I was watching the news on TV and the incident of a potential case of cheating on the Academic English for Science Students exam was discussed. As usual, random shots of the venue – i.e. Hong Kong University – were shown, including some shots of the door of what I presume to be the exam room. There was a notice on that door asking students not to bring communication devices into the room. If they choose to do so, "you must switched them off."

Perhaps the student(s) was just trying to smuggle a copy of the exam paper out to mock it publicly??? Will post screenshot if I manage to find one.

Here you go:


No Photoshopping, I swear.

Heeheeheeheeee. I love this headline – Promotion may find Manneken Pis holding hockey stick, not self.




為配合在拉脫維亞舉行的世界冰上曲棍球大賽，比利時布魯塞爾著名的撒尿小童像也被迫穿上拉脫維亞隊服。

Very bad.

Toilet paper costs $417. No, not per roll. Four hundred seventeen Zimbabwean dollars is the value of a single two-ply sheet. A roll costs $145,750 — in American currency, about 69 cents.

By March [2006], inflation had touched 914 percent a year, at which rate prices would rise more than tenfold in 12 months. Experts agree that quadruple-digit inflation is now a certainty.
Zimbabwe has been tormented this entire decade by both deep recession and high inflation, but in recent months the economy seems to have abandoned whatever moorings it had left. The national budget for 2006 has already been largely spent. Government services have started to crumble.

Zimbabwe's inflation is hardly history's worst — in Weimar Germany in 1923, prices quadrupled each month, compared with doubling about once every three or four months in Zimbabwe. That said, experts agree that Zimbabwe's inflation is currently the world's highest, and has been for some time.

Oh my god! Colbert roasting the Bush administration on the stage of the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, an occasion known for its levity.

In the Chinese culture, one is not supposed to "ruin" a party by saying things that might, however remotely, embarrass the host. You can see the horror in the eyes of the guests, how afraid they are to laugh with the unrestrained and irreverent mockery.

On one hand, I feel that Steve Colbert is being rude; on the other hand, this is probably the only chance for him to be rude to this president living in a bubble, who is making important decisions that are adversely affecting many many lives.


What is more shocking is that this entire episode seems to have been deliberately ignored by the mainstream media, who instead focused on the safe satire by President Bush on himself. Instead, articles about how "stupid" or "unfunny" Colbert was began to surface only three days after the event.

Useless trivia of the day: Hong Kong did NOT sign the 1961 Vienna convention on diplomatic immunity mentioned in this article.

US tops 'congestion charge debt'
BBC news

US diplomatic staff in London have run up unpaid congestion charge fees of £271,000 in the past six months, new figures have revealed.

Transport for London (TfL) said embassy staff, the subject of a bitter tirade from London mayor Ken Livingstone, have jumped high up the debt table.

The US embassy has said it does not intend to pay the fees, instead claiming diplomatic privilege.

The figures were released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The mayor said US staff should pay the congestion charge as UK staff pay road tolls in the US.

The new figures show that many millions of pounds are owed in total by several of London's 160 embassies since the introduction.

The US embassy is number one on the list for fees not paid in the past six months.

And the figures show that the Angolan embassy owes more than half a million pounds in unpaid congestion charge fees since the scheme was introduced in February 2003.

'This is not a tax'

A spokesman for TfL said: "We are continuing to seek payment for any outstanding debts from embassies refusing to pay.

"Last month the United Arab Emirates embassy accepted the principle and have joined the many other embassies who have agreed this is a legitimate charge.

"This is not a tax, it's a charge for a service and gives no privileges to any VIPs, so we do not see why diplomats should be exempt.

He said embassies were immune from clamping and bailiff action under the Vienna Convention, but TfL would continue to press for payment for money owing.

This guy rocks!!! Frankly, I'd be surprised if he doesn't get picked up by Hong Kong's mainstream media in three months.

By Christopher Elliott
The New York Times
April 25, 2006

The airlines have come up with a new answer to an old question: How many passengers can be squeezed into economy class?

A lot more, it turns out, especially if an idea still in the early stage should catch on: standing-room-only "seats."

Airbus has been quietly pitching the standing-room-only option to Asian carriers, though none have agreed to it yet. Passengers in the standing section would be propped against a padded backboard, held in place with a harness, according to experts who have seen a proposal.

But even short of that option, carriers have been slipping another row or two of seats into coach by exploiting stronger, lighter materials developed by seat manufacturers that allow for slimmer seatbacks. The thinner seats theoretically could be used to give passengers more legroom but, in practice, the airlines have been keeping the amount of space between rows the same, to accommodate additional rows.

