Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Exciting news for paranoiacs/cynics/hardened realists convinced that the Hong Kong government is gradually turning the screws on dissent in an attempt to Singaporeanize the Big Lychee: an oddly large-scale traffic redirection exercise, complete with high-profile publicity, ahead of tomorrow’s pro-democracy march.  The Standard and RTHK3 both enter into the spirit of things this morning by carrying dire advance warnings of traffic jams in Central*.  The authorities announce dozens of temporary road and car park closures, diversions and suspensions of bus/tram/minibus stops.

But it will be New Year’s Day, and hardly anyone will be driving anywhere in the middle of town.  And it is a march for universal suffrage in 2012 – an overused and ineffective form of protest that has been attracting fewer and fewer participants ever since the heady days of 2003-04, not to mention a lost cause.

There could be a boring, rational explanation: the estimated 10,000 demonstrators will go from near the Legislative Council building to Beijing’s representative office in Western.  This is a new route for such processions, through narrower streets than the usual Victoria Park-to-Central Government Offices march, so the police and transport people could simply be exercising caution in the public interest.

Alternatively, there could be something more sinister going on.  Officials could have decided to implement excessive measures in order to maximize inconvenience to everyone else and thus provoke community disapproval of the protestors and their aims.  Thousands of people, like the aged and infirm Mr Chan and his wife having to hobble an extra 200 yards to get a tram on Des Voeux Road, will come away with a deep loathing for the pro-democracy activists who brought this collective punishment down upon them.  Alarmists who want to spread such a theory can say it doesn’t sound so far-fetched given that the police, who once handled political gatherings impartially, nowadays routinely make anti-government processions as uncomfortable and annoying for marchers as possible.

Anyone wanting to make Hong Kong a more authoritarian place has to deal with two challenges.  First is the disinclination of the city’s people to being organized and regimented (as pro-democratic leaders know to their cost).  The second is the independence of the courts, which is unique in Asia.

Hence we see Leung ‘Long-Hair’ Kwok-hung, Tsang ‘the Bull’ Kin-shing and two others freed yesterday after arrest for non-payment of (modest) fines for illegal broadcasting.  (At an earlier stage of this Citizens Radio saga, one court even agreed with these pirates of the airwaves that government refusal to give their station a licence was an infringement of freedom of speech.)  They were spared jail and given an extra month to pay up, after pleading, in one case, a need to attend a sick parent in hospital and – try this is Singapore – a pressing engagement in the form of tomorrow’s pro-democracy march.

Chances are that their principled refusal to pay the fines will not lead them to prison; if no sympathizers cough up, officialdom will see to it that someone does.  At least, that is the way it has appeared to happen in the past: unlike its intolerant family-run counterpart in the Lion City, the Hong Kong government has long shown every sign of wanting to avoid the international embarrassment of a free-speech martyr behind bars.  If Long Hair and friends do get themselves into the slammer, the paranoiacs/cynics/hardened realists will be on a roll.

* The South China Morning Post opts out; this could be a sign of a sense of proportion, or that it miscalculated in firing over 30 editorial staff on Tuesday (it is awfully thin today, even for the holiday season).

The government wants to improve hygiene conditions at dai pai dongs in Central to make the modest streetside eateries fit for precious tourists to visit.  My local (pictured just days ago) is one of a pair at the pokey, vehicle-free, far western end of Stanley Street, under the Mid-Levels Escalator just yards up from Queens Road.

The surroundings are the usual Hong Kong backstreet grime: bare concrete, stained tiling, rusty drainpipes and assorted drips and leakages, brightened up by cartoon posters pushing anti-rat propaganda.  The al fresco restaurant contributes to the ambience with sooty dark green tarpaulins, stackable plastic stools, fold-up Formica-topped tables, garish lighting powered by dangling antique cables, a couple of industrial-sized rice cookers and various sizzling and banging sounds coming from the cubicle-kitchen with its sweaty topless cook and his wok.  I have resisted the temptation to find out how and where all the washing up takes place.

As the evening goes on and more customers appear, the staff pull additional tables out and start to colonize the narrower intersecting alleyway running up and down the hill.  Normal pedestrian activity continues, with passers-by squeezing through the public right of way.  The clientele are construction guys, teenage couples, the last of the low-earning local families not yet driven out by neighbourhood gentrification, and un-moneyed mainlanders unlucky enough to find the one retail outlet in Central where no-one speaks Putonghua.  And the odd westerner, possibly curious or trendily slumming it, but more probably just enjoying the no-frills but very tasty food.

