Busy at work, busy at home, here’s a variety of updates though ….

Sunday I was shopping in Mong Kok and so of course stopped into some sneaker shops.  Walked past this shop called “Dahood” and saw these in the window:

And I gotta tell you, they look even better in “real life.”  And I thought, “What better way to show my love and admiration for Jimi Hendrix than by wearing him on my feet?  Buying Converse is easy because they run large so I can pick up a size 11, a size most shops here stock, and they’ll fit fine.

But later on, I saw a pair of Nikes that I loved, too.  Nike, I need a size 12.  I went into every shop along Fa Yuen Gai, probably 20 in all, and all of them stocked this shoe but none of them had a 12.  One shop shocked me by having a 13 in stock!

So, determined, Monday night I stopped off at New Town Plaza in Shatin on the way home.  5th floor is loaded with sneaker and sporting goods shops and not one of them had my size in this either.  At least they had more helpful sales clerks – one who told me that the style was a month old so they couldn’t order it any more;another that told me that not only do most shops not stock size 12, those that do just get one pair at that size and once those are sold, that’s it.

I suppose I could have continued my quest for several more nights – Times Square?  Hang Hau?  Ah, frig it, internet.  Found a shop that had it and that also had a web site smart enough to read my IP address and toss up a large banner reading, “Yes, we ship to HONG KONG!” before I even thought to check.  Ordered them last night, got the shipping notice this morning with the UPS tracking number, another quest resolved.

Okay, at the moment, retail therapy is one of the sole (no pun intended!) pleasures in my life and no, I don’t feel like going into detail about it.  Just take it as played.

Speaking of retail therapy, my iPhone 4 order is settled and I’ll be picking it up on Friday night, after I leave the office and before I head to the next PASM Workshop party.  We’ve got a super hot model from China which I guess is why this party is titled, “The Heat Is On.”  If you want to check out the invite on Facebook (and maybe even come over to join the fun – HK$100 all you can drink!), then check the details here.

Yes, I don’t give a poop about “antennagate.”  I’ll shove a case on it and it will work fine.  Incidentally, today I had my first experience with iOS 4′s multi-tasking.  I’d had Skype fired up for some chats with my boss, who is currently out of town.  And even though I closed the app and was doing something else, I kept getting notifications for the next several hours as people noticed I was online and wanted to chat.  (One reason I hate chat software – I find it quite obtrusive at times and so only run it when I need to.)  At any rate, yes, it does work as promised.

Last for now, just want to mention a fabulous lunch I had today in Kennedy Town.  I’d passed this place last week and made fun of their sign:

I’ve never been to Twon before so can’t say if this is truly the best steak there or not.  Anyway, the place is called Al Basrah although the sign in front actually said Al Basrah Cow Pampas.  The menu cheerfully informs you:

I am BAHADUR K.C. SHIVA Founder of the trendy SOHO diniing area in Hong Kongin 1995 successfully open first restaurant Nepal Cuisine & La Pampa Argentinean Steak House, La comida coccina spanol, Bar Club, 1911 Kathmandu!!  Now I have chosen an upcoming new area in western district to open the first Fine Dining Restaurant and Wine Bar serving both middle eastern cuisine and the best Argentinean beef cuts from the FALKLANDS and SUCCULENT LAMB SHANKS FROM PATAGONIAFood of high quality with healthy aromatic spices to suite discerning Diners.

Whether or not this guy really kicked off the Soho dining scene I can’t say but I’m not entirely sure it’s something I’d boast about.  But I shouldn’t make fun because Mr. Shiva was there in the restaurant at lunch time and he turned out to be a very nice guy indeed.

Anyway, I wasn’t too impressed with the look of their $48 quick lunch buffet so I decided to order off the regular menu.  From a section called “The President’s Favorite,” I chose Biryani Laham which the menus says is Iraqi style lamb shank with rice.  And HOLY FUCK WAS IT EVER GOOD!!!!!  The rice was great, the lamb was so tender I didn’t need the knife provided and I wanted to ask for a straw to suck out the marrow from the shank, not sure why I didn’t, what I could get of it was enough to remind me why Anthony Bourdain often tags bone marrow as his favorite food.

