The Most Exciting Christmas Night Ever

Kelvyn Yeang, Kah Hock and myself enjoying Christmas the traditional way: with beer, oolong tea and instant noodles by the beach in Penang at three in the morning. (Photo by "Big Head" Huat.)

Happy Christmas y'all.

How Lord of the Rings Should Have Ended

(Via.)

Things I'd like to see in our education system but hasn't a chance in hell of happening

Optional atheism/humanism classes:

Victorian state primary school students will soon have an alternative — religious education lessons taught by people who do not believe in God and say there is "no evidence of any supernatural power".

The Humanist Society of Victoria has developed a curriculum, which the State Government accreditation body says it intends to approve, to deliver 30-minute lessons each week of "humanist applied ethics" to primary pupils.

Accredited volunteers will be able to teach their philosophy in the class time designated for religious instruction. As with lessons delivered by faith groups, parents will be able to request that their children do not participate.

Victorian Humanist Society president Stephen Stuart said: "Atheistical parents will be pleased to hear that humanistic courses of ethics will soon be available in some state schools."

I'd probably have a much easier time acing that class than Agama. Just saying.

Crap.

She read the blog.

Preparing for Departure.

I have nothing to do. On a Saturday night. Even considering my usual lack of social life, this is troubling. It is now 9.12pm and I do not know what to do. It will be at least another three hours before I even consider going to bed. All my friends are either on holiday or have emigrated permanently. The only person I have for company is my brother. He does not talk much. Except on World of Warcraft. It has been three years and five months since I last played World of Warcraft, and I'm not going to go down that road again just to have a conversation with my brother. So no.

Theoretically, I should have stuff to do. I leave Melbourne in a couple of days, but I haven't gotten around to packing yet. I only have one luggage and not many clothes to stuff it with. Packing, incidentally, does not have to be a multi-day epic struggle like it is with some people I know. It can be quick and painless, as long as you don't care how your clothes end up when you stuff them inside the luggage. It helps if you don't bother with the ironing bit at all.

Okay, I still have some minor shopping to do, but that's only for the day, not, like, night time and stuff. Fortunately for me, the only shopping I need to do is for friends who have special requests. (I've never even heard of "pralines" till now, and after half a day's search it turns out that I've been pronouncing them wrong.) This, too, is unusual for me as my mother would usually call by now, reeling off a list of things she "needed". Sometimes I would have to purchase a whole luggage in order to find enough room for all her stuff. So she gets to have all the special Melbourne things she wanted, plus a brand new luggage.

The special Melbourne things that she desperately needs, by the way, traditionally include brown sugar, bath towels and chili flakes from the supermarket. Don't ask. I've given up years ago trying to get a rational answer out of her.

Fortunately for me, she seems to have forgotten to call me with her usual list of requests, even though she had promised she would call sometime during the week. To ensure that this situation goes unchanged, I have decided to lay low and cut off communication with my dear mother for the foreseeable future. From now on, my mother and I will no longer speak to each other. At least until I need a ride from the airport.

It is a foolproof plan that I am confident will succeed. So long as she also forgets that I have a blog.

Two things I don't get about Malaysia

1. Why is it that our journalists see that a certain billionaire spending six figures on paintings is such a huge deal... yet they never give us his freakin' name. "Billionaire causes a stir"? THEN TELL US WHO IT WAS, YOU IDIOT.

2. Malaysia's racism towards Africans. I really, really don't get this. I mean, where does it come from? It's not like as if we were ever at war with the entire continent of Africa, or that there's a high urban crime rate involving people from Kenya or something. Hearing the students' accounts is just depressing. What the hell is wrong with Malaysians? Why is it that we can complain about racism towards Chinese or Indians, yet be utter, shameless bigots towards people with darker skin? Heck, my lawyer aunt is happily racist towards them - once telling me that I can date anyone I want except Africans - and sees absolutely nothing wrong with this. What the hell, Malaysia?

This seems a little backwards to me

A 16-year-old girl feels depressed enough that she tries to kill herself. Do we:

a) send her to some kind of psychiatric counselling?
b) investigate her familial/social circles to get to the root of what's causing her suicidal urges?
c) arrest and charge her for attempted suicide?

If you needed more than three seconds to think about that one, you obviously haven't been here long. This is Malaysia we're talking about, a nation that's been punishing victims because it's easier than fighting the cause for decades now. Also, a nation that's being policed by idiots:

The measure is being taken after a spate of suicides and attempted suicides in recent weeks prompted Deputy Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Ismail Omar to tell the New Straits Times that police were considering enforcing the law.

Yes, that'll teach those suicidal kids to make sure they get it right the first time.

Ohhhhh boy

I'm sorry, but I get the giggles every time someone says "Dragonball", especially when they try to say it with gravitas. (Via.)

AWESOME.

This is easily the awesomest news I've read this week:

There is a giant black hole at the centre of our galaxy, a study has confirmed.

German astronomers tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the centre of the Milky Way, using the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

The black hole is four million times heavier than our Sun, according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal.

The researchers from the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany said the black hole was 27,000 light years, or 158 thousand, million, million miles from the Earth.

