How did you survive all
the holidays recently? Any worse from all the wear & tear?
A
new year, new hope and a new, fresh start, as this local couple
on Main Street a few days ago proves! We're wishing them all
the best for a bright future together! But who's that Gweilo-in-a-hurry
trying to squeeze by the wedding party with his coffee?
Speaking
of a fresh start, a Chinese tea shop has also just opened,
close to Scorpio's. Nice flower bouquets...
This
is the first e-zine since Dec 25. I might not be able to publish
it weekly anymore in the future, as my work commitments are
slowly picking up recently. It's also proven extremely difficult to
find any regular/occasional contributors. I'll try my best to put
out at least 2-3 issues per month.
Did you tell us your birthday (no year
necessary)? We have birthday surprises for our members, different
for everybody, but at least a custom-made e-card (see left, made
for Insomniac's baby son, also an insomniac!). Let us
know, get a free birthday surprise!
Dear Lamma-Gung,
I am Jing Ling, the kitten on e's shoulder that u have kindly
featured in your Christmas e-zine. I have asked e to send this
message to you to express my thanks to u. u have made me a
tiny celebrity after mr 3 and mr taro.
apart from my thanks and kisses to you and Lamma-Por, i have a
question: how did u read my mind? how did u know what i was
thinking? curious! are u a cat in human disguise? tell me, i
won't tell e.
meow, jing-ling!
Doggy
(Laudable Lamma Luminary):
Thanks for including me, and thanks for
your continued hard work on My Lamma...
it is a great site and a great addition to the ever thriving
Lamma community.
Mr. DickStock (Laudable
Lamma Luminary & Website of the Week, see below):
My Lamma looks great. I'm gonna have to
whip out my camera and start snappin.
Top Brownie (Dragonboater):
I looked at your E-zine the other day
and it looks great!!
schan6:
Much thanks for enlisting me in your
site. I am acknowledging your email and look forward to enjoy
your interesting articles/information regarding our dear Lamma
Island.
Keep up the good work, lads!!!! With love from MALTA
"When I die, I want to die like my grandmother who died
peacefully in her sleep. Not screaming, like all the
passengers in her car."
•
Picture
Two
pictures this week, both entries for our
Photo Contest, which is still running till end of
January!
The
first one belongs into the Special Effects (SFX) category,
the 2nd one into the Animals category.
Both
these categories (plus Humour) have very few entries so far,
so your chances of winning would be VERY HIGH! So get off your lazy
a** and send me your computer graphics "experiments" (based
on Lamma photos) & the best, cutest snapshots of your pets!
A
closely related message, also about the Bookworm Café and "flames"
of a different & dangerous kind:
Li-ka-Donkey:
You know the real reason why you can't
smoke in the Bookworm?
It is too dangerous with all those bean eaters farting away.
No
naughty personal attack messages at all this week! But creative
puns and teasings like the two messages above are usually no
problem with most of our fun-loving & quite thick-skinned members.
Tease on!
Are
we back to our formerly peaceful discussions, sometimes heated &
passionate, but free from personal attacks? Let's hope so!
Mr. DickStock has been trying to hide
his great Multimedia website from us!
But our tireless investigative reporter,
Paparazzi webdog, has succeeded once again and discovered his
secret website!
If you've been at any party, bar or event in the
last several months where Mr. DickStock was present and
snapping away, you might find your mug shot, video or sound
recording on his website! For a typical example, see on the right!
Very pretty picture frames, and the photos are not
half-bad either!
A
newly registered user, but what really caught my attention was his
honest listing of his interests in his Profile, truly lad-ish
and so very politically incorrect: "Chicks,
booze, fags".
The baby above seems on the same track, 1 out of
3 is not bad at such a tender age!
We're
doing a house-cleaning of our registered members' e-mail
addresses. Quite a few have registered with invalid e-mails, or
their e-mails have expired since they registered.
If
you're registered and you did NOT receive a reminder about this
e-zine being published, then you need to update your e-mail
address in the
Profile. In the near future, we'll only allow active e-mail
addresses.
We've finally reached 200 registered members and 500 topics this
week!
Topic
#500 is
"Pull Moon Farty" (logo on left, the "Wooly Farting Swan"),
started by the Official DickStock Photographer, The Stick Insect
Hunter, promoting an "art and
music partival" on Easter at - no, not a Full Moon Party on
Powerstation Beach - Puerto Galera, the Philippines!