Food that is all the more tasty because of its low price, and in fact doubly delectable because that low price is a direct result of the fact that the operator pays no serious rent for this place.  Two people can (and in fact recently did) order a couple of giant (660ml) bottles of San Miguel beer, a dish of soy chicken, a dish of salty chili pork and a big bowl of rice each and end up with a bill for HK$106.  In the city’s central business district, this is a bargain; the beer alone would cost at least that much in one of Allen Zeman’s plastic themed bars in Lan Kwai Fong, and one diminutive serving of nouveau-Vietnamese-Italian-fusion stuff at the latest phony Soho ‘concept’ would cost 50% more.  It is a vivid reminder of the hidden taxes we pay via property prices.

Obviously, our officials don’t have to worry about Hong Kong citizens dining amid piles of diseased rodents’ carcasses and rivulets of sewage, but what will they do to make the dai pai dongs suitable for our much-cherished and economically vital overseas guests, whose well-being is a matter of great importance?  No-one will object to practical renovations that make cooking and washing easier.  But – even though this is a technocratic Food and Environmental Hygiene Department project, and nothing to do with the deranged little ear-wiggling cretins at the HK Tourism Board – you can never tell.  What are the odds that in six months time, the waiters will be dressed as Qing dynasty courtiers and handing out fortune cookies along with the Shanghai-style beef and tomato curry (HK$170 + 10%) and tiny bottles of Mexican lime-wedge beer?

Depending on the translation into English, Premier Wen Jiabao yesterday told Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen to resolve the city’s ‘conflicts’ or ‘contradictions’, though everyone seems to agree that the con-whatevers are ‘deeply rooted’.   The latter is probably the more accurate, provided we understand what Chinese leaders mean when they use the word ‘contradiction’: a problem we can’t pin on renegade provinces, hostile foreign forces or splittists.  A difficulty that – their own system and personnel being flawless – has no obvious cause and logically should not exist.  He also urges Sir Bow-Tie to handle constitutional reform in a ‘proper’ or ‘appropriate’ way, when it is obvious that Beijing is ordering the hapless leadership of the Big Lychee to implement no meaningful political changes at all.

Waddling around wrapped up like little Eskimos in the chilly rain, most Hong Kong people probably shrug off Wen’s delphic blather, but the chattering classes cannot resist speculating on what he  was really saying.  That it is a criticism of Donald is beyond doubt, especially when contrasted with the lavish praise heaped on the corruption-plagued administration of gambling- and money laundering-hub Macau.  But what are these contradictions that so vex the amiable Premier?  Pro-Beijing types claim it is something to do with Hong Kong being marginalized owing to insufficient integration/cooperation/partnership/blah blah.  Pro-democrats like to think Wen means public dissatisfaction with the lack of political reform, or at least the growing wealth gap.  Tsang himself maintains the subject is the need for economic diversification.

These are not mutually exclusive.  The narrow and partly stagnant base of the Hong Kong economy benefits a few players handsomely but depresses prospects for many individuals and businesses.  This is a contradiction; after 12 years, it is too late to lament it as a British legacy, but Chinese sovereignty is perfect, so that can’t be to blame either.

Patriots and China-beguiled foreigners see no way out but greater absorption into and reliance on the mainland and its tourists, infrastructure, Yuan and Five Year Plans.  Free thinkers would prefer Hong Kong to open up new opportunities through internal structural reform, such as scrapping the high land-price policy and breaking up the cartels.  This is a conflict: the first option is about top-down government that works in hand with favoured sectors; the second is about government that is accountable to the people and has a mandate to attack privileged vested interests.

No prizes for guessing which way we are supposed to go.  Hong Kong has economic problems because Beijing won’t let the city fix them.

A major contribution to the decline of intelligent conversation, letter-writing and spiritual contemplation is the emergence of Googleplexing either as a competitive sport or a solitary pastime.  The player chooses two improbable words and Googles them, with the aim of getting as few results as possible, though more than zero.  Thus if we Google ‘dwarfdom’ and ‘aardvark’ we find a disappointingly high seven web pages manage to contain both phrases.  The ideal score of course is one.

