The Never-Ending Blog.

Mecha-Rudhraigh vs the WTO!!

2005-12-13T18:28:00.000+08:00

Well, as you know everybody's favourite trade regulator, the good old WTO is in town having a meeting that's apparently aimed at solving the burning trade issues that cripple the poor and molest the rich of their god given dignity. They surely are a bunch of good Samaritans at the WTO, kind, considerate and truely concerned for the fortunes of their fellow man. Sadly, not all agree with this righteous point of view and a few of these malicious minded thieves thought it proper and appropriate to litter the streets of Hong Kong with their maloderous presence today.
I, thinking it an interesting situation, tagged along for the ride. To start with, it was pretty sedate although some of the walking bands and megaphone shouting was pretty cool. They closed off a long part of Wan Chai, there were representetives from every conceivable anti-globalisation organisation around, if Hong Kong is anything it's a mish mash of people from everywhere around the world so pretty much everyone has access to protesting here. Indians, Brits, Germans, Chinese, Koreans, French, Brazilians and of course the Irish. When I first got there it was pretty standard protest stuff, hundreds of people all walking in the same direction trying to make it look as though it represented something, even though the something in question was slightly different depending on which banner you were walking behind.
Some people wanted genuine fair trade, others wanted fair trade strictly for homosexuals, yet others wanted fair trade as a part of international communism and thene there was me, who wanted to take photos. Then there were the Korean farmers, who wanted to have the right to sell their products at the same prices as the multinational corporations who are edging them out of the market with mass production. Those pesky Koreans have a habit of dying of starvation and making everyone look bad as a result.
While I was walking next to the Oxfam group, I noticed that I was beside the dude from Amorres Peros and the Motorcycle Diaries. He was small, hairy and had a camera.
When we finally got to the ground outside the conference center, all the groups stopped by the seaside and took out the megaphones. An hour of shouting in Chinese and heavily accented English, nothing much had happened. The problem with these sorts of protests is that at the core of your mind, you're always a little bored and you hope there will be a little action. Luckily, I was not dissapointed. I was lucky enough to be beside some railings that overlooked the main poiint of entry to the conference when the Korean farmers attacked the Hong Kong police barricade. They tried to dump a burning funeral pyre on the police, but luckily they didn't achieve it. The cops were replaced by a forty person deep line of police officers, all of whom seemed to be about ten, in full riot gear with shields, pepper spray and batons. It was a crazy thing, people were getting sprayed, cops were getting hit, it's weird to see someone hit a cop and know that they won't get arrested cause there are just too many of them. It really drives it home how much the police rely on the support of the people to do their job.
When the Koreans started getting out of hand, they got pepper sprayed like crazy, I was about four meters away from this one guy who got a load of it straight in the eyes. He was on the ground writhing in pain, the kind of pain you don;t really see first person these days. I was on top of the railings taking photos for about an hour and a half whilst a full on riot was going down less than two meters below me. The photos I took were pretty unbelievable, you really can't beleive the craziness of see a guy get beaten with a baton, especially when you know he kinda deserves it for trying to smash a policeman in the face with a piece of wood.
Eventually things calmed down somewhat, the Koreans had all been peppersprayed and beaten so there wad no-one left to go crazy. It was odd, you could see loads of crusty Europeans in the mix, giving a lot of shit. Very weird to see that, kind of wanted them to get arrested. After a while I decided to leave and went off. As I walked home, I kept looking at all the people, amazed by the fact that no-one was fighting.
So all in all, my first riot was a glorious success, except that nothing actually got acheived. Some people got smacked around and yet others couldn't see yet, thank god, the WTO conference goes on and we can all go to bed safe knowing that the world is an ordered place. Apparently Saturday is going to be the hardcore day because 600 more Korean farmes are arriving so I may go again if I get time. I'll post the pictures I take then too..

30 things that I have learned in Hong Kong

2005-12-09T18:23:00.001+08:00

1] Chinese People love money, work hard and will be all of our masters in a short time. Our Kids will be naming their kids "Fung" and sending them to Chinese schools to learn accentless Mandarin.
2] Living in a big city can actually be a very small experience.
3] People on cocaine are not as much fun as you might think.
4] Chinese people tend towards being unimaginative.
5] Chinese girls love to date Europeans but want to marry Chinese.
6] Advertising is not as easy as you might think.
7] I like living in a place where things work properly.
8] Living in a different time zone to everyone you love is both good because you can pick when you're going to talk to people and shit because sometimes you can't when you want to.
9] Long distance relationships are extremely hard when you're in love.
10] Reno 911 is a great show in bits.
11] Paying full price for DVD's is stupid.
12] Meeting new and interesting people is hard in aplace where everyone is remarkably similar.
13] Living in a small flat can be a lot of fun if you have a good flatmate.
14] The internet is a small place.
15] The fact that every conception of the future in film looks like a mall in LA is depressing.
16] There are places on this Earth for everyone, even the fuckers have their own place where they can do exactly what they want.
17] I hate the word "Expat"
18] Blogs are a diamond mine of shit and excellent music.
19] I have a distinct interest in particular parts of the internet.
20] Being white and the much debated minority is not easy when you're trying to blend in.
21] You don't need Cantonese to live in Hong Kong, you just need Cantonese to talk to anyone worht talking to.
22] Within ten years, Hong Kong will rival any city in the world in terms of popular culture and celebrity.
23] Cantopop is crap, but popluar in mainland China.
24] Deadwood is a good TV show, in fact everything by HBO is great.
25] Rocky is a good game until you get good at it, then it's just boring and repetetive.
26] The music scene here is progressing well, but still shit and underdeveloped.
27] I like being able to buy cheap beer whenever I want in 7-11, but it makes me feel poor.
28] I like to live in a warm climate, but constant air conditioning is mind sappingly tiring.
29] Life is not an easy thing to predict.
30] I'd come back to Hong Kong, but I couldn't live here.

30 things thatI have learned in Hong Kong

2005-12-09T18:23:00.000+08:00

20 Things that have changed in the last 2 months

2005-11-28T17:53:00.000+08:00

1) I quit my job.
2) I moved out of the Sykes’ into a closet. But it’s a closet with a PS2 and an ashtray, so it was okay.
3) I’ve been writing a lot more.
4) I’ve started smoking.
5) I’m now smoking Menthols.
6) I don’t think I can go back to regular cigarettes.
7) I’ve become radically unfit but I’ve lost a load more weight and look more fit than when I was going to the gym twice a day, how hilarious is that?
8) I’m now on my natural “go to sleep at six in the morning and get up at three in the afternoon” sleep cycle.
9) I’ve been watching a lot more TV/movies
10) I eat out at almost every meal.
11) I now have to do my own washing.
12) I go out drinking a lot less now that I live thirty seconds away from all the bars.
13) I’ve started going into work solely because they let me use the internet. This means that hilariously enough, there are days when I sit on the net for hours, browsing and downloading, exactly what I did when I actually worked here.
14) I stopped playing the PS2 as playing Rocky for two days straight made me hit someone.
15) I’m planning on either coming home early to do some research for my book or going to Malaysia.
16) I finally saw “The Talented Mr. Ripley”, very good, although I was surprised by all the gay stuff. Not because I have a problem with including homosexuality as a narrative device but because I hate the gays.
17) I’ve been buying up small bankrupt corporations, amalgamating them into single corporate entities and selling them on to the US government at a vast profit.
18) I’ve started lying in this entry.
19) I discovered to my simultaneous glee and anger that the couch in my flat is actually a sofa bed. I have been sitting on that couch for days on end and my flatmate didn't think to tell me that it pulled out into a bed. That enrages me What's worse is that I didn't think to check.
20) I’ll be home for and after Christmas, this place is dead anyway.

My Day In: Air Conditioning

2005-11-15T11:25:00.000+08:00

04:40 AM
I wake up at with a comprehensive motherfucker of a sore throat because the air con always dries me out like I've been French kissing a sponge. After a few seconds of staring into the dark, I realise that reason I'm awake is because the fan has popped back on, making a loud "CLick" noise, it does this every fifteen minutes or so. Most times I'm able to ignore it but every sixth or seventh time it builds to a crescendo of sudden scary night noising, one of those "CLICK"'s makes me sit up in bed grasping for the light switch as I ready myself for the mortal struggle with the house sized cricket who seems to be trying to eat me. Of course I could just sleep without the air con on, but I have this thing about having to wash gallons of sweat out of my one set of sheets three times every day because my washing machine doesn't work very well. So, instead, I sleep badly and have a sore throat, it seems like a fair trade.

09:00 AM
Phone goes of and then goes back to sleep so that I can too. Room is freezing, yet somehow I am still sweating. Pull covers over half of me as compromise. Uncovered half now far too cold whilst covered half far too hot.

09:10 AM
Snooze mode # 1 kicks in, switch covered/uncovered sides. For brief moment am comfortable enough to escape back to sleep.

09:20 AM
Snooze mode # 2 kicks in, merely a transititory stage, perhaps change sides/hug pillow. On occasion if I'm feeling active I might turn off the air con and open my door a little at this point so that I can enjoy the next half an hour of cool air mixing with the war form the living room.

09:30 AM
Snooze mode # 3 kicks in and is ignored as I sleep. Room is pleasantly temperatured if I opened the door, or freezing if I didn't.

09:40 AM
Snooze mode # 4 kicks in , I debate whether to get up and instead go back to sleep. Throat is beginning to smart.

09:50 AM
Snooze Mode # 5 kicks in. I usually get up about now as I have to be in work for ten. I go out into the sweltering furnace of the living room, take a three minute shower, brush my teeth get dressed and am out the door and at my desk by 10:05 AM.

10:05 AM
Sitting at the desk, the office is freezing if one of the Chinese staff has had to walk to work, or pleasant enough if they didn't. The problem with Air con is that most people only really think about it when they're either too hot or too cold. So they end up turning it on or off and you have to just put up with the adjustment to your ambient temperature, you just have to take it.
It's not like you can for example, stand up and bellow in their face " Hey! Fuckwad! I realise you may be overly hot but for Christ's sake why don't you stand in the corridor where the building AC makes it Sub Artic for five minutes instead of making me sit here with goosebumps for the next twenty until I finally awkwardly ask if you mid if I turn the AC down a bit?" You can't do it cause your throat is far too sore.

12:30 PM
Lunch time means going outside, outside means a variety of ambient temperatures ranging from teeth chattering to sweltering. I walk from the relatively comfortable office, into the Artic wasteland of the corridor. I actually have a jacket that I wear just for when I'm standing in the corridor, it's that cold. Someone once told me that apparently in New York, more people die of pneumonia in the Summer than the Winter because they just live in the vast extremes of Outside Hot and Inside Cold. I can believe it. I tell that story at least once a week. I find it comforting in a "Generation X'er continuous appreciation of the vague sarcastic irony of our existence" kind of way.
Going outside right now is actually okay, it's like a really warm day in a temperate country, but coupled with massive humidity and even worse pollution it ain't doing your sore throat any favours. The Air conditioning units of Hong Kong are the single biggest drain on the power grid, massively outclassing their nearest rival. This also means they're the main contributors to the worsening pollution problem here. It's funny, in other places I would feel genuinely bad to be adding to this problem, here I don't even think about it as I reach for the AC. It's just too fucking hot.

In terms of AC, Walking through places in Hong Kong is a bit of an international tableau of differing climates. People here have actually figured out a way to make the kind of AC you subscribe to be a kind of social stratification. For example to many Hong Kong Chinese people, temperatures just short of freezing are the only acceptable standard, whilst Europeans with their added layers of fat prefer a more temperate option. So if you go into a Hong Kong Chinese business here and they favour a temperate AC, you can immediately tell that they're trying to cater to the Europeans, and vice versa. It's an odd little thing.

Also, to a certain extent climate control is another form of wealth classification, since more expensive air con units run into hundreds of thousands of HK Dollars, if you only have one of the window boxes {as I have had since I moved out of the Sykes's} you're doomed to half-measured air con. So if you have da money you can be comfy, tis as simple as that. The theft of air conditioning units from apartments here is apparently pretty massive, an interesting fact if you throw in the "bling" factor of having good air conditioning in your flat. Some people actually refer to each other's Air con units by model name. "Hey Yao lets go back to yours and crank up that sweet AC-1050 Beeatch!" "Fan, your Zannusi 55k is tricked out Muthafucka!"

17:00 PM
Been sitting at desk all day, throat even worse, feel like germs have spore colonies in the spongy air con filters and are busily invading my body. I have never had so many colds and flus in my life. It's like uin the office we all have one glass that we all drink out of, except every time we do it's always the backwashed bit at the end that's thirty percent spit.
I sneeze, everyone else here immeditaely covers their mouths. If someone coughs, I immediatelty cover mine. Germs and air con go hand in hand, the little buggers just love to get into the filters and go mental. Because it's all recirculated air, you get this weird stale smell, a kind of "diet-smell" of everything. For example if someone’s having a smoke, you get a kind of "Fresh-air Smoke" smell all over the place. When we get food in, you can smell the tinge of it everywhere. Because the air is cold, you're constantly taking deep breaths, I have yet to see a place where it's so cold you can see your breath, even though it's definitely been cold enough for that to happen. as far as I can figure that's largely because air conditioned air doesn't conduct vapour the same way as normal air, presumably because it's so devoid of moisture or some such other pertinent scientific fact.
I'm looking forward to going home, usually at around 18:30 PM, so that I can go and regulate my own air con and stop putting my jacket on and off every twenty minutes. Living in air conditioning is pretty much all about the five minutes after you've taken off an article of clothing or walked inside from the heat. All the other times, it's pretty shitty.

02:00 AM
I turn on the AC in my bedroom before taking a shower, the room has to be cool before I go to bed, it's just a pain in the ass trying to sleep otherwise. It begins to "CLick" as I leave the room. I hate that "CLick". More than I hate Osama Bin Laden, at least he lets me sleep.

Elaine.

2005-10-31T17:35:00.000+08:00

I found out on Saturday that Elaine, one of the two staff writers from BC magazine where I used to work, tragically committed suicide last Friday.

When I heard, I really didn't know what to do, I didn't know what to say, I didn't know how I felt other than I knew I felt insensibly bad. Since then, thinking about it I have to admit that I didn't know Elaine terribly well, we worked together in an office where we never really talked, but sometimes, even all you have with another person is a shared awareness that you're both alive, that they will share in part of your own life's memory and as such the death of that person is inexpressibly tragic, woefully all encompassing, personally devastating.

It's funny, now that I want to try and describe her I find I can't, or maybe it's that I don't want to try because now that she's not here to disprove my inevitably innacurate description of her, my insipid simplification of her life, I don't want to confine her to words like "a good person" and "sweet" because they're not who she was. She was so much more than that. She was a living, breathing person with all the millions of unique traits both good and bad that we all have and that's the tragedy, the world is a little less special now that she's gone. It's selfish for the rest of us who are still here and who knew her, but we can't help it, I know I can't. I miss her. Even though I didn't know her very well.

It's funny, for the most part we really do live in a culture of denial when it comes to death. Anti-aging this and plastic Beyonce that, death is really not something that we like to acknowledge. It's just something we genuinely wish wasn't there at all and the denial is so huge that it dwarves any ability on our part to compare it to something in our lives that we understand, something ordinary. Death, it seems, is an emotional trigger we can't stand being pulled.

Our denial is mostly made easy by the fact that for the most part, all the people who are reading this, ie. people with computers, treat death as a rather unnatural part of their lives because the seldom experience it in others and never in themselves and when it does happen to others it's usually to people that you can kind of tell are going to die. So, when we are confronted with sudden death, the very rapidity of it means that it's something that we can't ignore because the absence of that person, combined with the total lack of solid dependable knowledge as to what has really happened to them means that we are confronted by a reality much realer than the one we've been living in. We find ourselves stumped as to how to deal with this new reality, we wish that we could go back to living in the old one because it was a lot less complicated and it didn't hurt as much. Death brings desperation. In response to this problem some turn to religion, others to addiction, many just shut down from the all encompassing nature of the pain, living for the rest of their lives in quiet, unassailable agony. I wonder, is there another option?

I am one of the luckier ones in that with regards to Elaine's death, I was on the emotional periphery because I didn't know her very well. Sadly enough, I can deal with it, apparently this event is not large enough for me to really learn anything really real about death. My sadness aside I can fall back into my life and this merely ends the chapter marked "Elaine" in my head, in the story of my life. I think the real tragedy of suicide is for the people who are closer to the dead, those who cannot escape or evade the pain. Elaine impacted on many people throughout her life, more than she knew, more than any of us knew.

The saddest thing of all is that if suicides knew how many people will genuinely miss them after they are gone, they'd probably never do it in the first place..

Written this morning in work "Jesus II - Payback Time!"

2005-10-27T13:09:00.000+08:00

VO
Two thousand years ago the world was changed forever when our lord God sent his only son to Earth to die for our sins. Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace sacrificed himself so that we, the filthy sinners of the world, could be forgiven for all time. Since then many bad and evil things have happened, World Wars, Plagues, The Spice Girls, Terrorism. Looking around the world today you could be forgiven for thinking that the Dark Lord Satan has won the war for Earth’s soul, but you would be wrong. It’s not a question of if Jesus is coming back; it’s just a question of when. It’s not a question of why Jesus takes all Satan’s evil, it’s a question of just how much he can take, and what will it be that pushes Jesus over the edge of heaven and back down to Earth.

EXT – The United Nations Building in New York City-New York, it is a busy and baking hot day in New York. SAIED, a confident and good looking looking young Arab man walks towards the building carrying a rucksack, you can tell he’s an Arab because he’s wearing a turban, has a long beard and robes and is continually muttering “Allah U Ackbar” in an Oxford accent under his breath every couple of seconds. He meets another obviously Arabic man with a massive beard in front of the fountain JAFFAR who is holding a briefcase

SAIED
Greetings Jaffar, is it not a fine day to bring the fiery wrath of god to the infidels?

