The survey

Last month the UN conducted a worldwide survey with one question:

"Would you please give your honest opinion about solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world?"

The survey was a huge failure.

In Eastern Europe they didn't know what "honest" meant

In Western Europe they didn't know what "shortage" meant

In Africa they didn't know what "food" meant

In China they didn't know what "opinion" meant

In the Middle East they didn't know what "solution" meant

In South America they didn't know what "please" meant

In the US they didn't know what "rest of the world" meant.

from Sironi Peace

Pregnancy Pact?

How badly do some girls want to have babies? Badly enough that 17 girls have made a pact to conceive and deliver at the same time?

US probes teen 'pregnancy pact'

Fucked Up

Here's a real definition of having a shitty day:

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/6/17/nation/21573357&sec=nation


It's late, you just got back from work and your mom's pleading with you gasping her last fucking breath to help her.

Your mother.

Panic. You beg her to hold the fuck on.

And you run for help, screaming. Anyone?

You manage to find a car with four guys inside who ask you to get in so you guys could go get an ambulance together...

...before proceeding to BEAT THE FUCK OUT OF YOU UNCONSCIOUS AND ROBBING YOU...

In the end, you wake up 2 hours later and find your mom's dead.

What kind of animals would continue with what they're doing when they hear someone needs help and would die with that help wasn't given post-fucking-haste.

Whoever those fucks are, I hope their next heist or whateverthefuck it is they do fail to execute satisfactorily, resulting in their incarceration in a gay-only penal facility with major hard-ons for boy-flesh.

I also hope their testicles get cut off and stuffed in their eye sockets.

Fuck'em.

An update: http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/6/18/nation/21579551&sec=nation

Driven to Narcolepsy?

One particular trait I find about yours truly is that I love to drive long-distances.

Give me a good car (preferably with automatic transmission), drop me off at a location and tell me you need to get to a certain spot and I'll drive ya.

Drive around the state of Sabah? Sure.

Tackle the North-South Expressway and to Bangkok? Done.

Drive you from KK all the way south to Kuching? Can.....

Provided you pay for the fuel lah...

Yeah I like driving. On these long-distance road trips, I hardly get tired or sleepy. Touch wood I know but it hasn't happened to me on all those trips for work and holidays.

Here's the strange part.

On shorter distances, I get bored if there's no one to talk to or to listen to.

Do you get sleepy or tired while driving? Of course you do.

Everyone does once in a while. Especially if you drink and drive.

Let's admit it. With the total disregard for laws against driving-under-the-influence of alcohol (on our part) and a similar slack of enforcement (on their part) on this same law, EVERYONE is guilty of drinking and driving at some point of their lives.

So, my question is, what do you do to 'throw away' sleepiness/tiredness/drunkedness before you drive?

In my experience, when you ask this question, it gets people animated and gets them talking.

Why? Cuz it involves things people put in their mouths lah....

And this post was actually inspired by this :

The Caffeine Nap

Sleep researchers at the University of Britain at Loughborough did several tests on fatigued drivers to compare the effects of different methods for a driver can use to stay awake. They put the volunteers in driving simulators while they were sleepy and let them drive. Some of the tests included rolling down windows for cold exposure, blasting the radio and slapping oneself in the face to try to stay awake. But what researchers found worked the best was a Caffeine Nap.

The Caffeine Nap is simple: you drink a cup of coffee and immediately take a 15-20 minute nap. Researchers found coffee helps clear your system of adenosine, a chemical which makes you sleepy. The combination of a cup of coffee with an immediate nap chaser provided the most alertness for the longest period of time in tests. The recommendation was to nap only 15 minutes, no more or less and you must sleep immediately after the coffee.

Most adult Americans drink coffee, and caffeine is possibly the most widely used and longest self-administered drug in mankind. Caffeine is a stimulant and is often used when people want to stay awake. The caffeine nap is an example of the paradoxical effect of many substances in the body.

What other methods have you tried to reduce sleepiness or the effects of alcohol, besides coffee? Do you really wanna drink coffee at night after clubbing? I know I wouldn't be able to sleep at all after a cup of caffeine-flavoured juice.

Believe it or not, I get a lot of veterans of the pint saying, "Sup tulang!"

Whuuuh?? You're asking right?

"Sup tulang" is literally bone soup in Malay. Some kind of broth where various sections of beef have been boiled for several hours. You can usually eat them with noodles of your choice.

