MORE SENSELESS ACTS OF BLOGGERY

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Here at the Def Citadel, there’s a lot of choices for Song Of The Year, though not so many are available in an easily shareable format.

But I think I’ll go with a song that (1) I haven’t already posted here and (2) pretty much captures the spirit of the times.

That would be “Total Fear” by Cold In Berlin.



PRODUCTION NOTE: Their debut album has only just come out in the past month or so, but “Total Fear” has been around for much of the year, from when CIB were known as Death Cigarettes. On the strength of this song alone, I’ve been waiting all this time for them to put out a record.

Now they’ve done it. I’m looking forward to listening to the rest of it.

That’s how we live here,

This is dF

Another Writer’s Block meme floating around that I’ve been meaning to get to:

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I assume they mean the city where I live rather than a specific neighborhood or house/flat. For me, that means Hong Kong, where I’ve been living for the last 14.4 years. And seeing as how I've picked up a lot of new readers in the past few weeks (hello), here's yr chance to learn a little about my city of residence.

LIKE

1. No driving: Cars, gas and parking spaces are expensive here, and traffic jams are legendary, so I don’t drive. And I don’t need to, since the public transportation system is extensive, reliable and (for the most part) cheap. So even though I have an hour commute to the office, I spend half of that on a ferry (with free Wi-Fi, even) and I can also read.

2. Food: You can get just about anything here – Chinese food, obviously, but lots of other Asian and Western cuisine (though if you love Mexican food, yr choices are slim). If you like variety and trying new stuff that doesn’t involve combining burgers with donuts, HK is right up yr street.

3. Taxes: Any Tea Party conservative will tell you that Hong Kong has a flat income tax. It doesn’t, actually – we do have tax brackets based on how much you make, but it still works out to something like 16% overall. Which, I need not tell you, is cheap. It’s also why conservatives wish America was like Hong Kong (except for being owned by Commies, I mean), which means they clearly aren't aware of our public housing and universal healthcare programs. Also, we have no sales tax or VAT, so there’s some novelty in buying stuff and paying exactly what it says on the price tag.

4. Proximity to Asia: Because Hong Kong is small, travel is popular here, so it’s always possible to get good deals for air tickets to other parts of Asia. And HK is a good start point for traveling around the region: going to most places won’t take longer than four hours by plane unless you want to go to Tibet, Australia or Sri Lanka. Also, we have some good airlines out here that don’t suck all the joy out of flying, unlike some airlines in the US I could mention (all of them).

5. Reserved seating at movie theatres: I’m not sure if they’ve adopted this in the US yet, but in Hong Kong (and other countries in Asia), we have assigned seating for films instead of sitting wherever you want. I like this because if the theatre’s not that crowded, you stand a better chance of getting a seat far enough away from people that you don’t have to endure being surrounded by people jabbering on their phone through the whole picture. These things matter.

DISLIKE

1. Property prices: Rent in HK is some of the most expensive anywhere, which is partly because property is a speculation game to most people here.

2. No rockinrolls: The Hong Kong music scene is dominated by professional big-money Cantopop, which is good if yr into Air Supply, Celine Dion and N’Sync. Which I am not. Rock comes and goes, but unless you can do karaoke power ballads or sound like big-name Japanese glam bands like L'Arc〜en〜Ciel, you probably won’t get far. That said, there is an underground indie/rock scene of sorts, but with little media support, you have to know where to look. To each his own, of course, but the upshot is that going to live shows is the one thing I had to give up in moving here. Which is as well since I'm old and decrepit now.

3. Air pollution: It’s pretty bad. Sometimes it’s epic. Which, as I’ve semi-joked in the past, is why I’m in favor of legislation and treaties to cut carbon emissions – forget about whether they’re responsible for climate change, I just want my oxygen less chunky.

4. Horrible diseases: I’m exaggerating a little here. But we were practically Ground Zero for SARS in 2003, and we get outbreaks of Legionnaire’s Disease, bird flu and swine flu here. So if the Flupocalypse ever really gets underway, we’ll probably be smack dab in the middle of it.

5. Hot air, arctic A/C: We stay somewhere between 27ºC and 32ºC for about eight-nine months a year – which isn’t so bad, except that every office building, shopping mall, restaurant and bus tends to run the A/C at around 10ºC. Which means it’s like walking from a furnace into an meat freezer when you go indoors. Feels great for the first ten minutes, but after that you need a parka – and odds are you won’t have one.

And there you are.

There’s more I could add to either list, but the “Like” category would be longer at the end of the day. I do like it here. It’s not perfect, but no place is. I’ve lived in enough cities and enough countries to know that much.

READ MORE ABOUT IT: Full coverage is here if yr interested and have nothing better to do this weekend.

Happy to be here,

This is dF

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Assuming that by "this decade" we mean the 00s, I'm still partial to calling it the Batshit Reality Schism Decade.

Real gone,

This is dF

[Error: unknown template qotd]Oh, all right. If you want to play, put yr guesses in the comments and I'll give the answers in 24 hours (give or take).

1. I was seduced by a blonde Mormon into joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

2. I was thrown out of the US Army for being too fat.

3. I once did a full-monty stripping cop routine before a live audience.

Would I lie to you,

This is dF

Glommed from Internet celebrity puffdoggydaddy :

[Error: unknown template qotd]Well, I’m no bedsitter23 , and I’ve certainly never met a member of the Von Erich family, but I have met a couple of reasonably famous people:

1. Nile Rodgers, who I interviewed for journalistic purposes a couple of years ago while he ate fish. I have pictures of that. He was pretty cool to me, considering he was jet-lagged, hungry and was used to talking to music/entertainment journalists, not tech-heads like me – and he told so many awesome stories about David Bowie, Diana Ross, Miles Davis and how producing one Madonna song made him a millionaire for life because of the way record contracts were written in the 80s, that I didn’t mind that technically he never really answered my questions.

2. Mike Watt, formerly of Minutemen and fIREHOSE, who I met prior to a fIREHOSE show in Nashville. Granted, Mike is pretty accessible and will talk to anyone who’ll listen to him, but we had a good 30-minute conversation about the genius of Blue Oyster Cult and pro wrestling, so it was meaningful. To me, anyway.

That’s more or less it, unless you count Rev Horton Heat (who I met before a Knoxville gig for about 20 seconds) and Dolly Parton, who allegedly had lunch at my house circa the late 60s when she was just starting out and my dad was A&R for her label, Monument Records. But I was something like three years old, so I don’t remember it, and I only have my mom’s word for it. Still, she’s not prone to making up such things. And she assures me that Dolly was the most polite woman she’s ever met.

BONUS TRACK: Have some fIREHOSE (here amusingly misidentified by MTV as Firehouse, who were a silly hair metal band from around the same time and sounded like Bad English, only worse).


fIREHOSE were one of the more underrated bands of the late-80s/early-90s when “alternative” became “Alternative®”. And no disrespect to D. Boon, but as much as I liked Minutemen, I ended up being a bigger fIREHOSE fan (as you can possibly tell when I write my moniker out as dEFROG).

The problems, describe them,

This is dF