My photo is in the August issue of JANE.
It’s the same photo you see in the About Me page. My sister took that on 6 July, 2oo1.
I’m not sure if I’m tickled or embarrassed by this.
The day I become a media conglomerate boss (the teevee towkay neo, I guess), I’ll be sure to return the favour.
Many apologies for the unintended, extended break. I’ve only just been hooked up to the Internet (unlimited broadband-ish!), there is a little man ripping out a leaking water pipe in the bathroom, and the air conditioner service man is perfectly able to clamber in and out of the bathroom window (where the compressor is), which makes me feel really safe.
Smoking will make your little brother tiny. So unless you’re hung like a horse and have no money for surgery, I advise quitting smoking.
Robin and Daphne Wild think it’s possible their son was assassinated:
Mr and Mrs Wild heard about their son’s death in a late-night Foreign Office call. “We were told he had been surrounded by an angry mob and shot. They have never presented us with new information; we have had to put the pieces together ourselves,” says Mr Wild.
This turned out to be untrue; he was shot in the back of the head as he was crossing the street.
The Wilds buried their son in a small country churchyard close to home and were trying to adjust to life without him when their lives were turned upside down again last autumn. They were contacted by Michael Burke, who had returned from Iraq with some of Richard’s possessions. He suggested a meeting and the Wilds saw him at Euston station; they were surprised at Mr Burke’s insistence that their conversation should not be overheard. Mr Wild recalls: “We were sitting in that glorious pale autumn sunlight and for the next two hours, we heard things that made hair on the back of our necks stand up.”
As a former chief dental officer for England and Wales, Mr Wild “knows how things work”; yet even he could barely believe what Mr Burke – who had spoken to eyewitnesses – told him. “Far from being picked off on the spur of the moment by a mob, we were being told our son had been assassinated, probably by the CIA. He had not been in Baghdad long but he was asking questions, rocking the boat, maybe making himself unpopular. As a journalist he was not ‘on message’. We think he knew something that could have destabilised, or certainly embarrassed, the coalition and that’s why he was killed.”
More than this, the Wilds have resigned themselves to never finding out. They will not spend the rest of their lives campaigning and harrying government for answers. “Political assassinations involve cover-ups,” says Mrs Wild. “We do not have the resources to find out exactly what went on, but we have certainly found out more than we were told.”
The beginning of the story says the Wilds are not much for conspiracy theories. If the Foreign Office can’t, or won’t, tell them anything, after having given them incorrect information, and someone who was there tells them what he thought actually happened, crazy as it may seem, no one can really blame them for coming to that conclusion.
From what I can understand from this story, American legislators are trying to remove a tax break deemed illegal by the EU, and they are proposing to replace it with… a whole new range of tax breaks and cuts.
The core of the tax bill eliminates the exporters’ tax break and replaces it with new tax cuts for manufacturers. The House and Senate also used the bills to streamline some international tax rules.
Thanks, Terry, for the link to the story.
Over the last few months, Neil’s been talking about going to look at apartments. Our lease on the current flat comes due in this month. I never really thought to do much about it, then someone I know found a new apartment and said the agent she used was quite good.
Ah. Convenience. I asked her to get the agent to call me.
And call me she did. Miss Hong called me the very next day. Over that week, I went and saw a number of apartments. It turns out that I’m far less fussy than Neil, and after a lot of hemming and hawing, we narrowed our list down to four options:
We’re moving! We’re moving to the Big Apartment! We’ll have so much room we’ll be able to lose each other while at home!
Stay tuned for grumblings about how hard it is to clean and our imminent mouse and roach infestation. I’m of two minds whether to hassle con cajole Neil into letting me get a cat.
I just adore the Ministry of Manpower’s page detailing Singapore public holidays for the year. Clipart-tastic!
A study of inflation in Scotland since 1989 has shown that prices in the service industry have risen dramatically, while those in manufactured goods have fallen.
I imagine a similar situation must exist in other countries like the US, for example. A lot of people in the US aren’t happy that lower labour costs in other countries have sent jobs away (my favourite example is Neil’s story of a US immigration official asking his colleague if they were one of those people stealing jobs from America). On the whole, though, the jobs ‘stolen’ by China are low-skilled, manufacturing positions. Computers and televisions are becoming more and more commoditised by the minute.
Everyone wants lower prices. Unless the people who are unhappy with the situation are more than willing to accept a wage that averages US$100 a month (a Xiamen estimate), I don’t see them being at all competitive with their Chinese (or Indian) counterparts. If people want to enjoy the benefits of free trade, they need to accept the costs, too.
I do dream of the day I settle on one layout and stick to it for a minimum of three months.
The New Scientist publishes a reader’s novel way of stopping ants from infesting your house. A spoonful of sugar apparently does other things besides helping the medicine go down.
According to astute football fan Pablo Carral, he is in possession of the famous football that David Beckham failed to put through the goalposts during the Euro 2004 quarter final match, crushing England fans’ hopes and compounding the humiliation of the drubbing they received from New Zealand at the rugby that week.
And making Neil the smiliest Scotsman in Xiamen.
The Official Match Ball used on the game against Portugal, that left UK out of the Europe Cup, the same ball of the penalty, that David Beckham miss, will be auctioned on eBay. Pablo Carral, a fan, catched the ball and he took it out from the stadium.
