This just isn't a year to dig up anything

At a housing estate in Kowloon, there's a plaque marking the position of a buried time capsule left by the urban and regional councils, I heard from reader Gerry Em yesterday. Buried in 1999, it was due to be opened in 2020 but appears to have been forgotten.

Perhaps someone from the government can rush over and dig it up today or tomorrow, just before the year ends?

Or maybe not. Gerry's friends said that we should just let it be. "This is not the year to unbury stuff," said Elzan Simpson. "Likely will come with some dang curse or something."

If it contains artifacts from that year, the top song was Believe, sung by an auto-tune machine with a little help from Cher. Best forgotten.

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A former Hongkonger went to a funeral in Malaysia last week and noticed something about the mortuary, he told me yesterday. "There was a 2.5m high perimeter wall topped with unclimbable razor-wire," said the reader, who wanted only to be identified as Mr A. "To keep people out or to keep people in?"

Malaysia, of course, was the place where officials felt the need to tell citizens that Covid sufferers did not turn into "walking dead" zombies.

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The secret script prepared for the Hong Kong protesters last year continues to be recycled.

Demonstrators in the US state of Arkansas surrounded a police station, used the slogan "Stop killing us," firebombed police cars and demanded the defunding of the police force, Fox News reported.

The report, forwarded to me by reader Savindra Silva, quoted a police chief saying: "Breaking into a police compound and firebombing a police vehicle with a homemade explosive device is clearly not a peaceful protest."

Yep. Tell that to CNN's Hong Kong newsroom, please.

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Reader Jason Lee yesterday told me he has been tracking Western commentators' announcements about the crashing of China's economy. "The Chinese economy has now been 'collapsing' and experiencing 'a hard landing' for 30 years," he said. "Today it has collapsed so much that it is expected to overtake the US economy sooner than expected!"

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MEDIA: "Anti-monopoly attacks on big tech firms like Ant Group show that China is uniquely evil."

ALSO MEDIA: "Anti-monopoly attacks on big tech firms like Google show that Europe is watchful and efficient."

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The BBC's Stephen McDonell yesterday tweeted that China's de-radicalization program was "Auschwitz," a key center in the Nazi program in which six million Jewish people were murdered. Xinjiang was "occupied Poland."

This coincided with a mysterious anonymous announcement on Twitter that the Xinjiang death toll was now "officially" higher than the Nazi holocaust.

There's the problem. There is no death toll. Even the highly exaggerated narrative pushed by the BBC and others says Uyghurs are ill-treated but not killed. Someone needs to tell McDonell.

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The number of people wanting to join the Auxiliary Police in Hong Kong has doubled, the on.cc website reported on Monday. Good timing. Violent incidents have dropped to zero, while safe, mundane work, like handing out parking tickets, has soared. I got two this week.

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On Facebook's HK Expats page, Rick Johnson had an urgent question: "Wife didn't like new handbag I gave her for Christmas. It cost several thousand. What should I do?"

Caroline Bowles replied: "Get a new wife."

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