This is a good film. It follows the trajectory of a standard sports movie pretty much exactly, but it's still a good film.

It's a little bit funny and a little bit sad. Roger Ebert calls it "unreasonably entertaining" and I think he's right.
Whip It has flaws. It is often heavy-handed, for example, but just as you're rolling your eyes, it redeems itself with a bit of character or a joke. It's difficult to dislike a film made with what feels like such warm-heartedness.
Performance-wise, Ellen Page is excellent as Bliss and the least known Wilson brother (Andrew) has a weirdly dry yet emotional role as the team's exasperated coach.

One oddity about the film is that it's quite hard at first to work out when it's set. For at least the first half I couldn't decide if it was a modern-day setting or a 1980s period piece, partly because of all the retro cars being drive, until people started using YouTube and the date became a bit more nailed down. I think that's part of the point. The small town Bliss wants to get out of is so out of the way it's been passed over by the modern day.

The main effect after watching Whip It, of course, is working out what your roller derby nickname would be - my favourite one that appears in the film is Eva Destruction.
Mine is easy, aside from the fact that I would be unable to compete due to being a bloke - The Tominator, or if there were already one or two Toms in the squad, Tominator 2: Judgment Day or Tominator 3: Rise of the Smashines. If there were more than that I'd have to think of something else, because Tominator Salvation is right out.

My wife's putative nickname is trickier. The best ones we came up with played on her Indonesiosity, with Indo-Structible edged out by Magna Jakarta.
.

We finally got round to watching Ip Man on DVD the other day. Unfortunately all the dialogue, except the Japanese, had been dubbed into Mandarin, so it wasn't perfect, but it was still a very well put-together "based on a true story" number.

To give you an idea of the storyline, in real life Ip Man did refuse to teach Wing Chun to the occupying Japanese troops, but there is no record of him taking on 10 karate practitioners at the same time to make his point.

The film starts off in a classic enough mould, with the Northern ruffian Master Jin turning up and beating up the various masters of the Foshan kung fu schools one at a time until Ip Man, who is independently wealthy and therefore can't be bothered to teach, reluctantly fights Jin in in his own living room and beats him.
Then the Japanese turn up and it all goes a bit Casablanca/Schindler's List.

A lot of the tension in the fights and the who's-going-to-betray-whom scenes arises from the historical context, but in general Ip Man manages to keep things serious while still allowing comical touches, such as Ip Man's toddler cycling through the middle of a fight on his trike with the words 'Mummy says not to break anything else'.

However, there are a couple of sour notes. Chinese audiences seem to be able to handle it, but I find it hard to take seriously any fight sequence involving a very long, flexible pole, no matter how grim it is supposed to be. The same goes for the whole "hey, these factory women spent two weeks learning Wing Chun and now they can take on this axe-armed partisan fighters!" thing.

Another problem is Hong Kong cinema itself. Just as Hollywood film puts the sound of boxing gloves hitting each other even when someone gets punched in a non-gloved part such as the face, in HK it seems it's not a fight unless there are loads of treble-heavy slapping sound effects.

It's a pretty good film, though, all things considered. The "we don't mind being murdered by Fascists as long as they're Chinese fascists" subtext may trouble some audiences, but if you voluntarily watch a film made on the mainland since about 2002 you should already know what you're letting yourself in for.
.

Last night I caught part of an RTHK documentary that essentially consisted of various Hong Kong sports-doers whinging that they don't get free money from the government. Perhaps daftest of all was the marksman saying "It's not fair that shooting is overlooked because it isn't a popular sport". Surely that's the very definition of fair - if I invent a sport that only I play, would it be unfair for not to get government funding?
He also then kind of undermined his own argument by showing that he seemed to have found plenty fo workarounds to not having a coach, etc.

There's also a weird dynamic at work where, for example, members of the tae kwon do team were upset they weren't allowed to use the central sports complex, and because they didn't have a team physio "we pay for our injuries with our own money and time". What happened to doing a sport because you like it?
If all you want is the government to give you money while avoiding injury, go and work for RTHK. If all you want is a medal, take up a sport the government sponsors (assuming that's the only way to get a medal).

Speaking of which, that's shooting ruled out - it turns out the East Asian Games were so badly run that 9 out of 13 shooting events were cancelled (HK failed to build a proper venue and just held the shooting in the South China Athletic Association basement), so in a properly-run one, I might have a chance. Plenty of events.
But it looks like I'd need some proper coaching to win something at shooting, and HK doesn't do that, plus something tells me China and North Korea have this one sewn up.

