping to go for a massage marathon. But then it occured to me that T might not be so comfortable with the experience. So I started to describe it to her in detail, and got no further than “Well, you go to a locker room, take off ALL your clothes, even your underwear, wrap a towel around yourself and go take a shower in a relatively open area.” Well, actually, I don’t know that the womens’ side is like that, but the mens’ side certainly is. And as soon as she heard this, she said no thank you.

So I figured I’d at least go for a foot massage within the shopping mall. At this spot, chosen at random, I had one of the best foot massages of my entire life, one hour for 30 RMB (about US$3.75). This guy knew exactly what he was doing, knew exactly where to put pressure and carefully watched my face each time to make sure he wasn’t going too far. He had a younger guy he was teaching, so it was a bit weird as the teacher would press on one leg and the student would feel around on my other leg for the proper spots! Nevertheless, I felt great after this and gave the guy 50, keep the change, he was well worth it. In typical Lo Wu fashion, I almost couldn’t enjoy the massage because for the first ten minutes I had a steady stream of people asking me if I wanted facial, shoulder massage, manicure, pedicure, start all over again. After tiring of constantly saying “pu yao, xie xie,” I’d just close my eyes and put a finger to my lips every time someone came by. Here’s the master and his student (and yes, that’s my skinny very white foot):

While I relaxed and enjoyed, T ran around the mall on her own, coming back with two pairs of shoes and a blouse. Our shopping together was funny – she knows a fair amount of Cantonese while I’m stronger at Mandarin, so the bargaining was taking place in three languages.

The Lo Wu mall is really oppressive. Shopkeepers stand outside of every shop and yell out their wares to you as you pass by, “Hello sir, missy, you want to buy t shirt, Rolley (sic) watch, bag, pants, pen, painting” not to forget all the people running up to you every second offering pirate DVDs and software. The yelling is bad enough, some of these people poke you to get your attention, a few actually grab you. On the other hand, the next time I need any bedsheets or towels, I think I’ll go here instead of Sogo or Wing On.

I much prefer the shopping malls around Dongmen, which is where Shenzhen residents shop – LoWu is for tourists and Hongkies. It’s quite telling that something like 90% of the Born to Shop Shenzhen book only covers Lo Wu. And this past Friday SCMP ran a single page guide to Shenzhen that aside from Lo Wu only mentioned the artists village – not even a line on the tacky theme parks near Overseas Chinese Town (the area itself is quite beautiful actually) or the mini-Wanchai over in the Shekou area.

The thing about Dongmen is that you don’t have to put up with the relentless touts, there’s a much wider choice of cheaper food and the shops only mark things up 100% instead of 300%.

Dongmen is just a 10 minute 1 yuan busride away (not sure if the new subway goes there or not) but sometimes I confess I’m just too lazy to go that one extra mile.

I almost forgot that HK now has vanity license plates, so my first spotting of one kind of caught me offguard. Here ’tis:

Last note, one of the DVDs I special ordered this week was Saturday Night Live – Best of Saturday TV Funhouse. These are short animations created for SNL by Robert Smigel, the guy behind Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, with co-writers including Stephen Colbert and Louis CK. Some of this stuff is great, like this clip which is also on Youtube, the “trailer” for “Bambi 2002.” “Walt Disney’s Bambi is going into the vault for 10 years, depriving your child or future children of a significant emotional milestone…”

Last night I had plans, so T made plans to go out with friends. My plans fell through but I told her to keep her plans and I’d find something else to do.

I found myself at Laguna, first time there in about two months. Actually 9 PM on Friday night, every place in Wanchai seemed busy, even places that are dead during the week – Swindler seemed to be handing out shrimp cocktails, Typhoon had their usual crowd, Big Ernies was busy, so it was no surprise that Laguna was also quite busy. Several girls tried their luck with me, but I told them I was there just to look.

Over to Dusk Till Dawn to hook up with buddy S, who was having dinner there. When he finished eating, we went back to Laguna, still busy. I ran into I, an Indonesian girl I’ve known for quite some time, someone who was high on my list when I was single but the timing just never worked out for the two of us.

