I’ve started another blog, Spike’s Zippos, to catalog my Zippo lighter collection. Yes, probably of very limited interest, but what the hey. I probably have somewhere around 100 of these things, and I’ll update the blog as the photographing of them moves along. Here’s a sample from the first post, one of three limited numbered edition lighters from the H.R. Giger collection.

H.R. Giger is of course the Swiss artist who did the design of the alien in the Alien film series. He’s also done album covers for ELP, Blondie and others.

I have three of these limited Japanese Zippos – numbered limited edition – although I have two of the same one for some reason. Click on any image to see the full sized photo.

Here’s the first one:

This is the second one:

And here is the third, same type as the first:

Tops of the boxes, showing catalog numbers:

Sides of the boxes:

Each lighter is packaged with this book published by Taschen:

Tonight’s film, The Wrestler.

For director Darren Aronofsky, it marks a major return to form after the ridiculous The Fountain. (His next film apparently, will be a remake of Robo-Cop. Sigh.). Not to mention going from working with Hugh Jackman to Mickey Rourke.

Shot almost entirely with handheld cameras and also apparently mostly on location – if it has a documentary feel to it, in no small part that’s because cinematographer Maryse Alberti also shot Gonzo, Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and other notable non fiction films.

The film is a throwback to the 70s style of film that was centered more around character than plot. And that’s a good thing because the plot, what little there is of it, is an old story and told in a relatively predictable fashion. There are no surprises, no plot twists, the film goes pretty much exactly where you expect it to go. But it never bogs down and rarely seems to drag. The whole thing works because the characters are convincing and two of the three lead actors are amazing.

Mickey Rourke is every bit as amazing as you’ve no doubt already heard. Rourke was once handsome leading man material, then he destroyed his face by spending years in professional boxing, and has been effecting something of a comeback lately, following the time honored path of being very good in small roles. So it goes almost without saying that he grasps what it feels like to play a professional wrestler who was big 20 years ago and now lives alone in a trailer, wrestling for pocket change on weekends and working in a grocery store during the week.

Marisa Tomei’s role also seems to be a metaphor for her career. After winning an Oscar in 1992, she followed that up with a series of increasingly forgettable roles. She’s 44 years old now, playing a stripper who’s 44 years old, dancing on stage, maybe thinking about the days when she was younger and guys were lined up for private dances but now mostly thinking about her son and getting enough money to move someplace where the schools are better. Her performance is every bit as fearless as Rourke’s and not merely because she spends about half her time on screen topless. And one thing that comes across is that Randy the Ram and Cassidy may be stereotypes in their public personas but offstage each is very real. Maybe they weren’t smart when they were young, but age and experience has brought them both some degree of wisdom, kindness and even gentility.

I suppose at some level Aronofsky and writer Robert Siegel are comparing wrestling and stripping – the chemically or surgically enhanced bodies, some real blood and some real sex on display but at the end it’s all scripted, all an illusion that many gladly pay for and that some prefer to think is real. I guess you could say movies are like that, too. And many of us reach a point in our lives where we find we’re only good at doing one thing but people aren’t so interested in seeing us do that one thing any more. Where do we go from there? What do we do next?

The Wrestler doesn’t really answer those questions. Because for everyone the answer is different.

Go see this film if you want to see a great character piece and some terrific acting. Don’t go see this film thinking it’s Saturday night thrills ‘n spills. See it for Rourke and Tomei, both may never have a chance to be this good again.

Both the SCMP and the Standard have articles today about the closing of 60 year old Lok Heung Yuen Coffee Shop in Central. The SCMP notes the current monthly rent at $128,000 while the Standard pegs it at $120,000. Both note that the restaurant is closing because the landlord raised the rent to … wait for it … $360,000. Both articles manage to interview the same customer and the owner.

The Standard notes that the scumlord may have already signed a contract with a new tenant and so raised the rent to a ridiculous price in order to force the restaurant out. There is no comment about whether such unscrupulous activity, if true, is legal.

And neither article mentions the name of the scumlord. Did both reporters forget to ask? Or are the newspapers shielding the rich?

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The Standard also reports that the MTR will now be charging senior citizens only $2 to ride the trains – but only on Wednesdays and public holidays. Last year they got the $2 fare on Sundays and public holidays. I guess that the seniors actually took advantage of the discount fare on Sundays so the MTR changed it to a day when less people would use it. Nitwits.

I’ve just fallen down a flight of stairs. My fault for wearing socks on waxed wood floors and not paying attention. I hurt my right ankle, my right butt cheek, my left wrist. Nothing seems to be broken but I’m aching all over.