I'd already ruled out "dancesport" but if anyone is interested, it looks like medals are very much available. The voice-over reeled off what was meant to be an Impressive Stat: "60 dancers from six nations competed for twelve gold medals".
But if you work that out, it means 30 couples competing for 36 medals - more than enough for everyone!
.

This report of natural wonders at Mount Paektu doesn't make a lot of sense without the following background information:

- one of Kim Jong-un's nicknames is "the Morningstar General"
- he's being groomed to succeed his father as leader of the DPRK
- these signs and wonders occurred shortly before his birthday, January the 8th, which is also a public holiday in North Korea
.

An interesting thing about editing CLT materials (that's Chinese Language Teaching, do keep up at the back) produced on the mainland is that what the authors think is "an interesting thing about China" is often more revealing and intriguing than the bland subject matter they chose (e.g. Chinese people greet one another by shaking hands, amazing).

There's also some interesting projection at work in some of the texts proper - at least three of the passages in the book series I'm revising at the moment contain a variation on the old saw "foreigners find Chinese really hard to learn". But when you look at the examples given, it's more often "language students often have difficulties". One story was about a foreign student having difficulty with using the right vocab in context, which the author seemed to think was a trait unique to Chinese. I put a big red line through that one and it won't be appearing in the new edition.

But here's a bit of one with a little more projection than normal:
第二, 卷舌音很难.比如说"我是(shi)美国人"有的留学生说成"我是(si)美国人"。

In short it's saying foreigners have difficulty distinguishing between sh- and s-. But the thing is, they don't. Speakers of European languages, Indians, Koreans, Japanese, Russians, none of these have any trouble with sh-/s-, since it's part of their native language (zh-/j- is another question). If someone can point me to a language fitting the bill that has a lot of native speakers studying in China, I would be interested to find out.

In fact, the group that can't distinguish between sh- and s- easily is native Mandarin speakers - chiefly from the southern parts of China (where they also have trouble with n compared to l), and Taiwan. In these accents sh- is always s-, and those learning "standard" Mandarin have to train themselves to hear and produce the difference.

There are tricky sound differences for foreigners in Standard Mandarin, but the above isn't one of them. I notice in the contents of a textbook I have to do later in the year that one unit has a section on "q" versus "ch" which is difficult, but the next unit has "zh" and "ch", which isn't. Assuming no one stops me, that will become "zh" and "j", a distinction that causes me problems to this day.

And yes, beginning students of Chinese from Japan do usually struggle with l and r. And with "shi", but it's the vowel that is the problem rather than the initial consonant.
.

I've got some fairly mundane/achievable resolutions for 2010 - eat more fruit, get good enough at playing the berimbau that I can sing at the same time, that kind of thing.

However, I also now have a much larger goal - to win a medal (doesn't matter which event) at the East Asian Games.
Yes, that's right. Just as the government kept insisting while it was pouring money into the firework-laden opening ceremony, this international sporting event designed to let China win things against such athletic giants as Guam -- whose athletes mostly just looked bemused the whole time -- has inspired a yearning to participate. Not, however, for the reasons they might think.

The East Asian Games, we were told, proved that Hong Kong can do international events well. The opening ceremony with its nationally-themed barges in the harbour was nice, but I feel it slumped a bit in actual execution. Spectators for the hockey, for example, as I noticed while going in the opposite direction at Jordan MTR station, were directed to the stadium with a photocopied sheet of A4 sellotaped to a wall.

This was just the first symptom of a malaise at the event level. I later saw some of the events on TV, and what I noticed was this: with the exception of a few, such as the football, BMX or "artistic cycling" (i.e. BMX trick riding for the terminally uncool -- Macau cleaned up at this), the standard was unbelievably low.

Many finals only had three participants, which is nice because everyone gets a medal. The bronze medallist in the women's triple jump barely made it into the sandpit. The gold and silver medallists in the men's 1500m won by a ridiculous margin over a small chasing pack who timed like joggers in Central Park.

Now, I'm no athletic superman, but I reckon that by the time I've been here long enough to get a permanent residence card and thus qualify for the Hong Kong team, I can reach the blazingly low standards required to participate in the East Asian Games in Tianjin. Even if I somehow fail to get 3rd, at least I can say I'm an international athlete.

The question is, which sport?
The following are out due to the participants actually being quite good: football, rugby sevens, diving, swimming, BMX.
Out due to me being unwilling to do them: artistic cycling, 'DanceSport' (i.e. ballroom dancing), ten-pin bowling.

I'm thinking possibly handball, if only I knew the first thing about it.
.

Rather good stuff available here until Thursday.

