But wait!  There’s more!  A Frost Warning, applicable only to New Territories mountain vegetable growers who still haven’t heard that World War II has ended, was up overnight, but has now come down.  And we have a Red Flag Warning alerting us to the possibility that Big Wave Bay wasn’t called that just for fun.  Meanwhile, the roadside Air Pollution Index in Central today is Very High, which means ‘mostly nitrogen oxide, some oxygen’.

The big excitement for government officials whose duty it is to raise alarms is the first-ever Red Outbound Travel Alert, advising Hong Kong people to avoid prolonged exposure to Thailand on account – as it happens – of matching Red Shirts, the supporters of deposed Prime Minister Thaksin, who are planning a major march in Bangkok in the next few days.

The OTA system was introduced in October 2009 in response to widespread public whining after Hong Kong tourists suffered inconvenience when protests, also in Bangkok, shut down airports (Yellow Shirts on that occasion).  It covers the 50 countries Hong Kong people are most likely to visit, which is why the likes of Afghanistan and Somalia do not appear.

Under the easy-to-remember system, an Amber Warning (currently applying to five countries with predominant or large Muslim populations but obviously that’s just a coincidence) means ‘Everything is cool, you can probably relax, but don’t blame the Security Bureau if you get shot or kidnapped because we issued an Amber Warning’.

The Red Warning is a much bigger deal, causing in this instance the cancellation of package tours to the Land of Smiles, and therefore inflicting commercial costs on travel companies and airlines (though only outbound operators – it’s not like it affects our precious mainland tourist trade).  It essentially means ‘We wouldn’t go there ourselves, but then we’re Hong Kong bureaucrats who fall sick after touching handrails and won’t let our kids play on grass, so everything’s probably fine, but you can’t say we didn’t put up a Red Warning’.

The Black Warning will probably rarely or never happen, because it could cost other businesses money.  Some corporate HR departments and travel insurance policies undertake to evacuate people if it is raised.  It means ‘We’re going to freeeeeak out even if you don’t, and why didn’t you listen to us when we issued the Red Warning. And please pass the antibacterial hand gel’.

“Jeez, those three whatever-they’re-called guys are out there with the leaflets again.”

“Down Syndrome,” I remind him. He nods.

For several days now three young men – teenage boys, really – with the unmistakable features of the chromosomal disorder have been handing out advertising materials to passers-by on the walkways linking the office towers of core Central.  They are among many dozens of people who publicize pedicure, food delivery, tailoring, gym and other services in this way.  But they are doing it wrong.  First, they are out early in the deserted morning before crowds of commuters invade the district.  Second, they bunch themselves together between adjoining footpaths and office lobbies so they end up offering the pamphlets (for herbal medicine, as it happens) to the same person in quick succession, while other human traffic bypasses them just yards away.

“I wonder how much money they make doing that,” Odell says.

“I bet you,” I tell him, “some heartless bastard is paying them in beads or something.”

My ex-Mormon companion picks up a magazine left on the table and looks at the cover.  It shows someone from the other end of the mentally disabled wealth scale: Stanley Ho, Macau’s casino king, who has just been released from hospital after reportedly having a blood clot removed from his cranium.  At least he didn’t die, as some rumours had it. According to the gossip, his medical bill was HK$200 million.

Did they remove the part of his brain responsible for saying extremely stupid and embarrassing things?  Comparing the voluble tycoon at Macau’s chief executive ‘election’ last July with the broken apparent stroke victim wheeled out of the hospital a few days ago, it appears they might have.

On my left shoulder…  No, never mind him.  On my right shoulder, a small, shining winged being with a halo around its golden hair flutters gently up to my ear and whispers, “don’t forget – one must never, ever mock the afflicted.”  After thinking about it for a second, I grab the little angel, hurl it squealing onto the floor, stamp on it a few times and kick the remains under the chair.  But Odell beats me to it.

“Good! Looks like that’s the last crap we’ll have to listen to from that dickhead!”

Indeed. The world of sleazy, casino-monopolizing, polygamist, democrat-baiting, North Korea-linked plutocrats whose opponents’ lawyers mysteriously get beaten up seems set to become a duller place.

As Bloomberg point out, mainland GDP figures are still not especially reliable; local government officials have an interest in exaggerating results and exceeding targets – though some, notably in the south, are rumoured to under-report in order to pay less tax to the centre.

