This. Not so much surprising as it is just eye-rollingly backward. I'd even venture to use a big word like "anachronistic" just to show off, except that, well, when we see so many decisions similar to this with regards to Islam and Malaysian women, that word just doesn't quite fit anymore, does it?
The Syariah High Court here ordered Manohara Odelio Pinot to be loyal and pay back RM1,112,250 owed to her husband, Tengku Muhammad Fakhry Sultan Ismail Petra, the Tengku Temenggong of Kelantan.
"The plaintiff was a perfect husband and the question of torture does not arise. As such, the defendant has no reason to act in such a manner," he said.
Missing from the judgment is an expectation that the wife get dinner ready by the time the husband gets back from a hard day's work of being royalty. Also:
Asked whether he was hopeful that Manohara would be loyal to him, Tengku Muhammad Fakhry replied; "Certainly".
So I accidentally locked myself out of my room this morning. No problem, I thought as I took the elevator down to the lobby. I'll just show them some ID and they'll get me a new key. But previous experiences here started making me a little dubious about how smoothly it would really go. How much of a fuss would they put up to make sure that I'm who I'm saying I am and that I wasn't trying to sneak into someone else's room?
"Hi, I'm from Room ***, I locked myself out."
"No problem, here you go."
Now I'm not entirely sure if I should be pleased with the quick, painless service, or worried that the front desk just gave me a hotel room key without checking to find out who I was. I suppose they could have seen me around before, but still!
Okay, maybe I'm complaining way too much. But next time, I'm not leaving my 20-carat diamond collection behind anymore.
It is seven minutes to 10pm. I had gotten back from work less than an hour ago. Okay, had dinner with some co-workers, but still. Was tired, a little fried, very much looking forward to a nice hot shower. I mean, missing cup noodles aside, surely the hotel couldn't screw that up, right?
I opened the bathroom door and found myself staring at an empty towel rack.
Guys, at some point you've got to at least pretend to try, you know?
It's 12.39am and I'm tired and I have work in the morning, but I don't wanna sleep. Outside my window hundreds of cars are zipping back and forth in the Federal Highway. I see skyscrapers in the distance, their lights still turned on. There's another life happening right this very minute while everyone else is sleeping. I want to reach out and touch it, let myself get sucked into that other world.
But it's 12.43am and I'm still here typing/rambling away, with nothing but cold Kenny Rogers leftovers, a glass of Coke and hot instant cup noodles to keep me company, The Killers blaring in the background. I'm tired and vaguely annoyed but not sure at what and that's annoying me even more.
12.46am. It's almost like I'm waiting/expecting/hoping something to change, but all that's happening are my fingers tapping away on elegantly-designed Vaio keyboards and Brandon Flowers screaming away. I'm getting more and more annoyed, and I don't know why.
"I don't wanna be kept, I don't wanna be caged, I don't wanna be damned, oh hell"
It is 12.50am. I'm still in the same exact position I was 11 minutes ago. Everything's the same, and nothing's changed.
Ahh, KL. Back here for more work stuff; we've set production time for our magazine at two weeks, and hopefully we can cut it to one by the next ish.
I can actually see myself living here. I never thought of myself as a KL person, but there seems to be so much more life here. Penang is so blek these days, with highrises popping up at the least appropriate places. At least you expect highrises in KL. The people I work with are smart and friendly, and traveling around the city is so much easier with a GPS it almost feels like cheating. Though one time I followed the GPS's route from Tropicana to Solaris Mont Kiara, and I found myself in the North-South Highway, looking at a helpful signboard telling me which direction Sungai Buloh was.
Cons of permanently moving to KL (if that ever happens, which hardly seems likely at this stage) is of course leaving friends and family behind. Yeah, you can make new friends, but starting over from scratch has never been easy, at least for me, and I'm pretty shit at meeting new people. Which... would pretty much be the same scenario if I ever move back to Melbourne, come to think of it. Goddamnit.
Pros of temporarily working in KL: Company puts you up in a hotel, albeit a cheap one, and you're working more or less unsupervised, not in a dusty cubicle all day while dealing with endless meetings and office politics. There's a bit more pressure with that lack of supervision, but it's also very freeing.
Cons: the hotel I'm staying at is THE WORST GODDAMN HOTEL IN KL. I mean, there are at least two lamps that aren't working due to power socket failure, a front desk and room service centre that take forever to pick up the damn phone, and housekeeping is, arggh. I'm still too pissed off to be coherent. I found one of my brand new books a little mashed. Oh, and one day I bought some instant cup noodles for supper, left them in the hotel in a plastic bag by the corner, and when I came back later that night from work THEY WERE GONE.
Motherfucker. I have half a mind to fill in their customer review questionnaire. You know, the one that they'll just ignore in the end.
Had dinner with Zai and his wife Ulfah last week. I think it was the first time I'd seen them in person since... shit, their wedding a couple of years ago. Their daughter was born around this time last year. They looked like they hadn't slept in years. Suckers. Kidding, lovely people.
Daniel watched 2012 with his mom last night. He took MC from work today.
Was it that bad?
Well, I had extremely low expectations to begin with, so I ended up being reasonably entertained. Hey, when a movie promises to blow up the world and delivers exactly that, you can't be too mad at it, can you?