"Yeah, tapas? Just stick it in a pie like everyone else!"

"First, we hang you for a bit... but not for too long. We don't want to damage your neck. Then... we damage your neck."
.

Fifa World Player 2009 shortlist:
Michael Ballack (Germany), Gianluigi Buffon (Italy), Iker Casillas (Spain), Cristiano Ronaldo (Portugal), Diego (Brazil), Didier Drogba (Ivory Coast), Michael Essien (Ghana), Samuel Eto'o (Cameroon), Steven Gerrard (England), Thierry Henry (France), Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Sweden), Andrés Iniesta (Spain), Kaká (Brazil), Frank Lampard (England), Luís Fabiano (Brazil), Lionel Messi (Argentina), Carles Puyol (Spain), Franck Ribéry (France), Wayne Rooney (England), John Terry (England), Fernando Torres (Spain), David Villa (Spain), Xavi (Spain).

Note the italics. It's like the Oscars. Although including EBJT is like including Steven Tyler's cameo in "Be Cool" for Best Actor, which the Oscars didn't as far as I recall.*

What I'm saying is this list could be a lot shorter.
Or longer, to be fair.
Maybe it's slightly meaningless as a list, I don't know.
There's a separate list for the ladies, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know.

* No, the Kissinger jokes do not apply. EBJT makes Kissinger look like Robeson, adjusted for spheres of influence.

(Explanation below the cut)

I have a crippling fear of modernity and the outdoors.
My psychiatrist says I have Portuguese agoraphobia.

( Read more... )

An interesting book review, of an interesting-sounding book, Red Sun: Travel in Naxalite Country by Sudeep Chakravarti.

“India’s Maoists do not want a separate country. They already have one. It’s just not the way they would like it – yet.”
...
"When Chakravarti asks Ajay Sahni, of the Indian Institute for Conflict Management, why Indian policymakers prefer to focus on Pakistan, jihadis and separatists rather than the massive and growing Naxalite issue, he responds: “Because we don’t like it. There is no foreign hand; we’ll have to face our own failures in this particular case.” Maoists do not consider themselves unpatriotic, and they are steeped in Indian history; as such, they represent a genuine crisis of nationalism."

As traditional dances go, this pretty well knocks the stuffing out of morris dancing.

My friend Stephen recently sent me, among other things, a copy of 9Tail Fox by Jon Courtenay Grimwood. I am about to repay that act of generosity by nitpicking the opening chapters.

In fact, he and I have discussed before the problems with Grimwood's writing, and in reading this book I think I've worked out what my problem is with him. Because this is so far a much better book than the others of his I've read, Pashazade and Stamping Butterflies, it seems easier to spot these things. The following points may seem petty, and that's why 9Tail Fox is a better read - the issues are still there but have decreased in significance.

Grimwood's problem is interestingly paradoxical - he tries too hard and not enough.

Consider the description of the protagonist, Bobby Zha:
"A mixture of Cantonese, Catalan and Scottish, Sergeant Zha looked foreign, no matter where he was or who he was with..."

This kind of attempt to make your characters cool by giving them vaguely exotic backgrounds is very 1980s. I have been guilty of creating none-more-ethnic character backgrounds myself. The difference is that Grimwood is an adult writing a novel for publication, whereas I was a 14-year-old boy playing Shadowrun.

So he's overstretched very early on for no reason - Zha's Cantonese background comes up a bit, but Scottish? Who cares? It reminds me of Pullum on Dan Brown, "The details have no relevance to what is being narrated." Now, Pullum prefaced that sentence with "It has the ring of utter ineptitude", but Grimwood isn't that bad. Still, irrelevant details.

But when it comes to the actual work and craft of writing, Grimwood can't be bothered. It would take work to actually portray a Chinese-American living in San Francisco. So he doesn't. Chinese culture is given to us as... a parade with dragons and a teenage daughter who does tai chi.
Despite being Cantonese, the Sergeant has a Mandarin surname, although it's possible Grimwood decided to spell Cha with a Z for no reason. Stamping Butterflies demonstrated his lack of respect for Chinese language, which he seems to regard just as something to lend an aura of Inscrutable Ancient Mystery.

Lord alone knows what actual Chinese name Lietenant Que's surname is supposed to be. It's possible he actually knows the Hokkien pronunciation of the Mandarin Guo 郭. It's possible he took the Wade-Giles romanisation Kuei and wrongly assumed that the K (rather than K') was pronounced as in English, and decided to spell it like Manuel's catchprase in Fawlty Towers. But it seems more likely that he just made up a "Chinese-sounding" name. Grimwood's orientalism is a sort of Lustbader-lite.

