Wednesday, December 31, 2008

 

my 2008

today is the last day of 2008 and what a year it has been. i've never done this before but here's my best and worst list for the year.

A for asshole: the biggest asshole of the year

local: khairy jamaludin

kj otherwise known simply as the SIL (son in law) is without doubt the biggest dickhead in 2008. according to some he's one of the biggest factors contributing to the worst BN result in malaysian election history. he more than anyone else exemplify what is wrong with umno. this is quite ironic. khairi has everything, the connection, the brain and the devillish good look but he helped malaysians to wake up. it finally made people sick of UMNO, a party run and controlled by greedy self serving corrupt politicians .

international: george w bush

if not for bush a black man would never have been elected as the next president of the united states. bush is hated so much at home and abroad that no matter how good a republican presidential candidate had been, he would still be considered a laibility as he would be seen connected with bush and would be beaten by anyone from the democrat party. what an ending for bush. he leaves the presidency with the economy in tatters and the foreign adventure far from any form of closure. and to cap it all a pair of shoes was thrown in his face. i think bush will not loose sleep thinking about hundreds of thousands of lives he help to destroy in iraq and afghanistan but he will never ever forget this insult. he'll be tormented till he dies.


B for blog: best blogs of the year


i don't actually read too many blogs. i generally steer away from political blogs as these usually only make me feel depressed and angry. according to a newspaper report recently there are well over 1000 malaysian socio-political blogs but the few notable ones for me and that i visit quite frequently are as follows:-

rocky's bru :- for his breaking news which i may or may not agree
chedet :- for his opinionated views which i may or may not agree. one thing i love about blogs is the comments to a post but unfortunately one notable feature of chedet's blog is the people who comments to his posts. these people are some of the most retarded yes men and sycophants you'll ever see in blogosphere. i never read comments to chedet's blog. they are too stupid. i may be wrong because i had never pass beyond the first ten comments and these first ten were nothing but "yes tun i fully agree with you..." and variations of this crap. one memorable commentor wrote how happy she was that tun ate a whole plate of mee when he visited her home. what a cunt.
khalid samad: - to check the pulse of the new PAS . khalid is the younger brother of sharir samad and shah alam member of parliament.
niamah :- probably the only socio-politico blog that can make me laugh and cry at the same time.

there are a few others that i wish to visit more often but they make it rather less user friendly for comments. jed yoong for example. and the worst are those that were once open to all and now restricted like feisal tehrani. what does mr tehrani think he is? too precious for the common people who want to learn something from his 'great' mind?

and unfortunately some of the more fun blogs that i go quite often are no longer active. one that used to be my favorite is grumpy old bookman. it is no longer active since nov 2007. i love it not only for the mass of information he gave but also his sense of humor. and another one which has been inactive since november 2008 (which is a pity) is rox un cut. this is the only lady blogger that i trully am impressed with. her intelligent sock it in the face ballsy kind of writing is so entertaining that it doesn't matter what she writes about. i hate to be her husband or boyfriend. being a male chauvinist pig myself my kind of lady is one who put diapers on babies, clean and cook while i laze around watching tv and i think with this kind of lady i would have a fight from day one.

i save the best to last. my blog of the year without doubt goes to bibliobibuli. this is the only blog that i visit religiously . (a) because i'm a book addict. and (b) i love the catty fights in the comments which i must admit i joined and sometimes started myself. i'd love to have mud wrestling with some of the more agressive women commentors while we fight over melville or some of those boring booker books.


C for.....

never mind. it's too long already so i just stop here.

Saturday, December 27, 2008

 

tsunami revisited

four years ago on this day 26 Dec one of the worst natural disasters in our life time happened very close to home. fifteen months after it happened i went to Acheh to join the 'habitat for humanity' and Indonesia office effort to build houses for the victims of the tsunami at emperom.

i was the only volunteer from my company from malaysia that came but i didn't actually work very much. bricklaying isn't exactly difficult but too exhausting under the hot sun so being a lazy bugger that i am i just worked a bit in the morning and then just ambled away talking to people. and anyway , i came basically to show my solidarity and my sympathy to the victims.

and the victims too just stayed away from the housebuilding activities. i guess they just felt that they have suffered enough. just wait for the houses to finish and come in. after all the house building were contracted out already. all the same i felt a bit disappointed not to meet any of them apart from a few kids who came milling around us.

and so i spent my one week there walking around and snapping photos and talked to kids and any people that i happened to meet. heard a lot of grim and sad stories and rumours. one rescuer mentioned that he was perplexed why all the women victims that they found were completely naked but the men or children were not so.

and humans being humans, some victims were quite petty. some complained the houses being built for them were smaller than their neighbours (that were built by different donor organization.). some even complained that the houses were built in a shoddy manner. (probably right too with all the busy bodies and do gooders like me messing around with the bricklaying and house paintings).

on my last day there the 'habitat' people drove me around to see all the worse hit areas and where it started first at lokhna beach. i couldn't help myself and cried a little.