JAFFAR
Indeed Saied, today the whole world shall know that there is but one god and Allah is his name.

SAIED
Is everything in place?

JAFFAR
It is brother.

SAIED
So, sha..

His is interrupted by a man dressed in a shirt and tie wearing a badge that identifies him as a Mormon

MORMON [Loud and friendly]
Hello there gentlemen, my name is Elder Johnson from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints! Have you heard the good work about Jesus Christ?

SAIED [Maliciously]
Hey, why don’t you go fuck yourself?

MORMON
Well, there’s no need for that, I’m just trying to save your eternal souls.

JAFFAR
Well go save somewhere else you diseased patch of camel urine!

The MORMON walks away, shaking his head, he immediately accosts a pair of suited types with the same schpiel as they pass by.

SAIED
God, I hate the fucking Mormons.

JAFFAR
Yeah, the fucking bastards they’re always calling to the apartment during dinner, really pisses my second wife off. If it was up to me they’d all roast in fiery pits for eternity.

SAIED
Anyway, shall we do this thing?

JAFFAR
Indeed. Let’s get our bomb on.

SAIED and JAFFAR walk towards the back of the building.
CUT to EXT an unguarded service entrance where a shuttered grate has been left open to allow a nearby truck to unload it’s cargo of coffee beans and fresh tomatoes. They sidle up the truck, grab sacks and enter the building unnoticed amongst the workers.

Cut To INT Security office – A security camera screen clearly shows the two men entering the building, but MOHAMMAD THE SECURITY GUARD at the desk is also of Arabic extraction, you can tell this because he is wearing full Arabic robes, a turban has a long black beard and a little badge that says
“Security – Mohommad Smith”

SECURITY GUARD [Whispering to himself]
Allah U Akbar Saied! Allah U Ackbar Jaffar!

CUT TO INT Un Building – SAEID and JAFFAR are standing amongst a tour group consisting of an OLD MAN FROM TEXAS, a few young people and a group of small Catholic school children including a cute little blond girl called JENNY who are being chaperoned by FATHER MCGETTIGAN, an old Irish priest who looks as if he might have a drinking problem. The attractive female TOUR GUIDE is standing by to lead them through different areas of interest.

TOUR GUIDE
Now, if you’d like to move along, we’ll start the tour.

JENNY
Father?

FATHER MCGETTIGAN
Yes Jenny?

JENNY
Billy Batson just asked me if he could touch my heiny but I said no cause Jesus says heiny touching before marriage is evil.

FATHER MCGETTIGAN [shouting]
Indeed it is. Well Jenny, if that’s that case don’t you worry because then Billy is going STRAIGHT TO HELL!! Aren’t you Billy? Where you will be forced to eat liquid hot lava for all of time and burn in everlasting turmoil and torment, right Billy?

BILLY [Quietly, looking like he’s about to cry]
Yes father.

FATHER MCGETTIGAN [Shouting]
That’s right, now all of you little bloodsucking cretins, come on! There’re millions of starving black babies right now in Africa who aren’t as lucky as ye who are getting to swan about on school trips to the United Nation s Building!

The tour Group begins to walk through the building

TOUR GUIDE
The United Nations headquarters building was constructed in New York City in 1949 and 1950 beside the East River on land purchased by an 8.5 million dollar donation from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The building, which consists of

Whilst the speech is going on, JAFFAR is reaching into his briefcase and subtly assembling a submachine gun under his robes. The gun is completed as they reach a small room with only one entrance which has a number of posters that are relevant to the building’s history. He looks over at SAIED and nods, as soon as SAIED nods back JAFFAR grabs the TOUR GUIDE and points the fully assembled MP5 Hechler and Koch at her head. SAIED pulls out a massive Mini-Gun that he had secreted under his voluminous robes and points it directly at the children

JAFFAR
No body fucking move!

The room erupts, all the children are going crazy and trying to run away. The TOUR GUIDE is going absolutely hysterical. JAFFAR and SAIED are trying to keep the whole group together by pushing them together and screaming mindlessly in Arabic but somehow JENNY manages to break away and make a run for the door, she is about to make it when suddenly MOHAMMED THE SECURITY GUARD appears in the door with what looks like a Scud missile launcher.

MOHAMMED THE SECURITY GUARD
And where do you think you are you going little girl?

JENNY
AHHHHHHHHHHHH!

MOHAMMED THE SECURITY GUARD pushes JENNY back into the room and closes the door behind him, locking it with a key from his belt. He walks towards the still crazy crowd.

MOHAMMED THE SECURITY GUARD [Screaming]
Shut up!!

MOHAMMED THE SECURITY GUARD points the Scud launcher at JENNY and the room quietens down. Once they are calm, SAIED pushes Jenny back into the crowd

MOHAMMED THE SECURITY GUARD
Having trouble Saied?

SAIED
Don’t give me any of that backtalk! Is everything on schedule?

MOHAMMED THE SECURITY GUARD
Yes, Thank Allah for equal opportunity employers. Stupid Christians won’t know what hit them. By now videotapes have been given to all the major news networks explaining what we do here today.

JAFFAR
Shall I set the explosives?

SAIED
Yes Jaffar.

JAFFAR pushes the petrified TOUR GUIDE back into the mass of people and walks over to a certain wall, pulls off the posters and opens his briefcase which is full of explosives, he begins setting them up. Meanwhil,the OLD MAN FROM TEXAS and FATHER MCGETTIGAN are having a heated whispered debate.

OLD MAN FROM TEXAS [Whispering]
I’m telling you father, I’m not going out without a fight.

FATHER MCGETTIGAN [Whispering]
But what can you do?

OLD MAN FROM TEXAS [Whispering]
I can take them down.

OLD MAN FROM TEXAS surreptitiously pulls out a small knife from his boot and puts it up his sleeve.

OLD MAN FROM TEXAS [Whispering]
I’m a cop. I know what to do.

FATHER MCGETTIGAN [Whispering]
But there are three of them, they might hurt the children!

OLD MAN FROM TEXAS [Whispering]
I can get them.

SAIED [SHOUTING]
You two! Come here!

OLD MAN FROM TEXAS and FATHER MCGETTIGAN look at each other and then walk out.

SAIED
You were talking?

FATHER MCGETTIGAN
No

SAIED
It wasn’t a question.

SAIED shoots OLD MAN FROM TEXAS in the face, he falls back and hits the ground, everyone screams.

SAIED
No talking.

CUT TO – EXT An infinite cloud of purest white, in the middle there is a hole through which the hostage room can be seen. As OLD MAN FROM TEXAS is shot a beautiful, soft and gentle voice can be heard to say

VO
NO!

CUT TO – INT Hostage room – SAIED is now pointing his gun at FATHER MCGETTTIGAN, the room is in pandemonium.

SAIED [Shouting]
SHUT UP!!

The room quietens down.

SAIED
You [points at FATHER MCGETTIGAN] you are a Christian priest yes?

FATHER MCGETTIGAN
I am.

SAIED
And what do you think of what we are doing?

FATHER MCGETTIGAN
I think it is an abomination before God.

SAIED [laughing]
That is very funny, because I think it is God’s Will and since there is no God but Allah, surely you are wrong?

FATHER MCGETTIGAN
There is one true God and Jesus Christ was his son.

SAIED
Well, that’s a good point, I too am a priest and since I represent the Will of God if I were to say, shoot this girl here in the head to teach you not to talk, what would you say?

SAIED points his mini-gun at JENNY who cowers in fear. SAID starts the barrel of his gun spinning. JAFFAR and MOHAMMAD THE SECURITY GUARD look on with sniggering laughter.

CUT TO – EXT An infinite cloud of purest white

VO [very strongly]
NO! This is it, I can watch no longer my children suffer, now is the time for action!

CUT TO – INT Hostage room,

SAIED [Shouting]
You! [pointing at Jenny] Come here!

FATHER MCGETTIGAN [Shouting]
No Jenny! You stay there!

SAIED
Talking again? Maybe this will teach you.

SAIED begins to fire at Jenny and into the crowd of children, he laughs maniacally as the mini-gun blazes away, the small room quickly fills with smoke from the gun’s cordite until the children are obscured. Screams are heard under the whine of the gun’s motor. Eventually SAIED stops firing, but keeps laughing. FATHER MCGETTIGAN falls to his knees in abject despair, crying and sobbing. SAIED’s face is maniacal as he turns to FATHER MCGETTIGAN and starts the gun spinning again.

SAIED
The lesson is over.

Suddenly, magically, the room clears of smoke and the children are revealed to all be standing there, not knowing what has happened. On the ground about three feet in front of them there are thousands of bullets and there is also a man with long brown hair and a short brown beard. He is wearing a pure white robe.

JESUS CHRIST
No, the lesson is just beginning.

SAIED is absolutely shocked, JAFFAR and MOHAMMAD THE SECURITY GUARD are lying dead on the ground. FATHER MCGETTIGAN looks up at SAIED and smiles. JESUS CHRIST waves and SAIED is suddenly totally frozen in a stance of absoulte terror, only his eyes are moving.

JESUS CHRIST
Enjoy the eternally tormenting lava, tell Satan I’ll see him soon.

JESUS CHRIST waves his hand again and SAIED bursts into flames, he writhes in agony as the flames consume his body. Eventually he stops moving and the ashes turn into a disgusting blood coloured goo, as do the bodies of JAFFAR and MOHAMMAD THE SECURITY GUARD

FATHER MCGETTIGAN
My Lord? You’re back?

JESUS CHRIST
Yes I’m back, and now it’s Payback time.

One part of every sentence here is a lie. Guess which!

2005-10-26T17:15:00.000+08:00

Two weeks ago I went through a Machiavellian plan to secretly surprise my family by coming home for my brother’s birthday but they were still to be unaware of my other, more savage secret, that since moving to Hong Kong I had joined the CIA as the international assassin and part-time spam-monger Fanciful D Delphiniu!

I surprised my brother on the morning of his birthday by lying my way into his flat but once I had pushed past the third naked male prostitute dressed in a sexy Klingon outfit I realised that I was not the only one in our family who had secrets.

Later that day, I surprised the rest of my family at a restaurant which was lovely because my mother cried, of course I was unaware that she was crying because she realised that she’d have to pay for my dinner.

For the next few days, I mostly spent my time in Wicklow, playing computer games, talking to my mum, enjoying the fresh air and killing would-be Israeli assassins.

Later that week I attended Charlie Slevin’s Pirate-Themed 21st Birthday in Mayo which was totally not full of Charlie’s rough attempts to put his “pork sword” in everyone’s ear while they slept.

I saw all the guys I hadn’t seen in a while, Mano, Eddie, Dave Wall, Johnny Illan, Skec, Ben Ullman which was great.

Once home again, my friend Paul came over from Hong Kong for two days for some drinking, some chatting and to keep me up to date on an upcoming job in Russia regarding a certain corrupt Irish TD who needed “retirement”

For the next few days I wasn’t looking forward to leaving Ireland, my family and paying six euro for a watered down pint of piss.

Of course the day eventually came, I said goodbye to my loved ones, said goodbye to my father, hugged my older brother and my younger sister, kissed my girlfriend, garrotted my traitorous informant for not telling me about the second kill-team in Bangladesh.

When I was on the plane on the way back to Hong Kong I was sitting next to this guy, an Arab guy.

He claimed he was a police officer in Hong Kong, soon to join the Police Tactical Unit we had a nice conversation but thanks to my extensive CIA training I noticed that he kept drawing in a scrapbook which featured large pictures of what seemed to be exploding planes full of dying, screaming white people, one of which looked just like me.

He was very interested in my lifestyle in Hong Kong but I think he was somewhat put off by the fact that I kept openly readjusting the Glock 45 in my Leg Holster so that it pointed in his direction.

When the food service arrived he seemed to be unable to make the decision between the chicken and the beef lasagne, but it didn’t matter which he chose as I had poisoned both.

Later he slept for most of the journey, the poison was a fast acting neural toxin that gradually paralysed his breathing making it look like deep vein thrombosis.

I didn’t sleep as I wanted to try and normalise my sleep patterns as quickly as possible, plus I didn’t know if there were any more terrorists on the plane.

Landing in Hong Kong I was glad to be back but I had extremely mixed feelings, I missed Ireland, I missed my family, I missed my girlfriend, I missed my target when a stupid fucking bodyguard got in the way.

Now that I’m back, I’m back working away in advertising; good cover stories are hard to come by.

Ass Piracy on the Extremely High Seas

2005-10-26T10:46:00.000+08:00

Bueno
Originally uploaded by buen0.

Whilst back, I went to Charlie Slevin's 21st birthday party, I think this is the photo of the evening.

Well done Bueno! Two Gold stars!

Previously on Rory’s Blog.

2005-09-30T18:39:00.000+08:00

Cut to Chad and Rory backstage, Rory is lying on the ground in a puddle of vomit.

Chad
Hey Rory, you’ve changed man! It used to be just about the music! Now you spend all your time hanging around with all your new friends, drinking and partying, me and the guys hardly never see you no more

Rory [Shouting whilst Drunkenly waving around a half drunken bottle of Jack Daniels]
Get off my back you fucking albatross! Every time I achieve something, you fuckers are there to claim that you did it, that it was al about you and that I was just there at the time, doing fucking nothing. That’s it! I’m fucking leaving this shitty band and going solo!

Cut to Rory and Emma, sitting at the dinner with her parents, the room is silent, there is vomit on the table.

Rory [Shouting whilst Drunkenly waving around a half drunken bottle of Jack Daniels]
Listen, all I’m saying is that I’m too much man to just get it on with one woman, I’m an international Rockstar in China for God’s sake, what do you expect? Over there I’ma God!! Men, Women, Children, some animals that are capable of such emotions such as dogs, cats and maybe dolphins, they all fucking love me! Your daughter should be appreciative that I’m not fucking bored with her already.

Christopher [silently]
Get the hell out of my house.

Cut to Rory and Emma standing outside the Syke’s building,

Emma [Crying]
But you said you loved me!

Rory [Shouting whilst Drunkenly around waving a half drunken bottle of Jack Daniels]
I said a lot of things.

Cut to Rory driving a pimped out super tricked speed boat out of Hong Kong harbour to sea, his long hair is blowing in the wind, a Coastguard boat is following him.

CoastGuard [Through Loadspeaker]
Rory! Don't throw your life away! Turn back immediately! You’re heading into Tsuen Fan Wu: Dead Man’s Bay! There are underwater reefs! You'll be killed!

Rory [Shouting whilst Drunkenly waving around a half drunken bottle of Jack Daniels]
Fuck you you motherfucking bastards! You all make me sick! You all want a piece of me, everyone wants a piece of Rory, Well, you know what? You’re not fucking getting it! Fuck You!!!!

Cut to shot of boat hitting a reef, there’s a large explosion, Cut to shot of bottle of Jack Daniels falling underwater.

VO
AND NOW, THE CONTINUATION OF RORY’S BLOG

Lazy is Beautiful!

2005-09-14T15:38:00.000+08:00

Today, I spent some time perusing the work of the good people at www.goodplasticsurgery.com

This is basically a site that rates the plastic surgery that celebrities get done, showing before and after pics of everybody's favorite American sweethearts. What I find interesting about this is not the fact that someone is interested enough in this phenomenon that they'll actually spend some serious time posting hundreds of thousands of lines about Hilary Duff's new veneers, I was well aware that people were that pathetic, it's actually the sheer number of well known celebrities that have had plastic surgery, a long and painful process that's pretty much just a form of self-mutilation when you think about it.

Now I know this is hardly big news. We've all heard about this for quite some time,I could go as far as to say that I knew this already, everyone doed. But I knew it in that passive "no-one I know well has ever gotten plastic surgery simply to look better" kind of way. I think this site really hammered it home, people get this shit done for no other reason then 'cause they don't like aspects of how they look. It's funny, you hear about people getting plastic in a kind of "reading one of your mother's Cosmopolitans in the toilet" kind of way and you think "Wow, people are fucked up!" and it adds to your whole "Fairytale Kindom of America" concept, but I have to say I never really realised how truly prevalent it is, like even people who are by any standards already good looking get surgery to make themselves that little bit better.

Besides all the crazy Korean's and Brazilian maniacs, thousands and thousands of celebrities and celebrity wannabees routinely go under the knife! It's part of their daily routine, their daily life, like my life! It's like going to the dentist for them! It's banal! Like my going to work!
There are people out there who study healing people for ten years to be able to be paid vast amounts of cash to shove pieces of plastic under other people's skin to advance their social structure! It's insane! And then I inevitably thought, would I ever get something tlike that done?

No, no I wouldn't. Not Botox, not a nose job, no face lifts, no breast implants, no nothing. And not because I just think it's fucked up [although I do]I wouldn't because I'm already totally perfect so the question doesn't apply.

I'm one of the lucky few, the elite, those of "natural beauty" for who the concept of looking better is simply a non issue beacue they already look perfect.

So I of all people can understand why people would want to look like me, looking like me is great! People listen more, they're more likely to forgive you or give you another chance when you fuck them over or fail to do something, to lend you money, take your advice and put up with you continually ignore theirs, or even when you've broken a law or cheated on them! People are dumbstruck by physical beauty! Being good looking is the lazy man's answer to everything! Just look at how fucking useless models are! They have no talent, no profession or function in society whatsoever other than to wear clothes and walk! And people idolise them! Cause they're useless!
Jessica Simpson? Paris Hilton? FUCKING USELESS!!!!

So, yeah, if plastic surgery is for lazy people then the laziest person in the world would ergo be the most beautiful! I know what you're thinking, I thought it too. This means that Rudhraigh McGrath is the most beautiful man alive!

I'm so lazy I won't ever need to consider getting plastic surgery because getting plastic surgery is a real fucking hassle and I'm far too lazy to actually do it, so ergo I must be the most beautiful!QED!! I'm so lazy that I can't be fucked getting plastic surgery but at the same time I also don't need plastic surgery because I'm the most beautiful!