The Shanghai of this story, however accurate, comprises the city with the ugly skyscrapers we all know and love, plus a large rural hinterland.  It adds up to 2,500 square miles in size, versus the Big Lychee’s humble 425, and its population is 19 million to Hong Kong’s 7 million.  So people there are still significantly less productive, creating barely a third the amount of wealth per person than Hongkongers.  It was only two years ago that Shanghai proudly announced to the world that its farmers’ annual disposable income had exceeded the grand sum of US$1,400.

The ‘Shanghai faction’ who graduated from running the municipality to the nation in the 1990s under Jiang Zemin lavished their favourite city with resources.  This led to heavy subsidies for foreign investment, generous land and other aid for favoured local companies and a more state-planned economy than in many other parts of China.  As a result, it is less accomplished than it likes to think in comparison with other regions, with low levels of rural entrepreneurship, self-employment and patent applications, and low average size of private-sector companies.

But it works hard on its image. During a visit in the mid-90s, I saw a checklist of grand vanity projects, described as ‘pearls’ if I remember rightly.  They included the grotesque TV tower, which had just opened (you had to wade through mud to get to it), the impressive museum with galleries named for Hong Kong tycoons, and the yet-to-be-built opera house.  Some schemes, like many of the skyscrapers and the maglev train from the new airport to a suburb, were plain tacky.  Like Singapore, Shanghai seems to believe its own PR.

(Beijing’s decision a year ago that Shanghai will be the PRC’s official, number-one, oh-so-important international financial and (for some reason) shipping hub by 2020 looks like a pat on the head for Jiang’s old clique in retreat. One particularly desperate policy would be to subsidize private equity managers’ salaries if they set up shop in Pudong – why didn’t Lee Kwan Yew think of it first?)

The Shanghai-will-take-over-from-Hong Kong idea took off after the Big Lychee’s handover to China in 1997.  So traumatic was Hong Kong’s shock after the city’s bubble burst – five years’ deflation interspersed with suicides and SARS – that some impressionable local folk saw it as a deliberate policy of Beijing’s.  Jiang Zemin, the theory went, had ordered chief executive Tung Chee-hwa to wreck Hong Kong in order to create the space for their Yangtze Delta homeland to rise in its place. (Maybe a few even pondered Shanghai’s fate after the communists took power in 1949 and downgraded its economic role to cleanse it of capitalist, foreign decadence.)

If there was a plot to undermine the Big Lychee it was opportunistic and aimed at local morale and self-confidence. Official reassurances that Shanghai was a partner and not a rival and talk of the need for integration grew more insistent, as if to sow the seeds of doubt – especially combined with Shanghai’s leering hubris as it became the world’s top container port and won silly prizes like the Expo.  Then came the Great 2006 Marginalization Scare kicked off by chief secretary Rafael Hui and picked up with glee by pro-Beijing ranters eager to frighten disloyal fellow Hongkongers into toeing the line.  Horseshit about how grateful pitiful Hong Kong should be for the mainland’s supposedly generous support is now swallowed without question (as yesterday by the South China Morning Post’s Alice Wu, on the right).

The Big Lychee’s leaders remain patriotically silent about Shanghai’s numerous shortcomings and inadequacies as even a junior international financial hub.  Even when reminding the world that Hong Kong has no capital controls, an independent judiciary and a free press, they will never add “unlike Shanghai, which has corruption, protectionism, covered-up scandals, IP rip-offs, investor rip-offs, not to mention thugs that smash up migrant labourers’ kids’ schools, hospitals that dump the poor in the street to die and a government obsessed with the banning of pajamas in public.”

One last thing: when did anyone last see a Hong Kong hooker in Shanghai?

The confusion arises from Beijing’s hasty and slightly hysterical reaction when the five pro-democracy legislators resigned and thus triggered the five by-elections that they fancifully declared to be a poll on the single proposition of universal suffrage.  Since the Big Lychee’s pro-Beijing camp cannot adopt a public position at odds with that of the central authorities, they have to join in and loudly denounce as unconstitutional referendums that aren’t going to happen, even while our local leaders go about organizing the perfectly legal by-elections that will.

The local leadership of Chief Executive Donald Tsang and his senior officials are the most prominent victims of this illogicality.  Not only must they organize the five by-elections for May while reciting the mantra that the Basic Law doesn’t allow for referendums, they must try to conform with Beijing’s order that loyalists boycott the exercise, which in their case means not voting.  Yet abstaining on polling day presents its own problems.

