I do like the way that you sometimes come across a bit of writing on the web's formeost user-created encyclopedia that is perfectly odd, yet not so obvious about it that it gets picked up and edited out.

Consider the following from the entry on Grange Hill spin-off series Tucker's Luck:

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Series and Episode Guide

Series 1 (1983)

The first series contained nine episodes.

Series 2 (1984)

The second series also contained nine episodes.

Series 3 (1985)

Like the first two series, the third and final series had nine episodes, which means that there were 27 episodes in the entire series.

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Marvellous.
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The new season starts this week - in fact, there's been one game already, with reigning champions held to a 1-1 draw at home to Sun Hei. Clearly this is a sign we should pounce on that they were just flash in the pan last season, although by the looks of the team sheet they were missing most of their star Catalans.

Ranger have changed their name again, this time to Biu Chiu Ranger - their name sponsor for the new season is a watch-hands company. Not watches. Just the hands. http://www.hkfa.com/en/team_list.php?club_id=142

Apparently flush with cash from the lucrative watch-hand industry, Rangers have signed 9 new players for this season, including my mate (well, we say hi and how are you at parties) Brazilian striker Sandro from Citizen.

 Another one from the archives. 
This is a cut-up I made from an online discussion about coffee, and later used as most of the lyrics to a song of the same name that I performed with my band Autological. 

how do you take your coffee
(a cut-up poem)

Black and bitter
In honour of my wife.
Black and sweet
to switch things up.

Black and straight, baby
I have a minor addiction.
A cafe du monde in Hiroshima City.

How about you?
What about the blood of your enemies?
I wanna see the sun, blotted out from the sky.

What about the blood of your enemies?
It is Water. Watered-down juice. Milk in my cereal.

I'm not real choosy.
I'm getting old.
I am a skinny caramel macchiato with extra shot.

An old forum post of mine that I found. 
This is about a role-playing game, so some readers may wish to tune out now. 

The rest of you, read on for  the  magnificent, weak-joke-based homebrew that was... ROAD TO WANAMM.

It came about in the summer of 1998 or so, I'd say. Me and two of my mates had been reading HoL recently and playing a bit of Vampire: the Masquerade as well as our usual AD&D/WFRP type stuff. One evening we just started writing a game. It was sort of in the HoL style - i.e. handwritten on loose sheets of lined A4 paper by whoever came up with an idea, full of scribbly drawings in ballpoint pen.

The "Wanamm" of the title was the capital city of a country that I can't remember the name of. The country was but one kingdom on a single, mostly circular continent that floated in the sea in a giant frying pan that floated through space, orbited by a white Sun (eclipses occurred when the Sun went behind the pan's handle).

The name, incidentally, was just made by arranging our names in a certain order:
RO--WAN
AD--AM
TO--M
Clever, eh?

The description of the various races were substituted by how to make yourself look like one (elves dressed in 70s disco suits and pulled their ear-tips upwards, that kind of thing -- the hobbit directions were very involved and required two people, a table in front of a curtain and a pair of "gorilla feet" slippers). In mockery of heartbreaker naming conventions, the word "dwarf" had to be pronounced to rhyme with "barf". In mockery of Mage, magic was called madgyckdgf (the last three letters are silent).

All characters had "vegeplines", Vampire knock-off superpowers based on vegetables, the most common of which was Potatence. Yes, I know, I know.

And, oh yeah, the city of Wanamm was a sort of troglodyte settlement, with houses and tunnels carved into a giant potato.
And it was ruled by King Edward.

Later we added some things that I still think are good, like the Shergari motorcycle centaurs, or the clannish gelatinous cubes, who were divided into tribes based on what flavour they were (strawberry holding sway in the Tribal Council at present).

I only played it once with the guys, and ran a game for my brother (who played a gelatinous cube with a rebellious haircut (well, jelly-top sculpt)). But it was all good ludicrous freewheeling fun.
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 Time Out has put online Hemlock's article on the gradual ordination of Henry Tang as next Chief Executive of Hong Kong. This has been coming for a while, so it's common knowledge, but it's a good read that lays out a lot of stuff that - if you're a Hong Kong resident - you kind of know anyway but never really laid out concretely. 