Would
you believe it's already been three years since we celebrated the
new Millennium?
I'm
getting a yearly reminder of this as my Chinese step-grandson is
a Millennium baby (Yes, I spent Millennium Eve/Jan 1
morning in Queen Elizabeth Hospital, waiting...). We just
celebrated his 3rd birthday on Jan 1 (see right).
My three wishes for the new year:
1. Peace
No
major war in Iraq, or anywhere else!
2. Love
Between lovers, friends,
families, neighbours, citizens, humans, and pets as well!
3. Laughter
May laughter fill much of our
happy lives!
Funny
how my good wishes add up to the motto of this e-zine: Peace,
Love, Laughter, Lamma! (PLLL)
Here's a Year of the Goat "Fai Chun" from
the first site I ever webmastered, saying "May all your wishes
come true".
Click to make your own!
All good things come in threes, like 2003,
yes?
Here are a few more Lamma things that come in
threes (click to enlarge):
This "Restaurent...W/Platfrom" is up for sale, at $15K
per month, plus $0.2M for the furnishings, kitchen utensils &
licence.
This
could be your big chance to open the pub (or a tea room?) you've
always dreamt of!
But the
survival chances are not too good, as recent history seems
to indicate. This place has gone through almost ten
reincarnations in the last ten years, according to longtime
residents.
I've
witnessed three of them during the last year alone, from BBQ to
Thai to "Grill room" to "really inexpensive", while all the
restaurants around it have survived almost unchanged for years.
Bad Fung Shui?
Have
you heard about the "Big Rip-Off" of BBChris, our Classy Rock
Goddess?
Who ripped her off? Shocking but true, it was
actually HER doing this infamous rip-off!
ANY publicity is GOOD publicity!
Better infamous than NOT famous...
BBChris (about Thinking Out
Loud's recent gig at the Fringe):
"Awesome gig! Thanks! Only 2 Lamma
people turned up! hahahahahahaha
Glad a lot of my friends from town could make it!
First gig with 20-20 vision and first gig where I sang
all the songs.
I also ripped off my T-shirt in the second song. That felt incredibly GOOD! hahahahahhaaha
I think there's a stripper hiding somewhere inside of me.
wheeeeeeeeeeee".
Unfortunately, even though I've really
tried, there seem to be no photos of the T-shirt strip-rip,
as it was a huge surprise for the audience! On the right, a
BEFORE-RIP-OFF picture of the gig.
These
days, BBChris is singing praises to Lasik's (Laser-Assisted In
Situ Keratomileusis) "slash & burn" surgery on her eyeballs,
resulting in "20-20 vision" (see right, w/o glasses!).
But I've also found a
Viagra banner ad at the top of one of her web pages (see
below)! Hahahahahahahaha It's true! That's what you get for
hosting your website on a free, but advertising-supported host
with random banner ads you cannot control!
Save Lamma campaign
mass e-mail (register at SaveLamma.org for occasional updates):
Dear Friends of Lamma,
Holiday greetings to all! Here's a
brief campaign update as we enter 2003. Following the
meeting with the Planning Department and Civil Engineering
Department, we submitted them a report entitled "A New
Vision for Yung Shue Wan".
The report is now available at www.savelamma.org.
Rather than a detailed plan, it is an examination of the
approaches and guidelines most suitable for enhancing Yung
Shue Wan. A copy of the PowerPoint presentation made to
the government is also available.
We understand that "A New Vision"
has been circulated among government departments. For
example, at the beginning of December we met with Duncan
Pescod, the Deputy Tourism Commissioner, and senior officials
Winifred Chung and Kenneth She.
They had read "A New Vision for Yung
Shue Wan" and agreed about the village's importance in the
total tourism offering for Hong Kong. They provided
useful feedback and were supportive of the campaign's
efforts. There seems to be a growing willingness to listen
within many government departments, and we are encouraged by
the potential for positive and sensitive initiatives going
forward.
In other news, the institute of
Landscape Architects has sponsored a project within the
Masters of Landscape Architecture program at Hong Kong
University to examine the Yung Shue Wan situation and come up
with alternative proposals. The background field work was
very comprehensive and clearly opposed large-scale
reclamation.