After encouraging people for years to take part in, and therefore legitimize, our rigged election system, it would look odd for Sir Bow-Tie and his colleagues to implicitly urge us all to stay away.  It would raise concerns that civil servants of all levels, who are sworn to implement government policy, could be pressurized into not voting or penalized if they exercise their right to do so.  Most of all, how many of us will be tempted to go along to the polling station if Donald indicates that he would prefer us not to?

The chances are that they will wriggle out of it by saying it is a matter of individual judgement and of course you can’t vote if you don’t support any of the candidates.  It would be convenient if only the name of the resigned lawmaker appears on each ballot, thus winning by default with no contest, but this won’t happen.  First, the League of Social Democrats have vowed, if necessary, to run against themselves by putting a second candidate forward to ensure that the actual voting – this is on Planet Referendum, remember – takes place.  Beijing does not have a monopoly of irrationality. Second, as in every Legislative Council election, you can be sure that in every constituency some spotty, inadequate  truck driver, socialite, or fanatic will get him or herself nominated as candidates.  Several, probably.

Most likely outcome: everything will backfire against everyone, with the net result that nothing noticeable actually happens.

The Big Lychee is not necessarily pricier than the UK capital.  For example, the lowest fare on the London Underground is HK$46 (cash) or HK$21 (stored value card), while the Hong Kong MTR charges HK$4 and HK$3.6 respectively.  The longest journey you can do on the MTR, the 80 minutes from Chai Wan to Lo Wu, still costs only HK$44.  The UK minimum hourly wage for someone aged over 21 is GBP5.80, or HK$68, around three times what our local employers’ groups are proposing for our own version.

Hong Kong rents are at least as extreme as London’s, but Mr Geohgegan’s housing is provided for separately; let us assume that health coverage is, too.  So we are naturally curious: what will he spend the money on?

We are told that family comes into the equation, the implication being that Mr Goehgegan’s wife and two sons have balked at the prospect of congee for breakfast every day and stayed put in Britain.  This means heartbreak, homesickness and travel costs.  Let’s say each family member makes six return trips a year in first class at HK$50,000.  That’s knocked HK$1.2 million off that HK$3.5 million allowance.

(That exceptionally pitiful variant of real estate agent known as headhunters would hold their hands up here and yell “stop!”  Travel should be part of the basic package, they would insist, along with housing, car, driver, air-conditioning bills and quarantine costs for Toby the schnauzer.  To which we can only say, “We’ve got over three million to get through; go away.”)

So we have HK$2.3 million left.  One very efficient way for a senior new arrival in town to burn a bit of money is Contemporary Chinese Art.  Indeed, the sum of GBP300,000 was also the estimated price for Yue Minjun’s idiotic cartoon of grinning men and birds when it was auctioned last year, and it fetched over GBP450,000.   So let’s assume Mr Goehgagan takes a stroll along Hollywood Road and snaps up a few of the cynical derivative daubs by lesser-known mainland brush-wielders on the make.  Let’s say, owing perhaps to colour-blindness, a couple of these really ugly hair-salon things by one Jiang Congyi and some of the weighty metal figurines expat bankers seem to like – or anything, really. Bye-bye, another million.

Now we’re down to just HK$1.3 million, and there is light at the end of the tunnel.  And against the beckoning glow, what do we see but the silhouette of Allan Zeman, landlord of Lan Kwai Fong and purveyor of food and beverage to legions of well-paid, wife-less Western men unable to rustle up much more than Heinz baked beans on toast.  Eager to know more about the cultural background of emerging-markets Asia, Mr Goehaggan will start to explore the many varied Oriental cuisines on offer in user-friendly D’Aguilar Street.

From the fake-bamboo Thai place in California Tower, to the fake-bamboo Korean place in The Plaza LKF, to the fake-bamboo Japanese place in the Ho Lee Building, to the fake-bamboo Vietnamese place back in California Tower, he will dine in style, tipping the Filipino waitresses well and wondering why all these different countries’ foods essentially taste so similar.  Dragging a few buddies along for company and quaffing a generous amount of high-quality bottled water and fine imported wines and beers, that irritating HK$0.3 million will be gone within 12 months.

