Monday, August 31, 2009

 

agnostic flea

today is our national day (hari kebangsaan) . it used to be called independance day (hari kemerdekaan). i don't know why this change which carry subtle difference in meaning. in fact quite recently anwar and the gang in PKR were questioning why we celebrate 31 august 1957 instead of september 16 1963 as our national day as this is more correct because sabah and serawak were not yet a part of malaysia in 1957. so in a sense sabah and serawak need not really celebrate the national day today. not that too many people seem to feel like celebrating anything today .

malaysia today is at its lowest ebb. everybody is angry and sad. racial polarisation has never been as bad as today. racial tension is at its worst since i can not remember when. political blogs are bristling with incendiery postings and comments are full of hatred. facebook "friends" (those with brains) stop doing silly quizzes and posting inane statements and make comments on latest political happenings which elicit further furious comments. i must admit i did occasionally contribute my share of hate filled comments by calling umno people brainless bastards (which of course they are) and such like.( they deserve worse.).

everybody has an opinion on everything. non muslims comments on kartika beer drinking issue as though they are experts in syariah laws and believe their views are the wisest of them all. some muslims think that parading a severed bull head to show their displeasure at PR decision to relocate a hindu temple in their housing area as an enlightened action. malaysia today makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

today on this national day and right now , my feeling is dark and gloomy and full of foreboding of more worse things to come. i'm always wrong on all sorts of things so i hope i'm proven wrong again. i hope this day is the bottom of the trough for malaysia and we can only move up hence.

but when you're feeling low often times you turn to god, and especially so during this spiritual month of ramadhan. but when your mood is foul , you sometimes have bad thoughts. sometimes i feel like that agnostic flea in a funny cartoon strip that i saw a long time ago. it showed a little flea walking among dog's hairs. because the flea was so minute (in relation to the dog) the hairs look as big as coconut palms on a desert island and the little flea was walking on this island . and the caption says "sometimes i wonder if there is a dog"...my feeling exactly.

religion is a very slippery thing. but it's not the time to jabber about it today eventhough the leit motif of the the great malaysian novel we're living right now is yes, religion. except to say this. everyone has an opinion what god is and what true religion is. some of the best interpretation that i came across recently is this children interpretation of the christian marriage

A Christian should have only one spouse. This is called monotony.

and this on one of the ten commandments.

The seventh commandment is thou shalt not admit adultery.

and you know what, suddenly i feel the sun is shining again....happy merdeka (or national day)....

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

 

presidential read

i was thinking about posting something about henry chinaski (hank) vs holden caulfield as i've been having a bit of charles bukowski binge lately. j d salinger's cathcer in the rye(with angst ridden holden caulfield as the protagonist ) has been one of my all time favorite books- until that is - i met the young and obnoxious (and angst ridden) henry chinaski in charles bukowski's ham on rye. not sure if bukowski's book and the title alludes to jd salinger's book in anyway and i'm not one of those literature mechanics to take apart and find deeper meanings in books. i just read purely for pleasure. so i'll just leave it at that.

but then i stumbled upon this interesting slate article on us president's obama's summer read so i thought i'd post my 2 cents worth of comments instead. (chinaski vs caulfield will have to wait).

what people read always fascinate me and most times i can and do form a personal judgement if a guy or gal is an idiot based on their reading materials. not that i worry too much if a girl is an idiot (i prefer them stupid) as i often find smart- ass women rather boring and irritating most of the times...

but it's of course more complicated than that. take obama's current list for example. if he's just another boring lawyer friend of mine, that list of books would not say anything much about my boring lawyer friend. it doesn't help that i've not read any of those books and only familiar with just one author in the list(plainsong). and since i'm completely ignorant about any of these books i will just shut up and take what this slate article says as a fair view.

this is a president we're talking about. even if he reads ian fleming's james bond book people will perk up and take notice and try to look for deeper meanings in it . and according to this slate article no less than john f kennedy himself said that he read james bond novels for relaxation. and as this article say...

