The ABQ Correspondent

THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT

ISSN 1087-2302 Online Edition Number 367.....July 2026

Published since 1985 for clients and contacts of ABQ Communications Corporation, the fuzzy focus of The ABQ Correspondent is "the impact of new technology on society." If you'd like to receive email notification when each monthly issue is posted, please let us know. correspo at swcp dot com

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KEEPING OUR BALANCE (SORT OF)

Last month’s Correspo opened with a piece about Kowloon, the Walled City in Hong Kong, which was obliterated about forty years ago. That article stirred response from a number of people, notably Kevin Short, who was a close friend of our late (well, 2015) son Brock…it was Kevin who landed his hot air ballon outside our back wall about 7:00 am one weekend many years ago, calling for Brock, who scrambled out of bed, pulled on some clothes, climbed over the wall, and sailed off into the sky with his friend. Kevin has since become the artist of surfing in Southern California. It was a surprise to receive this from him the other day, paraphrased and edited a bit with his permission:

I liked your mention of The Walled City.
I spent close to a month there, living adjacent at the original Hang Fook Camp. which is no longer there, (and is missing from online records for the most part). I went to Hong Kong along with some of Jackie Pullinger’s close friends. She was a British missionary in Kowloon who had made a bargain with the head of the Triads to take care of any Triad members that had become drug addicts and were no longer productive. Before Jackie arrived the Triads had been simply executing those non-functioning members, She created somewhat of a non-lethal retirement plan, which, I was told, the head of the Triad thought was good PR within the ranks, as opposed to the death sentence.
I spent most of my time between the Hang Fook camp and Jackie’s original place in the walled City, doing repairs for her. It was truly other worldly in the Walled City, a dirty, slimy, smelly labyrinth.
A beehive of activity all the time.
Power and water were bootlegged; toilets were low, sloping corners of rooms with holes in the wall at floor level.
The Triads knew we were there to help Jackie, so we had their protection. and no one bothered us. You would see the Triad overseers staring from corners, down alleys, watching from balconies. You could recognize them by their tattoos and scars from knife fights. I was the tall blonde American, and when walking around I was glad to not get hassled.
By the end of my time there, I could navigate my way from the camp, which was down the block, to the correct room in the walled city without help. But only that one route!
There was no logic whatsoever to the slippery halls and twisting alleys. Everything was dimly lit.
That place felt like a wild animal that could swallow you at any minute.

Never underestimate your kids’ friends.

…and we recall San Francisco’s Chinatown when we moved to the Bay Area in 1951. Its main drag, Grant Avenue, was then still a bustling community full of exotic merchandise on tables that covered the sidewalks, so you almost had to step into the street to squeeze by. The tables were pulled out of the shops early in the morning and moved back in late in the evening. Several stores featured elaborately carved elephant tusks sculpted by families over three or more generations. Workers from the office district around Montgomery commonly strolled over to the many restaurants in Chinatown for lunch. (My dad went often to a place where they walked down a couple of flights of steps past windows that let them see the kitchen in operation. Several ducks hung near the windows, being taken down by the cooks to boil for a bit in whatever soup they were making that day, then hung back up. Somebody commented once, “Oh look! They have a new duck!”) It was an interesting place for a naïve teenage kid to explore, though the Ping Yuen apartment block whose first building had just been completed, had its scary aspects. It was no Kowloon, but clearly, forces other than the San Francisco City Government had a hand in its operation. Ping Yuen featured some unsettling murders over the years, and as recently as 1977 the “Golden Dragon Massacre” provoked Law Enforcement to do something. The problem was that not only gang members had been killed, but TOURISTS had also, giving pause to those who considered wandering over to Chinatown for lunch. While the Triads are reportedly pretty much in control there now, they gained their status largely by dominating the Tongs (see this also), which seem originally to have been family associations developed to protect the much put-upon Chinese immigrants. A Chinese high school classmate of mine commented seriously one day that his father had influence in three of the Tongs. It still seems wise not to cross the wrong people in Chinatown …well, anywhere…but notably there. Grant Avenue is now tidy, with no hodge-podge of tables in the sidewalks, and not nearly as interesting.

…and there’s Japan, where the Yakuza fill the role of the Triads. When Granddaughter Ondine spent a college year at school in Japan, one of her American professors was engaged to a Japanese lady who worked in some non-criminal aspect of Yakuza operations. When she died unexpectedly, the prof was startled to discover that he was regarded by the Yakuza as one of theirs. She’d been a faithful employee who deserved protection…and he inherited her status. It had/has its practical aspects. As a foreigner struggling occasionally with the government bureaucracy over employment, travel documents, etc, he realized that his incidental problems were expeditiously, magically, being solved. While grateful for that assistance, he understands that he may one day be called upon to return the favors, and he is a trifle uneasy about the form in which that debt must be paid.

…and last…my much younger brothers living in Chicago’s North Shore suburbs some decades since had a female classmate who was reportedly invited to the high school prom by the son of a prominent Mafia figure. Her scandalized mother forbade her to accept the invitation …and got a call from the boy’s mother. The caller was entirely sympathetic. “I understand how you feel,” she said, “but you don’t have to worry. We’ll send them in a bulletproof car.”