The reason for being distracted? The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

To digress a bit, we’re hitting Oscar season. And that means that the studios are sending out DVD screeners of the films they hope to see nominated. And some of those DVDs end up in the “wrong” hands and from there end up on the internet. So far I’ve managed to find Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, part 1 of Soderburgh’s presumably epic biography of Che, The Wrestler and Bill Maher’s Religulous. More are sure to follow. There is no doubt that I’d prefer to see these on a big screen, but while all have opened in the US, none have yet played in HK and perhaps some of these never will.

So, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Based on, more more correctly inspired by a 25 page short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, CCBB runs almost 2 hours and 40 minutes. It’s directed by David Fincher (Zodiac, Seven, Fight Club) and I’m increasingly convinced that Fincher is one of our greatest directors. In no small part because he’s taken something so potentially trifling and meaningless and made it into a movie that you can’t stop watching, even as you’re left wondering at the end what it actually means.

The story is pure fantasy. In 1918, Benjamin Button is born as a 70 year old man. It’s not a spoiler to tell you that as the movie progresses, he gets younger and younger until eventually, a baby, he dies. Would you be surprised to learn that screenwriter Eric Roth also wrote Forrest Gump?

But Button, played by Brad Pitt, is no Gump. Apart from this one medical oddity, which is never explained, he lives a resolutely ordinary life. He does no great deeds, he crosses paths with no famous people. He has one great romance in his life, with Daisy, played by Cate Blanchett. And while people are talking about an Oscar for Pitt, if any actor should get one for this film, it’s clearly Blanchett. (Tilda Swinton is also quite memorable, as always.)

Blanchett is an old woman in her 80s, lying in a hospital bed in New Orleans as Katrina approaches. Just as we watch Button un-age from 70s down to a baby, we follow her from 5 years old until her deathbed. She asks her daughter to read from a diary that she’s brought to the hospital, and from there Button’s tale unfolds. It’s the improbable and incredibly romantic relationship between Benjamin and Daisy that forms the emotional center of the film.

When it’s all over, I’m left thinking, okay, it’s a metaphor, but a metaphor for what? It’s a fable with a moral, but what’s the moral? I honestly don’t know. It’s epic and it’s intimate at the same time; it rarely felt overlong or forced or boring; the special effects are groundbreaking; it’s going to keep me thinking about it and I expect it to reveal itself further with more viewings.
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Religulous, Bill Maher’s attempt to attack organized religion, directed by Larry Charles (director of Borat) left me cold. I don’t disagree with anything Maher says, I just don’t like his approach to it. He rarely sits down with anyone who are prepared to conduct an actual debate with him, mostly a collection of frauds and charlatans – and if some preacher declares himself to be the actual Second Coming, in what way does that discredit the religion as a whole? What does he hope to gain by debating the finer points of Christianity with truck drivers at some tiny road side church (who treat him with far more respect that many others in the film)? He hits us over the head repeatedly with his thesis that the tenets of religions are illogical and that a lot of bad things have been done in their name. He attacks Christianity, Islam and, to a lesser extent, Judaism, almost completely ignoring Hinduism and Buddhism. But he doesn’t seem to have anywhere to go after that except to say that nuclear war and pollution may destroy the planet and in the end, he’s just preaching to the converted.

This in depth article in the New York Times provides a behind-the-scenes look at how Washington Mutual Bank, more than 100 years old, was driven into the ground by their policy of approving almost any loan request.

“It was a disgrace,” said Dana Zweibel, a former financial representative at a WaMu branch in Tampa, Fla. “We were giving loans to people that never should have had loans.”

If Ms. Zweibel doubted whether customers could pay, supervisors directed her to keep selling, she said.

“We were told from up above that that’s not our concern,” she said. “Our concern is just to write the loan.”

……..

On another occasion, Ms. Zaback asked a loan officer for verification of an applicant’s assets. The officer sent a letter from a bank showing a balance of about $150,000 in the borrower’s account, she recalled. But when Ms. Zaback called the bank to confirm, she was told the balance was only $5,000.

The loan officer yelled at her, Ms. Zaback recalled. “She said, ‘We don’t call the bank to verify.’ ” Ms. Zaback said she told Mr. Parsons that she no longer wanted to work with that loan officer, but he replied: “Too bad.”

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Parsons disappeared from the office. Ms. Zaback later learned of his arrest for burglary and drug possession.

But this represents just a symptom, not the disease. Clearly most banks were acting this way, just not to the extreme represented by WaMu.