...but those books also seemed to say something about the man who read them. It was just too fitting that Kennedy was reading about a debonair Cold War rake who made his own rules.

yes, just like him...and poor bush... when he chose albert camus' the stranger as one of his summer reads in 2006 there was a bit of raised eyebrows and a lot of derision.

slate again

I'm not sure what to make of this. It's usually college freshmen who suddenly take up the French existentialist's slim volume, and then usually to impress some literature major with wavy hair

and as the slate article described the book....

The main character, Meursault, spends much of his life as the young George Bush did, engaging in escapades that demonstrate little drive or motivation. On a visit to the beach with friends, he gets into a fight with some Arabs. Later, he finds one of the Arabs and without much further provocation shoots him repeatedly.

so in a sense as the (second) slate article put it...which, if you wanted to overinterpret things, gave you enough material to get you through a few packs of Gauloises. never mind that i don't know what the hell gauloises is and have never eaten any . still, sounds like the kind of books i will like. note to myself: must read it someday.

and i also remember reading a funny column in the herald tribune on a plane to somewhere about this and was even moved to do a post on it (and gave my usual rambling 1 cent worth of opinion on it).

and what about our top man? i wonder what najib reads (if he does at all). i remember there was an article in the local paper sometimes back describing najib's library and what i remember most was that there were piles of unopened and still shrink wrapped books in the library. presubambly sent by publishers. and one of the books was dan brown's da vinci code. mercifully still untouched and nicely shrink wrapped. so we didn't get to know in the end what our pm reads. i guess najib would do well to read collections of tuan guru nik aziz's lectures. somebody ought to give these as a present to him.

in fact i can't recall any of our top men ever mentioned the books they read for relaxation. we know that some of them 'write' books but what do they read? we all know pak lah used to at least pen one poem. so in a sense he's quite a poet. someting about searching for al-ghazzali but of course as we all know what he found was just fucking khairy....

obama's summer reads

The Way Home by George Pelecanos, a crime thriller based in Washington, D.C.;

Lush Life by Richard Price, a story of race and class set in New York's Lower East Side;

• Tom Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded, on the benefits to America of an environmental revolution;

John Adams by David McCullough;

Plainsong by Kent Haruf, a drama about the life of eight different characters living in a Colorado prairie community.


Wednesday, August 19, 2009

 

loyar buruk

just found out that there's going to be a new monty python series coming out soon. actually a documentary series on monty python but still, with monty python in it (or what's left of it) it'll still be something very much to look forward to. even by the high standard of monty python , the title of the series is very delicious....Monty Python: almost the truth (The Lawyer's cut).

that is the funniest title of any film that i came across since i don't know when. any mention of lawyers anywhere immediately either make you want to laugh or will raise a red flag. it's just like a mention of oh i dunno...snakes? it's absolutely in character and stand to reason that a majority of politicians are also lawyers which is as it should be for politicians are law makers. and to me both politicians and lawyers, well they are cut from the same cloth. lawyers first choice of career move is almost always to be a politician. it makes perfect sense and it also well, sometimes make me think of snakes...(quite unfair to snakes i know...but we're talking about reputations here....or as those sly bastards in umno now euphemistically referred to as perceptions...)

the best jokes are probably dirty jokes but a close second to me are about politicians and lawyers. i'm a fan of the new yorker cartoons and the great new yorker have compilations of all the cartoons ever published in the new yorker magazines in 'the complete cartoons of the new yorker' . and on top of that they have special compilations of jokes on some aspects that reflect human characters best...like the new yorker book of money cartoons and my favorite, the new yorker book of political cartoons and the new yorker book of lawyer cartoons.

i don't know what is it that make politicians and lawyers so ripe for derision and often hatred. we even have a very popular local compilation called politicians say the darndest. It was so popular that a vol 2 was recently published. i don't know if there are any local publications on lawyers jokes but we have an absolute gem of an expression about lawyers that reflect how we feel about lawyers...it's loyar buruk. there is no perfect translation of this term that i can think of in english language but this term perfectly describes the crooked lawyers.

