COUNTRY LIFE: SPECIAL PREVIEW

I would have posted this last night, but I was exhausted and on deadline. Nothing new there, but this week has been particularly brutal, and unlikely to get much better.

You’d never know Tuesday was a holiday. Yes, another one. The Chung Yeung Festival, in which – as you all know – we sweep the graves of our ancestors, feed them, pay them in hell money and accidentally set fire to the hillsides. It’s a tradition.

Anyway, we swept no graves, but we did go on a field trip organized by KT’s church to Yuen Long. Spent the morning in the Kam Tin Country Club, which sounds posh but is really one of those typical rural playground camps in HK where the activities include flying kites, riding on low-speed scooters, looking at caged chipmunks and catching goldfish in inflatable wading pools.

Then it was a pretty good seafood lunch at the Yau Lung Seafood Restaurant in Lau Fau Shan, and a visit to the Hong Kong Wetland Park, which I’d never been to before. It’s HK’s first stab at ecotourism, and is most notable for being the home of the crocodile that terrorized the Shan Pui River for seven months in 2003-2004.

I’ll file travel reports separately when I get the time, but you can see the pix here and here if you can’t wait that long. I sense you will be able to curb yr enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, here’s something to tide you over: the Cthulhu Bunny Mountains O’Madness Inflatable Death Playground.





I have no explanation. But I approve.

Arts and Lovecrafts,

This is dF

DEBATE 2008: NOW WITH ADDED TRUTH!

see Sarah Palin pictures

Wired’s Threat Level has been tracking the ways that the Interwubs is affecting the election campaign process – Obama Girl, how many friends Chris Dodd has on MySpace, LOLcats (see above), Ron Paul’s entire campaign, etc. Here’s another interesting angle: fact-checking debates in near real-time.

I subscribe to FactCheck’s RSS feed, so I’ve noticed that they’ve been liveblogging the presidential debates as they go, but apparently NPR’s Vox Politics has been doing it too. Various Twitterers do it too. And the results are fascinating. In essence, all of them – Obama, McCain, Biden and Palin – tend to stick to their campaign scripts in debates, which means sticking to the spin, mischaracterizations and/or outright lies they use on the campaign trail.

Which isn’t unusual in and of itself. That's politics. But liveblogging the facts in parallel to the spin is arguably one step away from having a running ticker on the screen autocorrecting the candidates’ claims as they go along. Or if you want to engage the Young People, do it in the form of those annoying pop-up balloons MTV used to do for music videos.

Why not? It’s not as though most of the debate TV audience goes to visit FactCheck afterwards. Which is arguably part of the problem.

Here’s another idea. In a debate, unlike a stump speech, you have someone sitting RIGHT THERE asking them questions the entire time. Why not give them a live RSS feed to help them call bullshit when someone tells a whopper? Maybe the candidates can negotiate on an acceptable independent fact-check source ahead of time to temper the usual claims of biased moderators.

If we get this right, we could see future elections where candidates would be forced to tone down the spin or risk being made a fool of on national television. We could rate their debate performance based on who has the least “Bullshit!” pop-ups.

Who’s with me on this?

Well, yes, okay, who am I kidding? People believe what they want, especially in politics, and they’re not going to let a bunch of pop-up balloons tell them what they don’t want to hear about their candidate. Fox News would probably filter them out anyway – or write their own. Or come up with their own amusing graphics. They have a lot of experience with that.

Get yr facts straight,

This is dF