Mindless Miscellany (No 6)

What's become of the world we've known so well? From sand pumping to baby dumping, the mindless are having a dandy time. Why this sudden spate of the cruel and unusual? Lack of the mind-building Omega 3 with the higher price of egg and fish? Whatever's the reason, it'll get only lower just when you think it's hit the pits.

1.Dump, baby, dump.

Fashion is back in fashion. In Malaysia all things worse than bad happen in series, with increasing intensity. The first one will almost always set a benchmark for followers to up the ante. Religious deviants, maid abuses, school gangsters, bogus doctors, missing children, you name it. And now baby dumping. Bumping off babies is fast becoming a trend, if it's not already. A day hardly passed without somebody stumbling on a foetus somewhere. The relevant and irrelevant authorities were all at sea with this spike in the ranks of the insane adolescents. PAS blamed Valentine Day and New Year tender moments. A sharp deduction by the clerics, who're clearly working without the benefit of a CSI-class paraphernalia. The NGOs called for early sex education. Lucky thing we've a Cabinet of sensitive and sensible ministers who decided on the shock-and-awe route: reclassify baby dumping as murder. NGOs, being what they are, were up in arms and lambasted Bung Mokhtar (although he's not in the Cabinet and he'd not dumped anything yet, but who cares). They still wanted early sex education, now even earlier, like pre-school. But all the clever ministers and feisty activists missed one important point, that baby dumping is just a trend. More of a fashion. The obvious solution is to stop this trend on its tracks. Make the fashion obsolete. How? Do nothing, that's how. I mean stop publicizing or sensationalizing any new foetus found. No news, no details, no graphic footage. Total blackout. The police would still investigate and lock up the suspect longer, but without scripted and staid press conferences or media releases. Any baby-dumping aspirant will now be completely demotivated as the message crosses his/her brainless head: that nobody dumps babies anymore, baby dumping is out of date, it's no longer hip to hate babies. Dump is dumb. This way, the Valentine or New Year love child will get to see the light of day.

2. Titanic traffic in monotone

The 10-day, 100 km monster traffic jam on a highway leading to Beijing finally ended on 25 August. At its height cars moved at a speed of 1 km in one whole day. A well-fed tortoise can cover four times longer in one day, if the poor guy can last that long in open Chinese roads full of exotic-meat lovers. Homesick Kelantanese who fret annually about 15-hr trips back home for Hari Raya should be thankful that their hometown isn't Beijing or near Beijing. You lucky people. I've my daily dose of traffic jam sending Sarah to school in the morning. I don't mind the full 20 -minute commute especially with the radio on. Until lately. You turn on the radio, and there he is: Dato' Seri Utama Rais Yatim on the air, extolling the virtues of jalur gemilang, adat perpatih and gotong royong in a dragging, archaic and utterly incomprehensible Malay. Imagine if I've to listen to his monotone for 10 straight days on the road to Beijing! All in all, we KL road users can pretty much consider ourselves a pampered lot. Only one or two-hour jams, not ten days. Idris Jala and his transformers should find this handy when they're up for another round of scare-mongering.

3. King Kong vs Mickey Mouse

Football again. But don't skip this one. Deep in debts and spurned by all genuine investors and Nigerian scammers, Liverpool has yet to get around its swaggering and blue-blooded ways. Ahead of the match against moneyed Manchester City, a senior Liverpool figure likened it to King Kong vs Mickey Mouse. He went on further to suggest that the City Sheikh should've waited and bought Liverpool instead. In the Liverpool hierarchy of lamebrains, this guy is right at the very top. Mr Lamebrain, the Sheikh is uber-rich, and if he actually wanted to buy Liverpool he'd have bought Liverpool (and get rid of you) whether or not it's available. He could've bought Barcelona or the entire Catalonia if he wanted to. The Sheikh bought Manchester City because he wanted Manchester City. That simple. He didn't want to buy a big, boring club and turn it into a big, boring club. No fun. He's looking for the adventure and romance of turning a richly talented team into world beaters. RM and MU should be afraid. Liverpool? Never mind.

Oh, that match. I think you know the score.

4. Papa and mama, don't preach

Just be careful about what you preach these days. There's plenty of furor already over the off-the-wall khutbah at two mosques in Penang and the alleged racist-slanted speech by a runaway school principal. I was genuinely amused because I like jokes, especially the MAD Magazine variety. But once I regained my sense and sensibilities, I tried to make sense of each of these separate but subtly similar cases and keep it in proportion. A confused and lovesick khatib? Political conspiracy, as usual? I'm not sure what to make of it. But police has ruled out humour as a motive and floated the Sedition Act instead. Scary stuff. And that power speech, if the principal's objective was to find instant fame, she'd succeeded spectacularly judging from the speed and intensity of the brickbats. I wouldn't add anything to her strong views, but I like her literary and euphemistic expression. She writes poems?

This is our City

The new English Premier League (EPL) Season kicked off yesterday with the usual hooha and hoopla. EPL may not be the sexiest of the football leagues, but it's by far the most widely watched, thanks to clever marketing, extortionate merchandising and disguised human trafficking. In Malaysia, EPL has more followers and fan clubs than the sickly Liga Super and Liga Premier combined. For all the talk and walk, our PM has admitted that he's a hard-core fan of Manchester United instead of Felda United.

An EPL season consists of 1000 games or about 2000 hours of football, excluding cup contests, injury time, repeat telecasts and repeat injuries. Games are generally played at breakneck pace, and any talented teenage upstart can consider himself truly gifted if he can complete the season in one piece, with no bones broken by attack dogs like Vidic and Neville. Most of you, if not all, will watch most of the live games, if not all (Only a retiree can come up with loony lines like this). And most of you, like our PM, have a team or two that you like or like to hate. My unscientific research has unearthed a clear, racially polarized trend: Malays watch only Manchester United, Indians would die for Liverpool but not for Samy Vellu, and Shebby Singh supports Spurs. Malays and Indians (and rest of the world) tend to avoid Bolton Wanderers. Chinese? Illegal betting. Mind you, these are just statistical means or averages. There are outliers or exceptions, of course, who still support Kelantan etc. Since I've got all covered, there's no real urgency to argue with me on the validity of these findings.

So which team tugs at your heart-strings? Man U and Liverpool, you say. So passe, so yesterday, so Melayu. Best is dead, Beckham has left and Giggs is hitting 36 and you're still strung-out on them. That's still Ok compared to my Tiger Lane classmates. They went to England for studies in the 70's and ended up cheering Southampton and Brighton (both now in League 1, a glorified English 3rd Division). They still do, in the closet.

So which is the team of today? It's Manchester. Manchester City. Unlike its tired and debt-ridden neighbour United, City is a gust of fresh air. It's a modern and cosmopolitan football club crawling with new-age, smooth-looking internationals like Hart, Johnson, Tevez, Boateng and Balotelli who will set your pulse racing. (Ok, Tevez does have some rough edges)

If that's not inspiring enough, how about this: Manchester City is now owned by a Muslim moneybags from Abu Dhabi, not 10%, not 50%, but full, 100%. Impatient and ambitious, he's already invested more than 200 million pounds (money, not weight) on new players. You can only guess how much is that money worth in Kelantan Gold Dinar. The Sheikh's noble mission is to break the monotony and stranglehold of the CLAM cartel (Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal, MU), and turn City into something bigger than Barca plus Real. It's a serious and sensible business proposition any day. Instead it's drawn an unprecedented level of envy and anger and expletives. About everyone outside the City of Manchester Stadium and across Europe just wants City to implode and flounder. Including, ironically, that balding, stammering and irritating former and failed City player Steve McMahon. Why is it not right for somebody with the right cashflow to invest bigtime in City when it's OK for the Americans and even the Russian mafia to invest in the CLAM cartel and pile up dead debts? Shah Rukh Khan flaunted all his dirty movie money and star power to buy and fly a cricket team and nobody raised a whimper. Hypocrisy and double standards to the core.

I've no problem with PM's wife falling for Man U. She loves our PM. Not much of a choice there. But you have a choice. If you're caught in the CLAM scam or you just happen to be one of the Brighton lost boys, it's time to move on and get some life. Join the Blue Revolution. Watch Manchester City.

