Soundtrack of your life ...

Embrace the unsilent voices in your head ...

Theme song is this:



Stress management, let me show you it.

Theme song:

Sometimes, only a small encouragement is necessary.

Theme song:


Ah, the theme of my halcyon days ...

Theme song:



A question for the ages ..

Theme song:


I love sleeping with sharks ... toy sharks, that is ...

Theme song



Have a good weekend, y'all!

I love animals ...

... they are so tasty!

Personally, I'd convert the bunny into satay first, but each to their own.

No, I don't have live animal pets. Why do you ask?

What's it take to be a man?

Apparently it's harder than it looks.



Forget landscaping. It's time to manscape!

However, gentlemen, before you start being depressed about having to look like a Jersey Shore reject, take heart.



Word, sistah.

It's the numbers, baby ...

Universal language which I don't speak or write.

I ♥♥♥ this guy so much.



Have a nice Labour Day everyone!

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*

Self-pimpage

A horrifyingly belated commentary to Whitney Houston's passing can be found here.

Better late than never, right, Pidah?

When you're in prison ...

Let's hope none of us ever had to put on the orange jumpsuit, yeah? Or whatever the local equivalent is.

However, exceptions can be made when your cellmates are this pretty. Maybe.

But what is the likelihood of that? Better to stay on the right side of the law, neh?

Forever yellow skies

I am sure everybody have fond memories of the music of their teenage years. Mine is pretty checkered because I'm a bit of a hipster when it comes to music, even when I was a mega spotty teen. I loathed most of the hit songs when I was 16 but it got better the year I turned 17 when rock music became cool again  thanks to grunge and the second wave of British invasion made its appearance.

When I heard that the Cranberries was going to perform in Kuala Lumpur for their Asia tour, I was totally psyched. The band's albums pretty much provided the soundtrack to various highlights in my life. I fell in love with them thanks to Linger, but the anthemic Zombie was the one that propelled them into rock and roll hall of fame leagues.


The stadium pretty much was shaken to its foundation when this was on.



I think this cements them as a pretty awesome stadium class rock band, don't you think?

Dolores sounds just as good live as she does in the albums; she's not much for audience interaction, but she delighted us all with her trademark hip gyrate, head banging and back-and-forth stiff armed march which was so cute. The rest of the band was equally indefatigable. The fangirls screamed when Fergal Lawler took off his sweat-soaked t-shirt; no surprise since the man is built like a brick shit house. Not bad for a forty-plus dude, eh? I guess bashing the drums do help a man develop his guns (mmm...).

I had teary moments during the first 30 minutes of the concert; it was just unbelievably amazing to be with so many other fans who were also hollering along to the same songs. And just like the Carpenter's song; it truly was  Yesterday Once More.

Eco or echo living?

On Saturday night, everyone was eager to participate in the Earth Hour and plunged themselves into darkness for sixty minutes. Which cannot be too dark what with streetlights and billboards etc. Yes, I am assuming you live in a city or at least the suburbs. It is doubtful anyone who lives in the middle of the jungle bothers very much about Earth Hour.

 See? Not very dark at all.

(Under cut for lengthy rants and a scary video)

Science rocks!

From particle to people

Under cut because of a lot of cool stuff!

The Drama of Childhood

The Mad Song 

by Mr Rogers

What do you do with the mad that you feel?
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world feel oh so wrong
And nothing you seems very right
What do you do?
Do you punch a bag?
Do you pound some clay or some dough?
Do you round up friends for a game of tag?
Or you see how fast you'd go?

It's great to be able to stomp
When you've planted the thing that's wrong
And be able to do something else instead
And think this song
I can stomp when I want to
Can stomp when I wished
Can stomp! stomp! stomp! anytime
And what a good feeling to feel like this
And know that the feeling was really mine
Know that there's something deep inside
That helps us become what we can
For a girl to be someday a lady
And a boy can be someday a man

I had moments of being a very angry child. Don't ask  me why; to this day I couldn't pinpoint the cause. The only thing good about it was I got it out of my system that by the time I was a teenager, I had no angst left. So I never bothered with any teenage rebellion.


