The Colour of Sin is a Crispy Brown

My phone camera is pretty crappy, so it might not be possible for you to recognise this blur of brown on the plate.

This, dear friends, is the picture of SIN!

Take the foot of a pig. Steam it until the meat is soft and tender. Then deep-fry lightly just till the skin is crispy.

There's a lot more to the recipe than this, but this is as much as I can figure out.

Steaming cooks and softens the meat without leaching out the flavour and juices in the meat, like what happens if you stew the meat.

Deep-frying alone will harden and dry the meat, and often dissolve away much of the fat in the meat.

But a combination of the two creates a miraculous dish of soft tender meat with juicy fat and crispy skin. It's like an orgy in your mouth.

And it only costs less than a dinner for one at TGIF. Not to mention that the restaurant also has crabs at RM13 /kg.

Business is mad, there's a specialised cook for this dish. And probably a whole production line for sorting, gutting, cleaning, and cooking crabs. The restaurant spans across 3-4 ground floor shop-lots.

You can find this restaurant at these approximate co-ordinates: N2 deg 18.320' E111deg 50.875'. You may GoogleEarth it, or head there with a GPS.

Mere walking distance from my parents' house in Sibu.

With this promise of a taste orgasm, maybe now I can convince some friends to come visit me in Sibu some time...

OOTS #285 & Langkawi

In the latest OOTS, Haley's line is:

"You can't understand me, so let me just say that you're a frigid bitch and your thighs look fat in that armor."


Taken me some time to get around to it, cos I just got back from Langkawi.

Will write about that trip, but I have to pack for Sibu tomorrow.

Will explain why I'm going to Sibu, or even where Sibu is, but I also have an assignment that I need to submit before Saturday, and I won't have the internet connection to do that in Sibu.

And I'm also sun-burnt from the hot tropical sun of Langkawi.

And my colleagues were so kind as to arrange a full day for me tomorrow...

Which I'll have to somehow manage despite being crippled cos a Honda Prelude rear-ended me yesterday, just before my flight to Langkawi.

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!


But at least I have a new toy to play with to keep me balanced.

Finally got hold of a GPS! Extremely good 2nd-hand condition, at half the price.

It'll be cool to use it in Hanoi.

Will review my gizmo some time. And explain Hanoi another time too.

Speaking of reviews... am also asked to 'audition' for a game review magazine. Gonna try to come up with a decent game to review. But have been playing so few games lately. Probably did less than 5 games in years.

Pulau Langkawi

Finally, a job assignment that brings me somewhere decent!

A satellite installation at an island in Langkawi had failed for a couple of months already, and our usual contractors are too overbooked to service us, again. So it fell to me to head out there to fix it.

It's a tropical island with good beaches. So, I have no complaints.

But before I head to the airport, I had to go pick up some invoices from the office. Somehow, it didn't occur to my manager to hand them to me before I left the office the day before... So, on the way to the office, I got rear-ended by a Honda Prelude.

That damnable man was practically sleeping at the bloody wheel, cos he hit me with enough force to bump me a few feet forward into the back of a Kembara. It was morning rush hour traffic so he couldn't have been going too quickly, yet the impact wedged shut my boot, and crumpled up my bonnet.

Well, his radiator sprung a leak and his front took more damage than me, so that gave me some malicious comfort. The Prelude is not the most common car in KL, so parts will really cost him.


But my car was still driveable, but not safely so, as the buckled bonnet won't lock right and might pop up on the highway. This couldn't have happened at a worse time. Just before I need to get to KLIA, and back on Thursday, and there again on Friday, and back again on Sunday. That's a few hundred ringgit damage in cab fares...


Well, enough whining...

So I got to Langkawi, met the representative from our client at the jetty. And we took a 20min boat ride to Tuba Island, an idyllic place with a population of a few thousands. We were headed to the primary school there, which was the benefeciary of this company's community outreach, thus explaining why such a kampung school can have IT equipment and a satellite broadband subscription.

The school happened to be having a sports day. It's rather amusing to see their house names are Satria, Waja, Wira & Iswara. But this is Mahathir's home after all.


Managed to get the work done in an afternoon, which gave me almost 24hrs of time to kill. That's where I made the mistake of asking the cabbie to take me to a cheap and clean place. If I had realised that my accomodations would be charged directly to the client, I would have gone somewhere closer to a beach...

If I boozed, I might have had a great time with all the duty-free beer. But as it were, my only entertainment was munching pasar malam food and watching Robin Williams on TV.

Next day, I rented a bike from a nearby shop and went cycling. It was the crappiest bike I've every ridden. Ever. I estimated that I could make my way from one end of the island to the other in 1-1.5 hrs. That's where the nice beaches are, the west side.

Took me 2.5hrs to make the journey. Crappy equipment can really suck the fun out of your favourite activities. Like reading a bad book. Although I did make a few random stops and found some of the polluted fishing areas carefully kept hidden from tourists.

At the beach, I was only rewarded with the sight of one chick in bikinis. Only one. It wasn't yellow, but it was polka-dot.

Only had half an hour to swim before I had to take a cab to return the bike and get to the airport.


The cabbie is ex-army. We talked about scandals in the Malaysian military. About our Spitfires that we purchased from the British, and left to rust in Arizona before fencing them off again to some other suckers.


Managed to get back home in one piece.

Then unpacked.

And packed again for Sibu.

OOTS #284

Finally, a good cryptogram after so many weeks.

And I must apologise for taking so long to get around to this. It appears that quite a number of Googlers have been here to look for the latest solution and not finding it.

"Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, and he eats for a lifetime."

So let me introduce all OOTS fans to THIS.


Or... if you can't be bothered, here's the fish.

Panel 3:
What?

