'I' of the Hornbill

The Zen and Zing (ZZ) of Catching Blue-bottles (BBs) With My Bare Hands (BH) or 'I' of the Quick Hands!

2011-03-26T23:35:00.000+08:00

The Zen and Zing (ZZ) of Catching Blue-bottles (BBs) With My Bare Hands (BH) or 'I' of the Quick Hands!

by Zaharan Razak on Saturday, March 26, 2011 at 11:30pm

Catching BBs with BH is one thing,
Bragging about it on FB is another;
Instead of applause, I got brickbats (BB2)!
One advised me not to forget washing hands afterward,
Another archly asked how come the flies were drawn to me!
A third was moved into pantun mood to inform me that
flies and bluebottles share one thing in common -
They shit on shit. All year six stuff dumped on FB!
None bar none think of fly catching as an art, a science,
And an exercise in mind-body coordination.
If you google, there's plenty of stuff
Which wax lyrical on catching BBs with BH.
A pair of quick hands is handy in life and the ability
To catch flies with BH provides a good test and training.
I betcha the BB2 throwers are not only flabby
in the middle but also upstairs. They can't think outside
Their conditioned box.
With me it is more than an exercise in quick hand -
Catching BBs with BH has been a lifelong passion:
I've been swiping flies since childhood,
Even keeping a mental logbook:
I can do it with either hand;
The most number caught in one sweep is 12;
Once in a while, I've caught a fly in mid flight!
The only other thing I've caught more than flies
Is roaches. Scores since childhood. Sometimes
with BH, but, I must admit, mostly with aerosols.

Should Dr M's 'Doctor In The House' Be Translated Into Malay?

2011-03-20T11:03:00.003+08:00

Should Dr M's 'Doctor In The House' Be Translated Into Malay?

by Zaharan Razak on Sunday, March 20, 2011 at 10:58am

If you are patriotic of the parochial kind like Gapena you would probably say yes. In fact I dare say Gapena secretly rues (or should that be secretly resent or grudgingly admire) the book being written in English in the first place. Heck the very idea of inviting Dr M to be their patron saint would drive all members to resign and form 2Gapena.

You see, the Malay language has a way of turning a deceptively simple but evocative phrase like 'A Doctor In The House' into something that is neither here nor there ... 'Doktor Dalam Rumah'. Translating it into 'Doktor Dalam Dewan Perwakilan' does not improve matters either. It may be technically and literally correct but it sounds contrived and stilted. That is the crux of the Malay language which puts many people off - it sounds contrived and stilted.

Gapena-ers don't know any better so for them it is a case of ignorance is bliss just like the frog under the coconut shell thinks it is living in a wonderful world. The Malay language do have their own evocative power but of the narrow and shallow kind. Thus in describing people who think living under a coconut shell is the better deal they would often use the phrase 'syok sendiri' which of course describes themselves.

So no prize for guessing (pardon the cliche) what my answer to the question is - please do not translate the book. Leave it as it is and retain its wealth of nuances and evocations. Translating it would demean it into a forced to read school textbook recommended by Gapena like 'Interlok'. Interlok? Rendering 'Interlock' as 'Interlok' not only demeans the original word but applying it to mean racial integration is as laughable as translating 'answer' as 'retaliate' as in this actual example I found here at FB: "Asked why, he retaliated that he wished he had taken English seriously so he could read Dr M's book." Except for 'retaliate', I've tidied up the sentence to make it sound more English than the original which you can find and read yourself for its atrocity value.

Our Behaviour Is Largely Unrecognized Conditioned Reflexes!

2011-03-13T00:29:00.000+08:00

Our Behaviour Is Largely Unrecognized Conditioned Reflexes!

by Zaharan Razak on Saturday, March 12, 2011 at 11:38pm

Very few people could tell off-hand the meaning of this rather academic sounding phrase, conditioned reflex. It is a term from the field of psychology which very few people outside the field have ever heard of or care two hoots about it when they see one. Fact is it runs through most of our behavior and thoughts and is a very useful concept to understand and explain many if not all our collective and individual wayward behavior and errant perceptions about most things.

A conditioned reflex is a repeated response, a habitual, inflexible, indirect response, to anything that arouses our interest or emotions. The thing that attracts our attention and demands a response can be an idea, a piece of information or news, a belief, other people, an ordinary everyday object or the world. Let us for simplicity call them all information.

Now information affects or has the potential to affect you in some way, that is, it arouses your interest and/or emotions and naturally, you respond.

The question now is IS YOUR RESPONSE ADEQUATE AND APPROPRIATE or is simply erroneous!

This depends on whether the information you receive is true or false, one, two, do you read the information correctly or incorrectly?

Now, information does not come in a raw form technically called data. The data have been ordered and presented by a source through a medium which could be language, sound or symbol or memory of an experience. Your brain then decode the information in terms of what it already knows or does not know including biases, prejudices, beliefs, fears and expectations.

Take ghost as a common example. In this RESPONSE-STIMULUS matrix, 'ghost' is information. But it is not raw information as if the word 'ghost' is the object (if it can be called object!) ghost itself. So you see when we react upon hearing the word ghost, be it in fear or interest, we are not responding to the objective reality of ghost whatever it may be or if it does exist at all BUT MERELY TO THE WORD GHOST! Now as everyone knows but often forgets the word is not the thing but is merely a symbol of the thing!

There you have the crux of the problem in dealing with reality! We are reacting to the symbol rather than the reality. Now symbol is man-made and can be manipulated to influence or gain an advantage.

A symbol can be loaded up with extra meaning quite different, exaggerated or added on if you like from the thing which it refers to. Such a symbol can be described as excess baggage.

No one one can prove beyond a shadow of doubt that a ghost really exist! But most people react with strong emotions to the mention of ghosts! People also manipulate the idea/word/belief of ghosts as a means to influence or gain an advantage on others.

We have been conditioned - exposed repeatedly - to react to the symbol - word, story, movie, image - of ghosts without ever experiencing the real thing if it exists.

Now replace the word ghost with the word god and you understand why religion and belief in god is a conditioned reflex never mind if god really exists or not.

Thus a conditioned reflex is an automatic response that becomes a habit by sheer force of repetition, imitation and mass adoption that bypasses thinking and analysis to a symbol mistaken for reality itself.

Misanthropes Unite!

Religion Is Thick In Symbolisms and Traditions & Thin On Proven Facts ... Evil Impersonate?

2011-03-10T23:37:00.000+08:00

The Tudung Revolution

2011-03-10T15:07:00.005+08:00

Way back in 1971 a student leader named Anwar Ibrahim set up ABIM (Anwar bin Ibrahim Maju) as a vehicle to advance his ambition to be somebody on the Malaysian socio-politico landscape riding on the largely inchoate groundswell of Muslim youth in search of a new image and banner to assert their identity feeling threatened by the pervasive economic and cultural influence of the West and the non-Malays majority of whom are non-Muslims.

Traditional religious institutions and rituals, PAS, UMNO were the main clothes hangers for Muslims to hang their emotional identity needs on, but there was an unexpressed, inchoate (same meaning actually, kiki) need for a new image and face. The face was provided by Anwar who was a jambu during kolej days but now beginning to show the wear and tear of too many times entering back doors and exiting front doors. The image was provided by the tudung. Anwar and ABIM members gave a new meaning to the wearing of the tudung. He made it popular, glamorous and fashionable. It is no more a symbol of piety than driving a posh car is a symbol of money well earned. Nowadays, anyone driving a flashy car is a suspect of being a crook, a corrupt official, a lawyer on the take, a dishonest politician, an SPM drop out who happens to have the ability to sing or kick a ball.

Similarly, wearing a tudung does not mean one is a god-fearing pious person. BUT IT IS CHIC! Also it is good PR in the form of window dressing to attract Muslim customers in this halal-haram suspicious world that Muslims find themselves co-mingling as a result of too much historical sleeping their ancestors indulged in ... what I call the Stupor of the Stopas! (In Kelantan dialect Mustafa is pronounced Stopa!)

So now the man who started the tudung revolotion has long abandoned his original vehicle for advancing on his Moscow, and instead is expending all his resources to stay within sight of Moscow but every step he takes to stay in position takes him a step backward. Rather like Michael Jackson doing the moon walk in the Billy Jean music video.

So now we have to change the acronym a bit to suit changing times ... ABIM: Anwar bin Ibrahim Malu.

Pickup Camperhome: Way to Travel the World

2011-03-09T20:23:00.001+08:00

Pickup Camperhome: Way to Travel the World

by Zaharan Razak on Wednesday, March 9, 2011 at 4:41pm

Lining up for a photo with the Swiss family helps to sooth my travelitis envy.

Natalie and her kids. The garcon is 8 et sa fille, 6.

The pickup is a Mazda double crewcab. The camperhome is made to measure in Germany.You can pull the camperhome out like a drawer and leave it somewhere safe when not needed to be on the pickup.

For comparison, this is a made in Thailand camperhome foisted on a single cab pickup truck. Bigger home but can only seat 2 people. Suitable for a couple and not a family. You also cannot separate the camper from the truck. A case of you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Ever since I read John Steinbeck's "Travel with Charlie," in which he drove across America with a poodle in a pickup truck with a camperhome affixed to its cargo bay, I've long dreamed of going on the road with a similar setup but the Malaysian motoring culture does not cater to such offbeat lifestyles and so no off the shelf camperhomes are available on the market. You can have it specially made but you've got to know your resources. So even until now my dream has remained a dream. Maybe I'll do it next year or year after ... I plan to base my camperhome on the all new 2011 Ford Ranger said to be available in September. For the camperhome, I'll get a local coach builder to do it for me.

Today while riding in Dungun town on my Modenas 125 I chanced upon this camperhome parked not far from Dungun Maidin Store. They were looking for a fax facility to send copies of documents to Switzerland where they come from.

About six months ago, I came upon a motorhome based on a Ford Transit van belonging to a French couple going around the world. By chance both women from the motorhome and this camperhome are named Natalie and they know each other because of their similar mode of travel.

To know more about the Swiss family Natalie, here is their website: www.lesGLEN.net.
For the French couple, Nat & Jean, here: http://www.natetjean.com/topic1/index.html.