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Ever since Apple approved a sort of “mature audiences” label for iPhone apps, there’s been an explosion in applications that make fart sounds, more than 20 variations on a theme. Via All Things Digital, the developer of iFart Mobile writes:

But I had a hunch that Christmas Eve and Christmas Day would be higher. How much higher was anyone’s guess.

All I knew was that a lot of people would be getting iPhones and iPod Touch MP3 players on Christmas Day.

Christmas came a day early for us. On 12/24, my jaw hit the floor when I checked my stats.

We sold 19520 units, providing $13364 in net income after Apple takes their cut.

I now knew that Christmas Day would be bigger than I would have imagined.

I made sure I was sitting down before I checked my day-after-Christmas stats.

It was a good thing.

On Christmas Day, 38,927 people purchased iFart Mobile.

Thirty-eight thousand nine-hundred and twenty seven.

Wow.

Thats $27,249 net.

Them’s US dollars folks, not Hong Kong.

iFart Mobile is currently the #1 best selling paid iPhone application. It sells for 99 cents. And the guy netted 27 grand in under a month. I think I need to download the SDK and come up with some silly but attention-grabbing concept myself. I’ve got an idea or two ….
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Along with the recent passings of Harold Pinter and Eartha Kitt, I was especially sad to note the death of Delaney Bramlett at age 69.

Bramlett, together with his then-wife Bonnie (reputedly the only white woman to be a member of Ike & Tina Turner’s Ikettes) led the influential Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, a group that at one point included Eric Clapton, George Harrison and Dave Mason amongst its members.

I saw Delaney & Bonnie (with Clapton) at the Fillmore East in NYC. Somehow we’d managed 8th row center seats (which meant that this incredibly cute blonde who’d snuck up from the back rows sat on my lap for the entire concert). Opening the bill was Wilbert “Kansas City” Harrison, doing some bizarro one man band thing. Next was Seals & Crofts, long before they’d had any hits. And then Delaney & Bonnie. Without taking any drugs, their southern/gospel/blues/folk/r&b hybrid left me feeling higher than I’d ever felt before, a simply amazing show, very similar to the one on the “On Tour” album. I’d also highly recommend “Motel Shot,” an acoustic album that came along long before the term “unplugged” was coined.

Delaney also wrote or co-wrote some hits that have become standards – Superstar, Neverending Song of Love, Let It Rain. Bramlett didn’t enjoy commercial success after he and his wife split up in 1973 but he continued to pursue an active career, releasing what will now be his final album of new material this year. Any collection of rock albums is incomplete without “On Tour With Eric Clapton.”

Stayed pretty much close to home for my 5 days off. Didn’t do too much but now that it’s Sunday night, seems as if the days just flew by. Let’s see ….

Wednesday night – drinking in Wanchai, gf got extremely drunk, 3 of us carried her to the car, but only me to carry her from the car to the house.

Thursday – recovery day. Dinner at Sai Kung waterfront, lobsters, prawn, clams.

Friday – shop till you drop. But first, lunch at the best wonton noodle shop in the entire world – hadn’t been there in awhile but they’re still there, the wontons are still amazing, and a bowl of wonton noodle soup is still just $16. (Middle of Stanley Street, hole in the wall joint, no English name.) I got a light box on Stanley Street, planning on using it to photograph my collections of Zippo Lighters and Hard Rock Cafe pins (2 more blogs coming to hold this stuff). But wasn’t till I got home that I realized the lens on my DSLR doesn’t have macro capability, so perhaps during the week ahead will look to get a wide angle/macro zoom. GF spent an hour in H&M while I spent an hour on the street watching the girls go by and checking my watch.

Neither Dymocks nor Page One had Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything, 10th anniversary revised edition” – guess he’s not famous enough here to have his books imported so file away for next Amazon order. Finished off Times Square by buying several steaks at City Super (dry aged U.S. black angus ribeye and striploin).

Saturday – resting my feet. A friend joins us for dinner, I barbecue steak and corn, our helper whips up (literally) a batch of mashed potatoes. The City Super steaks were frigging expensive but the taste was unbelievable – and fortunately I cooked them exactly right, charred on the outside, rare and juicy on the inside. I’d put plenty of kosher salt and pepper on them before grilling – once done I thought they were fine as is but my gf practically covered hers in the chili sauce we’d bought at the wonton noodle shop the day before – she claimed she could still taste how good the steak was but I think she was jiving me. At any rate, age old lesson confirmed, start with great ingredients, don’t fuss with them too much, you’re gonna enjoy.

