A few years back Bruce Springsteen, the monumentally tedious US rocker beloved of 40-something music journos and absolutely no-one else, sang "57 channels and nothin' on". And for once, I sympathise with the boring old fucker. Our landlady has just installed cable TV in our room (2 weeks before we move out - great timing) and, despite having over 60 channels to play with, there is basically fuck all worth watching. Apart from football. Here is a selection of "highlights" I enjoyed over the weekend:

X-GAMES ASIA
Ah yes, "extreme sport". Whenever I hear the expression "extreme sport" I think of events which push man's strength and endurance to its limits. The Tour de France perhaps, or triathlon, or watching an entire Richard Curtis film without vomiting. But for some reason, the X-Games consist of such "extreme" events as BMX biking, rollerskating, and skateboarding. Now I'm sorry, but if you're on a skateboard and you're over 14 years of age, you really need to take a long, hard look at yourself in the mirror.

ULTIMATE FIGHTING
Now this whetted my appetite a bit. Ultimate fighting you say? No holds barred? Two braindead rednecks butting, punching, gouging, kneeing and generally whaling the shite out of each other until one of them expires? Bring it on. Oh, but hang on, you can't wear shoes. Oh, and you have to wear gloves. And the crotch is a no-go area. And no headbutting or biting. And you get a break every 5 minutes. Ultimate fighting? Ultimate mincing about more like.

Here's what happens. The bell goes, & two big blokes jump around looking at each other for a few minutes. Then one grabs the other & they roll around in a distinctly homoerotic manner for a few minutes until one of them is declared the winner. Outside the gay fraternity I see no interest in this whatsoever.

ANIMAL PLANET/DISCOVERY CHANNEL/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CHANNEL
AKA "Nature will fuck you up bad" channels, where every programme is designed to keep the viewer in a state of terror about what might happen to them should they actually switch off the TV, haul their fat arse off the couch, and leave the house. Hurricanes! Volcanoes! Tsunamis! Polar bears! Snakes! Polar bears running down the side of volcanoes carrying snakes! DON'T LEAVE THE HOUSE OR YOU WILL DIE!!!!!!!

The mighty Chas & Dave once sang "There Ain't No Pleasin' You", a howl of existential angst about the fickleness of Mrs Chas (or Mrs Dave - the identity of the woman was left ambiguous, one assumes to avoid Chas or Dave being denied sexual favours or kicked squarely in the bollocks by one of the aforementioned ladies). And this weekend I knew just how they must have felt.

A few months ago Mrs HCT complained that she'd never seen me with long hair. This coincided with my usual barber putting his prices up by an outrageous 30% so, being a skinflint, and also having learned that submitting to Mrs HCT's whims ensures me a ballache-free existence, I decided to let nature take its course with the HCT coiffure. Last week, however, she began complaining that it was too long & looked untidy. A fair point - I'd brush it into some sort of order in the morning, but after 20 minutes on the motorbike, the wind whistling through my locks, I looked like the bastard offspring of Charlie Chuck and Jo Brand. However, I had grown to like it, so Mrs HCT's change of heart rather annoyed me.

So it was in somewhat of a bad mood that I wandered around the backpacker district yesterday afternoon, dodging braying gap year fuckwits clutching Lonely Planets tightly to their chests as if to let them go would mean certain death, in search of a cheap barber. Having located said service, I decided to test Mrs HCT's will and go for the full Zidane. A spot of Dutch courage, then home to see what she thought of it. "My God, it's much too short!" she cried, with depressing predictability. Bugger. Oh darlin', there ain't no pleasin' yeeewww....

Bizarre T-shirt slogan of the week:

Designed for me
ROCK BLACK
I went there out of curiosity

Nope, me neither.

Apologies for etc etc...Well, after 18 months of teaching here I finally got my first complaint from an irate parent. "Not only did the morning teacher (my colleague) raise his voice several times during the class, but the afternoon teacher (yours truly) ALSO raised his voice, AND left the room for five minutes DURING THE CLASS!!!"

Ye Gods, whatever next! A teacher having the temerity to RAISE HIS VOICE at an uncooperative student?!?! It beggars belief. And as for leaving the room during class, I'll avoid this next time by simply dropping my trousers and having a shit in the middle of the classroom, as this is what they would obviously prefer.