FB A Rich Vein of Human Prototypes, Here Goeth:

2011-03-03T21:27:00.003+08:00

FB A Rich Vein of Human Prototypes, Here Goeth:

by Zaharan Razak on Wednesday, March 2, 2011 at 2:20pm

1. Cyndi Lauper Type: Daddy, you're still my number one, but we girls just wanna, just wanna, have fun, fun, fun, That's all we really waant, just to have fun ... yeah, yeah, yeah ... fun, fun, fun ...
2. Eeerrmm Type: This one only knows how to growl using punctuation marks and perversely misspelled words!
3. Straight and narrow: This is the cyber Taliban who is dogmatic and believes only he and his beliefs are right, others are wrong! His mission in life, at least on FB, is to copy and paste ready-made sacred cows so as to look straight and narrow himself. Challenge him and he quickly feels annoyed and say, You're insulting my ancestors! Or his straw beliefs.
4. Shallow and narrow. Hey, mister! Why so serious! (There's even a contemporary pop song for them to hang by the coat-tail to) FB is only for chilling out, don't you ever forget that!
5. The Croakers: Like frogs in a pond after a sudden shower they croak alike producing an orchestra of sounds like ,,,///!!1???huhu, je, ak, :)),,,,-**-??hehe,,,hhaha//,,kokkikokkik ... aka Calibans. They also spell oops as oppss ...
6. The Too Smart For My Own Good Self-Confessed Kiasu Smarty Two Shoes. These will never let a comment pass sitting down without responding with an even smarter comment.They are wired up to be fired up. No second best or second guessing for them. They prefer to die standing up guns blazing than kneel down and beg for mercy. I bet when all the chips are down they will commit suicide. No surrender. Banzai!
7. The Vulgar from the Volga: They cannot resist their favorite battle cry, A Fart By Any Other Name Smells Just As Sweet. Oops, did I misquote a word? Aka FB maggots.
8. One wrong wong makes all wongs wrong: This is the type whose brains still operate on stereotype and sectarian rails. Their views are not based on objective facts and relevant fields of knowledge but based on what belief/cultural/class/racial group they belong. Ditto their opinions of others, not based on the individual person but on his ethnic group. Aka Wong from Huang Ho. Aka FB bigots.
9. The True Misanthrope. I only know two of these species, AJY and ZR. They are listed in the IUCN extinction list as vulnerable/endangered.
10. The Ants. These work hard to copy and past one-liners - jokes, trite, corny sayings which sound very deep to them - etc - taken from another site, often not bothering to give the name of the original writer or source. Also known as Mr Postman or Pizza Hut Delivery boy. Asked why, they'd say to serve as reminders ... yeah, like thousands of leaflets being airdropped during the Malayan emergency.
11. The chillers. These are people who seem to be quite successful people offline, running their own businesses, holding down good positions, having good family ties, or swinging their legs in retirement, but here on FB, they strip down and jump into the communal pool splashing in the water without any semblance of swimming like children in a wading pool. The serious swimmers training for the Olympics in another pool shake their heads in disbelief. Aka going gaga.
12. The blood, sweat and tears. This type will look high and low on the Net for sensational video - anything with blood, a mishap, freakish, grotesque, ghosts, or against the order of nature - and upload them here. They do it with regularity too, as though a habit, and invites you with a straight face, to say something about the video.
13. "And what type do you belong?" shoot back type.
14. The Anonymous. This type may hide only their real names but reveal their photos or hide both. If you are a fan of them you'd call them The Scarlet Pimpernel. If you don't like them you'd call them the boy or girl next door with a pimple to hide.
15. The humble. Has the habit of popping up with their tails between their legs or both palms covering their shame so as not to cause offense. If you tell them something which makes them feel inadequate, they will call you a show off and invite you to meet his big brother ... this type will never fight their own battle simply because they don't have enough ammo, or armor. He is often a product and a victim of hidden feudalism. Humility is either a mask for an inferiority complex or reverse psychology to tamp down a rising sense of self-importance.
16. The CT. No, CT does not stand for communist terrorist! This type likes to give out incomplete status updates, often without context, teasing your curiosity or showing a bit of leg and then failing to deliver or falling flat on the promise. It lies in common with the proverbial snake oil seller or pasar malam vendoring of the generator-powered loudspeaker kind. Often, the info is plagiarized. They will bend all rules and will never be on the mend. It is built into human nature and any suggestion of rules, principles and values will be instantly interpreted as totalitarian imposition.
17. The simple-minded. As much as Simple Simon wants/wishes the world to be simple, the world is a complex thing with many twists, turns, levels, highways, byways, corridors, nooks and crannies. It is a mark of genius to be able to see the simple in the complex and the complex in the simple but for the simple-minded he wishes or think the world is simple dismissing or ignoring the ramifications of an issue rather like an ostrich burying its head in the sand at the first sign of a challenge to its pea-sized brain. E=MC2 looks simple as a mathematical symbol but invite Einstein or AJY to spell it out on the blackboard and you will scream for mercy or loll your tongue in a stupor ending up looking like a stupa. The symbol sums up the universe. The universe and all that is in it is simple? "C'mon!", to quote Siriwan Mena.
18. The constipated. This type hasn't chipped in a word for days on end. His favorite response is "No comment," "Huh" or "Duh." Nothing comes out because there's nothing inside. Trust me, I meet them everyday. They lurk around every corner watching the world passes by, ready to pull back into the shadows or bushes at the slightest threat to his "battery low" intelligence. Pressed hard, they spout banalities of the kind you were told in primary year six.
19. The diarrhea. This one is the opposite. This one talks too much saying nothing. Lost in trivia and minutiae and long in the telling, it keeps you waiting for the point or punch line like a reporter waiting outside an important meeting only to be told there's no story.
20. The Gunslinger. This type shoots back the moment he sees the iris of his adversary's eyes widens or, getting hit, before his falling body hits the ground. He is the opposite of the poet, next.
21. The poet. This type does not shoot back immediately. He retires into his fox-hole, nurses his wound, recollects in tranquility and composes a reply days, weeks later, and may not even address or target the person who presents him with the challenge in the first place. The result? Literature. The poet liberates himself from being sucked into the need to retaliate but sees the challenge as an impetus, occasion or opportunity to try to carve out a work of art. He might even secretly thank his 'adversary.' First and foremost he answers to the Muse and not to the knee-jerk need to retaliate.
22. The obscurantist. This type likes to issue puzzle- or word-cross like status updates using obscure terms and references or his own 'Alice in the Wonderland' meaning which only he is privy to and expect you to know or tease your curiosity - 'You really want to know?' Some raise a question and before you could answer, answer it himself! Duh. An overgrown schoolboy masquerading as an adult. The more obscure the smarter he feels. To me he is swimming in his own excrement (there goes the Vulgar Volga in me!)! Cheapskate.
23. Lurker. This type sees no evil, hears no evil, says no evil. He just skips and skims quickly, maybe hit a "I Like" here and there and smiles benign smiles or maybe pulls a long face occasionally.
24. Stalker. Cousin to lurker.
25. Proxy War. Like America who cannot send marines to all war fronts but choose to arm locals to fight a common enemy, proxers are 'Istimewa' types in wheelchairs who upload dogmatic stands or ride piggyback on another commentator's comment by clicking on "I like" or adding a 'Hahaha" to prop up their emotional decrepitude and mental stagnation.

One Person's View of the Palestinian Presence in Malaysia

2011-02-27T14:37:00.000+08:00

I'm quoting in toto and verbatim without comment one person's view of the Palestinian presence in Malaysia based on his experience dealing with them:

"they are not the best of Arabs that l have got to know of....we are vulnerable to their criminals, who can enter here without any visa needed, there are gangsters, drug dealers and prostitutes among them.our government are giving them 1 mth entry visa...from there they will ask for more extensions from our immigrations via their embassy...our country is of course a far better place from their war prone country and they are taking every bit of advantage in what we are offering them in goodwill...the problems cause here are very damaging to our society and country, they are all over in Malaysia now just like the Iranians

this you can check with bukit aman and wisma putra...they turning to be a hands full to the authorities, ade tahanan kat lokap polis, immigrations and even at the airports. some even have multiple passports.... its very disturbing when they don't respect our government n ministers...kutuk menteri kita kow kow...maki polis, maki immigration kenapa tahan orang2 dia, kalau tak buat salah masakan authorities kite nak tahan deorang..betul ke tak? they act as if they are the masters and we are oblige to help them with their whims n fancies...they are here on Malaysian and world wakaf grants...tapi masih tak sedar diri lagi...they say they are from a poor country but they don't act like what they seem to be...they are very arrogant and demanding people...more of a blood sucker..! draining our country dry....like l said they demand to have the same privilege as the Malaysian, like the universities academic fees,hospitals and other privileges we enjoy being a local...that's very unfair to other poor nations and our people...if they can afford to travel all the way here, why give them the privilege...giving n offering them scholarships to study here are good enough,which l think should have been given to our qualified students here....as they can serve the country better...ramai orang kite pun susah jugak...

do you know that their embassy and the ambassador's residence are under Malaysian grant, they are residing in two of our government bungalows in jalan utant? kenapa deorang tak fight on the own land....why come here and demand to be heard and running away to other countries, when they themselves are not doing anything to defend their own country ...cowards l guess....mintak belas kecian dari orang sana sini...bila orang tolong, kutuk lagi ade...kaum yang tak pernah nak berterima kasih..they are very rough n loud people....totally opposite from our people n culture....l personally think the government should put a stop to this...we don't need ruthless n ungrateful people entering our peaceful country...

zaharan, when you write this in your blog, you mustn't reveal my name and where you got the source from. can't think if anything more to write or report to you, but will add when l have more..right now my brain is running blank..hehe maybe am to tired ... "

2011-02-26T13:18:00.001+08:00

No Comment is a Comment

by Zaharan Razak on Saturday, January 29, 2011 at 1:00pm

At a fundamental level, we are a mere witness, an observer; at a higher level, we make a stand, and, at some risk, make a statement. The intention is to show appreciation for and support the right and point out the wrong. At the lowest level are those who have nothing to say, prefer not to out of displeasure or disfavor, or are just shy, lacking in self-confidence being the victims of social bullying, control and repression disguised as the need to teach morals and manners. Out of sheer perversion, some would stick out their tongues and declare, "No comment!" But no comment is a comment. It reveals the pavlovian mindset of a badly-trained dog who just do the opposite of what its trainer wants the dog to do. It is meant to pull the carpet from under your feet. Fair enough, some noisy and nosy pokers need to be given the short shrift treatment but more often than not it is the failure of many members of society to stand up and make a stand on issues of the day. Number one, they don't follow the news and issues in the first place but even if they do they are afraid to open their mouths and risk be judged. Their motto seems to be, Better to keep my mouth shut and be thought a fool than open it and remove all doubt (Mark Twain?).

Why is it important to make a stand? To share with others similar and differing views on an issue, to open up a debate or discussion on the issue so as to be able to look at the issue from many perspectives to help strengthen the base and premise of one's stand, to fine tune it or abandon it altogether in the light of a more sound one suggested from the debate and discussion. And, that way, we grow. Otherwise, we will forever remain dwarfs, circus clowns, caged canaries existing self-satisfied in our own bubble of a make-belief world.

Of course all of us live in a make-belief world of our own making (often copied from a received or indoctrinated template) but it is a good idea to look over the fence (kandang) and see what's cooking in the neighbor's kitchen.

Call it a reality check if you like.

