Happy Meal

I notice that kids are always smiling in McD, but the parents have a grumpy look.. why is it like that?

According to the law of conservation of happiness, the total happiness in a system is constant.

Exam mentality

Senthil said

Back home, the mentality is very different. The attitude is, if it is not going to help you in your grades, don't bother wasting your time.

Awhile ago when I was surfing around a Malaysian forum, a student asked

"My teacher said understanding theory is more important than practicing problems in SPM physics, do you guys agree?"

You can almost infer that the students doesn't agree with his teacher.

It's true that doing sums help you a lot in exams. But saying that it's more important than theory is like saying that scoring exams is all that matter.

I still feel though that there's nothing wrong with this. It's just sad. Not wrong.

How to create an Olympic logo

Adopted by the 2012 London Olympics




at least the idea was not from the blood splatter of an execution.

Please don't leave me...

For some reason, I feel that the reason many people plea with their partners not to break up is analogous to why many people don't want to lose their jobs.

It's not like if they're very loyal to their companies, but they just don't like the idea of losing their jobs and the insecurity that pervades. In short, people may not love their jobs a lot, and they would still prefer to stick to them just because they don't want to be in the jobless transition.

They know the transition state may be a long one. Although their partners may not be where their affinities are, they are probably thinking that the status-quo is better than the partner-less transition if they break up in the hope for something better. It is just like the job market.

I may be wrong though, or maybe I'm just half right.

Sometime ago, I have someone who told me that when the money's right, you'll love the job. I can already see parallels of this in the dating/relationship scene. Can you?

Girls Made to Strip Naked for Opening Ceremony Selection

From the Epoch Times.

According, to state-run media, at the opening ceremony girls such as those depicted here, who participated in a programme called “smiling faces,” had to strip naked to get measured in order to get the job. The report notes that after their 6-month training, they were featured in the ceremony for three minutes. (Oliver Morin/AFP/Getty Images)

Can't do away with racial affirmative action in Malaysia yet

I think everyone is underestimating the problem in Malaysia, no I'm not taking about the ailing economy.

In the first place, we don't know how many people supports the racial affirmative action. We can't just suggest that the government scrap these kinds of policies. How many would be unhappy?

In South Korea for example, the new president wants to lift the ban on US beef in an effort to deregulate the economy, promoting freer markets (especially for the US-Korea FTA) and moving the nation towards being an advanced economy. Free markets, like meritocracy, are supposed to be more efficient, they keep the best and trash the bad. Free markets however isn't desired by Koreans who prefer to protect their own livestock industry. I assume that the health concerns are only overplayed as it has been 5 years since the outbreak of mad-cow disease.

This is the way things are in a democracy. The majority dictates what is right, it doesn't matter what is best. It's just what democracy is all about. I'm not saying that most Malaysians are like that, I'm not sure myself. Just noting that we don't know if they are or are not like that. We can't just expect racial affirmative action to go away. Not yet.

I have a feeling that a lot of Malays voted for PR not wanting to drop racial affirmative action. They just did that because they're unhappy with BN. We're all not sure and it's a bit far fetched to assume that their support for PR is proof of their support to end the NEP. Why did Lim Guan Eng became defensive when he was quoted for opposing the NEP? He probably got calls from PKR leaders telling him it's not politically good.

People who voted for BN is the same thing. They may feel that preserving the bumiputra status-quo as more important than ending corruption. Evidently there's still a lot of such voters. No they're not stupid, they just have different priorities than us.

There's just so many things that are good, but we can't do them because we are a democracy. Sometimes the majority supports something that isn't supposedly the best choice (I actually believe dropping fuel subsidies is better for the nation, a lot of economists point this as an economically sound choice, but Malaysians don't share my sentiment and the government is now pressured to reinstate it). The majority has a larger voice than you, I'm sorry.

People power may not always yield the best results for the nation.
But in a democracy, it is right.

What foreigners think about Malaysians

Heh, these are 'badddd' remarks, but if they're not I won't be posting them here anyway.

Number 1: Malaysians, the average Joe on the street, is a great person but that's the experience I've had all over the planet.

Number 2: What you've allowed the government and their rich cronies to do to your country is a shame. The NEP is a national embarrassment.

Number 3: My personal frank opinion is that they are not too friendly as they claim, honestly and are just too cold. yet again they don't get jokes. I love the country though.

Female promoters in Maxis Tower

Maybe they had this for quite some time already, but I've just noticed that they had A LOT of female promoters in the customer service center in Maxis Tower next to the Petronas Twin Towers. No, I'm not talking about counter staff. They are all just standing around. 2 of them are stationed to the left and right of the entrance to say "welcome" and "thank you" to customers.

It seems like its so easier to get a job if you're female than male. The above is 1 example. Promoters are mostly female. A lot of jobs don't have women but (most at least) is really because women don't want those jobs. Jobs like taxi, bus and truck drivers, and window cleaners (of high-rises); you rarely see women and it's really because women themselves don't want these jobs. I myself have not seen a women bus/truck/taxi driver in my whole life in Malaysia.