Even the name of the titular nine-tailed fox is wrong - it should be jiuwei, not jinwei. U for N is a common typographical error, but since it's persisted into paperback Grimwood either doesn't care about the error, or he just doesn't know it's wrong.

This ruined Stamping Butterflies for me. I enjoyed the bits in Morrocco but could barely tolerate the cod-China far future segments, and they in turn undermined the Morrocco parts - was I only enjoying the atmosphere because I know nothing whatsoever about North Africa?

It's not all ethnocentrism, though. There are bits of plain bad writing that needed a more ruthless editor. For example:

"Okay," said Lieutenant Que. "We're done here."
They both heard the dismissal in his voice.

In my experience, you only need to infer dismissal from someone's voice when they haven't just directly stated dismissal in their words.

Grimwood also likes his lazy cliches:
Things in the SFPD were changing. There were exams and job appraisal forms, review boards and seminars on how to relate to the city's different minorities.
If this book had its finger any more on the pulse of the latest issues in policing, it would be an episode of The Bill circa 1986.

OK, one more bit of ethnocentrism:
A sign on the front read, Ticket Office - Han Poon Shipping. It was so faded that, if it was not for the Chinese characters below, Bobby wouldn't have been able to decipher what it said at all.

To JCG, "a sign" is only something written in English.

But it's not all bad. The plot and setting (so far) are good and, importantly, not trying to be too clever. And the writing has plenty that an editor would keep, such as this description of a warehouse: "a jutting square of yellow brick that stole the middle from what had once been a large courtyard." Economical, evocative... nice work.

I hope for his next book, Grimwood gets edited more and maybe meets a Chinese person. He's got potential.

And Stephen, nitpicks aside, I am really enjoying the book, honest.

Just like everyone else, I am sad to hear that Chas and Dave are no more. Dave is retiring.

Along with the "Mentalist" thing (see earlier post)*, another of my idle-moment word games is to make up new versions of the chorus for the Chas & Dave hit "Hot-shot Tottenham". To make it more challenging I require a slightly tighter rhyme scheme with the word 'Spurs' than the original song.



Here's one of mine.
We're hotshot Tottenham, we are the super Spurs
Although we like our fancy drinks we rarely have chartreuse.
When do our gardening we use our secateurs
'Cause we're hot-shot Tottenham.

I hear Chas will be touring solo. Chas, if you're reading this, you can have that for free.



* Here's another one I thought of recently: "It would take a mentalist to reach that conclusion from the available evidence."

Today I happened across, as one does, a Facebook group called (and I apologise for the language) "SAVE THE INDONESIAN CULTURE FROM F*CKING SH*T MALAYSIA".

Here's the English bit of the blurb:
MALAYSIA IS ALWAYS STEAL OUR CULTURE. THEY ARE HAVEN'T ANY CULTURE IN THEIR COUNTRY. NOW, PENDET DANCE THE TRADITIONAL OF BALINESE DANCE IS STEALED BY THEIR FOR MALAYSIA TRULY ASIA PROMOTION. IM VERY SAD BECAUSE PENDET DANCE, REOG PONOROGO, BATIK, AND HUNDRED OF INDONESIAN CULTURE IS STEALED BY MALINGSIA (MALING = THIEF, MALAYSIA=MALINGSIA). ... WE MUST SHOW TO THE WORLD THAT MALAYSIA IS DOESN'T HAVE ANYONE CULTURE OR FOOD, THEY ARE ALWAYS STEAL INDONESIAN CULTURE FOR THEIR TOURISM.

Now, there are some legit grievances here. The appropriation of batik as a "Malaysian craft" is a bit suspect, for example -- it's a craft that goes on in Malaysia, but the implication that it originates from Malaysia is a non-starter.

But an unfortunate offshoot of Pancasila is that you get people deciding that some cultural artefact or other is "Indonesian" and that therefore no one else can have it. This is not really on, since Indonesia is a relatively new idea in itself. It's only been around since 1945. Batik isn't Indonesian, it's Javanese and Balinese. But it's also Chinese and Indian and Egyptian. A friend of mine recently claimed that China spread batik to all these other countries. Since batik in Indonesia predates written records and in Egypt it predates Chinese contact with Africa, that seems a bit unlikely. More likely is that batik is a pretty obvious thing to do with textiles, just as spaghetti/noodles are a pretty obvious food, and it can be invented separately in different places. If nuclear fission can be discovered independently in two different places, making patterns with melted wax isn't exactly a showstopper.