I AM A GOLDEN GOD!!! I AM THE MOST BEAUTIFUL, FLAWLESS BEING IN THE UNIVERE!!!! I AM BEYOND ENTROPY!!!!

Well..actually....now that I think about it, maybe a small chin implant, just to look more like The Hoff you understand.

"Nite of Champions"

2005-09-13T15:09:00.000+08:00

DSCN0989
Originally uploaded by Rudhraigh.

So, last Friday, no....wait.....this story begins before then.....I
have to go back further.....back, to whan it all began.

The year is 25,000 BC, man is but a distant and beautiful dream, a
mere speck in the eye of God, the universe's postman. Earth is busily
waiting for her husband to go out to work so that she and the Almighty Postie can get biiisaaaay. Soon, according to Stanley Kubrick, primitive apes are
learning to hit stuff with stuff, changing everything forever.
"Ape shall not kill Ape" was the refrain up until this point, but one
Ape wasn't listening, he was starting a series of events that would
lead to a Friday night 27,005 years later where I, and three of my
friends, watched Muay Thai Kickboxers knock several differing
varieties of shite our of each other. It was worth the wait.

I have to say, you watch the early Van Damme movies like "BloodSport" and apparently if you're any kind of man you think "That's so cool! I
love Blood! I love Sport! Ergo I must love BloodSport!" Now I loved
those movies, but blood makes me feel queesy and I feel that sport is
for people who don't know how to sit down, so I have to say, when I saw the poster for the event whilst dinnering in a crappy litle Thai restaurant, I was conflicted. On one hand I could watch some guys fightingm real hardcore and have fun, on the other I could get my fork and jam it into my leg. After careful consideration I decided to do both, so I limped to the fight with Ben, Bryan, Gordon and Tom, all of whom you probably don't know because

A] The internet is a big place
B] The world is a big place
C] Muay Thai is cool
D] That's it, Muay Thai is cool.
E] I realise I was talking about
something else, but what's much more
important is that Muay Thai is cool.

So anyway, we turn up and outside the stadium to see this crazy looking Belgian guy in a black suit. Bryan does Muay Thai Kickboxing as he's in the CIA {not really] and he knew this guy to be one of the big Kickboxing trainers in Hong Kong. The most hardcore trainer, the one that makes you crap blood for a week after a training session. Apparently he is what Jean Claude would have been if he hadn't quite made it, or alternatively he is what Jean Claude is on his way to becoming, now that his career is effectively over. He was hilarious, he had this real "Kick the shit out of you" stagger, even thought he was surrounded by some of the dodgiest looking bodyguards ever. He had an almost comical arrogance about himself. He's the type of guy that you'd kinda like to meet, have him give you crap and then casually shoot in the leg with a Glock like that sword guy Indiana Jones shot because he had dysentry, just cause you want to see him realise that Muay Thai is only really effective in a meter radius. What made it even funnier was that there was this other trainer, from the PRC, a little Chinese guy who was dressed in an entirely white linen suit. He was like the little guy in the white suit from that episode of the Simpsons with the Triads. They both kept chatting all night, I bet the Chinese Guy's name was something like "General Chang"

Anyway, once we were in the stadium it got underweigh, a hilariously tacky and drunken announcer in a sparkly jacket, unnattractive ring girls of indeterminate sex, thousands of screaming Chinese and Gweilos, including a troop of Hell's Angels, and I think there was some fighting.

Actaully, the fighting was pretty ridiculously hardcore. If you've never seen someone repeatedly bash their elbow across someone's else's face, I sincerely reccommend that you do. How you react is one of those "getting to know yourself" kind of life experiences.
There were seven fights, the whole thing lasted from 7:30 till midnight and as soon as we got there we realised we had made a tactical error, they didn't sell beer to the cheap seats. This was a real pain in the ass, until we realised that Gordon was still to come, so we got him to stop at one of Hong Kong's illustrious, omnipresent 7-11's where you can buy loads and loads of massive bottles of San Migueal for about a Euro each in order to rectify this situation. Now let me say something, there are many things in life that alcohol makes worse, vomiting, walking, working, not laughing, not losing your temper, shuouting, but one of the things it definitely does improve, is watching Muay Thai Boxing.

Once we were a couple of beers to the bad, it wasn't entertainment, it was war! It was pugilism! When The Chinese guy fought the Hong Kong dude, I swear to God I wanted somemone to die. Watching this stuff, with the doctors on standby and the mob mentality and the beer and the betting [I won lots, lost it and then won it again, paying nicely for my beer for the eveing] you really don't think it's that fucked up when a guy savagely knees another guy in the face. You just don't, the knee in the face is really just part of the ambience. Like drapes.

Anyway, there was a huge attempt to represent the nationalities, Australians, Japanese, Thai, French, even a fucking massive British guy who was knocked out in ten sceonds by this fat Chinese dude. I have video of us all on our seats screaming "Fatty! Kuma-tae! Fatty Kuma-Tae!" That's how drunk I was..

I got a picture, as you can see, with this guy who is the most Russian looking guy I've ever seen, but for some reason came into the ring wearing a leapordskin Turban, which was actually pretty cool. He proceeded to savage his opponent massively, splitting his lip inside five seconds with a wicked kick and knocking out inside a minute. All the fighter's had names like "Carnage" and "The Tatooed Frenchman" whcih further added to the overall level of taste and discretion.
As a professional copywrighter, I have to say that the fighter's bio in the Programme that they gave you was truly a piece of art. Apparently they all trained with the legends of Muay Thai in the mountains of Thailand, even the guy who was apparently a Shoaolin Monk, but looked like some piss scared guy they brought in off the street. He came in and, I swear to God, asked the announcer what the rules were. I didn't know what to think, I'm sure he recovered. At least I hope he did, he looked pretty dead.

I realise that this is a somewhat fractured account of the evening, but you have to understand, I was very, very drunk. After it was over, we went to this Fashion Launch Party [oo ee]where Ben and I got absolutely trashed and spent the evening trying to convinve the security that we were reporters that had an interview scheduled with Christian Dior, even though he wasn't there. This, as you might have guessed, was a lie.

Later, when I was too drunk to stand around drinking any longer, I left Emma, Ben and Lauren to the party and I got a taxi home. After about ten seconds in the cab, I realsied I was going to be sick, racked my brains to try and remember how to say stop, said my Address, "Hello", "Bye Bye", "Are You"and then finally "Left Here Please!". He didn't understand, so I had to mime vomiting, he suddenly understood, pulled over, I open the door, fountain Champagne heavy vomit [I stared getting full Champagne flutes from the barman and putting them into pint glasses, and I hate champagne] out of the door a couple of times, then finally, I close the door and we drive off. On the way home, the tai guy was on the radio with all his mates, miming vomit, looking at me semi-comatose in the back and laughing at the fucked up Gweilo in the back.

I have to say, I'm really looking forward to next Friday..

Punished.

2005-09-08T09:57:00.000+08:00

So yeah, due to overwhelming pressure from my adoring public [Gaz] I thought I'd post this hilarious tale of hilarity.
Okay, well basically, China, as you might know, produces a fair old whack of pirated DVD's. It's a bit of an industry, perhaps you've heard about it? They burn them in the millions and you can pick up dodgy videocamera versions or DVD rips from Oscar Screeners a couple of days after a movie comes out in the cinema. They're of varying quality but they're all ridiculously cheap so you end up buying a lot of shit you would never consider getting in the first place. The last time we went into China for example, Lachlan returned with a copy of "The Aviator" amongst other things, "Aliens vs Predator" and a genius copy of "The Punisher"

Now the funny thing about these DVD's are that they all come in pretty snazzy looking covers, most of which are made up by the guys who rip the DVD's, none of whom speak English. Sadly the above cover is of the above the board version, so no hilarity. But anyway, most of the time they write something in Chinese and then just load it into a translation program with hilarious results. So you read the back of "The Aviator" and it says "Good Luck man never speak French with his Mistresses Wife fanciful looks of death. Who can contain his lustful spirt for the life that he was wanting? Never, since the time of legends, has a French gate loved to live so much but till tomorrow, who knows?"

Other times they just copy another DVD's blurb wholesale or just Google the name of the movie looking for critic's quotes and stick that in. This can be pretty hilarious when the critic is saying something negative about the movie, but I digress. Also for some reason almost every cast list on the back of every DVD in China comes from Disney's "The Kid" with Bruce Willis.
I don't know why this is, maybe the Chinese just really love that movie. Makes sense though, you really would have to have no understanding of English to think it was good.

So anyway, we had gone through of the crappy DVD's, each one was accompanied by the collective ritual mocking of the blurb on the back. Most of them were just mildly funny anachronisms, like watching "Whale Rider" and it saying on the back "A High-Octane Thriller that grips you by the nose and never lets go!!!"
Eventually we got to the Punisher.

It was only then that we realised that this crappy re-make of Dolph Lungren's version on the classic Marvel Comic, that's about killing mob guys and righteous, glorious revenge had printed on the back in large letters:

"A Glorious Study of Homosexual Lust!! - The San Franciso Chronicle"

I have to admit, that was much more entertaining than the movie turned out to be.

Ahh, the nieevatay of youth

2005-09-07T15:19:00.000+08:00

http://www.kimyadawson.com/reliefthroughmusic/

The Alphabet

2005-09-07T09:51:00.000+08:00

Well, I've been getting flak for my lack of Blogging lately, although the complete absence of comments I get is indicative of the fact that we are all lazy (Other than my mum, love you mum!) so I've made a decision, I'm going to try make this a more daily occurrence, shorter entries but more to the point, and also it's going to be more bloggish in that it's going to be yet another uninformed idiot commenting in a completely superficial manner about the same stuff that everyone else sees on the internet every day because frankly folks, looking at the internet is all I do all day. At the end of all this, I will have developed net-browsing skills beyond the ken of mortal dial-up user.
My erstwhile flatmate and co-A-team watcher David Wall always claimed the internet was his bitch, having had some experience with office life I now realise that he was lying, both to me and to himself. It's actually the other way around. We, in office life, are all the internet's bitches.

And that sweet info crack taste so good!!

But let's not fool ourselves, I've said this before, I may say it again. It's a bit of a case of "No Darling! I love you! I swear I'll never hit you again........now why don't you go on and make me breakfast and we'll forget about all this......PIZZA'S NOT FOR BREAKFAST!!!!"
So, here are the obstacles.

A)Laziness and general malaise.
B)The ghost of periodic busyness at work constantly interrupting my real work, which is doing nothing apparently.
C)The fact that the Blogger page is in Chinese here, so don't understand any of it.
D)The fact that I know no HTML and cannot figure out how to post pictures of a nice size.
E)Laziness (So good they named it twice)
F)A complete unwillingness to comment on anything of substance lest it reveal how ignorant I am on all fronts.
G)The feeling that I should be working, even when I have no work to do, so writing a blog during office hours will be probably accompanied by all the many and varied types of guilt I go through as I sit at my desk doing nothing, for the vast majority of the day.
H)A complete unwillingness to give the industurial military complex anything other than a false and cursory look at my brilliance, lest they deduce my geniosity, attempt to abduct me and force me to orchestrate their plan to bioengeneer a thousand Flying Monkeys and send them into Iraq to swoop down at the head of the enemies of Freedom, cackling and knocking their fez's off and thus scare them into ending the conflict as well as making some evil Iraqi's poop themselves, much to the amusement of the onlooking fifteen year old American soldiers.
I)A real need to write extremely long Blog entries, I love to write and when I get going I find it very hard to stop. Ie: This supposedly short entry.
J)My Busy Life! I'm far too involved in other projects to even consider writing this at home, because I never go home! I'm out all the time! Tonight, for example, I'm going down to get a haircut and play Ultimate Frisbee in Victoria Park, Tomorrow it's the movies! Friday I'm off to Muay Thai Boxing extravaganza!
K)The fact that I know, no matter how much time I put into this, my mum is the only one who's going to comment with regularity and thus reassure me that people are actually reading this. Not that I have any problem with writing a blog solely for my mum (Love You Mum!) but I talk to her pretty regularily over the phone which is a much more time-efficient method of communication, blogs are for twats with too much time on their hands. Like me. And you who are reading it. Twats, all.
L)My laziness. So Lazy!
R)The fact that I don't know my alphabet very well.
M)The fact that I suspect that sometime in the near future, our blogs will be used as techno-evidence in our light-speed space-trials to prove we are Godless Athiest Communists Pinkos who deserve Excommunication, from our bodies.
N)The fact that no matter how hard I try, the internet is still twinged with neredery for me. This may amuse some of you who already consider me a nerd, but this is not the case. I am a geek and proud of it. Nerds suck.
O)The fact that I hate people who make arbitrary classificatory differences such as between "Nerd" and "Geek" and that regardless of what they say they are plainly just a "Twat" and this blog thing does this to me.
P)The fact that after a while, I get bored of trying to maintain an hialrios joke because frankly, I have better things to be doing.
Z) The way the End is NeverEnding!

The end.

Or is it?

[Queue hand picking up Ming's Ring and a voice Laughing Maniacally]

Battlefield Earth: Space is Lebensraum!

2005-08-06T03:01:00.000+08:00

The year is 2042, mankind is at war with a race of viciously fundamentalist space mutants called the Kreen Deltas Kappa Aieee's, who are intent on colonizing Earth for the purposes of spreading the message of their Holy Church, to spread Blogs.
"Sir!" shouts an emaciated corporal through the narrow slit in the back of my bunker, "You have to get out of there!"
"What?" I repliy, too intent on watching the perimeter for possible threats to notice such a pissant annoyance as some shitty noncom trying to cope with his own cowardice.
"Sir!, They're advancing on this position! There are too many of them, they're going to overrun this hill whetehr we're here or not!"
"Get back in your hole soldier!"
"But sir!"
I turn to him, giving him the full benefit of the four stars on my shoulder and the death in my eyes
"Soldier! Either way you're wholly fucked because you either get back in your foxhole or I take my shotgun and blow you another asshole! We are going to hold this place from those dirty Blog-reading freaks if it takes you, me, or the entire Mormon fucking Tabernacle Choir!"
"Yes Sir" he tremored, the hollow sound of a slow wetness covering his pants being the only distraction as he left to contemplate his death.
I turn back to my post and resume my vigil. The mist on the perimeter is thick tonight, I think, the bottom of the hill is out of site. Shit, those dirty Bloggers better not try anything or I'll fill that ground so full of lead that forty years from now people will still be dying of lead posioning.
Then suddenly, out of the darkness comes a light, and a sound!
"Is it just me or does George Bush resemble a kind of cross between a drunken Colin Farrell and a female Orangutan?"
The fuckers! I bellow, it seems they've sent in an advance guard of their political division, some of the worst of the Blog Armies, always ranting in an eloquent manner about the political events of the day.
"I mean come on!" the voice continues " He fits the bill perfectly, he's slow, simian looking, is illiterate, obsessed with himself, convinced of his own righteousness and also a complete fucking liar!"
From the natter I can tell it's alone because there's no fucking piddly little voice shouting "Comment! Comment" in the background. Good, I think, this should be easy. I cock my rifle, aim down the long barrel until I see movement to my right, an indistinc shape forms, falls out of the mist, it's a backpacker!
He's holding a Lonely Planet and everything.
And indeed, there were many of these on my recent trip to Vietnam, which I just returned from and it was lovely. Emma and I went to Saigon and then down to Mui Nei and then back up to Saigon and it was fantastic. A Couple of days of relative chilled outness and I even managed to read the new Harry Potter that all the kids are talking about. Otherwise, I've been working, chilling, formulating, playing, sleeping, eating and writing, but not neccesarily in that order. I'm still looking inot a few of my projects and hopefully some of them will be coming to fruition soon. Work is good, I've just submitted two TV Commercials and I did some general assistance on a Print Campaign for Mercedes in China which will soon go in every major newspaper across the country, which is cool. So I'm pretty happy with it, even though I should have done much better. Emma's cool, she's finished her internship so she now starts the fecking about stage of the holiday that I so love and she so hates. Otherwise, just the usual struggle de-la-Rory McGrath, One man against the Man!
Oo Ee.

Honesty is the best Fallacy.

2005-07-15T00:06:00.001+08:00

Okay, I feed bad. I've given you the most incredibly shallow idea of what the Hell I'm doing am that must end. Here's the story.
1] I am working in an Ad Agency, it's pretty great, they represent Mercedes and Virgin Atlantic in Asia, if I get the job permanently I'll be the English-speaking copywriter with loads of perks, responsible for Ads, grammar and various other stupidities.
2] I'm still living at Emma's parent's place, I love her parents but recently I feel that I want to move out becaue not a huge number of crazy intercontinental travellers have maids that iron their clothes, cook their meals and never talk back.
3] I'd like to move to New York, but I love Hong Kong and think I need to move out before I make any decision.
5] I want to write a book, more on this later.
6} I also want to write a screenplay, more on this as well.
7] I want to stop feeling intimidated by the fact that people I know read this, I want to feel good about writing it casually . It would help if you pasted comments god Damn it!
8] I want this to be day to day, rather than sleep to sleep.
9] I want you all to know I miss the Hell out of you and I look forward to seeing you again,
10] I'm sick of sorting out photos to make my post's more visual. I can't find the cable that connects my camera to my computer so you're just going to have to find my words entertaining, that's how it is.

Word. That's it.

Rudetc.

Reactionary reactions are mostly wrong.

2005-07-08T12:01:00.000+08:00

DSCN0307
Originally uploaded by ruadhraigh.