Those few of you still left reading this may be wondering why I've been absent from the "blogosphere" for so long. Well, it's partly to do with words like "blogosphere". Seems like everyone is blogging these days, most of them people with fuck all to say. If I see another blog subtitled "My random musings on life" or "the life of a crazy female" I will personally hunt down the writer and go all Dennis Nilsen on their ass.

In its favour, blogging is rather like punk, a democratic anyone-can-do-it movement which takes freedom of creative expression from the powers that be and allows everyone to give vent to their feelings, opinions and creative impulses. And when the writing is of the standard seen on blogs like The Curmudgeon, Michael Kelly's Page of Misery or my good friend Andy's Plumbing the Depths, that can only be a good thing. But what people forget about punk is that for every Buzzcocks, Fall, Undertones or Joy Division, there were a dozen Sham 69s, Lurkers and Sex Pistols (and no I'm not being deliberately controversial there, the Pistols really were shite - remove the safety pins & manufactured attitude & you're left with a bog standard pub-rock band whose music sounds hideously dated these days, and, next to the likes of The Fall or Wire, probably sounded dated back in 1978 as well). So it is with blogs. Having read a few blogs recently and been bored shitless, saying to myself "why the fuck do they think anyone is interested in this?", I was put off from updating Ho Chi Tim for a while. I've also been busy sorting out my new apartment, which I move into in a fortnight. But then I thought come on, I live in Vietnam, I see mad, crazy stuff every day. I'm not some "soccer mom" in Buttwipe, Idaho writing about her last trip to the mall to buy doughnuts. I recently drove to work behind a man with a cage of live snakes on the back of his bicycle! I live in a city where you can get a blowjob, the still-beating heart of a dead cobra or a bottle of seahorse wine within 5 minutes, day or night! Time to get blogging again!!!

It seems I'm a very rich man. I just had an email congratulating me on winning the UK National Lottery, and I didn't even enter it! The letter came from a Sir Stephen Smith, "online gaming coordinator". A somewhat menial role for a knight of the realm one might think, but then it transpires that the real donkeywork is being done by Sir Stephen's "fiduciary consultant", a "barrister" Charles Wilson, Kings Close, Thamesmead. I'd better get back to them - I'd hate to miss out on my winnings.

Talking of transparent scams, one was recently uncovered right here in Vietnam. It seems some crafty Nigerians had moved on from the legendary 419 scam (once Nigeria's second biggest souce of earnings, after its oil industry - true) and come up with something more creative - the Blackened Dollars scam.

The scam works like this. Nigerian fella spends a couple of days casing out a bar/cafe in HCMC or Vung Tau, getting to know the owner. He then produces a bag of black pieces of paper which he claims are $100,000 worth of "blackened dollars" - in order to get the dollars out of Africa, he had to disguise them by painting them black. Because of course, whilst customs officers in Africa or Vietnam are likely to ask questions about several thousand dollar bills, a case full of black dollar-shaped pieces of paper raises no eyebrows at all. Anyway, Nigerian fella then explains that, in order to unblacken the dollars and restore them to their former glory, he has to invest in $10,000 worth of a special unblackening chemical, and do you know, he's right out of cash at the moment, but if the cafe owner can front him $10,000 she can keep 20% of the dollars. A good deal right? So the next day she hands over $10,000 in cash, & Nigerian fella hands over the blackened dollars, returning 30 mins later with some "chemicals", into which he dips the dollars. He then tells the cafe owner to stick the dollars in the fridge as the chemical reacts with the cold, and to wait eight hours, after which the dollars will have become legal tender again. Then he gets the fuck outta town, never to be seen again. And at least half a dozen people were taken in by this.

Sadly a couple of the perpetrators are now languishing in jail. Let 'em go I say - anyone stupid/greedy enough to fall for this deserves to be parted from their cash.

Well, the rainy season is finally upon us it seems, and hopefully it will be shorter than last year's which outstayed its welcome by a good two months.

