Thursday, April 16, 2009

 

E & C

being a safety driven transparent ethical and above board kind of mnc that it is (cough cough) , we the employees of this mnc are required to take a yearly mandatory trainings and courses on various aspects such as motor vehicale /driving /safety ( all our malaysian BUS drivers ought to take this one) and a whole list of ethic and compliance (E&C) modules in addition to "bread and butter" trainings specific to our roles. (we in the company always like to say bread and butter ).

and for E&C we not only need to do the same online training over and over again every year and sign off just to prove that we understand every little details of the do's and don'ts but on occassions the management will force us to do a proper face to face sessions. this make perfect sense because you just won't believe how sometimes people get into really deep shit just because of some seemingly innocuous comments or e-mails. the great bill gates had to pay dearly for breaching antitrust laws and he was actually nailed by one seemingly innocent line in one e-mail to his staff . it's almost like that poor old guy who was sentenced to death by stoning in the great monty python movie life of brian for just saying Jehovah.

JEWISH OFFICIAL: Matthias, son of Deuteronomy of Gath.

MATTHIAS: Do I say 'yes'?

STONE HELPER #1: Yes.

MATTHIAS: Yes.

OFFICIAL: You have been found guilty by the elders of the town of uttering the name of our Lord, and so, as a blasphemer,...

CROWD: Ooooh!

OFFICIAL: ...you are to be stoned to death.

CROWD: Ahh!

MATTHIAS: Look. I-- I'd had a lovely supper, and all I said to my wife was, 'That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah.'

CROWD: Oooooh!

OFFICIAL: Blasphemy! He's said it again!


and how ridiculous can one get than this. an oil company had to pay 2.2 million dollars (and that's not ringgit mind you) for sexual harassment just because some funny guy sent out an e-mail on 25 reasons why beer is better than women. despite not a drinker myself, i thought that is quite lovely but typical of women they don't find it funny. i mean if i were a woman i would just think up and reply with 25 reasons why a beer bottle is better than men and that would be the end of it but not with women. as i always know women can be very devilish and too smart for their own good. they always think about how to squeeze money out of men. 2.2 million dollars compensation for being 'offended' is a lot of jimmy choos there.

and so, i thought whoa, what is so offensive about beer that a woman get paid 2.2MM because of that. and so i googled and here it is. 25 reasons why beer is better than women.

25 REASONS WHY BEER IS BETTER THAN WOMAN

1. You can enjoy a beer all month long.
2. Beer-stains wash out easily.
3. You don't have to wine and dine a beer.
4. Your beer will always wait patiently for you in the car while you play football.
5. When a beer goes flat, you toss it out.
6. Beer is never late.
7. A beer doesn't get jealous when you grab another beer.
8. Hangovers go away.
9. Beer labels come off without a fight.
10. When you go to a bar, you know you can always pick up a beer.
11. Beer never has a headache.
12. After you've had a beer, the can is still worth two cents.
13. A beer won't get upset if you come home and have another beer.
14. If you pour a beer right you always get good head.
15. A beer always goes down easily.
16. You can have more than one beer in a night and not feel quilty.
17. You can share a beer with your friends.
18. You always know if you're the first one to open a beer.
19. A beer is always wet.
20. Beer doesn't demand equality.
21. You can have a beer in public.
22. A beer doesn't care what time you come home.
23. A frigid beer is a good beer.
24. You don't have to wash a beer before it tastes good.
25. If you change beers you don't have to pay alimony

and so, we all had to undergo yearly E&C trainings to make sure that we don't make silly jokes about women and bear their wrath and the company losing millions in compensations. and yesterday i had to take the following courses:-

(i) Code of Business Conduct,
(ii) Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA),
(iii) Proper use of Company Asset,
(iv) Sarbannes Oxley (SOX)
(v)Fraud
(vi) Conflict of Interest
(vii) Safeguarding Important Information
(viii)ix) Antitrust
(ix) Diversity, Equal Opportunity and Respect at the Workplace


I think all malaysian government politicians especially umno fuckers should take this course. and the last one (ix) is especially appropriate to najib if he wants to really understand and conceptualize his "shoot from the mouth and think later" new slogan. i really don't understand this one malaysia shit. i mean how many fucking malaysia do we have all this while?. i know i'm a bit stupid but i think my terengganu friends get it right. they say they heard what najid said is actually "WANG Malaysia". if that's so, the slogan is perfectly understood by umno people. i mean it's now payback time. the time to recoup from "wang malaysia" all that has been spent during the recent election. you know , all those 'politik ONE' and all that.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