Panel 5:
No, wait, that verdict doesn't make sense. Laws don't work that way.

Panel 6:
I've seen enough of my thieves' guild friends sent to prison to know that this should have been a conviction.

Panel 9:
But.. but it doesn't make any sense!

Panel 10:
No! I'm not OK, this whole trial made NO SENSE!

Panel 11:
We WERE guilty! It shold have been a guilty verdict! I can understand if they wanted to reduce the sentence due to the circumstances, but it should have still been a guilty verdict.

Panel 12:
Oh, never mind, I don't know why I'm bothering.

Panel 13:
Wait--Elan, what did you just say?

Panel 14:
Oh my gods, Elan! That's it! Elan, you're a genius!

Venusian Sixth Sense...

So... I took a weekend off my gaming, and took a whole day to clean up my apartment. Had been servicing my bikes in the living room, so the floor was quite greasey. And my quarterly mopping was long overdue.

So I took a day to hose down the floors and scrub it till I nearly slipped my disc.

Anyway, the first friend that dropped by saw the cleaning, became immediately suspicious, and asked me who I'm cleaning for?

The next friend that found out that I had been cleaning, also became suspicious, and wondered who's coming to visit.

It seems that the only reason a bachelor will clean, is when he's going to bring a girl he wants to impress.

And when a guy cleans too regularly, he must be gay.

I once had a profound respect for women's intuition. But after some scientific observation, I think it's just a roll of dice on the craps table. If they jump to enough random conclusions as frequently as they buy shoes, occasionally they will make a connection that might strike one as intuitive.

Batu Dam

Costed me a fair bit, even with some mad bargain hunting, but I've got Red up and running. Had to spend a bit on a new wheelset that's suitable for disc-brakes. RM420 for a pair of Taiwanese knock-off hubs and fancy looking wheel rims. That's still a third of what I'ld have to pay for fancy Shimano hubs and bling-bling Mavic rims. And putting most of the new components from Blue over, and I've got a nice ride.

Got itchy, and bought new Deore shifters. LBS guy (local bike shop, just across the street from my apartment) assured me that it'ld work with my SRAM derailleur. But after I brought it back, of course it didn't work. Wrong index ratio, I could only get 7-speeds with my 9-speed gear sprockets. So I had to buy a matching Deore LX rear derailleur, from a different branch of the same business, of course. At the same time, forwarded them some feedback of their new branch and staff.

Then I serviced all the old stock parts for Blue, put everything together. And fetched some more bits and pieces and to get Blue up and running also. Albeit with a crappy suspension fork and very old tyres. But it still rides sweet.


So now, I've got two mountain bikes. (Well, three, if I also count my old LeRun, but that's way too heavy for trail riding.) 2 bikes ADD 1 friend = Adventure.

So I inducted a friend into this activity. His wife threw a small fit at being excluded from the activity and called us Brokeback Mountain cowboys... hummmm.......


Anyway-s, we tackled the Batu Dam trail on Sunday. It's an excellent place to cut our teeth into off-road riding. A good part of it is scenic as well as easily rideable. Then comes an uphill bit where we have to get down and push. Then some moderately challenging downhills (which I did not attempt at full speed, cos I forgot my helmet), and some insane downhills. And plenty of leeches.

Some parts of the trail has been damaged. Locked wheels digging into the dirt and erosion created some treacherous ruts. And although some bits have been repaired, it is not as well maintained as Bt Kiara.

But it's still a hugely popular spot. Met no less than four groups on the trails.

At the north-most end of the lake, there's a refreshing stream where a few families were picnic-ing. We took a break there and soaked ourselves. The mountain water was so cold that I probably turned into a eunuch.

Then we took the way out onto the highway, and found our way back into the dam via a hole in the fence, thus completing a clockwise loop around the lake.


It was a good test ride for Red. Full suspension makes a difference. No sore buttocks. The boys are safe. And I can pedal across bumpy bits much more effectively.

Childhood memories of food

Tehtariksatu tagged me for this meme like...4 months ago...

List down 5 childhood memories of food.

1. Chewing gum
The tidbits stall right outside my primary school gate always made bustling business when school was out. This was before the school was smart enough to build a proper canteen and set up business within the school compound. In those days, boys (of course, only boys do this) who have the munchies during school hours will have to run the gauntlet of prefects, teachers, wandering deans, pak guard etc all the way across the school field, pop out of the gate, buy their supplies, run back and lose themselves amongst the anonymous masses before they were intercepted.

And there was one kind of chewing gum that you can't find nowadays. It's probably illegal now. The chewing gum wasn't very tasty. Nothing tastes better than Wrigley's Double Spearmint. What's special about these gums though, was the packaging.

The gum was moulded into a cylindrical shape, wrapped with a thin white paper with the butt of one end painted orange.

Yes, it looks just like a faggot. (That's 'ciggie', for those of you who don't watch enough BBC.)

Almost everyone buy those and role play with them. Acting like Joe Camel, or the Marlboro Man.

You won't find sweets like that anymore!


2. Greenbean soup with hard-boiled egg
Back in kindergarten, the school served tea for all of us growing children. Nobody packed their own food. Everyone got the same food. It was a social equaliser. That, and everyone wearing the same uniform, same bag design, same pencil-cases, same pencils etc... We respected each other as equals. Except for the fat boys.

It's nasty to say it, but children are born cruel. Nobody taught us that fat is bad. But if someone is huge, our young minds automatically label them as fat, and treat them differently. Like a bull elephant, you don't want to provoke it, but neither will you be too comfortable getting too close to it. Even the boy with the mouthful of dental nightmare got more respect than the fat boy.

Anyways... the tea in school. I use to wolf down everything. Until one unfortunate day when they served green bean soup and hard boiled eggs. I only remember puking out my guts outside the classroom. It left a scar. Was 10-15yrs later before I felt comfortable eating any kind of bean soup and hard boiled eggs again.


3. Fish porridge
My mom left me with a nanny in the next flat when she heads to work.

For lunch, she often makes this porridge with slices of fish.

Only, this is a very bony fish. With all the fine prickly bones that you can never remove completely.

Eating that porridge was like walking a mine-field. You have to be alert, and catch those bones before you swallow. For every bone I caught, half as many I missed. Luckily I never lacerated my oesophagus.

And some magazine somewhere that I read when I was young, said that fish bones is brain food.

So, it's all good.


4. Roast piglet
It must have been 1983 or 1984.

My parents took me to Bangkok on vacation. And my poor sister was still too young to travel, so she was left with some cousins for the whole two weeks. She must've been traumatised, thinking that her family has left her for good.

My most unforgetable memory: the roast piglet we had for dinner one night.

Somehow, olfactory memories are more memorable than visual or auditory ones.

The crispy, succulent skin of the piglet.... Yummy...

It was only more than 17yrs later, that I got to re-experience that dish again, at the random wedding dinners that I get invited to. And it'll never be as good as that first memory.


5. Fried chicken wing
The most frequently bought food at the school canteen ever since I was old enough to be trusted with money. It was 60cts per piece. Nowadays, the average mamak will charge you 2.50.

Ashamed...

Almost everyone enjoys chuckling at a dirty joke or two...

But the level of filth that I'm able to catch... sometimes I'm ashamed of myself...

From an episode of Family Guy, when Brian is invited to direct a porno film...

BRIAN: "There's just no way I can do this... I've been around... You know er... I've licked my share of peanut-butter, but I think you need to find yourself a new director."


If you didn't understand the Goober reference, be grateful, and don't ask.

Meme of Four

Seems that I got tagged by Ben for this meme. I've come to the conclusion that this 'meme' thingie is something like a chain letter going around bloggers, and builds up more links between blogs, in an attempt to widen the catchment for visitors...

So, here's to duty....

4 Jobs I've Had In My Life

• Wan-tan mee stall owner (well, technically, a partnership for my hostel's open day, but it's more interesting than writing 'IT Engineer' four times).
• Door to door flyer boy for a community centre
• Partner in an IT service business (learning to great frustration that M'sian companies are interested in cheap, not quality; and their purchasing officer are only interested in what's their cut).
• Research engineer

4 Movies I Could Watch Over & Over

• Chasing Amy, directed by Kevin Smith, which I maintain is the most enjoyable love story I've every watched. You've got to love a movie with dialogue like,

"Fuck Lando Calrissian! Uncle Tom nigger! Always some white boy gotta invoke `the holy trilogy'! Bust this - those movies are about how the white man keeps the brother man down - even in a galaxy far, far away. Check this shit. You got cracker farm-boy Luke Skywalker, Nazi poster boy - blond hair, blue eyes. And then you've got Darth Vader: the blackest brother in the galaxy. Nubian God. Now Vader, he's a spiritual brother, with the force and all that shit. Then this cracker Skywalker gets his hands on a light- saber, and the boy decides he's gonna run the fucking universe - gets a whole Klan of whites together, and they're gonna bust up Vader's `hood the Death Star. Now what the fuck do you call that!"

"Intergalactic Civil War?"

• The Hunchback of Notre Dame. A lust-driven Disney villian? That's like the most powerful thing Disney ever did before all their executives got clobbered by the stupid stick.
  

• LOTR:FOTR. (The Horn of Gondor. Hyuk! Hyuk!)
  

• JFK.
  

4 TV Shows I Love(d) To Watch

• Coupling
• MacGyver (Class-A role model)
  
• Scrubs
• Family Guy (It's embarassing how many obscure pop references I can understand...)
  

4 Places Where I've Lived

• Sibu, Sarawak
• Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei
• Kota Kinabalu, Sabah
• BSH, Singapore
  

4 Places I've Been On Vacation To

• Kuantan
• Langkawi
• Melbourne
• Bangkok
  

4 Places I Would Rather Be

• anywhere with a good swimming pool
• the next geek-con where Neil Gaiman does a book signing
  
• a self-sufficient farm in New Zealand with a nuke-proof bunker until the mess in Iran blows over
• inside a bank vault, with an exit strategy
  

4 Of My Favourite Foods

• Sarawak / Foo-chow mee (Took me 9-yrs to find a place that sells near authentic ones outside of Sarawak)
  
• Bak Kut Teh.
  
• 花旗鸡饭, not seen outside of this one restaurant in Brunei, and it's gone now.
• Pork fallopian tube. Seriously. This dim-sum place in Brunei used to make an incredible dish. The dictionary definition for succulent should have a picture of this dish in it.
  

4 Websites I Visit Daily

• http://www.gmail.com
• http://www.somethingpositive.net
• http://kitco.com
• http://www.financialsense.com
  

4 Beautiful People Worth Tagging

• say again? beautiful people?
  

Fiction extrapolating current events

One thing that I'm noting also, from the few books that I've been reading recently... A number of authors are venting their disapproval of terrorism in their works...

Terry Pratchett's Thud! is a story of an ancient, pointless grudge between dwarves and trolls that goes back centuries. Ankh Morpork is a multi-ethnic, multi-species stew of culture. A group of traditional tunnel-dwelling dwarves drop in from the old country, and start to promote 'spiritual awareness' in the urbanised & 'corrupted' city dwarves and stir up ancient resentment towards the trolls. Then the dwarf holy man is murdered and a troll is suspected, leading to inter-species violence in the streets.

Pratchett's Discworld novels are frequently satires of contemporary events. Such as Going Postal may be a satire of the Enron scandal. Or Soul Music -with my favourite Pratchett quote: "We're bigger than cheeses,"- is a satire of the Beatles.


Orson Scott Card's Shadow of the Giant, where the Caliphate conquered India and commited atrocities. But he did distinct the line between the spirit of the religion, and the power-hungry madmen who were abusing the beliefs of their people.


In Olympos, an old-style human and the moravecs discovered a derelict nuclear submarine, armed with 48 MIRV ICBM missiles, each carrying a payload of 16 'black hole' warheads, which will create 768 mini blackholes ping-ponging around Earth's gravity until the entire planet is obliterated. It is an extremely creative doomsday scenario. The submarine was manned by 26 soldiers of the Global Caliphate. The author was trying to illustrate the mindless & deluded insanity that could inspire man to create such a weapon.


Seems like everyone wants to say something about the Middle East.

Happy Hallmark Conspiracy Day

My heart bleeds for each and every man who's forking out for three-figure flower and dinner bills.

Olympos by Dan Simmons

Life is sweet after getting the guillotine off my neck.

Can indulge myself, like spending 2.5hrs at Borders, reading Dilbert comics, or stuff on mountain biking and triathlon-ing etc... I'm certainly under no delusions whatsoever about my level of fitness, but one should still seek improvement, and also to shame meself into seeing how far short my level of discipline is compared to real athletes.

Love Borders. All those unwrapped books. It's good for me. I'm a bookworm.

Been so for a long while. Maybe it started because I am socially autistic. Or perhaps I just enjoy listening to smart people 'talk', (I vocalise every word I read in my head). Both will also explain why I'm frequently quiet amongst company; stupid things pop out of my mouth with alarming frequency, so I'll much rather not hear myself talk.

But if someone's recounting his knee surgery in great detail for the fifth time, or giving a running commentary on what Bree Van De Kamp is wearing, my brain may compell my mouth to speak and gush forth the garbage verbiage.

I'm digressing...

Back to books...

I used to read a lot. But these days, what with all the many little things that's taking up slices of my leisure, I'm having to cut down on quantity and focus on quality.

But with some exceptions... I still read Harry Potter so that I can tell people that Snape killed Dumbledore. Also Da Vinci Code, to experience the depth of disappointment to see how the whole world is taken in by such gimmicky drivel. It's like... watching Revenge of the Sith...


But I'm not here to review bad books. Not now...

Let's talk about good books.

I'm pretty much all about fantasy and sci-fi these days. If I were to name my favourite sci-fi, I'll go with Dan Simmon's Hyperion. That's where the creature on the right came from. It's the Shrike. An enigmatic & undefeatable killing machine guarding the Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion. This is the Balrog of Dan Simmon's world. An immediately identifiable icon of death.

The story of Hyperion continues in Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and Rise of Endymion. And I'm still not entirely sure how the Shrike came to be...


Anyways.... I can't seem to be able to hold onto a thought here, and it's taken me almost 400 words to get to the point of the book review.


Dan's latest book is Olympos, the sequel to Ilium.

Unfortunately, I can't talk about Olympos without talking about the book that came before it.

In Ilium, there are three discrete 'worlds' all happening together.

First there are the moravecs, a race of artificial beings created by humans millenia ago, and seeded in Jupiter, its moons, and the asteroid belt. They are a fusion of the organic and the cybernetic. They have autonomy, but also programmed to have a great curiosity in the human consciousness. They spend their lives conducting scientific explorations on Jupiter's moons and discuss literature like Shakespeare or Proust.

Being a being of scientist and engineers, they're picking up readings of critical quantum disruption on Mars, and have built a ship to investigate.


Second, there are the 'old-style' humans on earth. Living like terrapins in a terrarium. Everyone lives to be a hundred, exactly, in eternal youth. Every 20years, they are 'beamed' up onto one of the many artificial satellites to be rejuvenated. These satellites also facilitate childbirth, and heal fatal injuries. After a century, the human is retired from field service, and a birth is then allowed to take place.

Humans spend their lives teleporting all over a care-free Utopian earth. Everybody is illiterate. Robots handle all labour. Nobody works. Their only diversion is entomology, recreational copulation in a freely loving society, and a soap drama showing the Trojan war round the clock.

And the human females have evolved a something to keep and catalogue sperm sacs. So when their biological imperative drive them, they can sort thru the genetic material of any of their many one night stands over the course of decades, to fertilise the new life. Thus, creating an impossible society where a father could be copulating with his own daughter and no one would even know.


And in the third world, Priam's walls are under siege. His worthless son Paris has carried off the bride of Menelaus. Agamemnon has launched his ships and those of his allies to help his cry-baby brother get his wife back.

The whole cast from the Iliad is here. Achilles. Odysseus. Small Ajax. Big Ajax. Hector. Helon. Nestor. Cassandra. Andromarche. Patroclus. Briseis. Scamandrius. Apollo. Athena. Ares. Aphrodite. Hephasteus. Zeus. And many others. The Archaens. The Trojans. The Greek pantheon. The Muses. The Furies.

The cast that didn't fit though, was Dr. Hockenberry PhD University of Indiana.

For some inscrutible reason, some beings of unimaginable quantum powers have styled themselves as the Greek gods, and recreated all the heroes from Homer's Iliad to have them enact the siege of Troy.

The doctor has a PhD in literature with deep knowledge of the Iliad. He lived in the 20th century, but somehow, his body and memories had been reconstituted intact in this bizarre world, and tasked to give the gods a running sports commentary on the events around Ilium. Only Zeus and the commentators (and Cassandra to some extent) know the Iliad, but somehow, the entire cast, including the pantheon, are all following the script.

And if "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", here the powers of the gods are explained by pheromones, nanocytes, quantum fields or tunneling etc...

But what is most exciting, is to read the stories of the Iliad, finally in a readable form! Because seriously, I do not have the mental constitution to work through an epic volume of ancient Greek poetry.

I read this book before watching Troy. Which gave me an excellent perspective to enjoy all the bits that Hollywood did right, and the many many places where they shafted history in a fairly uncomfortable place. (And I don't mean the back of a Volkswagen.)

For example:
-The siege lasted 9 years or more.
-Achilles' gay-love for Patroclus, and upon their deaths their bones were mingled for sweet eternity.
-Menelaus did not die.
-Helen didn't escape with Legolas Paris. She was cornered by Menelaus in a temple. And just as he was about to plunge his sword (not a double entendre) into Helen, she bared her boobs and Menelaus changed his mind.


I'm digressing again...

Anyway, at the end of Ilium, all three worlds began to come together.

Olympos is the exciting climax. Of the fates of the 'old-style' human, after they found out the terrible truth about the orbiting satellites. Of the war between the pantheon and the Greeks, orchestrated by Hockenberry, who is enviably sharing Helen's bed. The conclusion of the Trojan war, which ended differently when Odysseus and Achilles are taken out of the equation.

The twist in Olympos, is the nature of Prospero, Caliban, Setebos, Sycorax, Ariel,and Miranda.

Yes, the cast from Shakespeare's last play: The Tempest.

And an enjoyable bonus ending, with Achilles and Penthesilea (an Amazon warrior of great beauty who was defeated by Achilles in the Iliad). Aphrodite gave Penthesilea an intoxicating pheromone, keyed to Achilles' senses only, to aid her in her ill-fated duel. But the big bosomed dumb blonde went and challenged Achilles standing downwind. HaHaHaHaHaHaHa. Resulting in the poor hero becoming helplessly in love with a corpse.


Better stop before I give away too much of the story.

Verdict: Good book. Read it.

Y's Insights

Remember Y - The Last Man?

The lastest ish has got some interesting insights into the female psyche...

"When's the last time you lathered and rinsed?"

"With what, Dr. Mann? The second the plague hit, you people started hoarding every last bottle of shampoo. I've been inside supermarkets where women left entire aisles of canned goods, but cleared out the goddamn HAIR-CARE section."

"There are plenty of farmers left, Yorick, but the cosmetics industry was run my men. Vidal Sassoon is a collector's item now."


Heh heh... in a post-gendercide holocaust, Head & Shoulders will be the new currency.

The author also has something to say about love...

"Love isn't an 'emotion', it's an abstract construct mammals assign to a biological imperative they don't fully understand."


And I thought I was a cynic...

You learn a new word every day...

Today's word is : Yaoi

Isn't it interesting to note that for every 10 perverted men with lesbian fantasies, there are at least 1 middle-aged woman with gay fantasies...

And I'ld like to further applaud the awesome genius of Wikipedia... I'll bet doughnut to dollar that an Encyclopedia Britannica editor will never ever come up with such a well researched entry.

Guillotine

Don't you just hate it when there's a bloody deadline hanging over your head, sapping the joy from your every waking moment?

I would be writing here, but there's work to be done...

Gotta get a bike, Gotta paint it red

Something in Dracula from Houston must have been subliminal... Cos I went and bought this, which I had been eyeing for a while. Managed to bargain the price down to a cool RM650. Bought it off a Malay bike enthusiast who's moving up to an RM3900 bike frame.

It's a full suspension mountain bike frame. A Haro Extreme EX2. Why a full-sus bike? A less bumpy ride. And from the looks of the reviews I'm reading, it sounds as tough as a VW bug. Or maybe it's just out of some deep-seated paternal instinct to protect my boys...

Well, what follows now is to transplant the rest of my bike componentry from my 2yr old Scott Voltage YZ4 over to this new old bike.

Bought my Scott at a good discount 2yrs back, for commuting, and to push up Bt Kiara (my skill level is far from able to ride most of those trails). And since then, I have upgraded every component on the bike. The Scott is still a beautiful bike frame with one little minor flaw...

It's missing two eyelets for bolting on a disc brake for the rear wheel. Found that out when I bought a pair of mechanical disc brakes last week. Thus, it gave me the extra impetus to buy this Haro frame. (Although this MOAB looks so much prettier....)

And next, I'll have to source a pair of wheel hubs too. The nearest bike shop is trying to scalp me for RM380 a pair. Am trying to find one at a quarter of that price....


And on some more serious news... Alan Greenspan retires from the US Federal Reserves at 80, and gold popped up to USD570 per troy ounce, an all new high in decades.

Perhaps Love

Once in a long while, a story comes along and speaks accurately of my own personal sentiments regarding love.

To borrow the words of a great philosopher, my sentiment is reflected as such, "Love : a grave mental illness." Plato.

This appears to be the theme in Perhaps Love. Not that I disapprove... It's good to see a theme more grown up than the usual Cinderella and Snow White stories.

But I still found the story horribly boring. It tries to do a Moulin Rouge thing, with circus performers, tango music, a tragic actress in a love triangle, and Jacky Cheung singing the bulk of the songs.

What were they thinking? Seriously! A chinese Moulin Rouge is like... a Bollywood Superman. (For a good laugh, please click on the preceeding two links, you won't be disappointed.)

I don't know music, but I know what I like. And I liked Ewan McGregor's singing way more than a guy who made his career and created his legend from his vocals.

I don't know music, but maybe it's something to do with the rhythm and cadence of tango music that makes it completely unsuited to mandarin lyrics. None of the songs were even halfway memorable. You know who wrote better lyrics? 阿牛 wrote more memorable songs than this. But that's just me.

The story revolves around three apexes of a love triangle. A mental case director, a mental case actor, and a mental case actress. I can't see how there's any love between the characters. The director wanted a sex-buddy for his long overseas filming jobs, and got comfortable with the girl. The girl wanted a break into acting, and take grotesque pleasure in mindf***ing the actor. And the actor is just a sad case of neurotic longing.

Perhaps love has missed the point completely. And the gratuitious song and dance sequences was how Moulin Rouge would be, if it sucked and used an amateur dance troupe. The cinematography was far from inspired. Watching the dance was like looking at spilt ice-cream on the floor: something that could have been very nice if a fool hadn't dropped it but is now just a disgusting mess on the floor that you wish you didn't have to clean up.

Plotwise, the love story climaxed early (at the same time as Takeshi's character), with half an hour to go. Which gave me some hope that the story will take a more guts-ey tragic turn: someone will die, either from tuberculosis (like Nicole), or someone's fit of jealousy (a good stabbing), or an unfortunate stage accident (like an ancient TV series I watched a long time ago, 戏班). The movie needed to end on an R+J tragedy or similar to have a glimmer of redemption.

The plot tried to go in just such a direction. Yet even while I was watching the clumsy fore-play, I realised that the director was going to pull out early and leave his audience unsatisfied. Wuss.


But watching the movie was not a complete loss. I made a surprising discovery about the actress, Zhou Xun. She's the blind girl in The Emperor and the Assassin.

Watched Emperor & Assassin many years ago in the cinema. And there was one scene that captivated me: where the assassin was sent to exterminate the family of a renowned sword-smith. After the massacre, the assassin found the blind daughter of the smith, who had been listening helplessly as her parents and brothers were slaughtered. The way she gazed sightlessly into the assassin's eyes.... Those were the most hauntingly soulful eyes I've ever seen.

I bought the VCD after that just to see those eyes again.

I've tried to look for a still of that scene from the movie, but can't seem to find it. Will make a still myself later.

Dracula from Houston

Sometimes it feels amazing when you find a piece of music that speaks to you on a personal level.

I've been playing Butthole Surfers' Dracula from Houston on a loop the entire time I'm blogging...

Got no future
Great big past
Little bitty guy on the rim of my glass
Gotta meet the plane so I can get my monkey
Teach him to be cool
But a little bit funky
Got no credit
And I got no fear
And I got about a buck
So I can buy a beer
Gotta see a doctor ‘bout the words I've said
And I gotta get a bike
And I gotta paint it red

Oh no
We gotta go
We're not gonna live forever
Why? Why? We gotta die
You know that we'll be together
Hey hey we gotta say
I could never be a savior
You don’t have to be there
Cause I'm never never never
Comin’ home

Three feet deep in a slow motion wreck
I was walkin' the walk
And I was talkin' to the best
I was wrinkled and shriveled
And steppin’ outta line
Had the end against the middle and losin every time
I was famous and heinous and crippled and sad
Thought I was invincible the baddest of the bad
Then I woke up one morning
And I stepped out of bed
Had to get a bike
Had to paint it red

Oh no
We gotta go
We're not gonna live forever
Why? Why? We gotta die
You know that wel'l be together
Hey hey we gotta say
I could never be a savior
I know that you’ll miss me
But I’m never never never
Comin’ home

Oh no
We gotta go
We're not gonna live forever
Why? Why? We gotta die
You know that we'll be together
Hey hey we gotta say
I could never be a savior
You don’t have to be there
Cause I’m never never never
Comin’ home

Staring in disbelief
Out at the gloom
I was forced with remorse to learn the bassoon
I got real good in about six years
Started playin’ out for a couple of beers
Then one day I was playin' at the gig
and in walked the monkey with a couple of funky friends
He came right over and said this is what you’ll do
You’re gonna get a bike
You're gonna paint it blue

Oh no
We gotta go
We're not gonna live forever
Why? Why? We gotta die
You know that we'll be together
Hey hey we gotta say
I could never be a savior
I know that you’ll miss me,
But I’m never never never
Comin’ home

Well, I've already got my blue bike. But I'll probably wait on that doctor's appointment.

Pekan Baru

My company has a client who has a couple of oil palm plantations in Sumatra, probably totalling 3 Singapores in size... They've an oil mill near Pekan Baru using our satellite broadband services. The system went down, and our contractor wasn't willing to commit personnel to service it. So it suddenly fell to me to fly there and get the thing working again.

Not too enthused about it. Cos when I go somewhere by car, I get to make mileage claims. And with the way my car sips petrol, I make a tidy little profit. But out in a boring little town in Sumatra, I don't get anything. And there's only 3 flights a week, I go on Tuesday, and I have to hang around there till Friday...

But it's work, so what choice have I got?

Gawd-awful early morning flight. No choice but to take a cab. Talked about Malaysia's economic disasters, past & future, the whole trip. The plane ride took off at 7.40 and I arrived at 7.20.

Luckily, the contact here met me at the airport. He slipped the customs people money to get me through without hassle. Who knows what's the going rate to smuggle in satellite transmitter parts etc... And if I let them know I'm just here to service an installation, they'ld insist on seeing my work permit/visa or something... But a couple of greens/blues/oranges/whatever greased the process far easier.

Hopped onto a car and driven almost 2hrs out of the town... Suffered a couple of minor head trauma on the way in, cos I kept dozing off in the car. But the driver was quite insistent that I see as much of his home as possible, and kept swerving the car sharply to smack my head against the seatbelt pulley. With each successive concussion, I lost more and more mental function, that it didn't even occur to me to just put the seat down and lie back until more than an hour into the journey.

They drive like maniacs here. The use of the car horn is a language all on its own. It can say a variety of things like, "Coming through!" "I'll bloody run you over if you don't get your crappy bike off the road!" "Don't you even dare think of cutting out into my lane cos I'm not slowing down for you, we'll die together if we have to."

It's better to just sleep through the nightmare and put my fate in the hands of God.

It took me all of two hours to get the thing working. After that, it's just a sad long wait till Friday.

I'm housed in some decent quarters at the mill. Room furnished with airconditioning, water heater, good spring bed, 24/7 maid service, food, gym. There's even pornographic art in my room. A kind of a spooky drawing of a topless kampung girl that reminds me a bit of Nang Nak. Small wonder that the previous occupant of the room took down the painting and put it face towards the wall.

I came prepared with appropriate 'desert island literature'. Some quasi-science/philosophy/art reading material that I prepared years ago. The kind of book that'll give you 6-12mths of reading in case you're stranded alone in a desert island... Gawd, it was boring!! I read a review of Godel, Escher, Bach in an issue of The New Scientist. I guess I'll eventually power through it somehow. For the same reason why people read A Brief History of Time.

The sex book I bought was much better reading. A lot of fascinating anecdotes on sexual cannibalism, stag horns, peacock sex, huge penises, etc. Oh, Stephen Jay Gould is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist. It only *seems* that biologists think about sex all the time. But really, Gould writes very good stuff. He even wrote an essay on Lee Kuan Yew's eugenic government policies.

But the book I really wanted to read was Dan Simmons' Olympos. But I only have about 5-6 hrs of charge on my PDA, and there was no way to recharge it. Be assured that I'll be ranting about this book in a later blog...


Back to my living arrangements... The main door gave me a small reason for concern... There's a huge lead pipe for barricading the door with. What's up with that?

Is there some danger of the peasants revolting against the bourgeois? (Isn't it ever so cool to be able to put in a word of French to class up your vocabulary?)

Well, it appears that there had been some small trouble before.

The roads radiating from the main town are speckled with random small villages. Some village thugs have a habit of stopping the oil palm trucks and collect a 'toll' of a couple of fruits. They do this enough, and get a small truck load, and then come to the oil mill to try to sell the ill-gotten goods back to the people they stole it from.

The barricade, and the two guard-posts on the way to the quarters are necessary measures after an incident.

It's a sad, but not altogether surprising, state of affairs. What do the locals here have going for them? They've got a bit of land, and the short-sighted sale of which is only a one time source of income. The only industry around is logging, saw-mills, palm plantations and the palm oil mill.


And another unusual industry I noticed on the way in... I saw a roadside shop selling gallon bottles of 'bensin'. That's benzene, isn't it? And I thought, cool, why not? Even I have times when I felt that I could do with some mutagenic industrial solvent. Maybe there's some local industry that uses the stuff, and there's a market for gallon bottles of the stuff...

Then I saw more and more roadside stalls selling this. WTF? What's the mystery market for benzene here? Do they huff the stuff to get high?!

Then I found out that 'bensin' is indon for gasoline. And 'solar' is diesel. Ooookay... That makes more sense... They've got no petrol stations outside of the town centre. So, entrepreneurs will motor into town, buy up a couple of containers of the gasoline, and bring it back to his village and re-sell them at a mark-up.

The coolest thing though, is that nobody makes a fuss when you light up a fag at these petrol stations. Not many places around lets you satisfy your nicotine cravings while you're filling up your vehicle.


Anyway, finally Thursday comes around, and I left the oil mill. Early morning flight on the Friday, so took a room in town. Got to see a bit of the town centre. Had 250,000 rupiah in my pocket, and nothing to spend it on.

But did manage to buy 48packets of IndoMie. They're less than RM2.00 for 6pkts, where I have to pay RM3.30 for 5pkts in KL. And the Indonesian version tastes better than the Malaysian one. Well, at least I won't go home empty handed.


While I'm talking about travelling... I'll also mention a bit about how to get to and from KLIA.

Right after you exit the baggage claim, you can start making random eye contact with the crowd. I'm sure you'll then be approached by no less than a dozen illegal cabbies who'll charge you about RM70-80 for a ride into the city.

Or make a left, and follow the signs to the KLIA Express, where RM35 will take you into KL Sentral in 28minutes.

Or make right, and look for the KLIA Transit. It runs on the same tracks as the Express. But buy a tix to Putrajaya for RM6.20. Exit the platform at the correct stop. Buy another tix to KL Sentral for RM9.50, and go back down to the platform to catch the next train in 30min.

Thus, RM15.70 can get you into the city if you're not in a hurry.

Pedalphilia

I'm not talking about The Woodsman. Although I'm talking about 5yr old and 10yr old boys, this has nothing to do with PEDOphilia.

Joined my first mountain bike hash today.

I've been ghosting the KLMBH group since I bought my Scott Voltage YZ4 two years ago. In the beginning, I had no means of getting myself and my bike to the bash sites. Only bought my trusty Daihatsu Charade last year.

The only off road trail that's within manageable distance from my apartment is the Bt. Kiara trail, near Taman Tun. I've been there twice, just to push my bike up and down some of the trails. It's a very technical trail, and the bulk of it is beyond my abilities. Do wish I can skill up and tackle it soon, before all of it is lost to rampant development. Properties in Bt Kiara are lava-hot.

After buying the car, I told myself that I will start joining a few bashes, especially if it promises to be scenic and non-technical. Somehow, didn't get around to this for an entire year. Thought I'll do something to kick my MTB-ing up a notch this year. Checked the MSN group last night, and whadaya know, there's one today, and a whole bunch of newbies are gonna be showing too!

SET!

So I cleaned my bike. Got rid of the embarassing cob-webs. Wiped the chain and lubed it with fresh oil. And packed my bike off to Rawang. Found the hash spot after only one wrong turn.

104 riders this day. And met the near-legendary Pigpen Pat, who is responsible for the maintenance and creation of the bulk of the trails in Bt Kiara.

There's a long trail, 22km and a short trail, 12km. I signed up for the long one. Pretty ambitious, but no pain, no gain.

Started off at 9.30. A hundred riders following the hares off the road and into the rubber plantation. We had to cross two streams early in the trail, which slowly strung out the riders.

I hung around the back of the group, and followed a couple of guys to look for alternative crossings before doubling back anyway. By then, most of the group are no longer in sight. I followed the trail of paper until I caught up with a small group. A dad with a bunch of boys with him.

By then, the trail has gotten steep. My front derailleur was giving me crap and the chain slipped off the cogs no less than 5 times. I was also running out of breath, and had to get off and push. I found myself barely keeping pace with a bunch of 10year olds!!

It took the better part of half an hour before I left them behind! I'm not THAT out of shape, am I? I kept pushing forward, but never caught up with anyone else. Are even the newbies so far ahead of me already? Come on, there were waify (adjective used to describe Winona Ryder) Malay girls riding cheap and gawd-awful heavy steel LeRun bikes! Those monsters are a nightmare on the steep slopes.

A simple ride? That's freaking false advertising! And all this while, I was still on the shared track for both the short and long routes. The trail hasn't split off to sate the thirst of the sado-masochists yet.

There were a couple of downhills too. The trick is to relax and ride it out, picking you path carefully. Hard braking will just tip your centre of gravity forward, and you'll endo.

It is exhilirating as hell. The adrenaline saturates your brain and you feel like you can almost see the Matrix. My thought process went, Ohshitohshitohshit ohshitohshitohshitohshit ohshitohshit ohshitHowinthegoodLord'ssweetnamedidIsurviveTHAT!!!

I can almost understand now why there's a Kiara trail named, Boner. (This is a double entendre.)

But it gets trickier when the slope gets bumpier. If you hadn't chosen your path properly, or not skilled enough to pick the right path, you'll go don'tgointherutdon'tgointherut don'tgoindon'tgoin... HelloRut! GotothegrassGotothegrass and Wheeeee! and Ow!

The rider behind me saw me do a double headspin triple somersault. His words: "That was incredible!" I'm only sorry that I couldn't have seen it myself. I landed on my back, which was cushioned by my CamelBak filled with 3Litres of fresh water. I walked away from that fall with no more than a pain in my right butt. No scrapes. No bleeding. No broken bones. It's like a rite of passage, and it even felt great.

Lesson learnt: I forgot to raise my butt off the seat. If I had stood up a little, the bike wouldn't have bounced so much and I should have been able to surf down the slope with more control of my speed. When you're bouncing and your wheels air-borne, the brakes don't do shit. There's no traction. Braking in mid-air only locks the wheels, and that spells bad news when you hit the ground again. Either that, or get a full suspension bike. :P

After the fall, my rear derailleur started giving me trouble too. I couldn't shift properly to the low gears, and the rest of the ride became quite a pain. When I bought those SRAM 4 with the shifters, I asked how good is it compared to more expensive ones. The salesguy said that it's not good enough for serious enthusiasts. Seems like he's right...

I kept pushing onwards, and still no sight of the women and children. I didn't want to be last, even if this was my first hash. Although I can still spot the paper trails, I don't relish the idea of being left behind. After pushing up a horrible slope that nobody could ride up, unless he's Mickael Rasmussen... I finally came to the fork in the trail that distinguished the sado-masochists from the common man.

I've finally came 10km, and can either take a further 2km short route out, or another 12km long route. Wisely, I took the sane choice. The last 10km was hard enough for me. I had no intention of seeing the rest of what the hares had planned for us. I caught my breath for a bit and chatted with the hare.

I found out that the boy I had so much difficulty passing, was only 5 years old!!!! I was almost out-done by a kid 17% of my age!!!! I only passed him in the last kilometre!

The remaining 2km was uneventful. Finished the hash with just enough water to spare, and found myself being the first 15 finishers. I'm sure there were more scrubs than this...

Maybe everyone else went the long route? Or maybe the crowd got led down a false trail early on, and that's how I bypassed them. I never caught up with them, cos they were behind me all the while!

Took some well deserved rest, and carbo-ed up with what the ice-cream man was selling. Hung around the finishing area to watch people finish and observe the post hash activities. Some brought portable showers to wash off. One Caucasian dude unabashedly took off his lycra pants in full view of everyone. No towel. No hiding behind a car door or anything. Down came the pants while I was on the phone calling my sister. I had front row seats to his creamy white and blistered cheeks.

Got to admire some of the hardware (double entendre not intended) the riders were packing. Marzochi Bomber front suspension that cost more than my entire bike. A Whyte PRST-4 that costs more than my car (just the bike frame, mind you). Even a LeRun, so at least I'm not the saddest case.

It's a good day. Any day that you can walk away in one piece is a good day.

The damage:

-RM 5.80 for toll, and less than RM10 of gas to get to Rawang.

-RM 10 for joining the hash as a guest. The registration is so that they'll come look for you if you don't make it out.

-Lost the ear-piece of my fave specs after the crash

-One knocked up rear derailleur


-One crack in my bike helmet. That's why "No helmet no ride" is a hard rule at the hash. I made it through the day with no loss of G.C.S. so I guess I got off pretty lucky there.

-One bruise in my right butt. But you don't get a photo of that.