The Olympics are coming!

i'm going to go to bed relatively early (~3am) tonight...  i want to try to get up and out of the house by 10am tomorrow...   I'm going to try to get down to TST by 10:30. 

Why?  Because the olympic torch is coming to HK!

- 2008.05.02 The Route of Beijing 2008 Olympic Torch Relay in Hong Kong

its a pretty big deal of course, they're closing off a lot of streets and they did a couple of practice runs last week...     Actually they seem to be doing a good job making sure it reaches a really good portion of HK's downtown areas,  it'll be passing by my house not once, but TWICE over the course of the day, and it'll even be passing only a few minutes away from the AnD offices... (although HK is so small, almost everything is just a few minutes away from everything).   Besides running they're putting it on a dragon boat to cruise through Shatin (near where I go biking),  they're also taking it to the Shatin Racecourse, where the equestrian events will be held during the games.

I read online here about the list of torch bearers.... recognizable names include Andy Lau, Eason Chan, Kelly Chen and Jacky Cheung.  cool!  (but why no Daniel Wu?!)

Anyway,  I hope it goes well.  HK police can be somewhat nazi-like when it comes to crowd control at events (then again, given the size of the crowds here,  thats somewhat  understandable).  So I'm guessing they won't let any tibetans (or the Falun Gong guys) anywhere near the torch....

speaking of which -

It think these aggressive protest tactics that have been seen in England and France have really backfired...   The opportunity to hold highly visible, highly effective protests have been lost,  all they've done is to turn the torch relay into an embarrassing police action (embarassing for the host countries, embarassing for the chinese people,  not to mention a huge waste of money and manpower).   

Now you can't get anywhere near the torch and rather than showing the people in Mainland China that their government's policies need to be changed, you are just giving that government evidence to feed into their propaganda narrative that 'Westerners are trying to make China lose face by spoiling the Olympics.'

I mean come on,  what is the real point of trying to wrestle the flame away from a paraplegic girl by yanking her from her wheelchair?  How can that NOTlook really bad?

oh, they'll be doing a webcast... starting in.... 7 hours