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And the mid-week mini-weekend is declared open

# 2013-04-29 17:19:34, Big Lychee, Various Sectors
In a world where 28,000 Chinese rivers have gone missing and women get surgery to have arms like Michelle Obama’s, it’s reassuring to hear some plain, simple truth. John Greenwood, inventor of Hong Kong’s currency peg, points out that a communist one-party state cannot accommodate a freely con...

Press celebrate Ugly People Day

# 2013-04-28 17:38:35, Big Lychee, Various Sectors
The May 1st public holiday comes early to today’s South China Morning Post, where page 1 is full of Ferran Adria, and page 3 (‘Leading The News’) replete with Annabelle Bond. These individuals (pictured below right) have two things in common. The first is that we have never heard of them. A qu...

We’re bored – let’s crucify a shoe-shiner

# 2013-04-25 16:42:48, Big Lychee, Various Sectors
“The pressure … has been growing steadily, with the media exposing more dinners than previously recorded.” Thus Hong Kong’s latest mega-scandal is born. Dinnergate. The story in a nutshell: former Independent Commission Against Corruption boss Timothy Tong allegedly misused public funds by t...

Anyway, aid just seems to cause more earthquakes

# 2013-04-24 17:55:31, Big Lychee, Various Sectors
Hong Kong lawmakers oppose quake aid; Hongkongers reject sending aid; Sichuan relief efforts provoke Hong Kong skeptics. The Big Lychee’s response to the Lushan earthquake does not leave the city looking like a shining beacon of generosity. The government’s initial decision to send Sichuan Provi...

Museum in evil foreign plot to keep motherland down

# 2013-04-23 17:27:57, Big Lychee, Various Sectors
Why are dockworkers striking and, in particular, protesting outside tycoon Li Ka-shing’s home? You thought it was because of pay and conditions, property hegemony and cartelization? China Daily corrects you… …the opposition camp and the foreign powers supporting it are preparing to seize Hong ...

Enjoy Yourself Tonight

# 2013-04-22 17:18:32, Big Lychee, Various Sectors
When bureaucracies are not using it to crucify harmless nonentities to justify their existence, the criminal justice system is a reliable source of entertainment. Hong Kong today settles down into its easy chair to watch two juicy cases unfold: the trial of feng-shui master/born-again Christian/Nina Wang toyboy Tony/Peter Chan for forging...

Prosecutors might go after people who aren’t poor

# 2013-04-21 17:34:12, Big Lychee, Various Sectors
In Norway, if you commit 77 murders you get a 21-year (extendable) prison sentence. In Singapore, the penalty for overstaying your visa can be caning as well as jail. But at least they have reputations for being consistent. Hong Kong can’t decide whether it is namby-pamby liberal or viciously cr...

Occupy Central starts early, pro-dems fail to show

# 2013-04-18 17:16:20, Big Lychee, Various Sectors
One of the Hongkong International Terminals contractors abruptly announces that it is shutting down, leaving hundreds of its striking port workers without an employer. The tactic is clearly designed to scare the strikers into accepting the pay offer currently on the table. The supposedly laid-off do...

Ninth Commandment to hit Hong Kong

# 2013-04-17 16:55:40, Big Lychee, Various Sectors
Stores and street-market stalls in Hong Kong sell fruit and vegetables in non-transparent bags. A clear label on the outside tells you how many pieces of produce are in the bag and what the total price is – for example, six oranges for HK$20. However, there is a catch: retailers lie about the numb...

Gold bugs vs voices of sanity, cont’d

# 2013-04-16 16:39:37, Big Lychee, Various Sectors
Bitcoins, gold and silver crash, and Forbes asks ‘what next?’ According to the conspiracy theories floating around, the rapid drop in the value of gold happened because the US government, big banks and funds chose this time to organize a massive short. Why? The Federal Reserve wants people to ho...

Spam and tycoons: equally invincible

# 2013-04-15 17:29:28, Big Lychee, Various Sectors
Yesterday, rising food prices were giving the poor ‘generalized anxiety disorder’, for which a psychiatrist prescribed ‘having fun while shopping for bargains’. Today, the Consumer Council’s Michael Hui pleads with retailers “to scale their prices down and live with the Hong Kong people ...

Unhappy poor are mentally diseased, says Chinese U

# 2013-04-14 16:23:52, Big Lychee, Various Sectors
People who can barely afford to feed themselves tend to be miserable. This stunning, Nobel-class discovery comes to us from the Mood Disorders Centre of Hong Kong’s Chinese University. If the unhappiness continues for over six months, it is classified as ‘generalized anxiety disorder’. Quoted ...

Martin Lee suggests the unsuggestible

# 2013-04-11 16:53:26, Big Lychee, Various Sectors
Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony has the subtitle A Soviet Artist’s Response to Just Criticism because the work was supposed to atone for his misdeeds – producing imaginative and un-socialist music that displeased Stalin, who at that time in the late 1930s was sending mill...

Lau Siu-kai, David Akers-Jones discover solution to tourism menace

# 2013-04-10 16:50:38, Big Lychee, Various Sectors
Aficionados of the art of unrestrained, indeed compulsively incontinent, shoe-shining reach with glee for their favourite sick-bags this morning as the Standard indulges in an unseemly double-grovel of tycoon Li Ka-shing and his number-one son Victor. The paper leads with the story of how the pluto...

The insurmountable horrors of standard working hours and Occupy Central

# 2013-04-09 17:24:17, Big Lychee, Various Sectors
The committee considering statutory maximum working hours in Hong Kong will take up to three years to produce its recommendations. Sounds as if the body is practicing an extreme version of what it has yet to preach, by strictly limiting its efforts to no more than – what? – 30 minutes per week....