Saturday, December 20, 2008

 

angulimala and karma

stole another hotel book today. a good one. and here's a confession. i've never stolen anything in my life- except hotel books on a few occassions . and by these i mean the bible and books on buddha's teachings and hindu holy books. i think hotels are probably glad someone steal these books and only too happy to replace them back. seems like nobody ever touch any of these. except people like me. i don't understand why hotel guests don't get interested in any of these books. to me the christian bible and the mahabharatas are some of the best ever fictions written by men. these guys must have eaten very high quality mushrooms while penning these phantasmagorical tales.

this time i nicked a little buddhist book titled simply as 'Karma' and the reason why i stole it was because i got sucked up by the first chapter that include a buddhist story of angulimala. a disturbing tale about a man that killed a thousand human lives and the only punishment he got was just a few kicks and sticks and stones thrown at him and yet when he died he attained parinivarna , the ultimate aim of (buddhist) life . this book went on to discuss if this is fair and the nature of karma. an interesting philosophical tract meant for general public written in very easy to understand conversational style.

although angulima looks like a puppy compared to bush , in one respect angulimala's story isn't very much unlike the now infamous bush shoe throwing incidence. bush is responsible for hundreds of thousands of death (not including a couple of thousands or so of his own people) and what did he get in return? a pair of size ten shoes thrown at him and the unforgettable words "this is a farewell kiss you dog!".

but unlike angulimala, bush has not shown any remorse for the crimes that he has commited (and still continue to commit) so i don't think he'll be attaining parinivarna anytime soon even if he's a buddhist and not even sure if he'll enter christian heaven when he dies.....

Friday, December 12, 2008

 

parrots

i like birds. and this time i mean the feathered variety. among the species of birds i think i like parrots the most. parrots are some of the most beautiful of birds species and as a group they are one of the most fascinating. And there are so many different types of them. From the huge grey african parrots to big and exuberantly colored macaws (which is a form of parrot) in the amazonian jungles, to the beautifully crested galahs of australia which is a type of cockatoos which is a type of parrot. their smaller cousins the cockatiels are no less beautiful. Some are small and gather in huge flocks like the budgerigars or the lorries and some are very streamlined and multicolored like the rosellas. and there are the nice lovebirds which is a type of small rather dumpy parrots and there are also parakeets and lorikeets. they may come in different shapes and sizes and names but one thing is common to all of them. they have funny looking hooked beaks.

i've never seen flocks of budgies or any other parrots in nature. have to make do with those beautiful nature programs on tvs except one species. i've seen flocks of perhaps a hundred or so galahs on gum trees in central tasmania on quite a few occassions. they were amazingly grand and beautiful but farmers simply hate them because they can be real pests which is a real pity.


i used to keep a pair of budgies when i was a student in tasmania but i soon get tired of them and gave them to a school girl who later went to study acting or theatre or something artistic. don't know if she ever become an actress or amount to anything much. i haven't heard from her for years.

i also used to keep a pair of indian ring necked parakeet (Psittacula krameri manillensis) . this species is very common in nothern india and i saw many of them all over the mughal monuments around agra and new delhi. but these birds screeched like mad every the morning and evening that i soon got very pissed off and in the end let them fly away. the moment i opened the cage door the pair shot off into the sky like bats out of hell. i guess i wasn't too good in taming these birds.

i also once kept the hanging parrot Loriculus g. galgulus. This is one of the smallest parrots in the world at less than 5 inches from the tip of the beak to the end of the tail. and it's an endemic species to our land malaysia. it's bright green in color and one of the unique features of these little birds is that they hang upside down when they sleep. they are very beautiful creatures but one thing i really hate about this species is that they shit a lot and scatter the shit all over the place. but i continue keeping the pair until one day when i was in bangkok and got an sms from my worse half. she said one of the birds died. i got terribly upset and asked her to make sure she feed the other one properly. and when i came back the remaining bird was nearly starved to death. my wife knows nothing about biology (and not much of anything else either) and she feed my parakeets with bird seeds instead of fruits which is the only food the hanging parrots eat. in the end i felt too guilty to keep the bird by itself in the cage and let it flew away.

and so now i have no more parrots but i do have one of the best books on parrots. it's a big coffee table monograph first published in 1977 Parrots of the World. one very good review of the book was available on amazon.com and an exerpt is below. you can read the full descreption of the book here.