Is the Official Europe Cup Match Ball, made in Thailand. It has the date of the game, the 24th of June 2004, also the place of the celebration, da Luz of Lisbon stadium.
All this from Terry’s heads up on the Inquirer story. Thanks, Terry!
There are rich people in Xiamen. There are middle-class people in Xiamen. There are blue-collar workers in Xiamen. There is one thing, in my opinion, that they all have in common (aside from the spitting and snorting that is absolutely delightful, I tell you) — DVDs.
Xiamen is full of DVD shops. There is no one village (suburb?) on the island that lacks a neighbourhood video store — some of them are even part of chains. Some rent, and all sell. Many of the stores also stock music CDs. Want the latest Britney Spears or Madonna (or whatever is on the radio these days)? No problem. If you were born yesterday, you may take your new purchases home, marvelling at the great bargains you’ve just found. On closer inspection, however, you’ll notice that the spelling on the track titles, movie titles, movie synopsis or reviews isn’t quite right. Some of them, in fact, are so wrong that they are just a jumble of letters assembled to look like sentences in English, since no words contain that many Js and Xs.
Latest releases (I mean in the US cinema) are available in the shops the week after I read reviews on the New York Times website. If you’re not the picky sort, have to watch all new films as soon as they are in the cinemas in the US, and have seven or eight RMB to spare, Bob’s your uncle. I’ve spotted (but not bought) Fahrenheit 9/11, King Arthur, The Stepford Wives, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and so on.
Television series are not spared the copiers’ nimble fingers. Documentaries are not immune, either. If you’d like a certain film or television programme and you haven’t been able to find it, the eager shop assistants just need a little time, a few days or weeks perhaps, and voila, a special copy procured just for you.
If you’ve been in Xiamen a while, you’ll have your own favourite DVD stores, where the staff know you by sight and value your patronage enough to warn you when the disc you’ve picked up is not a good copy (tourists, I’m sure, are not given the same treatment). All you need to do is ask, “shi bu shi die ban?” to find out if the DVD was copied directly from another disc, or if it’s a dreaded ‘cinema’ version.
You can tut tut and say we should buy the originals, we shouldn’t be supporting piracy, but I challenge you to find a decently priced original DVD in English in Xiamen. Here, the market does not support original DVDs. People who come on business head straight to the DVD shops the moment they have time off, stocking up (many also come for the golf clubs, and that’s another issue altogether).
I don’t know a single person who wouldn’t buy a pirated DVD, priced at a tiny fraction of the legal version. I know enough people who will, and do, buy counterfeit brand handbags and clothes; fashion is fickle, after all. Who wants to shell out hundreds or thousands and end up using whatever it is for only a season or two? Most of us don’t hang out with Paris Hilton. There are more stories in the news about China’s problem with intellectual property — my favourite is a Shanghai Daily piece lamenting that ‘some’ Chinese companies have no problem with copying other people’s work. China is all about the copying, legal or no. Flouting intellectual property rights doesn’t exactly cause a single one of them to lose sleep or bat an eyelid, unless they lose their court cases.
The reality is, China copies DVDs like crazy. The WTO may have strict laws about copyright and intellectual property, but the government, no matter how eager to fully comply in order to benefit from membership, will never be able to completely stop the pirates. The market wants cheap DVDs, and the pirates will deliver them.
Light Up the Sky in NYC.
Niger’s former pm says Iraq didn’t try to buy uranium from them:
Mr Mayaki denies allegations in the Senate report that he admitted meeting a delegation from Iraq in 1999.
The report says that he expected to discuss uranium with the Iraqi delegation but managed to steer the conversation in another direction.
But Mr Mayaki now says he has no recollection of such a meeting, while he was in government from 1999-2001.
“I think this could be easily verified by the Western intelligence services and by the authorities in Niger,” he said.
Good Lord. A contradiction, straight from the horse’s mouth? I’d like to see the verification — if either side declines, they have something to hide.
(My earlier post about Niger and uranium)
The British report assessing the intelligence used to send its soldiers into war is out. It says there were ‘serious flaws‘.
There was something I noticed right away, on Tony Blair’s reaction:
But he had became convinced after the 11 September attacks that a stand had to be taken against rogue states with WMD and “the place to make that stand was Iraq”.
On 11 September, suicidal terrorists flew commercial airplanes (the last time I was in one, I didn’t notice that they were weapons of mass destruction) into New York’s World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. How did he then determine that it was ‘rogue states with WMD’ that had to be dealt with?
Surely they should be dealt with regardless of what happened?
Were the attacks an excuse for him to say it was time to take a stand, even though they were unrelated? Isn’t it damning, then, to admit that he wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and used attacks he (Saddam) was not responsible for to set that process in motion?
An interesting page of Tony Blair’s relevant quotes from the run-up to the war to his response to the Butler report is also available.
Update: The Economist’s Global Agenda analysis is also online and free for the reading.
Betty Bowers asks, Is President Bush a Homo?
… Mr. Bush has been peppering his otherwise delightful litany of patriotic jingoism and pleasantly embroidered CIA-intelligence recaps with the effeminate mating call “fabulous” — three giddy syllables that are tantamount to coyly cooing, “Hello, sailor!”
Heehee.
(I got the link from A Peking Duck.)