Series 2 of my Mental Ideas Podcast (Oddcast??) will be back on the air @ RTHK Radio 3 in weekly episodes with a new twist, a live studio format and an electric mix of local and international guests!
The new series explores the impact of mental health on relationships in a humorously irreverent, offbeat, poignant & uplifting way. Stay tuned for news of S1’s release on other platforms and a sponsored TV spin-off! 🤞
Mental Ideas Oddcast
Larry Feign, my guest in The Depressed Comedian episode of my Mental Ideas Podcast (clip of us yakking @ The AIBs below), has a new book coming out June 28! Instead of being The Depressed Comedian, he is now officially Happy As Larry.
Larry is bestselling author of some 15 comic books and children’s book series The Fart Brothers, the latter of which he wrote under the pseudonym MD Whalen (until I outed him on air). Presumably, he feared it was a stinker. The Flower Boat Girl is his first historical fiction novel and the culmination of over a decade’s work. You can preorder the book on Amazon and read the first rave review of it here! 🙌
I’ve made it into somebody else’s book!! It’s by Dan Davies, has just been published and is called The Rantings of a Madman on Facebook.
I am flattered to be mentioned in a few of his rants after casting him, aged 53, as a 16 year old boy in Miss Adventure meets Motorhead, which was shown on Funny or Die. Thanks to Chicago radio hosts WC Turck and Kerri Kendall for reminding me of our madcap little escapade gatecrashing a Motorhead gig @ Madison Square Garden in their preamble to an interview with Dan about the book last week!
Dan has experienced international success as an actor and screenwriter. He was a recurring guest in the Trolls Anonymous & Death & The Frozen Tundra episodes of S1 of my Mental Ideas Podcast and will be back again in S2! His debut book is really quirky, funny and the first in a trilogy based on his Facebook rants from 2008 to the present day. Enjoy!
WOW! It’s been 10 MONTHS since Home Kong Kitchen got on a roll and started making serious dough! We’ve spent nearly a year turning our kitchens into mini-Hiroshimas and baking a difference to feed Hong Kong’s homeless! 🇭🇰
Our initiative started as a response to news reports that food waste charities were struggling to feed the homeless during the 3rd Wave of the pandemic. So what started out as the Baker’s Dirty Half Dozen began to bake our own and donate it to Breadline in weekly food drives.
As more and more bighearted Homekongers have rallied to our cause, Home Kong Kitchen has risen. We now bake, collect and deliver homemade breads, bagels and muffins directly to people living on the streets, in unlicensed shelters and refuges most days!
This Easter, Home Kong Kitchen‘s bionic baking community delivered dozens of afternoon teas to homeless shelters and refuges across Hong Kong! Props to Alana Ho for baking the scones, Chriz Lim for the lemon cakes, Raquel Ate for the giant banana cake and our original Baker’s Dirty Half Dozen for the hot cross buns! Not forgetting our amazing community of artists @ Mental Ideas for their handcrafted notes and inspiring artwork!
Besides our regular weekly deliveries to unlicensed shelters and homeless charity ImpactHK, Home Kong Kitchen is now delivering free breakfasts to anybody who needs it anywhere in Hong Kong! If you and your family are struggling to put food on the table, or if you’re from a refuge or shelter that has not yet sampled our baking and would like to, please take a moment to register!
We have lots of events lined up over the summer, including baking workshops in collaboration with Breadline @ Refugee Union, a monthly Picnic Project, a novelty cookbook and our first Bijou Pâtisserie, where you can order our baking! We can’t promise it will be the best you’ve ever tasted, but we CAN promise that every cent we make is donated directly to homeless charities!
To volunteer for HKK as a home baker, bread donator or artist, or to try our baking, email hello@homekongkitchen.com.
Thank you for your incredible kindness and support! 💜 💜 💜
Thanks to South China Morning Post journo Anthea Rowan for featuring me in her article exploring the stormy creative highs and lows of bipolar disorder in Monday’s SCMP!
Thanks to SCMP photographer Antony Dickson for an hilarious impromptu photoshoot on my roof, where for no particular reason (other than the weather was nice) we decided to recreate classic scenes from two of my favorite movies with my new poo Mojo Hobo Kaye!