which brings me to why it moves me to write about lawyers today in the first place. it's about that dickhead rohaizat some shit or other , that disbarred lawyer and umno candidate for the coming permatang pasir by-election.

this guy exemplify perfectly what a loyar buruk is as can be discerned from all the news about him in the media like here or elsewhere. and what's making it worse is the way umno ,this shit of a party is bending over backward trying to defend this bastard. all the more reasons why i hate politicians. and the funny thing is i have a sneaking feeling that kairy jamaluddin may have something to do with this. rohaizat is only 38 so he would be an umno youth member. and KJ is umno youth head so probably he had a hand in supporting this loyar buruk to be the candidate in PP. and kj, this fucking einstein see fit to defend and support this this loyar buruk as a candidate. speaks volume about both...ah well, my blood is boiling again..so i should stop here...

except to add a funny footnote .

one umno blogger that i sometimes read and quite respect his erudite (albiet sometimes long winded) postings is sakmongkol ak47. recently he had a posting why people in PP should vote umno this time. he wrote this before the news about the loyar buruk was out. and when he found this out he had this comment which made me respect him all the more. i guess he's one of the few good guys around in umno..good guys by umno standard that is....

this is his comments after he found out....

these fucking UMNO assholes never learn. just as we are about to defend the party, they have to come out with choosing a candidate that makes UMNO indefensible. bastards.

Sunday, August 09, 2009

 

May Allah have mercy on his soul....

on the day of the historic september 11 event when the twin tower was brought down by the 'islamic terrorists' i was in mulia hotel jakarta and like most others all over the world i was transfixed by the event unfolding. and just like the rest of the world for months afterword i couldn't make sense why this happened. just a year after, i was with a japanese, vietnamese and filipino collegues travelling up from kuta to besakih temple at the foot of bali's mount agung. and on the way i explained to my japanese friend in particular why this happened and tried to explain how these ' muslim terrorists' justified their act . and my filipino collegue commented... i timed you, and you spent more than 1 hour talking non stop....she didn't comment whether my explanation make sense or not though...

and a few weeks back i was with a thai friend travelling down from ubon ratchathani at the eastern thai-laos border and on the way back to bangkok we stopped over for a quick visit at the 'minor angkor wat' ruins of prasat phanom rung in buriram and all the way from buriram to bangkok while he did the driving i explained to him about 'muslim extremism' and when we arrived i checked in into the imperial queens park hotel on sukhumvit road - just a few minutes walk away from soi cowboy, the naughty place frequented by ugly farangs - and the first thing i saw on bbc was the news about the marriot and ritz carlton bombing in jakarta...

and today we read the news that nordin muhammad top , the alleged perpetrator of this act was 'finally' killed by the indonesian crack force. except we're not sure yet and may wait a little longer for confirmation. in any case the news is greeted with sighs of relief by many in indonesia and a lot more everywhere are very happy with the news. one of my indonesian fb friends is completely elated by the news but not me. and to be true to myself i sent a small post explaining to her why he was moved to choose this path and may Allah have mercy on him.

and not to repeat myself i'm copying below a comment i sent out to malaysian insider how i feel about this...

written by greengreenbottle, August 08, 2009

the US sends hundreds of thousands of troops to muslim countries and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent muslims and still killing them now...and yet when the syahids nordin and azahari killed a few to show their opposition to the US opressions of the muslim land they were villified as evil...

i don't condone what nordin and dr Azahari did but i sure as hell understand their anger... may Allah show his mercy upon their souls...

ps Dr Azahari was educated in Australia and not some obscure kampung madrasah... almost all the so called muslim terrorists who are worth their salts have some form of western education in western lands...so go figure...

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

<$BlogItemTitle$>