The iPhone photo above doesn’t begin to do it justice.  The only down side was that I was only able to finish about half the dish.  I had them wrap up the rest for me to take home, shoved it in the fridge at the office, but by the end of the day I was feeling so frustrated by the day’s events that I left it behind in the office (called a friend who was still there and told him to take it home for dinner).

Anyway, should you find yourself in Kennedy Town or in the mood for something from the middle east, definitely give this place a try.

And, uh, oh crap, 12:30, time for bed!

No, not food, this error in the SCMP.

On Friday, they reported on the death of diplomat Robin McLaren.  The obituary ended with this quote from Chris Patten’s former spokesman Kerry McGlynn, which I’m sure raised the eyebrows of the 16 people who read the entire piece:

“Sir Robin played the game absolutely scrumptiously, and followed the Patten policy to the nth degree.”

On Saturday, they issued this correction:

The report should have quoted him as saying: “Sir Robin played the game absolutely scrupulously, and followed the Patten policy to the nth degree.” We apologise for the error.

But let’s face it, don’t we all wish that the first version was the correct one?

Finally figured out how to have a halfway decent lunch at Cyberport.  Leave.

Yep, a friend and I jumped on the number 58 minibus, HK$5 and 10 minutes later we were in Kennedy Town, walking around and found a place called The Clay Oven, Indian place with a $45 set lunch that was not bad at all.  I’ll be going back to K-Town often to try some of the other places there.

A couple of doors down was this place named Al Basrah Cow Pampa.  As in “Middle Eastern Cuisine – Argentinean Grill Steak.”  I suppose that’s as fusion as one can get.  A sign there proclaims that they have the best steaks in “twon.”  I got a photo but I’m unable to sync my iPhone at the moment.

Which is really weird.  iPad syncs fine.  iPod syncs fine.  Then I plug in the iPhone – nothing, nada, zilch, the phone doesn’t register that it’s plugged in or charging, let alone start to sync.   So one might think that the problem is the sync cable or the dock connector on the phone, except if I take that exact same cable and plug it into a charger, the phone starts to charge right away.  (I’ve tried two different USB hubs; have not tried the USB ports directly on the computer because it’s a pain to get back there and anyway, as I said, everything else is syncing normally.)  Anyone have any thoughts?

Around 5:35 PM, the Black Rain signal went up with just 10 minutes advance notice.  Yeah, one is supposed to stay indoors when this happens, but I took this as a cue to get out of the office and try to maybe beat some traffic home.  As if.  Actually, things were quite okay on the HK side, but once I came out of the Western Tunnel, the rain was coming down as heavily as I’ve ever seen it.  And this being Hong Kong, people were continuing to drive as poorly as ever – lights not turned on, not signaling lane changes, speeding, etc.

So I get to the place near Shatin where Route 8 merges into Route 9 – 4 lanes going down into 1 and even with the rain, a bunch of brainiacs decide to create a 5th lane to cut through traffic more, further backing things up – and then at the bottom of the hill a huge flood.   Then a mile or two down the road, where I get off the highway, there must have been an accident, traffic on the cross street wasn’t moving and had all but completely blocked the intersection.  I sat there waiting for the light to change while another group of brainiacs figured it was a good time to run through the red light and try to squeeze through the small opening in that intersection – I kid you not.  Sai Sha Road had a spot that was flooded completely across.  And then at the traffic circle in Sai Kung town, a taxi driver who didn’t seem to care that there were other cars (including me) already in that circle, he was a TAXI! and he demanded his right of way.  Ah well, just another day on Hong Kong’s roads.