Just HK$1 million to go.  And go it does.  A few trips to Dymocks for books; to Olivers/Great/City Super for Marmite, HP sauce, toad in the hole and other gastronomic essentials for Brits; regular replenishments of underwear at the Marks and Spencer just along Queens Road; some badly needed weekends away at Aman resorts in Phuket, Bali and Bhutan; an inadvisable trip to Macau, maybe; a donation, in response to begging letters from expat housewives, to HK Newt and Pangolin Rescue; a few silk numbers from the famous IFC Mall scarf shop to send home in a fit of guilt after a slightly raunchy night with a few of the fellows down in Wanchai.

And boom – that’s it.  Forget the Porsche.  It’s late August, and the poor guy’s already down to his last 200 grand.

Update: the family, apparently, will be with him, and – as our friendly and wise local headhunters predicted – all travel and education costs are already built into the basic package.  So what will he spend it all on?  The answer: public relations advice on how not to infuriate shareholders.

• HSBC’s Vincent Cheng Hoi-chuen says: “It is impossible for rates to go too low, since banks cannot lend money in return for nothing.”  Except they can, for a certain amount of time, in order to attract suckers (‘expand market share’).  Having lured the borrowers, they then force pricy insurance packages on them, add hidden fees, and, a year or two down the road, jack up mortgage interest rates well into positive territory when the credit cycle turns.
• Hang Seng Bank’s Margaret Leung Ko May-yee chips in to say, in effect, that she is glad to see the HKMA’s top priority is ensuring the profitability of businesses in her industry.
• Standard Chartered’s Benjamin Hung Pi-cheng declares: “The market will determine an appropriate level of price in the long run.”  He presumably means prices of mortgages rather than property (but there is of course a link, and since Hong Kong’s land and property system is controlled by heavy government intervention and a developers’ cartel, ‘market’ forces don’t necessarily determine much).  Both global interest rates and local housing supply are being kept artificially low; we’re up to our waists in mainland stimulus money.  Where is this heading?
• Wong Leung-sing of Centaline Property Agency complains: “It is a very brutish way to intervene in pricing.”  The newspaper adds that he thinks banks should be free to lose money if they want and their shareholders can always sell their stakes.  Yes, banks can ‘lose’ money for a year on a 20-year mortgage with no problem, but Wong is a real estate agent and has a slightly different agenda from the other three.  The financial system is just a financial system, but a ‘healthy’ property market is everything.

Some say that Hong Kong is always experiencing a property bubble.  It might be expanding, it might be just bursting, it might have splattered a while ago and left foul-looking globules of gooey stuff festering all over the carpet and the windows; it is always there.  They complain that pushing prices up though keeping housing scarce is the only trick people like Chief Executive Donald Tsang know.

Others are made of tougher stuff.  Interest rates are low, liquidity is high, supply is tight; therefore there is no bubble, just a rational explanation.  Nobody here but us fundamentals. The HK Trade Development Council (run by a property tycoon) says so (using Hang Seng Bank research, so it must be true).  HK$12,000 a square foot, HK$24,000 a square foot, HK$71,280 a square foot – such prices are all caused by these hard, sound, undeniable factors.  Rental yields mean nothing; just check out that affordability.  And prices are still only barely back to where they were at the market peak in 1997.  Still only barely!

The chart on the right, while devoid of any statistical integrity whatsoever, rather elegantly illustrates a fascinating phenomenon: the correlation between growth in seasonally adjusted HK dollar M1 (the money supply) and the increase in the number of bores, columnists, pontificators, officials, analysts, tycoons and people who bought apartments at the wrong time, assuring everyone that there is not a bubble.  Owing to slightly sloppy methods of accumulating data, some of these may have been referring to mainland property – but I think the picture is clear.  The number of people saying this is not a bubble is rising all the time.  This surely means only one thing: we can relax.

Meanwhile, I can’t resist cutting out and keeping this delightful picture of an absolutely charming young lady in today’s Standard, on page 7, just opposite the above story.  It’s an advertisement from a subsidiary of real estate giant Cheung Kong Holdings:

The Chinese press are notorious for printing good reviews to shoe-shine or for favours and deserve one star at best.  The local English media, with a smaller audience to offer (I mean, higher journalistic standards), is probably more objective but also wrapped up in the game of charades – see the similarity of HK and Time Out’s earnest treatments of eminently missable places with silly names and decors.  Two stars.

