Found via Twitter – Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, the entire Great Lebowski script redone a la Shakespeare.

Speaking of Dudes-with-a-capital-D, CNNGo claims that His Bobness, The Great Zimmy, Bob Dylan will be gracing a stage in Hong Kong on April 8th.  I don’t know if he’s ever played Hong Kong before, I suspect the answer would be no.  They also say that he will be playing Beijing and Shanghai.  That seems a little bit suspect to me.  I’m sure Chinese authorities would present him a list in advance of songs that he would not be permitted to perform and aside from that list being quite long, he doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who would go along with that. (“Wait, you’re telling me that the only song I can do is ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ and I gotta change the lyrics to ‘Gotta Serve The Party’?”)

At any rate, thinking to myself, well, Barry Goldberg was my piano teacher back when Dylan produced one of Goldberg’s solo albums (actually it’s the only non-Dylan album that Dylan ever produced).  Barry kept saying he was going to introduce us but it never happened.  And I have a buddy from back in my college days who is a good friend of Dylan’s and writes most of the copy for Theme Time Radio Hour.  Wonder if I can get an interview – what do you ask the man who has been asked everything 1,000 times? – or a photo pass?

UPDATE – I am informed by a reliable source that Dylan performed in HK in 1994.  Welcome back Bob!

This is ironic.  The NY Times is carrying a Reuters report that American software company Cybersitter LLC is suing “China, several major PC makers and two Chinese software makers for $2.2 billion.”  The reason?  They say that China stole 3,000 lines of their software code to create the Green Dam internet filtering software that China tried to implement last year.

1 – Green Dam was generally proven to be a piece of shit that didn’t do what it was supposed to do.  Why would anyone want to publicize that their code was at the base of it?  Though I suppose if they were to actually win 2 billion bucks, they could shut down the company, retire and tell the world to kiss their collective butts.

2 – So nice that China, in an effort to enforce their laws, does so by stealing.  (If true.)

Perhaps the funniest and most appropriate part of the report is a typo about half way down the piece.  After correctly referring to the software as “Green Dam” twice, in the 7th paragraph the reporter (or editor) calls it “Green Damn.”

But I mean that in the best possible way.

There’s the Google phone (hey, the PKD estate is suing Google for calling it the Nexus).  The Kindle DX is now international.  Apple will probably announce some kind of tablet computer later this month.  And the Consumer Electronics Show has just gotten under way in Vegas.

Of course the CES is showing a lot of gear that will be released in the coming months.  Some of the camera companies have been announcing new stuff all week – Panasonic, Canon, Samsung, etc.  Of course I’m anxiously awaiting any Nikon announcements – in particular if when there will be a successor to the D700 and what that might be.

There are two bigger themes at CES that will have a bigger impact beyond a new point and shoot camera.

The first is 3D for the home.  Hardware companies will be discussing initial offerings and some US cable companies, such as ESPN, have also announced some plans for 3D programming.  In Hong Kong, 3D is sure to lag behind.  HD offerings are pretty poor so far; then again most regular offerings are pretty poor.

The second comes to us from the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem.  This is a consortium consisting of most, but not all, Hollywood studios and some of the major hardware and software companies.  They are trying to devise a unified DRM solution for video downloads – one that will finally allow for portability between devices and platforms.   With content owners finally waking up to the fact that physical distribution is dying and that people who buy a movie only want to buy it once and then watch it on their computer, their living room TV, their laptop and/or their phone, this could have a huge impact if they get it out the door.

Browsing Thursday’s SCMP.

In all seriousness, this worries the piss out of me.  Following a New Year’s Day rally in which three people were injured, the top Beijing official in Hong Kong, Peng Qinghua, has warned:

The city would not tolerate radical demonstrations.

Who can say what he means by “would not tolerate.”  How far will Beijing go to ensure “harmony” in Hong Kong?  Further down the page they report that Cheng Yiu-Tong, a trade unionist with a seat on Exco,  “noted that radical protesters were in the minority. ‘If the majority of people are like that, Beijing will have to send troops here,’ he said.”

This is how it starts folks, not with a bang but with a whimper.  And the worst part?  This is how it is.  Hong Kong is a part of a country where the majority feel that brutal oppression in order to maintain the status quo is just hunky dory, and the majority of the population seems to believe, “as long as I’m getting rich, fuck everyone else.”