 

basquiat

flying out of saigon yesterday i decided to stop over in singapore. i always say that singapore is the most boring country in the world and i think not many people will dispute that. it's probably the most colorless and sanitised place on earth but even then there are some little spots in singapore that is as rowdy and seedy as anywhere else. being so straight and sanitised may be boring but ironically that's the real goal of all good governments. singapore to governments is like readers digest to magazines or walt disney to movies. not good for books, or movies or anything else but exactly the thing we need for politics.

what should one do when one is in singapore? many just go there to shop. may be go and buy a pair of manolo blahnik shoes for the secrectary or mistress or two. but these days you can do these or anything else anywhere. but singapore is a very kiasu place. they will try to outdo each other in everything. even in sales. their newspapers are thick with advertisements on sales. and while leafing through the straits times i saw that they were having a warehouse book sale at expo hall 4B just one MRT stop away from the airport. being a book lover and a cheapskate even if i say so myself i can't pass any book sales or warehouse clearance and so i went there and ended up buying three books. a hardcover exhibition catalogue of BASQUIT, , The Coen Brothers a biography by Ronald Bergan and Islam and the West by Christopher J. Walker. all looked interesting in their own ways. Islam's relationship with the west has always fascinate me and coen brothers are very exciting film directors. and basquit was the only black painter that was truly embraced by the whites.

i first discovered basquiat when i once stumbled into a room of basquiat in MOMA new york where they had this little exhibition many years ago. i couldn't made head or tail out of it. and i still don't. contemporary art is one of the most fascinating and ridiculous thing in the world. all those boring bankers , heads of corporations and cement industrialists and the like try to look interesting by buying ridiculous art. you know, all those jeff koons, damien hirsts and the like. and lately contemporary chinese art. and probably also include the basqiats. at least in the eighties and nineties in case of basquiat for these days i rarely heard anybody talk or write about basquiat.

basquit is an interesting case. a black guy who at one point was homeless and a grafitti artist. he somehow became famous overnight and at one point became a protege of andy warhol and mixed around with the best of NYC art crowd only to spin out of control and died at the age of 27 of drug overdose. his paintngs were 'original' and idiosyncratic.

i never try to analyze paintings and one really shouldn't do so but even so, i had the feeling that this is another classic example of looking at art with ears rather than with eyes as a recent article in newsweek described it. this kind of looking at art is especially true with regards to contemporary art which is now all the rage with the modern chinese artists. some of these artists like yue minjun dished out just the variation of the same painting over and over again and the silly industrialists and bankers keep on buying them over and over again at astronomical price. from the same newsweek article again. are these art expensive because they good or are they good because they are expensive?

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

 

wawaweewah!!!! well done NIZAR!

oh wawaweewaah!!! as borat would exclaim. BN got the Batang but PR got the best part. they have the two burits! er...i mean bukits. it's perfectly acceptable and understandable that batang ai goes to BN. i mean these poor natives are almost still swinging from tree to tree to get around in this remote place and completely ignorant of the new malaysia. and i won't put it past BN fuckers to buy these poor voters with just a couple of pigs each. i mean fuck. this is what if anything, BN really excel in.

but as we all know the jewels are the two bukits. and wawaweewah! well done PAS and PKR! i mean i was half expecting the worst. what with all the big guns and all...and what is bigger than mahathir eh? but i think this is the end of mahathir. he ought to keep his peace now. just shut the fuck up. looks like the two bukits is his waterloo. stop giving trouble to the beleguered najib. the guy has enough problems and among other things to handle his dear missus and our new first lady rosmah (very scary this) without you trying to sodomise him further. and if najib is half as bright as i think he is, he should nicely tell mahathir to fuck off and go and enjoy his sunset years in the maldives or somewhere.

i think mahathir has done an irreparable damage to his image in these past couple of days. he literally flipped over backward and contradicted every single good thing he has been saying in his blog when he resigned and was outside umno since a few months back. but he went flipping mad the moment he rejoined umno. perhaps it can't be helped. an asshole party will turn you into an asshole. my advice to every good citizen: stay away from this shit of a party. let us move forward with a new malaysia. and you know, about that R.A.H.M.A.N prophesy thing? The N should've been NIZAR. he is the new Nik Aziz and even better. He is admired by both the malays and non malays. i pray one day he'll go on to be PAS president and go on to become our PM.

it is a good thing that i'm now sitting in a room on the executive floor of the new world hotel saigon and would not be reading any spins that will surely appear in the local papers tomorrow. i don't want to throw up all over the place.

and so tomorrow, my vietnamese friend will bring me somewhere that he has not told me (where) yet. this guy is getting more cranky lately. in the 'old days' he would entertain me as if he is a slave and i'm the king of bukina faso but these days... i don't know . lets see tomorrow.