There's faux authenticity in the mix, too -- the kecak dance, perhaps the acme of the Authentic Indo-Experience, was synthesised in the 1930s by a Dutch anthropologist called Walter Spies (to the best of my knowledge he was not involved in espionage, which with that name is a shame). It's a bit like Scottish tartans, you know.

Anyway, it's an unpleasant facet of the nationalism that, to be fair, does have some positive aspects in Indonesia. But when it comes to getting irate because some people who, frankly, live closer to the source of the culinary delight that is rendang than you do, have the nerve to cook their own version, you need to get a grip.

And keep it under your hat, but I actually kind of prefer Malaysian rendang anyway.

So TVB is now showing The Mentalist every week. The title still makes me giggle slightly. Not every time, but still.

My latest fun game is to create lines that could be used in the show, wherein 'mentalist' means d. A magician who performs feats which apparently demonstrate extraordinary mental powers, such as telepathy, precognition, etc.; a mind-reader.

But that could also be applied to 'mentalist' as in its common British usage, 3. Brit. slang. A crazy, uncontrolled, or eccentric person; a ‘nutcase’..

e.g.

"Be careful around this guy. I hear he's a mentalist."

"Briggs! Get this mentalist out of my office!"
.

Here's a bit of Hong Kong linguistics for you.

This is the number 1 typhoon warning signal, "indicating that a tropical cyclone is centred within about 800 km of Hong Kong and may affect the territory". And people refer to it as 'the T-one signal'. This is also used to describe the weather itself, e.g. "I think it's a T1 today."

Except... that's not a T. This is the next signal up, when "strong wind is expected or blowing generally in Hong Kong near sea level, with a sustained speed of 41-62 km/h (kilometres per hour), and gusts which may exceed 110 km/h, and the wind condition is expected to persist."



They're a series of abstract shapes that used to be raised at visible points around the territory to indicate the storm warning - the system used to incorporate direction at this level too, but it was simplified as today's mostly land-based audience don't need to know this and people used to erroneously think that a number 5 was less severe than a 7, rather than just blowing in a different direction.
The physical signs are no longer used, but the relevant verb is still 'to hoist' - announcements (and most malls, office buildings, etc. have a series of signs they put up in their public areas for this purpose) read "Tropical Storm Warning number 3 has been hoistead" or similar.

Here are the rest:



However, these are still referred to as T followed by a number, as you can see from my friend's recent Facebook status.


(Signal 8 is the point at which you don't have to go to work. Disappointingly, while we have had a couple of tropical storms of the requisite strength this year, they keep turning up at night or the weekend.)

When I first moved to Hong Kong I assumed the T stood for typhoon, and anecdotally this seems to be a common conception of the terminology, although I haven't done a proper survey.
.

Some photos taken for Lamma-zine of our adult and kids' classes on Saturday.



Gallery here.

;;

Some time back, I took part in a Spurs transfer prediction game. Out of sheer boredom, obviously. The rules went: "Everyone picks 5 players going out (2 points for each correct one) and 5 players coming in (5 points for each correct answer." The balance in these things between predictions based on what you think will probably happen, and plain wishful thinking, is always very shaky.
So far I am doing pretty well on the outs but the ins were always wild stabs in the dark. This is where I stabbed at on 27 May 2009:

OUT:
Bentley
Rocha
Gunter
Gilberto
Dos Santos

IN:
Marouane Chamakh
Kenwyne Jones
Glen Johnson
Danko Lazovic
Jonjo Shelvey

I think six points is my lot, but luckily no one else had a clue either, so there you go.
I suppose Jones or Chamakh might still happen, but I'd be very very surprised.
.

This is why no one likes Hongkongers.


據知戚眉廣告月初播出後，最少有 20個市民向影視處舉報，不滿廣告教壞細路，擔心小朋友會有樣學樣擠眉弄眼，有失斯文；有個港大碩士生批評廣告令人睇到好唔舒服，指摘廣告公司唔應該搵小朋友做表演工具。

When the Cadbury Eyebrows advertisement began showing in Hong Kong this month, at least twenty citizens filed complaints with the Hong Kong Television and Entertainment Authority, concerned that the ad might encourage children to move their eyebrows around in violation of common decency. One Hong Kong University masters student complained that the ad would make people uneasy and that the advertising agency should not have hired children as performers.
.

From elsewhere:

"because i like him, i'm glad he landed in such a great spot. he's still in a big league, he gets champions league on top of that (in a world cup year), he plays with two ivorians, the weather is better, and some might even argue spanish women are every bit as lovely as english. god smiles on that crazy clown."

Yeah, pretty much.
.