For non-HKers, here's the relevant bit about how the process works, so that you know it's not a real election: 
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In December 2011, the charade will officially start when around 200,000 Hongkongers will be eligible to choose some of the 1,200 members of an electoral college. This event will go by the riveting title of the 2011 Election Committee Subsector Elections, and if you belong to a professional or community association you may find candidates groveling for your vote so they can be one of the 1,200 who will (barring panda bear attacks) go through the motions and pretend to elect Henry in March.

The ‘subsectors’ are commercial, trade, community, political and even religious groupings, which is how the Election Committee they elect gets its official description of ‘broadly representative’. In fact (using the 2007 figures as a guide), 88,000 teachers will be allowed to elect 30 of their profession to the 1,200; while fewer than 300 top bankers and insurers (many with Mainland interests) will elect 36. Small, unrepresentative groups like tycoons and leftist cultural organisations will choose the bulk of the Election Committee, and Beijing-appointed local deputies to national assemblies will make up another chunk. Teachers and other normal, regular folk who think for themselves will be penned up in a little box accounting for just 15 percent or so of the 1,200. They might as well not bother, and indeed some will boycott the whole thing.

The exact composition and voting power of all these subsectors are painstakingly calculated to produce an electoral college that is a totally reliable rubber stamp. This is of course the same system used to elect the functional constituency representatives who occupy half the seats in the Legislative Council, giving Beijing a guaranteed veto over anything democratically elected lawmakers might vote for. The decks are stacked from the start.----

Amazingly, CE candidates do bother to go and do campaigning amongst the populace. Which is odd, since only one five-thousandth of that populace gets to vote. 
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I found this just now on an old, dusty website: a piece I wrote in 2006 essentially in order to deliver a single pun. 

我是毛主席的邮票员 - an excerpt

by Guo Ningyi

Guo Ningyi was Mao's official philatelist from 1940 until the Chairman's death in 1976, tasked with maintaining and organising the Great Helmsman's large collection of stamps. We are proud to present this excerpt from Mr Guo's memoir 我是毛主席的邮票员 - "I was Chairman Mao's stamp guy".

Stamps were a constant in the life of the Chairman. During troubled times, such as the 1960s and 1970s, their placid shapes and perforated edges were sometimes, he confided in me, the only thing kept him together. I well remember in those latter years the look of childlike joy he would get as he showed me some new acquisition for the collection. There he would be, sitting opposite me on the divan behind a plate piled high with buns, beaming as he passed me some rare 19th century Dutch specimens, the latest cricket-themed commemorative set from Niue or even something as simple as an airmail sticker with an unusual ink stain.

In later years, the Chairman became more of an admirer of stamps than an avid collector. He appreciated the collection he had and always welcomed such gifts as were presented to him, but the thrill of the hunt had gone. When you can mobilise a quarter of the world to search for, say, a 1918 "Inverted Jenny", much of the thrill is gone. Nonetheless, Mao never lost his love for his stamps - in many ways they were a trophy of the hard times, souvenirs that were hard-won through life and death struggle.

During the War of Single-Handed Victory Over Japan, for example, stamps were more often hard to come by than not. So it was with some relish that Mao requisitioned eight Imperial Japanese postage stamps captured by our Communist forces in a raid on a Japanese garrison in September 1943. They had been affixed to postcards that Japanese soldiers intended to send home. But now, seized by China's valiant soldiers, they were brought back to our camp in triumph and, amid cries of jubilation, carefully affixed to some of our few remaining stamp hinges (by 1943, stamp album supplies were running low) and placed in Chairman Mao's album. Later on, stamps helped advance the cause of peace too.

Everyone remembers the so-called "ping-pong diplomacy" of the 1970s, but in fact stamp-collecting's contributions to the diplomatic process must not be overlooked. Mao and Kissinger's shared interest in the subject helped along those first tentative conversations between China and the US. And who can forget when, on the occasion of US President Richard Nixon's visit, Chairman Mao showed his visitor his display cases of his most valued stamps, explaining that he arranged them so as to mimic the poetry of the classical writer Han Yu. It was then that Nixon famously quipped "imitation is the sincerest form of philately". Why, that single joke may have done more for Sino-American relations than the entire Korean War!