I now realise that I lacked the vocabulary to express how I felt even though I read a lot. The books that I devoured was chockful of adventures and fun, but there was barely anything emotional. It would have been nice if I had a frame of reference for my feelings that I could actually understand, and it looked like children who had the opportunity to watch Mr Rogers in his neighbourhood, got this advantage.

Fortunately for me, my mother had an excellent collection of Reader's Digest with sections addressing good emotional and mental health and how to condition yourself to be a socially acceptable human being. Not to say that my family did not show me an excellent example for being a good person, it's just that I'm so thick that the lesson didn't penetrate well until in my 20's. And I'm still a work in progress.

So teach your kids to express themselves in a respectful and positive manner. It is a learned behaviour, just like courtesy.

Or spree killing at their high school.

Sisterhood, yo

It's the International Women's Day today!

 

We made grands strides in less than a century. Women can now vote, get an education (though many places still frown on educating the females), get a job, smash through the glass ceiling and CHOOSE to stay at home and raise their babies (it used to be terpaksa-rela or it-really-ain't-a-choice-sugar). It's good to be a woman in this age because we live longer and are less likely to die in childbirth (unless you live in Afghanistan, Chad or something). And we have more opportunities than our grandmothers and great grandmothers, and all this changes over a mere two generations (barely three weeks if you are a fruit fly), at least for the women in Malaysia.

But we are still crippled by body image issues; trading corsets (yes, in Asia, we wore bengkung) for anorexia, the white ones burn themselves in the sun or in salons, the darker ones peel their skin with harmful chemicals to become fairer. We still earn less than men while working twice as hard, still get stuck with more household chores than our partner (maybe not an issue for lesbian couples, *LOL*), and we are expected to remain a virgin on our wedding nights when the men get approving thumps on their back for being a lothario. Our days off are not necessarily days off like a man would describe it and in fair weather or foul, the expectations on us don't change.

We are still not in control of the decisions to be made on our body. In the US, the Congressional hearing on contraception was a panel of men; so yeah, they know so well about a woman's reality about birth control and abortion *rolls eyes*. Did they not think that supporting the former means reducing the need for the latter? What with global warming and the stress of accommodating the needs of a burgeoning world population, having children in a more judicious manner is only logical.

Our clothes remain a hot topic for everyone, whether one wears too much or too little. Frankly, I believe that a woman has a right to choose whether she wants to wear a bikini or a burqa. Women's clothing has been an issue of contention at political and social level, as though the what we wear is the fabric of the society. Face it: the real major causes of social ills are poverty, lack of access to education and opportunity, lack of respect and empathy to fellow humans (and non-humans) as well as greed.
NOTHING TO DO WITH WHAT WE WEAR OR DON'T WEAR.

A few historians and sociologists remarked that civilisations begin to decline when the society begin to segregate women from the rest of society (reference here and Fatima Mernissi's wonderful books Women and Islam: an Historical and Theological Inquiry as well as Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World).  In an attempt to attain purity, maintain "honour" and satisfy false masculine pride, women are isolated from the rest of society, denied rights of basic citizenship (e.g. their children not given citizenship status if their partner are foreigners) and denigrated as a human being (i.e. when violence against women is condoned by the society).

Women still don't get much respect: we get blamed when we get raped, we are the first to be economically marginalised when the country's financial system experience a meltdown, women's worthiness are still judged  by their youth and looks and in any social crisis, women are among the first and most consistent victims.



Hence, inasmuch as we made leaps and progress towards improving the lot of women in this world, there are still plenty that needs to be fixed. For some society, the progression is remarkable and heartening, for some, social conditioning and culture made change a lot harder. We must never lose faith, ladies, but rather continue to work towards evolving our world to a more just and harmonious place. Not just for women, but for everyone.

Ear candy

I grew up listening to Madonna way back when she was still the Material Girl. Her poppy songs were the anthems of my younger days but I quit listening to her when she went overboard with the auto tune and got too hip hop for my taste. I love her songs in that they are easy to sing along to, even if you don't have a distinguished voice. I've never fancied myself as a Celine Dion and won't attempt her songs at a karaoke, but give me the Madonna 80's and early 90's catalogue and you'll pry the microphone from my cold, dead fingers.