Society finds ways to blunder along.

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NELS MUSES
Item:

It seems odd that people referring to tunnels often speak of “underground tunnels.” Why does it seem necessary to say “underground?” Where else is it going to be? Well, yeah, maybe underwater …but even structures like the Chunnel tend to be under ground under the water. Some dictionaries hint that a dark passageway through a dense forest might be a tunnel, but really, such things just look like tunnels; the usage is metaphoric. Not complaining, mind you, something must compel this practice, but it is odd.

Item:

This isn’t a new item, but sticks in memory, because this Volkswagen electric tractor seems so improbable. It looks right. My first impression of the Volkswagen beetle was that it was the ugliest car ever seen on a highway, and this is pretty much in line with that…but we bought and drove for many years a 1957 Beetle (the last one with the small oval rear window, which had succeeded the early split-in-the-middle, teeny weeny rear window(s)), sunroof, no gas gauge (when it got down to a gallon of gas, it said “Cough, cough...Achtung!” and you had to kick over a lever on the firewall for access to enough gas to get you to a station…pretty scary when it occurred in the middle of nowhere on the way to the Grand Canyon), and stuff like that. Great car. Anyhow, the tractor is enough like it to seem promising.

Item:

Somebody steered us to a website at which a camera watches a tomato plant named Sol grow (and blossom...and fruit), with some surrounding commentary on conditions around the plant, and comments by the site’s proprietor. Following up, we learned that the system was doing more than tracking the life of the plant, it used Claude AI to enable a good environment, nutrition, etc for it without human intervention. Indeed, the plant flourished. Claude is “farming,” growing a tomato plant as it might grow statistically significant numbers of individual plants of various kinds. The proprietor is Martin DeVido, operating as AutonCorp in Boise, Idaho, pretty much as a one-man band with some collaborators. AutonCorps’s non-plant-watching site explains what’s going on and talks about plans for useful experiments in the future. It’s intriguing to observe, and easy (too easy for me) to get involved.

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ITEM FROM THE PAST

The original date of this item is unknown…as is

the item itself, which I can’t find, owing to clumsiness

in filing…but it was surely more than twenty-five

years ago, and it would have gone something like this:

LET THERE BE LIGHT

Some of us remember using kerosene lamps to provide light in old homes that were not yet fully electrified. (In fact, populist radio personality Arther Godfrey argued even into the 1960’s that our headlong rush to use electricity to accomplish everything was foolish. Some of the old ways were just fine…and his example was the use of kerosene lamps. Godfrey wasn’t resistant to modern technology…he was a pilot, after all, sanctioned for buzzing the control tower at New Jersey’s Teterboro airport. He was just a bit peculiar.) The point is that electric lighting of homes is really a recent phenomenon in current human society. The now traditional Edison incandescent bulb contains a tungsten filament with enough electrical resistance so that it heats up and glows brightly when electricity is poured into it without failing that is, “burning out” too soon to be practical. Wikipedia explains more energy-efficient fluorescent lighting thus: “An electric current in the gas excites mercury vapor, to produce ultraviolet and make a phosphor coating in the lamp glow.“ Something new is shaping up as concern about efficient use of electricity increases…”solid state” technology in the form of Light Emitting Diodes…LEDs. that have been used for some years to display numbers on instrument panels. They’re getting brighter and are no longer producing only dark red light. Just maybe they’ll be in our lamps and ceiling fixtures some day.

This all is brought to mind by the fact that I was

surprised when changing a burned-out lamp bulb

recently, that it was one of those spiral-shaped

fluorescents…fitting the same shape and space as

the incandescent bulb it was designed to replace.

Most of us disliked those bulbs, whose color isn’t

quite right, and which often takes what seems like

a long time to come up to full brightness…but they

got us through what could have been some stressful

years of electrical shortage.

I replaced that bulb with…ta da!... an LED with

about the same (60-watt incandescent equivalent)

light output. AND…the LED bulb has a switch

that allows selection from three different color

temperatures.

The household LED bulbs began distribution in

2002, apparently, and have steadily been taking over

household lighting since then.

Yes, there are other alternatives to incandescents,

but none that just slip into use with no extra

consideration.

Remarkable.

I’ve saved that burned-out fluorescent bulb, and will

tuck it away in a small box with an explanation of

what it is and what it meant (perhaps a printout of

this). In twenty years, somebody will come across it

and marvel at it…never having seen one. It will

provoke conversation, and may be worth a dollar or

two as an almost-antique.

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This book was written, richly illustrated, and published by excellent grandkid Malia. At 7 (gosh, twelve years ago) she was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes… suddenly, of course; “Get her to the hospital NOW!” and things have been nip and tuck since then with many scary crises. She’s taken control of her life…played and sang at Whisky A Go-Go on the Sunset Strip at 15, put out an album at 16, published this book at 17, and is off to college hundreds of miles from home. She has been videoed reading the book at a kids’ hospital, and every incoming T1D patient there from now on will see that video. Some of us are rather proud of her.

ISBN‎ 979-8320821917

See on Amazon

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