Americans tend to think the rest of the world knows all about us, and thinks about us a lot. Pays close attention to our doings. How many times have you heard some idiot jock exclaim, “We shocked the world!”? And mean it. Because, sure, everyone in Africa and Asia and South American thought American Team […]

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He is out there nearly every day, maybe 10-12 hours a day, at the top of the stairs leading down to the Johnston Road exit from the Wan Chai metro station.
Sitting on a box only a few inches high, his two-string instrument in front of him, sawing away.
He has to be 70 years old and […]

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Again, I reserve the right to come back and write about any one of these items at greater length.
–They should consider a law here on “hands free” walking. At least once a day I almost crash into someone meandering/veering down the street while fiddling with their BlackBerry, or while texting someone, while playing a tiny […]

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I am not a fashion plate. And it gets worse. I not only don’t pay much attention to what I wear … I don’t pay much attention to what people around me wear, either.
But Hong Kong is making it easy for me. Especially here in the winter.

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I have a watch I like. It’s not expensive, at all, just rubber and plastic, but it has multiple functions. It has a digital readout. It has a button I can push to light up the face, so I can tell the time in the dark. It can tell me the date, which is something […]

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I remember the first day I spent in this apartment. Must have been Oct. 9, one week after getting off the plane and spending seven nights in the hotel.
In the tiny bedroom I saw a white device in a corner, next to the head of the bed. It looked like 10 or so long, rounded […]

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I am in Hong Kong to edit stories. Correct errors, make sure “style” is being followed, write headlines and captions. Occasionally, I comb the wires for stories and do some layout — on those occasions when I have been scheduled to put out the sports pages.
So, I didn’t come to write, and in Hong Kong, […]

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I was OCD before the phrase had been invented.
“Obsessive-cumpulsive disorder” is, I believe, what OCD stands for.
Let’s find a definition. Here’s one from medterms.com And this is just part of the definition.
“A psychiatric disorder characterized by obsessive thoughts and compulsive actions, such as cleaning, checking, counting, or hoarding. Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), one of the anxiety […]

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Hong Kong is not a big sports town. People don’t seem to talk about sports much, and they certainly don’t have much on the local sports menu. A low-level soccer league everyone ignores. And we’re about done.
Aside from a handful, a small handful of one-shot, bigger-picture events.
Such as the JB Group Classic, a tennis event […]

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Guaranteed, this is not the first time someone has suggested that, if Karl Marx were alive today … he would be 190 years old, and doctors would be staring at him with mouths agape — like rubes at the carnival’s two-headed calf.
As I was saying, if Karl Marx were alive today, he wouldn’t be talking […]

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