Well yeah, London got bombed. As I'm sure you know by now, if you don't then you should go have a look at the BBC, although the likelyhood of it not being common knowledge in the British Isles that London got attacked by terrorists is pretty low, not like here. Very few people over here seem to give a shit really, they don't really care. It'll take a bombing of a Hong Kong landmark like the MTR or the Peak Tram before the Chinese Nationalistic fervour gets going and God help us if it ever does. There'll be no "Maybe we shouldn't invade Iraq" or "Blair is a liar!" There'll just be a lot more dead people. But as it is now, it's a bit surreal here because you say to people "Did you hear about London" and they say "No" then you tell them and then they go "Oh" and then they change the subject and two seconds later they're laughing maniaclally about something inconsequential. I suppose it makes sense, we are thousands of miles away and the news coverage is pretty sparse but I suppose I would have thought that more people over here would care. It's pretty weird to be freaked out when no-one else seems to be.
So yeah, I'm kind of at a loss as exactly what to say, I hope everybody I know is okay, although I still don't know. The thing I do know is that quite a number of people are not okay and that is completely horrific.
The six degrees of separation thing means that the likelyhood is that I at least know someone who knows someone who was involved, the internet is full of reports of people like this who are trying to keep it together to whatever extent that they can.
Personally, I was supposed to be going to drinks with a Christopher and a bunch of other people from the British Consulate last night to celebrate London's winning the Olympic Bid, I was really looking forward to it, everyone was but that was obviously downplayed as most of the people involved had to go and talk about things that were slightly more pressing than getting drunk.
It's funny, my opinions on terrorism have always been slightly between the two majority views, pro-war and For Bush and Blair and anti-war and against them. I've never really known how to really articulate them until recently. I'm anti-war but pro-peace, and before you think otherwise they're not the same thing. I don't want war, I want peace, but the reality is that no matter how you look at it if we're not at war now we soon will be. The majority of people out there who are pro-war have no idea what they mean by that statement, and equally true of those who claim to be anti-war. People usually just pick whatever knee-jerk, peer supported crap that suits them and then go from there, spreading division and hatred because of their ignorance. If you don't agree look at some of the ridiculous cardboard cut dogma that instinctually came out of the mouths of people from both sides, here on the right and on the left less than a day after this all went down. People are so ready to see enemies where there are none, even in each other. I mean, I might differentiate myself from some gun toting crazy in America or some irresponsiblly Anarchistic moron in Britain but that doesn't mean that people who want to blow up Westerners do. I think that the time has come to really stop hating each other and start hating the people who are doing this to us, whoever they are. The worst thing about the crap that both sides are sprouting is that on both sides, some of it is true, we do need to be vigilent, but we also have to recognize that the policies of our collective governments seem to be involved in the problem. If we don't all start realising that there are no all knowing goods or all hating evils and that we just have to work with what we have most of us will end up being destroyed by a maniac with a nuclear weapon, be it one or thirty thousand. Jesus, I hate political rants, they're always so stupidly fucking reactionary. Like this one I suppose..

Screw Yiz.

2005-07-04T14:14:00.000+08:00

Well well, long time no blog. I admit it’s getting to that point that my fantastic electronic output might be near to being downgraded to some kind of semi-secondary status in your day and I realise that this is probably pretty distressing owing to the near sacred position it probably takes. You might have reached a point where re-reading my old entries is becoming slightly stale, maybe not so current and interesting. “What’s up with Rudhraigh?” I hear you say, “Is he okay?”, “Has he replaced us with a whole new genre of persons that are in every way superior?” "Has his new job gone to his head and put into a bracket of arrogance that defies rational belief?" Well the answer to all these questions is Yes. Yes I am up, very much up in the world. I am okay and I have replaced you all with other people, all of whom are so much more interesting and dynamic as to make you all seem like the personal equivalent of eating snot you found on the ground in the men’s lavatory.
So, why haven’t I written? Because as usual I have been both very busy and very lazy. I realise that I should be making more of an effort but goddammit I get up at 8:30 every day!!! I work all day and then I go home and go to the gym!! And all the day long I'm adulated and nagged by people that mean more to me than any of you!!! What more do you want from me you bloodsucking freaks?? It’s all Me! Me! Me! With you people, I can’t stand it any more. That’s it. No more Blog for you. None. Not even a bit more. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Nichts.

Comin' to you Real as Pentientiary Steel...

2005-05-30T15:28:00.000+08:00

So yeah, as usual of late lots has happened since my last post. First of all I finally quit my internship, the less said about that the better. I'm now looking for a job, again. I realise that most of my life seems to have been spent in pursuit of some apparently illusory job. The proble is that every job I do seems to be marred in some respect and I end up hating it. If I could just get something that I was enthusiastic about, I think things would be different. I wonder my life would be like now if I had gotten a job I really and truly enjoyed that paid well as soon as I first tried when I arrived in Hong Kong, all those months ago.
{Blur to Imaginary Fantasty)
I am lying in a massive bed, surrounded by silk pillows, hypoallergenic sheet, piles of money and many beautiful lady servants.
Servant 1: Good Morning Master, did you sleep well?
Me: Of Course my dear, I always sleep well, It's impossible not to sleep well when you're ridiculously rich and you made it doing something you love, but it's especially easy in my brand new tricked out 4.1 Litre Golden Mercedes Four Poster Bed, complete with Virtual Reality Plasma Screen, Multicolored Underlighting and GPS.
Servant 2: Don't forget the Interdementional Silk Sheets and Automatic Catheter.
Me: Ah yes, the Automatic Catheter, you know I can't even remember what it was like before when I had to actually leave my bed to go to the bathroom.
Servant 3: Yes sir, I think we can all agree that things are much better now that you're indescribably rich.
Me: Yes, and I suppose I can put it all down to finally getting a job that I enjoyed. That and my brilliance of course.
Servant 4: Oh yes, your brilliance is mighty!
Me: Well thank you for saying so, so how's my day looking?
Servant 5: Well Master, first you Breakfast with your lovely girlfriend Emma who you respect and adore above all else and to whom you continually prove your love by refraining from having sex with any and all of the beautiful ladies who adore you and wih whom you could indulge your many and varied sexual fantasties at your smallest and most meagre whim.
Me: Ah, good.
Servant 6: Then it's on to your heliport, to travel across to your Space Yacht, Robert De Niro has requested an audience, apparently he wishes to make a movie of your life and star as you.
Me: That talentless hack? Never! I shall star in it myself.
Servant 7: Of course that would be much better, De Niro's really gone downhill since Taxi Driver.
Servant 8: Actually, I quite liked Meet the Parents.
Servant 7: [Bitchily] You're just saying that because you know the Master likes that movie.
Servant 8: [Enraged] You Whore!! How dare you embarrass me in front of him!!
Servant 8 smacks Servant 7 in her lovely face and they proceed to fight. I look on with interest.
Me: I wager 2000 Quatloos on the newcomer.
Servant 9: It shall be done Sir.

Anyway, I could go on with this, I really could. There is no limit to how long I could indulge myself in this particular little post, but I've got to go get a job, which is shit. Because I like not working. It's great!
No it's not. I need a job.

Blood, Greg and Pink Champagne.

2005-05-18T16:42:00.000+08:00

So yeah, how much better is my life than yours? Much.
It’s much better.
It’s much, much better.
Than yours.
Which is not as good.
As mine.
Not at all.
In preparation for the visit of my good friend Gregory Morrissey esq. who is of late of Japanese extraction, I went through a surfeit of effort the likes of which has never been seen in human history.
The Pyramids? Pah! Mere child’s play in comparison with my labours!
Magellan’s Voyage of Discovery? He had a boat! I didn’t even have that!!
World War II? Why would you try to compare it to my recent hard work? It’s plainly not even in the same league in terms of human sacrifice!
The Holocaust?………………………..I would like to state for the record that I have now and always had nothing but solemn respect for the Jewish nation and the suffering and death they underwent and how dare you insinuate otherwise! Do you think I have such bad taste as to insinuate that spending fifteen minutes on the phone organizing two spectacularly good evenings out in any way compares to the deaths of millions of innocent people? Do you?
That’s right, hang your head in shame!…IN SHAME!!!!!
So, I guess the only way to proceed is to pretend that you never brought that up, but just so it’s been said I think your trivialization of my moral fiber is despicable and reflects more upon you and the calibre of your upbringing than any conceivable action in the entirety of your life, but lets say no more about it.
Anyway, Greg arrived at around half sixish –an hour after he had said he would the fucker- and we went for a wee drink in Lang Kwai Fong, which is sort of the Hong Kong Island version of Temple Bar. Incidentally did you know that the Temple Bar was originally named for a political movement by Catholic shop-owners in the 1800’s barring Jewish people from entering anywhere in the area except the synagogue that was situated there? So it was a “Temple Bar”? Isn’t learning fun? But racism isn’t, but we’ve already talked about that, so lets move on.
After the drink we went up the Flat where Greg dropped off his stuff –Sandy and Christopher very kindly said he could stay there cause they’re the nicest people ever- and we got ready to go out. We were attending the launch of a new line of lingerie from Agent Provocateur. I have to say, contrary to what you might think, it was fan-fucking-tastic, although we foolishly turned up in suits when suits are for old people. The whole thing was a decidedly classy affair, full of what are loosely termed “the beautiful people” and by that we really mean good-looking cocaine prostitutes who are so world-weary and ironic only because they’re always demeaning themselves by hanging around ugly men hoping for a line and think their pleasant visage will earn it for them. But other than that as soon as you entered the room, it was amazing. The whole place was done up like a burlesque house, pink and blood red fabric adorning everything, hot models in minuscule lingerie mingling with sleek and young whilst also energetically handsome and talented go-getters like myself and Greg, it was a great laugh. Then, once we’d met up with the socially omnipresent Lauren, [who hooks me up big style with the conexxxions] we found a nook and drank some free pink champagne. It was very pleasant, good choons, chats with Greg, very pleasant. But even the best formal party gets a bit samey after a while, that’s when a good party-planner brings in strippers. So then the physically unlikely figure of Dita Von Teese, Marilyn Mansons’ present fiancé and international burlesque star came out to the pounding beats of the Peter Gunn theme and stripped around a huge glass of pink champagne, which was nice. Once I was about six glasses of pink champagne to the bad, there was a fashion show where a lot of women wore very little, and then took it off, which was also nice. I can safely say that everyone was riveted.
At this point I’d like to state for the record that I spent the entire thing thinking of how much I love and admire my girlfriend Emma whom I also love and admire in as much as a man can. Of course I covered my eyes when things got too risqué, but sadly others were not quite so retiring, I think one middle aged man threw his underwear at Dita, he was probably a multi-billionaire, they’re everywhere here and they’re always making fools of themselves. Damn Billionaires.
Afterwards we went out to a place called Dragon-Eye where the after party was. I must say, I have never had a doorperson look at me with such comprehensive scrutiny. I realize now how hard it must be to decide if someone is well dressed these days if you work in a fashionable bar, especially because today messy is stylish, so doorpersons have to become effective fashion consultants, it’s not enough to just say that you’re stopping people with white socks in HK, it’s a little bit more involved than that. It depends on whether or not they’re wearing cheap white socks.
Anyway, after an evening spent dancing around like chic-muppets and Greg spectacularly failing to score a girl we later found had a boyfriend, we went home and went to sleep, as we mere-mortals have want to do from time to time.
The next day I had gotten the day orf work, so we went for a wee explore. I had a meeting with a guy from this thing called the Brunswick Group for a possible internship. It didn’t pan out but I had a great chat with the guy, a really nice guy he was. He made some interesting points about my CV, my aims and about what I should be expecting to achieve in Hong Kong as well as how I should go about achieving it. Afterwards, we walked about a bit, I showed Greg some of Hong Kong’s touristic delights such as the Escalator and the Wall-Tree and then we returned home again to ready ourselves for another hard night spent getting on the wrong side of right.
That evening we were attending a high-class launch for a global concierge service called “Quintessentially”. We made an executive decision to not look like executives like we had the evening before so I wore my now legendary misplet “Nietsche is dead” t-shirt and Greg wore a similarly informal affair, understated in the way he overstates himself.
Upon arriving at the mall that was housing the party around 7ish, we found that we couldn’t find it and Lauren wasn’t picking up the phone. You know the really annoying thing about HK is? According to the all the American movies that I know and love, Chinese people speak English when there are no foreigners around!! They just have a heavy Chines accent, biut it’s English!! So every one of those people I asked about the party was pretending!! After wandering the mall for about twenty minutes and cursing the name of the Chinese while also looking fantastic the whole time, I finally got through to an acquaintance of mine who was also going called Maddie Thompson and we went upstairs to meet her. She’s a card. At least I think she is, I’m not exactly sure what a card is when it refers to people, but instinctively I think that Maddie is one. So we accompanied her and her gaggle of beautiful model friends downstairs, she showed us the way and we finally found the party. Without any help from the bloody secretly English-speaking Chinese.
1] The party was amazing, full of the usual mix of beautiful young people, rich old people and free drink.
2] Said people all wearing formal dress, Greg and I only ones wearing t-shirts.
3] Got away with it because people just assumed we were too cool to care, which we
plainly were.
So we sat through the launch, sipping drinks and making pertinent conversation. Apparently Quintessentially are hardcore large, being spread across the fashionable capitals of the world. Top level membership costs about $30,000 a year. It entitles you to have no hassle about anything, ever again. And you have to be invited to get it. If you want to go skiing in the alps with a Chalet and a helicopter, they’ll sort it out for you but if you want said Chalet to be painted bright pink and smell like Mutant Space Walnuts they’ll sort it out for you. Reputedly Phil Collins had a bet with a friend who said that he couldn’t ring them up and get them to deliver a bongo drum to the boat they were on in the middle of the Mediterranean within an hour, they got it on and Phil played the night away. On his $30,000 bongo drum. Pontificating fucker has the tenacity to tell me to think twice about homeless people and he spends $30,000 a year getting bongo drums delivered to his Mediterranean yacht.
Anyway, we went to that, had a laugh, met some good people, some not so good people and drank a lot of free champagne and then left. It was an interesting foray into Yuppieville, hilarious in one respect, deeply disturbing in another. Afterwards we went out to a bar, got drunk and then ended up at this bar that I continually seem to go to called Yumla, I like to think of it as one of the techno holes from the Blade movies where all the vampires drink. We were drinking cheap beer out front that we bought in a 7-11 and chatting with the peeps.We drank and we drank and we drank. We certainly surfed the Light Fantastic that evening, I can tell you!
Actually……. I can’t really,…..cause I was drunk. Really really drunk. For all I know I spent the evening vomiting blood into an icecube tray that Yumla then put in their Bloody Mary’s for the consumption of their secret elite techno-loving vampire clientele, I can’t really comment either way because I don’t remember, cause I was really, really……really, really drunk. It’s possible of course that we did some Light Fantastic surfing, but I can’t be sure…..cause I was too drunk. I guess that’s pretty much the only thing I can say about that evening, that I was really, really drunk. And I didn’t die. Or if I did, I somehow managed to come back to life and have no recollection of it. Or maybe I’m now some kind of reverse vampire? I woke up the next day and now that I think about it I seem to remember some kind of ritualistic feeding, a newfound craving for blood, a desire to sleep by night, haunt the world by day? Wait a minute…..
DAMN YOU REVERSE VAMPIRES!!!!DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!!!!! I HAD A LIFE!!!!! A LIIIIIIIFFFFEEE!!!!!!
So anyway, the next day, which was apparently my first as a newly born reverse vampire, we both woke up with hangovers and with much trepidation at the prospect of a day of required activity due to the fact that it was Greg’s last day in town.
I took him down to Wanchai where we met my highly blood-filled friend Tom, a hilarious young-un who I like to think of as the Hong Kong equivalent of the Artful Dodger, and by that I don’t mean the shitty DJ who released the questionable “Moving Too Fast” some years back, no, I mean the cheeky chappy young street urchin from Oliver Twist, and by that I don’t mean the crappy cooking show with that South London twat who can’t pronounce his r’s, no, I mean the movie of the great Charles Dicken’s novel, and by that I don’t mean Charlie Dickens of West Lafayette in sunny Algeria who was born in 1983, no I mean the Victorian author who revolutionised the world of populist media with his serialised novels that examined the themes of the industrial revolution in a method that was immediately comprehensible to the newly literary society, and by that I don’t mean me, because I’m a reverse vampire and they don’t write novels because they don’t want the world to know of their existence. Instead we write Blogs, they’re much cooler than crappy old books and when you can play techno music while you write in them.
So anyway, we all went over to Kowloon side. I wanted to go and find a coffin but they wanted to go to the crappy Science museum. I demurred, knowing that Ic ould use my vampiric powers of mind control any time I wanted, but in the end it turned out that we were unsuccessful because we couldn’t be bothered walking. Instead we took a taxi [There was this scary cross hanging from the rear-vie mirro, I had to shield myself by going to sleep] to the Temple St. Market so that Greg could buy some shitty tack for the folks back in Japland. Once there, we saw they absolute miasma of stalls, shops and people that is a Hong Kong market. I had to control my new-found cravings for blood, but I was able to sate myself on a small pig I bought from a fleshy-looking man in a backstreet stall when Greg and Tom were busy looking at porn. It wasn’t very nice and I thought he overcharged me so I ate the man too. Sadly he was no tastier than the pig.
Meanwhile Greg was busy getting some hilarious stuff, and I bought some classic VCD’s Godzilla vs MechaGodzilla!!, McBain!! Cyborg Cop!! They all cost about 1 euro each so I was quite happy with this. Quite happy indeed. So I didn’t kill and eat the owner as I had originally planned.
Greg got some hilarious stuff, I want to re-iterate this. I’m not going to tell you what it was. This is an editorial decision, I have a responsibility to my investors, but needless to say it was hilarious so you’re just going to have to imagine something hilarious that you could buy in a Chinese market, like an exploding cow or a porcelain piece of crap. Or something.
Anyway, afterwards we were wrecked from walking around in the heat, so, hungover and despondent and tired from all the laughing at Greg’s hilarious purchases [They really were hilarious!! HAHAHA!!] we headed home on the Star Ferry. We didn’t get home however because we went for drinks with some of the other Interns again.I didn’t kill anyone and they got drunk, it was funny, then we left and went to a couple of bars in Soho. We ended up back at Yumla because I had to commune with my fellow vampires and scope out potential “Chow” [That’s not a racist slur on the Chinese by the way, it’s what we reverse vampires call people, duh.]. We drank a little, but the fight wasn’t really in us so we went home relatively early. Greg had to leave at 5:30AM to get his train to the airport so we watched the movie Seabiscuit [Which is probably Jamie Oliver’s favourite movie as it is shit, like he is.] until he had to go. We bid each other a fond farewell and he left for parts unknown with a tear in his eye, a bounce in his step and minus several pints of blood. I went back upstairs and went to my bed/crypt to ready myself for a new day of hardcore reverse vampirism.

