High-rise trash exposes cover-up battle
Yeuchhh. Robin Arrowsmith looked out the window of his flat and saw that his upstairs neighbours had thrown rubbish out of their windows. The stuff had fallen on to the canopy and spilled on to the balcony of the apartment in Arbuthnot Road, Central.
Good thing the canopy was there. It apparently had been built by the landlord to stop the muck landing directly on his head.
This happened several times, and Robin, who works in the finance division of a Hong Kong property company, complained about it.
The management company took action.
It wrote to him last week: 'Dear Sir, 'We have received complaints from the tenants of the building about the bad smell from the accumulation of rubbish on the canopy.
'Please note that illegal installation of canopy is strictly prohibited in accordance with the Deed of Mutual Covenant and, therefore, you are requested to remove the said canopy for the sake of the other tenants' interest as soon as possible.' So there you have it.
If rubbish is illegally thrown out of the window and lands on your corrugated plastic roof-ette, it is all your fault for having a roof, and you better do something about it. Hold it. There was a mistake in the recent recruitment campaign for the ICAC. 'Starting salary is $11,890 per month, rising to $121,715 by nine annual increments,' it said. If this was true, the salary would go up by a huge chunk every year.
The correct maximum figure for 'assistant investigators' is $21,715.
Ironically, anyone in that job who really earned $121,715 a month would fall under suspicion due to the 'unexplained assets' rule and might be instructed to investigate himself. It's early days yet, but the best mixed metaphor of the year so far was in a Hong Kong English-language newspaper (not this one) on Saturday. 'Bilateral moves towards fence-building have already been put on the back burner.' (Spotter: Jack Kirwan.) It's a lonely life, being a professional thorn in the flesh of government.
I bumped into Yaqub Khan yesterday, and he told me he had decided to advertise for a girlfriend.
'Tall, dark, handsome male, looking for open-minded, single or married ladies for never-ending fun,' said the lonely hearts ad he placed two weeks ago.
He got a reply from a gentleman who said his name was Edward, and who left a pager number and this message: 'My Chinese girlfriend who would like to screw you.' Notwithstanding the surprising message, it was delivered in an oddly business-like manner. Yaqub suspects this is not real romance, but a scam, and has decided not to return the call.
Excuse the language, but I am sure the term 'screw' was used above purely in the sense of 'swindle'. From a recent Social Welfare Department announcement: 'In view of the cold weather, the Social Welfare Department advises elderly people to take care of themselves.' Right, that's that little problem sorted out. An entrepreneur was quoted in the Shanghai Briefing column of Business Post saying that people who trade in China need to have 'the energy of a cow to deal with the stacks of paperwork'.
I thought I was well up on Asian literary imagery, but the energy of a cow? Cows must be different in north Asia. Cows elsewhere are rarely a byword for hyperactivity. Must admit to being relieved at the report that the Aberdeen Maxicab Service Company has been told to postpone the installation of tiny, aircraft-style television screens in Hong Kong minibuses.
You know what it would lead to, don't you? Mobile karaoke. Can you imagine trying to scream 'Yauh lohk' to the driver while the passenger next to you is belting out Feelings at 138 decibels? It is perfectly possible for a place to switch from driving on the left to driving on the right in just one day, with no fuss or complaints, but only if the person in charge has a lot of resolve and brooks no arguments.
It happened in Czechoslovakia, I heard yesterday from Duncan Parkinson. 'It was when Der Fuehrer marched in,' he said. Just a thought: 'You can go anywhere you want if you look serious and carry a clipboard.' (Dilbert, via Adrian Davies.) Spreads like jam Here's a lovely example of South Asian English. A check of the Concise Oxford shows that 'potentialities' - as in this ad placed in the Economist by the Prime Minister's Office in Dhaka - exists, even if it has the potential to make some shudder. The problem of 'over-writing' is common in the Indian sub-continent and Sri Lanka, the birthplace of the present writer. I recall a piece in an Indian newspaper in which a monkey which stole trinkets was described as a 'tailed miscreant'. A crime dispatch about a raid on a brothel included the sentence: 'The prostitutes hailed from Calcutta.'