Sunday – spring cleaning in winter – going through old boxes piled in the hallways, discovering artifacts from my life that I forgot even existed. I’ve got my father’s junior high school, high school and college diplomas – do I really need to save these? Old Playbills from Broadway shows I saw – including Waiting for Godot with Steve Martin and Robin Williams; Speed the Plow with Madonna; Pirates of Penzance with Linda Ronstadt – could this stuff be worth decent coin on eBay? How’s about the program/magazine from the 1973 Star Trek convention in NYC? Old Fillmore program books. Pages torn out of Billboard with my name underlined. Issues of Trouser Press with record reviews I wrote. I need to organize this stuff. Relaxing dinner at Cru, always dependable, still warm enough to sit outside and SK town is quiet at 9 on a Sunday night. Cru has a roast turkey dinner special, and I never order turkey but this time I did – turkey, ham, stuffing, mashed potato, baby asparagus, broccoli, carrots, tomato, baby corn, gravy for HK$155, not too bad a deal. Noticed that the new Japanese restaurant in the town square has a sign that says “Shushi Bar” – need to get a pic of that. Planning a trip around Chinese New Year – thinking 10 days in Vietnam, Vietnamese sandwiches, pho, bun cha.

And, well, it’s Monday already. Back to work, short week, another long weekend coming up ….

Lost my HSBC SecurID, which is needed for logging into internet banking. Got the new one in the mail along with a letter. The letter explains that I need to log on using my old SecurID before I can use the new one. Right.

Reading on the letter has the phone number I can call to activate the new gadget if I lost the old one. The letter is dated 5 days ago. The phone number has since changed to a new number to offer me better service. I know this because when I called the phone number in the letter, I had to listen to a 2 minute explanation in Cantonese before getting the English explanation. The recording offers to transfer me to the new number if I press “1.” Oh good.

Get transferred to the new number. Navigate the bewildering maze of menu options. Have to listen to a 2 minute recording about how to use the SecurID before I can press “O” to talk to a human being.

Said human being asks for my name and pertinent ID information and then informs me that their system is down and they can call me back later. Why did she ask for all that info if she couldn’t do anything?

An hour later, the phone call, SecurID is activated.
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Going through boxes taking space in the hall, coming across old papers. Bills from 1996 – that I shipped from HK to SF and back again. The instruction manual for the cable TV box when I lived in SF, that I shipped to HK. And so on.

Then something I knew I had but had no idea where. My grandfather’s (father’s side) passport. From 1928. Born in 1877 in “Austria, now Roumania” written in pencil. I never knew my grandfather – he died before my parents met. There’s a photo. A stern expression, round glasses, suit, tie & overcoat. 5 feet 8 inches tall, blonde hair, gray eyes. Do I see myself in him? A little.

The oddest thing about this … one of those mysteries of life that no one living can answer. I know the family name is Fiedler. I know my grandfather changed it when he came to the U.S. (According to my father, he was a cabin boy on a German cruise ship, jumped ship when it reached the US, swam to shore and changed his name. I have never believed that story.) My grandfather’s surname is different from my father’s. A slight variation in spelling. A ‘u’ instead of an ‘e,’ an ‘l’ instead of an ‘r.’ How did we get from his name to my father’s name? I’ll never know.

Hmmm, visas for Germany, Romania, Poland. Entry stamps for several eastern European countries. Transited France in April 1928 – guess he arrived by boat and then traveled by train. Left France again, back to New York, in September. Visiting family?

“Applications for passports by persons in the Virgin Islands, Hawaii, Porto Rico, Guam, or the Philippines, should be made to the chief executives of those islands.”

“The fee for a passport, including one dollar for the execution of the application and nine dollars for the passport, is $10.00.”

Anyone know if there are any places in HK that sell Frye boots? Dug out my one old pair of Frye’s to wear on Xmas eve and couldn’t even get them on. Kind of worn inside but it looks like it says they are size 8-1/2 … and I wear size 11. How long have I had these?
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Xmas eve was actually not that good a night. Out with friends and my gf decided it was a good night to get drunk. And she decided it was a good night to mix her liquor – vodka, tequila, beer – meaning that by midnight she was in the toilet puking her guts out and shortly after that three of us had to carry her to the car – had no help in getting her from the car to the house though.

But Xmas day was one of those days that I really enjoy being here. In the US, the traditional Christmas day meal for Jews is Chinese food – and that’s not a problem here! (The reason is that decades ago, Jews would want to get out of the house on Xmas day to get away from all the Xmas shows on TV and the only restaurants that were open in those days were Chinese restaurants. And now it’s a tradition.)