Mia muchas Infantigo con el Interim Grande!

2005-05-11T02:20:00.000+08:00

RSCN0558
Originally uploaded by ruadhraigh.

Before I go any further I'd first like to apologise to all those people who are plainly hooked on my random twitterings and are lamenting my recent lack of updates. I'm sorry but after an entire day of sitting around doing nothing but writing witty repartee, the last thing I feel like doing is sitting down and giving a run-down of what I typed about earlier on. But of course I have to keep on going! For the Fans! Such an outporing of raw human emotion I've never seen! "We love you Rudhraigh!! Why don't you post hilarious things in your hilarious Blog the way you used to? We miss your hilarious adventures and awkward moments of social infantigo!"
Well you know what? I don't think "infantigo" is even a word. I think you're just making up complicated sounding words in order to try and impress me as I am very intelligent and regularily use long and complicated words such as "Reson Detre" and "Periphary". Normally any attempt on your, or anyone's part to subtley test me on whether I will prefer to risk being thought of as stupid to point out someone else's mistake or if I'll wimp out and let any stupid shit fly will result in your glee if you're an asshole or your dissapointment if you're intelligent. As such your use of "infantigo" could be a blind, maybe there is no such word? Maybe you're just making shit up to see which way I'll jump? I could check on the interweb, but I won't, I will not make this blog into a house of lies, or a house of effort. So your test may have worked again. I will say nothing about infantigo and we'll continue like I didn't just point all this out...... or make it up myself. So anyway yes as I was saying, of late my social infantigo has been massive!! Much infantigo for Rory!! I have had another week of various activities, I've been keeping up with the mental metaphor of work as Summer Sports camp and it seems to be working quite well, although I think the people at the office are getting a bit weirded out when at 12:30 every day I do a lap around the room and then sit down with a plate of orange halves.
I'm not sure how much longer I'll stick with BC, it's been great but I kinda need to start making money. For my own dignity if not for the actual process of money-making, which I've heard is pretty good in and of itself. The last couple of days have been interesting, there are two new interns, a guy and a girl. When the girl turned up, she was acoompanied by a fifteen year old school kid, I assimed the kid was a new intern and my self respect went down a few hundred notches as I don't think either of my leaving certificates, my four years of university, my hours of study and reading, my thesis or my numerous essays could have really felt like they were being utlised to the full extent of their ability if they were put on the same qualifiactions level with a fifteen year old girl who thinks "Britney is the Coolest!!!" Now admittedly Philosophy isn't much of a degree, but it has to be worth mroe than that? Luckily I was to be proved right when it turned out that the kiddie winkle was actually doing her work experience for school for a single day, so my self-dignity went rocketing back up the scale, back to it's normal habitation alfway between "self-loathing" and "self-hating" I had to take her over to Kowloon Side to a restaurant I was reviewing to giv her the skinny on the true meaning of journalism: Free stuff. Over my fourth helping of sushi and ramen, I explained in my typically imperious manner why she should do Philosophy in Dublin in college. I tell this to all the smart kids that I meet so that I remove them from competition for my jobs. No-one wants to employ a philosophy graduate.
Anyway, the other two inters are great, it's a measure of the atmosphere of general communication in our office that by the second day I didnt actually realise that Patrick, the other intern, knew them both and they were all like best friends. It's great to see that, people being friends, its refreshing from all the networking freakos I've met so far that qualify friends as people who have given them their business cards more than twice. The two newbies are called Ryan and Danielle, they're going out and their constant canoodling makes me miss Emma with a fierce and amazingly omnipresent tenacity that I cannot describe in this format, it would require something altogether more complicated.
Otherwise, non-business as usual. Going to parties [I secretly went to a kickass one in Shanghai Tang, full of models and the beautiful people and didn't tell anyone in the office because I didn't want them to know I was hungover the next day, except that they're probably reading this right now so I guess the jig is up on that one] Tomorrow, my friend Greg Morrissey arrives from Tokyo, I have a full calender of events planned. Tomorrow night Agent Provocateur, the sexy lingerie people, are putting on a massive party that I have arranged for us to attend. Beautiful people in various states of undress, models slinking around in lingerie, free drink all night and half the interesting people of Hong Kong, not a bad thing to do first thing off the plane. Otherwise, it's just going to be regular Hong Kong stuff, I got the days off work so we're going to have an absolute blast.
In other news, Stiff with internships has happened but I'm reticent to say "I might" this or "There's a possibility" that, because every time so far that I've said something like "I met this guy last night who's the President of the Universe and he says that God is looking for Interns and he can hook me up" I've ended up an looking like an idiot because plainly the universe isn't a republic, it's more of a socialist oligarchy with inherently self-perpetuating physical norms. But anyway, I'll give it a go: I might be doing an internship in the Financial Times here. It's truly impossible to put that in context if you don't understand how important the FT is, and how important Hong Kong is to the FT. So if I become an IT in the HK branch of the FT, it'll be pretty fucking GT. I'll know more about that soon hopefully although I've stopped holding my breath for these things, I keep passing out in public and making much social infantigo for myself.
I've also been made a contributer to www.pixelsurgeon.com. It's a designy linkpage with reviews and hilariousness. At first this was admittedly just a roundabout way of pissing Dave Wall off by casually putting myself a notch higher than him on the imaginary "cool" ladder that he tries to scale daily, but I have to say I really enjoy writing for it. I can just think "Hey, I'll review this" and then it turns up online looking all cool and designy, I like that a lot. Also it'll let me claim to be a journalist even after I sell my shiny soul to the corporate magpies who keep flying around my house/body. So I've spent rather a lot of time taking photos of myself for my bio for the page and this is the one I chose in the end. I have others, including many taken of me in a pith helmet that I brought home with me after a particularily good night out. Anyway, I'm going to sleep now. You demanding assholes have kept me up to 2:00, again!! Ah well, I guess you're worth it.

Weak-end

2005-04-26T15:28:00.000+08:00

DSCN0413
Originally uploaded by Rudhraigh.

Friday
Woke up, throat sore as had forgotten to turn off air conditioner.
Didn't sleep well.
Went to work. Was very tired. Had stayed up late watching episode of OC. Very good, much scandal. Worth it.
Upon arrival familiar confusion by lack of specific things to do.
Confronted old problem, left to own recogniscence have always been quite lazy.
Stared at screen in vague manner, hoping that it looked like work but actually incapable of reading any of the text due to tiredness.
Span on chair for a bit to wake up, was upset because someoene had broken its tilt function.
Checked my websites.
Checked my mail.
Wrote a mail.
Went to water cooler for some hot Cold Tea Action.
After a while was suspicious that the sub-editor was suspiscious of my lack of work.
Went to lunch in Times Square Mall: Sushi
Came back. Still nothing to do.
Finally got so bored that I asked for something to do.
Was given boring work.
Shit.
Eventually, after spending four hours researching listings for the "Le French May" cultural festival, was told that actually we didn't need the listings.
Shit.
Was informed that I had to cover a wine tasting that evening and a restaurant opening on Sunday.
Shit.
Left work and went home to FlyPad.
Had dinner with Sandy and Christopher, both very tired and jetlagged, but suspiciously energetic as usual.
Checked my mail.
Watched second episode of the US Office. Suprisingly funny.
Watched episode of Malcom in the Middle. Very funny.
Listened to bloody cat meow for an hour. Not so funny.
Went to Wine Tasting in Bar on Peak.
Took Photos
Tasted Wine.
Met PR people.
Went home again to FlyPad and played Hero's Quest 2.
Eventually went out to Bar to meet friend Lauren and friend Tom in Lang Kwai Fong.
Bar had beergarden, so I bought beer in 7-11. They cost roughly 40 cents each.
Drank.
Drank.
Drank.
Met varying different people.
Wanted Cigarette.
Hated smokers.
Drank.
Drrank.
Dkank.
Snrnsk.
People were suddenly very funny, everything was funny. Talked loudly and with much Gusto.
Noticed little anthill on the ground behind where we were sitting.
Was suddenly obsessed with the hilarity of the anthill as it seemed to be making witty comments that paralleled and complimented my own.
Anthill made good point, maybe I was drunk?
Went home drunk.
Staggered past gate-guy. Doorman called elevator and pressed floor button. Said "Good Night!!"
Tried to call Emm, no answer. Sad. Missed her. Maybe cried a little. Drunk.
Slept in clothes on top of bed, air conditioning was too confusing to turn off.

Saturday.

Woke up around two to hear Lauren's story of vomiting in her room the previous night.
Mouth tasted like teeth had melted.
Underwear had ridden up around neck.
Sore throat.
Headache.
Felt Sick.
Hungover.
Went out to find Carmen had set table.
Sandy and Christopher had apparently gone to the cricket club.
Had previously said that would play squash with Christopher on Saturday.
Rang Christopher and recieved rather curt question as to whether I was coming or not.
Was a bit weirded out as didn't want to upset anyone, but said was coming.
Went to club, looked like death, brought squash rackets for expected game.
Upon arrival, realised that I wasn't there for squash as it wasn't just Sandy and Christopher as expected but a group of ten people, all looking very spiffy and well turned out.
All important friends of Christopher's
Was unshaven.
Had just woken up.
Was hungover.
Was the only one there not wearing a polo shirt.
Was Incredibly Embarrassed.
Was increbibly aplogetic.
Apparently Christopher had come in while I was asleep/unconscious and told me about change of plans earlier that day.
No recollection of said information.
None whatsoever.
After lunch, said hesitant goodbye to Christopher's friends, one of whom said he knew the editor of the Hong Kong Standard and would ring him for me. Went to buy little TV for little office in FlyPad.
Returned and set up TV.
Had dinner with Sandy and Christopher.
Tried to call Emma, no answer.
Sad and worried that she might think I wasn't trying to call her, confused as to how to solve the problem.
Went to computer, set it to download more Office, Scubs and Oc episodes from the Interweb. Left it lying upside down on the floor to better allow the air access to fan to keep it cool, thus preventing breakage as things work better when cool, except my throat.
Grew suddenly frustrated by recent lack of writing.
Tried to solve this but ended up playing computer games instead.
Read minute parts of book "The Last Governer" by Johnathan Dimbleby while game was loading. Confusing, slightly boring but informative and useful.
Felt good that I had read a little of a book that I wasn't really enjoying.
Unpleasant sensations are charatcter building.
Eventually was called for dinner.
Ate dinner with Sandy and Christopher. Tasty food.
Went out to same bar and did same thing with same people.
Drank.
Drank.
Drnak.
Met an American guy who used to work in a nuclear missile silo in Germany during the end of the Cold War.
He was a dick. He only liked Asian girls and was creepy.
Drank.
Drnk
Drnk.
Dk.
Intimidated by all women present, didn't know how to relate to them owing to my non-single status and eternal terror and being judged inferior by a female.
Instead, ended up talking with Tom about eighties computer games for a while and sweating in the heat.
Decided Hero's Quest 2 is my favorite game of all time.
Checked for precence opf hallucinatory anthill, but no longer there.
Drank.
Drank.
Watched Lauren Drink.
Wondered about the voint in her room.
Went home, shared taxi with Tom.
Talked about disconcerting effect of many gay men's inability to not take advantage of the fact that due to the laws of PCness, most "cool" straight men are obligated to not get pissed off when said gay men take liberties.
Got out of Taxi.
Waved at man at gate.
He opened gate.
Door man opened door, called elevator, pressed button said "Good Night!!!"
Went to bed, got out of clothes but still forgot about air con.
Tried to ring Emma, didn't get through.
Rang Home.
Talked to Mum, Lachlan, Dave, Sean Katie.
Was Drunk.
Went to sleep at 4:30am.

Sunday
Woke up at 7:00am to Emma calling me.
Called her back.
Had Chats.
Emma was upset, missing me and slightly drunk.
So cute.
Loved her.
Got up.
Hung over like a fox.
Sore throat from sleeping with air con on.
An hour or so later went out to brunch with Sandy and Christopher in Life Cafe, an organic vegan/vegetarian cafe on Escalator.
Had the Shepardess Pie, no meat. Was very tasty. Mango and banana juice a little tasteless.
Had good chats about whole slew of pertinent issues.
Eventually finished brunch and walked around doing some exploring.
Saw some cool shops.
Talked to some weird old women about China.
Saw a tree growing out of a wall twenty feet in the air. Was pretty cool.
Went to IFC for exhibition. Not very impressive but fascinating ideas, based on Chinese cave paintings. Oldest record of Chinese civilisation.
On return to flat around 4, realised that had to go cover the restaurant opening.
Hurried down to "Fat Angelo's"
Went in, family Italian restaurtant, lot's of kids. Not helping Hangover.
Ran into Luke "Takeabreath" Hunt whom I had preciously met in the Foreign Correspondent's club.
Found out that Luke had somehow read my blog entry about him and that he wasn't in fact going out with Diane Stormont. His real girlfriend was unamused by my insinuation.
Very embarrassed.
Downplayed it though. Hopefully
Also found out that Andy, the owner of the Restaurant was another guy I already knew.
Met Chris, he makes documentaries for MSNBC, The Discovery Channel and the National Geographic channel
All good people, many chats were had. Luke still hardcore.
After many beers and Irish coffee's they invited/informed me that there was a thing at the FCC that they were attending and that I should go.
Got Taxi with Chris and Luke, Andy followed behind with others.
Arrived at do, was youngest person there by ten years.
Was a memorial service for the Far Eastern Economic review, apparnty the magazine of substance in Asia that had folded the previous year.
Apparently every heavyweight journailst that had worked in Asia in the previous thirty years was there. People had come from all over the world. these were the people who had shaped Asia with their talent and their tenacity and their journalistic integrity. War correspondents, editors, columnists from every major magazine in the world. People who hadn't seen each other in twenty years.
I was wearing shorts.
I was working for BC magazine, it stands for Bars and Clubs.
Very embarrassed.
Everyone in the room other than me was in some way a heavyweight in their own right.
Was introduced by Andy to the news editor of the International Herald Tribune, he gave me his card.
I didn't have a card.
Very embarrassed.
I didn't want to have to hang off the guys all night because I didn't know them very well and this was such a huge and completely unique event that they wanted to split off on their own to see people they hadn't seen on their own so mostly stood on my own for majority of time there.
Took photos, trioed to keep up pretense that was covering event for BC. Not actually doing so as I knew too little about the night.
Watched speeches. Very cool. Pure vitriol in parts. Dow Jones is a fucker.
Had nothing to offer the conversation of the evening owing to complete ignorance of economics and total inexperience. Tried to stay out of the way.
Felt like others should have been ther but weren't.
Enjoyed myself immensely but was overawed.
Eventually went home, as was getting a little bored and more obviously on my own.
As I went out bumped into Andy, had nice chat about future in Hong Kong. Andy's a nice guy.
Walked to MTR, got train to Happy Valley. As I emerged into Times Square was suprised to find myself alone and confronted by large group of men with pump-action shotguns.
Midnight money transfer, Times Square to Securicor van. Took some blurry photos. Didn't want themn to think I was taking photos to plan a robbery. They look like they're guarding a Starbucks.
On way home passed little bar that looked interesting, went in. Totally empty. Ordered Coke. Cost Equivalent 5 euro.
Shit!
Got bus up hill to FlyPad.
Went up to gate, gate guy opened it up. Doorman called elevator, pressed button. Said "Good Night!!!!!!"Went to bed. Watched episode of Scrubs.
Turned off air conditioner and went to sleep.

SARS 2 - Viral Ninja Gweilo of Death!!!

2005-04-15T00:37:00.000+08:00

DSCN0286
Originally uploaded by ruadhraigh.