Anyway, before I head to sleep, let me just alert you that Barnes & Nobles is having a 50% off sale on ALL Criterion DVDs – including boxed sets and blu-rays.  Criterion is the “gold standard” for this stuff – great films, lots of time and care spent on the digital transfers, amazing bonus features.  I’d like to own everything they put out but it’s beyond my budget.  So this sale gave me a chance to get caught up on some of the stuff on my want list.  I counted about 30 things I wanted and then cut the list down to these:

• 3 Films by Louis Malle – boxed set featuring Murmur of the Heart, Lacombe Lucien and Au Revoir Les Enfants – each one a classic
• Burden of Dreams – Les Blank’s documentary shot while Werner Herzog shot the astonishing Fitzcarraldo
• Complete Monterey Pop Festival – one of my favorite festival films, finally getting the blu-ray
• Fanny and Alexander boxed set – featuring the over-5-hour version of Bergman’s final film
• Eric Rohmer’s 6 Moral Tales – My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee, Chloe in the Afternoon and more, more goodness in one box than I can stand!
• Night on Earth – hard to realize I didn’t already have this splendid Jim Jarmusch compendium
• Yi Yi – I love this Taiwanese family drama, again stunned that I didn’t already have it

So 50% off each of the above and I picked the “slow boat to China” shipping option which was just US$20 – after saving around $200 on the above stuff.  The sale runs for another 10 days so you have plenty of time to check it out and I have time to go back and order a few more – Burmese Harp, Berlin Alexanderplatz and the Olivier’s Shakespeare boxed set are looking very tempting.

News reports from “the freest economy on the planet.”

Excerpted from today’s SCMP:

Lawmakers have rejected a motion to use their special powers to compel the government to produce all of its correspondence with Henderson Land over the mysterious cancellation of 20 of 24 sales at Henderson’s luxury 39 Conduit Road development in Mid-Levels.

A motion moved by the Democratic Party’s Lee Wing-tat – seeking to empower the housing panel to use the Legislative Council (Powers and Privileges) Ordinance to order Secretary for Transport and Housing Eva Cheng to submit all correspondence between the Lands Department and the developer relating to the case – was vetoed yesterday.

The motion was supported by most pan-democrats, and opposed by the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong and pro-business lawmakers. The health services sector’s Dr Joseph Lee Kok-long was the only pan-democrat who voted against the  motion.

The League of Social Democrats and the Federation of Trade Unions did not vote.

Questions have been raised over the cancellation of the sales at the development. They were among 24 high-priced transactions publicised by Henderson in a move many saw as a fraudulent attempt to boost prices.

One of the cancelled deals involved a duplex which Henderson reported was sold for a record-high HK$88,000 per square foot. The subsequent cancellation of the deal triggered accusations of market manipulation.

Doubts have also been raised about the revelation that buyers forfeited only five per cent of the reported purchase prices and were not asked to compensate the developer for any losses on resale.

Cheng said yesterday that the motion was unnecessary because the administration had already submitted all the letters concerned to Legco and there were no more it could provide.

But Lee was unconvinced that the information produced by the government was exhaustive, saying the bureau had only supplied more documents after he threatened to seek use of the ordinance.

The only thing that would have been surprising would have been if the motion had passed.

And ya gotta love this one, also in the SCMP:

Secretary for Labour and Welfare Matthew Cheung Kin-chung admitted on Monday that some workers with low levels of productivity could lose their jobs after the implementation of the minimum wage law.

Legco finally passed the minimum wage law – without setting a specific rate – after a 41-hour debate by lawmakers last week.

The introduction of a minimum wage law is opposed by some employers, restaurant owners and representatives of the tourist sector who argue it will result in higher costs and unemployment in some industries. But supporters, including many lawmakers and unionists, said the legislation was long overdue, because too many workers earned low salaries

See, since they haven’t set the actual minimum wage yet, the scare tactics continue but this is really reaching a new level of insanity:  ”Oooh, with the minimum wage, people who suck at their jobs will get fired!”  Even the headline was more scare-mongering – “Cheung warns wage law may lead to job losses” – of course many people only read the headlines and not the stories underneath.