By contrast, ‘big’ and ‘lychee’ produce some 299,000 results.  Search for the whole phrase ‘ “big lychee” ’ by using quotation marks, and you get around 9,860.

Googleplexers frown on the use of whole phrases, as it makes the game unnecessarily complicated and tends to bring in a lot of zero scores.  Try ‘ “Mark14:19-20” “Urban Design Guidelines for Hong Kong” ’, for example, and you will not be amazed to find that no single on-line document features both strings:

But not so fast.  Google ‘ “Matthew14:19-20” “Urban Design Guidelines for Hong Kong” ’ and you actually get a result: a pdf file from the Big Lychee’s Planning Department on the HK2030 study from 2003-04:

The pdf file is missing*, but the cached html version shows that some pious bureaucratic soul decided to start chapter 13 on A Future Roadmap with the story about the loaves and the fishes.  Which brings us incredibly neatly to the fascinating subject of the rise of fundamentalist Christianity among middle and senior levels of Hong Kong’s professional, business and bureaucratic classes – a trend that poses an even greater threat to all that is decent and good than Googleplexing.

Thanks to their networks of schools, the mainstream Catholic and Protestant churches have long recruited among our city’s impressionable and upwardly mobile youth.  Christianity, like other habits of the colonial rulers (drinking cognac, wearing three-piece suits in summer, joining the Jockey Club, etc), also had a social cachet.  The stereotype middle-class, pro-democracy Hongkonger is a Catholic; the classic working-class, pro-Beijing equivalent follows the usual Chinese/Buddhist/Taoist mélange.

I don’t know when the evangelicals started to proselytize here.  I remember them organizing picnics and other activities back in the 1980s for poorer kids who didn’t get out of the housing estates much.  But at some stage in the last 10 or 15 years they seem to have sunk their hooks into the affluent and conservative upper reaches of society.

Property tycoon (and former Enron director) Ronnie Chan is rumoured to prowl the streets after dark looking for wayward youths to rescue for Jesus.  Sun Hung Kai Property’s Kwok brothers built a life-size (though concrete and supposedly educational) Noah’s Ark at their Ma Wan development.  Unlike moderate, mainstream Christianity, Calvinist/Puritan Evangelism stresses blind belief rather than loving one’s fellow man; some of its modern, born-again incarnations suggest that worldly riches are God’s reward for faith, making it the ideal religion for members of property cartels.

Over in government, we have Security Secretary Ambrose Lee pushing the Bible in official press releases; Constitutional Affairs Secretary Stephen Lam and Justice Secretary Wong Yan-lun are believers, as is former Commerce Secretary Fred Ma.  Another scurrilous rumour concerns a small group of the prosperous and well-connected who are starting up their own school, partly as a legal loophole to get around Hong Kong’s ban on home-schooling, to protect their kids from evolution, the Big Bang, plate tectonics and other science that contradicts the Book of Genesis.

Lower down the power structure, they crop up all over the place.  The 24-hour Creation TV (Cable ch15, Now TV ch545) station was endorsed by the then-boss of the government-funded Arts Development Council, one Darwin (but not –ist, presumably) Chen.  Philemon Choi, sitter on a hundred advisory boards, is an inveterate Gospel-pusher, as are hundreds of school principals, social service managers and similar doers of good.  And, of course, countless thousands of ordinary plain folks subscribe to this stuff, as well.  The agenda is anti-indecency, anti-gambling, anti-sex, anti-gay and anti-liberalism generally (though for some reason they don’t share the American evangelist or Catholic outspokenness on abortion).  Liberalism, if you read between the lines, is a code word for aspects of modern Western culture.

At this stage it gets creepy-yet-oh-how-predictable: mainland officials give their Communist, patriotic blessing to this movement.  A fine HK Magazine article sums it up.

One of many ways in which the Holy Spirit moves our officials to do the Lord’s work can be seen through a glance at the list of charities allowed to collect funds on Saturday mornings.  The word ‘evangelical’ crops up quite a lot (though the Evangelical Lutherans are OK – just ordinary decent non-mouth-frothing Protestants with a misleading name).  Breakthough (13.6.09, territory-wide) is Philemon Choi’s youth ministry.  Hope Worldwide (18.7.09, HK Island) fights AIDS with abstinence-and-faithfulness-for-youth projects.  Media Evangelism (19.8.09, Kowloon) is building a Christian media presence – yippee.  Operation Dawn (16.1.10, HK Island) cures drug addicts (Nepalese, who are Hindus, a speciality) through God.  These are mixed in with reputable Third World, elderly, kids’ and other causes, so generous donors who think they are helping the downtrodden and dispossessed might actually be funding the All-China Pentecostal Brightness and Sweetness Suppression of Masturbation and Bikinis Campaign.