Well, a lot has happened since my last post. Every night since the first night it occured to me that I was actualy working I've come home from work
(I love saying that...work....work......work wroks!)
and I've thought, "Hey, a lot has happened but I haven't posted any of it on my hot new blog site that all the kids are reading! I haven't fed the pack of ravenous sensationalists at home that hang on my every written word! I have to make sure that everyone knows what's going on in my fabulous new cosmopolitan lifestyle or else they'll grow bored and insecure and find someone to replace me who has a name that's easier to spell and a demeanor that's more entertaining to tolerate!"
Well, luckily for you guys this Rudhraigh Christopher Kevin John McGrath isn't going anywhere eithout one fucker of a fight and I'l take all comers, be it Bob Smith or whatever! Oh yeah! I've known about you guys and Bob Smith! I knew all along! I knew how you were sizing him up, how when I left you thought you could just have him move into my house, wear my dressing gown, drink my tea, watch my movies and make my sardonic comments and that I wouldn't know about it! I knew! Well here's something you didn't know, Bob is a plant! He works for me!! He's been keeping me up to date about all you fools!! I know all your dirty little secrets!! That was your fatal flaw!! Bob was too charming and he listened too well!! For shame you sickos, for shame. You know who you are, and now so do I, and a couple of my trendy new Hong Kong friends too because I tell them everything, we're that close, they're that cool, how we laughed at your perverse monkey antics, ha ha ha ha!!!
So yeah, that's right! I have shit on all of you now, some real dark shit too and it would be a real pity if I had to send the polaroids to your respective family members, especially as some of them are involved.
So when I come back there better still be a Rudhraigh McGrath shaped hole in your life because no mere Bob Smith will do the job. He, unlike you it seems, knows his place.
Anyway, now that that's finally settled we'll say no more about it, you know where I stand and where you kneel, let's get back to the topic at hand.
I started my job in BC magazine on Monday and I was at my first press conference about two hours later. There's a 7 a side tournament coming up with the big players from Arsenal, Man U, Eindhoven, Celtic, Rangers and Aston Villa. Get this, hilariously enough, I of all people have to go and interview all the players about their careers and their experience of HK. This is somewhat like asking the Pope to interview Ron Jeremy, I don't really think I'm the guy to ask to interview Footballers about football, but there you go. At the time I let it slip that because I saw friends playing Championship Manager that knew the names of a couple of the players involved. Apparently that was enough for my new Editor, a very nice, very talkative man called Simon Durrant who then decided that I was one up on the alternative of one of the girls. I think I might ask them why they prefer football to watching Star Trek, it seems only fair, I've had to answer the reverse for most of my life.
Most of my time in the office has spent been doing a fair amount of boring bitch work, putting research stuff into Excel spreadsheets, checking facts, compiling listings. This isn't really that bad, I expected that no matter what they said about "This office is different, we make our interns do important work that they can really learn from", I knew that no human being can turn down the opportunity to make someone else do something boring that you don't want to do, especially when you don't have to pay them for it.
The office is quite small and contains three staff writers [all Chinese girls from America], one editor, one sub-editor, two interns {Including me}, one designer, the publisher {Simon}, one receptionist and three sales personnel.
One of the staff writers is called Elaine, she's Hong Kong Chinese who lived in California, is about nineteen and has been working for BC ever since she finished as an intern after leaving school. She's really nice but quite odd in small ways. She says that her only ambition in life is to work in McDonalds. When I asked why she wanted to work there she replied that she "really likes McDonalds". I keep expecting her to give some sort of ironic snort, but so-far no joy. I think she just really likes McDonalds. Weird.
The other staff writer is a bit of a conundrum owing to the fact that I haven't been introduced to her yet. We've actually chatted about a whole range of subjects, she sits about two meters away from me yet I don't know her name, I chat to people that are further away than her because we haven't been introduced. I think her name is something like Althea, but I'm not really sure. I keep on waiting for one of us to breqak this up but either she doesn't care or I'm too timid. This sort of non-introduction awkwardness is bad enough when you only see that person every once in a while but when you have to sit there for hours it's pretty hard to handle. Actually I'm quite enjoying it, it's quite an odd situation. I like odd situations.
Patrick is the other intern, he's Canadian, and that's about it. As such he's about what you'd expect for a Canadian, speaks French, thinks Budweiser is the "Best Tasting Beer in the World", likes Hockey, says eh?.
In short, he's Canadian. Woo Hoo. Actually I'm giving him a hard time, he's genuinely nice and unassuming, like most Canadians. Damn, I mean, he's not one to get excited. He's quite outdoorsy......Damn, that guy is one incredibly Canadian Candian!!
Actually the fact that he's pretty young initially made me question what the hell I was doing here. Then I found out they get a wide range of people interning there, apparently they have five more of us drudges coming in soon.
The designer is called Henry, he's gay and won't stop staring at me. This is fine, until he starts talking in Chinese to the girls in the office while he's doing it. He talks and stares, pouts occasionally, they laugh and laugh and reply and laugh, he smiles, keeps staring, pouting, they keep laughing. I sit there, not knowing what is being said, assuming the worst, only knowing that I would cut off a toe to find out exactly what was being said. Not my toe of course, someone else's. Mine are too precious.
Liz, the Editor is Americanish New Yorky sardonic sarcasm personified but actually she seems to be pretty nice under it all and also very good at her job. She loves films and I think she's secretly writing a screenplay, I've seen the shape on her screen from my desk but every time I come near her she minimises it. I want to read it, and if it's any good, to steal it. Then I could put my name on it and eventually pitch it, get it green-lighted and made into a major motion picture. Then, inside six months, I'll be living the high life in L.A. doing cocaine off a hooker's back as I drive my Porsche at 120 MPH down the freeway through my tenth homeless guy and as I carelessly miss my fifth pitch meeting of the day. I can't wait, Liz is going to hate me. I'll send her a postcard, I will!
Otherwise, the rest of the office staff don't speak English and while I'm sure they're very nice I'm assuming they probably hate me because I'm white and therefore a foreign devil. Of course this is just a suspicion of mine. It's pretty unfounded and largely down to my inferiority at my minority status but still, they give me the evil eye sometimes when I'm going to the bathroom. I think they think that I don't always wash my hands. Which is untrue. I always wash my hands in public toilets. I'm obsessive about it.
So basically in the last couple of days I've gone to a restaurant and gotten free Thai food and beer while coming up to complete strangers and asking them if I could take their photos, started stealing CD's [they have every single cd ever released in the office] written two cd reviews [one positive and one where I insinutate that the only way that someone could produce such a shit album was if the artist was insane] visited Victoria peak to get ideas for an entry in a tourist guide I now have to write, stolen an idea for an article from another magazine, been given the cover story for the next issue [ooee!] and washed my hands a lot. It seems to be going well, now if only I could stop being so addicted to that stupid StrongBad site I'd be doing well. It's stupid because it illustrates my weakness as a person. That and the hand washing, I should just throw caution to the wind! Germs for all! Atchoo...

Day of Inform-Me.

2005-04-04T00:16:00.000+08:00

Titus's concern for Pakistan is touching.
Originally uploaded by ruadhraigh.

Well now that I'm here on my own, I have to say things have changed somewhat. Because Emma left as well as her parents who went to Tokyo for a few days I stayed here on my own to look after Titus the cat. Spending the last couple of days alone in the flat has given me a bit of an opportunity to give myself a kick in the ass, something I think I needed. From here on in I can't in good conscience sit around and do the typical Rudhraigh thing of treating my dressing gown as office dress.
I suppose in a way I could get away with that a little bit more when I was staying here with Emma, it was her house after all, I am her long-term boyfriend, I didn't feel as much of a need to legitimise my presence because I knew Emma wanted me here and since she lives here I had a slight proxy right to be here via her permission. Also she makes great demands upon my time. She doesn't tickle herself into unconsciousness herself goddamn it!
So now I'm here entirely because Emma's parents have demonstrated a downright saintly capacity for tolerance of my some what tiring presence. I'm now living in their flat when their daughter isn't even here, I'm here totally at their leisure and totally due to their innate niceness. This, combined with the fact that Sandy and Christopher are some of the most together and motivated people I've ever conceived of with gym in the morning, work all day and organizing the following day's gym and work in the evening, so I've felt somewhat more motivated to get my act together. As such I've gotten more done in the last few days than I have in the previous month, probably the last year actually. To be honest the last five years of college. So anyway, here's where I stand.
A} Next Monday I start an Internship in BC magazine. It's an unpaid 10 to 6 thingamy at a lifestyle magazine with casual dress, an incredibly rigourous group of job-related activities and an apparently pretty comprehensive expense account. As it's my first full-time job, I'm trying to stop myself from completely freaking out by mentally treating it as a kind of Summer camp, like the fantastic sports-fests I got bundled off to as a kid. Wait, a minute, I hated those things! I always got beaten up!! Those fuckers in BC better not try anything, I've got moves now, I'm a big guy, they try anything and I'll kick their puny little asses for them I will.
B} After the month or so of that I'll probably start something, be it another inernship or more likely an actual job, with an Advertising agency called Get Smart. I'd be writing copy for ads as well as doing some light design work, mostly conceptual stuff which I would then hand on to the company's actual graphic designers. They have a pretty impressive client list for such a small company, which leads me to believe they're pretty damn good. They seem to be anyway.
C} I seem to have about four grand in my bank account and more coming in, so I think I'll be okay for money for the moment.
D} I've been finishing off my TEFL course which leads me to believe that if I really need money quickly I can just get it by doing the odd English class..
E} I'm going to finally start watching the first series of 24, something I've been meaning to do for quite a while now. I've been unable to have a proper conversation with my brother for quite a while due to his obsession with the show and my fear that he'll spoil it for me by accidentally dropping in hints of what's going to happen. Finally I'll be able to sort that out.
Otherwise, being alone for the last few days has been pretty much business as usual. Sleeping, eating, exploring Hong Kong. Sleeping. To be honest I was slightly worried that the solitude might be driving insane but thankfully some light conversation with Titus, the family cat helped me out. He's a smart guy that cat, funny, deep, witty, suprisingly informed on a wide variety of contemporary topics of great and relevant interest. He just has this knack of just seeing past all the bullshit to the core of the subject at hand, like the way Jamie Oliver would be conversationally if he spoke English.
Actually no, not really, Titus is a beautiful fiend. He waltzes in, ignores you, expects you to pay attention to the fact that he's ignoring you and then ignores the fact that you're paying attention to his ignorance. The worst thing is that you keep forgetting how much of an asshole he is because you're just so mesmerised by how damn beautiful he is. A bit like me actually..

Emmasculated.

2005-04-03T22:26:00.000+08:00

Well, yesterday Emma went back to London. I'm not sure if there's anyone reading this who doesn't actually know me, and hence this explanation is probably a little redundant but hey, I'm an egoist, I like to think that my crazy, zany activities have attracted a readership of at least one person who doesn't know me. So, as such, this explanation is for you.
I've been going out with Emma for what will be three years in October. We met in college, she was my cousin's flatmate and regardless of what she might say I heinously seduced her as part of my global quest for conquest of all women. Unfortunately for that great endeavour I fell in love with her, thus ending any desire I had to conquer anyone else. As such, since I don't need anyone else, Emma is pretty much all women in the world to me that I'm not actually related to. She's my best friend, I love her.
Now, the problem is that I was two years ahead of Emma in Univertsity back in Ireland. I finished my degree a good two years before she will, so I had to think of something to do that would enable me to still see her and also enable me to get the fuck out of Ireland, a place that I love to hate but a place that just hates me. Fortunately enough her parents live in Hong Kong, the place I decided on moving to. Thanks to their insanely good nature, I'm staying with them until I get a job and/or get an apartment of my own. Emma came over for Easter to see me and see her parents and then yesterday she went home. Now I'm not going to see her for at least two months until she returns after her exams.
Thankfully, she's spending the whole Summer here so in two months I get to see her for ages, but there's still the matter of the two months. We've gone a month before but this is different, we're on opposite sides of the world. I have to say two months seems an eternity right now, comparable to the six thousand miles between us. It's like watching a two month long German silent movie about systematically abusive Nazi faecofeliacs running an pointlessly insane regime of torturous experiments on innocent children in concentration camps. Like waiting for a bus in Birmingham for two months. Like spending two months in a locked room with a Tv showing a looping copy of Batman & Robin. I can go for two months without Emma but it'll be like going for two months without smiling. Watching her leave was like losing an eye. Her leaving makes me feel like I'm a little boy trying not to cry when his puppy got run over.
I know I have to do it, but I don't want to. But I know I have to, but I don't want to. Yet again reality attempts to ruin my life.

Foreign Correspondent's Child.

2005-03-30T21:56:00.000+08:00

Tonight, as part of my quest for professional clarification I went to meet a lady called Diane Stormont, up until the day after the handover of HK she was the beaureau chief of Hong Kong Reuters. The last article she wrote was the Reuters article describing the handover. She's hardcore journalist history.
She invited me for a drink in the Foreign Correspondent's Club, yet another Hong Kong instituation that outdates democracy. The weird thing about all these formal clubs that I've gone to is that you can't pay for anything with money, it all goes on your tab. As such since money is useless in the FCC but it's also a club for clapped out Journos who are suffering from several types of alchoholic addiction, several types of stress disorder and every type of financial destitution, I imagine you commonly see people attempt to get a last drink on their already ludicrously overloaded tab. The bar itself is so fucking cool, long, loaded down with old wood and good taste. It's like walking into a room full of well dressed people yet knowing that every one of them has earned the right to scoff at the fact that you're not in a suit. They have, through their professional endeavours, earned the right to wax lyrical to impressionable young go-getters who want advice on their chosen career, hence my presence. I suppose that might just be my impression of the place, for all I know they're all sell-out pigs who masquerade as the real thing but for me the effect was the same.
The reason I was going to meet Diane was because she obviously knew much about Journalism and could give me an insight I lacked. The thing is that I'm still trying to make my decision about whether to go for Advertising and Lies or Journalism and the Truth. I'm effectively wondering whether I should sell out for the Ad agency's big bucks or keep my soul but become a self-pitying alchoholic.
Talking to Diane gave me an insight that I lacked because she was so matter of fact about it and she had a total right to be. Others ahve been like that but because she was who she was, I listened. It was pretty much, "Journalism is a job, you work and you get paid" and as such I should try to keep professionalism in mind and the fact that it was as competitive as the rest. Also I should keep in mind that everyone I contacted was really busy and that they get a million e-mails a day. Now I knew all this before I met Diane, but she really drove it home. There is no way in Hell that anyone is going to respond to an E-mail I send saying "Hi, My name's Rory! I'm really like smart! I want to write because I'm really deep and inspired!!", not when they have hundreds of people physically knocking at their door. I have to go out to these papers and physically, personally demand that they give me a job.
I also met a guy called Luke Hunt, I think he was her fella. He was really cool, really hardcore. He works for Agence France-Presse or the AFP, which is a news wire like Reuters. He told me that I'd need some sort of economic background or at least an ability to understand finance to go anywhere in HK journalism. Apparently it's a good time to come out because the economy here is bouncing back and as such many of the papers and such are expanding again, they might need staff. I might try with the International Herald Tribune in the next few days, that might be cool.
They also introduced me to a guy called Herbert, who I later found out was the photographer who took the iconic "Last Helicopter out of Vietnam" photo. You know, the one off the roof of the US embassy showing the last helicopter out of Vietnam. The one that he later told was actually off an apartment block, thus amicably illustrating the confusion that was endemic of the time. This photo has been published a thousand times, it was the photo on the cover of Time magazine to mark the 25th anniversary of the Vietnam war. Herbert got about $250 because he was working for AFP at the time and as such, they owned the rights. What a fucking fucker.
All in all, the FCC was a really cool place, I met more new and genuinely interesting people there in two hours of drinking than I did in six months at home. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Hong Kong rocks the fucking house.

Kung Fun.

2005-03-29T01:32:00.000+08:00

FIST OF FURY
Originally uploaded by ruadhraigh.

I wrote this about what I got up to on Sunday night, I'm posting it because I'm not writing it out again when I have a perfectly good explanation just sitting around gathering virtual dust.