Sofea Ismail and Rohiman Haroon like this.
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Propaganda from Mahomet to Mao

2011-02-26T12:18:00.004+08:00

Propaganda: From Mahomet to Mao

by Zaharan Razak on Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 1:45pm

Belief in any dogma and its propagation follows a familiar path from Mahomet to Mao.

A dogma is an insistence that yours is the only right way, others are wrong or an intransigent attitude saying, ok, you do it your way, I do my way, your belief is your belief, my belief is my belief, without reference to a third-party benchmark as the intransigent party sees it as another trojan horse, conspiracy or the work of the devil himself. It is proof perfect that the chloroform of propaganda has begun to work its effect and the mind is fast losing its rationality.

The route (ingredients): Ascribe absolute power to an absolute Thing, create a hierarchy to dispense the power on a human scale, create a senior-junior, teacher-pupil relationship to drive home the point/agenda, make a virtue of humility (to make the human mind more receptive, the easier to coerce and manipulate), use the cadre/recruit to attract more recruits or as frontliners (e.g. suicide bombers, drum beaters), create a single, mass icon, language and identity, create an opposable enemiy/ies (reminiscent of opposable thumb), make an example of traitors and turncoats, denounce enemies and traitors with equal ferocity even if only verbally and symbolically, ban any materials - books, icons, symbols, images - of other persuasions, replace reality wth fantasy and mythology, replace or do totally without the rules of science with traditional beliefs and practices, laugh off or herd out any deviant or non-conforming oddballs, emphasize the forms (never mind the substance) by the use of rituals, slogans, dressing, chanting, ceremonies, symbolic buildings, visual arts, the use of all-is-well, formulaic, courtly, cliched language, the use of threats and promises, patronage, appeal to guilt, fear and shame, use of name-calling, the use of soft-hard interrogation method, etc.

The purpose: to create a single, monolithic mass appeal, the mass mind, the easier to manipulate, to maintain the status quo and hierarchy of power. It has produced tribes, feudal societies, totalitarian regimes, communism, dictatorships, absolute monarchies, racism, sexism, cults, religions. History is littered with the effects of their onslaught. The only bulwarks that can contain or slow down their lemming rush over the cliff are science, rationality, the arts, democracy and liberal humanism.

Anger Management

2011-02-26T12:02:00.004+08:00

Anger Management

by Zaharan Razak on Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 12:59pm

Anger is a rising emotion that tends to spill over into exaggerated behavior like shouting, crying, banging, kicking or even indictable violence like taking the law into your own hands and use of inappropriate language such as vulgarism and obscenities. It is a reaction to a feeling of being wronged, insulted, your rights being transgressed, being betrayed, being oppressed, being suppressed, being unfairly treated, being jealous, bearing a grudge, being affronted, cheated, hurt, being attacked.

There are two kinds of anger, appropriate and inappropriate, and, well, borderline cases! In other words, like most if not all problematic human manifestations, anger is a whole range or spectrum rather than being clearly divided into black and white areas. Many gray areas. But it is useful to start by describing it as appropriate and inappropriate - just so or exaggerated. The key is it should not create more problems or bring in a new set of issues or be committing a new wrong in order to right an old wrong! One gray area is the 'artistic' or creative expression of anger where, for example, it may be somewhat exaggerated, like shouting - remember the primal scream? - but falls short of physical violence.

Anger is like a sick ancestor who refuses to die and occupies a room in the house of our mind, sleeping most of the time but occasionally waking up demanding attention. It is sleeping in our genes, in our childhood experience, and is awakened by the stresses of daily living. Most of us, most of the time, are mature, experienced and rational enough to manage the rising emotion of anger so as not to disrupt our daily life, cause ill-heath, age prematurely and damage our social relationships.

There are many ways to manage or express anger appropriately. Again, the key is not to bring the roof down on your own head but to subliminate them into healthy activities and outlets such as socializing, sports, hobbies, dieting, consciously and knowledgeably taking care of your health, doing charity or voluntary work, showing kindness and compassion to others including animals and plants and to make a habit of being kind, common courtesy, and of course having a sense of situation humor helps, either of the mild or hilarious kind. Be a riot but don't cause a riot, as it were.

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Yap Poh Meng and Sofea Ismail like this.
- Sofea Ismail Crying helps relieve suppressed anger ...
  Thursday at 1:47pm · · 2 peopleLoading...
- Joedrifter Walker Perhaps that's why they have crying babies in MC?.....
  Thursday at 2:57pm ·
- Yap Poh Meng Anger followed by vulgarism and obscenities are replacement of the deficiencies in one. An intellectual would controll his anger and thrash it out in a rational manner.
  .
  Thursday at 3:57pm · · 1 personLoading...
- Rohiman Haroon
  Orang Melayu, too, are famous for anger that the colonial British learnt and took the word "amok" into the Queen's English vocabulary. The story was like this: After seeing too many of these hysterical behaviours particularly amongst Mal...ay men running amok with parangs, Stamford Raffles curiously and quickly asked his subordinates what kind of hysterical behaviour that was. They came back to Raffles and told him that there was no such word in English to describe the behaviour. He then approached Abdullah Munshi (or Munshi's son) how to describe the behaviour. Abdullah Munshi replied: "If I tell you, would you mind tell Her Majesty The Queen that I was the one who invented the word." He spilled out the word and to his amazement, Raffles took weeks to ponder on the word. He kept on coming back to Abdullah Munshi to ask and then praised that it was such a wonderful but mind boggling word to describe a delirious and violent behaviour in such a short syllable word. In returning to England, he saw a pasqual running amok and being a witness to the crime, he told the police that the behaviour was amok. In the courts, he used the word again and the word was picked up by a daily news reporter, who then described in detail how the word ämok derived. If you go to Sussex Garden today where a lot of historical Malay documents were compiled and stolen, you'd find the word amok was annotated and absorbed into the English Language only later at the turn of 20th century as it was debated over and over by English linguists and psychiatrists alike. Much to our dismay, the name of Abdullah Munshi never surfaced in those intellectual discourse. I am sure Abdullah Munshi must be swearing from his grave. But alas, the word was not his in the first place. Two sen from me. Cheers.See More
  
  Thursday at 4:01pm · · 5 peopleLoading...
- Zaharan Razak Reminds me of Adam Jaafar and Botak Chin ...
  Thursday at 5:49pm ·
- Kamariah Haroon where did u get the story? did u concoct it urself?
  Thursday at 10:23pm ·
- Zaharan Razak If he concoct it, it is a good one, kihkih! If it is true, he is a good ferret to dig out obscure and forgotten nuggets of info :-)
  Yesterday at 12:16am ·
- Rohiman Haroon Heard it from Mana Sikana in one of his literary public lectures. I laughed my heart out...it is comedic tragedy, really.
  Yesterday at 1:20am

Skitterish Amateur Video

2011-02-26T11:57:00.001+08:00

Amateur Video

by Zaharan Razak on Friday, February 25, 2011 at 1:06pm

Just saw a news clip of a video recording of the Christchurch earthquake taken by a Japanese tourist. The camera jumps from shot to shot with less rhyme and reason than the jerky flight of a butterfly!

Nowadays video taking capability is in everyone's hands. Unfortunately, taking videos is not just about pressing the dedicated video button and dart from shot to shot like you would do with your naked eyes.

Video taking, if you want to produce a coherent sequence or story, must follow a few simple rules. Like writing, video taking has its own laguage or ABCs. I know it is the culture of young people, and some adults who overstay their youth like some wakil rakyats overstay their tenure, not to give a damn for rules, hence the atrocious writing on FB and elsewhere online. Just because publishing is now open to the rakyat and not the exclusive enclave of professionals, the concern of the pros that the masses will make a mess of the medium as well as the message has become a reality! Talk of giving a flower to a monkey!

All forms of communication have rules in order to facilitate and smoothen the process of conveying the message or meaning. But humans have a load of complexes to unload and deposit by the wayside and so in using communication to convey a message they are just as wont to want to not to convey the message but disguise it, cut it into halves and quarters, confuse it, mislead, tease and be in cahoots with a a select reader or group of readers/listeners as a tactic to alienate others! Sigh. Such is convoluted human nature or simple arrested juvenile growth!

Or else the communication suffers from a simple lack of knowledge and skill. Rarely though does it stay at that level or else it could easily be overcome by a few simple steps of study. But, no, to continue the theme of convoluted human reasoning, the communicator refuses to learn his art and is even proud being ignorant of the rules. They love the mass culture of 'pakai hentam'!

With the advent and popularity of the Internet and social networking facilities such as blogging, FB and Twitter, writing and picture taking has now gone egalitarian, a tool of the masses. For many, writing and picture taking is a necessary evil in whose rules they have not the slightest interest. What they are more interested in is the connecting and any which way will do, the one with the least line of resistance being the best, thus, you get, huhu.....eerrrmm,,,,,?! ak///jew...)))):_)))!!!nok mok tok .... etcetera, etcetera. And, sigh, it is these guerilla-gorilla--chewy-gummy language which elicits the largest fan mail!

Just watch the paltry response this note will get! I count myself lucky to get even one!

One would like to to think that there is a rich vein of potential interest in taking a short course, even if only for a day, in video taking or reading a short pamphlet on the basic rules of video taking, but no, any sit-down and mug discipline is anathema to mass followers, it reminds too much of coercive school culture, that deadening and sterile land where all curiosity and interest are like a cup of water poured into desert sands.

This trend is the great flattening and leveling of the cultural landscape where mass culture is in the hands of the masses where the elitist culture of Shakespeare, Omar Khayyam, Socrates, Aristotle, Khalil Gibran are no longer appreciated or relevant, or are they?

What Is Philosophy?

2011-02-20T00:06:00.001+08:00

Philosophy is an ability to look at everything that jostle to affect you - events, other people, your feelings, moods and thoughts - as not affecting you, as being a part of your psycho dynamics and yet are not you. It is a hard-and-easy-to-attain ability to detach and see yourself as a separate being from all that is happening around and inside of you.

Hard because it requires constant practice. Easy because it is easy enough to understand and accept. When you are saying my friend, my husband, my feeling, my mood, my body, you might as well say my handbag, my house, my car. Now you know as well as I do your car and all your possessions including the nice shopping bag you sayang to throw away may be extensions of you but they are not you and quite separate from you. You may lose a handbag or break a cup. So what, you're still intact.

Same truth applies to events, people and your interior monologue - feelings, moods and thoughts. They come and go. Most you pass or they come to pass with nary a second thought or glance. Some stay around a bit longer. But none lasts. Whether you leave first or outlast them, it drives home the point the truth that they are separate from you.

Mind you, there's a certain utility in feeling an affinity with events, people, things ... and thoughts. Just like reading a good novel or watching a good movie with which you can identify your own feelings and therefore feel close, so it is with one's life. But at the end of the day, you realize the book is just a book, the movie a movie, and you are still standing apart however close you came to the brink or even cross it into the world of the book and the movie. What you did was to temporarily suspend reality or disbelief and enter into a world of make-belief.