The result is an additional 6 seats on a typical Boeing 737, for a total of 156, and as many as 12 new seats on a Boeing 757, for a total of 200.

That such things are even being considered is a result of several factors. High fuel costs, for example, are making it difficult for carriers to turn a profit. The new seat technology alone, when used to add more places for passengers, can add millions in additional annual revenue. The new designs also reduce a seat's weight by up to 15 pounds, helping to hold down fuel consumption. A typical seat in economy class now weighs 74 to 82 pounds.

"There is clearly pressure on carriers to make the total passenger count as efficient as possible," said Howard Guy, a director for Design Q, a seating design consultant in England. "After all, the fewer seats that are put on board, the more expensive the seat price becomes. It's basic math."

Even as the airlines are slimming the seatbacks in coach, they are installing seats as thick and heavy as ever in first and business class — and going to great lengths to promote them. That is because each passenger in such a seat can generate several times the revenue of a coach traveler.

At the front of the cabin, the emphasis is on comfort and amenities like sophisticated entertainment systems. Some of the new seats even feature in-seat electronic massagers. And, of course, the airlines have installed lie-flat seats for their premium passengers on international routes.

Seating specialists say that all the publicity airlines devote to their premium seats diverts attention from what is happening in the back of the plane. In the main cabin, they say, manufacturers are under intense pressure to create more efficient seats.

"We make the seats thinner," said Alexander Pozzi, the director for research and development at Weber Aircraft, a seat manufacturer in Gainesville, Tex. "The airlines keep pitching them closer and closer together. We just try to make them as comfortable as we can."

There is one bit of good news in the thinner seats for coach class: They offer slightly more room between the armrests because the electronics are being moved to the seatbacks.

One of the first to use the thinner seats in coach was American Airlines, which refitted its economy-class section seven years ago with an early version made by the German manufacturer Recaro.

"Those seats were indeed thinner than the ones they replaced, allowing more knee and legroom," Tim Smith, a spokesman for American, said. American actually removed two rows in coach, adding about two inches of legroom, when it installed the new seats. It promoted the change with a campaign called "More Room Throughout Coach."

But two years later, to cut costs, American slid the seats closer together and ended its "More Room" program without fanfare. When the changes were completed last year, American said its "density modification program" had added five more seats to the economy-class section of its MD-80 narrow-body aircraft and brought the total seat count to 120 in the back of the plane. A document on an internal American Airlines Web site, which was briefly accessible to the public last week, estimated that the program would generate an additional $60 million a year for its MD-80 fleet.

United Airlines has also used the earlier-generation thin seats. But it held open the possibility that once its current seat stock needs to be replaced, it might try to squeeze in more seats. "We're always looking at options," Brandon Borrman, a spokesman, said.

Airlines can only do so much with their existing fleets to save space. The real opportunities, say seat manufacturers and design experts, are with the new generation of aircraft that are coming soon.

"People hear about these new planes, and they have bowling alleys and barber shops," Michael B. Baughan, the president and chief operating officer of B/E Aerospace, a manufacturer of aircraft cabin interiors in Wellington, Fla., said with a bit of exaggeration. "But that's not how planes are delivered. On a real airline, with real routes, you have to be economically viable."

Perhaps the most extraordinary example of a new jet that could accommodate features unheard of previously is the Airbus A380. There is so much available room on the superjumbo that Virgin Atlantic Airways is even considering placing a beauty salon in its premium-class section. (No final decision has been made, according to the company.) The first A380 is scheduled to be delivered later this year.

With a typical configuration, the A380 will accommodate about 500 passengers. But with standing-room-only seats, the same plane could conceivably fit in 853 passengers, the maximum it would be permitted to carry.

"To call it a seat would be misleading," said Volker Mellert, a physics professor at Oldenburg University in Germany, who has done research on airline seat comfort and has seen the design. If such a configuration were ever installed on an aircraft, he said, it would only be used on short-haul flights like an island-hopping route in Japan.

While an Airbus spokeswoman, Mary Anne Greczyn, played down the idea that Airbus was trying to sell an aircraft that accommodated 853 passengers, the company would not specifically comment on the upright-seating proposal.

There is no legal barrier to installing standing-room seats on an American airliner. The Federal Aviation Administration does not mandate that a passenger be in a sitting position for takeoffs and landings; only that the passenger be secured. Seating must comply only with the agency's rules on the width of aisles and the ability to evacuate quickly in an emergency.

The Air Transport Association, the trade association for the airline industry in the United States, does not have any seat-comfort standards. Nor does it issue any recommendations to its members regarding seating configurations.