When it began raining, we noticed a few leaks in our bedroom ceiling, and called our landlady to ask her to fix them. As usual she dragged her heels somewhat on this, the result being that, 10 days ago, I returned home after an epic 7-hour drinking session to find the bedroom under 2 inches of water, and my computer, TV & DVD player covered in plasterboard. Yes, the ceiling had collapsed, exposing the hilariously jerry-built nature of the roof above. In fact, calling it jerry-built is an insult to Jerry, whoever he might have been. Incompetent though he may have been, I'm sure even he knew about the existence of the word"drainage", a concept that seems to have escaped the troop of mentally-retarded baboons who built our house.

The landlady initially balked at my request that she return the month's rent. This is Vietnam, a country where nobody ever takes responsibility for anything, after all. This explains why terrorism has never caught on here - they'd be fine with the bombing, shooting and kidnapping, but the "claiming responsibility" bit would be impossible for them. But eventually she relented after visiting the scene of devastation. We've moved into the guesthouse next door until our apartment is ready, thus saving ourselves plenty of cash, so it hasn't worked out too badly all told.

Just back from a weekend with the in-laws in Ben Tre. I arrived at 10am on Saturday & was immediately whisked off to a death anniversary celebration with my wife's brother. Rural death anniversaries are one of this country's greatest experiences. Whereas in the West we tend to get maudlin and morose about death, here it's seen as a fact of, er, life, and so rather than dwelling on it & making themselves miserable, every year families throw a big party on the anniversary of a relative's demise, attended by extended family and friends and lubricated with lashings of lethal home-brewed rice wine. So it was at this particular bash, the details of which I'd like to share with you. However, I can't. My wife says I returned home on the back of a motorbike 3 hours later & had to be put to bed. All I remember is waking up at 6pm with my father-in-law waving a bottle of whisky at me, and it started all over again. The next morning the bloke whose party it was called me at 8am asking me where I was, as apparently in my drunken state I'd agreed to go fishing with him.

Bizarre T-shirt slogans of the week:

KENSINGTON LAMB FIGHTING
(Even more bizarrely, this one featured a picture ofMickey Mouse)

HIP-HOP 1946
"We'll meet again, beeyatch." Or maybe just the kind of ignorance of cultural history that recently led one of my students to submit an essay with the opening line "Since the 16th or 17th century, movies have been a popular form of entertainment."

And probably the best one ever...

CAMPUS BIKE
No comment needed...

Finally, an ambition fulfilled - I've got into the New Statesman. Click on the link below and scroll down to no.4...


http://www.newstatesman.com/200605220016

It appears I’ve finally got to the bottom, as it were, of my mystery virus. Went to the hospital last week for several (expensive) tests, and the results indicated the presence of the Epstein-Barr virus, aka glandular fever.

However, yesterday the doctor called me to tell me that, whilst the virus is definitely there, this time it isn’t glandular fever although it is probably a recurrence of the symptoms. He then told me I’d had glandular fever before, and I replied that I don’t recall having it.

“Can you remember a time when you felt lethargic or lacking in energy?”
“Only once – it began when I left university in 1990 and continued until, er, the present.”
You may as well ask Shane MacGowan if he remembers that time he got pissed.

He then told me I could start doing sport in a couple of weeks, which was good to hear, as I couldn’t do it before.

I got a bit of a shock this week when I received an email from the British consulate informing me of new passport renewal fees. As the government has decided to introduce the new biometric passports this year, the renewal fee will be an astonishing 91 FUCKING QUID. It seems there is no escaping rip-off Britain after all.

Having investigated it further, it seems biometric passports are the first line of attack in Bliar’s campaign to get us all to carry identity cards and leave an electronic trail wherever we go. This, it is believed, will protect us all from those nasty terrorists. Personally, I think that, rather than having flash passports with our iris patterns on them or whatever, we Brits would be safer from terrorism if we didn’t have a lying, warmongering bastard as Prime Minister, but there you go.

Should identity cards be introduced, the government stress that the scheme will be voluntary, not compulsory. However, this blatant lie is exposed by the fact that anyone wishing to renew their passport after 19th May will be obliged to hand over all the personal information required for ID cards, and pay the extortionate 91 quid fee, thus, surely, making it compulsory? No, says the Home Secretary, who claims that “the decision to apply for, or renew, a passport is entirely a matter of individual choice” – and therefore, so is the surrendering of the required personal information.