This is the crux of philosophy. The ability to switch from one world, one realm, of reality into another, simultaneously if need be. Two in one, if you like. The ability to feel one with things and yet being strongly aware of your detachment and separation gives you flexibility, versatility, stereo-vision (alright, AJY may prefer to call it Panavision), the ability to see two sides of a coin, as opposed to having tunnel vision or a monolithic view on life.

Philosophy is the last stage in which the learning mind arrives. The growing mind had gone through sensations, perceptions, ego identity, knowledge expansion, settled into comfortable grooves according to received wisdom, belief systems and life's experiences all of which provide data to form an image of the self. But this restless and wandering self - the soul if you like - the ultimate 'I' behind all phenomena with which you can no more say my 'I' and still make sense as you still can saying my self, my feeling, my life, whatever, is the sum total of your consciousness and more, being greater than the sum of its parts.

This 'I' is indestructible and is the one that survives physical death. In one word, it is consciousness or sense of self. The 'I' of the Dung Beetle, as I call it. You may choose to give it your own pet name (wink).

It should be clear from the above drift that neither possession, nor mathematical genius, nor a gift of music, nor good, nor evil (to be fair, as saints and sinners are assigned, they didn't choose to be), nor beliefs can ensure or enhance your final form but that it must be filtered through philosophy, the ability to feel detachment and closeness, sympathy and empathy, objectivity and compassion, simultaneously.

It is the final conduit through which your soul squeezes through to go to the next existential realm.

Note of Appreciation: The above words are a mere dressing up of thoughts triggered by AJY in the course of a dinner in, of all places, Jalan Alor!

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Sofea Ismail likes this.
- Al Jafree Yusop My friend, you've written it in a way that can be shared with a lot other 'I's. I'm in a constant state of learning from your knowledge and wisdom, heartbreaks and joy. May you have similar experiences with yours truly as well.
  5 hours ago · · 1 personLoading...
- Sofea Ismail I am learning a lot from him too ....
  4 hours ago ·
- Zaharan Razak I look forward to sharing experiences with you guys ...
  2 hours ago ·
- Nusrat Al-Jafree
  when I'm sad or depressed, the philosophy I have learned seems disappeared from my knowledge...is one of my weaknesses...today I cried whole day since morning for my lost persian cat (the white one) I blamed myself, I blamed my loving husba...nd, I asked the same questions like I was not learning anything through out my life, again and again...I was at war with myself, people, God, for the pain I was suffering...I know exactly why I was behaving that way, it was the pain of loosing what/whom you love dearly, the attachment one clings to...though I understand the philosophy quite well, still, it wasn't easy to make peace with yourself, it wasn't easy to forgive people, it wasn't easy to accept the fact that God doesn't really interfere with our choice and decision.See More
  
  about an hour ago ·
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Is Eating Pork Hazardous To Your Health?

2011-02-09T05:08:00.001+08:00

http://www.newswithviews.com/Ciola/greg8.htm.
Zaharan Razak

As the article says, people are divided on whether eating pork is hazardous to your health. Equally impressive arguments, some spurious, many fallacious, are arraigned on both sides of the divide. Personally, I don't eat pork for religious ...and cultural reasons, but I've nothing against the animal or people who do. All food, if eaten incorrectly, are hazardous to health. The beef against beef, for instance, is well known. Hindus avoid eating beef in toto just as Muslims avoid eating pork in toto. Vegetarians would put forward the case all food of animal origin is a health hazard, quite apart from ethical considerations. As the article asserts, the beef against pork should also include shellfish including your favorite prawns as they feed off dead matter off the sea/swamp/river beds but then so do fish, bottom or mid-water feeding! I've seen fish feeding on human feces if you ask me. To me human waste and the waste of other animals are part of the food cycle. We eat plants which draw its nutrients from decaying matter. Spore process drinking water from waste water. Awso Sporeans eat pork! So do the majority (a reasonable assumption) of the peoples of the world and for thousands of years too! So why single out the pig? Duh!See More

14 hours ago · · 2 people

Zaharan Razak

In Malaysia, majority (a reasonable assumption) of the Chinese eat pork. Statistically, Chinese are healthier than Malays who don't eat pork, physically, socially and mentally. Most cases of baby dumping, drug addiction, smoking, petty crim...es, corruption, politicking, dropping out from schools, being low-achievers, lacking in choices for recreational and sports outlets, forms of exercise like tai chi, chi kung, yoga, are to be found among the Malays. The average life span of the Chinese is higher than that of the Malays. China is the oldest continuous civilization. And how the Chinese love pork! So do the Koreans and Japanese, the other two great industrial nations on whom we non-pork-eating Malays depend for their technology. If pork is bad, then they should depend on us and not the other way round! Betui tak!

14 hours ago · · 3 people

Karl Anwar: Tak betoi. Me too, respect their (pork-eater) right to consume pork or its derivatives, be it in the form of bacon strips, ham, salami, peperoni to name a few delicacy from swine's flesh. I'm OK to use same utensil when visit my Chinese friends.

To single out Moslems as only group of pork-sensitive since 14 centuries ago is a grave misrepresent as the Jewish since Moses (at least if not long long time before Mosaic era).

I wonder how non-kosher secular Jewish to slaughter the hog :}) Extremely difficult to observe Kashrut law in the aforementioned case as hog's thorax so thick.

Zaharan Razak: I agree with your observations except for the points I've written in red below:

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 2:49 PM, Mohd Khairul Anwar Hussain <karlanwar@gmail.com> wrote:

Tak betoi. Me too, respect their (pork-eater) right to consume pork or its derivatives, be it in the form of bacon strips, ham, salami, peperoni to name a few delicacy from swine's flesh. I'm OK to use same utensil when visit my Chinese friends.
To single out Moslems as only group of pork-sensitive since 14 centuries ago is a grave misrepresent as the Jewish since Moses (at least if not long long time before Mosaic era).

I did not say Muslims ARE THE ONLY group, nor was I representing any group. I don't even represent myself let alone others. That is a wrong report of what I said. Read carefully again! Quote me the words! I was reporting objective facts that started to happen 1400 years before I was born and happening in many parts of the world where I've never been so I base my observations on what I read written by others who in turn got the info from others who got it from others and so on.. The tradition of knowledge. It is not important whether I'm right or wrong. The reported facts speak for themselves. Got nothing to do with me. I'm just a witness, a reporter representing nobody! Betui tak!?

Karl Anwar: Bro, I hate corrupt more than pork. No pork hater nor anti-canine

Ken Chin I don't know about if pork contribute to anything, but I can be sure that anything excessively applied will kill... including health, moral & intellectual...

Sufian Pua Tabik Zaharan....very interesting indeed. IF I am not mistaken, in time of emergency like you will die if there is nothing to eat, Muslim can eat it. Am I right?10 hours ago · · 1 person

Zaharan Razak Righto! And of course anything in excess, alcohol included, is bad. A glass of red wine a day is good for your health. So is beer. If you break any health rule, you're personally responsible. A health rule should not be a sanction to impose on the whole population on the pain of going to hell! Now that is turning a simple rule of living into living hell or an instrument of power, politics and people sanction, the holier than thou arrogance ...10 hours ago · · 2 people

Hew Yoonloong

not forgetting that europeans like the germans, love their pork as well. germans also make some of the best pork sausages. and it has not affected their ability to be good ( with technology) or bad (with ww2).
yr point is valid - but nutter...s exist in all shapes and color - they should loosen up, eat some shellfish, enjoy their sex, love their pots and quit preaching to others. But they cannot! they are aflamed!! maybe when they agitate enough, they might just be inflamed?

9 hours ago · · 2 people

Yap Poh Meng ZR well said and thank you for an interesting discourse from all. .I wonder if other muslims , especially the goatee have given thoughts to it.

Zaharan Razak

YPM: Naw ... it is politically incorrect for them ... they will probably have to find new employers or be self-employed if they talk like me ... LOL!
HWL: Agree. Been as close with the Germans as your imagination allows you and I can confirm... they are very, very clean ... their bathroom and toilet are the cleanest and driest room in the house! They spread out towels on the floor. I felt like an upcountry Orang Asli when I first stepped into one many, many years ago. I tell ya, I prefer porkeaters than lotuseaters (wink).See More

5 hours ago · · 1 person

Yap Poh Meng Many years ago, While still in service, I passed the same remarks that the pork eating countries are very much advance in tech and economy. it was not well accepted and of course some nasty remarks were passed towards me. This is rather sensitive to some and most muslim would refrain from discussing it.4 hours ago ·

Zaharan Razak

Being in denial mode, being sensitive or unwilling to admit to you're wrong is a common recourse of peoples who are saddled with upholding a falsehood which happens to be their traditional or religious beliefs. This denial is in the classic... mode of the emperor's new dress or the cow crap for King Solomon's saffron rice. And they have been at it for more than 1400 years and will carry their sensitivity millstone around their necks for the next fourteen hundred years and beyond. The cost? Retarded growth or poor self-belief, the very reason for their low-achievement and low-productivity.

Zaharan Razak Also reminds me of the story of the adult elephant who thinks the sapling his master ties him to is the same tree he was tied to when he was a baby elephant.

The Story of Man and Pig Thus Far

2011-02-05T10:51:00.002+08:00

Homo sapiens has been around for at least 200,000 years and it is reasonable to assume that pigs, wild and later domesticated, form one of his food sources for just as long and right from the beginning. If so, I think it is an insult to biological humans and an act that does not show filial respect to our ancestors, when, some 1400 years ago, some johnny-came-lately declared that humans cannot eat pigs if they want to go to heaven! Does it mean then our porcine-loving ancestors would all go to hell and half of the world's population today?

Johnny Last also imposed strict rules on the keeping of dogs so much so that most of his followers avoid dogs like the plague thus missing out on the experience of bonding with the first and most versatile animal that humans has ever tamed. These two traditions exemplify the inscrutable and logic-defying nature of many if not all the rules and precepts of Johnny's teachings. But the use of the stick and carrot, promise and threat means of persuasion, appealing to membership, common identity and authority-on-high always works on the mass mind and mass movements, in this case religions. In Johnny's religion it may be pigs and dogs, in another it is myths and stories used as common currency to whip up conformity and the adoption of make-beliefs as a surrogate for failure to think clearly and accept reality.

The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer

2011-01-21T00:08:00.003+08:00

Abandoned by its mother who may have come to grief at the hands of hunters, a baby orang hutan clings to the leg and later bosom of one of its caretakers, Michelle Yeoh, even if only during her brief for-the-media visit to Sepilok, Sabah. Feeling orphaned and inadequate, the baby orang hutan readily transfers her need for a mother figure to any surrogate mother that is any human who shows care and concern. This need and trait is common to most if not all primates, the biological order of which we are a member.

Similarly, a human who feels overwhelmed by the vastness and complexities of existence, not to mention his own personal inadequacies and shortfalls, would seek and cling to a cause, group, tribal identity or mass movement to sink and hide his sorrows in. The psychological benefits he gets from being a joiner of the cause or mass movement such as political parties, religions or racial identity are that other members would approve and clap his words and actions. He may also gain status, a position of power and influence stemming from the group.

As a member he is required to have the same beliefs and opinions on most if not all issues. Anyone who expresses conflicting beliefs and opinions are labeled heretics and become liable or fair game for persecution. A cadre with an eye for a higher position, popularity with his peers or approval from higher ups will expose and denounce the heretic, making a song and dance of it if not a career.

A common tactic is to appeal to peers and get them to clap or at least utter, "Attaboy, Mommy boy! Here's my tommy-gun to add gum to your chew!" Or words to that effect.

In the extreme form, these cadres are the fanatics who would die for their cause than be labeled a heretic, an outcast, or be insulted by one such as the body guard who shot his protege because the latter made a heretical statement appealing for the life of a woman who had been given the death penalty for insulting a mass movement of which the guard was a member. In another case, a cadre says, You may cut my neck off, but don't cut my hair please. Why? Because having his hair snipped is tantamount to having his manhood razored off. This is the belief of the cause or mass movement of which he is a member. Suicide bombers are spawned from the same zealot lot, or should I say, milked from the same ilk.

Many a movie and novel has played up this theme - I apologize for not being able to give any examples right now - but there is one non-fiction work that I know which explores this deep psychological sickness in the human psyche: The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer. Just google it.

An Exchange with a Malay Christian

2011-01-18T05:57:00.001+08:00

Zaharan: Hi, I'm a Malaysian Muslim. I have no wish to judge you. At the risk of being thought of as putting my foot in your door, let me raise a few questions. One, almost everybody seems to be anonymous here. Is this because you are afraid of being persecuted, ostracized or oppressed by some people? This anonymity may make some people wonder if you are a poseur, a non-Malay Christian pretending to be a Malay planted here for some secret agenda.
Even if you are a Malay and a Christian why belabor it and wear it on your shirt sleeve while at the same time hiding behind anonymity? A bit clashing, if not overcooked, don't you think? I apologize if I sound judgmental there.

Before becoming a Christian have you done any window-shopping and looking at catalogs of various beliefs like Buddhism, Hinduism, Atheism, Rationalism, Islam itself deeply enough and then decide to buy product A and not B or C? Have you studied comparative religions?

I'm not trying to throw a spanner into your mindset but just to share a common interest, assuming we do share a common interest - religions.

Coming a bit closer to your case, have you read any books touching on the subject of Islam-Christianity such as Ahmad Deedat, the story about Khatijah's cousin who was a Christian when he "anointed" Muhammad, the case about how Islam accepts Christianity but Christianity rejects Islam? I'm not defending or attacking either religion or any other for that matter. My standpoint is always one of impartiality when discussing inter-religious matters. My faith in Islam is a personal thing and it is not a standpoint in order to judge others. I don't believe religions more so God for that matter needs defending like he is your kid sister or can be "attacked" as God by definition is beyond such presumptuous human activities.

Finally I hope you can see this uninvited discussion of mine as an interesting and stimulating view that can only add rigor and vigor to whatever choices you make.

Thank you for your indulgence.

February 11, 2008 1:21 AM

Anonymous said...: Hi Zaharan Just to let you know that you have been very blessed by this blog. I am a Malay Christian and have searched both the Quran, five volumes of Sahih Muslim, had all literatures and videos of Ahmed Deedat, was a Muslim evangelist, research Muhd. and Isa Al-Masih. All these were my efforts to search for the truth of the one true God. In the end I cried to God for help. God showed me something that was beyond this world and in which made me completely happy. Yet I searched for another year till I gave up again and surrendered my life to God in 2003. Without knowing much I was set free, free from guilt, past, etc.I was a new creation..I don't even know why and dont knowanything about salvation?? Then that night I had a dream and was told to be baptised the following thursday afternoon. The next day, I saw a vision of Isa Al-masih on the cross, in my living room..It arrived right in front of me and He said " I died for u"..I searched the bible and my eyes were opened to Abraham sacrificing Issac..God revealed His love to me..then at the same time the Ka'abah played in my memory and that millions of Muslims went to Hajj to redeem their sins by sacrficing animals but God himself has came up with a sacrifice for us all..and that is Isa Al masih..the unblemished and the perfect one. You may not believe these but it is happening..many Muslims are accepting Isa Al Masih thru God revealing Himself in any way He chooses. One had met Isa Al Masih in Madina!! I want to encourage you to keep searching, probing and challenging any issues you have. God's spirit will show you the way. Bless you in Jesus Name.
January 6, 2009 9:24 PM

... and so on. Interested to read further? Go here: http://1flock1shepherd.blogspot.com/

See the Here and Now in a Pose of a Cat at Rest

2011-01-15T22:53:00.002+08:00

A cat does not have to have a reason to live. It just IS. Now, that's something I can learn.

Tsamrotul Jannah: mean??? a cat does not have reason to live??why??

Zaharan Razak: Why must a cat have a reason? It just lives. In the here and now. Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow is not yet. If you do not live in the here and now that means you are forever living on credit ... berhutang ... to pay off yesterday's regret and to put aside for tomorrow's fear ... this is a mind trap and a time warp.

Living for a reason means we are a pawn to the reason, we do not have an independent existence but forever be a shadow chasing something that is always just beyond our grasp reducing us to a squirming jelly of hopes and wishes for something up there, out there, and missing out on the reality of the here and now causing us not to focus on the facts of the case facing us, leading to many erroneous perceptions, making us stand back on prejudices and that is the crux of the world's problems.

The Yen and Zen of Fitness Training

2011-01-15T16:38:00.000+08:00

Today's fitness training is a mix of, one, 30 minutes of power walking at about 80 per cent of race walking pace - I guess the distance to be about 5 km - and, two, resistance training using weights, bar springs and body weight. I train 7 days a week, taking it easy on some days at about 60 per cent intensity of power training. In order to do this you have to like and enjoy what you are doing and not feel or see it as a form of self-torture. To do that you have to make it a habit, establishing a routine, a regularity and, well, a groove. Once you get into the groove, it becomes easier to do it daily. The motivation comes from doing it, from an initial awareness of its health benefit and the raising of the awareness to include the mental and spiritual dimensions as well. Exercising regularly, incorporating fitness training as a way of life not only keep you physically fit but also maintain a high level of mental alertness and emotional equilibrium. This many people know. But not many people would want to step out of rank and claim that fitness training CAN also be a spiritual experience or a way of developing a spiritual consciousness.

Before I talk about the connection between fitness training and spiritual consciousness, Let me explain what I mean by it as it has many meanings and mean different things to different people and in different contexts.

For my purpose here, spiritual consciousness is a state of mind in which you feel you can and choose to feel you are not a separate individual or ego at war, competing, envying, being jealous, comparing, wanting to best, to manipulate, feeling hostile, seeking revenge, not being concerned, not caring ... for/with others, with other living things, with the environment at the discreet, molecular and life-force levels. You can and choose to feel one with the world. This feeling or awareness is not something that falls from the sky on the wings of inspiration, revelation or after long years of meditation or prayer but instantly the moment you CHOOSE to feel it. It comes from within. Not outside. What is outside of you is only the backdrop, stepping stone or sounding board, while you are the player or drummer, as it were.

By this definition, if the awareness comes in the form of a set of memorized liturgy or quotation from an outside source however holy or celebrated, it is not the real McCoy. It has to come from your own heart and mind. You have to be able to describe it in words. It is not enough to feel it but cannot communicate it to others or record it for your own review. It is not enough to feel at peace with the world with a beatific smile on your face but all you can say is, "ERRRMMM" or "There are no words to describe it." Have you tried the dictionary?

You see, spiritual awareness is about reaching outside of your ego and skin. You don't feel that your ego and skin is a real barrier to the world outside in time and space and even dimension. And the written word is the most complete tool for this reaching out or communication. Music, dance, drawing, graphics, photography, sculpture, architecture are all great forms to express spirituality - a reaching out to universal and enduring themes of beauty and the human experience, BUT they are not standalones. Alone they are mute sentinels. You can respond in silence, in awe, but there is no sharing, no recording without the written word. Songs and speeches come close to bridging the gap between sound and word but, not recorded by the written word, they are just like froths, come and gone. So it is to the wings of the written word that we rely on to bear and share the message of our spiritual longing and realization this instant.

Now you can choose to feel and express your spirituality through any form of experience, not necessarily only through organized systems of beliefs and communal, societal or tribal traditions. You can participate in any activity in a passive, perfunctory, mechanical, blind, just enough to pass or make the grade, only physically, mentally or adding a spiritual dimension to it. To be cynical, you can say even robbing a bank, killing or committing suicide can be spiritual. I can't disagree with that statement. I know literature has explored the theme of spirituality in negativity, criminality or destruction. Seen spiritually, destruction, for example, is the ending of a phase and the beginning of another, a case of the phoenix rising from the ashes.

But back to fitness training and spirituality. That's it. Just will your mind to transcend the constrictions of conventional thinking -- the ego within the skin limitation - while your feet are pounding the path ... tap-a-tap-tap ... tap-a-tap-tap ... and simply love the world around you, the people looking at you with funny looks (yes they deserve your love too) ... but for heaven's sake don't pick up every stray kitten that crosses your path just because you're now a lovey-dopey convert ... sigh ...

CMOS Sensor Powered Superzoom Camera: Fujifilm Finepix HS20EXR

2011-01-12T00:10:00.004+08:00

This is the first BSI (Backside Illuminated) CMOS sensor powered superzoom compact camera on the market. Its 30x zoom is not the longest as Canon's Powershot SX30 IS with its 35x focal range being the widest at 24 - 840 mm compared to Fuji's 24 - 720 mm. But on other features, it beats the Canon (admittedly a 2010 model with no 2011 update) by far, sporting RAW shooting capability, HD video and a CMOS sensor.

Fujifilm FinePix HS20 key features:

All-new 16 megapixel EXR CMOS sensor
30x optical zoom covering 24-720mm (35mm equivalent)
3.0 inch tilting rear LCD with 460,000 pixels and new Rich User Interface using Vector fonts and graphics
Full resolution high speed shooting at 8fps, high speed video capture at up to 320 fps (320 x 112 pixels)
Advanced Anti-blur technologies
1600% wide dynamic range
Longer battery life (up to 350 frames with 4 x AA batteries)
Electronic Horizon level function
RAW shooting (RAW or JPEG or simultaneous RAW+JPEG)
Full HD movie capture using H.264 (MOV) format
New 27 mode EXR Auto mode
Colour fringe reduction and improved corner sharpness
Film simulation modes
Quick start mode
360° Motion Panorama mode
TTL flash control with optional external flashes
Lens hood included
Photobook Assist function

It is about time I upgrade my present superzoom camera, the Panasonic Lumix DMC FZ28 (18x, 10 mp). The Fuji seems to fit the bill as it is as dSLR-like as you can get in terms of performance and low light usability with no disadvantage of having to buy extra lenses. I await a full review before deciding to buy it or not. Together with the Sony TX10 as a rugged compact, these two look like my photography getup for 2011 on.

Fujifilm FinePix HS10 specifications

Sensor	• 1/2" EXR-CMOS sensor • 16.0 million effective pixels
Movie clips	• 1920 x 1080pixels @ 30fps • 1280 x 720pixels @ 60fps • 640 x 480pixels @ 30fps with stereo sound
Movie mode functions	• High Speed Movie（80/160/320 fps) • Vertical movie shooting tagging • Still Shooting during in Movie Recording
File formats	• Still image : RAW, JPEG (Exif Ver. 2.3 ) • Movie : H.264 (MOV)
Lens	• Fujinon 30x Optical zoom lens • F2.8 - F5.6 • f=4.2mm – 126mm • 24 - 720mm equiv.
Image stabilization	Yes, Sensor-shift
Metering	TTL 256-zones metering
Aperture	F2.8- F11 (Wide) F5.6- F11 (Tele)
Modes	• Program • Shutter Priority • Aperture Priority • Manual • Custom • Auto • SP • Movie
Scene	EXR AUTO (27 scenes)
White balance	• Automatic scene recognition • Preset (Fine, Shade, Fluorescent light (Daylight), Fluorescent light (Warm White), Fluorescent light (Cool White), Incandescent light)
Self timer	Approx. 10 sec./ 2 sec. delay
Continuous shooting	• L : Top - 8 / 4 (3, 5, 8 fps) • M : Top - 16, 8, 4 (3 / 5 / 8 / 11 fps) • S : Top - 32 / 16 / 8 / 4 (3, 5, 8, 11 fps)
Flash	• Auto flash(super i-flash)
Electronic Viewfinder	• 0.2-inch Colour LCD • Approx. 200,000 dots
LCD monitor	• 3.0 inch • approx. 460,0000 pixels • TFT colors LCD monitor
Digital input/output	• USB 2.0 High Speed • HDMI Mini connector
Video output	NTSC / PAL selectable
Storage	• Internal memory (Approx. 20MB) • SD / SDHC / SDXC (UHS-I) memory card
Power	4 x AA batteries
Number of frames	• Alkaline : Approx. 350 • Ni-MH : 　Approx 400 　　 • Lithium : Approx. 700
Weight (no batt)	Approx. 636g
Weight (inc. batt & card)	Approx. 730g
Dimensions	131 (W) x 91 (H) x 126 (D) mm
Included accesories	• 4 x AA type alkaline batteries • Shoulder strap • USB cable • AV cable • Lens cap and Lens cap cord • CD-ROM • Owner's manual • Lens hood
Optional accesories	• AC Power Adapter AC-5VX • DC coupler CP-04 • Lens hood LH-HS10 • Remote release RR80 • Shoe Mount Flash EF-42 / EF-20

Sony's New Ruggedized Camera Sports A CMOS Sensor

2011-01-07T00:09:00.002+08:00

Sony CyberShot TX10 is the first ruggedized compact camera to sport a CMOS sensor for better lowlight capture. This is the feature I've been waiting to see in this category all these years. All rugged cameras have been using the smaller CCD sensor and picture quality suffers as a result. I will wait for a full review of the camera by the experts before making up my mind if this is my rugged camera of choice though.

Rugged ultracompact replacing the TX5
Waterproof, dustproof, shockproof, and freezeproof
3.0-inch touchscreen LCD
1080i movie capture
16.2-megapixel Exmor R backside-illuminated CMOS sensor
3D stills and 3D Sweep Panorama
Available in March in US for about US$330

Olympus XZ-1: Enthusiast-level Compact Camera

2011-01-06T23:46:00.006+08:00

The Olympus XZ-1 is the company's offering in the enthusiast-level digital compact camera segment consisting of Panasonic Lumix LX5, Canon Powershot S95, Canon G12, Samsung EX1, Fujifilm X100 and Nikon Coolpix P7000. It has the brightest lens at 1.8 but uses a CCD instead of a CMOS sensor. Whether this lack of a CMOS is a deal breaker awaits a full review by the experts (not this blog!) An online source says Malaysian price is $1,800.

CNET Asia: On to the two main features of the XZ-1: The lens and the image sensor. The Olympus camera has a 4x optical zoom lens, but what sets it apart from competition is the aperture rating. The glass has a focal length of 28-112mm, F1.8-2.5. This means that even when you max out the zoom, the largest aperture opening is F2.5, which is big when compared with the LX5 and S95's F3.3 and F4.9 aperture at their longest focal length, respectively. In theory, the XZ-1's F2.5 aperture means that users can employ faster shutter speeds at 112mm, hence yielding sharper photos. Also to be noted is that the company used its Zuiko lenses for the compact, which are typically reserved for its interchangeable lens cameras.

As for the image sensor, the Olympus employs a 1/1.63-inch sensor similar to the LX5's. Conventionally, this means that it has more surface area to gather light to deliver better pictures even at higher ISO settings. As the unit we have is a prototype, we are unable to test the image quality.

Photos: CNET Asia

High Sensitivity 10MP CCD sensor
28-112mm equivalent lens
F1.8-2.5 maximum aperture
CCD-shift image stabilization
Twin control dials, including one around the lens
ISO 100-6400
New TruPic V processor (as used in the company's PEN series)
Large 3.0" 621k (VGA equivalent) OLED display
720p movie mode (30 fps in Motion JPEG format)
Micro HDMI connector
6 Art Filters (As per the PEN series)
In-camera RAW conversion
Built-in flash, hotshoe and remote flash control
Built-in ND filter

When you think of god, what is it exactly you're thinking of?

2011-01-06T15:55:00.015+08:00

Zaharan Razak When you think of god, what is it exactly you're thinking of?
Shakirah Zain Soalan cepu mas ... ($60,000 question)
Zaharan Razak Is it the word, the name, an image, a picture, a feeling, a series of dire threats of punishment, a holding out of hope, a haranguing, a sacred cow, a mix of some or all that you've been told but can never hope to experience without the media of word, image and feeling? God is any or all of that then? A projection of the mind onto its own screen in place of the objective reality which is supposed to exist out there or immanently in everything including your mind? Is it an idea in your head or an object, a quality, an invisible power (much like magnetism but much more), an argument (the uncaused cause) which is basically an idea? In so far as you cannot experience it, god does not exist. It exists only as an idea, a feeling, a hope, a symbol or as a told tale no different from gossip or as a propaganda tool used to exploit and manipulate the masses into mass obedience but creating instead mass disobedience and mass hypocrisy of the order of the Emperor's New Dress or safron rice for cow pad ... sigh ...

Shakirah Zain I think I edge closest to God when I am not thinking ...

Munyati Jawahir I think about my tough life ...

Zaharan Razak When you are not thinking, what are you thinking of? Is it a blank or a blur? Surely god is neither ... come to think of it, it could well be ... Can the mind ever be empty? When we stop thinking of A, the mind switches to B, to C, jumping from subject to subject like a butterfly. The idea of meditating to empty the mind is fallacious ... just let the stream of thoughts flow without trying to control them or be affected by them ... just be a witness ... even in sleep the mind is thinking albeit in a different mode .... sigh ...

Zaharan Razak MJ: God is a tough life then! Or at least a lorry to load your remembrance or thinking of"tough life" onto ... be careful, no overloading ... can lead to accident or wear and tear ... tough ...

Zaharan Razak Most people think of god - the idea of it anyway - when they feel down and out, when they are in trouble ... which means the idea of god is the mind's way of offering hope ... god then is just a mental activity ... an emotion or idea ... a means of coping with "tough times" ... we project our troubled thoughts onto a taught/received/drummed-into-your-head symbol of hope ... the thought of god as symbolism ... just rolling my dung ball ...
Zendy Zee Sir, when you think of god, what is it exactly you're thinking of?
Zaharan Razak Haha, ZZ, trust you to attempt to crash-land the table on my head! Here is my flow to your blow: In common with humanity at large, but not with any particular community who might think it heretical at such a pantheistic/eclectic/syncretic/all-encompassing/overarching idea of god, I think of all the aforementioned possibilities plus I stand apart and bear witness to the stream of thoughts and history of man much like taking up a temporary bivouac at a vantage point to watch the cars, bikes, buggies and trucks race by in the Atacama Desert in the ongoing Argentina-Chile 2011 Dakar Rally ... to see an ocean in a drop of water, to see the world in a grain of sand, to see god in a race across the desert ... ah, the poetic beauty of it all ... just rolling my dung ball ... 'I' of the Dung Beetle ...
Woh Siew Leong many kanfuzed God with a diet, a building, a book etc ... I say, search no further than your heart, that's where God is
Zaharan Razak WSL: You mean heart the physical organ, or the sum of your feelings and emotions including your will and intentions, good and bad? God is now reduced to an emotional heart, a human heart. What about monkey heart? Monkey awso got heart, what? Why not call a spade a spade? Why call it by a high-sounding name? For glamor? Aura? Glitz and glitter? A mercedez and not a proton (or potong as self-confessed monkeys would want to call it?) ... another slap on the dung ball to keep it rolling up the slope ... in the spirit of Sisyphus ...
Woh Siew Leong no ZR, God has never been reduced into an emotional heart, let alone being termed monkeyish. God is inside our heart, that's my point, as the soul and engine of our life. this heart then propels us to give to the poor, to cry a river, to think ...... with God's nourishment, this heart empowers us with the checks and balances of life
Zaharan Razak I see, God is to be found in the human heart ... not in a flower, not in a rock, not even in a monkey heart ... Darwin, your theory is wrong! If God is in the human heart and it "propels" (turbo?) Hitler, Saddam, Idi Amin, the Russ who massacred the Inuits, the Japanese army who killed 90,000 civilians in the Nanking Massacre ... I'd want to extend the inquiry a bit further than the human heart to outside of it as well, say, the monkey heart ... another slap on the dung ball ...
Woh Siew Leong ZR, that's your hearty assumptions gone imaginative ... just keep it simple, as long as we have the heart to see and smell the flowers, the heart to scale a rock, the heart to walk straight, Darwin or Hitler or Saddam matters not
Jeeva Jepp honestly, cant find the words to put it as an answer.
Shakirah Zain When I stop my thought process, I feel free. But it is fleeting. Coz the mind is conditioned to be busy, to worry, to covete
A Room To Grow hhhhmmmm......someone who can give/present/solutions...ways...miracles...make my life easier:-)
Zaharan Razak JJ: Have you tried the dictionary? WSL might want to recommend the Book of Daniel and I would add the Bhagavad Gita ... failing which you might want to replace the medium of words with another, a statuette perhaps?