Here's a pic:



Here's another pic of something simiar except this one's called "sup gearbox":

Do you really need to ask: Why gearbox?

Chinese like to stuff their oral cavities with something called bak kut teh which basically translates to big frikkin' pie.

Shit, I'm just fucking with ya.

It's actually pork rib/bone tea.

I swear it's true.

Your boner, sir.

Must be all the soup that's doing all the waking-up.

Another favourite after-booze meal for me and my mates is prawn mee:


Prawn + mee. I'll whack you if you need anymore description.

Seeing the recurring theme here, maybe all you really need to freshen up for that drive is this:

All the rest are just cotton-candy fillers.

How does your education kill your creativity?

Growing up and going to school in Malaysia could be summed up in these few words:

Read.

Memorise.

Regurgitate.

And anyone who have ever been to school here would no doubt be able to relate pretty well to those three words.

Face it, the school system in Malaysia doesn't do much to bolster kids' curiousity and creativity.




To quote Robinson: "...by the time they get to be adults, most children have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong and we run our companies like that by the way. We stigmatise mistakes. And we are now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst things you can make."

Is our creativity up to snuff?

What's a Real Man?

What makes a real man these days? Indulging my uber-human fantasies, I'm reading this right now by one of my favourite authors who also wrote Market Forces:

Nutshelling it, Carl Marsalis is the Blackman.

Not just because he's a Eurafrican (European of African ancestry) but because he's also a Variant Thirteen.

'Thirteens' are extensively-genetically modified alpha males: artificially bred and groomed for combat from a very young age. Possessing extraordinary speed and strength as well as vast and deep knowledge of armed and unarmed combat and insurrection, Thirteens are the planet's last super-soldiers, designed solely to fight wars and topple governments.

So, what happens during peace time? Well, for starters, it's very difficult to have single-minded trained killers with a strong distaste for empathy running free during peace time right? So like any 'right'-thinking society the world has become distrustful of these guys and decided that they should be rounded up and locked away. Either locked away or sent on to the Mars colony.

Enter this one guy, a renegade Thirteen, who has managed to stow away on a flight from Mars and is now running lose on Earth and predictably, killing lots and lots of people. In very gruesome ways. An example? On the 7-month flight in from Mars, he systematically mutilated and carved the bodies of the crew for meat with the help of some cryogenic technology. It was a long flight after all.

Now, Carl Marsalis, a bounty hunter of renegades for the UN, is the only other Thirteen who may be able to hunt him down and bring him down...

This story posits that after tens of thousands of years of social and biological evolution, human beings no longer needed to rely on the brute force of its male members for enforcing its social structures and hierarchies.

Back when we're still in our hunter-gatherer days, alpha males were the ultimate hot-shit of the day.

The society needed them to defend the village and bring back large meat.

So if you're an alpha male, you were the biggest, fastest and MEANEST one of the pack. Your fellow villagers needed you. And, you were the one leading the other alpha males to hunts and battles.

And, you got the most booty.

Cuz the women would go for the biggest fuck (mostly literally) they could find then, not because of the guy's charm or charisma or that he smells nice. It's because the women knew the biggest muthafucka then had the best chance of fathering strong children with the best potential to be the next alpha male.

Think of it as an early form of humanity's draft pick selection.

Now, in a highly feminised world, there is much lack of a need for brute force from individual human beings because society has in a sense gotten 'soft'.

These days, human males don't duke it out in the streets like in Martin Scorsese's 2002 Gangs of New York, and they don't fight wars in phalanxes and red capes. They do it these days through technology and legal 'discourse'. Today's first wave of the metrosexual male will not be the last.

But then.

What happens to this society when you insert several 'traditional' alpha males into the mix?

How would these ulti-males think? Or act in such a society that has lost the evolved ability to deal with them? Women on an instinctual level might be attracted to these men because of their innate 'manliness' just like most men are naturally attracted to the nubile young beautiful female.
Will these ulti-males be a threat to society just because of their genetic enhancement and alterations at birth? Thirteens for instance have been designed to act with pure malice and lack-of-empathy when it is needed, because on the battlefield, you'd have no time to think of the consequences of your actions, nor how the other guy feels. Just like, in the old days.

How would this be suitable in modern and 'civilised' society? The human capacity for paranoia, suspicion and distrust is nigh-unlimited and if the majority knew of these alpha-males walking with the propensity to violent (and worse) unpredictable acts, they wouldn't hesitate for a bit to put them away.

So What ARE the definitions of a 'Real Man' these days?

Looking around the web, I have managed to dig some lists, which can be quite varied.


AskMen.com says a real man is 'strong', doesn't cry, doesn't moan, doesn't complain and get this, doesn't get sick.

On the other hand, eHow.com says showing your more vulnerable side is acceptable if you're a real man.

"Show your emotions. Most studies show women think a man who can as easily cry as laugh and is not afraid to show his emotions not only to her but to the world classifies a man as a real man."

In his article, Tony Thomas says that the notion that 'real men' don't cry, don't show emotions and are not gentle are wrong.

"I guarantee you they had some deep-seated problems and had no idea what a real man is. Whatever the origin, those ideas of a real man were dead wrong."

In fact, the term 'real man' has become so convoluted that it's been made into a joke or a pejorative term.




For further reading:

How feminism destroyed real men.

How to be a real man: Tips, guidelines and rules to follow

David Rice on 'What is a real man?'

Empty Them Pockets, Mate

Kung Fu Panda kicks butt!

This was great! I thought it was the best animated movie since Finding Nemo.

Instead of a lengthy review, I'll just list my favourite parts here:

1. The intro

The style and the narration of the intro really pulled you in to the movie post-haste. Doing the intro like that in 2-D style was fresh yet, it had the familiar heart-pumping feel of good anime battle scenes.

2. Tai Lung's escape

I'd always love scenes of uber-powerful good/bad guys breaking out of impossible situations and the over-the-topness of this scene blew me away.

3. Po's chopstick training

This made me really think about how difficult it was for the animators to pull off and not had to be checked into any post-stress clinics. Dizzying speed and fun to watch.

8 Things I Hate About Kota Kinabalu, Sabah

Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, Malaysia.

Come in. Smell it. Smell that air? It's clear, unspoilt air.

See those guys sitting in the coffee shop? Yeah, those 3 guys, the Chinese, the Malay and the Kadazan dudes, sitting and laughing and just hanging out.

That's muhibbah.

That's racial tolerance right there. In pure form. Sincere and honest.

See those green things standing over there? That's called a forest. One of the biggest in the world and one of the most diverse of plants and animals.

But KK, Sabah is just like my girlfriend here:

Though she is THE most beautiful specimen of the homo sapien alive on planet Earth right now she does have some baaaaaad traits that I absolutely hate like leaving her under-garments all over the damn place and expecting me to pick up after her.

(Trust me guys after the first couple rounds of fore-plays and role-plays, it gets tiring.)

Back on point.

So even though I love my home town Kota Kinabalu to bits and there ARE many things to love about it, I got here some favourite issues of many Sabahans to bitch about, starting with...


8. Bad Roads

Check it out. The THIRD flyover in Sabah. Ever. Or as some douchebags here call them: fly-aways.

Get it right people, when you FLY AWAY, your frikkin' toes lift off and stay up to the cheers of the multitudes.

FLY OVERS are sections of road that only make you believe you're lifting off. At least for the first couple of times when you drive that modified heap of a Kancil at 60 km/h anyway.

So this fly-over has 3 lanes each side, passing by the Karamunsing intersection where you get spectacular views of the Kompleks Karamunsing, the Tun Fuad Stephens towers and the EPF building if you're so inclined to be impressed. I'll throw in the ONLY LED advertising board in town here too.

But you know what?

They're crap.

No sooner do you see the new flyovers come up, the sections where they begin and end start to feel like you taking a speed bump up the ass at 160km/h when you're only actually traveling at 20km/h.

And we have got more pot-holes in metropolitan KK than your post-pubescent acne-filled face after eating 10 KFC Buckets. The Hot & Spicy ones.


7. Drivers here suck.

I know you only had the minimum ten hours of driving instruction before you're legally authorised to take the test for the driver's license.

I know you spent the wee hours of the morning backing and forwarding your car to get the hang of the clutch.

I also know you had to get your instructor and driver's test agent to give the JPJ a pitiful RM100 gift as an 'endowment of appreciation' to 'facilitate' your performance on the test.

I KNOW all these. It's an open secret. No problem ok?

But you still suck at driving. And no, that stupid 'P' license doesn't mean you can drive like shit and not use your signals and drive real slow on the right lane. That 'P' automatically makes you palui by default.

Drivers in KK suck. No doubt about it. It's like saying the sun rises in the East and sets fire on their incompetent asses.

No signals when they switch lanes. Throwing scraps of shit out the windows. Driving slowly on the right-side lanes during rush hours. Using the signals but don't turn. Tail-gating.

I can go on and on.

Don't even mention what happens when it starts to drizzle. You'd almost mistaken them for thinking someone's playing a practical joke and decided to make a blizzard in KK thus rendering all roads slippery and dangerous if you drive at more than 30 km/h.

Douchebags on wheels indeed.

The only thing that can possibly worsen the situation is when they get more kap-chais on the road like in Penang and KL. But even that's happening.


6. Illegal Immigrants and Stateless Children.

GET. THE. FUCK. OUT.

is the logical summation of ALL that's been said on this topic.

Here. Here. And here.

Look. I'm not heartless. I agree Malaysia's a better deal for many immigrants who wants a better life with a better job and a chance to get with that immigrant chick he was eyeing on the boat coming over.

But hell, if they're gonna start some shit when they get here, I'm all for the government mouth-raping them and getting them the hell out of here ass first.

But then, you have their offspring who are born after they have reached and settled here illegally on fake MyKads. These kids are not registered anywhere which makes them 'stateless', not belonging to their parents' country of origin and not citizens of Sabah or Malaysia neither.

Poor, poor things.

Until they grow up and start harassing folk and tourists as mentioned here and here.

Then they deserve the same treatment by my friend here:


5. Shitty decor.

Kota Kinabalu's got a great sunset thing going for them and the abundance of natural and planted greenery but let's face it. The rest of the decor in town BLOWS.

Lime green, sun yellow, chili red lights? With blown out bulbs?? Sphere's of light hanging with no discernible pattern??? What the hell? Have we been letting birth-blind folk put these up???

Don't believe me? Drive along Anjung Senja towards KK Waterfront for just a few glaring examples of these lighting effects and tell me your retinas don't kick you in the balls for affronting them with these displays of suck.

Trust me it gets worse than this.

4. Spitting

Sigh.

I shouldn't need to but I'll let Wikipedia explain this:

"Spitting or expectoration is the act of forcibly ejecting saliva or other substances from the mouth. It is normally considered rude and a social taboo in many part of the world, though spitting can still be occasionally observed in some places. It is possible to transmit infectious diseases in this way."

LINK

Does 'NO SPITTING' as a general rule in polite society even need an introduction anymore?

The answer is a big fat 'FUCK YOU, NO'.

C'mon people stop doing that shit! And for that matter, no strong snorting, clearing your phlegm and blowing out your nose within visual contact of another human being.


3. Parking is shit here.

Yes, it's true. A KK person spends 30% of her life looking for parking during working hours.

OK fine I was exaggerating about the 30%.

But it is true that parking space in the town centre is one of the shittiest in the world. Unless you spend some money and park in a mall or something but most of the time, you'd have banged out a decent length (2 pages) article by the time you manage to find a spot. You'd also have caused your potential client to question your punctuality.

Developers: Put up some more parking complexes. They make money too dammit!


2. Shitty/non-existent garbage disposal.

What's large, has wheels and pees whenever you see it?

That's right. A KK City Hall garbage truck.

If you're out for dinner on a weekday at 8pm, bring along your favourite piece of gas mask. Because once one of these passes you and you just happen to be having your meals in an establishment with outdoor seating, you'd heave up your entire dinner. Yes, plus some of your lunch.

Trust me on this.

Somehow with the cooperation of the people (i.e. their inability to properly dispose of their garbage in tied garbage bags) and the general willful ignorance of the garbage disposal authorities, these smelly behemoths scour the city with their (very infrequent) pick-ups, with leeching trailing after them.

You KNOW how that should work out, don't you?


1. Toilets. Nuff' said.

The toilets, oh my god. The toilets.

If cleanliness is next to godliness, Sodom and Gomorah had NOTHING on Kota Kinabalu when it comes to the vileness of its dirty toilets.

Washrooms and toilets in general here are the epitome of SHYTE and sometimes you can take that literally.

One friend of mine worked as a complex manager for one major shopping mall here: "In some of the ladies rooms, you can see SMEARS of red on the walls at crouch height."

I stopped him there.

And usually, there are no toilet paper in public toilets caused by the prevalent and rampant cheapskatism which compels ordinary folk to steal toilet paper.



Well, what else can I say but.

Make Kota Kinabalu, Sabah your next holiday destination. If you dare.

5 Most Insane Things Said/Done by Malaysian Ministers

Malaysia is world-famous for some really awesome stuff. Having one of the best and most lauded Formula One circuits in the world, the tallest TWIN towers in the world, the beauty of our Kadazandusun and Malay women, the best prawn mee in the world, best roadside-food-stall-with-flies-that-won't-make-you-wanna-throw-up, blah, blah, blah.

But Malaysia's also famous for some of the craziest behaviour and shit-rivers that flow out of several ministers' mouth. So, damn the ISA and here's a short run-down of some really insane things said and done by Malaysian ministers in recent times.



5. (Former) Health Minister Chua Soi Lek promotes good health.

Young men everywhere in Malaysia who say that they have trouble getting 'it' up should now be suitably ashamed of themselves. And permanently retire their 'swords and keris'es' lest it be done for them. Slowly and painfully.

Chua of MCA held the post of Health Minister from 2004 to 2008 and he was a credible minister for that post as the dude was trained in psychology and psychiatry.

'Ah Lek' worked as a medical officer at Batu Pahat Hospital in Johor before opening his own practice in 1977. In 1990, he went full-steam in MCA politics.

Now, when the rest of us were still hungover and reeling from too much post-party-stress-disorders (choose your favourite ailment), the robust Minister of Health, on January 1 2008 promptly showed up all young 'men' around this here parts despite his advanced age, his ability for 'pleasing the ladies' as per the following video before resigning the next day:





4. Too Much 'Race-based' Politics, Naz?

Mohd. Nazri Abdul Aziz. Current Minister in the Prime Minister's Department.

Hatchetman? Guardian of Intregrity for Prime Minister Dato Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi? Or staunch supporter of UMNO?

Who knows?

But he's definitely hard-up for defending some notion of racial discrimination as evinced by the following video:



In his tirade, he uttered the phrase 'bloody racist' a grand total of 28 times.

28 frikkin times.

You'd think he'd made his point by the second time he said the phrase.

But by the end of the fifth time, he just came across looking like a childish prat in a shouting match with his cousin in some 'rumahtangga' before they're both pulled by the ears towards separate corners for some time-out.



3. Begging your pardon Dato's MPs, but what's bursting every month?

Ahh Malaysia. The South-East Asian bastion of religious freedom, racial integration and more recently, gender equality and opportunities.

And then you have this:



Backbenchers Datuk Bung Mokhtar Radin and Datuk Mohd Said Yusuf, two upstanding representatives of the people likened the leaking roof of the Parliamentary Hall to another respected MP. "Where is the leak? The member for Batu Gajah also leaks once a month.".

And yes, the calm and eloquently-spoken Bung Mokthar has also been appointed a Deputy Chairman of the Backbenchers Club.

Certainly, Malaysian ministers in Parliament are all about class and respect. And I've got a fucking bridge in Penang to sell to you.

For further information: http://femalevoters.wordpress.com/2008/04/20/malaysia-parliament-leaking/



2. Yet More Gentlemanly Manners for the Ladies

Here's yet another display of gallantry and gender sensitivity for the ladies of Malaysia when Kota Kinabalu UMNO pro-tem head Hj Roselan "Bonehead" Johar Mohamed said “If you cannot fight rape, better lay down and enjoy it.”

And that's not even the worst part.

Roselan uttered that piece of gem at an event jointly organised by the (read with me)

WOMAN, FAMILY AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT COUNCIL of Sabah.

Which should probably mean that there will be LOTS AND LOTS of woman there.

I'm surprised he wasn't immediately pelted to unconsciousness with used tampons after that.




1. Promoting Racial Unity and Integration, No Doubt.

The last (but not least) cringe-worthy comment comes from MP for Jerai, Kedah, Dato' Hj Badruddin Amiruddin who showed his racial tolerance and sensitivity for all Malaysians when he said, "Malaysia ini negara Islam. You tidak suka, you keluar dari Malaysia".



His strong grasp of both languages notwithstanding, Bad-ass-ruddin really exemplified Malaysia's strong drive for racial tolerance and mutual respect. And look, it's Bung Mokhtar again adding his own words of wisdom to the whole 'discourse'.

NOT.