She just returned from Indonesia. She’d left HK because, apparently, her roommate had stolen her mobile phone and passport (and god knows what else, because I says she’s in jail now). So she went back home, got a new passport, returned to HK and found that everyone else had moved out of the place where she was staying so all her stuff was gone. She said she found some Filipino girl who’d taken pity on her and let her move in; that she was in a rush to make quick money because she wanted to send money to her family in time for “Indonesian New Year.” I bought her a drink and she showed me a pill before she swallowed it, ecstasy, she said she was too shy without it. I looked over at S and we decided to get out of there and check out Neptune.

On the way over to Neptune, we ran into Sammy. Sammy, you might recall, was one of the long time managers at Neptune. He’d left, moved to Shanghai and opened a bar there, the bar went out of business within three months, he’d returned to HK and was working at Boracay, where he was miserably unhappy. He’s happy now, he and some friends have taken over Strawberrys, and the re-opening party will be on October 28th. They wanted to rename the place Hole-In-One, but the police didn’t like the word “hole”. He tried Hold-In-One, also no good. So it will now be called Galaxy.

I’d say the appropriate word for Neptune would be “mobbed.” We managed to find a seat at the bar and I proceeded to get quite wasted. Naturally I ran into a lot of people I knew and a lot of women who didn’t know me took their chances without much luck. Thoroughly wasted, I think I made it home around 3:30 or so.

There are just gonna be those times when I gotta go back and do the rounds in Wanchai, it was too big a part of my life for too long and there are times when I miss it. Last night definitely scratched that itch for awhile.

Later today we’re off to Shenzhen. I want to go for massage and would like T to join me on that, though right now she’s suggesting that I should go for massage alone and let her spend that time shopping for shoes. She’s also looking for DVDs of Korean TV series; she’d bought one set on Temple Street last week, some soap opera thing, watched all 8 discs in 3 days, gave it to my maid, who apparently has been staying up all night every night watching this. I’ve tried getting her to watch Sopranos and Seinfeld with no luck though right now she loves Ugly Betty and Heroes.

I’ve been a fan of Clint Eastwood’s for most of my life. If you look at his career in the 60s and 70s, he acted in a series of westerns and action films that helped define or redefine their various genres – Fistful of Dollars, The Good The Bad & The Ugly, Dirty Harry, High Plains Drifter, Outlaw Josey Wales. And there were a few ringers in there, movies that suggested that there might be more to Eastwood than met the eye, especially Play Misty For Me (his first film as a director, a May/December romance) and The Beguiled (gothic horror).

In the 80s, his star seemed to shine a little less brightly and yet there were projects that showed he was trying to reach further, though not always successfully – Honkytonk Man in particular. But if anyone tried to suggest to me prior to 1992 that he would end up being one of the GREAT American filmmakers, firmly in the pantheon with the Huston, Hawks, Chaplin, Ford, Capra, etc., I would have laughed. 1992 was the year of Unforgiven.

He still does the odd clunker (2002’s Blood Work was a horrendous mis-step) but his last two films have been Million Dollar Baby and Mystic River – remarkable for their emotional power and also for the moments of restraint when other directors might have gone over the top.

Clint is 76 years old and his latest film opens in the US this weekend. From the NY Times review of Flags of Our Fathers bu Manohla Dargis:

It seems hard to believe there is anything left to say about World War II that has not already been stated and restated, chewed, digested and spat out for your consideration and that of the Oscar voters. And yet here, at age 76, is Clint Eastwood saying something new and vital about the war in his new film, and here, too, is this great, gray battleship of a man and a movie icon saying something new and urgent about the uses of war and of the men who fight. “Flags of Our Fathers” concerns one of the most lethal encounters on that distant battlefield, but make no mistake: this is also a work of its own politically fraught moment.

Most war movies, even those that claim to be antiwar, overtly or implicitly embrace violence as either a political or cinematic means to an end. Few filmmakers can resist the thrill of the rocket’s red glare and the spectacle of death; the violence is simply too exciting. There are plenty of big bangs in “Flags of Our Fathers,” but because the screenplay, by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis, oscillates among three separate time frames — Iwo Jima, the bond tour and, less successfully, contemporary scenes involving Doc and his son — and because the flag raisers were pulled off the field before fighting ended, the violence of their war remains at a frenzied pitch. It doesn’t build, evolve, recede; it terrifies and keeps terrifying.