What utter, utter nonsense. For many people, renewing one’s passport is not a matter of individual choice. What about people who work in the travel industry – cabin crew, ferry crew, tour guides? What about truck drivers? And what about those of us who’ve had the good sense to get the fuck out? If I turn round & wave two fingers at the government and refuse to cough up my 91 quid, I can’t renew my visa here and therefore can’t work. So where is the “individual choice”?

Also, while I’m at it, if the government are intent on getting rid of our civil liberties, why the hell should we have to pay for it? Mr Blair, you want my data, YOU fucking pay! Or why not pass the cost onto the private companies who will be running the scheme and thus profiting enormously from it? Ah, no. That would go against the very ethic of the PFI carve-up, in which private firms rake in the cash while the government, i.e. the taxpayer, carries the risk. The biggest financial scandal since the South Sea bubble.

Encouragingly, the House of Lords have thrown out the ID cards bill yet again, though whether this will have an impact on the passport situation is unclear. Still, today’s national strike by UK government workers shows that there are still some people left over there with the balls to protest, so maybe if the ID card bill ever looks like going through, the masses will look across the Channel to this week’s events in Paris, and maybe look back to the successes achieved by the anti-Poll Tax campaign, and make their feelings known. Fingers crossed.

I recently posted an entry about the difficulty of
getting hold of certain basic items here in Vietnam -
shoelaces, Marmite and Guinness, for example. To that
list can be added magazines. Back in the UK I was a
magazine junkie, devouring the likes of Private Eye,
New Statesman, Uncut and various others, but sadly
such delights are not available here, meaning I am
restricted to Time and Newsweek.

I really should give them up, but unfortunately when
my good friend & former colleague Marcus returned to
Australia last summer (come back to 'Nam Bruce!) I
inherited his newspaper seller, an amiable bloke with
a speech defect who haunts the bars & cafes of De Tham
hawking foreign mags & newspapers. Because I once
bought copies of Time & Newsweek from him, he now
saves me copies every week and has an uncanny knack of
hunting me down wherever I happen to be, and so I've
ended up being a regular reader.

Which, in its way, is no bad thing - after a regular
diet of Pilger, Chomsky & the like, it's good to know
what the other side is thinking, and whilst Time &
Newsweek regularly chastise Bush & his cronies for
their mistakes, their motives are considered
unimpeachable. Yes, both mags are the house journals
of US market fundamentalism, regularly attacking the
likes of China, Iran and, on a weekly basis, Europe,
mainly because it still contains countries that have
horrible old-fashioned things like welfare, free
health care and trade unions. And, of course, whenever
they mention Vietnam, they always refer to Ho Chi Minh
City as Saigon. Er, chaps, YOU LOST.

Anyway, I write this as a few weeks back there was a
particularly amusing piece in Time about Belarus, next
in line after Venezuela and Ukraine for electoral
interference by USAID. Amid a piece doing some handy
spadework prior to undoubtedly forthcoming US/UK
government pronouncements about electoral
irregularities & vote-rigging in this year's
elections, the writer attempted to portray the
capital, Minsk, as a bleak, post-Soviet shithole.
Which indeed it may be, but his supporting arguments
were dubious in the extreme.

Firstly, he states, "The city centre streets are lined
with apartment buildings." How terrible - affordable
city-centre housing instead of office blocks and
shopping malls!!! Then, "There is no colourful
advertising or traffic to liven up the empty streets."
You mean the citizens of Minsk can go about their
business without being assaulted by garish, intrusive
billboards or getting stuck in traffic jams? What sort
of hellhole is this????

A fine demonstration of the fucked-up values of late
period capitalism. Knock down those apartments, shift
people out to the suburbs so they have to spend longer
getting to work, fill the city centre with office
blocks and billboards, and stick people in cars, thus
increasing oil consumption - and of course, when
people are stuck in traffic, they're a captive
audience for all that "colourful advertising". These
disciples of Adam Smith may be evil money-grabbing
bastards, but be fair to them, they are nothing if not
holistic in their approach.

But anyway, as I said above, for all I know Minsk may indeed be a cackhole, but to anyone who still clings to the old-fashioned notion that cities are places for people to live in rather than obscene temples to Mammon, Time's description of it makes it sound positively idyllic.