For example, we have (13.2.10, HK Island) the Society of Truth and Light – Hong Kong’s very own Christian Taliban, whose achievements include hijacking the jury-type panels that rule on obscenity in the media, inducing the cops to raid a chain of clothes stores over a T-shirt and wetting themselves over media discussion of homosexuality.  These guys are on their case.  We have six weeks to the second Saturday in February to decide what to say or do to these people when they ask for a donation on the streets of Hong Kong Island.  Remember: orange collection bag with a white lighthouse…

Can’t wait.

Time for one last Googleplex:

Fred Ma’s wife on encountering the Lord in Singapore (web page can be slow, possibly smitten with righteous wrath).

*Actually available here, but not worth a look

A photo essay on the Macau Tulip Exhibition…

here

Just another day for the Hong Kong government.  It announces a HK$7.2 billion (and no doubt counting) terminal – handout, in plain English – to the cruise liner industry, which specializes in bringing tourists ashore to take a few photos before whisking them back on board ship to spend their money.  It sets up two systems: 1) to pay private doctors a subsidy for vaccinating patients against the latest Mutant Swine Instant Agonizing Death Flu virus, and 2) to try to stop the selfless, dedicated professionals from cheating by claiming reimbursement for the same patient more than once.

And then, on a far weightier matter altogether, the administration announces new/reappointed members of the Honours Committee, whose job in turn is to announce new members of the Big Lychee’s most elite clubs: the government-conferred honours and awards that entitle the great and good to put letters like JP and GBS after their name and thus differentiate themselves from plain folks and, crucially, each other.

Of the eight names announced, no fewer than four (The Hon Charles LEE Yeh-kwong, GBM, GBS, JP; The Hon Ronald ARCULLI, GBS, JP; Dr [real] the Hon Edward LEONG Che-hung, GBS, JP; and Dr [honorary] the Hon Marvin CHEUNG Kin-tung, GBS, JP) appear consecutively (on page 2) of the ever-fascinating Hong Kong Precedence List.

Innocent onlookers may feel this suggests a certain laziness or lack of imagination on the part whoever selected the names; couldn’t he at least have shut his eyes and jabbed his finger around to get a degree of randomness?  In fact, this bunching-together reflects the four’s common status as non-official members of the Executive Council.  This whole system – the medals, the titles and the positioning in the official pecking order – are all about the scrupulous avoidance of any hint of randomness.

Three of the four – Chuck, Ron and Marv – are full-fledged government courtesans whose posteriors have warmed too many seats on official and semi-official rubber-stamp bodies to count.  As well as Exco, all have served on the Stock Exchange.  The fourth, Leong Che-hung (Edward, apparently) is a harmless medic and former lawmaker who should know better than get involved in this nonsense.

Let’s look at the other four.  Lawrence Lau is an Exco member (p.3) of academic extraction who seems to aspire to Arculli-like commitment to the government’s cause.  Elsie Leung (p.16 courtesy of a GBM) is a former justice secretary and recently appointed board member of Rusal, the colourful Russian firm trying to get listed on the aforementioned Hong Kong Stock Exchange.  Joseph Yam (p.17, GBM) is a former Monetary Authority boss who should have better things to do in retirement.  Odd man out by a mile is Lau Chin-shek (not important enough to appear in the Precedence List), pro-democracy labour activist and former lawmaker.  He is presumably supposed to lend the Honours Committee a dash of the proletarian masses, at least until the day they empanel a jury of teachers, housewives, bus drivers and secretaries to pick the lucky winners of JPs, GBMs, GBSs, etc.

Eagle-eyed perusers of the Precedence List will notice a plethora of exotic characters like The Rt Hon the Lord WALKER of Gestingthorpe but a marked absence of people called Huang, Zhou, Xu, etc.  Locally based mainland officials are not of this world.  This is why former chief executive Tung Chee-hwa gets a special mention on p.46 in the copious notes, to explain his apparently lowly appearance on p.17: he is in fact too important to appear higher up.

