THE GREAT BP GULF OIL DISASTER OF 2010: THE BOARD GAME

ITEM: BP once had its own board game in the 1970s, you know: Oil Strike, the object of which was to race rival oil companies to find and drill for oil in the North Atlantic. The first player to reach $120 million wins!



Of course, there are challenges: 

There are also risks like storms, which can hurt the productivity of your offshore operations, and, more presciently, catastrophic oil spills, which cost the player a small token amount of money to clean up and thereafter forget about.

One “hazard card” reads “Blow-out! Rig damaged. Oil slick clean-up costs. Pay $1million.”

How realistic!

PRODUCTION NOTE: Adjusted for inflation, today’s players would pay $2.9 million

CONSUMER ADVISORY: Not to be confused with the King Oil game by Milton Bradley.

Drilling fun for the whole family,

This is dF

THE LADY IS A TIGER

Pop stars come and go, but you know you’ve hit the big time when Hong Kong stars imitate you in drag.

Meet Lady Tiger.

That’s Wong Cho-lam [王祖藍], one of the hottest stars on TVB right now. Like most HK performers, he’s all-purpose (acting, singing, dancing), but he’s also a writer, an ace improv performer and impersonator. And he’s currently knocking them dead in a weekly variety show mainly by dressing in drag with co-stars Johnston Lee and Louis Yuen parodying Sex And The City.

Which is worth mentioning because in HK, the only way you can do a TV sketch with three sexy women making risque sex jokes is to have the women played by three guys in drag.

The other thing worth mentioning is that Wong is a better singer than most of the major Cantopop stars in heavy rotation. (So are Lee and Yuen, for that matter.)

Camp rock,

This is dF

HAINAN: THE STREETS

One thing about any trip to mainland China is that often, the view outside the tourbus is just as interesting – sometimes more so – than the actual tourism sites they take you to see.



Outside of the big urban centers like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, this is what a lot of China looks like – dusty buildings, sun-bleached signs, big piles of of stuff on the side of the road and lots of people sitting around waiting for someone to either buy it or hire them to do something with it – assemble it, move it, arrange it, whatever.

I don’t have any special insights into this. All I can say for sure is that there’s more to China than politics, totalitarianism and the facade they put forward at big international events like the Olympics or the Shanghai Expo.

Up next: the remainders!

Street life,

This is dF

YOUTUBE SURVIVOR SERIES #87: PARDON ME WHILE I HAVE A STRANGE INTERLUDE

And now, for no real reason, here’s Groucho Marx making an argument against conventional marriage. With bonus Eugene O’Neill references.

“One man and one woman was good enough for yr grandmother, but who wants to marry yr grandmother?”

They don’t write them like this anymore. They wouldn't dare.

Let’s be big for a change,

This is dF