It was the first monograph on parrots published in over a century, and it's still overwhelming. Approximately 340 species of parrot, including all extant species, are represented and described. There are 155 full-page illustrations by William Cooper. Most have more than one bird in the picture so that nearly 500 birds, including divergent sub-species, are illustrated.

and quite incidentally i'm now (still) reading a patrick white's short story "the cockatoo" in his short story collection the cockatoos. which is a very nice 'quiet' story about old people and feeding cockatoos.

The title story centers around a couple that have stopped speaking to one another, communicating only by written notes they leave for each other. A stray cockatoo in the yard that returns when fed brings them closer together again, but as more cockatoos come a peaceful world is again shattered.

white's story makes me feel moody but the good thing about parrots is that there are many parrot jokes to cheer you up. I've mentioned one already in my old post ( a bald patch September 09, 2008). and here's another one. One day a woman went to a pet shop to buy a christmas present for her teenage daughter. she asked for a parrot but the shop owner said that unfortunately all parrots have been sold except that one over there. the woman took a look and seemed to be happy with the parrot. can it talk ? she asked. oh yes, the man said but i have to warn you. she was kept in a whorehouse before it was sold to this pet shop. the woman said too bad but i'll take it anyway. i promised my daughter a parrot. and so she brought back the parrot to her house. when the parrot saw the new house she commented. hmm... very nice...new mama san, and new house.after a while the teenage daughter came back from school and the parrot made another comment...hmmm..very nice... a new mama san, a new house and a new girl... and in the evening the father came back from work. the parrot took one look and said... hmmmm... a new mama san, new house, a new girl but same old customer...hello there mr simeonides...

and talking about that, i'll be travelling to bangkok again next week and perhaps i'll go and drink coke in that go go bar in soi cowboy again... the best one if you must know is 'de ja vu' and i'm feeling quite de ja vu already....

Sunday, December 07, 2008

 

taste of cherry

watched another turtle fucking movie a couple of nights ago. a very good one. it's the iranian abbas kiarostami's taste of cherry. if i don't know better i'd think this is a porn movie by the sound of the title but it's nothing of the kind. far from it. it's a quintesssential art house movie . a meditation on suicide in fact. how far from porn can that be.

this is one of the movies often cited by malayisan censor board as an example of what movies should be like. mr kiarostami can make brilliant movies without stepping on the toes of iranian censor board and it's very restictive rules. and so why can't malaysian movie makers give us quality movies like these iranian films instead of making rubbish that pretend to be cutting age and liberal local turtle fucking movies that gets on censor board and everybody's nerves?

in malaysia we have two types of films. one is the yasmin ahmad kind of films which tend to have problems with the censor board and nobody watches and another is movies made by retards for general public whose IQs are just about 5 points above an average monkey. it's a lose lose situation either way. and so i still don't watch local movies and just watch repeats of coen brothers to cheer me up or watch dark art house movies that only make me feel depressed.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

 

the whys, the whys....


today i made a call to one of my indian colleagues in mumbai to say how sorry i am at what happened on 26 11. i feel truly sad at this senseless killings at the taj mahal hotel , trident oberoi and a few other places around the city. and it's a very close call to many of my colleagues. the taj mahal is a preferred company hotel for many of us coming to mumbai for business. at the last count almost 200 innocent people died. early reports indicated that muslim 'terrorists' wanted to kill as many ' infidels' as possible; preferably the americans and the british and jews.

this last week of november has been a particularly crazy month. at the same time of mumbai massacre, hundreds of muslims have been senselessly killed in nigeria by christians and animist tribes in the tribal and religious clash in jos..at the last count almost 400 muslims killed. suicide bombings in iraq afghanistan and pakistan continue as usual but they now sound almost like normal road accidents. what happened in mumbai makes thailand tom yam cow boys swarming key airports look funny in comparison.

whenever anything truly bad, astoundingly tragic things happen, one of the most natural thing for humans to do is to ask WHY?
but when it comes to politics this is not the case. and so yet again, when this terrible mayhem in mumbai occurred, we very quickly get the explanations on the who, how , what, and when...but not the whys. the whys will only be asked and eventually given a spin in all kinds of directions that the truth will never be fully uncovered or worse yet, the spin will start and become another justification to spark the next round of tragedy.

when 9 11 occured, robert fisk tried to ask the whys and he was villified for that. and so, i'm sure anyone who will try to ask the whys of mumbai 26 11 will not be listened to. or won't be taken seriously. everybody is busy with other important things. countermeasures, for example. or revenge by other name. but william dalrymple tried.and there's a good discussion and comments to his view. i think he's on to something. people ought to listen and you can read it here.

as for me, i have long given up trying to understand the nature of human beings. i take solace in this quote from ingersoll.

In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.

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