kaleidoscope

Kosovo declared its independence.

“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”

—Living like Weasels, Anne Dillard

Welcome home, Ching Cheong.

“I hate the way you talk to me, and the way you cut your hair.
I hate the way you drive my car.
I hate it when you stare.
I hate your big dumb combat boots, and the way you read my mind.
I hate you so much it makes me sick; it even makes me rhyme.
I hate the way you’re always right.
I hate it when you lie.
I hate it when you make me laugh, even worse when you make me cry.
I hate it when you’re not around, and the fact that you didn’t call.
But mostly I hate the way I don’t hate you.
Not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.”

Peta and Heath. 一路走好。

68 wordsTouchtyping

Not fast enough…

Twelve Days of Winterfest
(Sing to the tune of “12 Days of Christmas”)

On the twelfth day of Winterfest, the city gave to me
Toxic toys from China
Plastic Christmas trees
Cancer-causing Pringles
Trackside live horses
Pissed pentagon officials
Snow fights in the tropics
Tacky Christmas lights
Li-Ka Shing’s stake on Facebook
An empty Disneyland
Price hike on bacon
A Brand new legislator
And a promise of democracy

Credit: Leeann Bennett and Sarah Fung, HK Magazine, No. 710, December 21, 2007

—-

Have a Merry Christmas! I will be surveying whether Jesus will return with the Mahdi…

I woke up at 3 a.m., packed, went all the way to O’Hare, lined up for a good 2 hours and was told that my flight has been canceled. After some angry and tearful protests, they decided to upgrade me to First Class and felt “extremely sorry for the delays.”

At this rate, when will I ever see Hong Kong again?

Let me go, please.

ebay bidding

yada, yada, yada…

The continued existence of the United States means that Americans will continue to suffer from cognitive dissonance. They will continue to attempt to come to terms with that dissonance through some combination of moralism, cynicism, complacency, and hypocrisy. The greatest danger to the gap between ideals and institutions would come when any substantial portion of the American population carried to an extreme any one of these responses. An excess of moralism, hypocrisy, cynicism, or complacency could destroy the American system. A totally complacent toleration of the ideals -versus-institutions gap could lead to the corruption and decay of American liberal-democratic institutions. Uncritical hypocrisy, blind to the existence of the gap and fervent in its commitment to American principles, could lead to imperialistic expansion, ending in either military or political disaster abroad or the undermining of democracy at home. Cynical acceptance of the gap could lead to a gradual abandonment of American ideals and their replacement either by a Thrasymachusian might-makes-right morality or by some other set of political beliefs. Finally, intense moralism could lead Americans to destroy the freest institutions on earth because they believed they deserved something better.

—-Samuel P. Hunington

“If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.”

—Reinhold Niebuhr,  The Irony of American History