In the same article, the reporters engage in a bit of editorializing:

But this may be the face of the future, whatever Cheng or Peng say. A generation galvanised by a sense of powerlessness is determined to stand up for the downtrodden and against the rich, who they see as the chief beneficiaries of projects such as the railway. They meet and organise online, and some of their leaders had their first taste of protest in the demonstrations three years ago against the demolition of the Star Ferry clock tower and Queen’s Pier in Central.

Well, I see that as encouraging, though of course the powers that be wouldn’t.

Tomorrow there will be a mass protest against the proposed high speed rail.  This multi-billion dollar project to connect two places on the outskirts of towns, to be the world’s most expensive stretch of railway, is highly suspect.  While I agree that a connection to the mainland’s growing high speed rail system is important for Hong Kong, it’s the specifics of the route chosen that are causing people to wonder just what the hell is going on with our non-elected, non-representational government.  According to the SCMP, “some activists have warned they are ready for bloodshed outside Legco.”  Fear-mongering or reality?  I’m not in a position to say.

But more people are taking the position that our government seems to be exclusively concerned with further lining the pockets of the already-rich.  The gap between rich and poor in Hong Kong continues to widen and any student of history knows what the potential result of that could be.

So tomorrow,

The entire, 800-strong police tactical unit will be on standby for tomorrow’s vote on funding for the multibillion-dollar express railway project, with opponents threatening to surround the Legislative Council building with 10,000 protesters.

Who knows what tomorrow may bring?  One thing’s for sure – I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that the railway project as it currently stands will be approved.

In other news, why am I not surprised by this news?

Insurance agents say that despite having handed in resignation letters, the companies they work for are firing them anyway to get out of paying commissions and pensions. … One agent resigned from AXA in August last year, only to be fired by the company two weeks later.

It doesn’t surprise me that one of the companies named is AXA.  That’s the division of the Villains, Thieves and Scoundrels Union that my prior employer used for health insurance, and that jumped through hoops of fire to deny even the smallest reimbursements to employees.  Two more bits:

The 32 agents said they had yet to receive about HK$8 million from their companies. However, because of the contracts they signed, they are classed as “self-employed” and cannot get help from the Labour Department.

Lawmaker Lee Cheuk-yan said it was not a criminal offence when insurance companies breached a contract signed with the agents if they were not formal employees.  Any dispute would have to be settled in a civil court, he said.

I’ve got no idea why Lee would have brought up the notion of this not being a criminal offence.  Duh.

In other Happy News,

Part of a remote stream close to a country park in Ma On Shan has been covered with tonnes of demolition waste, believed to have been dumped by unscrupulous operators.  A wide range of waste has been dumped in the 10-metre-deep valley next to the Ma On Shan Country Trail, a concrete-paved vehicle path that joins Ma On Shan Tsuen Road. Lands and environment officials still have no idea who dumped the waste, though they received complaints about it as early as July last year. The only thing that seems to be certain is that taxpayers will have to pay to remove the waste from the government-owned stream.

It seems that we’re seeing similar stories on an increasingly frequent basis.  Our non-elected, non-representational government seems uninterested in passing laws in these areas that might have any true deterrence effects.

Over in the letters section, someone named Charlie Chan (sigh) Wing-Tai writes in to inquire about when our city’s bus companies will start to switch to hybrid vehicles.  That’s a good question.  His letter mentions that London is switching to hybrids manufactured by Alexander Dennis, one of the chief suppliers of vehicles to our companies.  I noted on my last visit to NYC that most of the city buses I saw were hybrids.  When will the bus companies here switch?  If it’s up to them, probably never, at least not without legislation (perhaps including tax incentives) forces their collective hands.

Another letter, from Simon Yau of Kowloon City, seeks to defend Magistrate Symon Wong Yu-wing for telling someone who was convicted that they would be “punished by heaven.”   Mr. Yau writes, “Most people would agree that the phrase is commonly and loosely used to condemn heinous acts.”  Not most of the people I know.

I note that another Hong Kong Magistrate, Stanley Chan Kwong-chi, recently stated in court, “…nobody escapes the judgement of heaven.”  I don’t have the entire context of that comment.  However, it came up in the trial of the truck driver who was smart enough to figure out how to get a 19 year old girl to pay him for sex.  For further commentary on the decision of this case, I’d like to refer you to this excellent post on Smog’s Blog.

More later ….