The Year of The Ox is upon us and to celebrate Home Kong Kitchen will be baking and serving cream teas for refugees @ Refugee Union in Sai Yin Pun THIS SATURDAY (Feb 13) from 2pm! Thanks to our collaborators @ Breadline for arranging this opportunity for us to mark the Lunar New Year in our own little way: the Cornish way!
Cream teas have been steeped in Chinese mythology and tradition ever since 400BC when Confucius tried one, overdid the clotted cream and sagely proclaimed “You are what you… think I’m gonna barf!!!” (His publicist later shortened the quote to “You are what you think.”) Here’s hoping the Year of The Ox will be a lot more creamy and a lot less plaguey than its Ratty predecessor!
If you would like to help me serve teas to refugees on Sat or wish to contribute baking or other gifts of cooking utensils, oils, pasta, rice, old clothes or laptops/ phones/ tablets capable of running the Zoom app (for refugee kids to do home learning), please fill in the form below! 💜
Kung Fat Hei Choi & Sun Tai Kin Hong! 🐂
Incidentally, I did consider serving cow pies instead of cream teas, but living in such close proximity to these feral beauties is enough to turn even the most un-woke meat-stinking Gen Xer vegan!
Also, I’ve got no idea how to bake cow pies. Is it flour, eggs, clotted cream, bananas?
View the gallery for this event: https://homekongkitchen.com/2021/02/15/lunar-new-year-events/
Last month, I announced my pie in the sky intention of making, collecting and distributing 100 Christmas Gift Socks to the homeless! Thanks to the amazing generosity and support of bighearted Homekongers, I can only ever find one sock and that target was nearly trebled!!!
Thanks to everyone who donated their time, energy, creativity and baking to Home Kong Kitchen in 2020! It’s because of you that HKK is collecting and delivering bread, bagels, muffins and other gifts to homeless people living in unlicensed shelters and refuges most days! We are also making weekly deliveries to Impact HK every Friday!
There are many ways you can volunteer for Home Kong Kitchen: you can bake a difference as part of our community of home bakers, you can make a difference as a bread donator, or you can create a difference as an artist on our sustainable bread boxes!
Thank you for your kindness and support! 💜 💜 💜
My virtual awards date was Hobo-dog Kaye (RIP 😢 – though he did at least wait until the awards show was over to do it). My attire was my dressing gown. The time was 2am. I’d run out of wine 4 hours ago so I toasted The AIBs 2020 with a cup of FUEL high protein instant porridge. It was an intense two-part awards program presented with unwavering gravitas. The lightest moment was when the AIB uploaded a mugshot of my leering face dementedly side-eying the award. Even I was scared my photo might glitch to life and shatter the screen of my iPad in a spontaneous smash and grab!
Luckily, it was all over before I could get in one good swing of my axe! Sky News StoryCast and Tortoise Media‘s My Mother’s Murder was announced the Factual Podcast category winner. Congratulations to the Association for International Broadcasting on two excellent awards shows and all the worthy winners! It was a bewildering honor to have been nominated and one of the highlights of my year (2020: sooooooooo gooooooooooooood!)
Hats off (because he has no hair) to the legendary Larry Feign, my guest in The Depressed Comedian episode, which the AIBs featured in their awards show!
Thanks to Hong Kong Buzz for publishing this piece on my Mental Ideas Podcast‘s AIB Awards nomination, film Transference‘s release (available NOW on Apple, Amazon and loads of other indie film platforms!), Proverse Poetry Prize anthology place and other happenings in the buzzy month of November!
You can watch the 2020 AIBs live TOMORROW (Fri Nov 13) and next Monday (Nov 16) in a 2-part virtual awards event webcast at 11pm HKT/ 3pm GMT on the AIB’s website and Facebook page! My cheeky little Mental Ideas Podcast for RTHK Radio 3 is a nominee in the Factual Podcast category. As rank outsiders go, we are the rankest. (The program booklet below certainly provides evidence of that!!!) But I am still giddy with nervous energy and bewildered awe just to be included as a nominee at all!
#2020 AIBs #Association for International Broadcasting #Mental Ideas #RTHK
