Horse Sense
When things are calm, peoples' eyes tend to glaze over and they give the impression of falling asleep, an impression kind of confirmed if they actually allow their eyelids to droop and start to snore.
When events are jumping, everyone is wide awake and ready to rumble.
The 2014 Budget was a classic non-event, so boring it was difficult to believe even the Financial Secretary himself had found it easy to stay awake while writing it.
One of our better known legislators, and past unsuccessful candidate for Chief Executive, Albert Ho found it difficult to concentrate on the Budget and instead did what quite a few men might have done in such circumstances, he started to surf the internet. And quite by chance – these things happen – he found himself on a website with pictures of attractive young ladies skimpily clothed.
Now at this moment a cleverer person might have quickly made a note of the web address and moved on to something more sober – more politically correct – or even pretended to make notes on the points in the Budget which he would later challenge. But our Albert, apparently determined to prove that electors were right not to make him our leader, stayed on the site long enough for media in the balcony above to take a great many photographs. It is a tribute both to their skill and to modern technology that the photos managed to capture his face and the pictures in such clarity that there was no defence. After an internal Democratic Party procedure, poor Albert was found guilty of damaging the party’s reputation and fined $10,000.
Meanwhile, in broad daylight in a public street a senior local editor was brutally chopped down by thugs hired for the purpose. My column about that incident appears elsewhere on this site.
The Year of the Horse has truly begun. Let us hope we manage to separate the important from the trivial and get the former right.
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