This Village can be somewhat confusing for expats. Our own Wesley
confessed that he still has loads to learn about the locals through our Pub talks after almost a year here. One obstacle to our expats knowing this Village better, I think, is the fact that we have very limited, if not useless, English media.
South China Morning Post almost always has hard news only. They report a lot of local politics, which can be very specific and difficult to understand even for some locals. Hard issues like the political reform in this Village could mean very little to these expats; most of them might not even be here long enough to witness the CE election in 2017.
The Standard, the only free English tabloid in this Village, has very little and superficial coverage on local happenings. Echoing the
BigLychee.com, the Standard is an English pro-establishment mouthpiece, with the fictitious shoeshiner Mary Ma feeding the paper with ridiculously ass-kissing editorials. With about 10 feeds daily at the local news section,
RTHK English news is simply hopeless in another way.

Out of nowhere came the
CNNGo.com site, an interactive online service operated by the great news network
CNN. Their Asia edition is in beta, or pilot, or whatever that implies they have the right to suck. Obviously, the site targets confused gweilos like Wesley; possibly seeing how abortive our local English media are, they
said they're "the
ultimate insider guide to Asia's greatest cities". So we expect some in depth and insider coverage on what the expats really care, which would fill the gap between the hard news of SCMP and the non-news of the Standard. Below I read the eight informative articles from CNNGo that even locals like me cannot afford to miss.
1.
Five unforgettable shopping mallsOk, they talked about the five most eccentric shopping malls in Hong Kong. To start with, Megabox was not the newest shopping mall in Hong Kong at the time,
Chris, as rightly pointed out by the commenter there.
Megabox opened on 1 June 2007; another major shopping mall above Kowloon station called
Elements opened on 1 October 2007. Ok, at the time of posting (29 April 2010) these facts might be a bit old for Chris to remember, but what about
iSQUARE that opened on 16 December 2009? I don't know if Chris or the editor of the site should be blamed, but amateurs like me could always get these facts through
Google within 0.20 second.
Reading further, I do not know how eccentric these malls are really. For instance, there're dozens of malls around the Village look almost the same as Argyle Centre, selling basically the same stuff all over. Going through the article, it takes no Sherlock Holmes to tell that the article could be a product of Chris' causal stroll in Mongkok in a random afternoon plus a half-hearted online research on the "newest" local mall. Still don't get it? You can plot the addresses of the 4 malls other than Megabox on Google Maps and you will get the picture of how close they're to each other.
2.
'Porkchop' pageant: Who is the ugliest Miss Hong Kong?I don't know what to make of this article. Who should really care about the Miss Hong Kong pageant? Is Zoe aware of the fact that nobody cares now? Yes, it's very cool for a woman editor of this prestige news network to mock other women as "porkchop", we respect that right. But before saying that "none of these things would matter if the girls looked better", Zoe, please put up a more recent portrait of yourself
here. We can then judge if your journalism matters.
3.
12 year-old beats 'scholar pseudo-model' at the last HKCEE in historyYes, it's about a 12-year-old beating a 'scholar pseudo-model' at the last HKCEE in history. 12-year-old vs. pseudo models. The 12-year-old got 24 points, the best among those models could get was 12 points. That's it. What is the article about? That. What do you expect?
4.
The Hong Kong Hot List: 20 people to watchIn November 2009, they said these people are defining Hong Kong. Nine months after, how has Hong Kong been defined by these 20 people? Since when Macau became part of this Village when they talked about what Stanley Ho's son had been doing with their City of Dreams resort? What has Gillian Chung been doing in these nine months? Anybody has a clue? What was Tanya Chan the Civic Party actress doing when the deal was made between the Democratic Party and the government on the electoral reform? Yes, these 20 people are defining this Village, in CNNGo's dream.
5.
Snake, liver sausages, and crocodile: Winter solstice Chinese banquetNo, Zoe, locals here almost never have snakes in a Winter Solstice dinner. Neither a crocodile tail. Snake soup is a popular dish in Hong Kong during winter, but in a Winter Solstice dinner, we usually have dried seafood like shake fin,
fish maw,
conpoy and abalone, if you're rich, and lots of meat. The common dessert after the dinner would be
tangyuan, you could have easily talked about the meaning behind that dessert but you chose not to. I know why. The piece was an advertorial for Lei Garden. (The meaning behind having tangyuan during the Winter Solstice dinner is the symbolism of togetherness/gathering of the whole family.)
6.
How two gwailos learned to speak perfect CantoneseTitle of the article should have been: Lives of two gwailos in Hong Kong. Having talked about the HKCEE a minute ago, Chris, you would have got an F in composition for not writing in accordance with the provided subject.
7.
Behind the scenes of Hong Kong's most loved egg tart bakeryThe
English version of the article is far better. But the Chinese they wrote made my eyes bleed. I have no idea why they feel that they need a Chinese section with Mickey Mouse translations of their English articles. When the BBC decided that they need a
Chinese site, they do it professionally. More than half of the contributors of the Libertines Pub can write better Chinese than that, CNNGo. Ping us, we are pretty cheap to hire.
8.
Where to join in the maddening crowds on July 1
"Maddening"! What do you mean, Zoe? You go say that in the face of the
Civil Human Rights Front and you will learn a lesson about the choice of word. And why there're groups taking it to the street on that day with different, sometimes contradictory, objectives? Are they just maddening mobs? A little summary of
what happened may actually help those confused gweilos to understand the day better. Ah, I almost forget. CNNGo is more about advertorials. This time for the Wanch.
So this is how one of the tentacles of CNN fares in this Village. Don't worry, the site is in beta, so you earn the right to suck. But if any of you seriously want to know more about Hong Kong the Hi-Tech Village, forget about the useless CNNGo.com, follow the Libertines Pub instead. We're the true insiders, and as the Hong Kong Blog Review
said, 'no intermediary is needed".