I HAD TOO MUCH TO DREAM LAST NIGHT (KEITH RICHARDS EDITION)

I go to an office of some kind to be exsanguinated. I don’t remember the reason why – I just remember it was vitally important to swap my blood out for entirely new blood.

KT takes me to the office – a cheap place in a strip mall. The process is equally cheap. The blood is in a huge bag the size of the biggest size of dog food there is, and the staff use water pumps and clear plastic hoses to transfuse it straight out of the bag and into me as my own blood is simultaneously extracted in the same manner.

The doctor (who looks a lot like a local politician) explains the main challenge in doing it this way: the bag of fresh blood is more than I need, so they have to know when to stop pumping – too soon and I won’t have enough blood, too late and I’ll die of hypertension. And they have to do it all in one shot.

The procedure is completed and the doctor checks me out. I can tell something is wrong – fluid is leaking out of my ears, and I feel like I’m going to explode. “A little too much,” the doctor says calmly and sticks something in my ear to “readjust the pressure”.

Eventually I’m cleared, and KT and I leave. She takes me to an ice cream place a few doors down, although I don’t really feel like ice cream – I feel cold, actually, as the new blood was refrigerated and hasn’t warmed up to my body temperature yet, or so I assume. We walk into the ice cream place and KT hands them some coupons she got from the doctor – turns out he owns the ice cream place too, and his patients can get special discounts.

And then I woke up.

Drain you,

This is dF

WHOEVER WINS, WE ALL LOSE (UPDATE)

The election is over.

Not yr election, necessarily. But Hong Kong’s Chief Executive election is. And we have a winner.



The headline is somewhat misleading, as it suggests that a non-Beijing loyalist was ever in the running (unless you include Albert Ho, who basically ran to prove that non-loyalists can’t win in a small-circle election). Indeed, it really came down to a choice of which Beijing loyalist is craftier and better at spinning scandals.

In which case C.Y. “The Wolf” Leung (above) is decidedly yr guy.

But fraught? Definitely. I’m sure Henry Tang – the first Establishment candidate ever to lose a CE election – never dreamed he’d have to fight that hard just to stay in the race, let alone actually lose. And CY Leung gets to take office still under scrutiny for things like alleged conflict of interest, alleged triad connections and his alleged secret opinion that radio stations who criticize Beijing should have their licenses taken away.

So. The Wolf is in charge now. Are we doomed?

Anti-Beijing protesters sure think so, though they’d be calling for the CE-elect to resign no matter who won. Their beef is really with the small-circle election process where 1,200 rich and powerful Beijing loyalists get to decide which Beijing loyalist leads the territory, and that’s never going to change as long as Beijing runs this show.

That said, Leung is promising full-on one-person-one-vote democracy by the next CE election in 2017. I doubt it will happen, but it might, if only because some villages in mainland China now have direct elections (which means they now have more democracy than HK does – irony!). Also, this election was so messy that it highlighted the flaws of expecting the public to sit still for a small-circle election when none of the candidates are particularly desirable.

On the other hand, the US – the world's Big Ol' Beacon O' Democracy – has been proving for years that if having to choose between the lesser of two evils is the problem, full-on democracy won’t fix that.

No hope,

This is dF