Piercings

When they say it hurts, well, they are partially correct – it is not that bad!

Further extending my 'week of firsts' I decide it's time to get piercings. I book myself in for 4 piercings - 2 lobes and 2 nipples at Commercial Rd. How do you prepare for these things? Google is your friend...

...and Youtube is not. Seven videos of people getting their nipples mutilated and I'm running for the door. Piercing artists HAVE to be sadists. Jabbing a bloke in their areolas then squeezing a bar through the hole is just cruel.

A quick chat with a msn buddy/doctor is just asking for trouble. Keloids, he says. Internal scar tissue that will perk my nipples up (is that necessarily a bad thing?). And a whole lecture about infections and swelling and the etc. Doctors can be so technical.

I spend another week toying with the idea before I decide it is best to skip the nipple piercings (for now) and just do the lobes (afterwards I hear myself say the word 'coward' a million times).

Inking followed by two sharp pricks and it's all over. Yada yada yada about the salt solution etc, I just wanted to get out of there, away from the sterile surrounds and the people in the waiting room.

Bling bling. Nana at the tram stop shows me her gold teeth. She must have noticed my sparklies.

Nice.

E

A week of firsts. I'm bored with being conservative, suppressed and indecisive.

2 minute walk from my apartment. Too easy. Straight pub where the locals hang out for a pot of beer. And yet past the cheap aluminum chairs, beer stained carpets, vinegary Sauv Blanc and locals in daggy shirts, they have the best paellas ever.

You can't say no to a good paella. Crabs, calamari, fish fillets, shellfish on a bed of rice and garlic with dustings of saffron, onions, tomatoes and fresh lemon slices. The rule is never to use the crab crackers - teeth will suffice. And fingers.

Rancid oil on my $99 polo. Yellow saffron seafood stench on your fingers. Washing is futile. But omg my tummy. How do you say no to a third, fourth, fifth serve?

Dxnixl is less sympathetic. He says I'm anorexic and therefore should eat more. My expanding waistline disagrees.

~

How much for a pill? I don't know these things. But a halfie later and I still feel nothing. Dxnixl reckons another halfie - omg sharing cubicles to pop vitamins is just not cool. The Market is full of str8 women and the men who love them, also many Asians? I can't make out why there are people wearing suits and ties when everyone else is half naked on the dancefloor.

Smoke. Bad music. Body odour. Pills are meant to take those things away, not enhance them! A few cute boys on the dance floor look at me and we exchange glances. I’ve forgotten that feeling for a while now.

4.27am. "I'm PEEEAAAAAKKKINGGGG!!!!", I say to Dxnixl. My first pill ever. A boy finally grows up.

Ida Corr Vs Fedde le Grand. My limbs have gone totally spastic. Dxnixl is loving it too; he sits in a dark corner watching me closely while I'm up on the podium, smelling faintly of calamari, shirt off and jeans hanging off my butt, 'grabbing' laser beams and swinging to the beat. This is alcohol x 100000

Fucking hell.

~

6.40am. Dxnixl left an hour ago and the effect is waning. I can't walk so I stumble into a blond boy with too much deodorant. Splitting headache. Some random offers me free drinks while we sit in one of the couches for hugs. Four cokes later and he wants me at his place? Bitch.

First tram at 7.34am. How the fuck do I know these things? Fumbling with my phone I manage a call to dxnixl. He's just hopped into bed, waiting for me to come home.

UMNO - U Make Noise Only (lah)

Oh why not. Election year anyway.

These are statistics from Uncyclopedia, also quoted by Raja Petra Raja Kamaruddin in Malaysia Today. Only the Malays in power, and anyone pro-BN will dispute its legitimacy.

(1) Of the five major banks, only one is multi-racial, the rest are controlled by Malays.

(2) 99% of Petronas directors are Malays.

(3) 3% of Petronas employees are Chinese.

(4) 99% of 2000 Petronas gasoline stations are owned by Malays.

(5) 100% all contractors working under Petronas projects must be of Bumis status.

(6) 0% of non-Malay staff are legally required in Malay companies. But there must be 30% Malay staffs in Chinese companies.

(7) 5% of all new intake for government police, nurses, army, are non-Malays.

(8) 2% is the present Chinese staff in Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF), a drop from 40% in 1960.

(9) 2% is the percentage of non-Malay government servants in Putrajaya, but Malays make up 98%.

(10) 7% is the percentage of Chinese government servants in the entire government (in 2004); a drop from 30% in 1960.

(11) 95% of government contracts are given to Malays.

(12) 100% all business licensees are controlled by Malay government, e.g. Taxi permits, Approved permits, etc.

(13) 80% of the Chinese rice millers in Kedah had to be sold to Malay controlled Bernas in 1980s. Otherwise, life is made difficult for Chinese rice millers.

(14) 100 big companies set up, owned and managed by Chinese Malaysians were taken over by government, and later managed by Malays since 1970s, e.g. UTC, UMBC, MISC, etc.

(15) At least 10 Chinese owned bus companies (throughout Malaysia in the past 40 years) had to be sold to MARA or other Malay transport companies due to rejection by Malay authorities to Chinese applications for bus routes and rejection for their applications for new buses.

(16) Two Chinese taxi drivers were barred from driving in Johor Larkin bus station. There are about 30 taxi drivers and three were Chinese in Oct. 2004. Spoiling taxi club properties was the reason given.

(17) 0 non-Malays are allowed to get shop lots in the new Muar bus station (Nov. 2004).

(18) 8000 billion ringgit is the total amount the government channeled to Malay pockets through ASB, ASN, MARA, privatization of government agencies, Tabung Haji etc, through NEP over a 34 years period.

(19) 48 Chinese primary schools closed down from 1968 - 2000.

(20) 144 Indian primary schools closed down from 1968 - 2000.

(21) 2637 Malay primary schools built from 1968 - 2000.

(22) 2.5% is government budget for Chinese primary schools. Indian schools got only 1%, Malay schools got 96.5%.

(23) While a Chinese parent with RM1000 salary (monthly) cannot get school textbook loan, a Malay parent with RM2000 salary is eligible.

(24) All 10 public university vice chancellors are Malays.

(25) 5% of the government universities’ lecturers are of non-Malay origins. This percentage has been reduced from about 70% in 1965 to only 5% in 2004.

(26) Only 5% has been given to non-Malays for government scholarships in over 40 years.

(27) 0 Chinese or Indians were sent to Japan and Korea under the “Look East Policy.”

(28) 128 STPM Chinese top students could not get into the course to which they aspired, i.e. Medicine (in 2004).

(29) 10% quotas are in place for non-Bumi students for MARA science schools beginning in 2003, but only 7% are filled. Before that it was 100% Malays.

(30) 50 cases in which Chinese and Indian Malaysians are beaten up in the National Service program in 2003.

(31) 25% of the Malaysian population was Chinese in 2004, a drop from 45% in 1957.

(32) 7% of the Malaysian population is Indian (2004), a drop from 12% in 1957.

(33) 2 million Chinese Malaysians have emigrated in the past 40 years.

(34) 0.5 million Indian Malaysians have emigrated overseas.

(35) 3 millions Indonesians have migrated to Malaysia and become Malaysian citizens with Bumis status.

(36) 600,000 Chinese and Indian Malaysians with red IC were rejected repeatedly when applying for citizenship in the past 40 years. Perhaps 60% of them had already passed away due to old age. This shows racism, based on how easily Indonesians got their citizenships compared with the Chinese and Indians.

(37) 5% - 15% discount for a Malay to buy a house, regardless whether the Malay is rich or poor.

(38) 2% is what new Chinese villages get, compared with 98% - what Malay villages got for rural development budget.

(39) 50 road names (at least) had been changed from Chinese names to other names.

(40) 1 Dewan Gan Boon Leong (in Malacca) was altered to another name (e.g. Dewan Serbaguna or something like that) when it was only officially used for a few days. The government tries to shun Chinese names. This example of racism occurred around 2000.

(41) 0 temples/churches were built for each housing estate. But every housing estate got at least one mosque/surau built.

(42) 3000 mosques/surau were built in all housing estates throughout Malaysia since 1970. No temples or churches are required to be built in housing estates.

(43) 1 Catholic church in Shah Alam took 20 years to apply to have a building constructed. But they were told by Malay authority that it must look like a factory and not like a church. As of 2004 the application still have not been approved.

(44) 1 publishing of Bible in Iban language banned (in 2002).

(45) 0 of the government TV stations (RTM1, RTM2, TV3) are directors of non-Malay origin.

(46) 30 government produced TV dramas and films always showed that the bad guys had Chinese faces, and the good guys had Malay faces. You can check it out since 1970s. Recent years, this has become less of a tendency.

(47) 10 times, at least, Malays (especially Umno) had threatened to massacre the Chinese Malaysians using May 13, since 1969.

(48) 20 constituencies won by DAP would not get funds from the government to develop. These Chinese majority constituencies would be the last to be developed.

(49) 100 constituencies (parliaments and states) had been racially re-delineated so Chinese votes were diluted for Chinese candidates. This is one of the main reasons why DAP candidates have consistently lost in elections since the 1970s.

(50) Only 3 out of 12 human rights items are ratified by the Malaysian government since 1960.

(51) 0 - elimination of all forms of racial discrimination (UN Human Rights) has not been ratified by Malaysian government since 1960s.