Why is it awesome? Dude, it's a gigantic black hole in the middle of our galaxy. What part of that sentence is lacking in awesome? That's right, nothing.

Plus learning about shit like this lets us understand how the universe works just a little better. Like how black holes might actually serve a purpose in the natural order of things, by pulling matter around it - matter that, if dense enough, can lead to stars being born.

Holy shit!

Seven years gone by

So this guy, Yazid Sufaat, finally gets released from ISA. Great, finally, another political prisoner is freed. Wait, he's not a political prisoner, he's suspected terrorist. Yikes, I say. Even worse, he's suspected of housing several terrorists that took part in September 11. Double-yikes!

Except that... he was never tried. As far as we know, no further evidence was brought forward against him. Heck, come to think of it, his big, heinous crime that got him seven years detention without trial was that he allegedly housed several now-dead terrorists.

I know Malaysia is rather lax when it comes to minor issues like justice and rule of law, but come on! I'm not saying that the guy isn't an evil Islamofascist terrorist who wants to murder the Western world in its sleep... but we don't even know for sure! That's even more fucked up than ISA-ing someone for their political beliefs. At least you can sort of understand why the government feels compelled to imprison someone handing out protest leaflets on a bicycle.

But we imprisoned Yazid Sufaat because... he let a couple of terrorists chill out at his place for a while. Not because he made bombs or he helped plan 9/11. He just let the ones who did all that kind of work live with him for a while.

Again, I'm not saying that the guy is 100 percent innocent. Maybe he knew what the 9/11 terrorists were planning, maybe he didn't. The point is we don't know. If he did it was never proven. The U.S., a nation that would have a bigger stake in this sort of thing, didn't think he knew anything and let him go. But we decided that he must be dangerous somehow and locked him up for seven years, only to release him because he "had shown remorse and repentance".

For god's sake. In the last seven years I got myself an undergraduate degree, a graduate diploma and a master's degree. That's how easily the government can fuck your life up.

Protecting our youth from the grip of the shuffle dance

I guess can see why PAS would want to ban a harmless-looking street dancing competition.


Terrifying.

Now if PAS Youth does anything remotely constructive other than screaming "BAN!!!" every three weeks then we might start taking them seriously.

You write like a girl

Apparently, there's a 60 percent likelihood that I'm a woman. Which, you know, might explain a few things.

In which it turns out I have quite a bit to say after all

Let's see. I recently got my PR, but I'm still jobless, so I don't feel different. My mom's been telling me to check out Dubai, which is supposedly a big developing thingamajig, except that it's probably going to come crashing down any minute now. Blarghblarghblargh.

I wasn't even planning to come back to Penang for Christmas. For one thing, Christmas means nothing to me, other than an excuse to meet up with friends and... do stuff. For another, the smart thing to do is probably to take the month of December to, you know, find a job or something. Except that one of my oldest friends in the world (knew him since kindergarten) picks now of all time to finally come back to Malaysia after staying in the UK for years, so thanks for the great timing, Huat. Oh well. There'll be jobs next year, right? Right?

I know, I've said this many many times whenever the blog's going through extended non-blogging periods, but the fact is this: Malaysian politics have bored me. I can't even muster the energy to get really pissed off over the latest thing anymore. (Seriously, speaking out against vernacular schools is "sedition" now? Fuck you.) The problem of course is that now I have nothing much to write about. Which is doubly annoying. I seriously think that the last couple of months have killed off my interest in local politics. Shit, for a long while there I was far more emotionally invested in the US elections than anything going on in Malaysia. The only thing I've been writing about lately is how sucky it is not to find anything to blog about.

I'm whining now, aren't I? I'll stop.

Nonetheless, Malaysian politics does seem to be in a bit of a rut. There was a brief moment of excitement and possibility when the general elections came and went earlier in March, and all the craziness surrounding the misuse of the ISA a couple of months back, and of course Anwar Ibrahim's reelection. But now we're locked in a holding pattern. The fact is nothing of consequence is likely to happen in the next few months, not until Najib is officially the PM. And if nothing's happening, there's not much the Opp seemingly can or will fight against. (Incidentally, not that I've had much respect for PKR in the first place, but they've lost what little there was of it when they shamelessly sucked up to the royalty and called for the reinstatement of immunity. I mean, what the hell was that?) This is the status quo, and it will remain so for a while yet.

And even after that, there's no guarantee that things will change for the better or worse. Najib's never struck me as the smartest kid in the class. He doesn't have the goodwill Badawi inherited when he first came into office. He's not the visionary Mahathir was. And he's certainly not the leader Tunku Abdul Rahman was. Seriously: Tunku Abdul Rahman, Tun Abdul Razak, Mahathir, and Najib. Which name look like it belongs? Then again, we already have a precedent with Badawi, and possibly Hussein Onn.

Malaysia's been through some rough periods lately, periods for which Badawi spectacularly failed to rise to the occasion. Things are only likely to get worse, and while I don't see Najib as a "falling asleep at the wheel" kind of person (in Badawi's case, literally), I don't see him as the man we need to pull the country out of this mess either. We need a strong, smart leader with balls to make the necessary changes. I don't see Najib having any of those three attributes.