SARS: Yet Another Slogan

Hong Kong, how you love your precious slogans.

Since buses installed television screens to pump inane garbage at commuters (including the nauseating anti-SARS slogan-like song We Shall Overcome), the Kowloon-Canton Railway, or KCR, has installed similar devices in the first-class carriages of its newest trains.

I was treated to an educational program on how to clean my flat using bleach. Hong Kong is big on bleach, but the smell of it makes me gag. Nothing kills my appetite faster when walking in to a restaurant than to get a strong whiff of bleach off a mopped floor.

The video showed that mixing one part bleach with 99 parts water will make a solution for use in disinfecting the home. The people in the video wiped door handles, floors, keyboards, tables and chairs, kitchen counters, toilets and so on. The table and chairs were made of beautiful wood; bleach isn't the best thing to put on them.

At the video's end, the slogan appeared. All such videos must end in a memorable slogan; that's the law. It read: Cleaning is fine with 1 to 99! Trust me when I say it has a better ring to it in English than it does in Cantonese.

The only thing missing was it wasn't set to music. The producers missed their chance to turn the slogan into a snappy jingle, something nostalgic and Andrews Sisters-sounding. Set it to some up-tempo swing music and they'd have a winner.

Can you hear it? Cleaning is fine with 1 to 99! Cleaning is fine with 1 to 99! Cleaning is fine with 1 to 99...

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