What else could have gone wrong? Ah yes, T returned to HK. Although she had gone to the Chinese embassy in Bangkok and received a three month visa, on arrival in HK she was pulled off the line, interviewed in one of those little rooms and at the end given just two weeks instead of three months. Despite the fact that she was carrying a letter from me, a copy of my HK ID card and a stack of photos of the two of us taken at different times, at different locations, with different groups of friends. She asked the immigration guy to call me to verify the information but he refused. He advised her to tell me that I should get my company to provide her with an HK ID card, and of course there’s no chance my company would agree to anything like that. For those of you who are new to this ongoing saga, marriage is not a possibility. I do have some other ideas but they will take some time to try.

As you can imagine, this put her in a lousy mood. All she wanted to do was go out and get smashed and I’m in no condition for that, so she went and drank with her fake aunt.

I stayed home and watched Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center.” I don’t think that anyone expected such an apolitical film from the usually opinionated Mr. Stone and in that sense I think he did exactly the right thing. Yet by giving the movie this title, one expected a sweeping panorama of the entire event. I already knew from the reviews that this was not it – the film focuses in on two Port Authority policemen who were trapped under the rubble and their families, waiting for word in their suburban homes. Which means the definitive account of the event has yet to be made and I’m sure there will be many attempts to do it. In the meantime, this is excellent film making and shows that even Nicolas Cage can be non-annoying when working with the right part and the right director.

T came back early, very smashed. Subsequent conversation included her wondering if I got the flu because I’d gone with other girls while she was away. I waited for her to be sober this morning before telling her that I hadn’t been with anyone else and that after a couple of operations, my resistance to germs was down and that’s why I got sick. Not sure if that’s the reason but the truth is that while she was away, while I was hitting the bars, I was also being faithful (which as many of you know is not something I’m normally good at but this time I was).

At any rate, today, the combination of vitamins, cold pills, lots of fluids, healthy eating means I’m starting to feel better. Two doctor appointments set for this week and the Seoul trip rescheduled for the following week.

Other distractions:

Something that caught my eye on Gizmodo this morning:

According to a recent report by In-Stat, over 15% of people carry two wireless phones. Other findings include:

80% camera phone users say they regularly carry their digital camera
75% of SmartPhone users say they also carry a PDA
>50% of users of multimedia phones also carry their MP3 player.
Just 43% of the respondents thought a smart phone could offer higher productivity.

Guilty as charged. My standard “day-pack” now includes a Treo 750v, a Blackberry 8707g, an iPod (either the 2G nano or 5G 60 gig), a camera (either a Canon Ixus 800IS or Nikon D80). It all gets shoved either into a 7 year old Oakley knapsack or a one year old fake British Army, fake leather shoulder bag (which one of my staff referred to as a “man purse”).

Okay – two phones because the Blackberry is supplied by my company and I’m not supposed to use it for personal calls or messaging, and I certainly don’t want my private life showing up on the corporate server, waiting for some admin with nothing better to do to start going through my logs. My personal phone is a smart phone because I do too much SMS’ing for a 12 digit keypad and there are a number of apps I have grown dependent on (HanDbase, WorldMate, multi-language dictionaries, a couple of games).

The iPod and the camera because neither phone does a good enough job of playing music or taking photos to replace those – and if they did, then battery life would start to become a major concern I’m sure.

It’s worse when I travel because I have all of the above plus my laptop, plus Altec-Lansing InMotion speakers for the iPod, plus a charger for each and assorted plug adapters depending on where I’m going. All of the chargers and adapters, a mouse and assorted cables, go into a small bag (which no longer has space for the laptop charger).

Speaking of tech, the Chicago Sun-Times puts into print what we all could have guessed:

Microsoft’s new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful. I’ve spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face.

“Avoid,” is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that’s so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity.

The setup process stands among the very worst experiences I’ve ever had with digital music players. The installer app failed, and an hour into the ordeal, I found myself asking my office goldfish, “Has it really come to this? Am I really about to manually create and install a .dll file?”

The Zune is a complete, humiliating failure….Result: The Zune will be dead and gone within six months. Good riddance.

Check this out. From ebay, a Playstation 3 sold for 99 cents.

From the NY Times, an article on the glut of new and reissued recordings by Philip Glass. One thing I love about Glass, aside from his music, is the fact that in his early days, he supported himself by being a NYC taxi driver. And back when I was a NYC taxi driver, I once got into a heated argument with a passenger over whether or not what he was doing was “music.” My first wife and I went to the NY premiere of Satyagraha, his opera on the life of Gandhi in South Africa, which was sung in Sanskrit. I remember sitting there thinking that the combination of the music and the staging was the most transcendent experience I’d ever had in a theater. I looked over at my wife, she noticed me looking at her and whispered to me, “I’m going to get you for this.”

Politics now, then some sex. The NY Times reports:

The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded.

The report offers little hope that much can be done, at least soon, to choke off insurgent revenues. For one thing, it acknowledges how little the American authorities in Iraq know — three and a half years after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein — about crucial aspects of insurgent operations. For another, it paints an almost despairing picture of the Iraqi government’s ability, or willingness, to take steps to tamp down the insurgency’s financing.

And this:

Defying a government curfew, Shiite militiamen stormed Sunni mosques in Baghdad and a nearby city on Friday, shooting guards and burning down buildings in apparent retaliation for the devastating bombings that killed more than 200 people the day before in the capital’s largest Shiite district, residents and police officials said.

Militia fighters drove through neighborhoods in Baghdad and the provincial capital of Baquba, firing at mosques with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades on the Muslim day of prayer.

Similarly from the LA Times:

Iraq’s civil war worsened Friday as Shiite and Sunni Arabs engaged in retaliatory attacks after coordinated car bombings that killed more than 200 people in a Shiite neighborhood the day before. A main Shiite political faction threatened to quit the government, a move that probably would cause its collapse and plunge the nation deeper into disarray.

The massacre Thursday in Sadr City — a stronghold of Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr and his Al Mahdi militia — sparked attacks around the country, reinforced doubts about the effectiveness of the Iraqi government and U.S. military and emboldened Shiite vigilantes.

In a sermon Friday, Sadr, a strong opponent of the United States, said the Pentagon’s refusal to grant full control of Iraqi security forces to the Baghdad government was leaving the populace vulnerable to insurgent attacks.

And as Sadr’s militiamen took matters into their own hands in battles with Sunni Arabs, his political representatives demanded that Prime Minister Nouri Maliki signal his displeasure with the U.S. military occupation by canceling a meeting with President Bush next week in Jordan.

The U.S. government continues to insist that Iraq is not in the midst of a civil war.

Last, some sex stuff:

Everyone is posting this recent picture of Salma Hayek. But just in case you missed, here it is as a public service for my readers.

Also getting posted everywhere are new nudes of Courtney Love published in Pop Magazine (obviously NSFW). Okay, her life is a series of trainwrecks and she’s had ‘em done (several times) but for 42 years old? Not bad.

One other NSFW recommendation which I keep forgetting to add to my blogroll is Tokyo Undressed. “A concept series project by artist/photographer Rikki Kasso.” Mostly very NSFW, despite the two pictures I’ve put below. Also very artistic.