Otherwise, little news to report from HCMC. I seem to
have been struck down by what I believe to be
glandular fever, having checked out my symptoms on
various online medical sites - aching
neck/armpit/groin, sore throat, feeling knackered all
the time - and will visit the doc next week to get it
confirmed. In a way it's no bad thing as I can just
about get through the working day but am too knackered
to go out carousing at night, thus saving me money for
furnishing the new apartment come the summer.

And, of course, Mr Glitter got a 3-year sentence for
his alleged kiddie-fiddling activities in Vung Tau.
Guilty or innocent, it was for me a disgusting
spectacle seeing so many British journalists there.
These cowards didn't have the balls to spend half an
hour checking the veracity of the various spurious
Iraqi WMD dossiers doing the rounds back in 2002/3,
but they'll happily travel halfway around the world to
watch some old bloke being put on trial for minor
sexual misdemeanours. What a fucked-up sense of
priorities.

Oh bloody hell, not Glitter again I hear you cry. Well, it's not every day that disgraced ex-glam-rockers go up before the beak in Vietnam, hence my bringing up the subject again. In fact, I read a
report on today's trial on Yahoo! News this morning and it spoke volumes about the Western media's attitude to third world/communist countries.

Anyone who's read any Chomsky or subscribes to www.medialens.org will by now be au fait with the one-sided reporting that constitutes much of western establishment "journalism" (witness the way "official" sources on, say, the Iraq war are routinely described as "reliable", whilst anti-war journalists are labelled "polemicists" or "outspoken" for example), and Yahoo's report on the Glitter trial is sadly
typical. Here are the relevant sections for your perusal and, I hope, amusement:


VUNG TAU, Vietnam (Reuters) - Disgraced "glam rocker"
Gary Glitter went on trial at a People's Court in
communist Vietnam on Thursday on charges of molesting
two young girls.

Glitter, whose real name is Paul Gadd, was brought to
the yellow concrete courthouse -- a Hammer and Sickle
emblem above the front door -- from the prison where
he has been held since he was arrested in November as
he tried to leave the country.

...

He has already spent more than three months in a
two-man cell at desolate concrete prison on the
outskirts of Vung Tau, surrounded by AK-47-toting
guards, mould-encrusted walls and coils of rusting
razor wire.


Firstly, there's the phrase "communist Vietnam". Why is this relevant? If he'd been arrested in, say, Canada, would the press refer to him being on trial in "capitalist Canada"? I doubt it.

Secondly, there's the mention of the hammer & sickle flag above the courthouse entrance. Again, why is this relevant? The hammer & sickle is everywhere in this country - it was after all the Communists who freed
the country from French occupation and who fought off the US in order to reunify the country in the 1960s/70s, and it was the Soviet Union who helped rebuild the country after the so-called "civilised"
world imposed a shameful and murderous embargo on 'Nam as punishment for having the nerve not only to oppose America, but also to subsequently have the balls to depose the Khmer Rouge. Why the hell shouldn't they fly the hammer & sickle?

Thirdly, note the references to the prison being "desolate" (Western prisons are like 4* hotels, presumably), "concrete" (are British/US prisons made of wood or something?), surrounded by barbed wire (how unusual for a prison) and patrolled by armed guards (again...). And the poor bloke is in a "two-man cell", whereas if he was in Britain he'd probably have the luxury of sharing a cell with half a dozen others. They also mention that the courtroom is made of concrete as well. Yes amazing isn't it, that we actually have concrete here in Vietnam. Whatever next.

The subtext here is, basically, conditions in third world countries, especially communist ones, are substandard, uncivilised and primitive, and the fact that there's a hammer & sickle above the courtroom
door means he won't get a fair trial.

It'll be interesting to see how the western media react to the verdict. If GG is found not guilty, you can guarantee that words like "incompetence" and "corruption" will be bandied about; if he's
imprisoned, expect horrific tales of primitive barbarity and talk of kangaroo courts.

In the twisted world of the Western media, it seems that paedophiles, usually public enemy no.1, are in fact slightly higher up the moral ladder than "Commies". If it weren't so transparently pathetic it would almost be funny.