A wave of unbridled exhilaration rips through Hong Kong this morning as Asia’s world city wakes to the news that its visionary leaders are set to negotiate a free trade agreement with Lichtenstein.  Despite its modest size (population: 35,000), the plucky little Principality, nestling in the verdant bosom of the Alps between Switzerland and Austria, is in fact the world’s largest exporter of false teeth and sausage casings.  Is it any wonder that the citizens of the Big Lychee are in such a heightened state of anticipation?  Not in our wildest dreams were we expecting Santa Claus to give us tariff-free dental fixtures and forcemeat wrappings.

But wait a moment.  A detailed and painstaking examination of all the relevant small print reveals a massive loophole: we don’t have any trade barriers against the wide range of life-improving goods and services churned out by the mighty Lichtenstein export machine, or any other nation come to that. Hong Kong has been a free port since 1842.  We pay no duty on overseas products entering our market and make no attempt to protect local producers from foreign competition.  So what sort of free trade negotiation is this going to be?

Perhaps quite a short one, even though the Lichtenstinian emissary will be joined by his EFTA counterparts from Switzerland, Norway and Iceland as he leans across the table and gives the Hong Kong trade official the bad news.  “Herr Chan,” he will say, “as you are already allowing our false teeth, our cheese mit holes, our colourful vooly hats mit dangling bits and our vhale blubber into your jurisdiction tariff-free, vould you mind telling us vhat concession you vill make if ve agree to reduce our highly protectionist taxes on imported Aces Go Places DVDs, ja?”  And Chan will be left mumbling something about measures against the dumping of collectable Hello Kitty dolls.

Under the British, the Big Lychee took an intensely snotty view of free trade agreements, self-righteously waving away any talk of bilateral deals and insisting that only global, multilateral lifting of barriers to commerce made sense.  It was a magnificent and heart-stirring combination of ‘holier than thou’, ‘holier than absolutely everywhere’, ‘you need us more than we need you’ and ‘take your domestic market and shove it’.  Now, our officials grovel for a pointless bit of paper to sign because they think it makes them look important.

The aerial photo shows the swinging Lichtenstineisch capital, Vaduz (population 5,000), with the famous Schloss circled.  It is from inside this sinister and gloomy castle that the mad, dwarflike Archduke Franken von Pappen von Bulow XIII issues edicts demanding that his clog-wearing, cuckoo-eating subjects meet ever-higher production targets to enable him to succeed in his evil plot to flood the world with cheap Lichtenstinite-made dentures.

On a visit to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the city’s transfer to China from Portugal, PRC President Hu Jintao praises “the constant progress made by Macau people of all circles in pursuing a development road that conforms to Macau’s realities.”

Interesting development road, interesting realities.  Large-scale expansion of the casinos – the only legal gambling in China – has resulted in a flood of money from the mainland, much of it almost certainly the ill-gotten gains of corrupt local officials being frittered away or laundered.  Beijing can adjust the flow, and always leaves the tap at least half on.  Billions upon billions of dollars have gone into the pockets of a few local and Hong Kong families and big professional American interests who have licences to run ‘gaming’ establishments.

The Macau government’s slice provides nearly 80% of tax revenues.  GDP has nearly tripled in the last 10 years, leaving the city’s people statistically Asia’s second-richest.  However, after allowing for a sharp rise in living costs and an influx of overseas labour that has depressed wages, most of them have seen relatively little of the new wealth.  Instead, a lot of money has been disappearing into a black hole.

The one, officially admitted Shocking Case of Administrative Corruption is that of Ao Man-long, now in prison for taking US$100 million in bribes from developers, construction companies and so on.  No-one in Macau believes that Ao’s direct boss, outgoing chief executive Edmund Ho, knew nothing about it (there is a charming rumour that Beijing will settle accounts with him later).  Nor does anyone believe that Ho’s successor, Fernando Chui Sai-on, appointed by Hu yesterday, is innocent of wrongdoing in the US$180 million overspend on the Macau Dome arena built for the 2005 East Asian Games, from which Ao received plentiful kickbacks.  The government auditor who publicized Chui’s involvement is the one official not reappointed to the new administration.