It made me rejoice that Madge appears to be returning to her musical origins in her latest single. Maybe I will want to buy this album after over a decade of turning up my nose at her output.

Drums of war

"We go to war to teach Americans geography."

-- paraphrased from someone or other --

I grew up during the last dregs of the Cold War. Unlike most of my classmates, I watched the news (cos news time is sacrosanct to my Dad) and read the newspaper (I ran out of fun things to read), so I had an idea on how the West and Eastern bloc have a hard-on for each other. Hollywood's depiction of bumbling Communist spies also fed this idea. It was only while I was watching a Bruce Willis movie featuring the cold-eyed Eastern European baddie that it made me wonder: how do the filmmakers in the Communist Bloc feature Western spies?

I was 12 when the Berlin Wall came down. It was a severe buzzkill when you go to school telling people about this awesome event and most of them don't even know what is the Communist Bloc.

*head desk*

For a while the world was giddy with the thought of real world peace. It shouldn't be an impossibility, right? Now that everyone are friends and democratic-like. But we forget greed and human ambition has a way of changing the best laid plans. Yugoslavia imploded thanks to historical resentments and ethnic disputes. The states in the former Soviet Union began demanding autonomy and re-drawing of the borders; now we hear of exotic locales like Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan and the knowledge that there is another Georgia outside of the US of A. Warring factions in Africa never really stopped killing one another and the unfortunate civilians who occupy their disputed lands. The Dark Continent feeds our need for the minerals that adorn ourselves and run our electronics; turmoil ensures that the supply flow never ceased at a price that we can('t) afford.

In other words, business as usual.

September 11, 2001 changed the game plan yet again. The West have a new boogeyman and it is the Muslims who are out to destroy them cos the Muslims "hate their freedom" (paraphrasing George W here). Which ever theory subscribe, even those who say that the attack was a conspiracy by the Americans themselves to expand their strategic influence, there is no denying that the world is no longer the same as when the WTC was upright in Manhattan.

Iraq and Afghanistan was invaded in the name of rooting out the nasty Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organisations that are out to get the West. Hundreds and thousands of civilians are dead, maimed and displaced in the name of American freedom. As bad as things were under Saddam Hussein's regime, I wonder if the Iraqis would trade him for life under the Americans. It is nice that the American troops are withdrawing, but after near everything that made life bearable (like water treatment system, sewage management and electric plants) was reduced to a rubble by uranium-depleted shells, with nothing but a shaky government that has yet to show real ability to unite the people and move the country towards positive development and progress, I wonder if it is any different than the US abandonment of South Vietnam.

And now there is all this talk about attacking Iran because the nasty Mullahs are building nuclear weapons and not just developing alternative energy sources. First, the sanctions and trade embargo by the US and some of the other Western countries.  In retaliation, Iran is refusing to supply oil to British and French firms. Reports are coming in about how dangerous it is to be an Iranian nuclear scientists. Apparently, if the car bombs don't get you, dudes with guns/killer cars will.

*sigh*

I was privileged to have had an opportunity to visit Iran back in the 90's. My impression was of a country frozen in the 70's, manic drivers, and air perfumed with thousands of years of history. It was there that I see what military presence in the capital looks like (men with AK-47s at street corners and in front of strategic buildings). These were left over from the war with Iraq. Nearly every Persian men have gone through national service and know how to bear arms. The Persians are almost one and all friendly and proud of their historical and cultural heritage. They can tell you which king was ruling Persia in 789 AD. They are not Arabs and do not speak Arabic. They have excellent desserts. Pistachio is cheap there.

The government is repressive, women can't wear bright colours and the people worry about who is eavesdropping on them. But they don't hate the West, or the Sunnis (unlike Sunnis who think that Shiites are no better than heathens) nor do they want world domination. The Iranians want to join the rest of the world and be able to progress just like everyone else. They won't abandon religion altogether in the pursuit of moderation and liberation.

I think that an attack on Iran would be a terrible mistake. It would definitely be a costly and protracted one, and the only winner will be those with oil and gas interest who will take this opportunity to rape the country.

This song encapsulates the feeling of the ordinary citizens at the height of the Cold War. I think the sentiments are still the same right now for all of us the world over. Let us hope that the rattling of the sabres remain just that and that no weapons get unsheathed (except for your friendly neighbourhood flashers).



Freddie, I am sure this song brings memories of your youth, no?

New stuff I've read this year ... so far

It has been 7 weeks and I have only read 8 books! Been so busy, so slow down a lot. Yeah. Right.

I read mostly romance and I don't apologise for it. I don't care if I don't know who won the Booker Prize, I don't want to read 'em. If it's a Nobel Laureate of Literature, please don't pass it to me. I am a Phillistine and I am okay with it.

Once I fall in love with the work of an author, I obsessively search out her/his catalogue of work and read everything I can get my grubby hands on. I follow them and urge (silently) that they type faster and publish more to keep feeding my reading habit. Hence, 6 out of the 8 authors below are authors I have been following, some since my teenage years. 

Since I am a creature of habit, I keep gobbling whatever it is they write even after they shifted style or had become plodding or whatever. Hey, we all evolve, right? Hopefully for the better, but if not, whatever. So even if they have shifted style into something that makes me go "meh", but I will continue to read them until they no longer write. Or I no longer have money to rent. Or the books really just swerved into "Do not go there!" territory. Whichever comes first.

Under cut because of loads of pictures. Not in chronological order.

If I Survive by Hybrid

Ah, a walk down memory lane.

Lessons in song

(Severely personal post ahead. You have been warned.)

Majalah 3 tonight featured Mr. Abdul Halim Yazid, a dikir barat artiste and his travels in the Deep South of the United States to trace the story of the blues. I only caught it halfway when my ears pricked to the call of prayer from Senegal that was featured on the show (caught the rest on online). I happily abandoned the dishes I was washing in the kitchen and sat down to watch.

It was nice to see how musicians from different backgrounds and musical traditions could mesh together so beautifully when they sit down for a jam session. But what made me tear up was the song "Al-Fatihah untuk Ayah" (Al-Fatihah Prayers for Father) that Mr Abdul Halim sang together with some blues musicians. No one uploaded that version just yet, so here is the plain dikir barat version.



It was a beautiful tribute from a child to his father, singing farewell to his father who has departed this world for the next. My understanding of the Kelantanese dialect is poor, but I got the gist of the message of the song. The words were simple but heartfelt, the melody plucking the heartstring as it beats along to the rhythm of the drum.

(The rest is undercut for intensely personal navel gazing which may not be of interest to you.)

Song that make you go hmm ...

and then think.



Stolen from Ashare Alias' post. There are lyrics there.

Eye candy!

Mmmm ... delicious start to the day.

Do you appreciate your senses?

As a music aficionado, I love the luxury of listening to aurgasms (the first 2 definitions, please). I try to be cautious with my headphones and earbuds, not to listen at too high a volume which could damage my hearing in the long run. But as I mentioned before, many people are not as careful. Are you one of them?

Like many of our senses (sight, taste, feel) we take our hearing for granted. I only appreciate my voice (although I am a mediocre singer) when I had a horrid throat infection to the point that I completely lost my voice. And yes, my youngest uncle was right. Once you stopped talking, it is very hard to start again, even if you are a chatterbox.

Do we think about other people who are deprived of their senses, either from birth or due to disease or accidents? Have you ever thought how it would be like if one day you can no longer hear the voice of your loved ones, no longer see the beauty of this world, no longer taste chocolate, no longer feel the silk against your skin? If your answer is yes or no, pray to God that you will never experience it.

It is easy to feel sorry for people who are unable to enjoy one or more of their senses due to a disability. However, many of them refuses to be the object of pity and made a life for themselves that is fulfilling and rewarding. And yes, even deaf people can enjoy music. Evidence are below.

Grenade by Bruno Mars



The New Sh*it by Marilyn Manson



Jar of Hearts by Christina Perri