| From Hemlock today:
Tue, 8 Apr
A newspaper cutting from the weekend brings to mind an email several weeks ago that asked me, as an alleged member of the digerati, to list my favourite gadgets for an article in the South China Morning Post Sunday magazine. The request came from David Wilson, and my initial impulse was to give him a long-overdue piece of my mind about his shameless hand-wringing and public consultation-fixing back in the late 1980s when he was Governor of Hong Kong. Then it occurred to me that if fate has reduced him to freelance writing I should go easy on him.
The problem is that the last thing I do is evangelize, connect people and adapt quickly. When I leave home I rejoice in not having a device that enables thousands of people worldwide to interrupt me with long-winded descriptions of their current activities. I also enjoy not blanking out the world around me by listening to eight gigabytes of music or immersing myself in Edison Chen’s entire photo collection. I have also noticed that what you don’t own you can’t leave in a taxi or have to worry about getting repaired. And that people who have a Star Trek-style, black plastic communications device clamped on one ear, with a light blinking, look tragically stupid. So I regaled Lord Wilson with details of my most essential kitchen artifacts, like the Bluetooth-compatible, GPS-enabled wireless olive spoon.
He wanted to know my occupation. It was a toss-up, and ‘chiropodist’ lost. Then he said wanted a large-format picture. He didn’t say of whom, and digital images of Bobby Kennedy and similarly worthy late heroes look too dated, so I emailed him the saddest, most geeky (without stretching the boundaries of credibility) looking mugshot Google Images could muster in a minute. And David wanted a name. Would he, I wondered, notice an anagram of his own? It seems not.
Actually, a fork does fine.
Quality! Nice one SCMP!  |