I am and have been for most of my life an obsessive purist about watching movies. I am all about the purity of the movie experience, about the lack of outside interference. I am that guy who testily tells loud strangers in cinemas to shut up. I am that asshole who tells his friends to keep it down when they’re having a conversation in their own house because he’s trying to watch Aliens for the four hundredth time. The truth is that in a world so devoid of appealing edifices of spirituality, the movie theatre has become my church, it’s where I worship. So I take my movies very seriously and I resent people trying to distract me from my chosen theology.
As such, I’ve always loved the cinema’s themselves; I love their simple bland objectivity. I love the way that filmmakers can project so many different stories into this generically empty space. In a large expansive rectangular room with red walls and a big, eye-filling screen there is nothing that comes between you and the story. Until recently I couldn’t conceive of anything being better than the simplistic purity of this delightfully objective delivery system. I thought that when it came to watching movies the lack of outside distraction was paramount.
Then, on the night of Easter Sunday, as part of the 29th Hong Kong International Film Festival I watched Kung-Fu Hustle and Bruce-Lee’s Fists of Fury in the middle of Hong Kong’s Financial District on the biggest outdoor screen ever erected in Asia, a scene that was admittedly heavy on the distraction. Over the next few days the festival is showing outdoor screenings of various movies including some experimental animations by Astro Boy’s creator Tezuka Osamu and Kevin Spacey’s Beyond the Sea.
I have to say that all in all after weighing up the pros and cons and given due consideration to both options that on the whole the outdoor screenings of the two movies I saw were better than the cinema; they were much fucking better. In entertainment stakes they made watching movies in the regular cinema look like you were watching a movie on a melting two-inch screen in the deep-blackness of the bottom of the ocean when you’ve just had your eyes sewn shut.
Let me set the scene for you, the Tamar Site that the screen was erected on is in just in front of the mouth of a vast canyon of beautiful Hong Kong landmarks, each one of them belonging to a huge financial giant. Bank of America, HSBC, The Lippo Building, The China Bank, every one of them architecturally unique and covered in a characteristically Asian light scheme that shines into the night like some kind of constant electronic fireworks display. Neon company names shine out of every surface; Chinese characters that look like they’re on fire permeate the night’s sky. This area of Hong Kong is where Ridley Scott obtained the look of Blade Runner; the Corporate East meets the Corporate West, on Super-Hyper-Techno-Acid from the Future!
I hadn’t seen either movie before, Kung-Fu Hustle has had rave reviews and Fists of Fury is by all accounts a Kung Fu Classic so I have to say that I was probably more excited about finally seeing the films than the novelty of the setting. I was somewhat apprehensive that we wouldn’t get good seats or that it would rain, two things that were very possible. Although I knew it would be good I wasn’t absolutely sure if it was going to be that great.
Driving there in a taxi, the screen emerged on the horizon a good two minutes before we actually approached it. When I arrived at 7:00 there was vast crowd of people, who were mostly Chinese although it was peppered with the occasional Western Gwai-lo standing around with a conspiratorial look of mutual recognition on their face gained from having lucked in a bit of an inside-secret. It’s not often these days that you see anybody who is really, truly impressed about anything, but on everybody’s face and in everybody’s eyes you could see the disbelief at the scale of the screen and the magnificence of the background.
The weather was pretty usual for this time of year in Hong Kong, sticky and humid. You could taste the need to rain in the air while helpful festival staff were busy handing out white plastic-macs with a level of foresight that later proved to make the whole evening possible.
The closest I can come to describing the feeling I had when I saw the set-up, the massive screen, the stacks of speakers is that it was like when I got the Millennium Falcon for Christmas when I was eight. There were at least a thousand seats, all lit up by floodlights with the massive bulk of the inflated screen fronting the whole endeavour. As soon as we got in, my girlfriend and her brother and I all raced around like the eight-year-old kids we felt like and finally found great seats right at the front just it started raining, which it continued to do for most of the night. Once we had the seats and right through Kung Fu Hustle and Fists of Fury I hardly noticed the gathering wetness down my back, I was that blown away by the scenery, I was that excited by the prospect of the movies.
While I was struggling into my mac the place quickly filled up to absolute capacity and the floods dimmed to a kind of hazy half light, the red and blue neons on the side of the skyscrapers illuminated the mist and rain, giving the whole place a weird glow, like seeing the possibility of coloured headlights in fog.
First there was a short and nicely put together montage of film clips celebrating a hundred years of Chinese cinema, which was one of the themes of the festival. At the same time the Hong Kong Symphonette played the music for the short live, it was our first exposure to the screen’s sound system, which was immense. I had been so concentrated on my anticipation of the visuals that the quality of the sound didn’t really occur to me. Then Kung Fu Hustle started and it blew me away, almost literally. Thankfully both movies were in Cantonese with Mandarin and English Subtitles but it was in the fighting that the sound and the visuals really showed what you can do with volume if there’s no restricting walls to cause the deafening of the crowd. Once the movies actually started and the kung-fu styleee punches were a-flying you could physically feel every blow in your chest, it was like being beaten up by a movie.
You could see people on the street behind the screen stop and stare, cars slowed down and pulled over, the crowd roared along with the movie. The Lion’s Roar in Kung-Fu Hustle was so loud that I could see the windows of the cars and the skyscrapers reverberate. As the action of the movies got more and more serious, so did the weather, the rain really started pouring down but safely ensconced on our macs and bathed in the warm night’s air we braved the whole thing with hardly a thought for the conditions. Every couple of seconds you’d look up, see where you were, see the amazing background, the fantastic enthusiasm, you’d realise that there was no where on Earth that would be a better place to show these two films and look at the person beside you in true “Oh My Fucking Christ” amazement, even though neither of you spoke the same language. It was so eerily beautiful it was like we were in the movie. When Bruce Lee came on there were shouts and cheers, every one of his fights were filled with cheesy point of masterful ability and quality sound effects. I think it would have made him happy to see himself still looking like a god, projected in the open air of modern Hong Kong.
In terms of the experience, all in all and out of the two Kung-Fu Hustle was the better because it was better able to take advantage of the amazing opportunity that the setting offered. The booming sound, the sharp visuals, the magnificently choreographed fight and CGI sequences, it was like what Tarantino was trying to achieve with Kill Bill but put in the perspective of KFH spectacularly failed to pull off. While Bruce Lee’s fighting was extraordinary in Fists of Fury and the in-story theme of racism towards Japan was hilarious to watch, especially in the company of so many Chinese and Japanese people, the quality of the sound wasn’t up to the former because recording standards were obviously much lower back then. Also and with a sad predictability when it was compared to the CGI enhanced battles of Kung Fu hustle it looked pretty hokey.
As we left I kept talking about Kung Fu Hustle and the amazing differences it had made to me as a cinema-goer, you could see everyone trying to get to get to grips with seeing the end of four hours of such an amazing experience.
I have to say, after that I’m not sure I can go back to my cinema’s treasured bland objectivity. I think I might now need a bit of drama to my backdrop. I realised that the distractions of a locale can definitely contribute to the experience rather than detract from it, like watching Jaws in a lie-low floating in the sea or watching Alive on the peak of Mount Everest. The only problem I foresee is that it might have been too good, that I might now have an unrealistic expectation of what a good cinema-going experience constitutes. Hopefully before I die, just once, I’ll be able to sit in a throne on a huge Imperial space station and get to watch Star Wars projected on the surface of the Moon before I have it blown up. Is that too much to ask?

Two Things that are very cheap in Hong Kong

2005-03-25T14:46:00.000+08:00

1] Food -There are so many differing ways, manners and avenues to attempt in a culinary sense and the vast majority of it is so cheap that makes you angry. Having lived in Dublin for most of my life I'm really truly realising in a very first-hand and actual sense that every restaurant in town is the moral equivalent of a sweatship that makes bubble-gum flavoured baby poison and is entirely staffed by orphans. Next time you see a restaurant in Dublin colsing down, don't feel bad for the people involved, throw stones at them, teach your children to revile and spit upon them. Irish Restaranteur's are like war-profiteers, they get fat off the misery and sacrifice of others. In Hong Kong, things are as they should be, food is food and it's priced as such. Sushi for example is so cheap that eating it becomes like eating a packet of crisps, you can do it whenever you want because no matter what if you're not actually homeless then it's an affordable option. And it's not just the normal everyday stuff that's affordable, even though some Western food is slightly pricey. As you walk around differing parts of HK you are continually confronted by storefronts maybe two metres in length that's fronted by a glass-fronted counter at which you can sit and eat a wide variety of culturally entrenched grub. One of the more charming things is the weird thing in which they have eerily accurate plastic versions of the meal lying around for your perusal, it's a bit like when you're in a chipper and for some reason they leave all the minging fly-covered unfried stuff behind the glass of the counter where you can see, like seeing uncooked shite it will make you want to eat it? Got a hankering for some boiled Chicken feet? Slightly in the mood for some fermented bean curd covered in a two-inch roll of globulous Pig Fat? If so then I know the guy who does the best, he's this crazy old Chinese guy with one eye and a parrot in acage. I know this because evrytime I pass by him he shouts "You come here! Eat good! Best in Town!! I change money too!!"
If you can't trust a Chinese Pirate who can you trust?
2] Taxis - Getting a taxi here is the fucking business. I get taxis everywhere, every day. Now, it's important that you know, the thing is that on avarage I really am a cheap bastard. I have always had an aversion to casually spending money on piddling little shit that cost more than five euro. This may be because I'm sensitive to the fact that I'm lazy and I'm trying to maximise my money and hence also maximise my lack of overall effort, I don't know, but what I willl say is that when I'm at home I resent taxis, I fucking hate them. I hate the way they're generally either unfriendly or over-friendly and always fucking boring. I hate the way they sit in taxi-ranks for hours staring out the widows when they could be reading a fucking book or performing any number of productive activities. I can count the number of genuinely pleasant taxi-rides I've had on the fingers of one foot. Now you can accuse me of classism or social xenophobia if you want, that I should have made more of an effort to get along with the taximen of Dublin because they are the salt of the Earth, that the reason I detest them is because they talk with a Dub accent and are working for their money. If this is the case, this is how I respond: A: Fuck You.
B: The avarage taxi driver earns four
times the avarage wage of the Dublin
city worker.
They are usurious, abusive motherfuckers who drive slowly on purpose to pump up their fare. I hate paying them their blood money, they can fuck right off.
Hong Kong taxi drivers however are legendary wage-warriors who put up with a lot of shit in the course of their honest persual of an honest days work. I have met more interesting HK Taxi-men in the short time I've been here than I have in my entire run of their Irish equivalent. They are moral giants, dwarving even the most generous philanthropists of our day. I say this because I can get a taxi from Emma's down to the centre of HK and it will cost me about three euro. Three euro. Three of them. The equivalent trip at home would cost about ten if not twelve bills!! That's three times the amount!!! And they don't try to drive slowly so that they get caught by traffic lights, they don't blatantly go at 25 MPH when you're trying your best to hold the vomit down until you get home cause you don't want to get stung by the shitty soiling charge. Of course, it might be the case that I've just been lucky with the taximen I've gotten so far, maybe one of them will detour, drive me into a garage where I will be taken apart by Chinese surgeons and my organs will appear in a little old lady who will swear she's been straining blood through them for years but if that's the case, at least I don't have to have boring, meaningless conversation about either Manchester United or the shitty deal Taxi-drivers have gotten since the government issued all the new plates, because they don't speak English.

Piracy, Adventure and Blogging on the High Seas.

2005-03-22T22:13:00.000+08:00

Recently, I have been reading a lot of historical fiction about the sea, Hong Kong being a historically naval place. Master and Commander, Star of the Sea, Shogun, Tai-Pan, in many ways the focus of all these books is to ennumerate the various manner in which thousands of men died in a very slow and painful manner due to ignorance of the importance of basic hygiene, not insulting the French and eating your vegetables. These deaths make for drama, for high-adventure on the high seas, but what they also serve is to illustrate just how huge the world is when all you have to travel it with is a tub of wood and a sail. Today, we do in twelve hours what it used to take people two years to do.
Back in the day, the Far-East was a place of legend, an unseen, unknown universe of unlimited wealth that shockingly took no stock of European interests as it was too far away. Of course to the Orientals, Europe was an equivalent mystery albeit an inferior one because they thought we were all just evil ghosts that flew around bemoning the fact that we had been so evil in our previous lives. Hundred of thousands of men died trying to travel to Asia, sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, Magellen's straits, the Laurentine abyssal. Men were press-ganged on to ships, never to see their homes or families again. Boys left home and returned as men, rich beyond the conception of the common man,a full haul of nutmeg or saffron from India could fetch prices equivalent to about five or six hundred million dollars, if you received one percent of that, that's five million dollars.
Storms, Pirates, the French, the Natives, Squalls, Landmass's, Mutiny, Scurvy, Ignorance, Buggery and the Lash. It took people up to two years of traveling to get from Britain to Hong Kong and I just talked to my brother on Skype over the internet and was able to say "God Bless you" when he sneezed. We are roughly 6187 miles apart and I just heard him sneeze. How fucking cool is that??
Jesus, how lucky are we to be around right now? Just you try to explain to a guy from the seventeen hundreds about blogging, about Skype, about mobile phones and how small the world can be. then try to convince him that we were better off travelling at a slower pace. Don't get me wrong there are obvious downsides to our lifestyles but at least for a larger number of us the everyday elements of it are slightly more tolerable.
Just imagine the conversation you could have with one of the crewmembers of one of those expeditions about your dismay at the shocking discomfort you have to go through, at your righteous indignation at having to go through the absolute unmitigated Hell of sitting in a smallish chair and eating low-quality food for ten hours to get to Hong Kong. You might think it would be awkward when he responded but don't worry, by the time you'd finished talking about how much you hate air-line food he'd probably be dead from malnutrition anyway.
So anyways, in the majority of ways and for a fair number of people life is good. I love technology and boo-ya sucks to you if you don't realise the miracle of modern living.
Ps. I do realise this only applies to the people who have the technology, I doubt you'd have to invent a time machine to produce a person who would be shocked by the convenience of your lifestyle.

Squashed Expectations.

2005-03-21T00:41:00.000+08:00

Today, yesterday and the day before I played squash, I now love squash, for me squash is the new black.
I, like so many others, have never really been a sporty kind of person. Because this statement is so often said it's easy to miss its full implications so I'll say it again, I have never really been a sporty kind of person. Whatever you want to say, I wasn't cool, I didn't do weights,I'm not buff, I'm physically inferior, whatever. I just didn't have the attitude for it.
This of course is a nice way of saying that while I wasn't last picked for teams in school, I certainly wasn't a "go-to guy" when it came to competitive sports. I have always put this down to two things, a lack of the peer pressure of having loads of other kids around where I lived as a kid and the fact that I'm usually pretty comfortable doing anything I'm not comfortable with. Now I don't mean that I was an unphysical kid, I spent ninety-percent of my days exploring the forests near my house in the wilds of Wicklow, building forts, hunting my brother, getting hunted by my brother, having my brother, cath, gut and clean me and mount my head on his bedroom wall, I was seriously down with that sort of thing.
I just didn't so much get the whole rugby, football, tennis conspiracy that private school habitually tried to lay on you. Inwardly, I always thought that rugby was for morons, tennis was for girlyboys and football was for egomaniacs, I just couldn't appreciate their conception of finesse so instead I watched Star Trek and read books and I stand by my decision.
So playing and genuinely enjoying sqaush is a pretty big thing for me, it could theoretically be the difference between a thriving vigorous sixty-year old Rudhraigh and a thrashing, cardiac-arresting forty-seven year old Rudhraigh. It really is fun, and I don't often say that about anything that requires you wear funny shorts or keep score, other than the hooker-sex of course.
Now I have been playing in a place up the road that Emma's family are members of called the Hong Kong Cricket Club. It's a high-class mish-mash of old ex-pats and young go-getters. It's yet another holdover from the old colonial days, back when every member was A) White B) British By God! and C) White.
Now of course even though there are many Chinese members today it's still quite odd, like an old pub that's had smoking banned but you can still detect the odour an colour of nicotine in every square foot of every room. There are old pictures on it's tastefully decorated walls with pictures of strapping Englishmen in white conquerer helmets straddling Hong Kong like they were claiming Prima Nocte.
Recently, it's had the inevitable PC making makeover so you're no longer around to call the Chinese staff "coolies" or beat them for some entertainment. No, It's important to know that today if you're going to beat one of the Chinese servents you have to have a real and valid reason or else the other members will stand there in the background while you wash the blood off your shoes and their pick the teeth from your squash racket and give you cold and dirty looks over their Pimms and lemonade and mutter to each other about your "Ill-Breeding and typical Irish mania".
Anyway, in truth the place is great (It has a bowling alley, a swimming pool, three great restaurants, two bars, four tennis courts, four squash courts, a golf simulator, a cricket pitch and a video shop that you can take 5 DVDS at a time for a week, all included in the membership fees) and there are at least as many Chinese members as gwai-lo's, but I'm learning that that's pretty typical of Hong Kong. There's not nearly as much segregation as you'd expect, at least not within the rich. Here money buys you everything and everything has a price, and averyone smiles when a friend buys something new. My price might be swanky squash facilites and traditionally elitist drinks, I haven't decided yet.

Seven Times a Lady.

2005-03-19T03:00:00.000+08:00

Today, the weather was beautiful, the sun was casually sidling down and gently insinuating itself with the city. It was like being seduced by some sort of natural force, like aquicesence was inevitable and that any attempt on my part to try to do anything other than give in was pointless. As such, the daytime of my day was focused around a visit to the Hong Kong Botanical gardens. It's mostly a repository for plant-life having a billion differnt types of tree, fern, moss and grass. It's full of kids, tourists and of course the animals. It's kinda like a semi-zoo whcih is kinda worse than a real zoo because it doesn't have the funding. It has the low-budget highlights of the natural world. Flamingos and other random birds fill the aviary, sloths and terrapins and lemurs litter the other parts of this diet-zoo. For the most part it's just sad, then you see the orangutan's then it becomes genuinely upsetting.
I think one of the great betrayals of chlidhood other than Santa Claus's non-existence and the expectation of work is zoos. When you're a kid you're completely oblivious to the reality of the suffering of these prisoners of evolution. When you're a kid you think that these animals love being enclosed, because you love looking at them, that's kid-logic.
Now today, as an adult, I can pretty much stomach any of these things without getting upset, but for some reason, seeing orangutan's in a cage upsets me. They look so empty, like the unexplained confinement has sucked the life out of them. They look like prisoners without hope, ignorant captives of ignorance.
But on the upside they gave me a splendid idea for a book.
Later, when I was far away from the pseudo-zoo and back in the human equivelent I went out with Emma and my friend Lauren. Lauren works for the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's resident Irish Times. She seems to know everyone. We went out for drinks and such because this weekend is Hong Kong Rugby Sevens weekend. I'm still not totally sure what the specifics of Rugby Sevens are, I assume it's seven players playing rugby and such but I also assume it has to be slightly more complicated than that, but to be honest that's as far as I will go in the interest stakes.
Anyway, the upshot is that we went out for a drink on Rugby Sevens weekend, it was somewhat like reaching for a glass of water and unwittingly picking up a glass of bleach. Think of the worst, most tacky, most randomly chaotic, drunken, pissed, vomit covered, vomit coloured evening you have ever seen then think of what it would be like if it was arranged in a foreign country by the Chinese. Think of sports and how serious certain people take them (this may in fact be yourself, if so then you know exactly what I'm talking about}. Now think of all this, a convention for people who love all these things, shouting, getting drunk, nationalism and more shouting. Think of the women who are attracted to the men that are like this, except realise that in the HK Rubgy Sevens they're all about forty years old and trully, finally, minging. And desperate. Think about the fact that every hooker, every scabies-ridden, pox-filled-clabtastic AIDS ho looks forward to doing a roaring trade for the three days of the Sevens. It's like Hooker Christmas. The place is infested with the most hardcore bunch of absolutely fucked Rugby fans I have ever conceived of. If the prospect of vomiting on another man's piss while he's getting a blowjob from a Thai Girl with a ciggarette in the side of her mouth appeals to you, then come to the Sevens! It's full of every stereotype you ever thought ot raging against.
Of course, I watched the Ireland-Wales Match with five hundred other people at one in the morning, four hundred and ninety-nine of which were absolutely wasted. I shouted, I regaled, I bellowed but nothing could help Ireland, especially because inwardly I wasn't really fussed. It's not that I wouldn't love Ireland to win, it's just that I kinda want Wales to win too, the Welsh are just adorable! With their unfeasible accents and their inabillity to discern between their sister and their girlfriends they're just darling!
Anyway, I saw us lose then we left.
On our return to the center of town Lauren and her friend Holly both drunkenly gave the taxi-driver a real colonial stylee what-for for trying to rip us off. I couldn't tell if he was really doing so or if they were just practicing the ancient European tradition of hassling people who don't speak the same langauge as us but all the same the journey was remarkably silent after he threatened to kick us out of the cab at the side of the road.
It's important that you realise that by this stage I was pretty drunk, Lauren was also drunk, Holly was drunk, Emma was drunk, Lachlan (Emma's brother) was drunk, the rugby fans were certainly very fucking drunk, I suspect that even the taxi-driver was drunk. It was like going to the World Relapse Convention for Alchoholics Anonomous.
All in all I enjoyed myself, I think that tonight was like going swimming in the sea as a child, starting to struggle and drown, then finding your resolve, pulling yourself up and out and emerging from the water as a man with a raging hangover and the realisation that in fact the sea was not water but beer,.
I feel it was fairly successful..
Oo Eee.

