Homeless, homeless, moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake*

Back when she was still publicly accessible, Ivanka Trump used to tell a story about her father’s reaction to seeing a homeless man sitting in front of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York during the 1990s:

“I remember my father pointing to him and saying, ‘You know, that guy has US$8 billion more than me,’ because he was in such extreme debt at that point.”

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Bagpuss, Diana, and the Frog Princess

Having little interest in the monarchy, I never paid much attention to the long-running Netflix series The Crown until I learned that one of my favourite television characters from my childhood, Bagpuss, appeared briefly in two episodes of Season Four.

In Season Four, Episode Four, Favourites, a heavily pregnant Princess Diana lies in bed at Highgrove House, locking herself away from her abusive husband who is banging at the door, demanding that she come downstairs to meet his mother. She turns to the television, increases the volume on her remote, and settles back to watch Bagpuss and The Frog Princess. Continue reading

America’s Sweethearts give us an insight into the heart of America, and it is not so pretty

In the final episode of the second season of America’s Sweethearts, it was revealed that the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (DCC) will receive a pay raise of roughly 400 percent for the upcoming 2025 season.

While that sounds like a lot, the increase comes from a ridiculously low base where these elite athletes earned about the same as a fast-food worker. Even the most senior squad members made just US$15 an hour, with US$500 for each game day appearance in 2024, while the Dallas Cowboys’ quarterback, Dak Prescott, made US$60 million in what was a bad losing season. Continue reading

Hong Kong charges into the future but retains its identity for now

Hong Kong has seen a remarkable growth in the use of electric vehicles (EVs) over the last five years, to the point where EVs now account for 11.5 percent of all vehicles in the city, according to official figures from the Department of Transport.

The government deserves a lot of credit for introducing a wide range of subsidies and incentives in its 2021 Roadmap on Popularisation of Electric Vehicles but this rapid growth would not have been possible if Hong Kong was not already a relatively small and compact city, ideally suited to EVs. Continue reading

A possible prototype of Hong Kong that never developed until after the British left

Fifty years before it got its grubby hands on Hong Kong, Britain was already eyeing up another piece of Pearl River Delta real estate.

Following his ill-fated mission to China in 1793, Lord Macartney, ordered one of his entourage, a young artillery officer and amateur draughtsman named Henry William Parish, to survey the small island of Ma Wan as a possible base of operations. Continue reading

Folie à Deux: The Joke is on You

The sequel to Todd Phillips’ 2019 movie Joker was one of the most anticipated films of the year. Not only would Joaquin Phoenix reprise his role as Arthur Fleck, he would be joined by Lady Gaga as the Lee Quinzel, the earlier incarnation of the Joker’s hell-raising girlfriend Harley Quinn. Continue reading