On-line readers’ reviews like those at Open Rice are beyond the grip of the fashion/spas/brands consumerism that earns glossy magazines their living and are therefore more likely to be rooted in reality.  However, real life can include amateurishness, inconsistency, malice, and PR people posing as happy customers, so, despite deserving three stars, this fare still needs a pinch of salt to go with it.

Is there no such thing as a four-star review – one that cuts through the pretentiousness and says: “this is crap”?  There is.  Consider the following description of the Soupe à l’oignon at the ridiculously named Agnès b in IFC Mall:

…the soup was laced, very heavily, with sugar. It is an old trick of idiot cooks, worn thin with time.  If one enjoys drinking onion water with some peeled onions, added to it, a broth that tastes sickly sweet, then, this is for you. For this reviewer, it was pushed aside after the first spoonful …

After the first 2 courses, things went downhill rapidly…

It gets worse, to the extent that you almost start to feel sorry for the cynical accountants behind this sorry excuse for an eatery.  This is a review that makes you wince and want to look away, but of course you can’t; you want more.

Even if a restaurant is judged to be good, its environs may still not pass muster:

…a filthy place, in the main, and some of the buildings in their present state ought to be condemned, in this medium’s opinion … a horrid admixture of European and Asian drunks … whores and prostitutes roam the street … At the same time, homosexuals scour the area in search of new partners.

For young girls to visit this area of Hongkong Central, it may seem an exciting adventure into another side of the Hongkong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but, probably, more often than not, innocent girls are corrupted by the fast-talking inebriants that frequent what this medium would claim is a blot on the territory.

That, it hardly needs to be said, is Lan Kwai Fong.  The restaurant under review, Habibi, quite rightly gets the thumbs-up.

Those two reviews in all their glory are here and here.  The writer –
the commas gave it away – is Raymonde Sacklyn, founder (in 1974) of Target, a daily Xeroxed newssheet covering business legal cases, market commentary and sometimes eccentric gossip.  It lives on, on the web.  The restaurant coverage is free for all to peruse, as a public service, and perhaps as an inspiration and example to the more self-restrained and cautious reviewers out there.  Four stars.

A perfect example of this is revealed in the photo in today’s Standard showing the site on Kennedy Road of one of yesterday’s deaths.  The 18-inch wide concrete ridge on which the taxi has come to rest is not merely a base for the fence; it is the sidewalk.  As a resident is quoted as saying: “you fear [cars] will brush against you.”  The narrowest-shouldered, slimmest individuals will be in danger – even when the vehicles are not suffering from violent mood swings – if someone else comes along and they need to pass.

The decision to make the sidewalk so narrow was made by a civil servant implementing a policy, and that policy is to accept pedestrian deaths in order to keep the traffic flowing.  This is an extension of the policy to treat traffic in Hong Kong as a natural phenomenon beyond the control of mankind: though its course can be diverted here and there, its volume – which usually rises year after year – is no more manageable than the lava flows that ooze out of the ground in Hawaii and Iceland.

It is not a coincidence that the Transport and Housing Bureau responsible for this approach is the same part of government that thinks 400 square feet is sufficient for a family to live in and HK$69 billion is a sensible price for a 16-mile stretch of rail track.  It is not the only part of the bureaucracy heavily populated by psychopaths – the planning and lands function of the Development Bureau is stuffed with them – but its malevolence towards citizens has a higher profile.

Interestingly, these two bureaus are involved in a power struggle in Kennedy Road.  Transport officials naturally want to keep pedestrian numbers down through a high mortality rate caused by vehicles traveling at speed.  The planners, however, have a different agenda.  Their priority is to kill off a larger number of people more slowly through increasing air pollution.

To this end, they have authorized the construction of Hopewell Holdings’ famous mega-hotel just down the hill.  As (rather whiny) residents have pointed out, the structure will block airflow and create traffic gridlock; when the tower is built, people walking in the neighbourhood will be squeezing their way through almost-stationary vehicles crawling along at the speed of molten rock.  Thus the planners will come out on top and rot people’s lungs with suspended particulates over many years, while the transport officials will have no choice but to lose face and abandon their favoured ‘instant death’ solution.  Just another of those interdepartmental squabbles that make government so interesting.

