Happy New Year to all hochitim readers! And may I begin 2006 with a piece of advice. If you ever find yourself suffering from flu over the New Year period, stay in bed until you're better. Do not, I repeat NOT, take enough paracetamol to revive a corpse, drink lots of beer, and lie on a pool table while someone pours neat whisky down your throat. From a hat. I can assure you it's a seriously bad idea.

2006 is only a week old yet we already have an entrant for best garbled English t-shirt slogan of the year. Check this out, it's a beauty:

I wandered as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales bills
When all at once I saw
Beside the lake beneath the three flutters continuous

A visionary splicing of Wordsworth and Andre Breton, or complete bollocks? You decide.

My mother was here for just over two weeks during the festive period, and on one of her wanderings about town (once I'd persuaded her that HCMC is not a hive of scum & villainy, and that some bloke asking her if she wants to buy fruit does not constitute a wanton assault on her personal freedom) she spotted a cafe selling "fried ice cream". Convinced she'd been out in the sun too long I told her she was talking bollocks, but a couple of days later she took me to said cafe and indeed they were advertising fried ice cream. I was having none of it, but the old dear was up for trying it so in we went, and the dish in question duly arrived. It wasn't, in fact, fried ice cream, but a very bizarre construction involving ice cream sealed in two slices of fried bread. Basically the kind of thing that would have even a Scotsman saying "Och no I cannae, I've got tae watch ma figure". Not sure what drugs the person who invented it was on but I want some.


I read an article the other day about an American blogger who was arrested & questioned by the FBI simply because his blog contained the noun "suicide bomber". So here we go - suicide bomber suicide bomber suicide bomber suicide bomber suicide bomber suicide bomber. Come & have a go you fascist pricks.

I also see that Charles Kennedy is currently on the rack after admitting he lied about being an alcoholic. Funny set of moral standards they have in Britain these days - they'll happily reelect a proven, documented liar & war criminal, but woe betide you if your private life is less than 100% squeaky clean. Baffles me.

Finally, and this is aimed more at any HCMC/Hanoi residents who might be reading and who, like me, have had their fucking fill of backpackers (which most expats have), I can heartily recommend Australian horror film "Wolf Creek", in which two truly obnoxious English backpacker girls are brutally murdered by a wisecracking outback psychopath. Grisly stuff, and a very funny piss-take of the Crocodile Dundee "THIS is a knife!" line. Coming soon - "Pham Ngu Lao", a new film about an English expat who overhears two backpackers trying to get 3p off the price of some DVDs because they're soooooo poor and is forced to hack them into tiny pieces and feed them to his neighbour's chihuahuas.