This background work and the just
completed final projects resulted in some very interesting
information, visuals, and design concepts which we plan
to highlight on the website soon. This material will also be
presented to the Planning Department.
For now, the ball is in the
government's court. They have gone back to the drawing board
and have indicated they are seriously considering the
suggestions by Save Lamma and the many people that wrote them
urging a more sustainable development strategy for YSW.
If they are really listening then
they will incorporate the feedback from the extensive
resident, tourist, and business survey's and petitions, as
well as the information contained in the articles and
television programs that have come out about the YSW
reclamation project.
As more information becomes
available, we may need to increase our pressure, but
for now let us see what the government's next move is.
Happy 2003 and may the upcoming year
of the Ram/Sheep be a good one for Lamma!
Usually,
many people are eager to meet Chow Yun-fat here on Lamma.
Left: visiting Northern Lamma School a few weeks ago,
"...as
head of its alumni association to the delight of its pupils."
But
we just received the e-mail below, from somebody looking for his
sister, "a distinguished nature photographer". Can
YOU help her?
YC Lee:
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am a college teacher and have seen a documentary on the
television quite some time ago about Ms Chow Chung ling of
Lamma Island (sister of the famous actor Mr Chow Yun
fat) who is a distinguished nature photographer.
Is it possible to obtain an e-mail address of Ms Chow
so that I can get some advice on nature photography
from her?
Your assistance will be greatly appreciated.
By the sound of this, I'd love to get advice
from her as well. Looking at all my Lamma nature snapshots,
you surely agree that I desperately need some good advice! But
I'm not easily discouraged!
ost
weird & outlandish
topic
of the week. What the heck are the guys in this topic talking
about? And what about all these weird new userids (Beanburglar,
Pulsy Galore, Li-ka-Donkey, Ronald McBobsy)?
The
anti-Political-Correctness forces have assembled at the doorstep
of the
Bookworm Café, it seems, launching good-natured verbal
attacks, confusing and distracting onlookers with messages about
a mysterious Wigwam of Love, hirsute lentil eating birds,
scurillous little capitalists, Tofu jockeys, bean burgers and
a competition for poems/limericks "to Win a Bird". Check
it out & contribute!
All of this recent verbal
mudslinging and creative misbehavin' seems to confuse new
members, giving them a totally wrong impression of "Life on
Lamma"! For example:
caff:
Oh, how things have changed, I only
left Lamma 4 years ago but it seems that the peaceful,
tranquil haven is no more. Can it really be that bad?
Of course, it did not help matters when I told him about the "fisticuffs
between bikers and pedestrians, the bloody noses, plus a few
broken bones of pedestrians run over by bikes or the
occasional umbrella poked into a speeding bike's wheels, but no
casualties at all yet this year!"
I
also told him about the mob lynching of a VV driver last
week, for running over 1 cat, 2 dogs, 3 grannies and 4 Hawker
Patrol officers (OK, those 4 didn't really count, as they won't
win any local popularity contests).
Unfortunately, caff has never posted again (shooed away?)
and I seem to have killed our
longest-running discussion with my naughty message...
Oh my, maybe I'm also guilty of misbehavin'!?
The new, small "Best" selection of
the Official DickStock Photographer, The Stick Insect Hunter,
will remain at its former location:
http://dont-touch-my.com/dickstock/
Introducing
local artists:
First up: Mrs. Nick the Bookman!
Interviews With Laudable Lamma Luminaries!
New Stories From Our Contributors
suggest new topics,
e-mail Editor
Speaking
of a fresh start, a Chinese tea shop has also just opened,
close to Scorpio's. Nice flower bouquets...
No
naughty personal attack messages at all this week! But creative
puns and teasings like the two messages above are usually no
problem with most of our fun-loving & quite thick-skinned members.
Tease on!
I'm
getting a yearly reminder of this as my Chinese step-grandson is
a Millennium baby (Yes, I spent Millennium Eve/Jan 1
morning in Queen Elizabeth Hospital, waiting...). We just
celebrated his 3rd birthday on Jan 1 (see right).
Have
you heard about the "Big Rip-Off" of BBChris, our Classy Rock
Goddess?
Plus
a passionate plea from our "angry young man" Insomniac:
