BOOKED

Ithaka

2011-12-26T13:18:00.010+08:00

when jackie onassis died in 1994 her then boyfriend, a jewish belgian businessman read ithaka a poem by the greek poet c p cavafy at her funeral service. i found this out from a nyt column published in our local nst. i don't understand poetry and never read any. always thought poetry is for women sissies homosexuals and cronically depressed people. i thank god that i'm none of the above. the only poetry that struck a chord with me until then was lewis carrol's nonsensical hunting of the snark . full of adventure and illogical fits and madness and nonsense, much like real life is. sometimes i do view life as a form of a hunting of the snark until i discovered ithaka thanks to that jewish belgian businessman final farewell to his partner.

reading ithaka for the first time makes me want to cry . how sublime how true and beautiful it is! and as the year 2011 has flitted by and comes to an end it's a fitting reminder to myself how true the poem ithaka is....

Ithaka

C.P. Cavafy

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,

so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor,
Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard
(C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992)

what i want i won't get

2011-11-26T08:28:00.002+08:00

last week when i visited bang malea temple ruins in seim reap i saw a guy perched on a stone ledge with a big camera on a tripod trying to take a shot of some scene which i didn't quite see the significance of. there was nothing special at where he was aiming the shot at. no ornate carvings or ornamentation of any sort. just plain jungle.

bang malea is out of the angkor complex and very much less visited by the normal tourist hordes . it's ta phrom on a bigger scale with the same scene of temple ruins overgrown with trees and clasped by buttressed roots of fig trees. since i've made my rounds of the angkor complex several times from my previous visits before i decided to go to the less visited areas particularly the magnificent but politically contested preah vahear right at the thailand cambodia border in the north east and take a leasurely drive down to Koh ker and preah khan to bang malea and back to siem reap town. But things rarely go as you plan and i ended up only visiting preah khan and bang malea where i met this guy taking shots precariously perched on a stone ledge far from the other group of package tourists.

and so i carefully skipped up stone by stone to him and said don't worry i'll be careful not to trip over his tripods and we got to talking. turned out that he is from LA and has been to cambodia previously for a brief visit and fell in love with the country and the people and now he is having a longer month long visit to explore the country better. he is probably in retirement and so could afford to do this . He's probably in his sixties but could be much younger and look in the best of health. Lanky and thin and unlike the usual overweight and out of breadth foreigners you tend to see on the usual package tours everywhere.

Cambodia and also much of south east asia isn't too expensive and i thought to myself . hey i can do that. when i retire i'll take a month out and stay in bali, than go to luang prabang for another month and then to pai in thailand for another and on to may be baguio in the philippines and than sabah and yangon and round up by staying in siem reap in time to see the birds (feathered kinds) in prek toul bird sanctuary in tonle sap by december....holiday all the year round...

but even a full year round holiday could be a bore. there's such a thing as holiday fatigue. human can sometimes be such bastards . nothing can please us ALL the time. perhaps all those spiritual people got it right. perhaps those buddhist monks lead the happiest lives. but perhaps not. nobody can run away from his inner demons. the yearning and impossible search for peace. i'm fucked.

son of a father

2011-10-26T08:38:00.006+08:00

as i'm writing this, my old father is in a hospital due to urinary complication and serious chronic asthma attack. he is much better and out of danger now. but i feel bad as i could not be by his side as i'm a few thousand miles away in luang prabang laos which can't be helped. he is warded when i am already out of the country for several days.

and then i see this guardian cif news which is striking on many levels. and although i'm not a theatre goer i wish i could go buy a plane ticket right now and head straight to the theatre. One of the comments sum it best...

from SLIMZ comment:-

.....A son tries to look after his father, an old man, in a stage set that looks like a gleaming modern appartment. The back wall of the stage is a huge portrait of a beautiful Christ. This image of Jesus is immense, the size of a building and his face is beautiful, patient, kind, still and unmoving. And in front of this portrait the drama plays itself out. The son, a middle aged man in a suit, would like to get ready to go out. His father watches TV then shits himself. The son clears up the mess. Then the father shits himself again. Once again the son clears up the mess.

This continues. Over and over. The father constantly shitting himself. The son cleaning. Above them the image of Jesus, kind, impassive, unmoving, still, dead, loving, patient..

.....Then terrible things start to happen to the image of Jesus....

life is like that...

2011-08-11T21:17:00.008+08:00

the day that guy DSK the once sure bet for the next president of france had kinky sex with that african refugee hotel maid in new york sofitel hotel and ran off and got apprehended in jfk airport i was at the same airport too. i felt funny the way some significant events sometimes happen near you. when thailand had the last coup i was cooped up in a hotel not very far away. when the second bali bombing occured i was booked in a hotel less then a kilometer away. it goes to show that all kinds of funny things happen just near you everyday. just that you mostly are not aware of it. it's perfectly conceivable that the guy sitting next to you in a posh restaurant is a serial killer. or have just raped a six year old girl. just that he's not caught yet. or ever will.

this DSK fellow's sexual madness may seem to be incomprehensible to some but it is all perfectly normal. normal in the sense that if we know what men do when they think people aren't watching, it's absolutely astounding. there's no end to human depravity. most of us are real bastards when we really get down to it.

the other day for instance. i was having a formal meeting in our -what they call- iroom with this perfectly straightlaced and serious guy . a high flyer in an MNC. and in the middle of the discussion he said, ok let me show you this neat system where we can share the documents...and i said oh no, i'm very bad with all this new stuff. he said, no, it's very simple i'll show you. his laptop was connected to that thing that projects the image onto the big screen and he clicked his laptop keypad a few times and before he could do anything ten or so pornograpic images of couples screwing and pussy close-ups appeared in all their glory on the screen. his acute embarrasement was somewhat lessened by the fact that we had -what they call- one-on-one meeting rather than in a big room full of people. and i tried to lessen it further by asking him to copy the glorious images onto my thumb drive.

but that goes to show you never know the secrets of men until they get caught or they are blown out by some stupid clicks on the keypads. so be careful when you're doing big presentations. keep all your nasty stuff in external drives.

all these remind me of another thing. i haven't been reading much lately although i dip into a few short stories now and then. the last story i read is a story simply titled 1% about bikers in "playboy's College Fiction: A collection of 21 years of contest winners". 'Haven't read any novels for quite a while although i've been searching second hand bookstores for the late david foster wallace's infinite jest for quite sometimes now. i'm piqued when i heard the author mentioned that the book was written after a few of his friends committed suicide (which he too later did) and his comments that he was surprised many readers think the book funny whilst he considered it a very sad book. he said all these (and much more) in a fascinating interview with charlie rose. infinite jest is a gargantuan and 'difficult' book and in all likelihood i will not finish it as i tend to these days but one other book that i've been looking for i'll most likely finish it in one or two sittings. it is one racy and evil book that i think i will enjoy. i've been searching this book by the late Sebastian Horsley, his memoir Dandy in the underworld high and low to no avail but one day i'll get it. this guy admitted that he had slept with thousands of prostitutes and was not ashamed of it. he even gave a rather funny and smart guide to whoring as you can see here. that idiot DSK should have adopted sebastian horsley's philosophy or taken his advice rather than destroying himself in such a silly manner in the NYC sofitel.

the hutongs

2011-06-12T09:47:00.006+08:00

i skipped one of the sessions of a congress i attended last april in beijing and decided to walk the hutongs around liulichang instead. didn't feel guilty about this as the session did not really concern me. i was just an observer afterall. It was one of the last sessions and half of the attendance were nowhere to be seen since the day before. The ones that were present looked bored to death and some of the african nations' representatives were in total stupor since day two of the week long affair.

most of government representatives of all the continents and members of the UN were there. the opening was grand, with some africans looking magnificent in their colorful national attire and the rest choose to be safe and came in dark or black suits. the early sessions were rather formal as to be expected but the sessions quickly degenerated into semi casual affair. what i found remarkable was that this congress generally mirror the state of the world as we live in now. Day one started enthuistically enough. minor african nations clamoured and competed with each other to put their names on record by seconding every motions put up by bigger western countries . we support the recommendation put forward by Germany, said the representative of lesotho or some such country. we agreed and seconded the proposal by the USA , exclaimed burkina faso. Asian nations were quiet except thailand but perhaps understandable as this was a food safety congress and thailand is an important agricultural nation. singapore was alert but keep their peace. japan was very attentive but didnt' say much. malaysia didn't utter a word for whole duration of the congress and maldives slept all the way through. and by the third day the meeting was generally conducted among a few representatives of the western nation and china. the rest took time off to do sight seeing.

and so i too went to the hutongs around the famous tourist area of liulichang. but even the hutongs are now very much geared to tourists and you can wander around anywhere with perfect safety and peer into the homes and little shops or take pictures with not a glance from the locals. the only good thing about this hutong area was that it is still not visited by the package tourist hordes and you just occassionally see a depressed looking white who was probably a travel writer. and you can still see that strange chinese toilets where the doors are absent and people just squat and shat alongside each other. how can they do this is beyond me.

it is interesting that paul theroux didn't mention about this in his funny travel book on china riding the iron rooster. he whined and grumbled about the chinese and their spitting, that other strange chinese behavior which i have never witnessed even since the first time i started travelling throughout china in 1997 . but i could see the open door toliets everywhere even now and paul theroux did not seem to care or saw it even when he was travelling around in 1980s.

i grieve

2011-05-02T22:31:00.001+08:00

osama is dead.
i grieve

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYJwYjanCRQ....

world book day

2011-03-12T05:09:00.003+08:00

today i read a facebook status update from one 'fb friend' that this month of march the world celebrates world book day . how stupid of me. as much as i love reading (for pleasure i might add, although in this facefuckingbook era of distraction and short attention span disease , it's getting harder and harder to pleasure myself from reading books) i never realize till today that is, that we have a world book day. but i guess it's entirely understandable. having world book day that is. afterall we have just about world this or that day practically everyday.

it's good to know that book lovers and booktrade people celebrate this day in many different ways. i imagine some bookreading groups having their special gatherings . i imagine maybe sophie fucking kinsella brigade will have their own celebration by baking a cake in the form of the latest book by SFK and eat it. book stores will have special sales. A world book day website says that UK and ireland world book day was on 3rd of march and as the site puts it;

A main aim of World Book Day in the UK and Ireland is to encourage children to explore the pleasures of books and reading by providing them with the opportunity to have a book of their own.

i never thought the british children have any problem to 'have a book of their own' .that noble aim sounds very much like what countries in africa or fucking bangladesh ought to have. i would have thought for the uk, "opportunity to have a book of their own" should be replaced by say, ipads...

and here, how did we celebrate world book day? i'm not sure if we did anything. unless you count the launching of the ex pm's memoir as a part of the event or a 'game' posted on the status update of one of my 'fb friends'. the rule is to open to page 56 of the book nearest to you and write the 5th sentence and post it as your fb status update.

infantile, but could be quite a fun trivial pursuit with interesting result. the only problem is the nearest book anybody here have is probably in the town library. and this was amply demonstrated by the response to this fb friend's status update. out of twenty or so responses to his post, none did as required. all posted inane and unrelated comments.

but i could easily do this. i have here beside my bed a side table at arm's length away with four books on top of it.at the bottom of the stack is colin thubron's travel book the lost heart of asia,next is a small artbook 'flowers', on top of that is phillip larkin's "Required Writing" Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982, on top of that is Intercontinental's travel guide book 'Best of China' and the topmost and qualified as the nearest is a quarterly literary magazine 'Story' (summer 1996 issue).

i read somewhere sometimes ago that j d salinger's first fiction was published in 'story' and since then i religiously collect this magazine whenever i can find them. which is not easy as you can only find them in second hand payless book sales here. and even then quite rarely. stories in story rarely dissapoint. and the 5th sentence on page 56 of this volume is this . it is from a story "May be autumn is over ' by Jeff Maehre. It is his first published story.

I didn't know if I was standing over his spleen or stomach or eyeball or what.

now, don't say i did not celebrate world book day....

falling out of love with the internet

2011-03-02T09:25:00.004+08:00

i used to like the internet. very much. but not much anymore. the first time i started surfing the net was in the mid nineties. in those days internet use here was still not widespread and even with a slow computer and no broadband you can get fast downloads. not anymore , even with broadbands and better and fast computers. but that's not the reason why i don't like interenet anymore.

when i first started using the internet it was still quite new. but even then the greatest thing about the net that i like most was that most of the useful things you want to read or see , you can get for free. there were not too many super applications like you have today. there were no youtube, or blog or googlemap, or wikipedia or twitter or facefuckingbook then. but hey, even from the beginning there were a lot of porn. and if you're not too stupid you can get a lot of downloads for free. you just can't escape pervesion and prostitution. even in cyberspace. but it is perfectly understandable. human are just human. it is in our nature to exploit women . and in the early days i must admit i did check out some of these naughty sites. until one day when i booted up my computer and there on the desktop was this picture of a woman spreadeagled with a huge dong 'logjammed' in her vagina. no matter how i tried to delete the thing it just wouldn't go away until i finally gave up and brought it to a computer shop to clean it up. and from then on i rarely go into those dark sites again. but that's not really the reason why i don't like the net anymore.

it is amazing how much internet has changed our way of life and i've not met anyone who isn't a net addict to some degree. it is probably the most unrecognized disease of modern days. and the irony is that for many people it doesn't make them much 'happier' than their pre-net days. one of the most insidious effect of the net on me at least is this. it kills my book reading habit.

this is also quite ironic because with the internet an average person probably 'read' more than they ever did in their pre-net life. but it's not the same anymore. like eveyone who is a net addict , i'm now experiencing attention deficit disorder. we want everything fast and brief. we're impatient and easily distracted and easily waylaid by 'links'.

i hardly pick up a book anymore. which is another irony because my book collecting has never slacken down and the library is growing bigger by the month. last night i picked up an outdated biography of The Coen Brothers who are my favorite film directors which i hope will distract me from the internet a bit and stop me from checking out the retarded status updates of my fb friends. ok, may be not stop alltogather but ....oh never mind....

before and after

2011-02-18T17:47:00.003+08:00

i am not very adventurous when it comes to magazines. (i'm not adventurous in anything for that matter). i tend to stick to the same old titles and when i like a certain magazine i will religiously collect every issue i can get of it. well, back issues that they sell at discounted price at least. and so i now have (among others) a respectable collection of the spectator , architectural digest, the new yorker, apollo, art news, arts of asia and granta. the last one is not strictly a magazine but a literary quarterly of course. and many years ago i used to subscribe to scientific american, art in america and my favorite scientific magazine of them all, the cheeky journal of irreproducible results. and whenever i travel i steal the economist from the aircraft.

i never realize until quite recently that the spectator is a tory leaning magazine and i hate the fucking tories. but it's too late now... when i was young i have this habit of reading newspapers from back to front. meaning i read sport pages first and then the racy stories and book pages which are always toward the middle or the end of the papers too and work my way to the front pages. and very often i never get to the front page which is quite fine because if you know malaysian newspapers, you know that the front pages are filled with nothing but cocksucking stories about some asshole ministers cutting some fucking ribbons at ground breaking ceremony of a new supermarket building and shits like that. and most days are even worse, you get these fuckers pontificating on some dumb issues that make you want to puke all over the paper.

oh dear, there i go off the rail again. ranting like a bastard at mere mention of these politicians. but as i was saying, i have this habit of reading things back to front and all the best writings in the spectator are at the back of the magazines. columns like low life and high life (that's two separate columns , please) are really demented and i love them . and so i am hooked and keep on buying the spectator.

as for the architectural digest the best thing about it is for me to have a peek into famaous people's homes and palaces. although i hardly read any of the columns in this magazine i love looking at the paintings they hang on the walls and salivating over their libraries. sometimes they have this before and after issues where they show an old house or rooms before and after renovation and interior decoration which is quite nice too.

which reminds me about the time i went to the dentist recently. most medical and dental clinics have really rubbish magazines in the waiting room. all those free magazines from credit card companies or airlines. and for some reasons motoring magazines (which i really hate- obviously for men patients ) and woman magazines (which i never read). and you can have some idea how rich some of these dentists and doctors are by the magazines they put in their waiting room. not many people i know read yatching magazines or those tatlers and wine spectators .... bastards.

and here i was waiting my turn and i thought hey let's have a look at this woman magazine then . i picked one at random and actually found some of the articles quite interesting. you know all those silly stuff how to make your man love you forever or how the wife of this asshole minister spend her time at home and such. won't make me start collecting women's magazines but enough to lessen my anxiety anticipating the coming pain and even more painful amount of money i had to part for the effort. and i remember this one before and after article. for before it shows a picture of a beautiful , slightly homely and innocent looking young girl . and then they start doing her up. it shows a series of 'improvement' steps from what i think they term as 'the facial' right up to dolling her up in proper costumes. and walla! they then show the masterpiece. her 'after' picture . she now looks like a fucking prostitute in a kind of dolce & gabanna costume went riot. God! women are so stupid! give me the innocent village girl anytime instead of this fucked up madness.

love hate relationship with books and authors...

2011-02-05T11:55:00.006+08:00

i've often wandered why i like books and writings by authors that i know i won't like to be friends with. these writers i find distasteful in some ways and not people that i would even want to meet or be associated with in any way. but i can read all their books no matter what they write on.

and today while going to the bathroom as usual i picked up a book at random from my library which has now spread into my bedroom . the book is (again) orhan pamuk's other colors and the first page i flipped open turned out to be chapter 52 titled Andre Gide. here mr pamuk mentioned gide's visit to istanbul in 1914 and the experience of the visit found it's way into his famous diary which mr pamuk described it as to contain some derisive and angry comments on turkey.

First Gide describes meeting a Young Turk on the train to Istanbul. This pasha's son had been studying art in Laussane for six months and now returning to Istanbul with Zola's popular novel Nana tucked under his arm; finding him superficial and pretentious, Gide turns him into a figure of fun.

well, i can understand Gide's feelings perfectly. exactly how i feel about the wogs in kuala lumpur...except that it's not that simple. looking at my library content and what i read and like i'm beginning to think that i too think and behave like that most destestable and pititful creature the wog. oh how complicated life is!

and sometimes i wonder why i collect all these books the authors of which i have no interest whatsoever to meet or make friends with even if they are still alive and if i have the opportunity. but a sentence mr pamuk wrote in chapter 52 on Andre Gide rings true...

We admire writers for their words, their values, and their literary prowess, not because they approve of us, our country,or the culture in which we live.

this explains somewhat the books that i like but the authors of which i may even hate...

serious pursuit of happiness

2011-01-26T23:19:00.003+08:00

sometimes back just after the hurricane katrina created serious havoc in new orleans and some other parts of the usa i read in the international herald tribune an interesting article which i forgot what the title was. but the gist is something like this. here is a man, handsome, in the prime of life (lets say in early thirties) has a highly paid but high pressured job which takes him to travel everywhere and he has all the girls he could eat. for vacations he takes his girl friend (which he changes on almost yearly basis) to acapulco or some such resorts but he couldn't leave his job well alone and need to take and make phone calls send and reply to e-mails and switched on his laptop and keep connected 24 hours a day. and here's another person. this one is a fat lady, quite ugly, has a low paying but undemanding job . her days are spent with her grandchildren and on sunday she goes to church and contribute a part of her small pay to charity. if given a choice of who would you want to be it's quite obvious that all of us would choose to be the guy in question rather than the fat lady. but if one is to pick who is living a happier life perhaps there would be big difference in opinions. depending on how you think what happinness means . the international herald tribune pointed that in all likelihood the ugly lady would be leading a happier life. it took me quite a while to see through the article though. it was nothing about not to worry about being ugly and living a simple life and all that but doing some charity would do good to you. and yes, in a round about and sly way go help the katrina victims.

but in any case that's the good thing about happiness. you don't have to be handsome or beautiful and have a well paying job or filthy rich to be happy and it's not uncommon for someone who has everything to jump out of a building. people thousands of years ago know this. the great buddha and the saints of all religions know this. but despite all these, we are hell bent on trying to be the most of everything in serious pursuit of happiness. why? i don't know fuck why but in one word i think what we all search for is not so much happiness but 'fun'.

and for fun i'm currently reading gunther grass who is one of my favorite authors . the book is call of the toad . on one level it's just a love story between two very old people. doesn't sound much fun but if you know gunther grass you know nothing seems to be what it is and i find it very stimulating to savour his baroque sentences.

on the last days of dec 2010

2011-01-02T09:54:00.006+08:00

i don't have a good memory. in fact it's quite bad sometimes. it's a good excuse to have a bad memory. i can always come late to meetings or not at all for boring appointments. my excuse is oh i thought that was for tomorrow?!. people would say ; don't you use organizers and stuff? but i will say i'm too stupid to learn all these new fangled stuff. when people hear that you admit you're stupid they invariably leave you alone. people are kind that way.

and even if you have a good memory you would not remember what you did exactly a year ago , let alone five years earlier. but thanks to my blog posts i could . and here are some of the things i did on the last days of the year since 2004.

the last book i read in 2004 was kurt vonnegut's cat's cradle ( a rereading actually). on the last days of 2005 the last book was again by vonnegut . galapagos. no mention about last books in 2006 but on 31 dec 2006 i read the last interview of isaac bahevis singer in salon.com. on Dec 31 2007 i wrote a resolution to read hikayat abdullah. which of course i never did. who keep their new year resolutions anyway?. Dec 31 2008 blog entry did not show any book list but i was in that familiar obnoxious mood and i attempted a kind of top ten from A to...well, i just managed to go all the way up to B and ended there. A is for asshole and for the year 2008 the biggest asshole of the year went to khairy jamaludin (local). He was the most hated bastard in 2008 by far. and george w bush won the international asshole accolade. nobody would dispute that either. there was no entry on Dec 31 2009 but on 27 dec 2009 i had a post on soldier of love. sade's new song from her then new album. it's a sad song and the whole album is a good one to cry over an expensive sofa, as one music critic described it.

soldier of love.

I've lost the use of my heart
But I'm still alive
Still looking for the life
The endless pool on the other side
It's a wild wild west
I'm doing my best
I'm at the borderline of my faith,
I'm at the hinterland of my devotion
In the frontline of this battle of mine
But I'm still alive…..

just about describe my feelings exactly a lot of times.
and on the last days of this year the last book that i finished from cover to cover was christopher hitchen's hitch-22. and currently reading Sea of Faith:Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World by Stephen O'Shea a highly readable book that described the familar historic battles between the muslims and the christians in the middle ages. and also dipping into Colin thurbon's travel book "The lost Heart of Asia".

didn't do too well on the fiction front this year. new books do not interest me much . mentions of 'booker prize' make me feel nauseated. new fiction these days probably parallel to what's happening in the art or music world. they don't speak to people like me any more. new arts are trying their best to shock you but peel a layer and you see nothing underneath.

but i do try. in fact the first fiction i read (and finished) on the first day of the new year was a short story by a new writer. on the first day of 2011 i picked up an old the new yorker summer fiction issue(June 14 2010- which happend to be my birthday by the way ) on 20 under 40 most promising writers in america today. a short story of 8 of these writers were featured. tried the first one 'The Pilot' by joshua ferris. left me yawning. Jonathan Safron Foer's story also didn't grab me. So was Philipp Meyer's first paragraph. But the next one by Rivka Galchen (who i couldn't make it if that is a man or woman) grabbed me by the balls straight away. but i also know immediately that this must be written by a woman when we were told early in the story that when her husband left her he took away a particularly nice parmesan grater...i mean only a bloody woman write like that. a man writer wouldn't give a fuck about a parmesan grater. okay may be some gay writers will. and that's the problem with woman writing and why i deslike them. but in any case i did finish her 4 pages or so "The Entire Nothern Side Was Covered with Fire".

happy new year !

do the right thing

2010-12-07T20:32:00.002+08:00

to the question in Hitch-22 ; if you were offered a chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity ? christopher hitchens says this... All right, same me but with more money , an even sturdier penis....

ah well, it's all about money and sex after all. i've always known this. i may not agree with many of mr hitchen's opinions as described in this memoir -especially on iraq and his good friend salman rushdie- but when it comes to desire for more sex and money ...well all humans are quite the same.

it's funny . the two recent memoirs that i read (orhan pamuk's Istanbul, and now hitch-22) give me exactly the same feeling about the authors. as i go deeper into each book i begin to dislike and/or disagree with the writer more and more. this is not to say that i don't like reading what they wrote. in fact the writings of both are truly fascinating. but i know that these writers are not people that i would want to be friend with.

and on reading the chapter 'Salman' in Hitch-22 it further sthrengthen my dislike for salman rushdie (which is perhaps the exact opposite effect of what mr hitchen's tried to achieve here). very soon after the publication of the satanic verses and the ensuing scandal and mayhem mr rushdie perhaps against his better judgement succumbed to his fright and tried to pacify the muslim anger by writing an apology of sort.

christopher hitchen's described it this way in hitch-22.

One of the the worst mornings of my life came in the cold winter of 1990 when I read that Salman Rushdie had written a short article titled " Why I have Embraced Islam."

I knew about this and i still would be very much interested to read what he said in this article but for some reasons i never get the chance to do it. and most muslims know about this back pedalling by salman rushdie but of course none buy it and muslims anger at salman did not subside and still smoulder right up to this day. and they were right.

a few pages later christopher hitchen wrote (although no date was mentioned i guess it was much later than that 'cold winter of 1990') :

During his stay with us at Thanksgiving, while he was signing a few books for his newly born "un-goddaughter", he seized the volume of essays in which this literary abortion was preserved like a nasty freak in a bottle, and wrote across the title "Why I Have Embraced Islam" the additional expressive words: "No! Aargh!" He then carefully crossed out every page of the "offensive" piece, signing each one to confirm his own authorial deletion.....

i would have thought mr rushdie would just leave it alone forget the whole thing and move on or better, be braver and publicly disown the article rather than performing this little theatrical act to impress(?) his good friend...but i can't recall he did such a thing.

writerly constipation and love of writing

2010-12-03T20:27:00.002+08:00

in sir vidia's shadow , a book of revenge by paul theroux on his one time close friend and mentor v s naipaul the writer (paul theroux) memorably described one incidence when he visited the famous writer and found he was in a foul mood. all because he was sitting at his writing table for how long i couldn't remember now without going back to the book , was it half an hour or was it half a day? but that does not matter, the point is v s naipual sat there for a long time and the only word that he could muster to write on the white sheet of paper was 'The'. and this is one of the best writers in english language past and present -or so they say- we are talking about. and if such a gifted writer such as v s naipaul has such mental block and writerly constipation as this what hope is there for others?

i've always wondered why people choose to be writers or journalists or worse 'mere hacks' writing all sorts of rubbish. i think it's one of the hardest and most torturous profession to write for a living. these people must be masochists to inflict such unneccessary pain on themselves and yet, i recently saw christopher hitchens on charlie rose talking about his battle with cancer and saying that the thing he feared most is the day when he would be unable to write anymore. and incidently i'm now half way through hitch-22 his very readable and sometimes quite funny memoir....

chinese friends

2010-11-06T01:11:00.004+08:00

when i saw a picture in MI of a row of orang asli queuing up waiting to cast their votes in some godforsaken place in ulu kelantan , all wearing red umno t-shirts doled out for free by umno i know straight away that PAS is fucked in galas. well, that's all i want to say about the recently completed by-election.

today my son said his friend who got a scholarship to do medicine in some godforsaken place in russia said ALL malay students who go there had to join umno student club. what if they refused i asked. they can't. why? because they are automatically enrolled as members. are there other malaysians in the university?. yes chinese and indians, he said. they are private students and band togather against the umno club. excellent i said.

and i said you must make friends with the chinese in your university. my son is studying in nottingham university at semenyih. he obtained straight As in his spm but only managed to get scholarship to semenyih branch. be grateful i said. others have to make do with UITM or upm and if they are chinese most of them may even have to pay their own way. my other son also obtained 9As in his spm and he is also pissed off that he could only manage to get scholarship to study at monash in sunway. i said the same thing to him. be grateful and make friends with the chinese.

but it's difficult to make friends with chinese students my semenyih son complained. i'm not surprised because most chinese think malays are just retarded monkeys. i don't blame them. most malay students do seem so. but i told him don't be afraid of the chinese. most of them are son of bitches but if you show that you're no worse than them you may won them over. i said most of my good friends are chinese. i said i'm more comfortable working with chinese the myself. yes they can be right bloody motherfuckers but they are very professional, their attitude is always positive. we malays are the opposite. sit with umno fucking malays for five minutes and you'll feel as though chinese are going to drown you in their pees and you'll be fucked if not for umno. umno is dumbing down the malays to feel inferior stupid and besieged.

and of course chinese are not that. they are just like any other human beings. meaning, mostly bastards like any other human race. but the world is big. pick the good ones i advised my sons. and my monash son said he had some good chinese friends. yeah? and he said one is from mauritius. can't be i said. mauritius is in africa somewhere. well he is chinese, my monash son said. and he's very clever but crazy he added. crazy ? how? oh sometimes he sleeps in the college. he finds some quite room at the back somewhere and sleep there . one day he slept on the roof of one of the buildings. huh ? that is crazy i said. yes, and i joined him there too, my son confided. hmmm, splendid.

and not to be outdone my semenyih son said he too has a very good chinese friend. what makes you think he's your good friend?i asked. we always go out togather and he even ask me to go to bali with him. he didn't ask his other chinese friends but me . okay i said. and is he from mauritius too? no.he is from terengganu. can speak trengganu slang very well. is he a private student? i asked. no he obtained straight 12A+ in his spm and he gets yayasan trengganu to study in semenyih. oh that's wonderful i said. no, he is very angry . my nottingham son said. he's angry because yayasan terengganu give overseas scholarship to malay students even if they ony get 6 or 7 As but he gets 12A+ and can ony come to semenyih branch. and i said isn't that typical of umno?

i thought of telling my sons about my chinese friends too. about my kelantanese chinese friends that always speak in our own kelantanese dialect and eat budu. and how we treat each other not as malays or chinese but plain human beings. about how one of the chinese friends even get the president of his company to come and convince me to join his company. but i said no because i'm enjoying myself too much fucking around in this american company where i'm at right now. how he always go to shenzen or somewhere to frolick with all those chinese whores there. how he always come back and relate all the dirty details to me. how one time he had blood in his semen and was worried sick that he might have cancer on his dick. or about this chinese friend who said if i'm interested to have maids he can find a good filipino illegal immigrant from sandakan. just tell me if you want tukang masak or tukang masuk he says. ah tukang masuk sound interesting i told him that time. but i'll think it over, er...sleep on it.

but i don't tell all these to my sons . perhaps next time . when they are less green. and talking about the chinese i'm currently reading another excellent colin thubron travel book again. this time about china and the chinese of course. the book is Behind the Wall: A journey through China. and it so happen that i'll be travelling to Nanjing for the first time in a couple of weeks' time. during eidul adha in fact. which i'm really looking forward to. to see how the nanjing hui muslim celebrate the feast of qurban. and i'll have a quick stop over in hong kong for a couple of days. haven't been to hong kong for quite a few years now. should be another interesting week or so. but i have to tell you this. i hate fucking chinese food.

erotica

2010-10-27T08:11:00.003+08:00

one of the earliest coffee table books that i ever bought was "Erotic Art of the Masters" during my student days. the book had pictures of paintings of naked women or couples in sexual acts which would be considered pornography by many. what i didn't know at the time was that famous painters like manet picasso watteau renoir and many more did paint a lot of risque and downright dirty pictures. it came as a pleasant surprise and this book has remained one of my treasured possession and favorite till this day. it led me to all sorts of new experience and knowledge and appreciation of 'specialist' paintings such as indian miniature paintings and japanese shunga.

one of the most arresting pictures in the book was not the explicit sexual coupling or a naked body but a seemingly innocent fully clothed picture of a girl by an 18th century french artist jean baptiste greuze . the girl had her left breast partially exposed with pink nipple clearly visible and she was carrying a cracked water pitcher on her right arm and a bouquet of flower hiding her pubic region. as the caption in the book says...the crack indicates that she has lost her virginity . the contemporary viewer understood. it's a deeply erotic and sensual painting.

serendipitously many years later i came across the original painting when i visited the louvre for the first time. life is like that sometimes.

jaded....

2010-10-12T19:20:00.002+08:00

the other day i read somewhere that barack husain obama read jonathan frantzen's new book freedom on his holiday. nobody made fun of him reading this . not like when george W fucking bush picked up albert camus' the outsider and pretended to read this on his holiday. i guess he just flipped to that part where an arab was killed for no reason. i'm sure he could identify with that well. i must confess that i've not read the book and so i don't pretend to know the context of the murder. but it is interesting to note that GW fucking bush picked this book . as an arab killer himself i guess he would want to find some answers in there. it is one of those books that i wanted to read too but never get around to do it (and probably never will).

b husain obama 's hands are not too clean either. he's continuing GW fucking B's activity particularly in screwing up afghanistan and i'm no admirer of this black man much. well, a bit. he's definitely a step up compared to that stupid cunt sarah palin . god knows what that bitch will do if she becomes president of the USA in future...god forbid. all the same it would be interesting to know why obama picked freedom on his holiday.

as everybody knows jonathan frantzen many years ago famously snubbed oprah and refused his book the correction to be featured on her show. I for one fully agree with him. i can't understand why this woman is so popular and powerful. i can't stand watching her show for five minutes. so in a sense you could say that frantzen is a serious man. not one to mix around with silly women like oprah etc. and obama is not likely to pick up dan fucking brown in a million years so i guess frantzen is an obvious choice. no controversy.

and i read somewhere that frantzen is such a serious man that he deciplined himself not to have any distraction while writing. he even physically plugged his computer internet socket so that he would not be tempted to go and surf rubbish. for that's what unfortunately internet has become . not too many years ago some people threathened and even did throw televisions out of the window but now i guess it's time to throw out computers into the river and return to good old way of enjoying ourselves. reading good books.

but like many people i can't seem to do much of that these days. i feel so jaded. so many distractions in cyberspace. many years ago i swore i would keep away from reading local political blogs and yet these days i never pass a day without reading insanely stupid, envious, gossipy and angry political blogposts. despite myself i love reading about that idiot ibrahim ali's rants for example. and the evil of facebook! i only have 194 'friends' on my facebook and i don't even know 90% of them personally and yet i spent inordinate amount of time reading their stupid and moronic 'status update'. i wonder what those people that have a thousand and more friends do on facebook. i thank god that i don't have and will never have twitter . and that's not the half of it. but damn. everybody is adicted to internet these days... it's too late. we are all lost and so might as well just enjoy it.

and that's the problem. we're gobbling up junks while our doctors say we need balanced diet. good ruffage and all that stuff. but porn and facefuckingbook and the rest are just macdonalds. we're all mentally obese...hellllllppppp!!!!

a finite life

2010-09-19T12:26:00.004+08:00

it is perhaps obvious but it comes as a little surprise nevertheless. i found that there is a pattern to my partiality to the contemporary writers/personalities and books that i like. and it's rather disturbing because emotionally all these personalities i would consider distasteful , or hateful even and not people that i love to be friends with. but intellectually it's the opposite. i mostly don't agree with them but i find their writings intellectualy pleasing, stimulating and i can read any of their writings despite not neccessarily agreeing with them. i'm talking about martin amis, julian barnes, christopher hitchens and salman rushdie, yes that bastard too. and there's another commonality there too. they are close friends to each other. at least once in case of martin amis and barnes. in fact mr amis is so close to hitchens that at one time they even went to a whorehouse in new york togather . and you can't be much closer than that.

and recently i watched a charlie rose interview with martin amis where he talked about his friend's chris hitchen's oesophageal cancer which is now already at an invasive stage. i did not know about this at the time. it's such a mundane news but it caught my breadth away and i felt as though it happened to a close family member. and a few days later i switched on to charlie rose again and saw this balding and gaunt fat man being interviewed. i caught the program when it already started for some minutes so i did not know who was on the program and it took me quite sometimes to realize that charlie rose was talking to chris hitchens. he looked very much different to his former handsome and confident- belligerent even - self. one of his shirt collar lapels was carelessly tucked hidden under the jacket which made him looked sloppy and dishevelled. he looked beaten and subdued . and it looked as though he was trying to control his helpless anger for catching this terminal disease and not throwing tantrums on the program.

knowing his view on god and the rest i watched closely to his response to Charlie rose's questions but perhaps not surprisingly there was no surprise answers although one could detect that his answers were not as combative as it used to be. it's just a fact of life he said. he is unfortunate to get the short end of the stick . that's all. god has nothing to do with it. the thing he worried most is when he is not able to write anymore. so that's his raison d'etre. i can never understand that part. why the urge and need to write? i wonder what will happen when that time will eventually come. Perhaps sooner than later as he can do nothing much now. the malignant cancer has spread all over his body and his tenure on this earth is decidedly finite and coming very close to the end . i feel sorry for him.

a simple life

2010-08-28T13:15:00.002+08:00

i have a friend who is an average middle class guy. like most of us, he lives a quiet life minding his own business and doesn't get too worked up on things. just mosey along the path of life with no great upheavals or calamities but also no real high points of any significance either. he has no ambition to be a hero, a famous man or to change the world. just want to live a happy life. in other words a seemingly boring life. but life is not as simple as that. even a flea has an interesting life if you ask david attenborough.

incidentally today as usual i just picked a book at random and i came upon this nice description in margaret atwood's Writing with Intent:Essays, reviews , Personal prose 1983-2005. in an eulogy Carol Shield who died last week, Wrote Books that were full of Delights she wrote:

Human life is a mass of statistics only for statisticians; the rest of us live in a world of individuals, and most of them are not prominent. Their joys ,however , are fully joyful, and their griefs are real. It was the extraordinariness of ordinary people that was Shield's forte,....

doesn't exactly moves me to go and buy carol shield's books but how true it is what she says. and my friend do have his little adventures. and one little adventure that turned his life upside down started when one day he came to his secretary when no one else was in the office and took her hand and put it on his dick. and that little act triggered a tragicomic sequence of events that he has yet to fully recover from. hmmm...so much for simple life.

cortez the killer

2010-08-08T04:02:00.005+08:00

the other day i bought three tickets to watch slash (of guns n roses fame). i thought i'd treat my son who is picking up electric guitar as a hobby (and hopeless at it) and another one who likes guitar songs. you might wonder why not four tickets ? one for the missus too that is. but if you know my wife you'll agree that she is more suitable living in the tribal lands of peshawar or afghanistan for she's such a very strict muslim but that is not to say it in a disparaging way because she's the greatest friend i have and such an angel not least because she lets me walk all over her (in a very nice kind of way) . but in the end i did not go myself but both of my sons did. i wanted to go because i was hoping he would play that old guns and roses' song november rain which has a fantastic blistering and weeping guitar riff by him but it might just as well i did not go because he didn't play this song in that concert so i wasn't feeling too bad throwing a 100 ringgit ticket away.

and here i am at four in the morning in an internet cafe in a bad sector of a certain town on transit to another city known for the sodom and gomorah sector itself listening to songs on youtube while watching street prostitutes across the road milling about trying to hook up depressed looking men for a short bonk in cheap hotels nearby.

these streetgirls are a very peculiar lot. i'm sure none of them put streetwalking as their ambition in school record books but they looked a relaxed and happy lot. may be they just give up on life and say oh fuck it i might as well enjoy this shit. which is not such a bad philosophy when you think about it. and while i'm on the subject i can inform that one of the books on my to buy list for a few months now is Dandy in the underworld by sebastian horsley. i did not know anything about this guy until he passed away of drug overdose a few months back and read his obituary in the guardian. and he was a fascinating pervert who lived his short life to the fullest not least for the fact that he unashamedly admitted that he liked screwing prostitutes and had done so to more than a thousand of all shapes and sizes and colors and nationalities. splendid!

and here i am listening to youtube songs and i keep on playing the great and moody cortez the killer again and again. this great neil young song has been covered by many and some are arguably as good or even better than the original like this one or this. and speaking of cortez the killer one of the fascinating books i read sometimes back was this historical account of cortez conquest of the aztecs and when i got to the interesting part (at the point when montezuma is about to be routed and killed) other books intervened and such is life......

how do i get my reading mojo back?

2010-06-06T11:39:00.006+08:00

i'm currently reading voss by patrick white. and after this i plan to resume reading a confederacy of dunces- may be. i left this half read when things started to get interesting. the reading was interrupted because i left the paperback at the back of a hotel limo taking me to shanghai airport. and i just bought a new paperback oh...about a year or so ago and the book is now sitting there among all the rest of books still waiting to be read. and about a month ago i finished reading a twilight in delhi by ahmad ali. last night i read the monk's ta le an interview of a tibetan monk by william dalrymple in the paris review.and before i went to sleep i leafed through an old volume of Art of Asia which interestingly had a story about the Farquhar's collection of natural history drawings of malacca which belonged to the royal asiatic society and was going under the hammer at the time for an expected 400-600,000 pounds. and shame on malaysia as we now know the collection is now in singapore. i was fortunate enough to see an exhibition of the complete collection of this immensely beautiful drawings several years ago in singapore of which i took some pictures here. and before going to sleep i read some obscene and very funny derek and clive from the book Peter cook and Dudley moore. ....and my bedroom is now imprisoned by books as you can see here. and so, taking everything into consideration one might say that i'm not doing too bad in the reading (for pleasure) department.

but then why do i feel so jaded and disinterested in any new writings and new books? mention of winners of this and that literary prizes put me off just like i 'm put off by winners of say amarican idol or eurovision song contest or academy award movies. new writers don't interest me. local writers are worse. i don't even want to hear anything about them. what is this disease i'm having ? am i a literary snob? it can't be. anybody who loves derek and clive can't be a literary snob by definition....as someone asked in the paris review, how do I get my reading mojo back?

net chat

2010-06-02T00:46:00.002+08:00

i don't normally chat on the net . never any good at it. i always find it boring . the (unknown)people i chat with in open forum i find stupid, don't have much to say and after a few plesantries i tend to pick a fight . i used to enter religious chat rooms many years back because here i assume you'll find good honest people but soon enough you discover that there are a lot of strange and eccentric people in there. in other words people that are just a step away from the loony bin arguing and splitting hairs with each other. there can be an upside though . one of the best catfight i stumbled into was this forum between muslims and hindus...it was so belligerent, abusive and very very funny. there are so many crazy do gooders in religious chatrooms (especially the christian ones) out there that it makes me wonder why these kind of people are so hell bent in trying to 'fish for souls'...i've weaned myself out of these chatrooms a long time ago . the splitting of hairs that go on in there about abstruse and nebulous and incredulous concepts of god and it's existence in various religions and the arguments that your religion is the true one and the rest are false are so tedious and nothing more that the version of my father is bigger than your father....nobody ever convince the other...if you start with believing a frog is the creator of the universe you will stay the same at the end of the arguments and no amount of argument will convince you that a dog is in fact the true creator...if you start with believing say, a jew was/is a god no matter what amount of logic the other tried to convince you that some funny creature with an elephant head is actually god will convince you otherwise...and so, i stopped coming in and soon after that i discovered bookblogs....

and i like books... and so i started arguing about books in one particular bookblog. my intention was good. i want to know more and want to express my views on things but very soon enough i started picking up fights again....i always thought book lovers are better and more open minded to contrary opinions but soon enough i found that they are just as retarded and close minded as the religious brigade... and so i basically weaned off from bookblogs too...and then i turn to political blogs ocassionally but the creatures here are even worse...political blogs give me nothing but bad blood ...and so i've no where else to go in cyberspace except many be 'hobbies' and the dangerous and dark world of porn and other unsavory sites...but i tried to stay away from these dangerous zone of forums and even chatrooms about 'relationship....

but all is not lost..we now have facebook!...and so perhaps is a better place because you can choose your 'friends'... and so i had my first chat on facebook recently...it goes like this.

hi!
oh hi mr xxxx where do you live?
i'm in italy
oh and i'm in malaysia
ah..that is near thailand?
ahaha...you obviously don't know your geography well. yes...between thailand and singapore...the boring bit
ahhaha... do you like thailand?
yes, very much and you?
yes. do you know mae?
who's mae?
a thai girl
half of thai girls in thailand are called maes! which mae?
she is in your fb
oh? mmm let me check for a second...yes she is! why do you ask?
she' was my girlfriend
oh! how is she?
i split with her six months ago... thai girls are beautiful!
yes! and italian girls are beautiful too!
no they are not!
why?
they are fat!
ahhaha...eating too much pizza...
malaysia girls beautiful?
yes malaysia girls are beautiful (i lied)
do you like thai girls?
yes i do...don't we all!
yes. they like italian money
hahaha they like every country money...may be they like italian bananas too?
(he let that pass)i like to come to thailand again...
yeah me too...

***
doesn't make much sense and not too hopeful with this one ...but i have some interesting unknown friends in my fb....
interesting days ahead....probably.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE1Ro_wPGIU

hey now (don't dream it's over...)

2010-05-26T22:22:00.002+08:00

a blast from the past. everytime i hear crowded house's song ' don't dream its over (hey now)' it brings a lump in my throat.such a sad sounding song! i don't know any other crowded house songs but this one but i know that some of the members were once in splitz enz which played genesis influenced prog rock songs, a totally different kind of songs from the more soppy crowded house music. and i've seen splitz enz live in my student days oh...seems like a hundred years ago and i love splitz endz because they sounded quite like genesis- peter gabriel era- which is one of my all time favorite bands and not the post gabriel era helmed by phil collins which i detest because of his soppy songs . but i quite love his (phil collin) jazzy adventure with brand X which is virtually totally unknown that even wiki entry on phil collins didn't mention this and certainly unknown to the generation of kids who only know his soppy songs - singles- like 'another day in paradise' during his more famous solo career as phil collins which is quite ironic again because when peter gabriel left genesis and turned solo he was ten thousands times better than phil or even most other english artists (which include american and aussies and other non native english speakers who sing in english if you want to be pedantic about it).

aah kids these days..with their ipods listening to rubbish. but thanks to good people that upload surprisingly hard to find songs onto youtube we can all go back in time and listen to real songs...

there is no there there

2010-05-08T12:05:00.003+08:00

a few minutes ago watched john simpson's world on the bbc about the rundown shanty town part of chongqing called eighteen steps which will be torn down and replaced by ugly tall modern buildings very soon . i like simpson's world. he certainly picks all the interesting places and people for his program. this particular episode shows a small corner of chungqing which is marked for new development. the place is just an unremarkable shabby and dirty slum but he feels perhaps a mild regret that this colourful place will be no more in a few years time. his feeling about the place was exactly how i feel about places like this.

i've been to so many places and like mr simpson and one of those particular types of tourists , we are always looking for the picturesque. i've always feel uneasy and guility about this. we're selfishly taking voyeuristic pleasure looking at other people's misery and messiness just because they are colorful and picturesque. we feel regret that this messiness will be replaced by efficient comfortable tall gleaming buildings simply because they don't look beautiful to our 'romantic' eyes.

i know this is selfish but what to do. humans are just like that. at least some are. and so i go all over the world looking for the picturesques. i've long lost my interest in visiting the modern cities of the west. but never tire of visiting the messy and crumbling part of asia , the culcattas , kashgars and yangons of the world.

in a few weeks' time i'll be watching the world cup in johannesburg and what i am looking forward to is not the brazil vs ghana or germany vs ivory coast matches that i will be attending but deep in my heart what i really want to see is the shanty town of soweto. and i just found out what soweto meant. i was traveling to novotel bang na with an aussie collegue when we got to talking about south africa and he asked "do you know what soweto means?" and i said no. "it's south western township. " oh bugger. the place lost some of it's 'lustre' and romance now. all this while i always thought it to be an african word .

mr simpson mentioned a very interesting quote from getrude stein about a city , LA i think it was. when she visited the place what she said was "there is no there, there" . and i know exactly the feeling. we're always looking for the "there" in a place. modern cities all have lost the there, there. and interestingly i am still reading bits and pieces from getrude stein's ' an autobiography of alice b toklas' which is full of fascinating episodes about her salons and meetings with artists like picasso and others. i never like marie laurencin as an artist but there was an interesting episode about her in this book. she was messy and picturesque.

and fortunately for me too, i've seen the famous potrait of getrude stein by picasso in the MET (or was it at MOMA?) several years back. i took a picture of it although i think it wasn't allowed. i don't care very much about this ruling of no photos in museums. i always take as many as i like on the sly. it helps me to remember what pictures i've seen. and interestingly one time in the national potrait gallery of london while i was deep in concentration taking photos an old lady museum guard came from behind and told me nicely not to snap photos and i had a little argument with her about the louvre and some others allow photography and...oh i'm digressing again...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/35749829@N03/3700649373/in/set-72157621004512359/

and about that place bang na just near bangkok souvanabhumi airport , that simply means rice field. the area has a sizeable muslim community that live their own old quaint life in a messy and picturesque way amidst the modern nondescript concrete modern buildings and one of these days i'll make a proper stop and visit their villages and mosques there. it looks like my kind of place. there is still a there, there.

five o'clock in the morning....

2010-04-25T12:10:00.004+08:00

woke up at 5 am today. it's a rare occassion that i go to sleep early. early for me means around 12 mid night. and last night i went to bed early and so woke up early which is also not my usual habit. i usually sleep around 2 or even 3 am. not that i do anything useful. mostly watching animals on national geographic or animal planet or news on aljazeera or one of those late night shows with jay leno or letterman or conan o'brian (not anymore now that he's gone from nbc) or reading light stuff or surfing rubbish on the net. no i don't mean porn either. if you're living in any asian countries you'd be an idiot to surf porn. apart from all the hassle with unwanted pop ups, spywares and add wares and viruses that create havoc with your PC it is likely to happen that you'll find your better half suddenly standing behind you unnoticed while you're deep in concentration on close-ups of er...a russian lolita's beaver for example. not a good situation to be in. and as i say if you're in any big asian city, for a few dollars you can buy a cd-rom of all the downloads you want. and that is not counting all the normal dvds of all sort of porns that a perverted mind can think of. the world is getting really crazy and i quite like it.

but as i was saying, i woke up at 5 am this morning and feeling rather alert and so i picked up max brod's Franz Kafka's A Biography which i just started a few days back after i finally completed Ahmad Ali's sombre "Twillight in Delhi" a novel about old delhi's moghul life in decline . but at five in the morning reading a 'serious' book about a surreal person didn't do it for me. so i scanned the rows of books at the foot of my bed and picked Robert D. Kaplan's "The Ends of The Earth" A journey to the frontier of anarchy. It's the kind of travel book that you can start anywhere as each chapter is a neat article by itself and so i read the chapter Laos, or Greater Siam? lately Laos facinates me more than most south east asian countries may be because i've traveled quite a bit in the rest of SEA but not laos apart from a day visit to vientiene a few years back. but Kaplan's chapter on Laos is rather dissapointing. it's a bigger picture kind of story and did not really get under the skin of common laotian psyche. this is not to say that the writing isn't good but it's not 'personal' enough. and about four pages into the next chapter "Cambodia, back to Sierra Leone?" i fell back to sleep....

company meetings

2010-04-15T13:26:00.003+08:00

i know i've arrived at a certain state and level in the organization when i can have this kind of company meeting with seniour collegues. consider this meeting that i had recently with asia pacific supply R&D head.

'hi Pxxxx. how's things with you? are we on netmeeting? should i call you?'
'hey, how's my good friend today? yes, here's my IP address....'
'are you sharing something? the bloody line is awfully slow today. well, while this thing is coming up, just a personal question. you've been to south africa so many times. i'm thinking of taking a day to visit a game park...'
'you can't go to SA without going to a game park'...
'yes, but kruger is out...too expensive and i don't have enough time, is a one day visit to pilanesberg worthwhile?...'
'that's the one near sun city . yes that is good. one of the best in SA...'
'ok then. what about soweto? do you think it's ok for me to visit soweto?'
'it's a dangerous place . you must be very careful...'
'well, fuck Pxxx . i'm not white. i guess i can just blend in??...ok , i can see your excel now. ok i can update you on xxxx (here i name our company new product). it's due to get approval in indonesia in 2nd quarter this year. and may be 3rd or 1q next year here.'
'what about Thailand?'
'you know thailand Pxxxx. it's always giving me pain. the place is so unpredictable...but even if we get approval, the commercial folks may ask, you know...what about supply?'
and Pxxx our asia pacific Supply leader replied. ' here's my answer to their question. that's none of their fucking business right?...'
'ahaha..i guess you're right'...

****
and last week my 'functional boss' who is based in london sent me a short e-mail. it simply said this. "FLATTERY WILL GET YOU EVERYWHERE"
and i sent back a reply.
"i always believe trickery is more effective!!!"

adultery

2010-04-04T09:09:00.002+08:00

read a funny short story in an old the new yorker issue several days back. it's called 'love story with secondaries' . nothing extraordinary , not exactly one of those great masterpiece of literature centered on people bonking other people's wives and vice versa like emile zola's tharese raquin or anna karenina or madame bovary or effi briest and the rest. just a garden variety short story about adultery.but unlike all these great literature which in this sms and tweeter era seems decidedly overly ponderous plodding too dark and finally boring this little short story is crisp and funny.just right for our current era of short attention span and quick gratification.

here's one thing i note about adultery. it is almost always messy and in all cases , without exception it is always sad but the interesting thing is there is always elements of dark comedy in all of them. in the above story the adulteress was whacked on the face with an umbrella handle by the wife of the adulterer. and that's the beginning.

a measure of a good writer is to make you believe that he had expert knowledge of what he writes about and in this case i think the writer must have probably written about or based on his own experience. i know this because the ending is so typical of what so many guys that i know have done all along.

huzun

2010-03-10T01:22:00.002+08:00

the title of chapter ten of orhan pamuk's excellent memoir Istanbul :memories of a city is HUZUN. the first sentence of this chapter is :

Huzun, the Turkish word for melancholy, ..........

and early on in the book he wrote on his four favorite turkish writers who were all in their own ways melancholic. but in chapter ten he described huzun not as a personal or private melancholy as we understand it but a melancholy of a city. his city istanbul.

To feel this huzun is to see the scenes, evoke the memories, in which the city itself becomes the very illustration, the very essence, of huzun.

and in one very long sentence of perhaps almost a thousand words or more (i did not count) he went on to describe the feeling of this huzun.

I am speaking of the evening when sun sets early, the fathers under the street lamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags....of the the patient pimps striding up and down the city's greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist;the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings....of the old men selling thin religious treatises , prayer beads and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discoloured by dirt, rust, soot and dust;of the broken seesaws in empty parks....

and he went on in this manner for four whole pages in one unbroken extravagant sentence which gets me to feel huzun myself.

spiritual defining moments: pt 1

2010-02-15T16:12:00.009+08:00

this first one and half months of 2010 had been one crazy time for me. and probably it's one of defining spiritual moments of my life . first off early january went to singapore...nothing there. a sterile and souless place with gleaming modern generic architecture. nothing but clinical efficient boring place...but then probably not quite. my old classmate from younger days who is now a singapore PR and pilots SIA 747 aircraft came with his spanking new mercedes to my hotel and tried to prove to me that singapore also has some color and spirit and proceeded to give me a quick tour of the underbelly of singapore. not bad. not bad. orchard tower is chock a block full with ugly filipino and thai whores and even uglier old fat western perverts. but if you know where to look you can have heartbreakingly young and beautiful russian girls too... not bad not bad . and elsewhwere you can pick the rest of the usual suspects, Batam rejects, vietnamese and loads of mainland chinese girls...not bad not bad not bad.

but as if god wants me to see more of the world underbelly i had to go to bangkok yet again and this time around finally managed to have a quick visit to the male paradise of pattaya. a place full of thai girls trying to make some money to send home to poor relations in the villages back in chiang mai or chieng rai or whatever the hell these girls come from. not bad not bad not bad. and then on a spur of moment i just tore away my SIA return air ticket and bought a first class bangkok sungai kolok rail ticket and had a 20 hr train journey from hua lamphung bangkok railway station to the southern border town and playground to local malaysian perverts. lonely planet mentioned there are well over 30 hotels in this crappy cowboy town but there are only at most two or three barely three stars affair. the rest are just crappy ten or twenty room set up that you can rent by the hour for may be 5 USD /hour and bring your choice of girl or two or three for a quick bongking or the whole night or weeks if you so desire. and i say a choice because this is a place where they 'break' the girls and you can have your pick of thai, myanma hill tribe girls or laotians. some are barely legal or even under age...bad bad bad... but fun fun fun for those who like that sort of things.

and along the way on the train journey i observed and it warmed my heart to see that the southern provinces are very much like home with muslim men wearing white skullcaps and ladies with tudungs everywhere. mosques are everywhere with onion domes and tall minarets raising above crappy two story buildings in smalltowns like so many mushrooms after rain. and i've been told countless of times everywhere and not only in thailand but southern phillipines and india that if not for 'politics' people of different faith can and do live happily with each other.

which brings me to my next point. a week before bangkok trip i visited yangon and as i promised to myself after reading the first chapter or two of william dalrymple's the last moghul quite a while back the first thing i did after checking in at the trader's hotel was to go straight to the shah bahadur dargah. this is the final resting place of the last moghul king of india. thanks to the british 'magnaminity' this last king of moghul india who was also a sufi and poet of some repute was deposed to yangon and this was where he died . and with typical british humor, these bloody bastards kicked the last king of burma the opposite direction to india and where he passed his remaining days. there was some talk about bringing the remains of the burma king back from india and sending that of the last moghul king home from burma but nothing fell through. in any case the resting place of shah bahadur now is transformed into a little 'dargah' with a resident imam who is supposed to be a renowned sufi. i had maghrib prayers there with him as the imam. and this dargah is just about fifteen minutes walking distance from the grandest buddhist monument of myanma, the shwedagon pagoda. while hundreds and may be thousands of people visit shwedagon everyday not more than two or three people ever visited this little dargah. i was told that each day only one or two well read westerners or may be sufis ever come here. but at certain time each year there will be a band of quwalli singers from india come and sing the sad quawalli songs in memory of this last king.

but as if to counterbalance the sadness of visiting this last mughal king resting place i decided to pay a visit to the underbelly of yangon next. and so the night after i paid a quick visit to tyingyi market. this place by day is a bustling murket where locals come for cheap clothing and stuff but when the sun sets the neon signs light up and you'll see rows of karaoke bars and dance clubs. these dance clubs are nothing more than pick up joints full of young and old myanma girls hoping to hook up with foreigners for the night. and if you're obviously foreigner looking like say, koreans, the moment you come in the usher will sit you down and corall a gaggle of girls towards you and these will be smiling prancing and showing their best pose to you and hoping you to pick one or two or three to sit down with you. and if you decide to pick one or two or three to your hotel , there will be a group of young boys shoving their hands into the taxi and fighting with each other to sell pack of condoms to you. it was a very funny and sad sight at the same time. but this is nothing compared to g.b road of delhi india.

***
pics of hua lamphung-sungai kolok train journey here

this, i gotta have...

2010-01-02T14:29:00.004+08:00

the last book that i finished in 2009 was a dark and darkly comic memoir nothing to be frightened of by julian barnes and as the last minutes of 2009 ticked away i was reading william darlymple's city of djinns: a year in delhi. both incidently are about death and decay. the former a personal decay and the later a city.

it is perhaps fitting that you end a year with books about decay . this is not to say that they are all melancholy and sadness as both have comic moments. although both books' leit motif is decay they were very funny in their own ways.

an example from julian barnes:

Renard recorded in his Journal the death of Tolouse-Lautrec. The painter's father , a known eccentric , came to visit his son and instead of concerning himself with the patient immediately started trying to catch the flies circulating in the sick room. The painter, from his bed, remarked, 'You stupid old bugger', then fell back and died.

and here from william dalrymple's city of jinns.

Ibn Batutta had few expectations of India. The Hindus, he knew, at least refrained from eating pigs (unlike the Chinese or the disgusting Christians of Byzantium), but he had heard that they had other habits the very thought of which made him swoon. "The Hindus venerate oxen' he wrote, 'and it is said that they actually drink the oxen's urine when they fall sick.' Later, on witnessing a sati (the immolation of a Hindu widow) , Ibn Batutta was so shocked he nearly fell off his camel.

and in city of djinns: a year in delhi mr dalrymple mentioned a novel Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali. and commented that the brilliance of this book was immediately recognized by both E.M Forster and Virginia Woolf.

again. from the city of Djinns:

Twillight in Delhi is not only a very fine novel , it is also an irreplaceable record of the vanished life and culture of pre-war Delhi.

mr dalrymple was impressed enough to go and seek the author who was still living in karachi at the time , an angry beaten old man. and i will be travelling to delhi again in february and i would certainly go and look for this book. i usually never like book recommendations by anybody but books mentioned in books that you like always pique my interest. and this i gotta have. for one thing india to me is one of the most fascinating countries in the world and there's nothing better to get my islamic extremist blood boiling than visiting all those mughal tombs and buildings in delhi and agra, still mejestic and proud looking although a mere shell of their former glory.

soldier of love

2009-12-27T17:30:00.003+08:00

I've lost the use of my heart
But I'm still alive
Still looking for the life
The endless pool on the other side
It's a wild wild west
I'm doing my best
I'm at the borderline of my faith,
I'm at the hinterland of my devotion
In the frontline of this battle of mine
But I'm still alive…..

from sade's great new song Soldier of love...

books for guidance

2009-12-10T18:04:00.003+08:00

no, this is not about all those shitty motivational books by the like of fucking deepak chopra or that lateral thinking asshole guy...i hate these kinds of books and i hate those fuckers that read them more. in fact come to think of it i hate everything in this world apart from sex and money of course. and beautiful animals and trees...and books and paintings...shit come to think of it i don't mind this world at all....when i'm not thinking too much about my fellow humans ....

i read somewhere , oh yes i remember now, in the new yorker book of business cartoons. there's one very nice cartoon i like. the caption is the truest thing in the world. it says. money is the report card of life. gets me mad as hell to think that those corrupt bastards in politics get a distinction in their life report card . i'd be happy just to get a strong credit. C+ say. oh i'm not complaining. i do get by. the thing is not to look up too much but to look down at the poor sods that are below you. there are millions of them. may be billions. looking up make one envious and mad but looking down has it's own drawback too. it makes you depressed.

i was having this lunch by myself today and this nice honest looking chinese guy may be in his forties came in. he wore presentable clothes and with a tie on (god, i hate fucking ties and what i hate more is fuckers who wear ties in this hot climate. these fuckers are dumb.) and he was carrying two leather brief cases and one big black garbage bag full of leather goods. he was trying to hawk leather belts and wallets it gets me depressed as hell. i mean this guy is presentable enough . why does he abase himself by going round in restaurants trying to sell this stuff and achieving nothing apart from annoying people who want to have a quiet meal? if i want to have these stuff i'd go to petaling street and buy all those fucking fake guccis or whatever. this poor guy doesn't even know the most basic marketing strategy. you just don't fuck around when people are eating their noodles. that's another good philosophy to get you by in this world.

what makes me depressed as hell is that he's trying to make an HONEST living. but he's not doing it right. he could have done so many other things apart from fucking around in restaurants while people are eating. and if you want to take it in a broader sense this also applies to all those who ring your door bells at home trying to sell fucking water purifiers and all that sort of shits. and all the rest of intruders and touts and spams. they are all the same. they shove things up your nose and i hate this kind or marketing strategy.

i'm not sure if that poor chinese guy was influenced in any way by all those motivational books . who knows i won't put it past those asshole authors to cook up all kinds of demented "can do" ideas in all those books and some credulous folks just gobble 'em up line hook and sinker as the saying goes. i never read any of these books so i may be wrong.

but that does not mean that i don't find some good advise and guidance from the kind of books that i read. more often than not these 'gems' come to you unasked and in unexpected ways. take the three books that are currently in my office. all three are books that you can pick up and read at any page in any order and you may sometimes find some basic truth and 'guidance' from there.i stack them in this order. at the bottom is the giant book of dirty jokes. There isn't much gems in it, in fact it's full of dross and mostly the jokes are gross. but you do find some good philosophical ones like this one: A divorcee took an office job and said. "I hope I'll find sexual harassment on the job". or this;

Two kids were having an argument about whose farther could beat up whose father.
One boy said, "My father is better than your father."
The other kid said, "Well, my mother is better than your mother."
The first boy paused, "I guess you're right. My father says the same thing."

and on top of this joke bible i put the modern day bible. It's The Dilbert Future: Thriving on Stupidity in the 21st Century. unlike the giant book of dirty jokes, this book is full of good advise and a very valuable guidance to navigate our modern and complex world. despite myself, i immensely benefit from it. Take this prediction #31 which is coming into reality as we speak(or blog) now. Note that this book was written way back in 1997 (published under Harper Business :A dicivion of Harper Collins Publishers no less).

Prediction no. # 31 states;

in the future skilled professionals will flee their corporate jobs and become their own bosses in ever icreasing numbers. They'll become entrepreneurs, consultants, contractors, prostitutes, and cartoonists.

well, that 'future' is now.

and the book on the top of the stack is The Meaning of The Glorious Koran - An explanatory translation by Marmaduke Pickthall. this is a very battered and dog eared well thumbed 'bible' that i got as a present from a fellow student friend a long long time ago. he is now a vice chancellor of one of the most wellknown local universities . for the non muslims and those muslims who are ignorant of the qur'an , let me say this. the Quran is a grim fire and brimstone 'bible' full of admonitions and exhortations. Mostly very logical and 'doable' for the practising muslims but right bloody difficult to adhere to for those muslim bastards who think they know better. every page has something useful or interesting things in it .

take this for example:

And lo! in the love of wealth he is violent. (surah al-Aadiyat verse 8)

or this.

Rivalry in the worldly increase distracteth you, until you come to the graves...(surah At-Takathur ; verses 1-2.)

fair enough. looks like human has been behaving exactly the same since more than fifteen hundred years ago.

the scale of things

2009-12-03T18:34:00.004+08:00

recently i asked a vietnamese friend how happy he is on a scale of zero to ten. zero being a state of total unhappiness and ten the opposite. and he mentioned eight. that is a very high number to me and i'm rather surprised a vietnamese can have such a high level of happiness. i guess they don't give much truck to freedom of expression and all that and couldn't care less how the country is run as long as they can have enough personal freedom to get what they want.

and he basically gets what he want which is chiefly- like most people in the rest of the world want -enough money and enough sex. and in vietnam sex isn't too much of a problem as long as you have enough money. the goat has at least two young mistresses less than half his age that i know of and he just bought a usd220,000 house which he paid for in cash(!) . the house looks terribly crappy to me but it is in disctrict 3 of saigon which is the second most expensive district after district 1 so he is happy. it's the location man, he says.

but here's the thing. it always make me wonder what can make human truly happy. it could be that this vietnamese guy probably say his level of happiness is eight out of ten because i asked this question when he had just bonked one of his young ladies and she was sleeping on his lap (we were in a taxi out of tra vinh) but i've seen him looking gloomy at other times. on a different trip with him he mentioned that he just had a 'big war' with his wife. i should've asked what his level of happiness then.

but when all is said and done there's probably nothing much that can be done. one day you're happy and the next you may not. happiness is just a state of mind and there are infinite ways how one try to achieve this. the problem is to maintain this fucking state of mind. i do try. and when i think about it, the reason why i keep on accumulating books which is growing at quite an alarming rate is just to keep my state of mind at a level of at least say six and above.like most people who are bibliobibuli i read books purely for pleasure (for happiness). does it work? yes and no.

the love bug

2009-11-25T08:33:00.002+08:00

one thing i noticed about the classified column in my favorite magazine the spectator is that all the people advertising for friendship and love are mostly in their fifties and without exception above 40. and to be fair, they are also looking for mates in their age group so i guess these are genuine loners looking for genuine relationship , long term or other wise.

and it also mirrors the demographic of the spectator readers who are of older age group or those younger ones with sufficiently mature brain cells to understand the spectator humor. and the love bug column where these old geezers are pining for their soul mates are a lot more fun to read than those in most other magazines or newspapers . not that i make a habit of reading these kinds of columns but sometimes you do find some surprises there.

take this lady for instance. this is what she wrote;

Stunning , extremely elegant city professional lady, 60. I have everything and yet nothing without someone to share with....

how on earth can a lady of 60 be stunning is quite beyond me. and i'm referring to physical beauty. elegant may be but stunning? in my book a girl of 18 or twenty can be stunning without trying, even if she doesn't wish to be so but try as you might once you're past say 45 sorry ladies.... try philosophy or something for happiness. physical beauty is for the young ones.

as expected men are much better at this kind of games. some of them are probably quite honest. one reads Unattractive, miserable old man, with no interest what so ever. Needs to meet desperate slimish , attractive lady 50+ who has an unrealistic expectation.

i expect he would he get an avaalanche of calls. and i like this one best
Tall, bald ugly dentist, would like to meet tall interesting , intelligent woman for dates and so on.
that just about correctly describes most dentists but that's life. not everybody is brad pitt. just a fact of life. but all the same i just wonder why do people need to go this far to find love and sex?

culling books

2009-10-31T11:39:00.003+08:00

the other day as i usually do, i picked up a book at random but this time not from those nicely lined in book racks of my three thousand or so books in my personal library (and still expanding) but from the stacks of books under my bed which are waiting to be put in their proper place on book racks which i couldn't because they are now full and turned out this book is other colours ,a collection of 'essays and a story' by orhan pamuk.

i came to orhan pamuk rather late and i must thank one 'pessoa' who first made me aware of this writer several years back. i very rarely care for book recommendations from anybody until i 'met' pessoa in one book forum. we had a fight over something and i challenged him to name some of his favorite books and much to my delight he came up with a list of about fifty or so books about 40% of which were completely unknown to me -at that time. the reason why i asked him to name his favorite books is simply because i will know immediately if he's a good reader or not by the list of books he considers his favorite.this is the easiest way to find out if someone is an idiot. the fact that he used pessoa as his 'avatar' after fernando pessoa which at that time was also unfimilar to me indicated that he is a very well read man and a book addict.

and you can't find a more book obsessed person than orhan pamuk. i once read somewhere that he would feel literally sick if he is kept away from his reading and writing. for those of us who are unfortunately inflicted with the curse of inordinate love for books and have become book addicts, one of the chief worries is what to do with all the books we keep on collecting although knowing full well that we'll never ever going to read most of them in this lifetime. and it was a pleasant surprise to find one of the essays in orhan pamuk's other colours is "How i got rid of some of my books" and unlike my usual approach to reading -for pleasure- i approached this article as some of us would read all those 'book for dummies', namely to find solutions to our particular problem.

but in the end i get nothing of the kind out of it. the essay is what one would expect from orhan pamuk. a very interesting and meandering thoughts about favorite writers and his love of books. he would never write anything remotely pedestrian like all those boring DIY articles in book for dummies but he did mention that he managed in the end to dispose a laughable 250 books (out of twelve thousands in his library!) . and i find it very funny that those he considered unfit for his library are those books as he put it in the last sentence of the essay

This is how my Turkish literature shelves are quickly losing works by half-witted, mediocre, moderately successful, bald, male degenerate writers between the ages of fifty and seventy.

i had a dream....

2009-10-24T07:03:00.002+08:00

what a strange dream! it's quite atypical of my normal dreams of girls -who are not my wife- having all sort of shenanigans with me and what is worse is the dream was in english... a sure sign that i'm turning into one of my most hated creatures...the wog! oh what a dream! and it was not 'i had a dream' kind of that most famous black man on earth (and who recently slipped down to the second- after barack obama) who was shot dead for his idealistic dream...no, mine is a whole lot down to earth, mundane but disturbing to me none the less.

they say your dreams reflect your collective inner subconscious concerns and desires. and some say it merely depends on what you ate the night before, or because you don't wash your feet before you go to bed or some religious nuts would say because satan piss in your ears...

but let's see. what was the last food i ate last night?. Pineapple. doesn't seem to explain the dream. did i wash my feet before i go to sleep? my feet are always clean. i wear flip flop slippers in the house and i don't go walking barefoot anywhere and sometimes wash them before coming out of the toilet...so i can consider that yes, effectively i washed my feet.

did satan piss in my ears? my wife always read passages of the Quran before she drops off beside me and although the Quran is not my bed time read i consider i was close enough to the holy book so i assume satan won't be hanging around near me. so, no satan urine in my ear.

and that remains the last thing. my subconscious desires and concerns. i'm a normal man. my normal aim in life is just like all of us... sex drug and rock and roll...or variations there of. the last thing i did before i went to sleep last night was to watch the late and great gore vidal on you tube . and read APOLLO magazine (Oct 2008) article on Prince Hans-Adams II of Liechstentein art collections which is considered to be one of the world's gtreatest private art collection. all these have absolutely nothing to do with the dream.

so there's one thing left that can explain it. it's the office work! like most of us poor salarymen, we bring our office worries to bed. but i always take a cavalier attitude towards office work. my motto is do your best but fuck them if they don't turn out the best. but the funny thing is i don't have any worry ith my office work. i could do them in my sleep!...hey that's proably the answer!

i dreamt of being tasked to chair a multi agency multinational meeting on a topic which i was absolutely unprepared for. we came to this office and led to a meeting room which had a BED in it. as some of the members arrived one or two tried the bed reclining or sitting on it. and all the participants in the meeting were WOMEN. some were quite beautiful and many were CHINESE. i was very flustered because i didn't know any of these women and i didn't know what the agenda was and no knowledge or experience on the topic at hand. and instead of documents and files i only brought a PILLOW to the meeting....

look at the bright side of life

2009-10-15T13:31:00.002+08:00

i drove to pd on saturday night , the last night of campaigning for the bagan pinang state by election . jalan pantai was chock full of people and there was a very carnival like atmosphere along the road especially near and around telok kemang area. you can't even enter telok kemang and the traffic was diverted away at the roudabout. not without unintended sense of humor - it was diverted out back to kl.... i stopped at one place which i mistook for a pasar malam but full of people selling PAS things ...t shirts, cds, dvds, even dikir barat cds...but with a difference... the songs were all PAS oriented campaign songs. very nice. i almost felt like i was in my home town kb. never thought to see this kind of thing in PD which on normal days is almost like some places in bali...almost...and i thought hey, the old bugger is gonna get a drubbing this time may be? ...but then i realized all this carnival was due to people from outside coming to campaign or give moral support to PAS . met many people from kelantan, trengganu etc. spoke to a few and even went to one of the PAS ceramahs nearby which was empty and i had a sinking feeling that all wasn't well...and the rest is history...the sly bastard won by a landslide.

so much for idealism. all the yellow black and brown voters went back to support the dimunitive bugger in droves. can't blame them. fuck idealism. you can't eat idealism. what have they got to lose? between a dour , inarticulate and almost retarded looking PAS candidate and a cheerful devillish bugger with bag loads of goodies...in hindsight it's obvious who the people in pd will choose. it's a no brainer.

i'm feeling sick of my fellow malaysians again... i'm losing hope. i don't think we'll ever be going to see umno and bn uprooted. may be we deserve having these crooks as our masters. we are all not so angelic ourselves. we're fucked and so we deserved to have fucked up masters.

the great wonder is we can stand being made fool of and being kicked around for more than 50 years by these assholes and yet we are super critical and can not stand five months of teething problems when it comes to the more idealistic PR people. talk about twisted logic.

but we have to look at the bright side of life - to quote life of brian - again. may be this bagan pinang fiasco is just a special situation. a localised and temporary insanity. we move on.
may be we all should be more positive . may be it's instructive and we to take heed from this little story...

A young man was extolling the virtues of his beautiful fiancee. One of his closest friends exclaimed, "you can't be serious about marrying Sarah Jane! Why, she's fucked every man in syracuse."

The bridegroom-to be thought awhile and then muttered pensively, "Syracuse isn't such a big town."

- Giant book of Dirty Jokes.

laughing at truth.

2009-10-09T18:03:00.002+08:00

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

- Umberto Eco

Hey i like that. i don't exactly know what it means but i like it. and perhaps that's the reason why i like books by people like kurt vonnegut and mark twain so much. hell i even like chris rock's stand up comedy. and all those fantastic coen brother' movies. they all have one thing in common. all these people make us laugh at the truth...whatever the hell truth means.

on the first day of hari raya

2009-09-25T09:02:00.004+08:00

on the first day of hari raya about noon or a bit earlier -around elevenish (as some would say) we were enjoying our hari raya gathering eating all kinds of kelantan cookies and delicacies like tape beras and nasi dagang , and oh by the way nasi dagang belongs to kelate and so is nasi kerabu, or budu or akok and so don't terengganu dare to claim nasi dagang as theirs or petani malays of southern thailand claim the rest as theirs or else there would be serious 'repercussions' from us (just remember pendet issue hmmm?) - but as i was saying while we were gorging ourselves silly there was this assalamualaikum greeting from two indian looking white jubah clad long bearded guys at the door and today being an open door festive day we invited them in and as usual in our place, we always assumed that jubah clad foreigners can only speak arabic and so some of us hollered to bukhari, my youngest brother and a syariah mejistrate educated in jordan and the only person in our family who can speak impeccable arabic to come and talk to these guys. but turned out they could only speak a little arabic ...shuay, shuay...and i asked them if they speak english and one of them said yes....

and so i invited them in and invited them to eat our copyrighted food like tape beras and akok and nasi dagang...and while they ate i asked them who they were (turned out they were pakistanis from islamabad) why they came to kelantan and the english speaking guy said they came to seek donation to build a mosque in pakistan and people recommended them to come here because it is 'an islamic state' and i said yes , that's true. that's true...and i asked them what do they think of taliban? and their eyes opened wide and they exclaimed taliban no good, taliban terrorists! and i said no they are not, they are good people!

and they still persisted, no !taliban bombed mosques, killed people they are kaffir...they are kaffir from india coming to pakistan to become terrorists...and i said no taliban is good they fight the fucking americans, they do jihad...and sensing my 'angle' they softened and said yes real taliban is good but many called themselves taliban but they are really kaffir..they killed and bombed mosques... they are indians...and so i let it at that...and asked what do they think of osama ben laden...and to preempt whatever they wanted to say i said osama is good! osama fights for jihad...he fights the fucking americans... and so they nodded and looked anxious to go... and so i gave them ten ringgit....and off they went ...

not that i'm tight fisted or anything but i commented to my syariah court mejistrate, how do we know if these guys are genuine? there are so many fake donor seekers around...claiming to be jihadists from afghanistan, myanmar , palestine and the rest. they might simply collect the money changed the jubah to jeans and t-shirt and go and enjoy themselves at the thai cowboy town of sungai golok just 40 km away. but on the other hand who knows ? they might be genuine donation seekers. the mosque name is ali murtaza which is a very syiah name... which is another interesting point i would like to discuss with them but this is hari raya...we don't wan't to be too serious... most of us were only interested to just enjoy our copyrighted kelantan food after one long fasting month which wasn't really making us any lighter because we were pigging ourselves silly at night instead which defeat the whole purpose and spirit of ramadhan which is another story again.......

eid mubarak ...

reunion and friendship

2009-09-11T00:05:00.009+08:00

friendship is a funny thing. the ones you made during your younger days usually last the longest. forget office collegues. they can be the best of buddies when you work togather. they may open their heart out to you, tell their darkest secrets and perversions but the moment they change jobs...woosh..gone. like rats out of an aqueduct, to quote life of brian . but those that you made during your school days are different. perhaps because we were more innocent then. we had higher tolerance for each others' stupidities and cruelties. we didn't understand what hurt means. we didn't take things to heart as much as we do with friends we make during our later years. and with the passing of time memories become all the sweeter as all the hurts we might have harboured would all be healed by father time.

and that's why i hate reunions. they kill old memories. and more likely than not instead of reinforcing friendship it can go wrong and we would be hurt by the slightest unintended slights. so i usually stay away from reunions. and looking at once sexy girl friends which you may or may not have fantasised and masturbated to and now looking like mishappen baloons don't help.

but here's another thing. with facebook , reconnecting with old friends that you have not met for donkey years suddenly become so easy. but this too, i tried to steer away from. occassionally i came across a few familiar names but i never invited any of them into my fb. almost all my facebook friends are virtual friends. it's interesting to to see some of these people making fool of themselves by spouting pseudo philosophies and making inane remarks . but this is no problem, because i have a very high tolenrance for stupidities. what i can't stand is fakery and wogism.

real friendship is almost impossible once you have reached a certain age. if you don't make good friends during you school days, well forget it...may be i'm wrong. i'm always wrong. i actually have some very interesting friends that i made post school days... but to say that they are friends that i'd die for, well, that's asking a bit too much. in fact i don't think i'd die for anything. i'm very selfish. just like all of us. we're all heartless....except those stupid ones who think they must save the world. why?

obsession

2009-09-06T08:14:00.009+08:00

sometimes i wonder... why can't we be like the singaporeans or the chinese ( in china ) or the vietnamese. these people's philosophy is simple: why give a fuck about politics? whoever rule the country is no concern of mine. if we can live reasonably well and have enough 'space' and lee ways to do whatever we like, then why worry? we're fine!. who gives a fuck what those criminals do in their parliaments or whatever they call the monkey house where they preside.

but i think i know the answer why we care about politics so much and why those people don't. it's simply because malaysia is - to use a singapore expression- a kiasu country. we think we are the best and comparable to the best in the world in everything. when the US admitted that they are screwed because of the financial blow-out, we say we are ok because we can manage our economy well.when other countries are in turmoil and their people are at each other's throats we looked smugly and say, look at us. we're multiracial like no other country in the world but look how we live peacefully with each other (and forgetting places like switzerland etc). when our neighbours are demonstrating and rioting all over the place we shake our heads and say, what kind of democracy is that? we malaysians practise real democracy. and there actually lies the answer why we're obsessed with politics.

the real problem with malaysia is this. since we are kiasu and want to beat the shit out of everybody we try to ape everybody that we think are good. we think the brits and the americans are good. they practise democracy. so we must too. so we practise democracy. a better way than the brit and the american version. but this version is like opening a door a little and allowing us to glimpse what is inside. and so we peeked in and we glimpse what freedom of expression is like. and we know it's good and so we ask for the door to be wide open . and here lies the problem. the door remains open just a little and our political masters say that's it . no more! and so we holler and shout and become obsessed with politics. we see that our masters are bastards but because the door isn't wide open we are quite powerless apart from shouting and hollering and becoming obsessed with politics.

but china or vietnam are diferent. they don't give a fuck. politics isn't the common people's concern. just go forth, multiply, make money , have fun. leave the governing to us. that's not your affairs. do this long enough and if you govern well (like singapore) , people will soon forget about politics and they will sleep well without getting their blood boiling about the affairs of the state. but we malaysians are too far gone. too late to go back to china model. we've tasted the best thing in life. full democracy and freedom of expression. and we want the max. but we aren't getting this anytime soon. and so we shout and holler and become onbsessed with politics.

agnostic flea

2009-08-31T10:44:00.005+08:00

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)....

presidential read

2009-08-26T14:54:00.005+08:00

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.

loyar buruk

2009-08-19T09:18:00.011+08:00

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.

May Allah have mercy on his soul....

2009-08-09T08:54:00.006+08:00

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...

good books for bad men...

2009-07-30T09:11:00.003+08:00

picked up a novel at random from my fiction rack and it turned out to be post office by charles bukowski. i haven't read any fictions lately and i find it rather heavy going to plough through the kind of fictions i usually read... it's just like chess. can't play it for ten minutes without making me lose interest in it. i'm not good at it by any standard but i used to play with this guy and what i liked best is to egg him and insult his moves and watching him gets madder and madder...

nowadays i have absolutely no interest to read any new writers ...the way they write it almost make me think that thay have one thing at the back of their their mind...booker prize. english fiction these days are tedious. all words and little meat. with the same smart alecky sentences that go from point A to B in loops and bends rather than a straight line. and they all feel the same. they are inbred. just like what taki said years ago...in the Spectator high life column 20 oct 2007...

And as far as literature is concerned, fuggeraboudid. I simply can not read a modern novel even when stuck in a doctor's waiting room without TV. It's as if the work comes out of hip-hop culture, or whatever it's called nowadays.

but bukowski is certainly not one of these. and lucky for me. i'm beginning to enjoy reading fiction again...and with sentences like this who wouldn't.

The midget was married to a very beautiful girl. When she was in her teens she got a coke bottle trapped in her pussy and had to go to a doctor to get it out, and, like in all small towns, the word got around about the coke bottle, the poor girl was shunned, and the midget was the only taker.He'd ended up with the best piece of ass in town.

but if he were alive today and of commonwealth citizen ( which he wasn't) i don't think any of his books would even be among all those other boring booker books in the shortlist let alone a winner. but i guess bukowski isn't meant for 'intellectuals' and literary kind of readers... bukowski is to depraved drunken men readers in the seventies like sophie fucking kinsella to hare brained women of the present day.

i haven't read many of his books, in fact only read one other book factotum (his second) which is more of the same as post office (his first) with the same henry chinaski ,the protagonist bumbling from one job to another and i watched a good and rather sad documentary about him born into this and i don't think the readers digest brigade would be his fans. he wasn't a 'good' man and i think 'bad' men would be more attracted to his books than the normal and boring 'good' men. i can't imagine women reading his books. whores may be. but i could be wrong as I LIKE his books and i am by no means a 'bad' man...at least i think so...

c'est la vie

2009-07-24T00:30:00.005+08:00

there's quite a brouhaha (hey nice old word this) about the news of that model who is sentenced to a fine and whipping for the crime of drinking alcohol in public. the uproar caused by this little news is because of the general public ignorance about the muslim syariah hudud laws and the idiots among us including the ignorant non muslims who don't have anything to do with this issue start to give their half cent worth of stupid comments.

now i don't want to sound like my taliban brothers for only god knows i'm such a hypocritical bastard myself but there's only one word for it. leave it the fuck alone. oh no, that's not one word but one sentence. but the point is these days any old fool think that he/she is such an expert in islamic jurisprudence and start arguing and giving their own fatwas why this or that sentence is not right. for the muslims who don't agree with the sentence just go fuck yourself...go and apostasize and go and worship a fucking jew or goat or a tree. be anything you want..just fucking apostasize...be a kafir...and just shut the fuck up.

now this does not mean that i'm HAPPY with the sentence. in fact i pity the poor girl. but i look at it this way. say, if you're caught screwing an underaged girl , you can shout and holler till you're blue in the face that it is all consensual but you know that if you're caught, well than you're fucked my friend. simple as that. nobody will argue that the sentence is unjust . there won't be any brouhaha if you're whipped and put in the slammer for it...unless of course if you're a politician like that ex melaka chief minister who was alleged to screw an under aged girl and get away with it and the only person who was kicked into the gaol was the current CM of penang and his crime was only for trying to defend the girl ...

and so, the lesson here is simply this. don't get caught and you'll be fine. i was with a few business collegues in dusit thani bangkok recently and during the crappy business lunch they as usual noticed that i don't drink and asked why. and as usual i explained that i am a muslim who don't drink. and one of the guys mentioned that he recently attended a meeting and sit at the same table with what his name that banker brother of your PM najib? oh! and i gave a name and he said, well he drank wine! and i said well, as i say i am a muslim who don't drink, but many others do. but doesn't your religion say you can not drink ? he egged me on. and i said well as far as i know all religions don't allow adultery and sex before marriage but that don't stop us from srewing like buggery...or something to that effect. and i asked him what was the reason the guy gave for drinking . oh he said it's only fruit juice. and i said there are some other reasons given . one of my friends just said it's for medicinal purpose. but the point is these guys and thousands others don't get caught and so... many others who commited crimes thousands of times worse and don't get caught ...yes life is unfair that way. but that's life c'est la vie ...

a dog philosophy of life

2009-07-11T09:28:00.005+08:00

if anybody asks me what i want in life i in all honesty can't answer with certainty. i mean yes, we all want to live long, healthy worry free life and have lots of money and sex and all that. in one word we all want to be happy. but i sure as hell don't know what can make human beings truly happy or worse what on earth happiness means. i know i'm an idiot but when i sit down and think about it (which isn't often) i come to the conclusion that since homo sapiens are just another animal species it's probably best to look at what the other species do and how they carry on their lives and may be we can learn something from it.

this is hardly original. humans have been doing this all the time. and i don't mean observing animals like david attenborough and all those animal planet people who funnily enough are not much different from my friend here who is a porn addict.both types (david attenborough and my pornographer friend) study and watch animal after animal and they get trully obsessed by it but with no other motive than just to satisfy their curiosity and craving.

but there are others who study animals so that they may learn how to adopt their methods and strategies to solve our human problems. the crafty chinese know these since thousands of years ago and classified humans based on twelve species of animals depending on your birth date. and we know that all those communists get their ideas from bees and ants and dictators from all those animal colonies with alpha males . you know, like monkeys. but it is interesting to note that there's no democracy in animal kingdom. i can't think of any animal species that adopt democracy , the human preferred form of communal living. which may be the ultimate proof that humans are better than animals but the way most democracy is practised all over the world it does not seem so. in fact it may prove another opposite thing. it proves that humans are the most decietful animal species there is. they will try to achieve their goals by lying, cheating, bribing , blackmailing and any other unfair means that they can think of.

on personal level humans have much to learn from animals. in fact we all adopt certain animal behaviors and philosophies . say of a certain species of insect (or come to think of it almost any kind of animal ) if you're an adulterer and many of us are simply pigs. this is very interesting. why adultery is so prevalent in animal kingdom and why most humans resemble pigs than other animals such as say, doves for instance. and another observation; all successful women are just like cats. they are cute, halplessly lovely , completely selfish andd can get away with murder.

it is my habit to read a page or two of whatever book lying around on my workstation while waiting for my laptop to download all those e-mails and yesterday i came across a few fine jokes in this 'big book of dirty jokes'. one was a rather sad but funny joke about a divorcee who just got a new job and hope to find sexual harrasment in the office.(ha ha, just apply for any government job ladies, or become a maid).

there are quite a few dog jokes and one of the 'deeper' ones has this interesting dog philosophy which i think some of us may want to adopt. i know many politicans are adopting this already. crafty bastards that they are. and it is this:

if you can't eat it, you fuck it,if you can't fuck it you piss on it.

now we know why most successful men are dogs.

cyber friendship

2009-07-03T08:19:00.003+08:00

a couple of years ago a company collegue from uk travelled to meet me in bangkok for a meeting. he is one of those people who are afraid of flying. his aerophobia was quite acute that at one stage of the flight he had a nightmare and imagined the plane was on fire. as we get to know each other better he told a small secret. he is now married to a girl he got to know from the internet dating site. i always thought that all these sites and chat rooms where people hunt for partners are only for simple no string attached and no -frill bonking. but if a scientist (as my collegue is) can find a good wife on the net, there must be something more to these sites than i give credit for.

making friends and even getting hitched based on long distance friendship isn't new of course. in the pre internet days many school kids have 'pen-pals' . you pay a small sum and choose three friends from countries of your choice and soon you'll be writing letters back and forth with your new friends. i remember almost all my male friends choose young girls from uk, sweeden or denmark and none from the poor countries like bangladesh , cambodia or vietnam. and the writing can sometimes get crazier and crazier or in most cases the friendship slowly fizzled out and met a slow death. but one friend aimed a bit lower. some magazines used to have back pages full of photos and addresses of people who want to make new friends. he chose one and diligently wooed her and in the end to cut the story short he managed to marry the girl.

virtual friendship can lead to all sorts of things and this phenomenon isn't new except that these days with myspace or facebook and other social networking sites making friends can not be easier. there was an interesting article (somewhere) comparing myspace and facebook and the conclusion was myspace is more for people of the 'lower class' compared to facebook which have more educated class. not too sure about that as i see a lot of idiots milling about in facebook....at least judging from their inane and asinine posts. or could it be that i'm missing the point? but i mean, if your cyber friends see it fit to post things like...nak makan jap...or nak tido...or going shopping for milo...i mean, what the fuck?

another interesting scociological observation made by another article (somewhere) was how young people vying with each other to have more friends on their facebook. less than a thousand isn't acceptable and you're a social outcast. and therefore they will start inviting new friends from all over the world.

well, i personally consider myself lucky if i can call 3 persons as my real friends but on the other hand , that isn't a bad idea. having lots of virtual friends i mean. create a persona for yourself on cyberspace and invite new friends from all over the globe. and so i started doing just that. a very simple matter to invite young things from all sort of places to become friends. that's easy. they'll 'accept' immediately. then i stepped a gear higher. i checked some famous local names. and i immediately hit a snag. some accepted immediately, some a bit slower and some didn't. a case in point is tian chua. this PKR guy is one interesting bloke and i'd love to be accepted as his 'friend' but the fucker hasn't accepted till now. never mind. there are millions of people who are willing to be my friend. and so i revved up a gear higher. i thought hell, why don't i become friends with famous authors? so i searched salman rushdie. another snag. search results came up with lists of salman rushdies but you only can become a fan of him. fuck, i don't want to become a fan of anybody , not even of sir dickhead. i want to be a friend. and so i tried another name. martin amis...and the same thing happened. can only become a fan. and so i gave up on these big headed authors.

and i tried politicians next. the first name of a politician i want to be a friend with is ahmadinejad of iran. and dang! the same thing happened. i can only become a fan. so i 'lowered my expectation a bit and searched local politicians...i saw mahathir's name there...but no...i'm not interested in this guy. i searched a few others ...TG Hadi Awang is now a friend which is very funny as i've been insulting him so many times in this blog for his hare brained UG idea. -but since only about five people come to this blog anyway, i'm safe. the likelihood of him stumbling here is just about the same probability of me getting hit by a meteorite. anwar ibrahim still hasn't accept, and when i invited her daughter nurul izzah the reply came that sorry, she already has her limit of 5000 or whatever number of friends allowed by facebook. hmmm... i only have about 80, a long way to go!

but i have another interesting problem which is very enlightening.
Yesterday i became a friend with tuan ibrahim tuan man...he is one of the three current vice presidents of PAS and the number three most important leaders of PAS (after TG HA Awang, and Nasaruddin mat isa - not accounting TGNA who is above it all of course).

one of his posts in facebook yesterday was about how the satans are trying very hard to split PAS because of the UG fiasco. I made a small comment to his post which goes something like this:..

...but we must also ask, if satan has sneaked into the turbans (of PAS) ? which create this fiasco in the first place? and why the angels did not inspire PAS leaders to be proactive and ask umno people to join PAS instead of clamouring for this vague concept of UG?

one hour later i found out that my name was promptly removed from his friend list. interesting that he does not appreciate honest dissenting voice. apparently he can call others satan but can not tolerate honest questions wondering if satan can sneak into turbans. i hope the site is only manned by his idiotic officers rather than himself and it's not his doing. all the same it is disturbing to think that PAS have this kind of intolerant idiots as leaders.

some are lucky enough to even get married with their cyber friends and some don't even get to keep their friends for one day. never mind. sometimes i think it would be good if you can find your soul mate in cyberspace, you know , something like 84 charing cross road ?

but one can't ask too much. i think i'm going to do a different thing today. may be invite film stars, actresses , famous people to be your friend? i may start with paris hilton...but some people say she has herpes....

ah well, that's life...

2009-06-26T01:03:00.003+08:00

...ah well, luang prabang has to be put on a back burner for a while though ironically i may have to go there in the near future on 'official business visit' . but in the mean time i have to make do with sitting here in a small but quite nice room in Maison D'Hanoi , a boutique hotel on Hang Trong st right in the heart of hanoi's old quarter. at usd70 nett per night this place is relatively 'cheap' at least compared to the rather grubby hilton hanoi opera which as the name suggests is just next to the hanoi opera which is priced at usd130++ for the cheapest room. i was there for a couple of nights and the hotel was full of fat americans, thin ethiopians and other africans from countries like mozambique and gabon attending seminars and conferences .

and incidentally, i read a fine but unusual obituary of omar bongo the late president of gabon in the economist on the singapore airline flight to hanoi. i've never heard of this guy and never realised what a right bloody bastard he was. he plundered gabon for 40 years and treated the country as his personal property. he reminded me somewhat of our local hero tun Mahathir who is still living and still messing about with malaysian politics.

maison d'hanoi is just a few minutes away from hoan kiem lake and it is always fun to walk around the lake at night and watch groups of middle aged hanoi ladies doing aerobic to the outdated crappy dance music on old fashioned portable 'boom box' and even better still watching all the young and shapely vietnamese girls just lolling about sucking on ice creams.... and if you look a bit like a foreigner you can't walk two steps without being waved at by motorcyclists who are everywhere offering to bring you to massage parlours... not that i have the slightest urge to take their offer. it's quite possible that they may bring you to some dark alley and rob you instead of presenting you with those luscious young viet girls. but still, i thank god that i am born a man.

and in these days of facebook and instant friendship i just sent a note to one of my girl vietnamese cyber friends saying that i'll be in hanoi and may be you would like to have coffee or someting with me?. and she came back asking how old i am which prompted me to check her profile and found out that she was born in 1994. hmmmm....i'm now feeling slightly worried that she may think that i'm a damned pedophile.

update:

saw her latest facebook 'what's on your mind' post which simply said woohoo!!! she did an IQ test and seemed to be elated with her result. and this is how her score is stated... i quote...your IQ is above 85!! she either had a very fine sense of humor or it's just that english isn't her strong point and she's only fifteen anyway.

not to be unkind or anything but somehow that reminds me of the hardtalk program on bbc last night with jane goodall talking about gorillas.....

UG? Urghhhh!!!

2009-06-17T20:21:00.004+08:00

OMG! (as some people would say these days), there's no let up to this Unity government (UG) stupidity. and the devilish umno , sly bastards that they are are quick to sense blood. and the fucking retarded leaders of PAS (and i'm especially referring to nasharuddin and his band of idiots) are swallowing it hook line and sinker (as the expression goes ). god! it makes my blood boil again.

i need a break from torturing myself reading and hearing and watching these umno devils egging these PAS idiots on and on with this UG stupidity. it's so bloody embarrassing to stand and watch pas getting mauled and fooled by the umno devils yet again... dear god almighty! i had to run away again! fucking coward that i am! i just can't understand these people. why are they hell bent on destroying what gains they have! why are their brains so fucking small that they can not think outside of umno! and this media spin about the erdogans are pro anwar is making me trow up again! fuck the alleged sodomist. pas with people like nizar, khalid, husam can give anwar a run for the money (as the expression goes) and pas people ought to have bigger brains to think beyond anwar!

but with pea brained nasharuddin and the gang egging hadi awang (which never in a million years will become PM inside or outside PR) on and on about UG, and TGNA is getting angrier and angrier and the sly devils in umno egging the idiot nasharuddin on and on for more concrete UG talks it's a matter of time before things will really blow up and PAS will then be truly screwed .

god! i really think i need another break...and i think i'll go to luang prabang this time...or may be in the short term (as they say in our office) i'll just make do and pacify myself by reading another travel book on laos by that "intrepid geriatric granny" dervla murphy titled one foot in laos.
if this one sentence exerpt from this independent book interview is to go by she sounds like one hell of a grand mama...but may be instead of cooling me off it'll get me all riled up against the fucking american government again...

"Every night during the Secret War, while Americans postured about saving the world from the evil empire, their AC47 gunships patrolled skies over Laos and when their infra-red sensors reacted to warm flesh, heroes on board fired 6,000 rounds a minute, not knowing whether their targets were Pathet Laos, soldiers, buffaloes, North Vietnamese, pigs, nursing mothers, gibbons or children. And B52 pilots on their way back from abortive sorties into Vietnam regularly dropped unused bombs upon Laos, having being ordered not to land with high explosives on board."

travels

2009-06-11T22:37:00.005+08:00

i was in makassar recently and found out that our pm DS najib had just visited the town about a week before and a road was named after him somewhere. i don't know what kind of road it is. how major it is or if it's just an alley way , a lorong in a pijat zone of makassar. it was a first anyway as i don't think there's a road anywhere named after our PM yet apart from this one. and so soon after he became pm too. quite an achievement this. apparently najib is quite proud of his bugis heritage and the sulawesi bugis are obviously proud of him too. i wonder if the sulawesi people know anything about altantuya and the c4 stories.

but they sure know about manohara. the moment i checked in the first question the beautiful indonesian check-in girl at the hotel counter asked me was why did the sultan of kelantan beat up manohara. i said it was not the sultan. the guy is old and sick and i know nothing about the strange sex games these people play. i mean manohara is just seventeen! she could have mistaken a rough sex game with beatings, who knows. and today we hear that the prince, manohara's husband is denying everything and planning a lawsuit.

well, that would be interesting. i certainly would love to know what really happened. i don't know anything about manohara until this scandal blew over a few weeks back and i still don't know anything but i sure would like to know all the dirty details of what actually happened. i mean why on earth a prince would want to beat a seventeen year old girl and one of the most beautiful models of indonesia too? but then again, we all have heard that many bluebloods of the world are nothing but assholes.

when i told my indonesian friends that i wanted to visit makassar their first reaction was why on earth anybody want to go to makassar? there's nothing there . and that is just about quite right although i found the old port at poatere quite interesting.my actual destination was to see the interesting culture of tana toraja people. and since i'm not one of these intrepid travellers who like to rough it out i simply hired a taxi for three days and the driver became my chauffer and tour guide. and tok ba proved to be an excellent driver and tour guide.

i'm now at a stage of life where i find modern western cities absolutely boring. i now have no desire to visit USA or UK or any western european cities anymore. certainly not any of the fucking german cities although i've never been to germany but i would certainly be interested to go to albania or khazakstan. and probably i will one day too.

and these days my reading is mainly travel books. my collection of travel books are getting bigger and bigger . from classics like Goethe's Italian journey to Redmond O' Hanlon's congo Journey or Into the heart of Borneo and william dalrymple's city of Djinns and so on. for the first time in a very very long time i can't remember finishing any novel yet this year. this is not to say i don't read any. in fact i started on too many and half read novels are piling up higher and higher and i had to put a small book rack beside my bed and it's now full of half read novels. the last book i finished from cover to cover was in fact a travel book . it was colin thubron's in siberia and now i'm into the last quarter of in search of khazakstan :the land that dissapeared by christopher robbins. this is quite a fascinating book and mr robin painted kazakhstan entirely differently from shall we say borat's kazakstan.

one of the most interesting sections was about the nuclear arsenals left by the old soviet union in kazakstan. there was an intense competition between the US government and the other parties from the iranians to the al qaeda gangs trying to buy these arsenals but sad to say the president nursultan nazabayev in the end sided with the US. if he did the opposite the world would have been a lot more interesting now. although mr robbins painted a rather positive picture of nursultan nazabayev from what i read elsewhere he is quite a bastard. and you know a country is quite fucked when you read that a teenage girl living in one of the remotest places on earth had her yurt wall full of posters of english bubble gum singers and listening to britney spears at full blast.

another travel book that i'm currently reading is a much more straightforward travel writing by a guy who did it the hard way. Stranger in the forest:on foot across borneo by Eric Hansen is a much simpler writing of a personal journey in the jungle of borneo with some fascinating insights about the penans and other native people of the remote areas of kalimantan and serawak. some of the old cultures of these people are not unlike the people of tana toraja.

but tana toraja people are quite something else. it's the only people that i know of that make funeral ceremonies the highlight and focal point of their lives. the burial custom is quite simply macabre. pointless for me to say anything more about it as it is so wellknown and so i'll just stop here for now. you can see some of the pictures from my flickr site here if you like....

Not quite high life...

2009-05-30T02:00:00.003+08:00

i'm going to do a taki today. for those who read THE SPECTATOR you know what i'm talking about. taki's high life happens to be my favorite column . the other is the opposite of taki's and appropriately called low life. if anything low life is even better than taki's high life. being a rather poor bugger with no silver spoon shoved up my throat myself i naturally can identify with jeremy clarke's low life misadventures more than taki's high adventures.

take this not quite recent and sad but rather funny low life misadventure in one february 09 issue. mr clarke was looking forward to watch his football team (low lifers as you know watch soccer as opposed to rugby for the high lifers) that was finally beginning to win matches . and he had to take a three hr train ride to london and change over for another ride on the tube. the thing is he is myopic with one long sighted eye and the other short sighted. his contact lenses were naturally different for his right and left eyes . the only thing is on this particular day he put them the wrong way. and so he decided to change them in the train toilet but as you probably can guess, he dropped them in the yellow puddle on the floor. after some further mishaps he was finally able to clean and wore the lenses the right way and to drown his sorrow while waiting for the tube he took a beer and justas he raised the can to his mouth a policeman came up to him and said 'sorry, you can't do that here' in polish accent. and just then he realized that he left his football ticket at home....and here's another lovely one.

taki's on the other hand is the total opposite. he hobnobbed with all the right group, all those sarkozys, the putins and one of these days i'm sure the obamas too. he name dropped like there's no tomorrow. well i can do that a little if i wanted to. for example, at one time i knew anwar ibrahim quite well. i mean personally. in my student days i once had him in my room with a gaggle of his admirers listening to him making fun of umno. but even in those days i never liked him very much. during this same student days one of my friends who is now a vice chancellor of a local universities and i once drove anwar to an airport. my friend happened to be a great admirer of anwar and wanted to wait till the plane depart and wanted to be with anwar as long as he could but not me. the moment we sent anwar safely to the airport i said let's go and anwar wasn't too amused with me. one time many years ago my vice chancellor friend came to my office and invited me to join him to campaign for one of anwar's close friends who stood on unmo ticket . i chased him out of my office with mild insults and we were never that close anymore from then on. but he is a good guy. not like most umno garbage.

and about these three PAS deputy president candidates. i've observed all the three up close a few times. or at least with mat sabu and nasaruddin. as for husam, well my younger brother who is now a syariah court hakim used to work for him and his wife is one of my sisters' good friend. and we get to know about his family life quite intimately. one time nasaruddin came to my sister's home while i also happened to be there. he is a friend of my brother in law. and i get to observe him with his guard's down so to speak. and i can tell you this. he's no PM material. and so is mat sabu. but husam. he's different. there are people who hate his guts and there are people who love him. one of my friends who happened to be one of fairly senior guys in kelantan PAS one time spent hours talking about husam's dark sides. but as a whole i gather that husam is the best among the three. certainly the man that i would like to see as PAS deputy president.

disintegration

2009-05-15T18:41:00.002+08:00

what a mess perak is in now! for some crazy reason it keeps on reminding me about the bible story of the death of JC. when old JC died on the cross, we effectively don't have a god to run the universe, for you see, JC is not only the one and only son of god but god made human flesh and blood or so some people think. and so effectively if this is to be believed , when JC died, god also died so basically it means that the universe had no menteri besar when JC gave up the ghost. which sounds rather funny- for a god to give up a ghost- but then it's not that inaccurate to say this because god in christian religion also comes in the form of a holy ghost. so it's just like perak state now, when nizar is declared the real MB, but then the court awarded this 'stay of execution' (which sounds rather grim in a different context) and so now zamry thinks that he is still the MB but that is disputed by about everybody except umno people and so basically perak now has no real MB just like that time when we had no real god because he died on the cross...or so some people believed. in short perak is in a limbo or to put it more bluntly, perak is fucked.

which makes me think about sex. the funny thing is , as we all know malaysia is a highly polarised country. racism is never been more intense than it is now. the chinese think that the malays are lazy buggers, the malays think that chinese are just like the hated jews and everybody just kick the indians around. we malaysians are completely screwed. the only thing that prevent malaysia from disintegration is this. the different communities are just like the animals in the jungle. they by and large keep to themselves and don't encroach onto each other's space. so although we all call ourselves malaysians we live our separate lives. it has been said that for malaysians , the only time the different races are fully integrated are when they visit whorehouse. for you see, in a whorehouse chinese like to fuck malays like to fuck chinese like to fuck indians like to fuck malays like to fuck indians and so on and on...so yeah, that's not a bad idea, turn malaysia into one big whorehouse and we'll love each other.

that reminds me of another thing. i'm getting mildly depressed again because currently there is a huge book sales going on and i bought a few hundred ringgits' worth of books again that I will never ever going to read. not because they are not good but on the contrary they are very good and that's why i'm mildly depressed. with thousands of books in my personal library now i'll need several lifetimes if i were to read them all. and among the books and back issues of magazines that i bought was this scientific american issue which caught my attention. one lead article is why do men buy sex. and one little fact was astounding;

In Thailand, where prostitution is illegal but socially accepted, one study suggested that a whopping 95 percent of men have slept with a prostitute.

and that my friends mean that just about everybody goes to a whorehouse in thailand...except the monks may be. may be that's why thailand is such a tolerant and non racist nation. everybody goes to whorehouse. oh, some will start shouting about the exploitation of women and all that. may be true. but not all. i've never seen a whore with a long face in my life. well, at least from my observations of naked girls happily dancing their life away in soy cowboy and the like. which is not to say that these girls are not exploited by evil men. some of course do.

which brings me to another thing. one of the books that i just bought was this last novel by norman mailer. one of the triumvarate of the truly great american writers. gore vidal and kurt vonnegut were the other two. all of them are dead now. the castle in the forest is norman mailer's last book and is a story of the young hitler narrated by the devil himself. sounds very delicious . anything about evil is fascinating and it's worthwhile for everybody to understand more of the nature of evil and for some crazy reasons that makes me think about umno again.....

industrial grade stupidity

2009-05-08T00:48:00.004+08:00

malaysia is a very boring country. i mean one is hard pressed to think of one interesting thing about malaysia. yes we have a lot of monkeys in our jungle. and we have orang utans swinging from tree to tree in sepilok or somewhere. that is quite interesting. but apart from a few monkeys i can't think of any other thing that is really interesting about my country. but lately our political shenanigans are at least at par with some fucked up countries like the philippines, or thailand or afghanistan... we don't bomb people yet but i think we are getting closer. and probably about time too.

today malaysian politics is elevated to the next level of industrial grade stupidity. i won't say anything about the monkey antics in perak dewan today because everybody has read all about it elsewhere like here or here. these two ex PKR son of bitches jamaluddin mohd razi and mohd osman jailu who were caught red handed with bundles of cash up their bums sometimes back and the mother of all bitches hee shit foong (ex DAP cunt who sulked because she can't get a camry- according to some reports) will go down in history as the vermins responsible for screwing up malaysia and make us the laughing stock of the whole world (not that the whole world gives a shit about malaysia). to think that three worthless piece of shit can cause so much pain and trouble to the people of perak and malaysia is almost incomprehensible. and thanks to these three assholes the perak state government is now well and truly fucked. not that i fucking care very much about perak state but boy oh boy i really wished someone shove C4 up these vermins' bums and blow them up to high heaven...no, make that hell....

oh dear... i get really worked up again i'm afraid and it's 1.24 am in the morning and i need cheering up. and i guess i'll follow the example of Edward Heath (British PM in the seventies). He read Monty Python and the Holy Grail (book) and this is what he wrote (as appeared on the cover of the book)...

Certainly cheered me up a lot after losing two elections and the leadership of the conservative party.

someone ought to give the book as a present to Dato Seri Nizar (my current hero).the book is a first draft of the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail with all the crosses scribbles and doodles and it is very very funny. I've seen the film countless of times . (countless here means probably 3 or 4 times). i read the first few pages just now and it certainly cheered me up a bit. here's a version of the script. reading this make me forget those assholes in perak.

and i read quite a funny joke from RPK's newest mad posting in exile here.
and here's the joke...

Recently, they held a competition to create a new slogan for Najib’s regime. The third prize was a trip to the US. The second prize was a cake. When the second-prize winner was called up to receive his prize he screamed, “The third prize winner gets a trip to the US and all I get is a bloody cake?” The soon-to-be Malaysian Ambassador replied, “But this is not just any cake. This cake was baked by Rosmah herself.” The second-prize winner then shouted, “Screw Rosmah,” and our wise guy replied, “Ah, but that is the first prize.”

And of course the soon-to be-Malaysian ambassador is 'mr raba raba' as the KJphile blogger sakmongkol AK47 calls him.

not exactly in the monty python's and the holy grail's league but not bad...any joke about our first lady by definition isn't bad...

and for some reason i suddenly feel a craving to read what used to be the best comic strip in the NST. i'm referring to li'l abner. they don't feature this comic strip anymore and NST these days is just a ghost of it's former glory days (and i'm only referring to their old wednesday's literary section when if i'm not mistaken khee thuan chye was the literary editor). just reading this wiki entry on li'l abner make me glow with pleasure.

the fucking perak state assembly sitting today can give the best li'l abner strip a run for the money .

holy goat

2009-05-01T15:05:00.002+08:00

the other day during a meeting a couple of us went out to do our Zohor prayers. and while leaving the room one of my friends made a comment "but we all pray to the same god, right?" what he meant was why all these different ways of worshipping the same god? you go and do your five times daily prayers in the mosque, you go to temple and you go to church and so on. and his question was a very valid one. there were indonesians, a colombian, a couple of vietnamese, a couple of thais a filipino, an australian , a couple of chinese malaysians and a couple of malay muslims in the meeting. and we all have diferent religions and beliefs.

one of the best features of our corporate culture is the high respect for diversity and so everybody has the freedom to do and observe his religious practise and culture no matter how outlandish or strange it may seem to the others. but this question of worships and religion always bug me. why all these fights even about what to call god? and that is just for a start. is it any big deal if christians also want to call their god Allah? why don't hindus add jesus as another one of their numerous gods? what if they do? and so on. and all these unfortunate and sad fights all because of different ways of worshipping god. the recent 'scandal' of a hindu convert to Islam who wants to bring up his children into islamic faith whilst his ex wife who is still a hindu want them to remain hindu reminds us how explosive and sad things can turn into. no wonder in some culture when this kind of things happen they simply use guns to settle the matter. clean and easy. i can not imagine what i'll do if i'm faced with a similar situation as this indian couple.

*

although the question "but we all pray to the same god, right?" wasn't addressed to any particular person i thought i shouldn't leave it unanswered and so I replied "oh no, we worship the same goat" and my recently turned very pious muslim collegue turned to me and wishpered under his breadth...'you be careful, that's blasphemy'. but i may not be far off the truth. different religions differ so much in how they view god(s) and how god wants us to be behave it is almost quite impossible to say that we are worshipping the same god. human intellectual wirings is such that we have this a priori belief that truth is one. you can not have two different sets of truth. all achievements of science depends on this fundamental fact. and that only means that when it comes to different religions , there can not be multiple truths...meaning that there's only one true religion.

but as we know it is not as straight forward as that. religions undergo the same darwinian evolution as much as living things. there is no one religion which is completely unique and arise or stands on it's own. independent of anything before it. all religions are influenced and based on it's predecessor. so in a sense they are one but updated in different ways. so why bother? you like apple, i like orange but they are all fruits right? but it's not as easy as that. even among apples there are varieties, i happen to like cox and you granny smith and so on. and we think those that eat rambutans are plain fuckers...and we start fighting. and we all forget about god, the compassionate and all that.... we might as well worship goats.

E & C

2009-04-16T12:25:00.005+08:00

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.

basquiat

2009-04-12T02:24:00.004+08:00

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?

wawaweewah!!!! well done NIZAR!

2009-04-08T00:47:00.003+08:00

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.

theory of everything

2009-04-04T09:39:00.004+08:00

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.

list of fives

2009-03-28T22:02:00.003+08:00

sometimes last year my boss who is english gave me an everton jersey. i am not a fan of everton but he is. and a few weeks back in one of our routine long distance phone conf (he's based somewhere near london) he mentioned how excited he was now that everton finally started kicking ass. i mentioned to him that if everton ends up fifth or better in the league i'll treat him to a nice curry when he comes down here next time around. i did not realize at the time that everton was in sixth place. i thought that was quite amusing .i don't know what he made of it. i don't know where everton is at the moment as i've long stopped following british soccer. in fact i don't follow anything these days. and i don't know why i said fifth or better. number five doesn't signify anything for me. i don't believe in any special numbers though surprisingly for unknown reasons i hate number 13. i hate to admit it, but at the subconscious level i'm probably influenced by the westerners' superstition.

five sounds like a good well rounded number and so i thought i'd make a list of my five bests of five categories just for the hell of it.

here goes- in no particular order:-

1) Five best english songs

Yesterday - The Beatles
American Pie- Don McLean
Do it Again -Steely Dan
Maggie May -Rod Stewar
Solsbury Hill - Peter Gabriel

2) Five best Rock albums

Dark side of the moon- Pink Floyd
Machine head -Deep purple
Close to the Edge -Yes
Lamb Lies on the Broadway - Genesis
Harvest-Neil Young

3) Five best movies

The Big Liebowski (Dir. Joel /EthanCoen )
Once upon a time in America (Dir: Sergio Leone)
One flew over the cuckoo's nest (Dir: Milos Forman)
Nosferatu (Dir . Werner Herzog)
The Exorcist (Dir: William Friedkin)

4) Five best novels

Catcher in the Rye - J. D Sallinger
The Tin Drum- Gunther Grass
Kim-Rudyard Kipling
The Great Gatsby- F Scott Fitzgerald
Alice's adventures in wonderland -Lewis Carroll

5) five most interesting malaysian politicians

(tuan Guru) Nik Aziz
Nizar Jamaluddin
Khairy Jamaluddin (no kin of the above)
Karpal Singh
Anwar Ibrahim

wow...is this for real?

2009-03-22T17:10:00.008+08:00

read an interesting interview of mike tyson yesterday. not our local idiot mike tyson, our very own legendary m2Taib who -for unknown reason to me- is saddled with the mike tyson monicker. this damned guy has the cheek to contest for deputy umno president post and for all we know and i won't put it pass the stupid bastards in umno- now that the ex tnb clerk ali rustam who supposedly can't speak a decent sentence in english to save his grandmother is out of the way- to vote for him , who also supposedly can't speak a decent sentence in english to save his grandmother. and he may win it too next tuesday (god forbid! - for the sake of malaysia).

no, i'm referring to the true legend mike the heavyweight boxer. this guy has his equal share of tribulations -to say the least -and now that a movie on him is out soon i'm very much looking forward to it. he is one very fascinating character. he shows the best and worst side of what human being is all about.

and speaking of which, last night watched US president obama interview on jay leno. i only wish we have our own local leno, or conan or letterman or jonathan ross to interview our local politicians.well, may be in a hundred years time. for the moment we'll have to make do with ...nothing. obama is a fascinating politician. his intelligence is without question. anybody who can explain to non economist and layman like me how AIG can bring down the whole banking system of the US and ruin the us economy if it is not saved (bailed out) in 5 minutes on a funny talk show program must be something. i wish him all the best and wish he could think out of the box on foreign policy too (but here, i'm not hopeful).

and speaking of boxes, one of the most interesting comments by tyson in the fascinating the guardian interview which you can read it here in full is this. he is in a rough patch right now but according to this interview;

Now he worries the film might be too successful and he will end up with "too much money and pussy" again. "It's pretty dangerous. I become accustomed to it."

now THAT is something most people would LOVE to worry about. too much money and pussy! boy, i'd love to have this headache any time any day.

which reminds me of another very very interesting thing.

Wenger J Khairy made an interesting comment to my blog post 'don't be evil' (march 15) saying that he doesn't buy that coming from google because as he put it:

...recently they were even accused of playing a part in trying to cover up Nazri Aziz son's photo

well, what do you know! is this for real? you can read all the juicy stories and avail yourselves to the racy pictures here. pictures were supposedly of our menteri nazri aziz bonking a girl that is obviously not his missus and his drunken son with a bevy of beauties. so far i've not seen anything in the MSM or even the other internet papers but you can see all of them here. despite claim by the blogger who posted the story on his site that there were several attempts to block the site , so far "they" are still unsuccessful and the site is still up and running. but hurry ! just in case they may be successful as google itself is giving a helping hand as the blogger exclaimed in one of his posts;

I am an American being CENSORED by the Malaysian government with the help of Google!

well, there goes google's 'don't be evil' motto. and is there any connection between this story and nazri aziz declining to contest the supreme umno post? who knows ! and i for one don't care. in fact in this matter i'm all for free consensual sex. enough of all these hypocrisy! who cares what you do with your dicks. good luck to you! but...but...but if you are a public figure of course you're expected to behave yourself.

gone to the dogs

2009-03-18T23:21:00.004+08:00

and so, ali rustam the malacca CM , a one time ex tnb clerk and an aspirant to the no 2 post in umno (and by default deputy PM) now bites the dust. he was caught with his pants down and is now barred from contesting the post that some think is his for the taking. some like sakmongkol47 claimed that he 'crashed the red light' even way back in 2004 but was lucky to escape punishment then- like the rest- except the poor isa samad who infamously uttered the unforgettable words to people who presumably got his money but didn't vote for him " kita jumpa di padang mahsyar" or something to that effect .

so that leaves two men standing for the no. 2 contest. a) the current favorite muhyiddin who according to sakmongkol 47 in one of his recent blog posts again:...

I remember Musa Hitam used to joke around saying; the only land (tanah) that Muhyiddin hasn't sold or alienated is the land on his mother's grave.

and the second candidate is the biggest clown of all.M2Taib. the man who dragged a couple of million ringgit worth of hard cash into australia and feigning stupidity and ignorance of basic custom rule and to prove that he couldn't understand a simple aussie custom form he took an english test and obtained a failing grade, and presumably because of this he was found not guilty by the aussie court. to pull one over the aussies is something i really admire him for but what guarrantee that the fucker won't pull one over us the rakyat if he is elected the no.2?

but that's not the worst of it. najib the unchallenged one and our PM to be is someone to really fear for. the situation is so desparate that zaid ibrahim even made a plea to the king not to make najib the next pm. and oh boy, with rosmah as the first lady....this is more fearful than hantu tetek.

but what choice do we have? the second liners aren't much better. Hishamuddin , reputedly the most popular VP candidate according to RPK is a brainless twat....or something to that effect and khairi ? he'll treat the country like his fiefdom if given the chance. afterall, in pre march 8 era, he used to run malaysia on behalf of his FIL if we were to believe what tun dr M says...

and so you think ok we should come see the other side. well my friends, bad news here too. this side is equally fucked. Parti keadilan is full of useless assholes. look at the bastards who ruined perak govt. and now ruining penang. they are all keadilan fuckers. the keadilan haters would gleefully point out that it must be so because their leader is reputedly fond of assholes.

and DAP?.with demented karpal singh around nobody in his right mind will pay serious attention to DAP...except chinese racists.

ahhh...PAS then. well, i can say this. PAS has some of the most beautiful and idealistic and morally upright supporters of any parties around. but their head! their head! by Allah...the head is fucking retarded! when everybody is pissing on BN and this shit of a coalition is half dead here comes the fucker offering some lifeline in the form of unity government! what fucking unity government. and the cheek of it all. does he realize that his party (PAS) is the most junior party in PR? i think hadi awang's head should be examined ...by top psychiatrist.

i'm fucking sick of malaysian politics...the country is going to the dogs... i'm going to switch off again. in a couple of weeks' time i'm off to vietnam again. my randy vietnamese friend says there's a very good beach right down south. it's an island at the southern tip of vietnam. for all i know the fucker is referring to perhentian island. you never know with these vietnamese. they are a bloody mad people too. for all we know they think some of our islands are theirs...and if we bring them to the international court we'll probably lose again...like that batu putih thing....anyway, i'll make sure that i do not put my handphone in my pocket when going snorkelling this time...

don't be evil

2009-03-15T10:26:00.004+08:00

i learn a very surprising thing today.i found out in a book "the google story" that the corporate motto of google is "Don't be Evil" . and the company's philosophy is to solve problems and make a product first and then think about making money. this is in complete opposite to most businesses where the executives and managers think about making money first and then make a product. the euphemism for this is 'meeting customer needs' ( i only know this too well).

don't be evil! isn't that the most profound and also the simplest and most obvious thing in the world! i wish every corporation and political party and government in the world have the same motto. probably it's not a bad idea for the united nation (or the united nothing as one funny t-shirt logo calls it) to adopt this. i wish the present american government practise this. and on the local front, i wish umno and BN instead of following their unwritten motto of "let's steal more" to do a muhasabah diri . not doing evil is a good point to start from.

don't be evil. short and sweet and eloquent. but like most things the seemingly simplest of statement can be the most complex to comprehend and have the most far reaching significance. take einstein's e=mc square for example. it is the most beautiful and simplest equation in the scientific world ever. it can do infinite good but also capable of doing the ultimate evil . it'll unlock the energy of atoms but it also can destroy the world.

the pedants among us will say ' but what is 'evil'? and i sure as hell can't answer that with certainty. in fact i still don't understand what it really means when we say 'i love you'. such is mysteries of life....

booksellers of panjayuan

2009-03-03T17:06:00.009+08:00

one thing i always never fail to do when i go to beijing is to make sure i stay over the weekend and visit the famous panjayuan weekend market. there's nothing like it anywhere in the world. yes there are many famous weekend markets all over the world , like the chatuchak market in bangkok for example, where they sell everything except slaves. but panjayuan is more special. the place only sells handicrafts, curios , antiques -or at least copies of the real thing- paintings and books. you won't see clothing , pots and pans, vegetables or food here. it's heaven for antique hunters - or copies of the real thing. and the place is huge. you'll be spinning and drop to your knees before you can complete the round of the rows upon rows of stalls selling every imaginable chinese curios and fake antiques and jades and gem stones, or even simply plain pebbles and stones and tibetan handicrafts and copies of modern and classical chinese paintings, and ceramics and potteries. They even have a section at the back where they sell all kinds of sculptures and statues.

and the good thing is you can bargain like crazy. if they ask 1000 remimbi- or yuan as they commonly call it - for a dopey looking piece of pottery, go ahead, bargain for 100 yuan. some of them may feign anger or look insulted but it is usually just a show, if you are brazen enough and say oh, fuck it, i'm not going to pay a yuan more and walk away, they usually start pleading to raise a bit more and in the end you may end up paying say 200 yuan. i did this a few times myself but i make sure i have chinese friends around to back me up. if i go alone which i did many times, the bargaining part isn't so much fun because one look at you and seeing that you're a foreigner they immediately raise the price twice by default. if you're a fucking white man or japs they may raise it up to three or four times. and
whites and japs don't know how to bargain. these people always 'spoil the market' wherever they go.

to me, the best part is the uncovered area where sometimes you find old wiry looking women - i imagine villagers from outside beijing- try to hawk their fake antiques. i can spend hours looking at these and occasionally buy one or two celadons. but what i really like best is to go to the side of the huge covered area by the wall where the book sellers are. there are four long rows of these which put together may be come to 300m or so. and here you'll see the book lovers. my soul mates. you'll see middle age men looking for rare books and books on chinese antiques and paintings, for you see, the really great thing about panjayuan book stalls is that for for the most part these stalls sell only this kind of books. antique books and books on paintings. but there are a sizable number of students and beautiful chinese girls come looking around for cheap second hand books on all sort of topics.

and probably this is one of the few places you can bargain for books just like buying fake antiques. last august i bought a huge and completely new coffee table book Lucien Freud by William Faever (Rizzoli publication ny) for less than 200rmb (rm 100) whereas the list price is US135. and that's the thing about this place too. although the books are almost all chinese, if you're patient enough to search carefully , you'll find that there are quite a few books in English. in fact a few sellers specialize in english art books and auction catalogues . and if you like chinese paintings this place is heaven.

i don't like chinese (classical) style paintings very much but since the early nineties the chinese have quietly revolutionize the painting genre and some of their young (and now not so young painters) have produced some of the most distinctive paintings in the world. Yue minjun with the ridiculous pink silly laugh self potraits now sells for millions of USD and you can see very good copies of many of his paintings sold in panjayuan for around 300 yuan. so is zhang xiogang with his stylised paintings of family groups to look like old photographs. but i hate these chinese avant garde artists. their paintings are ugly. but chinese modern still life which owes very much to chardin and even earlier 17th century dutch still life masters are absolute delight. i've bought a few copies over the years and to my pleasant surprise i just discovered that the very first chinese painting i bought from beijing about ten years ago is in fact a copy of He da-Qiao's painting. i found this out when i bought a book of still life paintings an album of Oil Painting of He-Da Qiou ( for only 20 rmb) in panjayuan a couple of weeks ago. and there it is. the original painting of the copy that i bought is in the book. panjayuan can give you pleasant surprises .

kashgar

2009-02-27T23:05:00.002+08:00

many years ago, when i read that there were -and most likely still are- several uighurs from china's sinkiang autonomous region been detained in guantanamo bay, i couldn't understand or make sense of this. but now that i have visited kashgar, i can see that this makes perfect sense. the old quarters of the city is nothing like china and decidedly middle eastern in feeling and i could imagine this is what afghanistan or that rowdy pakistan tribal areas look like. the old quarters are 100% muslim uighurs .(in fact i hardly see any han chinese in the whole of kashgar). some of their women cover their heads and faces completely. and i meant that literally. the funny thing is they just simply put a brown see-through towel over their heads and lift it up as and when they feel like it. looks silly even to my muslim extremist eyes. i won't be surprised if my brother osama is hiding somewhere here rather than in the pakistan tribal areas as what those damned americans think. he'll be at home here.

but sadly the old quarters are now hemmed in in every direction by the boring chinese modern buildings. so, if you want to see old kashgar do come quickly. i think this will probably be gone in a few years time. even if they don't, i think the old silk road romance is quite gone now. many of the young uighur ladies now don't wear head covering scarfs, let alone drape brown towels over their heads. and although their men don't look handsome to me, and some of their girls looks a bit hairy , these young women exude strong animal sexuality. chinese girls look positively frigid compared to uighur girls.

and when a uighur taxi driver said to me ' karaoke you like?' my eyes widened a bit and i said yes? you have here? and he said yes, we go tomorrow ok? and i realised that he was actually offering to take me on the famous karakoram highway to karakul lake, a scenic area 180 km away from kashgar. but sadly i didn't have the time and just did the obligatory things every visitor does in kashgar. which is to visit the sunday market and animal bazaar and the two venerated sites in kashgar, the abakh khoja tomb and the tomb of yusuf has hajip, their 17th century revered muslim missionary whose teachings is widely practiced now. and the rest of the time hanging out around the id kah mosque, the spiritual heart of kashgar. or at least that's what my travel book says. and what lonely planet says is true (and i always found that among travel books, lonely planet is always the best and most accurate) that chini bagh hotel is very strategically located. it's only ten minutes walk away from id kah mosque and you can walk anywhere to main areas within kashgar from here.

since a picture is worth a thousand words as they say, i've put a novella's worth of pictures on flickr that you can visit here. i made no pretence to be a fancy photographer but you'll have a very good idea of what khashgar is like by looking at these pics. i wish i have some pics of uighur girls (preferably nude) but one can't have everything .....

cheb mami and going to kashgar

2009-02-19T23:51:00.004+08:00

here's my kid doing rubik's cube under four min.with the great cheb mami music in the background. i can't work out how the hell he did it. he can repeat it as many times as you like and now getting better and better at it. can even go under three mins. kids are amazing. i once mentioned this in an old post but since i'm listening to rai music of cheb mami and khaled right now i thought i might put it again here. most people know cheb mami through his wailing on sting's desert rose. but he's much more than that. he and khaled are the kings of rai. these are quite old music now and i've lost track of the newer arab music . but i can never get tired of khaled's and cheb mami's songs of the eighties and nineties. i'm listening to all these desert songs as a kind of an entre' to my long dreamed visit to kashgar tomorrow.

kashgar of course isn't in the middle east but in the semi desert area just next to taklimakan desert in central asia. the only muslim majority city in china and an important city in the middle of the silk road of centuries ago. yinchuan in the muslim autonomous province of ninxia just south of inner mongolia is another muslim majority city but when i was there a few years back this city was already completely sinified that it has totally lost whatever character it once had. and so before kashgar (kashi) turned completely into another boring generic chinese city i thought i'd better go now and visit the id kah mosque and other muslim holy sites such as the tomb of Abakh Khoja and the famous sunday market. there are only two good hotels for non speaking visitors. one is SEMAN hotel which was once the russian embassy and the other is CHINI BAGH which was the british's. only seman can be booked online but to my distress it was fully booked on the dates i'm going. so again had to get my good chinese friend in beijing to book me directly the room in chini bagh which is just as well as this is much closer to the old part of the city and just near the id kah mosque and the best hotel in kashgar. or so according to the info in the lonely planet and other internet sources. i'll soon find out.

my dream is to take a land journey by train retracing the silk road from beijing to kashgar. i did take this 48 hour train journey from beijing to urumqi. but did not push through perhaps another 12 hr land route to kashgar. this time i cheat a bit. will just simply take a flight from beijing to urumqi than a short connecting flight to kashgar. sometime in the future i hope to complete the silk route by doing kashgar to istanbul. ....probably when the the damned americans have had enough of screwing up pakistan afghanistan and iran and things settle down and become less crazy in these areas....probably it'll never come. but miracles sometimes happen...so till then, i'll just savor kashgar...tomorrow.

not quite the three musketeers ...or the three stooges either

2009-02-18T11:25:00.013+08:00

i've never been to DBP that bastion of the malay language champion (which is doing a very poor job of it) but i was there last night. i was there for the live session of tv 9 "Hujah' programme of pemuda umno 'debate' among the three aspirants to the ketua pemuda umno post . although i despise umno with all my heart i'm open enough to listen to what they have to say and i thought this is the best place to learn the new vision (if any) of umno . here are their best young leaders mukhriz, KJ and Khir toyo . they would have a slug fest answering hard hitting questions from Prof muhammad Agus of UKM. a young guy from my home state with his thick english budu accent which is typical but peculiar to my home state english speakers , and now a well known local political commentator and analyst and de facto successor of the notorious razak baginda of altantuya fame.

and not least i was there to observe these three famous malay guys up close. and i wanted to observe khir toyo's amazing physical transformation . at one time he was turning white almost like micheal jackson due to tempe power. the last time i saw him up close was on april fool's day last year when he accompanied dr M at the hotel in PJ when dr M gave a scintillating speech insulting his successor dollah B and his SIL (and even rebuking najib for not aggressive enough to push dollah B out) . and at that time mr toyo for some reasons reminded me of my palm civet pet. his hair was completely white and face quite red like a blushing chinese doll. tempe power apparently worked very well even to the hair. and at that time i managed to shake dr m's hand and i can report here that his hand shake was the limpest i've ever experienced from anybody. and i resoved last night to shake hands with these three young pemudas and see who had the firmest grip.

but first about the slug fest. i'm not going to say much about this as many would have watched it on tv last night and many more will read the spins in newspapers today. but i'll just say this. prof agus did very well to ask all the hard hitting questions but the answers from those three pemudas did not give any real surprise. i was hoping for some agressive soul searching and even controversial replies from these young men but none were forth coming. all were for ISA, (although khairi seems to be a bit more open and willing to talk to the oppositions how best to improve ISA) , all think that they need to do more to mend fences with the non malays who had turned their back on BN. on education mukhriz reiterated his interesting proposal for a single school system and which i totally agree (and should have been done a very long time ago). on race relations toyo has perhaps the most controversial view. he bravely stated that not all races in malaysia are equal. (tidak sama rata). i'm sure this will not be blown up by media but this is very revealing. umno is as racist as ever. but no fireworks. no explosions. no catfights. i would have thought they would come more prepared with better 'positions' on issues but didn't seem like it. these young men were no three musketeers to save malaysia but they are no three stooges either.

the session was surprisingly muted. i detected almost a defeatist atmosphere even among the audience. this is a party that knows they are fucked. probably half of the audience are umno haters like me.

people say KJ is very articulate and i totally agree with this. kj really speaks well. i fancy he thinks of himself as the barack obama of malaysia. in fact he's the only one who mentioned obama last night. toyo was good, but mukhriz wasn't so hot. he appeared almost too nice. but the most revealing time was after the session. as in most things in life the digressions and the off the record part of any thing is the most interesting part. and last night for me was not totally lost. i enjoyed observing these three after the live session ended when they mingled around with the crowd.

the moment the show ended , these three scattered separately and quickly were surrounded by three distinct groups. you hardly see any difference for the first ten minutes or so of course. the only shouts you hear was hidup dato seri , hidup dato seri meaning for khir toyo of course. he was the popular one. many people scrambled to congratulate their pemuda of choice and i was busy elbowing everybody to go and shake hands with all the three of them. i first shook hand with khairi. his grip was quite firm.or could it be my hard grip that i felt?. i went next to mr toyo. his was just about the same as khairi's. on a scale of 1 to 10 ( ten being the firmest) i would rate both at around 4-5? i thought to myself. fuck! i was the one that did the gripping, so i resolved to soften my grip when i go to mukhriz next. and i did so when i met him and i distinctly felt that his was limp! just like his father's. a bit stronger may be.

you can read quite a bit about a person from hand shaking but i guess with politicians hand pumping thousands of times everyday i guess you can't read too much into it. but the interesting thing is to observe the crowds. soon enough the crowds became distinctly different. khir toyo was surrounded by a big crowd and he went out of the hall first with a gaggle of supporters cheering hidup dato' seri...he looked every bit a politician that he is. i observed that tempe power had somehow decreased now. he is slowly turning darker compared to last april fool's day when i last saw him up close. may be i was wrong, the hall was quite dim.

mukhriz was surrounded by his admirers and genially bantered with a few. all of the people surrounding him looked the serious type. but the most interesting to observe was khairi. at one stage he was almost alone by himself!. and then a gaggle of young school girls surrounded him and scrambling all over each other taking pictures with him.

He looked like an innocent lost young man or even like a humble artist. he didn't look like your average politician at all. he's almost like mawi among his fans. i almost felt a sudden liking for this guy. goes without saying if puteri umno are allowed to vote he'll win hands down, just for his looks alone. but looks can be very deceiving as we all know. among the three he looked the most amiable which surprises me a bit because i expect to see mukhriz that way. but khairi is the the man that will melt anyone's heart. i wonder how his sex life is. i bet it must be very very very interesting.

birdy

2009-02-16T13:36:00.002+08:00

i'm very disturbed reading RPK's latest 'No holds Barred' blogpost in his Malaysia today netpaper today. it's true that RPK is wellknown for his flamboyant writings and histrionics but he's a man of his words. and a very very principled and brave man and i very much fear that he really will carry through his threat to starve himself to death if he is found guilty tomorrow and be sent back to jail. he sounds very depressed and i hope that what he wrote is no reflection of his 'saner' self. and i hope and pray he'll not be found guilty tomorrow. but what if he is?

i don't have too many people that i particularly look up to as 'heroes' but RPK is one of them. one of my local heroes. not that i always agree with his writings. he can be a real nut when he writes about islam but taken as a whole, he's my kind of guy. and i certainly don't want him to starve himself to death in jail. i think he can fight a better battle than that. nobody is jesus. jesus was very lucky. the world changed when he was cruficifed on the cross. that could only happen when people were idiots and believe in superstitions as was in jesus' time. but not now. nobody cares about sacrifice these days. and RPK won't change that. if RPK dies, people will forget him in seven days. a romantic form of protest but the world will go on. may be, just may be there will be stories writen about this man but i doubt it. malaysia is not a nation of writers. so RPK will be forgotten. no great literature will be written about his heroics.

oh and i finished reading Lucifer's alligator last night. and incidentally it's about protest too. a protest that did not give any good result. a hopeless protest. perhaps not dissimilar to RPK's threat to starve himself to death. i too sometimes can't keep my mouth shut. i too sometimes feel like shouting and protesting. but i'm just a weak bastard. i like life too much to do anything significant in life. i'm just like many of us...we just wait for the RPKs of the world to do the dirty job for us. we just reap the harvest. and this realization makes me feel depressed no end. i feel guilty.

but i do try sometimes. not much but sometimes i try to shout and holler. take this local book blog for example. bibliobibuli is a fairly popular local book blog visited my many (young?) local aspiring writers so i thought ok, i'll come in here and say my piece "as and when neccessary". i thought , writers shapes the nation and hopefully i can give my POV on things. one thing i notice is that most writers believe they are the most intellectual and liberal people there are. to put in another way, their egos are as big as this universe. but i often detect that they are mostly normal people. meaning as stupid and ignorant as any average guys. and i notice that many are terribly ignorant about islamic worldviews but unlike scientists who by default are keen to understand things objectively, writers are more lead by the heart. you can't say things that opposed their views without being hounded out of the discussion. this arguments on the talibans in a recent bibliobibuli post is an example. i guess it's not the writers fault really. i just bark at the wrong tree and the wrong place.

but all these dark musings make me want to fly away. escape. and incidently one of the more memorable books that i read about trying to escape is Birdy. It's a book writen by william wharton. and here's a good news for old geezers aspiring to be writers. Birdy was his first book and written when he was 53. well, at least it was pubblished when he was 53 that is. and he got $500,000 advance for it too. and it was a damned good book. i read it way back in the eighties and watched the movie version too. mainly because the sountrack is by my favorite musician peter gabriel. mr wharton passed away last october without much noise around here but there is a good orbituary in nyt as you can read here.

I hope we won't be reading RPK's orbituary any time soon. I hope not for a long long time. I salute you RPK.

lucifer

2009-02-14T10:36:00.003+08:00

last night i read a short story in STORY (winter 1999) which started with a very good sentence. Celibacy had been Lucifer's idea and i promptly fell asleep before the end of the first paragraph. The story was by an unknown woman writer (to me) by the name of Julia Whitty. the little info at the back of this literary quarterly mentioned that Ms Whitty's stories have appeared in Harper's among a few other publications. and she has also received a Bernice Slote Award for fiction in 1986. i've never heard of this award before and google doesn't help much. there was a mention about someone winning $500 Bernice Slote Award for the best work by a beginning writer so it must be one of those little awards to inspire aspiring writers to bigger things. in fact i too have been toying with this idea of setting up an annual prize for some kind of writing competition here . i was thinking to get the company where i'm working now to set aside some funds under 'club and recreation ' committee for this. but sometimes i'm just too damned lazy to push things through. i did put up a paper to improve one state zoo a few years back but my proposal lost to some other boring proposal. but anyway the point is, ms whitty whoever she is is quite an acomplished writer.

and me falling asleed before the end of the first paragaraph was not a reflection of her writing. it was quite captivating in fact. and that's quite something because i generally don't read women's writings very much (in fact very very little if any) . i don't mind short stories by women though. because with short stories you can finish in one sitting (unless you fall asleep half way through that is ). so me falling asleep before the first paragraph of Lucifer's Alligator (that's the title of the short story) had nothing to do with the story itself or my prejudice against women writers but was due to a couple of other things. one, it shows that i don't have any worries in the world, and two i was just dog tired.

it's quite ironic that the more i buy books the less i read and i can not remember when and what was the last fiction that i finished from cover to cover. it is unfortunate that the political scene in our country is always at the boiling point that even i who generally hate politics - and especially umno politicians whom i detest with all my heart - do get sucked in and i'm ashamed to confess that now i've become quite addicted to the rancorous political blogs and net newspapers and have little time left to read good writings. this is very bad for me. it's like a disease that i can't get rid off. malaysians writing have one fatal flaw. they lack sense of humor. malaysians can write the most mind boggling political anlyses and conspiracy theories but the only thing i get out of reading all this is just feeling very tired and angry. certainly not very good for my health.

i guess i'll resume my reading of lucifer's alligator at some point. may be tomorrow night may be next week. i know if it's in STORY it must be good. afterall j.d Salinger was first published in STORY. and it has been going on and continue to be published since 1931. but i don't know. with all these political wayang going on it's highly likely that i'll be glued to the screen reading incendiery political blogs for the next couple of months at least- and get tired and all worked up by 11 pm and leave no time to read anything else .

lucifer's alligator is quite a misleading title because the lucifer here is just a name of a hippopotamus and the story is about goings on in a zoo but perhaps there is a good similarity to what's going on here right now. replace the zoo with malaysia and the hippo lucifer with lucifer the christain satan and i guess the story is just about right for malaysia. the christian lucifer is certainly very busy in the state of perak right now. but i may be totally wrong . need to finish the story first. may be tomorrow night, may be next week , may be sometime later....

perak is fucked

2009-02-07T23:11:00.003+08:00

now, i'm not going to give my two cents worth of political analysis . there're too much discussions, analyses , comments and spins already in the blogosphere , the msm and idiot tvs. i can't add anything worthwhile but i'll say this. perak may be quite fucked right now. but out of this fiasco I'VE FOUND MY LOCAL HERO!!!

forget najib forget anwar. both are merely the two sides of the same coin. both are assholes. now i know who is the real candidate for our next PM. the past few days' events have proven to be the making of dato seri ahmad Nizar. i've nothing but admiration for this man. i love him! he's malaysia's best hope . i dearly wish PAS will field him as a parliamentary candidate in the next GE. i dearly wish PAS will elect him to the highest office and i dearly wish this man to be our next prime minister.

isn't it ironic that a PAS man fights tooth and nails for a perak state government full of chinese DAP excos and state reps? one would think that PAS would secretly be elated that now the state government is full of malays(muslims) . but pas is not an asshole party like umno. PAS has idealism and principle. and even a bastard like me can understand that. i may not be a model muslim but hell, i love PAS. i only trust PAS. and watching malay muslims with white kopiahs in their thousands demonstration and protesting just to save a government full of chinese assemblymen should put to rest the chinese distrust of PAS . PAS isn't like the fucks in PKR and DAPs. you can depend on PAS. and nobody can buy PAS people.

interesting time ahead! but can't help wondering how those two PKR fucks and umno fuck and that DAP fuck sleep. do these fucks have conscience and souls? don't they feel ashamed looking dato seri nizar in the eyes? but i guess some men are just animals....

boracay

2009-02-05T05:47:00.005+08:00

oh what an interesting time it is for the citizens of perak state! for those who are addicted to malaysian politics but have high blood pressure and heart problem i suggest you take a few days off and fly somewhere where umno DAP and PKR don't mean a shit. (these parties full of crooks racists and rejects of each other certainly don't mean shit to me) . go to boracay or somewhere. let the politicians fight it out. switch off.

i don't have high blood pressure and heart problem as far as i know and i'm not from perak but i am in boracay right now . a place that is listed in one of those silly books of lists like 1000 places to see before you die. boracay is one of the three from philippines that made it to the list. the second is banaue rice terraces in the north east of luzon. sometimes described as the 'eighth wonders of the world'....not very much of a wonder in my view...and the third is...never mind...lists are very subjective and quite meaningless most of the time.

boracay is okay. think of kuta bali with no big surf but better beach. nothing too spectacular . snorkelling places are not half as good as those on the islands off trengganu. the only memorable thing for me is that i snorkelled with my mobile in my pocket and needless to say i'm 'immobile' now at least for a few days. there are quite a few phone repair shops here speciallising on repairing drowned mobiles. apparently there are quite a lot of idiots like me. germans, americans...so i don't feel too bad...

right here right now

2009-02-01T09:13:00.005+08:00

i can't see any reason why we malaysians can't create great works of art in whatever medium, literature, films, paintings, whatever. we have everything. beautiful country , a great history and a completely fucked up people. we've been fucked in succession by the portugese, the dutch , the brits and the japs. and now we fuck each other. chinese hate the malays, the malays think the chinese dirty money grubbing bastards and the indians will fuck any chinese and malay women they can lay their hands on and nobody cares very much about indian lives. we even kill them in police lock ups. we are fucked and we hate each other. if that's not the most powerful motivation to spur the creative juice flowing then i don't know what is.

and don't forget the politics. for a flea country we have some of the most egotistical politicians in the world. take dr m for example. the way he carries on he still thinks he's the best politician in the whole fucking world. and to all intents and purposes he thinks his hand picked successor abdullah badawi a retard. and that's not all. the political shenanigans that are going on right here right now is as volatile and crazy as any of those fucked up countries in black africa. this brilliant piece by RPK is a taste of malaysian politic at it's best. . .

an excerpt:-

When Pakatan Rakyat formed the Perak and Selangor state governments soon after 8 March 2008, Umno quickly offered PAS a deal. If PAS was prepared to form a coalition with Umno in Perak and Selangor, they agreed to allow PAS to become the Menteri Besar of these two states. As a sweetener, Umno also agreed that the Islamic law of Hudud be implemented in Perak and Selangor. Umno will give PAS its Hudud that it seeks.

It was a sweet deal. Not only will PAS be running Perak and Selangor and will hold the post of the Chief Operation Officers of these two states, but PAS will also realise its dream of seeing Hudud as the law of the land where it had failed in Kelantan 20 years ago and Terengganu ten years ago.

Sweet deal as it may be, PAS said no. Realising its dream and being in charge is one thing, but they also have to consider their loyalty to their partners, PKR and DAP. They will not betray their partners in Pakatan Rakyat for any amount of money. So PAS said no.

Umno then worked on DAP since PAS was no longer a possibility. The offer was RM10 million for each DAP man who was prepared to cross over. The DAP men and women all declined the extremely attractive offer. RM10 million is a nice figure. That kind of money will go a long way. But there is more to life than money. And no DAP man and woman took the offer.

Okay, buying Perak and Selangor State Assemblymen and women from Pakatan Rakyat is not possible. No one is for sale. So, if you can’t buy them, then kill them. And Umno got a certain MIC man who married his boss’s wife after sleeping with her whenever the boss was out of town to do what he is most good at. They wanted PKR men fixed up.

That was easy. He is an expert at fixing up people. He fixed up his boss. He fixed up his boss’s wife who is now his wife. He can fix up PKR men easily enough. He asked to meet two PKR men. He then arranged for his driver to carry a bagful of money to the appointed meeting place with instructions to drop the bag under the table unseen and unnoticed. He did just as he was told.

No sooner had the bagful of money hit the ground when the Anti-Corruption Agency officers rushed in, picked up the bag, and arrested the two PKR men on allegations of corruption. They did not know what hit them. They did not even notice the bagful of money under the table.

These two PKR men are now missing....

if that's not a seed for a great work of ah...that word again, 'literary fiction' or a crime 'potboiler' then i don't know what is. but all we have are some books about ghosts and about some grandmothers and grand fathers.

sometimes it makes me wonder why we malaysians are still unable to create world class literature or films or any other form of arts. we have an amir, the film maker but despite his great sense of humor and obvious talents he's no emir kusturica. the painful history of yugoslavia gave birth to emir kusturica's underground one of the best and phantasmogarical films i've ever seen.

here's an excerpt of the above slant magazine review of the film:-

There's no need for a movie adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realist tome One Hundred Years of Solitude. It's already been made. Emir Kusturica's tragic-farce Underground may be the most important film of the last 25 years, a sweltering, morally inquisitive work of political narrative fiction that laments our propensity for auto-destruction...

it could well be said the same thing for malaysian politics and perhaps one day we ought to have our own 'underground' made. malaysian politics is just as obscene as any and sometimes- just sometimes- it makes me want to switch off and hit to the jungle and live like a savage. but it's just a fleeting feeling. i too have been smeared with so much muck that i feel too weak to raise above it all .

sometimes obscenity can be raised to such a level that it looks like art. i don't know what is what anymore. just like porn, when it's raised to a certain level it is considered art. take this pic for example. this is a great piece of painting by courbet. it hangs in the muse d'orsay so it must be ART.

mrs wino's boobs

2009-01-30T08:29:00.004+08:00

if you ask me who are my current favourite singers or bands i must admit i can not name any name. the local radio stations aren't any help at all...most play infantile ditties or those stupid ghetto hip hops that i detest. of course there are memorable songs here and there such as that song about umbrella ela ela ela...but i don't think i'd go out and buy her albums. pop isn't exactly my genre of choice. though i must say now that she's coming to perform here next month i don't exactly mind and go and watch her perform. though most likely i won't. one of the few songs that i like in recent years in the pop/rock catergory is audioslave's like a stone...but that was years ago...i seem to get stuck with trippy songs from the seventies...pink floyd, yes (tales from the topographic ocean, fragile, close to the edge era) , genesis (peter gabriel era). and i just bought from a local pirate Lou Reed's BERLIN a julian schnabel directed 2006 concert film of lou reed playing songs from his great 1973 BERLIN album. julian schanbel is an interesting guy. he once came to canne's film festival wearing a sarong. i hate his paintings but his films are good. especially his latest the diving bell and the butterfly.

but these days one is hard pressed to name any really good and interesting english singers. one name quite stand out though. amy winehouse. otherwise known as Barmy Amy , or mrs wino among other things. this lady has character. a boozing drug addled 'genius'. she's living her life to the max and slowly killing herself in the process. with a husband in jail and personal life in tatters and probably going psycho (by common conventional standard that is) one ought to feel pity for her but hey, it's her life. she hasn't killed or harm anybody as far as i know.

even so it came as a small surprise to me to see her doing a 'balcony boogie' in the nude as you can see here in st lucia where she's having her holiday right now. but for a drug crazed babe who looked half dead not long ago, she seemed to be quite healthy now and she sure has quite a nice body (i stole this pic from one naughty blog ). i give her 7.5 out of ten.

and here's one of her very good songs titled appropriately enough you know i'm no good.

the year of the ox

2009-01-28T05:56:00.005+08:00

there's so much rubbish on the internet about what this year of the ox will portend to us mortals in the next 365 days already that i'm not going to add my two cents worth of nonsense here. if only the world is that simple and we can understand the future simply by reading the meaning of the zodiac signs....

i'm a monkey based on chinese calender, and this is what they say about monkey people...

People born in the Year of the Monkey are the erratic geniuses of the cycle. Clever, skillful, and flexible, they are remarkably inventive and original and can solve the most difficult problems with ease...

that is laughable hah hah hah...at least in in my case that is.

almost six years ago to the day , i went to kolkata and by pure coincidence i stumbled into a huge book fair on the kolkata maidan. i couldn't remember why i ended up on the maidan but i recall coming there and watched people playing cricket. i was there for a long while and towards the evening just ambled to the other side and there it was. the 25th Kolkata Bookfair in full swing as one might say. and if you know me, i go crazy about books the way women go crazy about shoes, handbags and chocolates.

and according to wiki entry...

It is a unique book fair in the sense of not being a trade fair - the book fair is primarily for the general public rather than whole-sale distributors. It is the world's largest non-trade book fair, Asia's largest book fair and the most attended book fair in the world. It is the world's third largest annual conglomeration of books after the Frankfurt Book Fair and the London Book Fair...

there i was cursing myself for not realizing it sooner and went there directly instead of watching unknown teams playing a poor cricket match. and so i dashed about in and out of the many book sellers' booths and just about 30 minutes to closing time i found this booth selling old books on all kinds of muslim esotorica , books on mughal rules and biographies and indian histories. i felt truly dismayed because it was closing time but i did manage to buy a hard to get 5 volume hardcover copies of Dr J.C Mardrus complete translation of The Arabian Nights .

but not only that... there were some other stuff going on and i found this poor looking boy selling rolls of charcoal drawings on a dusty part on the edge of the field and i bought four charcoal drawings from him . he couldn't even understand english (which is quite rare in kolkata) and i had this beautiful bengali lady translated and haggled for me and i got the drawings for almost nothing.

and here's one of them. it's in a series of 3 . i thought i might post it here as this is the year of the bull .

redacted

2009-01-26T09:16:00.004+08:00

Of all the films being made about America's involvement in Iraq, evidently none is more loathed in the United States than Redacted. This "fictional documentary" by Brian De Palma, about an outrage committed by US troops on Iraqi civilians, is powerful, provocative, shocking and even slightly crazy in ways that may not be entirely intentional. By the end of its 90 minutes, the china shop of taste and judgment is pretty well smashed to pieces by this great big bull of a film. I've seen it twice now - at the Venice film festival last year and at a screening in London - and both times I could feel huge numbers of people, hawks and doves alike, being gripped, baffled and appalled by its sheer semi-controlled offensiveness.

that comes from the first paragraph of peter bradshaw's review of the latest brian de palma's movie 'redacted' in the guardian. it tanked horribly in the US and probably haven't been seen much elsewhere outside of the festival circuits. probably it's no surprise but a real pity. people don't want to see themselves in the mirror if what they see is not what they want to see and redacted shows some of the worst aspects of american war on iraq. someone ought to give this movie as a farewell present to george w bush.

i hate to watch movies about iraq as atrocities are still going there right now and it's too painful to sit and watch and be reminded of everything that is still going on. the pain is too raw. so it's doubly amazing that brian de palma can go through making such a painful movie. most people need the distance of time to softhen things up. the only two movies about iraq that i've seen are this and the equally great screw ball black comedy the three kings set during the first iraq war. This later one is quite the opposite apart from the fact that both are in a sense 'anti-war'.

it would be interesting to see in years to come whether the movie makers would treat the middle east, iraq and iraqis as they treat the second world war and the germans and the jews and the nazis. and who would be the nazis in this case?

jay leno

2009-01-20T17:51:00.007+08:00

these days we don't get too many good comedies on tv. it's a real pity that astro doesn't have a comedy channel. about the only comedy i get these days are from jay leno . but in general i hate talk shows . i never watch the local ones. they are mostly embarassing and sometimes quite stupid. and i detest oprah, she's so tedious and boring...i can't understand why she's so popular...but i quite enjoy that trinity of american funny talk show hosts (david letterman, jay leno and conan o'brien). unfortunately we now only have leno here. and he's good.

women can never compete with men when it comes to being funny. may be they have smaller funny bones in their body. but there could well be scientific reason for it. and it's probably evolutionary. in fact christopher hitchens had a very interesting thing to say why women are not funny. read it for yourself here.

the other day jay leno mentioned about the playboy lord hugh heffner. do you know that this guy is now 88 and currently has three girl friends? two of them are twins. nineteen year old twins! this guy has all the luck in the world. but i can't imagine what he can do with all those girls though. but then again may be he's still a randy bugger as he always is. why, the other day there's a local news about an 84 year old molesting his 10 (Ten!) year old grand daughter. he was caught 'lying on top ' of the girl. he is an animal it's true but it proves one important point. this is very good news for us males. even in our sunset years we can still be as randy as any young studs. and not to worry if our weapon of mass destruction don't function too well by then. we can buy viagra by the jars. and what about the women you ask. that is absolutely no problem. one thing i learn about women. they LOVE money. they'll do anything for money. it's all evolutionary.

and on that day dustin hoffman was on the program. i don't view dustin hoffman as a funny guy so it came as a surprise to see him on jay leno cracking jokes and enjoying himself acting like a comedian. i know that he has acted in comedies before in films like meet the fockers but i remember him more as a dramatic actor and some of the most memorable films and my favorites are his seventies films like papilon, midnight cowboys, marathon man and straw dogs.

i usually don't watch comedies like meet the fockers or those other tedious family oriented and feel good comedies that holywood seems to dish out every year. the kind of comedies meant for people who read the fucking reader's digest and business books . i personally like my comedies a little bit shall we say of 'industrial strength'. i'm more of a borat person than that sienfield asshole. and so it was quite fun to listen to dustin hoffman telling a joke about oral sex and the bullfrog on jay leno. i think i'll now go and look for his film lenny about the very very bad mouth comedian lenny bruce . there is a version of this oral sex joke on the internet somewhere but the one i read was nowhere as funny as the way dustin hoffman told it. but then again dustin hoffman is a very good actor....

trengganu kite, CONGRATULATION!!!

2009-01-18T08:08:00.004+08:00

KT people has done the right thing! MY HEARTFELT CONGRATULATION!!!

as a kelanatanese i have always looked at terengganu as a kind of an idiot brother. they speak funnnier than us, they tried to copy our nasi dagang and get it hopelessly wrong (they use WHITE sticky rice!) , and they are weak when it comes to politics. they wilt when umno assholes wave twenty ringgit to their face. not like us who don't give a fuck for umno briberies. we'd rather become backward and live in stone age rather than be ruled by bastards from umno. we love our nik aziz but trengganu people don't seem to love their great tuan guru hj hadi very much.

but not this time around! they have done BETTER than we kelantanese would have done. i think if this 'buy-election' had occured in any kelantan seat ,with all the bn big goons swarming the place , and the unheard of promises and candies thrown every which way, WE would have wilted! but you, people of P36 did not wilt this time! you're the hero! i'm overjoyed.

and looking at this picture of raja petra kamarudin (RPK) broke down in tears , overwhelmed with emotion brings tears to my eyes. now here's a man - a special one among many - who had worked so hard and tirelessly to ensure the KT people especially the chinese to vote for PAS.

this by- election proved many things and all the political wags will have a field day in the next few weeks to come spinning and pontificating to their hearts' content but i'll just point to one. khairi jamaludin was quite cocky when he tought he trapped PAS and dragged the 'hudud' issue in as a bogey for chinese voters , but this failed. ironically the debates that ensued and explanations by PR people and thanks to people like RPK in the end it turned into a a non issue here and ultimately with better understanding it will perhaps lessen the fear among non muslims in malaysia as a whole. in short KJ looked like an asshole. i'm amazed why umno is so besotted with this guy. the fucker is a liability to umno. and that reminds me. why on earth did umno still drag that rat ezzam to do last minute dirty job for them?. that cost umno a few hundreds votes at least.

and so, i hope this sweet victory in kt proves once again that malaysians are not too stupid after all. i can see a potential new beginning of a really new malaysia where malaysians of all colors and religions will live and love each other as one.

altruism

2009-01-13T18:19:00.003+08:00

scientists are very clever people. take my collegues for example. they are in the business of torturing rats to find out certain things. it's not always rats though. in some cases they do it to rabbits, and also to other 'lower' animals like birds, fishes, and even earthworms. and in the old days to 'higher' animals like dogs and monkeys. but these days they just stick to rats mostly, or sometimes to rabbits and guinea pigs.

and the things they do to these animals are rather interesting . for example they force feed certain chemicals to pregnant rats to see if these rats will abort their feotus. and they force feed male rats to see if their little balls and their little peckers will shrink as a result of feeding on these chemicals. sometimes they will spary these chemicals into the rats' eyes and see if these will result in what they refer to as 'eye irritation'. needless to say some may go blind if the chemical is nasty enough. in other cases they will feed these rats at varying doses over long period of time and at the end of the 'experiment' they will cut up the animals to see if the chemical produce CANCER to any organs.

and all these tortures, slow death and killings are done in the name of science and for the benefit of mankind. because the thing is, from all these tortures my collegues will get a body of data and results which they will then extrapolate to us human beings and make a wise ponouncement whether a certain chemical can be used by humans without giving any unaccepatble health hazard and risk. so in a sense my fellow collegues, who are so pacifist and won't hurt a flea , all very upright and some very god fearing and religious even, can sleep easy. what they do is something they had to do for the greater good of fellow human beings.

i guess that is how people like george bush and those israelis justify their atrocities. they have blood on their hands but the things they had to do are something unavoidable. something they had to do for the greater good of mankind. i suppose the same argument also applies to the suicide bombers and all the other 'murderers' who kill for idealism. i suppose the nazis cooked up about six million jews because they think their action was for the greater good of mankind for in their eyes jews were vermins. so who are we to say who is right and who is wrong?

what is the difference between killing one man and one million? what is the difference of killing a rat and killing a human being. the jains of india certainly won't see any difference there. and so we go on and on for ever and ever killing each other because we think what we do is for the greater good of mankind. we burn and sacrifice ourselves because we think these are a small price to pay for the ultimate goal. in a morbid way we think that these killings are in fact an act of altruism.

i once had a conversation with a british taxi driver in a very little quaint town called letcombe and i remember mentioning to him that if a man from two thousands years ago were to raise up from the dead he would find our world now with all the technology and modernization would be completely alien and incomprehensible to him but he would find absolutely no change in our human psyche. our greed, our thirst for blood and our territorial instinct will be completely understood by him. we have not changed an iota in these respect from the first bipeds that ever walk on the face of the earth since half a million years ago.

i wanted to talk more along this line but he wasn't interested so we found a common ground and talked about women with big tits instead.

films i watched in the last week of 2008

2009-01-05T22:57:00.012+08:00

uncharateristically of me, i watched quite a lot of dvds in the last week of 2008. first i watched the openly gay director gus van sant's very good gay themed film my own private idaho. i'm 110% hetero but i absolutely have nothing against gays and lesbians and as long as a film is good i don't care if it's a gay themed film or a gangster movie or a comedy or whatever. and by sheer good luck i saw andrei tarkovsky's 1974 sci-fi classic solaris in the bargain bin at my usual pirate dvd store and watched this several days ago. the film was based on a book of the same title by the polish writer stanislaw lem . this moody and complex film moved me to go and dig stanley kubrick's classic 2001: a space odyssey for an encore. although this film was made in 1968 the special effects still doesn't look dated. the film was based on the book by arthur c clarke.

on the last day of 2008 i watched a very good film the assassination of jesse james by the coward robert ford. based on the book of the same title. easily one of the best films of 2008 in my book and the last minutes of 2008 went by without me noticing it. what a boring life. i spent my last day of 2008 sitting at home watching a pirate dvd rather than popping all those fancy pills and screwing around in sex parties like some people apparently did.

watching a good old western movie led me to dig old cowboy movies and i revisited an old favorite , the wacky sergio leone's the good the bad and the ugly. and after that the lawrence kasdan's wyatt earp and last night watched the recent ed harris quite funny cowboy movie appaloosa based on a novel of the same name. and so i thought that's enough of westerns for a while and so i picked something quite different. i chose modigliani a film about this famous painter. i had a special affinity with modigliani not least in the sense that his is one of the first art books i ever bought. when i was a young student many years ago i bought modigliani and the painters of montparnasse. it was on 27 December 1979.

modigliani is a very captivating film despite what the critics say. uncharateristically 'tomatometer' in rotten tomatoes only gave a very low 5% approval rating. the lowest i've ever seen for a movie in this movie review site. but this is totally rubbish. modigliani is fantastic , at least up to the first 30 minutes of the film.

i can't watch the film beyond that because my stupid pirated dvd just got stuck there. that's one of the setbacks of buying pirated dvds from china. some are ok and some can be played half way. and so i did the next best thing. download it using ares but again, bad luck. the one i downloaded had no subtitles and the language is french. and i download again, this time i make sure it has english language. bad luck again, this , the only one in english has a very poor connection. the download goes nowhere. so i am stuck.

and then i turned to youtube. and found this. this clip of paintings by modigliani has a fantastic and moody music by Pasquale Catalona. a complete unknown to me. it is a soundtrack from a 2004 italian film le conseguenze dell'amore. i need to go and look for this film. and for pasquale catalona.

my 2008

2008-12-31T18:37:00.005+08:00

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.

tsunami revisited

2008-12-27T10:18:00.007+08:00

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.

angulimala and karma

2008-12-20T23:04:00.003+08:00

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.....

parrots

2008-12-12T19:17:00.007+08:00

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....

taste of cherry

2008-12-07T16:03:00.002+08:00

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.

the whys, the whys....

2008-12-02T06:01:00.006+08:00

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.

what i think about this and that....

2008-11-25T21:45:00.002+08:00

i thought to myself, whoa, how come i hardly say anything about my own country here? or not that much. i was thinking about this because recently one of my foreign friends told me he saw that tourism advert on astro in the hotel and he asked me what does it really mean? malaysia truly asia. the question stumped me. i can't give any good answer to that. so i thought i'd put down here my thoughts on a few things about my country malaysia. i don't talk much about my own country because well, you hardly notice things that you're familiar with . you just take it for granted. you hardly notice anything in your own backyard so to speak. but i'm going to put things under a microscope . i will pretend that i'm interviewing myself and say what i think about this and that.... my thoughts on a few things about my country...

so what is this place called bangsar then?

oh i dunno... it's a place about ten minutes drive from my work place. used to be very trendy about ten years or so ago. half of the people living there are assholes and the other half are wogs. i hate it.
these days a lot of other areas are aping this place. you know, malaysian population can be divided into...

yes , chinese, malays , and indians (not neccessarily in that order)...

no , i mean to say malaysians can be divided into several kinds of fruits...bananas, coconuts , ubi keling and assorted nuts... racists, fundamentalists ....

ubi keling isn't a fruit surely? but coming back to the three major races...

yes, it is actually a type of tuber with black skin and white flesh. and yes, it's true you know about that joke that goes something like this; if there is one chinese, you see him working hard to make money, but if there are two of them they will start gambling. if there is one indian , you see him drinking toddy, but if there are two of them they will form a debating society. if there is one malay , you see him sleeping, and if there are two of them they will start having a kenduri.

i think that nicely sum up the saliant traits of the three major races in malaysia.and explains the state of the various races in the country right now.

you mean the chinese although a minority is controlling the economy , the indians....

you know what one american collegue of mine once said ? he said if it's not for the chinese the malays will still be living in trees... the fucker is a racist bastard i know- he married a local chinese- but there's a grain of truth to what he says. and lately malays have been grumbling and whinying about how they have been left behind and all that. the malay papers are now full of this whingeing and wringing of hands. malay chauvinist blogs too. one guy by the name of KJ (that is kadir jasin) even penned a poem lamenting the sad plight of the malays in their own land. you can read it for yourself here. i was moved to even post a comment. check it out . you may learn something. (from my comment i mean).

that is interesting. so the malays, when they are down they write poetry? are the malays a very literary people?

well, i was reading the golden chersonese and the way thither by elizabeth l. Bird quite recently. this is quite an interesting book about her travel in the the malay archipelago in the nineteenth century. in her brief introduction to the country and the malays she mentioned that the malays don't really have a literature of their own. she is actually half correct because all the classic malay literatures are basically either derived from hindu mahabarathas or the arabic sources including the one thousand and one nights stories.

but we have a very nice and unique poetry form called pantuns. my home state goes even further. we still have a vibrant dikir barat shows which uses impromptu two line pantun rhyme somewhat akin to rap music of the western world. but it's much more complex and varied than rap. and they think nothing of covering famous songs in dikir barat versions. one of my favorites in the old days was a song called pasar malam. the first lines goes like this...

wa pergi pasar malam
wa beli seluar dalam
lobang lobang....

and it is sung to tom jones she's a lady.
in those days some dikir barat can be very risque or downright pornographic but our great leader tuan guru nik aziz put a stop to all this nonsense. he didn't even need to give out a fatwa but we all listen and obey him whether we like it or not.

that's interesting about nik aziz, but we'll do that one some other time. but how about today? do we have any good literature in malay?

these days like anything else to do with malays, we are fucked. malay kids these days, if they read anything at all, they only read silly malay romance and malay chick lits which are probably ten times worse than sophie fucking kinsella. i may be wrong. i haven't read a malay novel since my school days which seems like a hundred years ago. probably the last malay novel i read was shahnon ahmad's ranjau sepanjang jalan...and i remeber it was a very very intense and boring book. think of some of the worst booker shortlist books and you get the idea.