It's a Roland Emmerich film; you know what to expect by this point. (And what you expect not to see are subtlety, moderation and logic.) Shit blows up, in expensive-looking CGI, in increasingly ridiculous ways. (The moment the aircraft carrier scene happened, I wish Danny Glover's character would've said, "I really fucking hate symbolism." You'll understand why when you see it.) Plus, I'm a big fan of Chiwetel Ejiofor ever since he nearly stole the movie from Nathan Fillion's hands in Serenity, and he's pretty much the soul of 2012. (Sorry, John Cusack.) Seriously, if you expected anything, I dunno, substantive out of this movie, you're an idiot. (That criticism doesn't apply to Transformers 2, which is objectively shit, I don't care how much money it's made.)
In particular, the allegations cast a shadow on the prediction in the last World Economic Outlook, believed to be repeated again this year, that oil production can be raised from its present level of 83 million barrels a day to 105 million.
External critics have frequently said this cannot be substantiated by firm evidence and that the world has already passed its peak in oil production. Now the ''peak oil'' theory is gaining support at the heart of the global energy establishment.
''The IEA in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as high as 120 million barrels a day by 2030, although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116 million and then 105 million last year,'' said the IEA source, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals inside the industry.
''The 120 million figure always was nonsense but even today's number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.
Malaysia's oil reserves will last for just another 20 years. Worldwide reserves... well, it looks like we can't trust the official figures anymore, if the whistleblower turns out to be right. Solar tech is advancing rapidly, but even then it'll be another 50 years till it gets to the point where it can start to replace our oil dependence, if not longer.
I've started to revise my previous anti-nuclear stance. It looks like we'llneed nuclear tech after all, if only in the short to medium term, until alternatives prove more viable. The problem with nuclear power plants is that they're too big, too damn expensive and too dangerous. Hundreds of millions to build, an additional hundreds of millions a year to maintain... plus Malaysia doesn't exactly have a good record with maintaining standards. Present nuclear plants are just too heavily entrenched in the Cold War model, and not what we need now. We need a new kind of nuclear power plant, one that's relatively cheaper, causes less havoc on the environment, and less easily weaponised. As hard science fiction writer Charles Stross points out, nuclear technology had the bad luck of being discovered right around the time a major war was brewing.
The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology's biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.
Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.
"We have found the first archaeological evidence of a story reported by the Greek historian Herodotus," Dario Del Bufalo, a member of the expedition from the University of Lecce, told Discovery News.
Okay, so Malaysia's brain drain problem is starting to bite us in the ass. Actually, it's already been bit many, many times over the years, but this might be the first tangible case that'd make people sit up and take notice.
Of annoyance is Gerakan's Wan Sun Keong, who keeps harping on about how Penang produces "6,000 engineering graduates" a year. I don't know if those figures are true, but even if they are, that's not the point. The point is that we're producing 6,000 engineering grads a year, and an MNC took a look at them and said, "Not good enough" and walked away.
Fact: we're losing Malaysians every year. 40 percent of overseas Malaysians are in Singapore, including a couple of MPs. Opportunities to grow are extremely hard to come by, and there's way too much red tape that gets in the way. Sheena can regale you guys numerous horror stories about trying to make it as a doctor in Malaysia. (But only when you buy her a drink.)
Plus that engineering thing? Malaysia has one of the, if not the lowest number of patents produced in the region. You know why? We don't have people to do the R&D work, but even when we do, the patents go overseas. Why? Red tape. Do you know how long it takes for a patent to get approved in Singapore? One year. Do you know how long it takes for a patent to get approved in Malaysia?
Three years.
The tax structure thing the article floats at the end isn't going to cut it, not on its own. There are much deeper, more fundamental issues involved, most of which involves the fact that Malaysia is a crappy place to grow talent.
I usually don't bother addressing comments made on old posts, never mind posts from almost two years ago, since they're usually critical and insulting at a time when no one else would be reading them and be ready to call on their bullshit. But this is just too precious to pass up. If you didn't click on the link, the post in question was referring to a case in Saudi Arabia where a woman who was gang-raped was sentenced to be lashed repeatedly.
Two years after I made that post, I got this comment from Anonymous:
ok lesson i dont know whats your problem with saudi arabia but lesson have you ever wonderd why saudi womens wear that black and we call it (abbaya) we wear it to protect our selves cause our women is like i dimond not a segret we are protected we are not a segret any one can smoke and when he finesh he throw her and thats ok for you selling womens having money for sex we have a degnty and if i give you two kind of choclaits one of them is clean and covered and the other is open and dirty tell me wich one you will gonna choose iam pretty shore you will choose the clean and covered one and stop talking about freedom cause this is our freedom we choose it and thats what we want cause we feel save and btw iam from saudi arabia and iam proud to be saudi
I like that he goes on a bizarre rant that is only tangentially related to the topic in question. I love how he inexplicably compares women to cigarettes and chocolates. I love that he talks about how much he's proud to be a Saudi, but after spending all that time writing this comment, never actually talks about the woman who was sentenced to be punished for being raped.
Most of all, I love that he never uses a full stop, not even once. Please, read that again and bask in its glorious brilliance.
I will likely have more to say about my weekend in Langkawi (short answer: WOOOO!!), but I will say this: whenever people talk about parasailing, no one ever, ever, mentions the fact that it has the curious side effect of crushing your balls.
