Why I don’t find the Asiatic characters on Little Britain and Come Fly with Me racist

BBC I have a problem with blackface and yellowface, generally when there are more than capable actors who could have taken the role, but I make exceptions in some situations.    Take, for example, the news that Little Britain and Come Fly with Me are being removed from streaming services because of what are now […]

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Where does Hong Kong’s new national anthem law leave parody?

Steve Cadman/Creative Commons 2·0 I don’t profess to be an expert on how Hong Kong law functions these days with its mix of old British ordinances and the laws made after 1997, but one thing that struck me with at least the news reports covering the criminalizing of insults against ‘March of the Volunteers’, the […]

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Going beyond a blacked-out image: thoughts on Black Lives Matter

View this post on Instagram #blackouttuesday in support of Black Lives Matter. It was the only blacked out media I found on the phone. Recorded in our conservatory one night. A post shared by Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jack.yan) on Jun 2, 2020 at 7:39am PDT Usually I find it easier to express myself in written […]

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Live from Level 3

Finally, a podcast (or is it a blogcast, since it’s on my blog?) where I’m not “reacting” to something that Olivia St Redfern has put on her Leisure Lounge series. Here are some musings about where we’re at, now we are at Level 3.    Some of my friends, especially my Natcoll students from 1999–2000, […]

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Light humour, dark copy

I really love Hong Kong 漫畫 or manhua, and found this in one of the boxes from the move.    This was before the days of our having a computer scanner, and I had photocopied it out of a magazine or newspaper. There were years the copier was on the blink and everything would come […]

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A concert that takes you home

  One bonus of the lockdown was the live Easter Day concert held by Hong Kong’s own Sam Hui (許冠傑), perhaps fairly described as the king of Cantopop.    I had no idea this was even on if it weren’t for the fire at the Baxter’s Knob transmitter that took out television transmission in our […]

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COVID-19 infections as a percentage of tests done: April 13 update

I can cite these COVID-19 calculations (infections as a proportion of tests done) with a bit more confidence than the last lot, where many countries’ testing figures had not updated. I see the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has released its total test numbers now, and they show a pretty good result, too.    Compared to […]

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Another COVID-19 table: total infections as a proportion of tests done

Peter Lambrechtsen rightly pointed out that COVID-19 per capita infection statistics aren’t as good as knowing the infection rate based on tests done, so at 2 a.m. I decided to crunch some numbers based on the stats I had on hand. These are many hours old now but hopefully still indicative of where things stand. […]

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One more COVID-19 post: graphing and animating the data

Russell Brown linked this COVID-19 trend page by Aatish Bhatia on his Twitter recently, and it’s another way to visualize the data. There are two axes: new confirmed cases (over the past week) on the y and total confirmed cases on the x. It’s very useful to see how countries are performing over time as […]

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COVID-19 per capita: April 2 update

I had to see how we were tracking on total COVID-19 infections alongside other countries on a per capita basis, and here’s the latest update (source also linked above). I knew Switzerland was doing badly, but not this badly. I know I haven’t been consistent with my previous post’s country selection, but I don’t want […]

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