God bless the child

Title from this song. Ah, a walk down memory lane.

My childhood was rife with epic adventures. Whooshing down mountains on cave rivers, battling the Nazis in a Sopwith Camel, fighting for what is rightfully mine with magic, plotting to regain royal thrones, performing in a circus, solving mysteries with my boyfriend Ned, and much, much more.

No, it's not just because I'm lucky enough that my parents were unsuccessful in curtailing my television viewing, but because of BOOKS.

Beautiful, marvelous, magnificent BOOKS.

Enid Blyton, Carolyn Keene, Captain WE Johns, Rubaidin Siwar, Khadijah Hashim, Othman Puteh, Othman Wok, and many, many more has helped fuel my imagination and vocabulary. I became addicted to reading at a very young age, and the habit remains to this day. It got to a point that I was borrowing a book every day from the school library, and I made no bones about harassing the student librarians to open up the gates to paradise. I can still recall the crisp scent of my primary school library, the hushed hall and the rows upon rows of delicious books. Mmm.

School holidays were highly anticipated for the opportunity to haunt bookstores. Those stores were wonderlands for exploration, racks upon racks of fragrant, bound pages that harboured secrets and knowledge. I think my Mom sighed a breath of relief when we discovered the rental book store that carried books that I would read (I was an age appropriate reader up to a point); the money would go for much longer with rental and would save on storage space.  

However, I find that the section for children's books in Malay these days are terribly disappointing. I posit the evidence below:

Some desultory fairy tales, and ooh. Encyclopaedia stuff. Exciting.*yawn*

Hikayat Derma Taksiah modernised, most of these.

These pictures were taken at Borders in Bangsar Village 2. Notice that the children's books actually occupied only the top one and a half row of a SINGLE RACK. Those are mostly encyclopaedia types and a miserable collection fairy tale fictions. The rest is taken up by religious tracts and sappy, I-like-to-be-emotionally-abused romance novels. I mean, WTF?

How on Earth can we hope to inculcate the reading habit in our children with such a meager selection? How do we encourage them to explore worlds and dig for information and knowledge beyond what can be Googled? When most of the books are directed to the Malay Muslim audience, how do you hope to encourage non Malay children to love the national language when they have nothing engaging to read?

What happened to the writer of children and young adult fictions in Malay? What happened to the translated books? I remember seeing Harry Potter and Twilight in Malay on display in Popular Books but I don't see them any more.

I got to read Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Eyre, Jules Verne and many more English literary works, not in its original form, but beautifully translated and abridged (I did get on to read them in the original version). Most of my Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and Biggleswort adventures were in Malay and what a wonderful discovery it was to read them as they were first published. Those books taught me about life in foreign lands, understanding motivations and reading between the lines, and made me pretty good at comprehension exercises.


The English books selection, on the other hand, is fantastic. You can get up to 6 racks for the young readers and the same number dedicated to young adults. But how do we instill a love in the national language when there's nothing to read in them? Children rarely read newspapers, and most of the Malay magazines for children (except for Dewan Pelajar and Dewan Siswa) appear to be geared only for the Muslim readers. Not to mention that it is darn hard to find Dewan Pelajar and Dewan Siswa in regular bookstores anyway.

Truly, we cannot blame the children for pooh-poohing the national language. Not with this appalling situation.

*shakes fist*

Losing My Religion - And Finding My Faith

Based on the writing prompt: What I Learned from Someone*

Sparked by ear candy

The year was 1991. The American rock band REM released a single that shot them to superstardom, Michael Stipe’s crooning of being left in the spotlight andlosing his religion has emphatically propelled the band out of obscurity. Personally, I preferred the Nina Persson’s version; her sweet, slightly raspy voice lent a different piquancy to the lyrics and melody. Tori Amos, mad musical genius that she is, deconstructed the song and reinterpreted it into something very different.

(more after the break)

Strange fruit

Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday

Southern trees bear a strange fruit, 
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, 
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. 

Pastoral scene of the gallant South, 
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh, 
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck, 
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop, 
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

What could drive people to commit such atrocities on another human being? Is it as simple as us-vs-them propelled by the mob mentality? Quite a number of lynchers in the American south during the segregation era were actually church-going members of the society; they even created memorabilia of the horrifying events. The lynchers of the mentally ill man accused of burning the Quran in Pakistan claimed that they were doing it in the name of Allah. Angry mobs killed African-looking men in Libya in retaliation to atrocities committed by African mercenaries in Ghaddafi's employ. If you are accused of practising witchcraft, don't think that not living in the dark ages or 18th century will save you; people accused of being witches in Africa are still being killed in this modern 21st century.

How does fear and hatred remove your moral brakes so totally that such heinous action can be deemed acceptable?

*contemplates*

Inspired by this article.

Midweek *ahem* & giggles

But ... I love spiders!

Duh. *rolls eyes*

C'mere, sexy!

There are millions of English teachers on the Internet, that's why.

The rest undercut for tak senonoh-ness. Beware that it may affect your Ramadhan performance, hehehe.

Public Service Announcement

Do you have a cell phone? If yes, how do you react when you hit the highway and realised that you have forgotten your phone in the charger cradle? Do you shrug and went on with your journey or do you double back to get your lifeline?

For many, the decision is the latter. The cell phone is no longer a mere accessory, but as vital as your wallet and keys. It contains your correspondence (e-mails, text messages), your confidential information (yes, there are idiots who keep their pin number on the cellphones, not to mention poorly shot nude pictures) and often doubles as work and entertainment system.

In a word: IMPORTANT.

We got so used to being connected that the loss of this connectivity is terrifying. I know many people who check their phones when they first wake up (and not to turn off the alarm) and scroll through e-mails and messages even before brushing their teeth.

Some worry that we are losing our vocabulary with text messages. What could be abbreviated, is, or poorly spelled. The glass half full people would say that our language is evolving with each thumb stroke over the surface of your smartphone. After all, no one speaks like a Shakespearean play anymore (unless they're literature hipsters or something).

But this addiction has more implication to it than surgical interventions to fix repetitive injuries from texting. Most of us text while we drive. I have even seen motorcyclists texting while riding their bike. You know what this means?

It means we're crazy. 

We take it for granted that we can avoid collisions with other objects when our thumbs run over the surface of our smartphones. We are special. We have superpowers that allow us to multitask, right? We are so good at texting and stuff, we don't really need to look at the screen, isn't that so?

Wrong. You won't see the lamp post or the old lady whose hands are filled with her grocery while you are sharing some youtube sensation with your Facebook flist. What you should do is move to the side, finish your text/Facebook update/Twitter rant/road traffic Instagram/whatever, put your phone away and then continue walking or driving. There are even people who got mugged because they are distracted by their phones that they are not paying attention to their surroundings. Heck, my aunt was one such victim. 


So either quit the dangerous self-delusion that you can use your phone while driving or walking or wean yourself from the hyper connectivity of your mobile devices. It may save you not just physical harm, but even fix your relationship with the people in your life.

Just ... just put the damn thing away, will ya?


*facepalm*

Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude \SHOD-n-froy-duh\ , noun:
A malicious satisfaction obtained from the misfortunes of others.

So I share with you pictures that make you go tee hee, albeit guiltily (or not). Because we all have a little evil in us.

  Surely you've felt like doing this before? *titter*

Yes, you should fear for the current generation.

Save on cement, you said ...

Gimme a stiff one ...

How on earth ...

Now where have I put my phone ...

Even serial killers need car detailing. Blood's a bitch to remove.

The real ending to The Avengers.

Just yank 'em down and bend over.

Lesson plans are tough to prep.

Genius unappreciated

An awesome comic paying tribute to the unadulterated genius of Nikola Tesla.

Stolen in entirety from here.

Your tears are all the pay I'll ever need

Sometimes, this is my theme song.



It is the perfect soundtrack to your monster truck - firebomb daydream while you are crawling along to your destination, fantasising about firebombing everyone in front of you and driving your super duper heavy duty monster truck over the smoking wreckage of the other vehicles.

*attempts to zen while stuck in the morning/evening jam*

Honours or honest degree?

I was amazed when I read this. There are students out there who could afford to fork out two grand for someone else to write their thesis? The mind boggles. My experience of student life (undergrad and postgrad) is one of skimping because even if you get a scholarship, it doesn't necessarily cover all your expenses (my uni is located in Kuala Lumpur).

Are we more morally bankrupt than the people before us? Are the changing landscape of professional development and personal growth pushing us to become more dishonest? Are we just lazier than before?

Who knows. It could be any and all or even none of the above. All I know is that being a teacher at tertiary level just got tougher. I mean, you can identify that the student was cheating, but proving it is something else altogether. So you may have to grit your teeth and just pass the kid anyway even though you know well that he/she couldn't use prepositions properly to even save her/his life. The kid whom you know worked hard, built his/her skill sets to write a darn good thesis got no more than the cheating one because you can't prove how the cheater cheated.

How depressing.

Midweek sh*ts & giggles ... early-ish.

Death wish

But not the way you think. Chumbawamba, a band that struck supernova-like stardom for 15 minutes in the 90's thanks to this song, actually released a song that reads the passenger manifest of people whom they would like to see die in a plane crash.



Since Ally McBeal made the cut, I daresay it's a pretty good list.

Midweek sh*ts & giggles - misanthrope edition