Live from Occupy Wall St in Asia

AS THE Occupy Wall Street protests spread to Asia, would police please note that we are mild-mannered Asians and do NOT want to be blasted with pepper spray. Try ginger and lemongrass with a hint of cumin, maybe.

The picture above shows an image from a TV report (AFP TV) of your columnist and his daughter at the protests in Hong Kong, where we were interviewed by lots of people, from Asia’s Now TV to the middle-east’s Al Jazheera to the New York Times.

One of the main themes of the protest was the people’s anger against the Hong Kong property companies, who monopolize the land and the government’s ear. These guys are everywhere.

When the clip above made it to YouTube, it was overlaid (see green banner below) by an advertisement – from HKProperty .com ! Oh, the irony.

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A MAN was arrested in New York last week after he punched a guy for singing badly at a karaoke bar. What did he expect to hear at karaoke bar? Pavarotti?

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WATCH OUT parents. A terrifying epidemic of extreme studying is spreading through Asia’s youth. Children are blatantly reading books like Applied Mathematics Vol 2 in broad daylight. Parents are calling on the authorities to take action.

This is not a joke. In South Korea, the government made it illegal for tutors to teach children after 11 pm, so teenagers are now studying at midnight in secret locations above shops, Time magazine reported.

No sooner had I read this when I stumbled on a Straits Times article which said that half the parents interviewed in Singapore said their kids studied too hard. The Education Minister is investigating.

I even found a related story in the UK press, which said students in South Asia were finishing their own assignments and then doing homework for Western kids via email, charging US$2 for each math question. Mohammed Ali Khan of Islamabad, Pakistan, told the Sunday Telegraph: "I get work from all over the world including Australia, the US and the UK.”

I am shocked. SOMETHING MUST BE DONE. The key question is this: If wasting our youth in a blur of drink, drugs and bad television was good enough for us, why isn’t it good enough for them?

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A STOLEN mobile phone posted a picture of the thief on the victim’s Facebook page, police in the US city of Georgia said last week. It happened because of a new option which makes your phone automatically upload all snaps to the social networking site.

Facebook is amazing. Last week my daughter uploaded a photo of me to her account and the auto-tagging function recognized my face and remembered my name. How come Facebook can do this but my family, friends and workmates can’t?

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AL-SHABAAB, a group of wackos whose main activity is to embarrass real Muslims, banned samosas in Somalia. They feared that diners innocently eating dinner would notice that a samosa was a single unified snack but had three different sides, and this would cause them to say to themselves: “Now I understand the doctrine of the Holy Trinity! I must immediately convert to Christianity!”

Christians claimed to have no figures of snack-led conversions and pointed out that samosas were Hindu anyway.

Why has no one made a sit-com about Al-Shabaab? You wouldn’t have to think of jokes, you could just write down whatever they say.

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A TEAM of Americans last week said they were “travelling to the Far East to find the Yeti”, a powerful, hairy creature said to be able to survive in conditions that would kill most living creatures. Wow, the Republicans are getting REALLY desperate for a presidential candidate.

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TALK TO ME. The occupy Wall St campaign needs a central message. Can anyone think of one for us?