It was because of key stamp-related events like this in the course of his life that in 1976, mere weeks before his timely demise, Mao was reported to have said, "you know, I really like stamps."

Wo shi Mao zhuxi de youpiaoyuan will be published in hardback in February 2007 and will then be banned on the mainland five weeks later. It will subsequently be published in full-form characters in Taiwan and available in English via a specialist publisher in Hong Kong.

HKFC 2 - 7 Kitchee

On Friday 6 May, my wife and I went to the Hong Kong FC Stadium (not to be confused with Hong Kong Stadium) to watch the home side take a 7-2 pasting from fellow first division side Kitchee. 

This was not merely down to being devotee of o jogo bonito but also to see Kitchee win the league championship - breaking South China AA's hold on the title for the first time in four years.

You have to feel a little bit sorry for HKFC, who are an amateur team. Even though some of their players are amateur in the same way Soviet olympians used to be, the majority of those playing on Friday night had, presumably, just finished a full day of work, unlike Kitchee's squad. I bumped into one HKFC player I happen to know outside the stadium just after kickoff (I was running late). Apparently he's injured, but a more cynical fellow might suspect he just wasn't that interested in taking a beating from the champions-elect in the last game of the season. 

In team-I-vaguely-support news, there's also still a chance Citizen can beat South China stablemates TSW Pegasus to third, which would be nice even if it wouldn't mean very much. 
Citizen will play in the AFC Cup next year by virtue of having won the Senior Shield, so there's international football to be had for them. 
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The Triffic Tottenham blog has a decent piece on the pros and cons of N17's "Yiddo" self-nomenclature, and on the cons of David Baddiel's film about it.

http://triffictottenham.co.uk/to-yid-or-not-to-yid/


"Adding insult to injury is the nonsense being talked on the official Spurs website. Apparently these chants are the work of “a small number” of Spurs fans. Turn up at WHL and see whether this is the case. The club says it wants an open and honest debate about the issue. Fair enough. Then accept that it’s a huge majority, not a “small number”, who join in “yiddo” chants and songs. We do it because we are proud of the club’s Jewish identity.

"The funny thing is that I do think there are good arguments against the whole “yid” thing, and I have often thought about them and wondered whether I was doing the right thing by joining in these chants. But the film is way too sweeping and blinkered to explore them with any kind of subtlety. For example, you could argue that non-Jewish fans shouldn’t join in these chants, on the basis that it isn’t for us to decide what is and isn’t offensive to Jewish people. I can accept that. Personally, I have always decided it’s ok for me to join in those chants knowing that I have the backing and understanding of Jewish friends who I am very close to, whose Bar Mitzvhas I attended, who I value greatly, and who I would never want to let down. But maybe that sounds like the kind of rubbish argument of people who say, “I’m not racist – loads of my friends are black”. Maybe I really am that bad. It’s a worrying thought."
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... from beyond the grave!

Longish piece in The Awl about the Greenspan-Rand connection and contiguous territories.

"In his own way, Greenspan had inherited in toto Rand's short-sightedness, egocentrism and complete lack of understanding of "the behavior of individuals and societies." Though he would play his delusions out in a very different arena and not, so far as is generally known, be going around slapping anybody in the foyer. His big scene would come forty years later, in a Congressional hearing room."

http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/when-alan-met-ayn-atlas-shrugged-and-our-tanked-economy?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheAwl+%28The+Awl%29

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Having recently been in an online conversation in which various enthusiasts of e-books (a fine medium, by the way) insisted that publishing companies and their attendant "gatekeeper" role - although any world in which J. Archer esquire is published must surely gainsay the gatekeeping aspect of publishing - I found this interesting.

The comments are the main point of interest.
http://booksandpals.blogspot.com/2011/03/greek-seaman-jacqueline-howett.html

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