Saturday, April 04, 2009

 

theory of everything

stephen hawking is one of the most amazing human beings there is. permanently bound to a wheel chair and with a very sorry looking degenerating body eaten up by lou gehrig's disease, one would expect any person in that situation to give up the fight and ghost. any wheelchair bound malaysian with a broken leg would probably think of death and do nothing but watch cartoons all day. i would if i were in that position (god forbids). but dr hawking is made of an infinitely stronger stuff than that. he is the living proof against euthanasia and should put to shame all those people who think suicide is an attractive option to solve problems.

as far as i know dr hawkings doesn't spend his time watching cartoons (ok may be some) or think about suicide (ok, may be some) but he spends most of his time thinking about the secrets of the universe. he wanted to find a theory of everything. simply put , science has shown that the universe is governed by a few basic laws and made up of a few basic little particles that combine into bigger things. everything in the universe is basically the same thing arranged in different ways. a newt, jesus, you and me, even khairy jamaluddin or najib or monkeys, a plastic cup , a daffodil , the moon, the sun and stars are all made of the same thing . it's a matter of arrangement based ultimately on these few basic laws.

but stephen hawking found discrepencies between these few basic laws. einstein's theory of relativity can explain the workings of very large objects (moons, planets and stars) and little things (atoms, electrons and such) can be explained nicely by newton's quantum mechanics but the two theories fall apart at extreme ends of each other. quantum mechanic falls apart when describing the behaviour of very large objects and theory of relativity doesn't work at extremely small dimensions (quarks and stuff). this gets stephen hawking all worked up. which is a good thing for us less intelligent people. if dr hawking is a lot less intelligent and doesn't have the lou gehrig disease most likely he would be up and about and behave like an average person. he would probably go and play soccer or enter politics. but because he is wheelchair bound but with the brain power the size of this universe he spends his time trying to unlock the secret of the universe by uniting the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. he wants to get a nice elegant equation to sum up the secret of the universe. he's been working at it tirelessly to this day and as far as i know- without much success.

but someone already attempted and showed in the journal of irreproducible results JIR "all theories proven in one graph". i must say i don't understand this graph at all but i used to subscribe to this very good 'scientific journal' and it's one of my favorites in my university days. certainly beats the journal of helminthology.

as they say the journey is the important thing and i hope one day he would find the answer. and perhaps then we will know why we are here and what for?. of course "what for" bit is quite subjective. especially if we take GOD/ALLAH out of the equation. and dr hawking thinks that we can safely rule out god in this. (basic laws about the universe does not need to factor in the creator). and so it's likely that we will continue to behave very interestingly irrespective of whether we know the secret of the universe and why we are here or not.

in fact one of the most fascinating behaviour to me is one exhibited by prostitutes.but not the clients. we all know why they go to prostitues:they just want non complicated sex but the route one goes to get uncomplicated sex are infinite and can be very interesting.

incidentally just now i was reading a back issue of my favorite maagazine SPECTATOR and in the back end 'your problem solved' section there is this funny question.


Q: I have a dear friend, a dear bumbling fool of the old school who occasionally is driven to use the services of a prostitute. In the past he always found them by looking out for immodestly dressed women who are standing in the street smoking with one leg against a wall. Now that so many of these women are in fact, lawyers who are just having a smoking break outside their office, I am concerned that he might get into serious trouble. How should I advice him?

P.R; London SW3.

and the answer is also quite original. but you have to go and look for yourself in The Spectator 29, September 2007.

and incidentally too, there is an article in the current the spectator magazine about that lady MP who used a little taxpayer's money to 'pay for porn'. hmmm...but this crime is minuscule if you know how some of our malaysian taxpayers' money is being spent by malaysin BN government. some even used it to go to disneyland. disneyland over porn? i choose porn anytime.

oh dear, i've digressed so far away now so i'll stop.

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