WSL: The topic of this thread is what exactly are we thinking of when we think of god ... not where, not what matters not, not my imaginative style ... you're getting off the thread ...
SZ: Our stream of consciousness, thinking, is like a river ... we cannot stop it, neither does it serve any purpose to do so, the trick is to channel, focus, harness, stimulate it to keep it in a healthy state and do some useful work like problem solving, understanding the world including ourselves, thinking of others, and finally, when feeling tired or stressed out, resting it with light entertainment like listening to music, being alone, having laughs, light reading, light conversation (no power struggle) and final of finals ... sleep ... ah, bliss of bliss ...

Room: You're not looking for someone special, are you?
Jeeva Jepp nah.. no pictures come up in my mind when i think about god, the most is juz a thought process that takes place when i think about god. rational. surprisingly different when u think about religion. seems like god and religion somehow in my mind is far apart.
Zaharan Razak WSL: Oh, forgot to mention, Hanuman the Monkey God might feel miffed with your words " ... let alone be termed monkeyish ... " Please note I did not 'term' god was monkeyish. It is your own imagination.
Ahmad Fares sins ...
Zaharan Razak SINS: Say it nicely, stupid!
Yap Poh Meng Suffering, killing, destruction of nations......etc.

The New Name of My Other Blog, http://zaharan.blogspot.com/

2011-01-04T03:41:00.002+08:00

Believing In Judgment Day or Qiamat

2010-12-31T19:11:00.003+08:00

A belief in judgment day or qiamat is an article of faith no less or more than a scout's pledge to honor king and kountry. If you join the scout's movement you are required to recite the pledge, no less or more than you do so upon the formality of becoming an MP. No one questions it; people just do it, going through the motions whatever go inside their hearts. Nor is it my intention here to question people's rights to any faith. What I like to question is what is in people's hearts. Not the heart of any Tom, Dick and Harry but the human heart generally and that is an open field and rich vein of study called psychology available to anyone who takes the trouble to read up. No need for a formal degree. Just read up.

You see, faith may be sacrosanct but not the anthropology, philosophy, psychology and sociology of faiths. You may also include another tool for scrutinizing faith, comparative religions. With these tools of study you will have a field day dissecting and analyzing the sacred cow of faith, hitting a rich vein simply called human nature, arguably the most interesting subject under the sun to study.

So here are a few juicy lines of what underlying emotions fire men to put so much faith in faith. Straight off, let me remind the gentle reader that when we talk of faith we are talking about believing in claims that cannot be proven right or wrong. For example, if a bantu or a vanuatu claims that a frog is the manifestation of god, you just nod politely, sagely, or choose to remain motionless. You must not snigger because sniggering is bad form. The important thing to remember here is neither you, nor the fella, Bee or Vee, can prove what either had just said was right or wrong.

So what's with the belief in the Last Day? Well, I put it to you, psychologically, believing in it is like the gambler's last throw of the dice after he has lost all his money at Genting, simultaneously hoping to win and not caring if he does not. If he wins, he has come good; if he does not, it is not going to make a difference. He's broke and he is bankrupt, moneywise. Mind you, he may have one or two aces up his sleeve: for sure, he is confident his maker will forgive him his sins and his devoted wife will bail him out.

A believer in last days can also be likened to a bankrupt. Having sinned his life away, like a bankrupt who wasted away his assets in lost ventures hopes for a bail-out, a sinner hopes for last minute redemption - his sacred books are full of last minute redemption stories to pull him back to rank.

Having conscientiously or self-consciously done more good than bad by his own estimation, a do-gooder hopes to claim his rewards.

Having been at the receiving end of foul acts and getting more than his fair share of a bad start in life, not to mention poor luck throughout his life, the less-fortunate hopes for some compensation to level the field of fate.

Heard tell, the idea of last days involves some sort of cataclysmic event, an apocalypse, an armageddon, an all out war between good and evil. In this scenario, the evil role is of course played by others who don't share your faith. So if you are standing on the right, those on the left are the evil ones. While those standing on the left says the evil ones are those on the right. Whether the two sets of players are humans - down to the last man, woman and child - it must be, but heard tell two symbolic figures may fight the battle on our behalf while we watch the proceedings from various vantage points.

The idea of a final and utter destruction to all of mankind, the mother-lode to all the apparent destruction and deaths throughout human experience, is a common thread in faiths and history and appeals to our sense of injured dignity and pride. It is like when we get hurt or is about to die, we wish, fantasize, that others would suffer the same fate. When a footballer falls down in a tangle of legs he just might hook a loose foot around that of another player's to bring him down too. When a criminal is cornered in a shootout with the police he will try to take other lives with him. A soldier shares the same obsession. In a scene of many people dying, like being trapped in a mine or swept by tsunamic waves, the fascination of seeing others dying around you is just as intense as fearing your own end.

Believing in qiamat is mankind's ultimate attempt to make sense of an existence that makes little sense. It is the ultimate cry of a babe left in the forest to fend for itself before the kind wolf picks her up. Sorry Hans Christian Anderson, but I'd rewrite the tale of Hansel and Gretel thissaways: lost, disoriented, hungry, shivering, sobbing, fearful, exhausted, sleep-deprived, they would long for death to end their pain and misery ... if they do die, then indeed their world has come to an end and believing in judgment day would go a long way to ease their tortured minds. I can also flip the ending on its other side and make the siblings survive their ordeal, either by eventually finding their way out back to civilization or being rescued. Then a belief in judgment day would provide an extra boost to their recuperation and getting back into the groove of normal living.

In conclusion, whether judgment day is an objective reality that will take place in the future as a single event affecting everyone dead or alive or is an onging event applied to individual deaths cannot be proven or disproved and is a matter of faith. But psychologically, our minds need this belief as a buoy to keep our sanity afloat.

Me? I like to stand back and apart and be a witness to life's flow of beliefs and events, be it coursing through my own mind or humanity at large.

Three Folding/Disassemble-able Recumbent Trikes: Terratrike Rover, Trident Spike & HP Velotechnik Gekko Fxk

2010-12-28T23:37:00.003+08:00

Below: The Trident Spike folds; seat height is 15". Story goes that the Spike was made and named as such expressly to taunt the earlier-made Terratrike Rover in the spirit of "Wee Ken Fatt - Soh Ken Wee." Go figure. Full specs are not available as of this time. It was launched yesterday in the US.

Above: The Terratrike Rover can be disassembled into four parts for easy stowage or transport. Seat height is highish at 18". A bit on the heavy side at about 19 kg and is not a speed demon.

These two recumbent tadpole trikes represent a sub-group of recumbent trikes with high seats. They are not the first or only ones but they are perhaps unique in being quality trikes selling for under US$1,000.

13-inch seat height
fastest folding
a commuting trike also suitable for touring when fitted with accessories
Made in Germany

Don Quixote (Teh-O-Ki, in reverse) alias Pak Pandik alias Gadfly alias Buzzard

2010-12-27T23:46:00.002+08:00

Two of my favorite literary caricatures, Don and Pak. The insect is a bonus ammo in my Rambo belt. The bird is a new notch. Or so my benighted imagination deceives me. Not being blessed with superior anything - birth, luck or intelligence - I've chosen to spend the rest of my life huffing away at the edifices erected by fellow humans who are far more superior than me. Since I'm no Socrates, I should be able to go the whole hog without hemlock. My ascendant is Aquarius. My horoscope says I'm a humanitarian who identifies with the world and the human race. Please, do not race-profile me. The bit don't (sic) fit. I am my own person who marches to my own drum beat, ahead of my time and thus liable to be labeled as an eccentric, weirdo or sesat (stray) by tribalists. The price to pay? I cannot fall back on tribal support when threatened or oppressed, often by thuggees thrown up by the tribe. I just have to learn to live with that, steep though the learning curve is. Having to fall back on my own resources will hopefully restock my coping armory. Insist I'm smart and I'll show who is an upstart. Me! I may disagree with you but I'll defend your right to disagree with me. I can identify with the old and young, traditional and non-traditional. Thus sprake Zaroastran (Zaharan & Zoroastra), the Confused One (Yang Kohopiuh in Tranungspeak). Far, far, from the madding crowd, on the lunatic fringe, is where I tread my life and ply my trade, bandy nonsensical words about.

Al-Quran, Surah 5: Al Ma'idah, Section 11: Christian Nearness to Islam, Line 82

2010-12-27T11:09:00.002+08:00

"Strongest among men in enmity to the believers wilt thou find the Jews and Pagans; and nearest among them in love to the believers wilt thou find those who say, 'We are Christians', because amongst these are men devoted to learning and men who have renounced the world and they are not arrogant."

The above quote is taken from the book "The Meaning of the Holy Quran ... " by Abdullah Yusof Ali.

I do not know the whole truth of anything be it god or any revealed religion and I doubt anyone does. Many people and texts claim to be (represent is closer to the truth) knowledgeable (experts) or the actual word of god. I have no quarrel with them.

What I would like to do here is give my own honest opinion for the quarter sen that it is worth. If my opinion differs from anyone else's, that is the mark of an open market place of ideas. I stand on the principle that everyone is free and entitled to their opinion whether they are factually right or wrong. For example people have the right to believe that the Earth is flat. I do. But that is another topic. What is wrong is to impose your opinions on others. Of course if you are a teacher and a pupil says 2+2 = 3 you have a duty to correct the mistake. That is a factual error and not an opinion. An opinion is a statement about variables, validity, values, logic, philosophy, aesthetics, judgments - non-factual matters. It is important that we can clearly see the difference between a fact and an opinion. The two are often mixed together and we are easily confused, easily assuming one is the other when they are often not. A fact is a statement or word referring to an objective reality which can be proven or self-evident in its truth. If there is a difference, by degree or meaning, between a statement and the thing it refers to, then it is an opinion though it claims or purports to be a fact.

So what I'm going to say now about the quote from the book above is an opinion, not a fact. It tries to come as close as it can to the universal standard of acceptance - the truth - but how far it does is for the reader to judge for himself, hopefully without fear or favor. Just remember that whatever you say is also an opinion although you may think it is a fact. I suppose for argument sake we can tentatively agree to accept the criterion that a fact (other than straight forward facts like 2+2 = 4) is a statement which is logical (based on valid reasoning which we don't want to go into for now) and which can be agreed to by many people without fear or favor. For example most if not all can accept this statement as an opinion which is close to being a fact or true: Harmony and peace is better than acrimony and war.

Here are my statements about issues raised in the quote above:

1. "Strongest ... enmity ... Jews and Pagans ... " This quote is vague, generalizing, stereotyping, racial-profiling, racist, smacks of bigotry, fixed/inflexible, intolerant of people of different persuasions and expressions and purporting coming from an all powerful figure it is contradictory of it to condemn its own creation ... one wrong Wong does not make all Wongs wrong ... there are as many kinds of pagans as there are fish in the ocean ... psychologically everybody is a pagan in the sense that we mediate and communicate through symbols, images, things and transact with earth and gravity which is essentially what paganism is ... minus the rituals and ceremonies which differing only in form characterize all religions.