And then you can't help but wonder; considering that the amount of men and women mobile subscribers are almost equal, shouldn't they put an equal of amount of male promoters to female promoters? I got no idea if men do really get more easily aroused than women (and I doubt I'll ever do for the rest of my life), but I do know that such has been so established, socially..

Assuming that's indeed correct, then the reason why there's always an abundance of sexy female promoters around, and a lack of sexy male promoters; is because males are more sexually inclined than females.

As a male, I find this pretty unfair. Hmmm...

Dr Mahathir's Insensitivity and Hypocrisy

From Che Det

1. Non-Malays and maybe quite a few Malays have strongly criticised my piece on the Bar Council. I am made out to be against free speech, human rights etc.

2. What I was talking was about sensitivity - about the need for people to be sensitive to the feelings of other people. It was not about Islam or its teachings or its history per se. It is about the Malays and the non-Malays in this multiracial, multi religious country and their sensitivities.

Funny. He must have forgotten about his sensitivity to sensitivities when he wrote the book 'The Malay Dilemma' and spoke about Malay rights.
You can catch an example of such of his blog posting here.

20. If what we want is to be able to provoke people as a matter of right more than our own well-being and that of fellow citizens then be insensitive and have open debates by selected people whose views are already known, who are insensitive to the sensitivities of others but are very sensitive about their rights to be insensitive, whatever the cost to others and the country.

I wonder then why UMNO members have to speak about Malay rights and about Malay supremacy. Aren't these opinions already known? And insensitive?

Constitution = some law of nature thing

Today as I sat in a college canteen moments before a Malaysian Studies exam, I overheard this conversation:

Girl: What's a constitution?
Boy: Some law of nature thing.
(got no idea if he meant it back as a question)

In case you really don't know what's a constitution Wikipedia has the answer.

Sarong Party Girl

From the Sarong Party Girl:

I’ve no idea how to deal with the opposite sex without exerting my physical desirability, and it is difficult for me to do so without. I wouldn’t come on to them of course, wanting sex and using the prospect of sex is two very different things. In the former you’re the prey and in the latter, you’re the predator. But I can’t help but cock tease. I don’t think there’s anything we can do about the way we behave around the opposite gender, the only thing stopping other girls from doing it too is a lack of self-confidence or vague notions of what is and isn’t socially acceptable.

Very old entry. The blog is no longer maintained.

Beijing's poor air quality

From here.


Consensus has that reducing pollution is averse to the economy at least in the short-run. Consensus also has that George W. Bush and other similar leaders like his Chinese counterparts are bad because they are non-committal to fight pollution.

But really, is it the faults of these governments? What if the peoples of these nations willingly would forgo their health for more material wealth?

Should governments then be their moral/rational guardians? Malaysians don't think so. "We want cheap oil. We want subsidies. Screw sustainability. Screw the future. We want more wealth now."

Power of non-violence

Dr. Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and founder of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Non-violence, in his June 9 lecture at the University of Puerto Rico, shared the following story as an example of "non-violence in parenting":

I was 16 years old and living with my parents at the institute my grandfather had founded 18 miles outside of Durban, South Africa, in the middle of the sugar plantations. We were deep in the country and had no neighbors, so my two sisters and I would always look forward to going to town to visit friends or go to the movies.

One day, my father asked me to drive him to town for an all-day conference, and I jumped at the chance. Since I was going to town, my mother gave me a list of groceries she needed and, since I had all day in town, my father asked me to take care of several pending chores, such as getting the car serviced.

When I dropped my father off that morning, he said, "I will meet you here at 5:00 p.m., and we will go home together." After hurriedly completing my chores, I went straight to the nearest movie theater. I got so engrossed in a John Wayne double-feature that I forgot the time.

It was 5:30pm before I remembered. By the time I ran to the garage and got the car and hurried to where my father was waiting for me, it was almost 6:00pm.

He anxiously asked me, "Why were you late?" I was so ashamed of telling him I was watching a John Wayne western movie that I said, "The car wasn't ready, so I had to wait," not realizing that he had already called the garage.

When he caught me in the lie, he said: "There's something wrong in the way I brought you up that didn't give you the confidence to tell me the truth. In order to figure out where I went wrong with you, I'm going to walk home 18 miles and think about it."

So, dressed in his suit and dress shoes, he began to walk home in the dark on mostly unpaved, unlit roads. I couldn't leave him, so for five-and-a-half hours I drove behind him, watching my father go through this agony for a stupid lie that I uttered. I decided then and there that I was never going to lie again.

I often think about that episode and wonder, if he had punished me the way we punish our children, whether I would have learned a lesson at all. I don't think so. I would have suffered the punishment and gone on doing the same thing. But this single non-violent action was so powerful that it is still as if it happened yesterday. That is the power of non-violence.