The Year of the Horse isn’t a euphemism

9pm local time, 8°C (45°F), overcast and chilly

THIS is my long-promised but SRSLY delayed Chinese New Fear Year post for the Year of the Woodchip Particleboard Horse.

The Chinese Year of the Wood Horse (Whores?) began a whole week ago last Friday (31 Jan) at 23h00 Hong Kong time (Thursday, 30 Jan, 16h00 UTC).

With that kind of delay, anybody could reasonable hit back that I might as well put out a 2014 Christmas post instead. Point taken.

Interestingly, the original ‘lede’ was to have been “Torommow will be…”

Yes, folks, ‘torommow’ is the latest Hong Kong spelling of ‘tomorrow.’ So now my readers are hip, flip and no blip in the hip-speak scene.

Like all Horse years, this year will be a year of horsetrading.

Dafuqizdat?

(Some words and pictures offensive to prudes, or exciting to w@nkers)

That time again – Lunacy Festival!

10.35pm local time, 28°C (82°F), some rain patches

RIGHT ABOUT NOW, my funkless soulless siblings and niblings, it’s Midautumn Festival. That means the loonies are coming out of the woodwork tonight.

Let me tell you my own family’s understanding of this festival before everything goes to pot in the midst of time and Internet space.

(Shoutz and belated happy birthday to my longtime reader Ed H.)

Updates marked in red made on 2013-SEP-2013.

What’s it been like for you – the year, I mean? (1/5)

(Updated 06 March 2012 for typos, broken links and formatting failure)

Twenty twelve calling!

I originally meant to release this post on 1st March but got held up by money and work matters. Money matters mostly, actually.

Why 1st March?

No special reason, just the fact that I’m 80% Roman fanatic and 20% renegade used-car salesman. You see, 1st March happened to be the Roman New Year — our year 2012 being 2765 Anno Urbis Conditae. That day, bizarrely I grant you, is how I’ve always started my new years. So 1st March is ‘my’ new year.

(Incidentally, my father was 80% renegade used-car salesman and 20% gentleman architect.)

So six weeks have passed the Year of the Angry But Useless Rabbit got jugged and gutted and the Year of the Destructive Dragon on Autopilot rolled in.

• Have you been pigging out till you’re all horrible and deformed now?
• Did you booze yourself unconscious?
• Or had you gotten yourself arrested after that row with the transvestites down the local pub?

Nothing?!? Do you NOT partake in holidays? Failed pagan you are.

Oh, I see — you pigged out on horribly deformed trannies while being liquored up for — alright, let’s not travel down THAT road then.

Dear readers, I give you my review and outlook (‘rando’) for the year just passed.

♥ ♥ ♥

THANK YOU

You, you, you, you — and you — you too — you over there — as well as YOU.

Thank you to all and sundry for staying with me and my blog all this year, all this time, all this crap I churn out.

Your presence, jointly and severally, are always appreciated.

♥ ♥ ♥

THE FRONT YARD

Honestly, do we really need an angry year-ending review?

Yes, we do — if not for your collective sakes, then at least for whatever’s little left of my mental well-being.

Sit you down. Breathe. Put on your reading blinkers. Get some coffee or your favourite contraband medication. You’ll need it.

__________

First quarter 2011

The cool winter air in Hong Kong didn’t last long enough for some of us who are lucky enough to own our own homes, but the homeless no doubt welcomed that.

An earthquake nearly levelled Christchurch in New Zealand. Ain’t karma a bitch — Kiwi asstronomurfs were part of the team that downgraded Pluto, the god of the underworld, later in the year.

And China sent in a 10-man rescue team to New Zealand dressed in traditional Chinese wedding red — the mother of all embarrassments. (Most Chinese can’t tell the difference between red and orange.)

__________

Second quarter

On 11th March 2011, the Great Japanese Earthquake Tsunami Volcano Nuclear Meltdown Disaster led to salt hoarding here in Hong Kong for a few days.

No exaggeration when I say I’ve actually seen people gulping down spoonfuls of table salt to stave off radiation poisoning.

Food prices in Hong Kong (and worldwide) started going through the roof by now, and haven’t stopped flying up since.

Inflation here in Hong Kong was officially 5% p.a. — rather than the 12% that I (and most other accountants who I know) have managed to have calculated.

Our esteemed government has been consistently ignoring that food inflation has been running at 9.7% quarter to quarter (by my and accountants’ calculation).

__________

Third quarter

Signs of a worldwide business downturn began to hit here — thanks to the constant bickering around the world about how to save the ‘too big to fail’ that turned out to be too big to bail.

Georgie does not approve

Hustings started for our next Chief Executive (i.e. governor) of this ex-British/now-Chinese colony next year.

Three top contenders are two ‘ministers’ of ours and one lawyer-turned-politico. Their antics don’t exactly inspire confidence. Indeed, they inspire fear and anxiety for our future that ANOTHER idiot will be running our lives.

What we need is a ruthless dictator who’s a murdering, two-timing bastard with no compunction about robbing other countries blind. Any British– or American-trained politician or politicised civil servant will do just fine, thank you very much.

Pluto got formally downgraded to an asteroidy space rock. Srsly unforgivable. Pluto is/was the God of Wealth and of the Underworld, and we’ll all be going to hell because we’ve upset him with the status downgrade. Bad call.

__________

Fourth quarter

No let-up in the soupy summer heat. You might not know this, but you could develop a semi-permanent skin condition because of long exposure to high heat and high humidity.

Two earthquakes nearly wiped out the city of Van in Turkey. Ain’t karma a bitch when you’ve offended Pluto by downrating him.

We had an abject election of district councillors (for us, sort of like ‘city hall’ politicians). That ended up in the arrest of 22 unmistakably brain-damaged persons for vote-rigging.

Honestly, we don’t mind the vote-rigging, but try not to embarrass the rest of us. Those 22 morons managed to do the impossible:

• roughly half registered their votership under the same address
• the other half registered under another address but of a non-existent floor
• all of them registered en masse

That tends to call our sanity and intelligence into question. Vote-rigging is such an easy deal that it really takes a blithering idiot to screw it up like that. All 22 of them.

Santigold and crew … in frilly dresses

The memorably named Clockenflap festival took place during one of our coldest weekends. It was amazingballs (the weather and the festival).

No disrespect to our own, but having been to (literally) more than 300 concerts and assorted soirées in my time, yours truly can truly trustworthingly truthfully say you’ve got to hand it to the expats (plus our own local semi-expats) to organise this shindig.

If it were left up to our ‘local’ locals — or worse, the government — it might as well be called “Cocked-up-’n-Flopped.”

__________

UP NEXT IN PART 2: THE BACKYARD

© The Naked Listener’s Weblog, 2012. Updated 06 March 2012.

Images: Homeless via Oracle Thinkquest ♦ King George VI via BWG ♦ Clockenflap image by me.