If “Flags of Our Fathers” feels so unlike most war movies and sounds so contrary to the usual political rhetoric, it is not because it affirms that war is hell, which it does with unblinking, graphic brutality. It’s because Mr. Eastwood insists, with a moral certitude that is all too rare in our movies, that we extract an unspeakable cost when we ask men to kill other men. There is never any doubt in the film that the country needed to fight this war, that it was necessary; it is the horror at such necessity that defines “Flags of Our Fathers,” not exultation.

Where “Saving Private Ryan” offers technique, Mr. Eastwood’s film suggests metaphysics. Once again, he takes us into the heart of violence and into the hearts of men, seeing where they converge under a night sky as brightly lighted with explosions as any Fourth of July nocturne and in caves where some soldiers are tortured to death and others surrender to madness. He gives us men whose failings are evidence of their humanity and who are, contrary to our revolted sensitivities, no less human because they kill.

One view of Mr. Eastwood is that he has mellowed with age, or at least begun to take serious measure of the violence that has been an animating force in many of his films. In truth, the critical establishment caught up with the director, who for decades has been building a fascinating body of work that considers annihilating violence as a condition of the American character, not an aberration. “Flags of Our Fathers” is an imperfect addition to that body of work, though its flaws are minor and finally irrelevant in a film in which ambivalence and ambiguity are constituent of a worldview, not an aftereffect. Notably, Mr. Eastwood’s next film, “Letters From Iwo Jima,” set to open early next year, revisits the same battle, this time from the point of view of the Japanese.

I suppose in any major city in the world (and some minor ones) you’re going to see poor and old people going around, going through garbage cans, pulling out whatever is recyclable, and then bringing it to some recycling center to get a few pennies per ton to help them buy food, shelter, drugs, sex, whatever. In Hong Kong, it’s one of the cornerstones of the Donald’s social welfare and pollution policies.

I work at Taikoo Place, a Swire-owned complex of a dozen or so office buildings. They’re all non-smoking (except for the restaurants) so there are always lots of people gathered around the ashtrays at the various entrances. I haven’t really checked, but I suspect a lot of these people are smokers like T, who never smokes a cigarette more than halfway down.

Enter Butt-man. I see this guy almost every day. He’s in his 50s or 60s, I suppose and I guess he lives in neighboring Taikoo Shing. He’s about 5 feet tall and 5 feet around. Every day he wears the same clothes – a formerly-white sleeveless undershirt, black shorts and black sneakers. He carries a small plastic bag.

Every afternoon, he makes the rounds of each garbage can around Taikoo Place. He inspects each cigarette butt in each ashtray. If the butt has been smoked all the way down to the filter, he puts it back in the tray. But if there’s a quarter inch of smokable cigarette left, he puts it in the bag.

And this guy really scares me.

After all, I’m a heavy smoker. And I know what germs are in my body and can guess which ones are passed along to the cigarette butt. Buddha alone knows what germs are in the bodies of the other tens of thousands of people in these buildings. The Cosmic Muffin alone knows what this guy risks catching every day in order to continue his habit of smoking for free.

So one reason I’m scared is because I have no idea what diseases this guy might have. Another reason is because he’s still walking around every day and maybe that means he can’t catch any of our diseases and he’s really an extra-terrestrial or belongs on the show Heroes.

The concept of going up to someone who’s standing there smoking and saying, “yo, dude, got a spare fag?” must have eluded him.

(Back in my college days, I knew this guy, his name was Mickey Jackson. Heaven help anyone who called him “Michael.” Mickey didn’t go to our school but liked to party at our dorm and he kind of knew me because we both used to hang out with David Peel in the East Village, so he’d often spend the night on my floor – sometimes alone, sometimes not. Mickey was big and Mickey was black and he had a huge jetblack Great Dane named Shaft. If you didn’t know him, he looked like a really scary guy, with or without the dog. So he’d go up to people, ask for a cigarette, and 9 times out of 10 he’d end up with the entire pack. He’d smoke one, decide he didn’t like it, and leave the rest of the pack for me. And that’s how I kinda ended up being a smoker ….)