I Ain't Got no Time For Yo' Jibba Jabba!

2005-03-18T22:07:00.000+08:00

It's funny, I'm not a very articulate person, I usually put this down to a belief that I never learned to stay silent when I had nothing to say. At times {in fact most of the time} I'll walk away from a conversation inwardly berating myself for not giving a decent representation of myself to the person or persons involved, I feel grateful for their tolerence of my inarticulate nature. I spend a lot of my time deperately trying to justify myself to the people I know. If there's one thing I've realised in my life it's that people dislike casual desperation in a close aquaintance, but they hate close deperation in a casual aquaintance. I've always been somewhat of a sensate, convinced that my life should be as interesting as humanly possible so it's hard to stomach it when it's actually me that's the uninteresting party, it means that there is never any party, just a bunch of people standing around trying to silence the common awkwardness by talking loudly. Believe me, I'm very aware that it's annoying to have to deal with a casually known person who can't contain their inner deperation, or at least make it casually interesting. As such I've always felt that to an extent I'm inhibited by the people I know, that my behaviour around the people I know is part of the main reason that I feel slightly estranged from my life. As such my move to HK is a lot more than a move to a foreign country, it's an opportunity to redefine myself, to finally give myself a chance to say what I meant to say.
Actually, you know what? That's not funny at all!!
Calvin & Hobbes are funny. And anything that Mr-T says.
That man is a laugh riot.

Bus-Love.

2005-03-16T19:20:00.000+08:00

When I first considered coming here I must say one of the most intimidating factors of the whole "Living in Hong Kong" concept was how the non-European persons who resided here (I.E. The Chinese) would regard yet another foreign devil coming over and taking one of their rightful jobs merely because I could speak English and was white. I was worried that I would walk into a job that by rights some more able Chinese guy should be filling purely because of an unjust system of racial opppression and fiscal harassment. I was worried that the Chinese people of Hong Kong would hate me, spitting rancid saliva on my food, evil looks at my face and the demand for justified karmic retribution into the infinite arena of Nirvanic Circularity. I was worried that I was walking into a situation where the avarage Chinese mother would see me in the street, stop their small and beautiful child and point at me with a wary finger as I passed them by, desperately trying to ignore the newly learned hatred in the child's eyes. I was worried that I would find myself ignoring the fact that my new friends were racist, sexist bigots who saw the Chinese people as resources and were quite able see themselves as righteous consumers of a historically endowed vice. I was worried that I would do well here, that I would prosper, but that all the time I would have a sickening desperation permeating my whole being, knowing that I was prospering through the degredation and mass-abuse of the many by a priveleged few. I was worried that I would have to lie to my family and friends about my life here, mask vital truths that were completely definitive of my situation because my acceptance of them was so shamefully morally reprehensible that no person with even a modicum of self-respect could know they existed yet go on without without denying them completely. I was worried that Hong Kong would make me a hypocrite because it was based on a system of hypocrisy that had been going for hundreds of years. I was worried that I might end up a miserable, fat, bald forty-five year old advertising executive with a totally consuming cocaine addiction, four technically legitimate children that saw me as nothing more than a mine for money and a tribe of illegitimate sprogs who legtimately saw me as an analogy for the rape of their country.
But today, as I ran for the departing bus to go to Central and pick up a suit I was having repaired, the bus stopped because it saw me running. Never, in all my time in Dublin, actually nowhere in anywhere in Ireland did a departing busdriver stop the bus because he saw me running for it. Never.
Hong Kong loves me.
And I love it.
Oh Yeah!

Fake Country..

2005-03-15T14:22:00.000+08:00

CIMG0018
Originally uploaded by Rudhraigh.

Yesterday I crossed the border into the PRC and went into Shenzen.
Talking to Christopher (Emma's Dad) he says that Shenzen has probably changed rather a lot in the last few years, but that he really wouldn't know because he's only been there once.
He first came here in the seventies. Back then he was a British police officer one of the many colonial Gweilo's keeping the peace. This was obviously back when the British still owned this town, so I believe him when he tells me that things have since changed. The only time he has ever in Shenzen was when it was still just a conglomorate of tiny little villages that was only remarkable because it bordered Hong Kong.
He was chasing a criminal throught the streets who thought that he could get away if he ran over the border bridge and escape into China. When Christopher ran over the border line in his HKPD uniform he says that suddenly roughly a hundred Chinese soldiers pulled out their rifles and ran towarsds him screaming at him in rapid Mandarin that they would fill his Gweilo ass with Chinese metal if he didn't get back into Hong Kong pronto.
Potential internationial incidents aside the thing about this is that in this repect very little has actually changed, the Chinese are still threatening to fill our Gweilo asses with metal it's just that today this is a different kind of metal, not so much bullets, kind of more digital cameras.
Shenzen is a shopping mecca. You can get absolutely anything and everything you could ever want in Shenzen. While it used to be a few tiny little villages it's now one ridiculously labyrinthine sprall of a mall. It was the largest shopping related building I have ever thought of. I'm not joking when I say that you can get absolutely lost in there, I know this because I did, several times. Believe me when I say that at the top there are two floors the size of about four football pitches full of tailors and cloth sellers where you can get absolutely any clothes you can conceive of made up. Three equivelent floors where you can buy electronic goods and watches where a "Lolex" will set you back about $2.50.There are literallyt thousands of Chinese trying to persuade you to buy weirdly incongruous goods. Every once in a while a crowd of these hawking Chinese passes you by and you see that they're crowding around another Gweilo (European) and the Chinese that are simultaneously crowding around you go after this alternate Gweilo because you're ignoring them and the Chinese that are following them come after you because they have met similar disinterest. It's like you swap subordinates.
There are also about nine floors of identical boxy seventies shops selling fake everything for nothing. Fake this and fake that. Genuine Chinese fakes. Strangely enough, all the clothes I was wearing when I arrived were probably made in China, it was like they were coming home.
The really funny thing is that it's actually illegal to sell fakes in China so what you end up doing is sidling up to a likely looking ten-year old Chinese kid and muttering "Prada, Prada, Prada" He then takes you through the incomprehensible maze of shops full of millions of harrasing and haranguing peopel to the back of one particular shop where he pulls at a wall of packages of nappies. The wall opens and you walk into a tiny room filled with every kind of Prada shoe you could possibly find, for about a hundredth of the price. The location of the Prada room changes every day so that the authorities can conintue to turn a blind eye because this mall is so insanely huge that they can happily claim it's an impossible task and keep on taking their bribes.
Ironically, many of these fakes are apparently made by the same people who make the real deal. This makes sense because it's cheaper than having to bother finding someone new and going through the hassle of teaching them how to make it when you can get the only people in the world who knows what to do from experience and pay them roughly a dollar a day to do it for you.
Apparently the workers make more money from the fakes than the genuine articles, once they're trained to make a particular kind of shoe/shirt/wallet etc. they can then go work for the fake makers, the lucky bastards..
Anyway I bought Armani shirts, Levi jeans, Ralph Lauren socks. I'm having a suit made, A full length Cashmere jacket. I have now got fifteen different kinds of everything and I spent roughly.....two hundred quid.
My tailor, John, the nicest guy ever, works from 7 in the morning till 11 at night, if he's lucky. On a fairly regular basis he might not sleep at all.
But it's okay because I returned from shopping with more bags than I could carry, a manicure (my first ever) and a real repect for the fact that the Chinese people really know what work really is, mostly because they're really working themselves to death for us.
So now, for a laugh, why don't you check and see how many articles of the clothing you're presently wearing comes from China, when I did it I got 4!!

Work Schmirk.

2005-03-10T19:59:00.000+08:00

SV3
Originally uploaded by Rudhraigh.

This is but the tiniest part of my view from my bedroom window at 6:30 in the morning. The jet-lag still has me waking up at odd times so I have a lot of time to think and take pretty yet random photos like this one.
As it is there are a few things I need to get done in order to legitimise my stay here somwhat. The requirements are:
1] Get a job
2] Get an apartment
3] Get a work visa
Now 2 and 3 totally rely on 1.
If I aint got no job I can't get an apartment and they only give you a work visa if you have a job. So, in order to rectify this I narrowed my career choices down to two main areas: Journalism and Advertising.
On the Journalism front:
Possibility 1] I had sorted out an internship with a magazine called BC magazine before I arrived. It's supposed to be a fairly irreverent piece of anti-establishment crap, exacrtly the sort of thing I would be interested in wasting my time at. The fucker was that it's unpaid, so if I were going to take it I would have to have some sort of paying gig at the same time. Luckily I undertook a TEFL course before I arrived and just have to finish one or two parts of it. Apparently SARS scared all the Enlgish teachers away so there's a real shortage of Europeans with TEFL courses around, I could make great money teaching Hong Kongites how to appreciate the Simpsons while at the same time doing the internship.
Possibility 2] It looks like a good chance that I could end up writing for one of the local English papers [of which there are a few] I know a couple of people who work here as well as Christopher [Emma's dad] knowing just about everyone there is.
In Advertising:
Possibility 1] I could just go and apply for an internshiop in one of the 4a companies here and hope for the best. They take in a huge amount of copy monkeys and spit them out as seasoned ad-men. I'm not sure I'd enjoy it though, it seems pretty regimented..
Possibility 2] I had a meeting today with a fantastic lady who owns a small hotbox of an agency. Basically she employs a small team of people with a total emphasis on creativity and quality of work. They have some great clients and they all seem like really cool people. I'd have to be flexible and able, but at the same time she's flexible and able so the work environment would be great. They're crying out for capable designers here, there';s a real shortage and I think she was hoping I had some sort of ability in that department but actually I think she was impressed by my ability to express myself. She set me some research, intorduced me to a friend who was the head of Reuter's Hong Kong division and told me to get back to her. I really want this job.
So all in all it's working out fine. I have options that feel right and I'm generally pretty happy about the whole thing. Now if only I could get some fucking sleep.

Stereotypically Sarcastic.

2005-03-07T19:41:00.000+08:00

So tired.
I spent the day following my family (who are over for a couple of days) walk around the streets, buying this, haggling that, buy, sell, buy.
So tired.
The jetlag is making me feel ill, my body keeps wanting to pack it in and go home where inactivity rules. It also makes you sensitive to the oddest things.
When I arrived here I quickly remarked (internally of course) that this country seemed to vaguely smell of something I didn't expect because it seemed to be so obvious, I thought it smelled like a Chinese takeaway. The scent of Kia Ora flavoured chicken dishes seemed to be everywhere, wafting around the oddest places. It's not exactly what you'd think, I suppose you'd hope that the Chinese takeaways you patronise at home are at best a pale imitation of the real thing, that when you visit the reality it shocks you with the zest of its Oriental mystery, the timbre of its nasal ablutions. So I had to ask myself, what did this piece of shocking stereotype come true bode for the rest of my experience here? Was I to look to the stereotypes we all love and endorse with our ignorance to inform me of what to expect? Could I look forward to many great nights talking about "Flied Lice" and watching people in pointy bamboo hats walk around calling me "A Wowee-san" (or is that Japanese?)
Not really, I think it was just a phase. The scent improved as I moved around.
As I walked around the streets I was assailed on all sides by an all-out olfactory war of people and cars and smog and dead chickens and ginger and dogs and people and dirt and clean and disinfectant and maybe still a little the faintest little ghost of Kia Ora chicken. Frankly any attempt to reconcile the stereotypes you expect and the reality that confronts you is as pointless as a bowl of strawberry jelly.
The streets here are wide and slightly dirty, yet the shops are small and totally clean. At the moment the weather is extremely pleasant but it bodes of the coming months of living in a wet spirit-sapping inferno. Apparently Hong Kong is a hot moist bag of muck in the Summer months and I can certainly see how that might happen. It becomes an indoor world, powered by air conditioning. You're trapped in a place of constant sore throats brought on by over-dry air and SARS and Avian Bird Flu paranoia. If these killer diseases have the same symptoms as a cold, when you get your Summer cold, how do you know you're not dying? That's what I want to know. I think I might buy myself one of those surgical face masks that people wear to protect themselves from germs. Even now you still see a couple of them floating about, like some guy was halfway through surgery and stepped outside for a fag. At first I just thought that there were an awful lot of Michael Jackson fans who just couldn't let go, then I remembered about the whole epidemic thing.
My mum bought me a very pleasant phone that I much appreciate because it makes me feel like if the worst comes to the worst I can always indulge in some hot sexx chat, something that was advertised almost everywhere I went today.
In other news I'm trying to decide what I'm going to do about work, I have to get a concrete job sorted out as soon as I can simply because you require a work visa if you stay in Hong Kong for longer than three months. As I might want to stay for a great deal longer than that, a job becomes a neccesary part of the equation. I've given myself three months to decide if I want to stay here for a while, you can guess for yourself which I'll do as my mind vascillates between the different possibilities. Perhaps we can make a game of it?

MECHA-RUDHRAIGH!!!!! Taller than the tallest building, more powerful than all of the armies of man!!

2005-03-07T09:25:00.000+08:00

SV1
Originally uploaded by Rudhraigh.

So yeah, two days ago I moved to "Hong Kong" I did this for various reasons but mostly I just did it. As you may or may not know (but of course if you don't know then you're a moron) Hong Kong is one of the most famous and most wealthy cities in the world and is situated on the Eastern coast of China. It's the world's eight biggest economy, and that's compared on a national level. Hong Kong as a city makes more money than most of the world's countries do and that includes my lovely Ireland. This is one one of those statistics that probably suprises you, like finding out that Finland tops the world in competitive market forces or that in many places the avarage American probably can't spell competitive without spelling it with a 'z'
Anyway, Hong Kong is populated by around 6.8 million people, 95% of which are of Chinese ethnicity. For a person who is only really used to the Chinese in the traditional Irish manner, as being some kind of guiltless tribe of newly freed and industrious triers who are continually, facelessly, working away in the capitalist paradise of McDonalds, it's new to see them actually living normally in a place that they call home and in jobs that you actually want to do yourself. The idea that a Chinese person can move to Hong Kong and be able to be free to work, live and play as they want makes this place seem like a haven and everyone knows it. There's a weird feeling here, looking down out of the the absolutely fly-ass pad I'm presently staying in makes it seems like there's money and opportunity stuffed into every crevice. The thing is, it's not like London where it seems like economics exists because London does, here you know that Hong Kong exists purely because of the economics. In this way it feels like freedom, the freedom of the Chinese people. It's that same freedom that makes America seem so attractive Now some of you might be thinking "Hey, wait a minute, I've heard about Hong Kong, it may seem Chinese but it's really ruled by the Europeans and Americans there and since McGrath's a European he's only really competing with other Europeans, a quick handshake in the right place and a nod to the right person and he'll be fine"
To you I say this, do you think Rocky Balboa won because he was Italian? No! He won because he had heart! Do you think he won because he knew people? No! He won because he wanted it! He won because He had an edge formed by his experiences on the streets and he had no-where to go but up and nothing to lose! The Chinese people are the modern Rocky Balboa! There's a pool of ability that we all talk about back home in our kind of casually knowing way "Oh yeah, look at China! Look at China! Look at the Chinese! Look at their work ethic! They're definitely on the up and up!" Well then, tell me something, if you all really believed that, why the hell aren't you learning Mandarin? Why the hell are you still anywhere other than in China learning to be Chinese? Because I can tell you, even after only two days, it is so obvious that these able-bodied hungry-ass Chinese people we've been talking about, they're not some sort of vague conceptual issue that might have an affect on the global society one day, they exist! They're real! They're here! It's as simple as this, they are hungry and we are fat and when it comes right down to it that means that they have the better ability to take what we all want.
So now that I've left my home and moved into all of this you'd think I'd be pretty intimidated. After all there are 6.8 million Hong Kongites here in this city and I don't really know any of them. For the most part they speak a language I don't understand, come from a culture I have no real conception of, have customs I'm unaware of and they were here first. Even discounting their numerical advantage, in a one on one fair fight the avarage Hong Kong resident could probably kick several entirely different varieties of shit out of me and then make me eat it at their leisure, and this includes the many little old ladies they seem to have hanging around the gaff.
So, in order to prevent this happening, I have decided to make sure a fair fight never occurs.
In the late great spirit of European colonialism and the traditional spirit of white oppressors everywhere I intend to lie, cheat, steal and destroy my way to the top, because believe me even after only two days here I know that Hong Kong is a city of extremely able people in transit, some are on their way up and some are on their way down and I have decided that up has a better sound to it. I have decided that I would like to live in a place so fly that it never touches the ground. I want a car so fast that by the time you realise I'm coming, I'm gone. I want to have a job so poweful that I can change the word for "Power" to the word "Rudhraigh"
You may be thinking, "Jesus, it only took Rudhraigh two days to completely sell out and go rampantly insane, it's like he's some kind of ravingly capitalistic monster with no moral standard and a desire to drink human blood? What's that about?"
If you are thinking that, don't worry, you won't be for long, only until I have you executed for daring to impinge upon my imperialistic goals. I will straddle this city, tearing down the concrete edifices and the fantastic buildings and throwing them into my hungering gullet. I will use my flaming breath and lazer vision to melt their puny defences as they hurl them in tiny desperation against my magnificent form. Prepare for a new era world! The era of Mecha-Rudhraigh! King of the Universe!

Flickr

2005-03-07T09:20:00.000+08:00

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.