Sunday, March 26, 2017

As the sun sets on 689's term, in comes 777!


Seen in November 2014, and still applicable today
 
Carrie Lam has been (s)elected as Hong Kong's next Chief Executive:  Surprise, surprise -- or, rather, so not!  Within minutes of the result being announced, jokes started flying about the 777 votes she had received from a possible 1,194-- and not just about how paltry were that number that she needed to get a well-paid job (whose salary, more than incidentally, is higher than that of the Presidents of the United States of America and the People's Republic of China, among others!). 

Somehow, the heavens -- or is it Beijing? -- seem intent on playing numerical jokes on recent winners of Hong Kong's Chief Executive "election".  For example, the 689 votes that Leung Chun Ying received in 2012 invariably gets one thinking of June 1989 and what happened in Beijing on the fourth day of that month.      
 
Now there's the number of votes that Carrie Lam received today: which, when taken at face level, is better than what the man whose five year term she spent the bulk of as Chief Secretary received by an auspicious sounding 88.  Unfortunately for her, however, the number seven is -- as Apple found out last year -- phonetically similar to a slang term for "penis"; so her total number of votes can be expressed as "penis, penis, penis", and probably will be by a large number of people at such as this year's edition of the annual July 1st protest march!
 
More than incidentally, this July 1st is when the woman who I'm pretty sure will now get regularly referred to as 777 is scheduled to take over from the man known as 689.  And even as the penis jokes were being circulated, so too were promises and calls for friends to meet up that day to voice our protests against the small circle election and its results, and to let it be known that we still do seriously want genuine universal suffrage for Hong Kong.

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