Plastic Buns?
February 17th, 2007Just to give impetus to the suspicion that mental disturbances endemic  in the New Territories are more acute in the Outer Islands, their District Council chairman Daniel Lam Wai-keung emerged from a brain storming session with the Leisure and Cultural Services department  last week with an announcement. The buns used in Cheung Chau’s bun festival will no longer be real ones. They are to be made of plastic.
Brain storming with the Leisure and Cultural Services must be a bit like discussing theology with David and Spice Beckham. They already have bidding plans for staging the 2014 Winter Olympics here and are ready with a proposal to stock library books on floating platforms off popular beaches so that swimmers may read improvingly before the swim back to shore.
But Daniel Lam has shown he was up there with them. Fearless of being ridiculed from Shautokok to the Sokos, Mr Lam explained that using plastic buns, the bun towers would ‘look nicer, even after the contest’, which is pretty vital. It seems that the real things are ‘ugly and messy’. Confectionary is a dirty business, you see.
Sources close to the ground on Cheung Chau (they sleep out) tell me that the buns are just the small beginnings of Mr. Lam’s neatness and cleanness. The fishing boats in the typhoon shelter are to become plastic as well. They will bob more entertainingly in the water for tourists that way, and will suffer less damage than the wooden ones when they bang against the soon to be built plastic piers.
Massive plastic orange ducks are to be floated amongst them also to excite tourists and fleets of swan styled plastic paddle boats will further froth the interests of the beloved and bountiful Mainland visitors.
Eventually, the whole island is to be replaced by an identical plastic replica. “It will be a lot cleaner and nicer†said an excited Mr. Lam on condition of anonymity. “There will be no rocks and soil to fall around the place when it rains. Horrid food stuffs and turds won’t stick to the ground so easily. People won’t get cut and infected when they fall down drunk and the place will be a cinch for everyone to hose- and how we all love to hose! During busy periods, we can get the Government Flying Service to come over us with those big buckets.â€
In the meantime, geomorphological Cheung Chau, purged completely of anything animal or vegetable, is to be severed from the sea bed and towed to a point off Sentosa island to demonstrate to the Sings that we can be as anally retentive as them -and then some!
May I just ask of the bun festival itself that if the element of daring has been removed by the safety harnesses and the senses of sustenance and good luck gone with the dough and the lotus seeds, what is the point in having the damned thing at all?
September 14th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
Cheung Chau…
Good to know ……