“…all electors in Hong Kong to actively participate in the forthcoming by-elections in the five geographical constituencies to peacefully quantify public opinion through voting, so as to achieve the social effect of a de facto referendum, and strive for the expeditious implementation of genuine universal suffrage and abolition of functional constituencies.”

The tautology “effect of a de facto” is presumably an attempt to make the characterization of the polls as a referendum as palatable as possible to folk who, loyally following the ill-advised example set by Beijing’s local officials, publicly declare the idea to be somehow a constitutional abomination or even act of treachery, albeit perfectly legal.  The use of the word ‘expeditious’ is an enormous, though totally expected, disappointment to those of us who have been waiting for the day when a Legco motion doesn’t feature the word (it appears twice, as a verb, in the following motion put forward by the Democratic Alliance of the Blah Blah of Hong Kong’s more-aromatic-than-fragrant Starry Lee).

The motion is a call for the people of the Big Lychee to register their discontent – and a desperate one.  From property developers to pollution to schools to poverty to traffic congestion to consumer rip-offs to overspending on infrastructure to underspending on health, there is so much to be angry about that it should be easy to rouse, say, 40% of electors to turn up in May and vote overwhelmingly for the pro-democrats.  The way things are looking, they will be lucky to get half that turnout, allowing pro-establishment figures to portray them, not unreasonably, as humiliated.

Much of the problem must be the pro-dems’ compulsive and self-indulgent focus on the abstraction that is political reform.  Maybe functional constituencies are a cause, or a symptom, or a symbol of what is wrong with Hong Kong, but after a quarter of a century, people are numbed to them and to wrangling over them. Much to the relief, no doubt, of the bureau-plutocracy that runs this city, the government’s opponents mostly chant structures and concepts rather than food, housing and hospitals.  The nearest to an uprising the motion might lead to is a walkout from Legco by the pro-government lawmakers.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, and indeed planet, we have the US Tea Party movement, the latest in a long line of grassroots backlashes against the federal government.  Like its predecessors (eg the Ross Perot fad), it is less representative than it thinks and will fizzle out.  It probably is, as House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggests, being hijacked by the Republicans (and partly engineered by vested interests, and partly aligned with the Democrats’ aims).  Most of all, some of its followers have mental health rather than political complaints.  It would be interesting to know what percentage of them believe:

• the US government was behind the 9-11 attacks;
• President Barack Obama was not born a US citizen and/or is a Muslim;
• the US government has plans to round up domestic opponents and put them in concentration camps and/or confiscate all private legally held firearms;
• the Bible is the literal truth and scientific explanations for the origins of the universe, the planet’s geology and different life forms are wrong; or
• the European Union is the Kingdom of the Antichrist foretold in the Books of Revelations and Daniel.

Click on Audrey to hear the Sensational Alex Harvey Band

Even given all this, there is a large group of decent, sane people out there who are genuinely furious about bank bailouts and bonuses, unemployment and evictions of homeowners, and scared by the apparent calamity and uncertainty around them.  Tea Partiers’ votes could affect the outcome of some elections later this year.

In Hong Kong, maybe it would be called the Yum Cha movement.  Or maybe it would be more historically resonant to see the local equivalent of the Boston Tea Party as Commissioner Lin Zexu’s defiance of colonial power in throwing British merchants’ opium into the sea at Humen in 1839.  (The comparison is faulty, but for the more Anglophile pro-dems he would be the ideal patriot-hero figurehead.)

It won’t happen, even if we caught a glimpse of it over the high-speed express rail project.  Partly, perhaps, because Hong Kong people are too docile, cynical, busy, splintered or self-centred, but mainly because the words needed to spark a fire aren’t there – just more endless droning on about universal suffrage.

Maybe we should call it the Dinner Party, in honour of Mao’s definition of what a revolution is not.

This latest version is not to be confused with a blog, because blogs, whatever their easiness on the eye, are common and mostly stink.  Also, you wouldn’t find anything as vulgar as a blog on the website of Oxford Tutors, an up-and-coming educational service offering to teach the Big Lychee’s children all their favourite important academic subjects.  Blogs are stupid, but what ambitious parents can possibly look at NTSCMP, with features like Dog Pram of the Month, and not feel inspired to entrust their slightly slow kid’s supplementary schooling to its creator?

Catch it before it goes the way of its noble predecessors (see the first) in its long journey to cosmic enlightenment.