Needless to say, none of this appears in the China Daily coverage of the 10^th anniversary of Macau’s handover, in which everything seems to be perfect (though the president looked thoroughly bored yesterday as Chui formally introduced his cabinet to him one by one; it was clear he was totally uninterested – or wanted to appear totally uninterested – in who the various public works, transport, security and other secretaries were).

It is impossible not to ask one simple question: Why does Beijing choose one widely-presumed-to-be-tainted man after another to be in charge of the place?

For a big clue, let’s look at another fact not reported in the official press (or anywhere else I know of).  Every usher, technician, musician, dancer and guest present in the Dome for Saturday’s celebratory gala had to complete a Chinese Ministry of Public Security questionnaire asking for details not only about themselves, but their parents and – yes! – grandparents (residence, jobs, etc). Macau’s predictable refusal to admit Hong Kong activists and journalists over the weekend was part of a bigger bout of paranoia.

Like any authoritarian regime, China’s leadership fears and distrusts just about everyone else in (let alone outside) its own country. There are good, clean people in Macau, but they don’t get a look in – or, like the conscientious auditor, are discarded.  Although unwilling to endorse corruption openly, Beijing seems to feel comfortable only with local administrators who materially and massively benefit from the city’s economy.  The notion that someone might look after the cookie jar out of duty, pride or virtue and not dip their hands into it unnerves them.  It is as if such people are a threat.

We see something similar in Hong Kong, where public funds flow to Beijing’s favourites via pointless infrastructure projects.  It is not simply an unwillingness to kowtow or shoeshine that leads Beijing to view moderate, constructive and thoughtful people active in civic society as untouchable outcasts.  It is the fact that they are not complicit.

The medication is called Cold-FX; the tagline is ‘Rich Dad’s Cold Remedy’; the visual shows, against a wood panel background, a photo of a father and son in a tacky gilt frame next to a silver platter holding a crystal glass of water, an old pocket watch and three pills; a separate picture at the bottom shows the packaging, while the small print blathers about successful people, quality, blazers and ties before telling us we are talking about some quack ginseng nonsense.*

The slogan is presumably an allusion to the Rich Dad, Poor Dad get-rich-quickish books, games and motivational lectures.  At first glance, it promises a bit of tongue-in-cheek parody, but then… For a claimed immune system booster?  By a Hong Kong ad agency?  In the South China Morning Post?  No.  The creative genius concerned seems to believe his target audience is one that takes the Rich Dad concept seriously – which, since this essentially means the gullible, perhaps makes sense.

The main premise seems to be that prosperous, old-money westerners – generations of them, indeed – gobble these miracle cures, therefore they will work for you, too.  Perhaps we are also supposed to think that if we use these pills, we will become affluent and surrounded with antique timepieces and furnishings.  Or maybe we are invited to believe that if we flash our bright pink plastic bottle of Cold-FX on the MTR, desirable passengers of the opposite sex will assume we already are, and will want to breed with us.  The ad agency probably wanted to cover every angle.

If the portrait of the implicitly moneyed father with son looks familiar, it’s because the highly original admen lifted the idea from the Philippe Patek luxury watch campaign, which goes back years.

In its early version – back in the more raffish 90s – the father was a cooler-looking, jet-setting sort of guy eager to give his little boy a thrill.  We knew he was loaded because he had a speedboat, with a steering wheel at an angle that displays your shiny, pricy watch to great effect.  But how did he get rich?  Coke dealer would be my guess.  His wife was awarded custody, but he had the kid snatched and flown out to his Caribbean hangout.

The current father-and-son pairs are altogether more understated.  One (on the left) has a warm, approachable demeanour.  The dad made millions selling toxic mortgage-backed derivative securities before having a crisis of conscience; he now pesters wealthy friends for donations to his charity, which collects books for schools in Nepal.  The boy used to get bullied a lot at boarding school but has recently become more confident and wants to get into theatre set design.

The other pair is decidedly less cuddly.  The father started off burning buildings down so owners could claim insurance, before becoming the biggest slum landlord in his city with interests in various entertainment outlets.  His sullen offspring used to pay bigger boys to beat up the kid on the left and recently got the family’s young Salvadoran maid pregnant.

You never actually own a plastic bottle of Cold-FX, you merely look after it for the next generation.

* “If it does have any effect at all at preventing colds, the effect is very, very modest.”  Others are less sure.  I say: if it really works, why do they need such desperate and dismal marketing?