So says the Economic Intelligence Unit, providing a comparative rating for end-of-life care in 40 countries around the world.  (Reported in the Economist, via Business Insider.)

Hong Kong ranks #20 on the list.  Britain is #1 – though I know many Brits who would happily die in Hong Kong rather than live in the UK.

What’s more shocking – this flat for sale at Bel Air for HK$66 million or that someone thought “atlruetive” is a word?  Stand far enough away from the sign and the word starts to look like “attractive” even if the flat doesn’t.

Brief bit o’ meta:  for some reason, WordPress has stopped emailing me when someone posts a new comment.  Apologies if it takes longer than usual for your comments to be published.

The SCMP reports that David Tang is putting his money where his mouth is.  He’s paying three British authors to come to Hong Kong and speak at two forums that he’ll moderate.

Tang has invited three author friends – Frederick Forsyth, Andrew Roberts and Stephen Fry – to fly to Hong Kong at his expense to attend a forum to discuss “How and what and why do writers write?”

Tang is paying for this out of his own (deep) pockets and making it free for the public.

Tang wants to ensure the forums are open to the public. “Anybody can come,” he says. “When you have a good speaker, you either have to pay for it, or be a member of a fancy chamber of commerce, or be a High Street banker. [But] when I do a forum, I want it to be entirely free, entirely open to the public.

He also hosted a planning event for the West Kowloon Arts District and plans other similar events.

By the end of the year, he hopes to organise a fashion forum, inviting people such as Vogue US editor Anna Wintour, whom Tang met recently and who has expressed interest in coming to Hong Kong. Others such as Stella McCartney, Jimmy Choo and Tom Ford are also on Tang’s list. Acting will also be an interesting subject for discussion, and Tang suggests that Michael Caine and Jude Law could be potential guests.

His reason for doing all this?

“The fact is, there are many people who are very culture-sensitive,” says Tang, an art lover and cultural critic. “I have always thought Hong Kong is actually not a cultural desert. The image has attached itself to this territory because we are dwarfed by mad moneymaking and therefore people tend to think we do nothing else.”

Let me make it clear that I like David Tang (or what little I know about him) and think that what he is doing is admirable.  More of our billionaires should be making contributions to the greater good of our little SAR.

But a thought comes to mind.  In order to prove that there is culture in Hong Kong, the answer is to import artists from outside of Hong Kong.  Where are the Hong Kong artists or, more importantly, where are the world class Hong Kong artists?  We know the answer – for a city of 7 million, with the amount of education, prosperity and stability that Hong Kong enjoys, the number of people creating great art is few and far between.

So while it’s nice that Sir David is footing the bill for some of his friends to come here and talk to us (and I hope he continues to do so), perhaps he might also donate some of his billions to local universities, endowing scholarships or equipping schools for education in the arts, something which today seems to receive little if any emphasis in our schools.  If we want to make Hong Kong a cultural oasis rather than a desert, we need to educate, encourage and support local talent.

Found in a hallway in Cyberport – certainly seems to me like the title of a Wes Craven film.

Spotted in Wellcome in Sai Kung.  (Sorry, no time to flip the image, “image rotation not supported by your web host.” Sigh.)

Okay, it looks a little strange with the bits of white tape and all, but this is something I’m in favor of.  Food labeling in the US is incredibly misleading and research has shown that in the 30 or so years that they’ve been calling foods “Fat Free,” obesity has drastically increased.  I’m happy that Hong Kong is taking a stand on this.

Speaking of Cyberport, food and horror, this is the chicken curry they serve in the food court.  Literally skin and bones, I don’t think there was even an ounce of meat in this bowl.

Last for now (and maybe least?), on the 69X mini-bus from Cyberport to Quarry Bay, I was pleased to note that the bus doesn’t have a driver, it has a captain.

Watchdog David Webb chimes in on the Henderson/Conduit Road deal.  He gives a fascinating history on this plot of land, from 1911 up to the current development.   In the end, his opinion boils down to this:

… but we seriously doubt that any but the most ignorant buyers saw the prices as a guide to what they should pay for a property elsewhere in Conduit Road or mid-levels, and we have no sympathy for anyone who thought that uncompleted transactions in a small project are a guide to the general market.