The two Asian airlines seen as the most likely to buy a large plane for short-haul flights, All Nippon Airways and Japan Airlines, are lukewarm about the Airbus plan.

"Airbus had talked with us about an 800-seat configuration for domestic flights," said Rob Henderson, a spokesman for All Nippon Airways. "It does not fit with our present plans going forward."

A spokesman for Japan Airlines, Geoffrey Tudor, said Airbus had presented its ideas for using the A380 on short-haul flights, but added, "We have no interest in increasing seat capacity to this level."

Boeing is under similar pressure to squeeze more seats onto its newest aircraft, the midsize Boeing 787. Some airlines are planning to space the seats just 30 inches apart from front to back, or about one inch less than the current average.

And rather than installing eight seats across the two aisles, which would afford passengers additional elbow room, more than half of Boeing's airline customers have opted for a nine-abreast configuration in the main cabin, said Blake Emery, a marketing director at Boeing. Even so, he said, "It will still be as comfortable as any economy-class section today."

Indeed, it is possible to have it both ways: more comfortable seats that are also more compact. For example, the latest economy-class seat from B/E Aerospace, called the ICON, allows the seat bottom to move forward when the seat is reclined, so that it does not steal legroom from the passenger behind it. It also incorporates better ergonomic designs now typically found in the business-class cabin.

But the ICON and similar seats can cost up to three times more than the $1,200 that a standard coach seat costs. That may make them unaffordable to all but a few international airlines that would use the seats on long-haul routes, the experts said.

Some frequent fliers, asked about the slimmer seats, said they feared that the result would be tighter quarters. Some expressed concerns about sharing a cabin with even more passengers and increasing the risk of contracting a communicable disease.

Others were worried about even more passengers sharing the already-tight overhead bin space.

"It seems like every year there is less room for my long legs," said Bud Johnson, who is a frequent traveler for a military contractor in Scottsdale, Ariz. "I'm afraid that's going to continue."

Lately I have watched a bit more regular TV and have constantly been bugged by the level of shamelessly horrible and commercials. Two series of commercials often succeed it driving me away from the TV:

1. 白花油王子
Very well described here. I scream for my sanity every time this gentleman comes on screen with i) his ninth-tier actor / actress friends or poor Chinese athletic champion friends, ii) the freaky doll of a baby, which he reportedly made in his own image, who wears a red mushroom on its head and a leaf in front of its willie, and iii) a moronic song that he wrote and performed with an appalling lack of talent.

I suspect God permit his series of commercials to exist simply to remind us that rich perverts can do whatever they like with pure pride.

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

~ Dorothy Parker(1893 - 1967), US author, humorist, poet, & wit

2. Hugo Boss fragrances
So far I've seen three on the telly.

A long time ago, probably the first product in this line, there was a woman crouching on a box or something, with a pair of lights dangling from her shoulder. Besides giving a Western interpretation of the Cantonese slang 車頭燈, I didn't see much of a problem with the spot.

Then a young man, deliciously naked in the upper body, keeps throwing a ball back and forth with - gasp! - another instance of himself. The spot itself is harmless. It's just that, when this fragrance was launched, they decided to make 古天樂 its spokesperson. In some promotion event, he, unfortunately, had to say the name of the product, and it was a ridiculously lazy Cantonese pronunciation of an already absurd name - "Bos in Moe-筍". Whenever we see this spot on TV, 銘漢哥 and I can simply never resist saying those same words and giggling at the innocent half-naked dude.

The one that really incurs my loathe and hatred, however, is Purple. A lanky, scantily clad lady, against the magnificent backdrop of NYC, suddenly flips out and starts doing some really stupid and DANGEROUS things. They include jumping into a muddy pond of water, in the middle of the street, and kicking it up onto unsuspecting fellow pedestrians, thrashing her blonde mane blindly in all directions, again in the middle of the street, and hopping in and out of a departing train.

Since when are these attributes of the Perfect Woman to which we're supposed to aspire? Why would any ad exec think that a freaky crackpot would sell a cheap, mundane fragrance? And how much damage do they intend to inflict upon the TV viewer by showing it every 8 minutes?

I was initially planning to compile something like a "Top 10 commercials that I absolutely hate", but in the process of research (i.e. watching TV) I was so constantly shocked and appalled by these two that my mind went blank. Any suggestions on additions to the list?

Woman: Look at all these rude motherfuckin' men! Can't get up and let none of these ladies have a seat.

Man: Having a vagina is not a disability.

– L train

Why hasn't anyone started one for HK already???