My cousin Fish plays Return to Castle Wolfenstein and all sorts of FPSes. I managed to convince him that Heinrich Himmler was indeed a real person, and not a creation of computer game designers. Such is the problem of pulp fiction action hero/villain Nazis. Real history is so easily forgotten.

Fish finds me sadistic for this, but being tortured by lightning-wielding silly-German-accent mad scientist zombie Nazis in a torch-lit gothic dungeon is pretty damn funny. The caged skeletons dangling from the ceiling by rusty chains are the icing on the cake. Camp at its finest hour.

I also play Warcraft III- Fish wonders whether the people have British or American accents. The answer to that is they speak in a dialect of English known as Campy Fantasy Film English. I'm sure a true linguist can look into this. Fish also says that Arthas the paladin is comparable to Bush in his warlike righteousness; we had a good laugh mentally imposing Arthas' forthright knightly dialogue on Bush's simian head; "I stand for the light!" "Feel my wrath!" "Slay them all!" 'For honor!" "Betrayers of the light!" "I will hunt you down to the ends of the earth!!! Do you hear me?!!" I'm afraid this is only funny if you say the above in a grim and determined manner, setting your jaw just so.

Have also done lots of mountain hiking so it's not like I never go outside. I'm outside quite often. Kinda tropical. There's a type of fern that curls up when you touch it, and stairs carved into the rock and tumbled rockfaces and waterfalls that trickle over them (but they look dirty) and small orange crabs bright enough to appear cooked that scuttle away with amazing dexterity when you (unwisely) poke them with a toe. The good thing is that you can see very far into the mountains that fold in a green felty fashion like a giant's cloak in the foreground. It's easy, in the shadow of a mountain, to misjudge distances, until you see tiny white blots that are apartment buildings on the adjacent mountain's rocky spine, and you realize that walking from point A to point B would be the fruitful work of several days. You can see into the densely populated valley with its concrete forest of buildings, and saddles of mountains and the sea between mountain gaps, until the mountains fade into a universally flat haze in the blue distance against the horizon.

It's very strange how halfway around the world the rustling murmur of cicadas and the warm smell of suntan lotion can make it feel so much like home.

On July 1st, 2003, 500,000 residents of Hong Kong took to the streets to protest Article 23, a lovely piece of legislation wherein the Chinese government can ban or arrest any organization it considers to be a "threat to national security." In a city with little history of civil disobedience and little history of democracy, one fourteenth of the population turned out to defend its freedom of assembly based on something one small human rights organization circulated online. If something like that happened in the States, (even where people seem to protest or rally at the drop of a hat) something would REALLY happen! I don't know what you saw in the press; I have NO idea what kind of "foreign" news makes American news these days, but the streets were filled as far as you could see from one horizon to another, spilling over with people even in aerial shots, like Times Square on New Years Eve- the air was excited and electrified, almost festive, like though that's trivializing it, because something very important was happening, and people were part of something big, and doing something that mattered. Most of my family went (both my uncles, my aunt, and all four of my cousins), though I didn't; I kind of regret not participating in what is now a part of history; my cousin Joanne and her friends, in a Where's Waldo fashion, can be found in a crowd photo on the 2nd page of "The Apple" newspaper, which she's saved for posterity. She's now a part of documented history.

On July the second, looking at the sickle moon over a neon night, the city and harbor felt very much alive. It- the crowd moving and alive splashed across the tv and papers captioned in big lightning characters reading "Against 23!" and "To the Streets!" and "Hong Kong Lives Forever!"- was one of the most beautiful things I've seen in a long while. Perhaps there is hope for this century after all.

Unrelated and Interesting Tidbit: Omnipresent in public places are a bunch of hand sanitizing boxes, like electric blow dryers you see in public bathrooms. You stick your hands under the motion detector and a little mist of antibacterial wash sprays bout. The bottled variety is also popular. Ah, zeitgeist of the times.

I heard that Strom Thurmond kicked the bucket. Poor Andrew D; now he has nothing to joke about.

I am in Hong Kong. The weather is actually good for a change, meaning that it's cool and breezy. Took a walk in Victoria Park, which has finished renovation and is greatly improved. Have gone mountain hiking. Take that, Malex! Wyoming my ass. Except that it's raining right now, but that's beside the point.

Kinda boring, but that's what you get for living with old people who do nothing but watch crappy Chinese tv.

My grandma is not biting my head off this year which could mean one of several things. One, that she's going senile. Two, that I'm not as obnoxious a brat as I was last year. Three, that losing twenty pounds does affect how people treat you.

People still wear SARS masks, but not as much. In airports. Also, mostly restaurant workers and sanitation workers. Saw a t-shirt, which I did not buy but still thought funny, of Mao in a SARS mask.

Have problems sleeping the entire night, but that's to be expected.