looks like nothing seems to be right in your view. you remind me of the book a confederacy of dunces and the main character, that fat ignatius reilly....

funny you say that. i read that book about a year ago but half way through i accidentally left the book in the hotel limousine on the way to shanghai airport. and i just bought another copy recently and now resuming from where i left off before. don't call me that or i'll punch you in the nose. i think we should end the conversation here before i get mad....

devadasis

2008-11-19T17:46:00.004+08:00

i guess this is no country for old men. I think i'm now truly on the other side of the generation gap. take this word pengkid for example. I've never heard of it in the whole of my life until a couple of weeks back and that only because there was a little storm in a teacup about some people wanting to protest in the nude because they disagree with the fatwa on pengkid. protesting in the nude in malaysia?? where?! i'd dearly love to come to one (just as an observer of course.) but malaysian authorities are not only incompetent and corrupt assholes , they are also boring and sour puss. they ought to encourage people protesting in the nudes!

pengkid. i wonder where that word comes from. that doesn't sound like bahasa malaysia to me. the media sometimes translate it as 'tomboys' and sometimes as lesbians! and as so often these days, the easiest way to know anything is just to google it. and when i did, i get this. harmless enough i think and i personally have no problem with either tomboys or lesbians . in fact i find them quite sexy but here's the thing. i don't fight with fatwas. i RESPECT fatwas.

and another thing. non muslims have no right to comment on fatwas. this is the realm of islam and for people professing islam. let them fight and bicker among themselves but others, please stay out of it. you see, i don't think it's my business and would never think about protesting against christian religion for example for making nuns 'the brides of jesus' and make them celibates (if i were to be unkind i'd say; what a waste of good pussies). and so by the same argument, non muslims should refrain from poking their snouts into other people's affairs.

one thing i learn about religions. philosophically ALL religions are GOOD . but as they say the devil is in the details. ALL religions have at least some astoundingly stupid and ridiculous aspects . some are completely demented in in their dogmas and belief (eg christianity) , some in their practise (eg my own religion Islam) and so on and so forth.

and take hinduism for example. i'm currently reading Huston Smith's The world's Religions and i find the philosophy behind hinduism amazingly logical and beautiful (and to be fair so are the other religions too). but then i came across a very interesting article in a not so recent the New Yorker issue about devadasis. these young girls dedicated to the goddess yellamma would be deflowered as soon as they reach puberty either by the temple priests or the highest bidder in the village who usually are the village head or the rich who are invariably much older than the poor devadasis. and so you'll get a sixty year old man having sex with a twelve year old girl. such is life and fate for the devadasis. they will ultimately end up either as temple prostitutes or more often than not these days end up in mumbai in the 'cages' in kamathipura, reputedly the biggest red light district in the whole world. this article Serving the goddess by william darlymple is on line and you can read it here. and for a less prurient and more balanced article on the subject, probably this 52 page academic write up Devadasis-sinners or sinned against by Anil Chawla is a good start as any.

i've never been to mumbai but i can well imagine what it's like. several years ago i was in kolkata and one day i took a taxi and asked to go to sonagochi , the largest red light district in this city. unfortunately the taxi driver happened to be a pious muslim and refused to escort me to go around the warrens and alley ways of this hell hole. but sometimes next year i'll make sure i visit mumbai's kamathipura. i may bring a bag of condoms and pretend to be one of those boring NGO persons working to save the world. and i'll make a point to look out for those young girls with the distinctive necklaces. the devadasis.

the man who wasn't there

2008-11-12T17:49:00.003+08:00

That evening, I went to the video store and almost rented “Wuthering Heights,” then switched to “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” then, feeling haunted in a dumb way, ended up renting nothing at all.

well, her loss really. that came from a short story that i read in a back issue of the new yorker (March 24, 2008) a couple of nights ago. it's one of those literary sci-fi short stories that got you hooked because you wanted to know 'what happens next'.

i've not been reading much fiction lately and come to think of it i've never finished any fucking "booker fictions" since god knows when. the last one i did was many years ago . it was the folding star , a great book by alan hollinghurst, much better than the line of beauty in my opinion (which i managed to read half way through before other books hijacked my interest away from it). i'm a bit tired with all this smart ass writing with no real meat in it but that doesn't mean i am out of love with good writings. it's just that the moment someone says 'literary fiction' i feel like throwing up. it's not them . it's just me . i think i'm getting stupider by the day. to finish a 400 page 'literary' fiction these days seems like a very daunting task and is a torture rather than a pleasure as it should be. but i won't be touching any sophie fucking kinsella any time soon. not in this life time anyway.

and as a compromise i suppose, i go and read short stories. good literary ones i might add. in the new yorker or story or granta ...all those good literary weeklies and quarterlies. and as i said i read this story The Region of Unlikeness by one young lady with a very exotic name. Rivka Galchen. i know absolutely nothing about this writer so as usual i turned to the net bible (the wikipedia) and an entry about her is there. so i suppose she has arrived as a somebody. a writer in this particular case.

and while i was at it (googling wiki) just for fun i typed a few big local names - or probably more appropriate to call them 'glocal' personalities- a term derisively dismissed by just about everybody (except umno assholes) coined by that guy najib tun razak in a fit of inspiration a while back to describe this kind of successes. and there it was. tash aw is there. but preeta hasn't yet. or may be i just misspelt her name. may be i spelt it as preeta rasamasam. that can't be right?! but amir muhammad(director) is there. so this man with so much potential but despite everything managed to make some of the worst films in the world has arrived. well done!

but to tell the truth i'm greatly dissapointed with amir's films. yes i've never seen worse films in my life. however i must say this . it has to be just me. or it could be because of my worse half. (one good advice; always blame women for any wrongs in the world). one time i went to watch an amir muhammad movie at the matic (i think that's what it was called) under the royal selangor club padang which is now no more - i think.. the whole place was flooded several years back in one of those famous kl flash flood. the unfortunate thing was this. i went to see the films ( lthe big durian , mona fandey and one or two other local art house movies and documentaries) and for some forgotten reason me and my worse half had a 'war' - as one of my vietnamese goat friends refer to the usual family tiffs- on that night.

and on my way back this worse half of mine kept on chiding me for bringing her to see crappy movies where perverts sniffed shoes etc ( amir muhammad's lips to lips). and another time when i brought home a pirated copy of lelaki komunis terakhir (the last communist) she just said; you and your shoe sniffing movies again. i said, it is not! it is a good movie. lets watch. but she just went and make bubur kacang in the kitchen within ten minutes. and she was right. it's one of the worst documentaries i've ever seen . it's certainly no crumb.the only thing i find mildly interesting is the scene where this guy was explaining different varieties of petais. but what the fuck petais have anything to do with chin peng our great last communist was beyond me.

i don't get it. i couldn't get it. it must be me. i own up, all these art house movies are beyond me. i can't remember but i've already mentioned somewhere . all art house movies are like watching turtles fucking. the idea of watching sex act is always interesting , but turtles fucking? and that's how most art house movies are. they are the equivalent of, yes, literary fictions. both are variations of turtle fucking.

but just like literary fictions, art house movies can and do grow on you. if you perservere , and be patient enough to give your full concentration turtle fucking CAN be very interesting and you don't have to be david attenborough to enjoy it. and that brings me back to that sentence in the short story above. i don't know about wuthering height (the movie) but i sure as hell know "the man who wasn't there". this black and white coen brothers' film is the quintessential art house/turtle fucking movie. but a great one at that. it won the best director award and was nominated for the palm d'or at cannes film festival (2001).

i first watched it on singapore airlines on the way to new york quite a few years ago. and by the way, singapore airlines is my preferred airline. singapore may be the most boring country in the whole of the universe, but you got to give it to them. they have the best airline in the world. MAS? i avoid it like a plague.

i was sitting beside this guy in business class (company money mah) and to be friendly i just asked what line of work he did and he mentioned someting about 'investment banker'. so i just shut up and clicked the remote and out of the 80 or so films available i just watched the man who wasn't there TWICE all the way to NYC. that was how good it was.

but if you want to watch the ultimate turtle fucking movie i think nothing can beat Bela Tarr's satantango. a seven hour plus hungrarian film in black and white. incidently a guy with a strange monicker pan tat ( which translates as "cunt") posted a comment in my recent post with a very good turtle fucking movie discussion blog site and the last entry was on bela tarr.

i may not get too many comments in my blog but one thing is for sure. i sure get interesting people visiting mine. people with brains! i don't get ball licker assholes like those that post comments in dr M's hugely popular blog che det. i imagine mahathir must be quite dissapointed with so many apple polishing retards hanging around his blog . i would if i were him.

ps;, i found out that the new yorker story i mentioned is available on line . you can read it here.

black america!

2008-11-06T17:12:00.003+08:00

who would have thought we get to see a black man as the president of the united states. not in my life time, or so i thought. just think, a few years ago, if mr obama were to jog around a middle class white area in any average white suburbs of america he would probably be chased after by a policeman . and now he's the president of the usa!

if truth be told when i first saw him on tv about a year ago, i thought to myself. why, he reminds me of one of my drug addict friends back home! and i have an instant and instinctive and incomprehensible dislike for him. but to quote that idiot character Chad (brad pit) in the hilarious movie burn after reading - in the scene in the car before he got socked on the nose by the foul mouthed Osbourne Cox ( john malkovich)- "osbourne cox, appearance can be deceptive"...and how true it is in the case of mr obama. and i distinctly remember one japanese girl interviewed on cnn declared that she will not vote for obama -because he's black.

but that was a year back which now seems like so long ago. and now the whole world seems to be madly in love with him. it's like beatlemania. or a mawi mania multplied a billion times. the level of world interest and excitement leading to this cycle of US presidential election is absolutely phenomenal and the level of support for obama as reflected in this on line voting is universal.(i stole this from crankshaft). Out of a total of 868,144 unique votes from 213 different countries obama won with a landslide majority in ALL the countries except one, macedonia. and another place called Niue which i've never heard of before where there's only a single vote and this is for mcCain.

the world seems to be truly fed up with bush and his bullying ways and everyone hungers for a change. for a new america which is more benign and sympathetic to the world at large.
but if it was a person other than obama, say hillary clinton against mcCain would the interest be the same?

and now that he is the president would obama be able to do any thing different? or would it be more of the same packaged in a different way? i am not optimistic at all and not too hopeful but all the same i wish him all the best to bring CHANGE.

ps: this morning i shoot an e-mail to a collegue in Indiana and here's her comment...which i think is very realistic and well said.

Most everyone you talk to is thrilled that Obama won. McCain was a good man, but a lot of people thought that a vote for McCain was a vote for the same - and the American people are really fed up with Bush. The only reason he was re-elected four years ago was because of the person that ran against him. Therefore, it was not a vote for Bush but a vote against the Democrat that was running. He was not good either. We knew what we had with Bush, which wasn't good, but it would have been worse with the other guy. But, I think we ended up being wrong, but because things got worse and worse. I just hope that Bush is removed before everything goes to pot here. He can't get out of office soon enough for me.

It will be interesting to see what and who Obama puts into his cabinet. That will make him or break him. The next few months should be very interesting. I hope he chooses good and educated people, and not people that he needs to reward for helping him gain the election.

Any way - I'm hoping this is a new beginning and change really is in store for us.

burn after reading

2008-11-02T02:46:00.005+08:00

i finally got hold of the coen brothers' latest movie 'Burn After Reading' last week. i was hanging around nana area , one of the the hell holes and cesspits of bangkok watching ugly white men having fun with ugly and sorry looking prostitutes and on a whim stopped at one sukhumvit roadside pirate DVD stall and pleasantly surprised to see that the movie was available. I've been searching for this movie for ages here but none seems to even know about it. not even my regular pirate. and so i was naturally very excited and went straight back to my hotel room at emporium suite on sukhumvit rd and played it straight away on the video player. in case you have not stayed at this hotel but willing to part with around rm500-600 per night let me tell you that it is a great place to stay as it has a really huge room and a living room with complete audio video system with flat screen tv and video player and hi fi. and it comes with a kitchenette too . very convenient for a family. a much better hotel than much more expansive hotels around.

like most much anticipated things in life that you have waited for so long to come your way, the first time i watched this movie, i was mildly dissapointed. what was all that about i thought to myself. is that all? and the rather poor quality of the dvd did not help. but as with ALL coen brothers' movies i have no problem with repeat viewing. and on second viewing i liked it much better. it was hilarious. the dialogues is classic coens. and as i said before watching coen brothers movies is the closest to reading literary fiction in film form. it is pointless for me to say anything about this movie as everything has been said already. critics have written all sorts of things and compared it to different coens' movies but for me, this film resembles their great and first film blood simple most, not so much in the story line but the tone and feeling. anyway, if you're such an ignoramus, i guess this wiki article is as good as any for a start. and the excerpt below basically described the film.

The Coen brothers said idiocy was a major central theme of Burn After Reading; Joel Coen said he and his brother have "a long history of writing parts for idiotic characters" and described Clooney and Pitt's characters as "dueling idiots." Burn After Reading is the third Coen brothers film for Clooney (O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty), who acknowledged that he usually plays a fool in their movies: "I've done three films with them and they call it my trilogy of idiots." Joel said after the last scene was shot, "George said: 'OK, I've played my last idiot!' So I guess he won't be working with us again." Pitt, who plays a particularly unintelligent character in Burn After Reading, said of his role, "After reading the part, which they said was hand-written for myself, I was not sure if I should be flattered or insulted." Pitt also said when he was shown the script, he told the Coens he did not know how to play the part because the character was such an idiot: "There was a pause and then Joel goes...'You'll be fine.'"...

and by sheer good luck i managed to get another pirated copy with perfect quality from a saigon mall on dong khoi st yesterday and for only half the price of that from nana . and i've now watched the movie again (with high quality picture) for the third time and i still don't get tired of it...the movie grows on you with repeat viewing.
go watch it...and if you don't like it , i can safely say that your brain waves don't quite synchronised with mine...which may or may not mean anything really.

saigon plus

2008-10-29T22:37:00.003+08:00

saigon. the city is changing by the day. i can see the physical change every time i visit the place and it is not too much to my liking. it's becoming generic. some new sectors of the city are not much different than many other modern asean cities. but some other things haven't changed much. people here are as friendly as ever. same as usual. when the sun sets, on every corner of every street, or at least around the major business hotel area around sheraton on dong khoi st and the area around it, if you are a man and looks like a foreigner, you'll be accosted by smiling men offering to take you around on motorbike (for a small fee of course) and without fail will try to hook you up with 'a lady' -as they put it.

and if you say yes, they will call the lady on the mobile and soon a motorbike rider will come along -with a girl at the back. my vietnamese goat friend referred to these ladies as 'motorbike chicken'. not sure why he doesn't call them chicks rather than chicken. i put it on account of his rather poor command of english. one time another vietnamese friend ordered buffalo juice in a restaurant when he actually meant pomelo juice. and calls vegetables 'grass'. as in i like grass. may be he meant just that i don't know.

sometimes i just wonder, some of these vietnamese professionals... their english is quite atrocious. that's the favorite term one of my indian friends back home refers to the standard of malaysian english in general these days...atrocious. but the the viet women , or more often girl shop assistants around these tourist area can speak english quite well...perhaps better than some of the vietnamese professionals in MNCs. and even those ubiqitous young boys and girls selling chewing gums can speak passable english...although one boy once asked me ,suicide sir? when he meant shoe shine.

and last night a depressing thing happened to me. this very small and young girl came up to me and offered to sell chewing gums . and as usual i said no. she kept on pestering and tagged along as i walked away. and when i came to a place where the street was quite empty she said do you want to have sex with me? and i just looked at her and asked how old are you? eighteen she said. you don't look like it. er ...how much? one million. she meant dong. the vietnamese currency which is roughly about usd60. dong! what an apt name for a currency in a country where sex can be bought quite cheaply! oh i also have a viet friend with the unfortunate name of Dr Twat , a real randy bugger. but that's another story.

anyway, as i was saying. i wasn't tempted. and she started to give the usual sob story. the father is sick. she was cheated when she was young and so we sat down on a bench and i asked her the story of her life. and she kept on asking me if i want sex. in the end i just bought a packet of gum just to keep her from pestering me. and in the end she finally went away but when she was quite a distance away she turned back became abusive, shouted insults at me (in vietnamese) and flapped he arms and showed rude signs.

but what really depressed me was this. when she squatted in front of me there was an unmistakable odour coming from her. she pongs. to use v s naipul's expression that i read somewhere when he unkindly described one wellknown dame. i am sure she isn't healthy. some peadophile must have done that to her . a couple of years back i visited an exhibition about the life of geishas in a museum in tokyo and one thing struck me. the average life span of gieshas in the old samurai days was less than 30. not hard to understand why it was so short. and i wonder what will happen to this chewing gum girl. i hope she lives past 30.

the love for fired clay

2008-10-22T07:51:00.007+08:00

i am not a polymath by a long shot...well perhaps i can imagine i'm a bit of a poly(elementary) math? but what i really like about myself is this. but first i have to admit that i don't exactly love human beings very much. what humans have done to fellow human beings and still continue to do , and human greed, and cruelty and all kind of ugliness make me feel quite hopeless and helpless. but despite all that i am very much interested in many kinds of things and arts created by men. (men here is of course referred to humans of both sexes or three).

and one of man's fascinating and great creation is the arts of pottery. ceramics. gazing at chinese celadons, old vietnamese potteries, swankhalok and sukhothai and khmer iron brown glazed wares inexplicably gives me a serene and profound feeling of calmness and even almost intellectual trance. it's almost erotic. i can not explain this but there it is. i can look at a good piece of chinese celadon vase or jar with fine crackles for minutes on end and be transported into a small ecstasy. (doesn't need much to get me into a mental orgasm eh?).

since the price of good pottery is obscenely expensive, just like paintings, it is way beyond me to have a decent collection myself. although i can claim to own a few decent vietnamese celadon bowls reputedly from the ancient lei dynasty and a couple of khmer iron glazed jars (pic on the left) among a few other reproductions of old chinese celadons the best way to admire fine specimens of these potteries are simply to visit good museums.

and one of the best museums with reputedly one of the greatest pottery collection of 'kendi' (the pouring vessels) type is actually in Musium Seni Asia, University Malaya. There is a fine publication on the collection Kendi: Pouring Vessels in the University of Malaya Collection by Khoo Joo Ee - which i bought in the university bookshop a few years back.

not exactly a very sexy interest this, i must admit. but as you grow er... older you tend to pick up some wierd interests (and i don't mean any of those sexual perversions) like collecting ceramics and taking interest in parrots ...that sort of things.

like many other things in life i become interested in ceramics purely by accident and serendipity. many years ago i joined a few fishermen friends in their small fishing boat out fishing in the south china sea. they have this small bowl which they put salt and chillies in for dipping grilled sotong and fish . it is obviously not the usual bowl that you buy in the market and it turned out the bowl was caught in their fishing net and when i asked if i can keep it they said yes. and that's it. the start of my interest in pottery.and turns out there is one bowl of exactly the same type in the university malaya museum collection .

over the years i've visited many museums all over south east asia, china, korea, japan europe and the US and one of my goals is to visit topkapi palace museum in turkey. it is reputed to have one of the best collections of ceramics in the world...

women reading

2008-10-18T10:13:00.004+08:00

it has been said by many including famous authors - mario vargas llosa for example- that if it is not for women the 'novel' would be dead a long time ago. not many men read for pleasure it seems and thanks to women books in the fiction genre is still alive and well. for men, reading isn't fashionable and decidedly geeky. only boys who have problem getting girls or gays or dorks read. not exactly groups most men would like to be identified with.

but women are different. for a start a great number of them are woefully indiscriminating in their taste. they will buy and happily read and enjoy silly chick lits, romance and pulp fictions book after book . i suspect that the extraordinary and ridiculously fantastical sales of the children book in the harry potter series is solely due to women readers. i've never met a man who read harry potter.

but that is not to say that men are eclectic and have good taste. on the contrary these days most men prefer to surf porn and in malaysia read half-baked poorly written local political blogs. so we are no better then silly women.and that is not to say that women don't understand 'quality', or read serious and ah that word again ...'literary' fictions. in fact i also suspect that if it's not for women all these "booker" books would sink without a trace- most of them anyway. but the thing with women is they are indiscriminating. one day they may read say mikhail bulgakov and the week after they will happily pick up sophie fucking kinsella or yet another harry potter volume

women reading has fascinated many painters since hundred of years ago. I can't recall any good paintings of men reading but there are plenty of very good paintings of women reading. recently i bought quite a delectable art book Reading Women that has a selection of color plates of paintings of women reading by well known (and some less welknown) artists through the last several hundred years.

one particular painting is my favorite. it's a theodore roussel's painting of a young nude girl reading a magazine. it is mentioned that it's in the tate but i can not recall ever seeing this when i visited both tate london and tate modern several times in the past. I'll make a point to look for this when i go to london in future.

this painting captures everything i like about women.

two good questions

2008-10-14T08:16:00.002+08:00

i had two very interesting and explosive questions from two persons yesterday. one came via an sms message from a lady. another from a man; face to face.
the lady's sms is this, verbatim: Do you agree polygamy halts sex work? Ths was suggested at my work. Wud ths man want to marry my chow kit sex workers?

the other came from one of my randy goat friends. he has been spending a lot of money travelling to chang ping china bonking karaoke girls there. apparently changping is THE place now for people in the know. i've been all over china (but NOT for bonking, mind you) but never heard about this place until recently from this goat friend of mine. everytime he goes for his naughty trip i always ask him to bring back a report, preferably with video clips as well. he never fail to give very amorous report with all the details but unfortunately never substantiated with video clips. (are you mad? you want me to get into trouble with my wife? he would say). but his last trip recently made him very worried. the first thing he did after coming back from this trip was to barge into my room and confessed to a disturbing thing.to cut the story short, he shot blood . we discussed this at length and concluded : too much sex probably.

and yesterday he came to see me again and told me this "issue" still persists - and it has been several weeks since he came back from the trip . and asked if i've ever had such a problem. i of course said fuck no! and i tried to calm him down as best as i can and asked him to see a urologist (and report back to me). when i came back from office yesterday i related this to a person that i call " that woman" behind her back and she immediately diagnosed it. your friend has a cancer of the dick. hmmm...i always know women can be very cruel.

my friend's er ...issue is what we can term as an acute problem but the question from the lady above is more chronic in nature ( to put it in toxicological term) and is much more complex philosophically speaking. here's the question again (ah, the magic of cut and paste!!! to think that some idiots pretentiously say they prefer writing with pen- why don't they go further back and say they prefer hacking heiroglyphics with chisels?... pretentious lot these people are...but that's for another time)... :Do you agree polygamy halts sex work? Ths was suggested at my work. Wud ths man want to marry my chow kit sex workers?

the answer to many men is very obvious. (NO to part one and may be to part two of the question. ). women are incredible. even some of the brightest ones are clueless when it comes to major things in life. like sex. little wonder that they have been exploited so by (bad) men.

but i thought i want to expand further my answer to do justice to such a seemingly simple but deeply complex question and for this i thought of looking for answers in my sex bible the kamasutra of vatsyayana. i thought i read something about how men can win over girls and even wives of your enemies there and that sort of things which can answer the question above but i just couldn't find the much thumbed book anywhere!.

the problem is, if i've absent mindedly put back into my library it would be almost as good as gone. simply because i'm very sloppy and don't stack my books in any systematic order and now that my collection has slowly come to a critical mass for a personal library ( coming to 2000 + books) it's quite difficult to find any specific one in a hurry. i actually keep the kamasutra in my what they call here "the workstation" but it's not there. this is easy to confirm because i only keep THREE "non technical" books" in my office. everyday i religiously flip through these while waiting for my lap top to boot up or when downloding some lengthy pdfs. these are the said kamasutra that i bought from a sorry looking indian book peddlar on the sidewalk in culcutta several years ago. the other is "party jokes: a collection of the wildest, most hilarious and often tasteless jokes for adults". this little treasure was left to me by one aussie expat and the third is: "The world's Religions" by Huston Smith. this book came via my other randy goat turned deeply religious friend who thought this book "too technical and dry" who in turn got it from his american gay collegue who also thought the book too dry. not true. the book is very good. one book on sex, another on religions and the next making fun of both. i think i have a nice trinity of books that unite everything there.

p.s:
as to the kamasutra all is not lost. thanks to the magic of internet i just found out that they have an e-copy which may or may not be the version that i have in the hard copy but that you can read here.