Thursday is Rambling Day
So it’s Thursday and I’ve got nothing in particular to say so I’ll just say lots of non-particular things in a way that’s probably filled with run-on sentences and other such annoyances what would drive your basic grammar professor to tears or at least to increase the amount of whiskey in their coffee. Sixth grade it was I think when we had a history teacher, a mean bugger if I remember correctly, that used to do very little to hide the fact that his coffee thermos had a friend named Jack Daniels living with it in the desk drawer (probably in sin) and we used to dread having to go to his desk to talk to him because his breath smelled of coffee, whiskey and who knows what else.
Have I mentioned that most Hong Kong locals are lazy? Don’t get your politically correct feathers in a ruffle just yet. If you’ve lived in Hong Kong or maybe just visited, you may have noticed that most doors to buildings don’t open themselves. No they are opened by non-locals. If you see a group of Asians walking toward a set of six doors but you don’t know which ones are locals, you can easily tell the locals by their tendency to run 25 feet out of their way to slide sideways through a closing door than to open one themselves. I have even seen people stand in front of closed doors waiting for someone else to open them, and no their hands were empty. In one case I saw a young woman stand and wait for an elderly woman to pass her and open the door before slipping through herself. I’d like to say that this is not common but it really is. You can almost see the locals lining up behind a white person (gwai-lou) walking towards a closed door. It’s our job I think. I’m fairly certain that if all the foreigners left Hong Kong all at once, the entire local economy would collapse within a day because no one would be able to figure out exactly how they are going to learn telekinesis fast enough to get the doors open with their minds.
Muzak is pretty common here and probably more common than in most places. Muzak, in case you don’t know, is the music that plays in elevators and other common areas that are remakes of well known songs that have the lyrics stripped out and are generally recreating all the instruments on a small Casio electronic piano keyboard. I was thinking about this as I was approaching the elevator in the mall my office is connected to, not in the elevator which strangely has neither muzak or music, but in parts of the mall itself and its a little game I challenge myself with to discern the original song before I move out of its audible range. I’m quite good at it. Today it was Phil Collins’ Billy Don’t You Lose That Number seemingly being gently played on an electro harpsichord/claviola one man band arrangement. In the elevator in the hotel in Kuala Lumpur the song The Age of Aquarius had been so mangled and mutilated it took two or three trips to and from the lobby before I figured out that indeed they were talking about the moon being in the seventh house and Jupiter aligning with Mars and so on and so forth. In that case there were lyrics… I think that’s what through me off. That and the mix of raggae and new age celtic etherealness that made of the music. Hard to say really.