Decided to do the tourist thing – 5 minutes into Sai Kung town, waterfront seafood restaurant. The waitress (who was at least my age) kept calling me “handsome boy.” Okay ….

One lobster steamed and covered in garlic, a pound or two of clams in black bean and chili sauce, another pound or so of steamed prawns, dau miu stir fried in garlic, fried rice with salted fish. Sitting outside because the weather was really fine, watching the parade of people passing by (and a cute girl at the next table wearing Ugg boots, leg warmers and gym shorts)(and a group of girls dressed like Japanese cos-players – wish I’d had my camera).

Just thinking to myself how nice it is that I’m living minutes away from this funky little town that offers so much choice on just three short streets, country living on a mountainside with a sea view, less than 45 minute commute to the office …. sometimes I really appreciate Hong Kong. So it’s not Thanksgiving but I found myself thinking about how thankful I am for the way things have turned out.

On the other hand, today is one of those days when I’m sitting around, kind of bored, no idea what I want to do.
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Having now played around with the WD TV box a bit, I’m mostly pleased.

It can play all the MKV files that my previous box didn’t. It’s been kind of hit and miss with displaying subtitles, but still an improvement over what I had before.

Came across this one odd bug – it has this built in “media library” thingie in which it scans and saves metadata for any disks attached to the box. Straight out of the box, the media library is turned on. I later found it in the menus and switched it off.

So here’s the bug. I unplugged the USB drive, added new files, and in one particular directory did a mass renaming of the files in there. Plugged the drive back into the box and went to that directory. All the box “saw” was the old file list, now reporting that each file was only 0 kb in size. I had to turn media library back on to force a rescan of the disk. Following that, it worked just fine.

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A new watch from the good folks at Tokyo Flash.

I like the black one. They won’t ship to Hong Kong. The only place I know that sells Tokyo Flash watches in HK is at Delay No Mall and they don’t seem to have the latest models.

Yeah, because on a grey day like today, all I can think about is shopping.

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Well, it’s not quite all I can think about. I’ll leave you with the former Mrs. Salman Rushdie and current host of Top Chef, Padma Lakshmi.

From CrunchGear – this is a solar battery charger. Comes with two batteries, a solar charger cell and can be plugged into the wall to charge those batteries if there’s no light available. It has a USB out, which means it can then be used to plug almost anything that charges via USB (iphone, blackberry, etc.). Don’t know what the actual charging output is, but it will “debut” shortly at CES and then sell in the US for $50. Could be a handy little toy.

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If you’re traveling through London, more specifically Heathrow Terminal 5, Gordon Ramsay’s got his own take on fast food and take away in the terminal, called Gordon Ramsay’s Plane Food. As reported on Serious Eats, you can get a 3 course meal in an insulated bag for 12 pounds. And it looks like this:

and this:

In other words, a definite step up from economy class food.

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Here is something I am buying later today, Western Digital’s WD TV. I’ve bought units like this before – generally a box that you slip a hard disk into and then connect up to your TV and/or stereo, allowing you to watch media you’ve downloaded on your home entertainment center rather than on your computer.

Previous boxes I’ve owned all come from Korean companies that went out of business rather rapidly – which translates to no firmware updates. The current box I’m using can’t handle MKV files and can’t deal with subtitles on AVI files. And as it happens, the remote is on the same frequency as my NOW TV set-top box, which as you can imagine is a pain.

The WD box is different in that you don’t slide a hard disk in, you can connect any USB storage device. (They’d like you to use a WD one but you don’t have to.) And it handles all those options with a variety of outputs including HDMI at resolutions up to 1080p. And since this is Western Digital, hopefully they won’t go out of business in six months and I can get ongoing support and updates. Costs between HK$800-HK$900. Here’s CrunchGear’s review.

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The new must-have free iPhone app? Pundits are saying it’s Animoto, which takes the photos on your iPhone and turns them not just into slide shows, it turns them into music videos. Free. Will try it over the weekend.

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Here’s another free iPhone app that could be quite useful to us …. Shizhi converts Chinese measurements to western ones. I can never remember how big a catty is supposed to be (and of course it’s always different, especially if you’re a gweilo).

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Last but not least for now, I know this looks like a photo taken in Fenwick’s, but actually it’s the otherwise talentless Pussycat Dolls. Lead singer Nicole Scherzinger (center) is half Filipino.

TTFN!