His essay also includes this important point:

This touches on the frustration of not just the one third of the population that lives in public housing and another sixth who live in subsidised housing, but also the middle classes who face a lifetime of paying off mortgages to finance a piece of air enclosed by a small concrete box purchased from one of HK’s feudal landlords who then pay royalties to the SAR crown in the form of land premiums, taking a big fat cut in the middle and gaming the system as much as they can. They are a clique without whose support, through the Election Committee, the Chief Executive cannot be elected, and without whose support, through the functional constituencies, the Government cannot govern.

And gives an example of exactly how much money the owners of Henderson have:

As we said in our article on the soon-to-be-launched Larvotto (3-Mar-2010), HK is in one of its frequent property bubbles. On 18-May-2010, HLD Chairman Lee Shau Kee’s family paid HK$1.82bn (US$233m) for a site at 35 Barker Road in a rare public auction of a private site. The property allows a GFA of 26,675 sq ft, and they will also pay to demolish the existing block of flats (called Falconridge) and build 3-4 houses for the billionaire’s family compound. So the land alone cost $68,229/gsf. The vendor was another tycoon, the low profile billionaire shipping-cum-property tycoon Hui Sai Fun. He owns Central Development Ltd, which owns Central Building and Central Tower, in Central, and developed the Highcliff skyscraper at 41D Stubbs Road, which really does have 72 storeys above ground.

That’s right – the Henderson chairman just paid US$233 million for a plot of land on which to build a family compound.

The no smoking law in Hong Kong penalizes the person smoking but not the owner or manager of the establishment in which the person is smoking.  And in reality, that means that restaurant and bar managers often have no reason to enforce the no smoking law.

Seems our liquor law is the same.  I noticed this in an article in the SCMP today about a third 7-Eleven opening in Lan Kwai Fong.  Bar owners in the area are upset because people can go into the 7-Eleven and buy a beer for HK$15 instead of the HK$50+ that bars charge and then stand there on the street and drink it.   I even recall reading an article somewhere a few years ago, one of those “Hong Kong on a shoestring” sorts of things, advocated doing exactly that.

Anyway, this SCMP article contained this little bit of insight:

Under the Dutiable Commodities Ordinance, it is an offence for a person, except on the authority of a liquor licence, to sell or supply liquor at any premises for consumption on those premises.

A police spokesman told the Post: “If a police officer finds any person drinking intoxicating liquor in any premises in which liquor is sold, and a liquor licence for the premises is not produced to the police officer, the officer may arrest any person, whether under the age of 18 or not, found drinking there.”

Get that?  If you’re in a place that sells liquor for take-away only and you stay there to drink, you get fined, but the place that allowed you to stay there and drink doesn’t face any penalty.  Which is probably why the new 7-11 is promoting itself on Facebook as “Club 7-Eleven.”

“Welcome to Club 7-Eleven in Lan Kwai Fong, Central,” it reads. “Our doors are always open and our friendly club teams are ready to serve you. Come in to Club 7-Eleven and you’ll find a great selection of high-quality alcoholic products at an everyday fair price, along with speedy transactions in a clean, safe, friendly clubbing environment at Lan Kwai Fong.”

(Yeah, I suppose some of you will comment that the bars will get what’s coming to them because their drinks are so expensive.  But one they’re expensive is the ridiculous rents they pay to be there.)

Oh, by the way, guess who owns the 7-Eleven franchise for Hong Kong?  Dairy Farm.  Who owns Dairy Farm?  Jardine Matheson.  Jardine, in case you don’t know, also owns Wellcome, Mannings, Three-Sixty, 50% of Maxim’s and the Hong Kong franchise for Ikea.  They also own Hongkong Land, which means many buildings in Central, including the Landmark, Prince’s Building, Exchange Square and so on.