Mindless Miscellany (No.5)

For a reigning retiree, the two-month lull between the World Cup final and EPL ranks among the most stressful of times. Not as bad as the notorious post-natal variety, but it's depressing enough. Nothing seems to move, not even Samy and his MIC. Luckily we have morons, plenty of them, to fill up the void. Like the ubiquitous manholes, they're real and here with us for some reason. (Samy and morons in one line is pure coincidence. Honest):

1. I was stumped recently when my youngest, Sarah, asked me the meaning of 'terkedu'. Yes, it's a valid Malay word. Not Kelantanese or youngish rubbish like kantoi, awek etc. Frankly I wasn't quite sure about the meaning of 'terkedu'. But I could guess by its sound! That's doubly disturbing because Sarah was preparing for UPSR and my Malay had been officially certified as excellent by virtue of my A1 in an exam 40 years ago ( my F9 for Chemistry is irrelevant here). In a weak attempt to appear unruffled, I asked Sarah for the question paper, and there's the question in its full glory. It ran like this:

Question: Ahmad .............bila melihat seorang gadis cantik di hadapannya.
Answer: A. Terkejut B. Terkedu C. Terpegun D.Terbabas.

One look, there's nothing wrong with the question, written by, I guessed, a well-trained lady teacher with at least 20 years' experience. Shaken, I looked again and almost screamed in triumph and sweet revenge. The correct or intended answer was 'terpegun'. Really? Is that a standard reaction or response from a boy (assuming Ahmad is a boy) upon seeing a pretty girl? What if Ahmad was just a five-year old? Or an overrun retiree, like me? Or a ripe 17-year old but with, well, a 'different' lifestyle? The answer might well be none of the above. Or 'terkedu', whatever it means. Or even terbabas !

No insinuation or allusion here. I've nothing against the teaching profession. The teacher is NOT a moron. On the strength of this particular question, she's at least average. My argument is strictly hypothetical. It's not fair to expect the poor teacher to reframe the question by expanding Ahmad with qualifiers like his age, social orientation etc. That would certainly add more confusion for Sarah and probably her mom, too. More information isn't necessarily helpful, especially if you're untrained. My friend and I learned this the hard way when we sat for GMAT about 30 years ago. You've to score a near-perfect GMAT if you're gunning for Harvard, Kellogg or Wharton. In the maths section, the first question began with " x is an integer. What would be the value of x if.............." I skipped and jumped to the next one, again it began with " x is an integer.........". So was the next one. And the next one. Five consecutive questions. Man, I couldn't breathe. I'd heard of odd and even numbers, but integer? It's basic maths but I was completely wrong-footed by this seven-letter fear factor. What? You know integer? I didn't attempt the five integer questions because there's a steep penalty for a wrong guess. I could've easily aced the questions without this little clue about x. The sad, subdued atmosphere on the way back was finally broken when my friend asked me "What's an integer?" ( with ger as in burger!). We laughed out loud the whole week. We didn't go to Harvard. They accept only geniuses and near-geniuses. Not near-morons.

2. A study led by a Harvard economist found that your early childhood education did shape your later life. A tracking of 12000 children (age 30 now) in Tennessee showed that those who 'd learned much more in kindergartens were more likely to go to college and earn more. This is scary. Kindergartens in Malaysia are bad enough as they are. Unlike sugar and flour, kindergartens are largely unregulated and unsubsidized. Annual fees are typically made up of tuition fee (10%), books(10%), stationery fee (5%) and stationary fee (75%, non-refundable). It's not uncommon for a kindergarten in KL to charge a five-year old kid RM5,000 a year. UTM is charging only RM3,000 a year for undergraduate engineering. Apparently the kindergarten owners increase their fees based on their brain waves. Of course you can never get to see the waves because of the brain size. The fees will soon reach moronic proportions once they hear about this little Harvard study !

3. Two recent public appointments have already breached the moronic level. One was the reelection of a former and failed deputy president as a new deputy president of FAM. He 'll be having 'hard times' reporting to the unopposed president, who happens to be his father. Malaysia is currently ranked 142nd by FIFA, just below Burundi. Enough said. The other appointment was equally mindless. Two hyperactive local movie producers were appointed to FINAS Board. No rules were broken, claimed an (quite rightly) unnamed official. The players now are regulating themselves and fellow players. This must be good-governance's finest hour. What do we get next? Ah Longs on Bank Negara Board?