(52) 20 reported cases whereby Malay ambulance attendances treated Chinese patients inhumanely, and Malay government hospital staffs purposely delayed attending to Chinese patients in 2003. Unreported cases may be 200.

(53) 50 cases each year whereby Chinese, especially Chinese youths, are being beaten up by Malay youths in public places. Police reports may be checked to verify this, provided the police took the report, otherwise there will be no record.

(54) 20 cases every year whereby Chinese drivers who accidentally knocked down Malays were seriously assaulted or killed by Malays.

(55) 12% is what ASB/ASN got per annum while banks fixed deposits are only about 3.5% per annum.


The rest can be read here.


Source: Uncyclopedia.

Ditto

Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: February 14, 2008

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”

Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” up a wall. Ms. Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture.

Joining the circle of curmudgeons this season is Eric G. Wilson, whose “Against Happiness” warns that the “American obsession with happiness” could “well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation.”

Then there is Lee Siegel’s “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob,” which inveighs against the Internet for encouraging solipsism, debased discourse and arrant commercialization. Mr. Siegel, one might remember, was suspended by The New Republic for using a fake online persona in order to trash critics of his blog (“you couldn’t tie Siegel’s shoelaces”) and to praise himself (“brave, brilliant”).

Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn’t zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge. She is well aware that some may tag her a crank. “I expect to get bashed,” said Ms. Jacoby, 62, either as an older person who upbraids the young for plummeting standards and values, or as a secularist whose defense of scientific rationalism is a way to disparage religion.

Ms. Jacoby, however, is quick to point out that her indictment is not limited by age or ideology. Yes, she knows that eggheads, nerds, bookworms, longhairs, pointy heads, highbrows and know-it-alls have been mocked and dismissed throughout American history. And liberal and conservative writers, from Richard Hofstadter to Allan Bloom, have regularly analyzed the phenomenon and offered advice.

T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly review Raritan, said, “The tendency to this sort of lamentation is perennial in American history,” adding that in periods “when political problems seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is a turn toward cultural issues.”

But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.

She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map.

Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library’s majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”

Ms. Jacoby doesn’t expect to revolutionize the nation’s educational system or cause millions of Americans to switch off “American Idol” and pick up Schopenhauer. But she would like to start a conversation about why the United States seems particularly vulnerable to such a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism. After all, “the empire of infotainment doesn’t stop at the American border,” she said, yet students in many other countries consistently outperform American students in science, math and reading on comparative tests.

In part, she lays the blame on a failing educational system. “Although people are going to school more and more years, there’s no evidence that they know more,” she said.

Ms. Jacoby also blames religious fundamentalism’s antipathy toward science, as she grieves over surveys that show that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism to be taught along with evolution.

Ms. Jacoby doesn’t leave liberals out of her analysis, mentioning the New Left’s attacks on universities in the 1960s, the decision to consign African-American and women’s studies to an “academic ghetto” instead of integrating them into the core curriculum, ponderous musings on rock music and pop culture courses on everything from sitcoms to fat that trivialize college-level learning.

Avoiding the liberal or conservative label in this particular argument, she prefers to call herself a “cultural conservationist.”

For all her scholarly interests, though, Ms. Jacoby said she recognized just how hard it is to tune out the 24/7 entertainment culture. A few years ago she participated in the annual campaign to turn off the television for a week. “I was stunned at how difficult it was for me,” she said.

The surprise at her own dependency on electronic and visual media made her realize just how pervasive the culture of distraction is and how susceptible everyone is — even curmudgeons.


Source: The New York Times

Badawi?

How can I not be ashamed that he is my Prime Minister? Apparently, he cannot answer questions directed to him.



In the UMNO General Assembly, his most famous quote was "SAYA PANTANG DICABAR". Yet in this video he looks like a headless chicken struggling in the Swiss Alps.

Kenapa oh Badawi kenapa? Cabaran sekecil ini terlalu besar bagimu? HAHAHAHAHAH!

God save our country.

VOTE THE OPPOSITION.

Stereotype

Fridae has been kind to offer a free week of Perks. So its like, chatting online has taken a new meaning now that my postcode is 3011. Apparently, the suburb I live in makes me who I am, not the other way around.

Also cultural stereotypes. The perception is that we Asian people are restricted to clichéd hobbies - shopping, drinking alcohol, wearing eyeliner and Gucci, gambling, clubbing, shoes. Behaviours that include accepting without question, distinguishable accents, lack of speech, insecurity, awkward hand gestures.

These people are obsessed with being 'straight-acting' whatever that means. They've internalised the 'fragile Asian boy' model for self-empowerment - masculinity, it seems, is dictated by the 'manly' things you do, and an Asian boy can never be 'manly'.

They can't accept me because I enjoy servicing motorbikes, working in the garden, playing sports, fixing taps, or Bunnings on the weekend.