2. " ... and nearest among them in love to the believers wilt thou find those who say, 'We are Christians', because amongst these are men devoted to learning and men who have renounced the world, and they are not arrogant." Again this is gross generalization. And why discriminate among different persuasions and creeds? Why not accept all as different ways of expressing the same universal needs and concerns? Is it referring to Christians of a specific area and era? Say so, if so. Or is it meant to be for all times as is commonly understood? And why highlight and label the Christians as having among them men of learning and men who renounce the world as just as many if not more among them don't and as if other creeds don't have such men? Why not mention the great traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism too. What about the longest continuously surviving civilization men has even known - the Chinese? And yet the book the above quote is taken from claims to be perfect and complete and the unalterable word of the creator ... sigh ...

3. From even a cursory glance of the book it is self-evident that the book is obsessed with pitting people against people, the so-called believers and unbelievers. Unbelievers of course refers to all religions other than the anointed one - Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, the Chinese religions (many ... hehe ... Taoism, Confucianism, ancestor worship), all forms of animism and paganism, sun worshippers, emperor and king worshippers, atheists, agnostics, existentialists, humanists (truth be told I'm a bit of everything, nothing and beyond ... hehe ... ). This is divisive politics at its worst. No wonder world politics has come down to goatees vs the rest of mankind. An over-simplification but still ... The book is obsessed with reminding its readers, again and again, repeating the same thing over and over, sin and punishment, sin and punishment and how great is great ... It is like Muhammad Ali shouting, "I'm the greatest." Say what you will, but I'm more interested in the psychology behind the ideology, if you don't mind. If you remove all the repeat words, I don't need to use a calculator or make a computer analysis of what is already obvious to the rough eye, the book would be reduced to a postage stamp.

Enough said.

Points of Disagreement: Agreeing to Disagree

2010-12-25T18:16:00.003+08:00

All talks have a topic or should. Some meander without focus or direction serving up not so much a topic but the relationship between or among the participants. Often there is an underlying power struggle to determine a status, hierarchy or pit one's will against another/others. Talks can proceed smoothly, stutter, falter, meander into a dead end or come to an abrupt end. It may even proceed under pretense or duress.

Talk is like a game of soccer. The ball is the topic, point of agreement or contention. If the talk proceeds smoothly to the satisfaction of all parties it is like a good game of soccer in which the players by and large concentrate on playing the ball rather than attempting to scythe the legs of opposing players.

In any discussion, online or off, instead of focusing on the what of a topic we tend to be distracted by the question of who is talking, the personality or status of the speaker, his social orientation and demographic background. We go for the man rather than the matter. We question or attack their character rather than address the subject, the original question all but forgotten. We bring in new, off-thread topics perhaps because we feel trapped, pushed to the wall, inadequate or incompetent to answer the original question. For sure, a participant's credentials color his stand and knowing them is half of the work in understanding done but leave it in the background instead of turning it into a hot topic forgetting the original one altogether.

This is what is called a communication breakdown. The discussion could not proceed, tails off or comes to an abrupt, often unceremonious, end.

Just as the ball is the object of contention in soccer, so is the topic or thread in a discussion. The rule, play the ball, applies to both. Let us agree to disagree when disagreeing, in a spirit of sportsmanship - fair play, equal opportunity, level field, playing by the rules - and enjoy disagreeing as much as we enjoy agreeing.

Anti-Aging Tips for the 50 Plus

2010-12-24T13:11:00.005+08:00

Here is a checklist of things you can do to help you enhance your total health - mind, body and soul - particularly if you are 50 and above. Tissokay, don't feel lacking if you can't tick all. The more the better of course and you can always start a new activity if you want to add to your list:

1.To stimulate and challenge your body wiring, do simple chores or exercises with your weaker hand - brushing teeth, combing hair, playing badminton, soaping your body, writing "punishment lines" (I shall not be late to school) daily,

2. Go for daily brisk walks. you should feel that you are breathing a bit harder than normal.This will stimulate your blood circulation, exercise your lungs, strengthen your heart, tone your muscles and give your skin a glow. Walking about at home in the normal course of a day is better than nothing but it is not good enough as it does not elevate your heart rate which strengthens it. A hike in the woods is the best form of walking.

3 You don't have to give the exercise a name like yoga but bend and stretch your joints.

4. Do static, weight-bearing, resistance exercises like pushing your body off the chair or floor, straightening your knee while seated (good for the tendons holding the kneecaps).

5.Pummel all parts of the body that you can reach with your fists, fingers, palms - shoulders, back of head, lower back, arms, abdomen, chest, soles of your feet. palms.

6. Swing your arms clockwise and anti-clockwise to loosen, straighten and tone your shoulders.

7. Play board games like chess and scrabble to exercise your brains and socialize.

8. Play card games to keep your wits about you.

9.Read every day. Balance your reading material between the informative and imaginative.

10. Write regularly if not everyday. Keep a journal and, in this digital world, the best form is blogging. Writing on FB is good too. Bear in mind that smsing, writing in incomplete, abbreviated sentences, stringing not longer than three sentences together is better than nothing but it doesn't quite help to enhance your mental power as writing in complete sentences and coherent paragraphs.

11. When writing, at least make an attempt to respect and honor a minimum of correct spelling, grammar and other guides to good composition such as consistent forms and coherency.

12. Have a few hobbies that are balanced among the three human needs - physical, mental and spiritual. Many hobbies cater to all three with emphasis on one. Gardening, for example, is physical but can also be mentally stimulating and spiritually satisfying. Photography is mental, spiritual and can be physical (the walking involved to get the best images). Of course being superficial is not enough; you've got to go deeper into your hobbies.

13. Learn a new language; know more than one language. I am competent in English (A1, MCE), passable in Malay (C6, MCE) and know a smattering of German and Thai. Am learning Arabic, French, Spanish.

14, Learn to dance if you haven't done so already. Of course formal dancing is better than impromptu jiggling to the music coming from the radio but it is better than not dancing at all. To benefit more from dancing, you have to do it regularly.

15. Learn to play a musical instrument. I'm hopeless at this. I love music and it affects me deeply but play? No talent. Just like swimming. One of my serious hobbies is kayaking, but I cannot swim. Wearing a personal flotation device makes all the difference.

16. Listen to music, especially classical music. Purchase a reasonably good high fidelity audio system, not necessarily a very expensive one. but if you can afford it, why not.

17. Learn or continue to learn, formally or informally; join a class or study on your own. My interests are encyclopedic from comparative religions to photography to mysticism so learning is a daily process for me in order to keep pace with the passing parade of news and views I encounter daily.
I never allow a word or term that I'm uncertain of to pass me by without googling up its meaning.

18.Travel. It may be a cliche but it is true, travel broadens the mind.

19. Be a volunteer. Apart from the fact that altruism is a virtue in its own image and reward, it makes you feel needed and that is good for our restless soul and clattering mind.

20 Believe in something that is more important than your ego. Sense that you are a small and mortal part of something immense and immortal. This is arguably the most important tip. It is both the hardest and easiest to hold. My personal experience is the awareness keeps slipping from my grasp. I keep falling into the delusion of self-importance. One practical tip: always give way or precedence to others especially those you consider are weaker and poorer than you. While driving, I practice defensive and not aggressive driving. Never shout, swear, wave a fist, scowl, give a fierce look, at another road user while being shut in your air-conditioned car which usually only the passengers in the car get the benefit of. Smile and nod more.

21. Eat. Always be mindful of the food pyramid. Do not live to eat. Be frugal. Don't waste food. Order what you can finish or prepare food at the most for keeping over for one more meal.

22. Sleep. Ah, who doesn't know this one or needs persuading. Still we don't always listen to our own advice and stay up late. I'm guilty of this and there is no cure. Our whole day will be affected, jeopardizing our time for other activities.

23. Meditate. Slow down the heart, still the mind, be in the here and now ... easier said than done. You need to do it regularly to have any chance of being competent at it. Don't just do it during times set aside specially for it. Inculcate it into other activities such as while driving, talking, walking and during stressful moments.

24. Sense of humor. Like charity, humor begins at home. Yes, it is quite safe to do it at home. Never leave home without one.

This is by no means a complete list and you can add or subtract it to suit yourself but the 24 tips above should be a useful basis to start reviewing your lifestyle and judge if it is healthy or not.

Enthusiasts' Digital Compact Camera, Fujifilm FinePix X100, on the 2011 Horizon ...

2010-12-21T21:58:00.005+08:00

The Fujifilm FinePix X100, on sale in March 2011, is a significant departure from most digital compact cameras in that it sports a retro rangefinder look, an APS-C sized CMOS sensor which is ordinarily only available in dSLR cameras, a large F2 aperture lens (useful for low-lights and achieving a soft focus background) with a built-in ND filter, a dedicated RAW button, a fixed focal length of 23 mm/35 mm equivalent (better resolution and less lens aberration), a hybrid viewfinder (EVF and OVF with auto parallax correction), 1280x720 HD video with stereo and a 2.8" color LCD monitor.

The retro design goes back to rangefinder cameras first popularized by Leica from the 1930s of the type used exclusively by legendary photographer Henri Cartier Bresson. Japanese brands came onto the scene in the 50s with Nikon made popular by Life Magazine war photographer David Douglas Duncan who used it to cover the Korean War of the 50s. I had a cheap Yashica rangefinder camera in the 70s. Rangefinder cameras went out of fashion from the 80s being overtaken by SLRs and, later, digital compacts and dSLRs. The X100 may well start a revival of compact rangefinders combining digital innovations and the simplicity of the classic design.

For more details of X100, see here: http://www.finepix-x100.com/x100/technical-specification. Price will be about RM3,000 putting it beyond most casual photographer's ambitions, if not pockets.

Bird Photography

2010-12-17T22:46:00.004+08:00

Above: January 10, 2011: Must be the same pair, on the rooftop of a neighboring house. Photo taken from DdD.

A shot of the same male hornbill on a different day (21/12/2010) this time perched high on a tree but still within sight from DdD. The female has just flown off to another tree ahead of her mate.

Above: Two shots of the same bird, the common Magpie Robin. The wall fence of my house, Dungeon di Dungun, is a favorite perch of many birds and it provides a perfect setting for me to take photos of them.

Above: Two shots of the same pair of Black and White Casqued Hornbills. The difference between the male and female can be seen not only in terms of their plumage, bill and casque but also body language relative to each other. The lady seems to defer and mirror her mate ... part of their lifelong monogamous pairing harmony ...

Dogs Allowed In Mosques

2010-12-14T15:30:00.003+08:00

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Muzaffar Kaisar Ishak: A Remarkable and Unique Malaysian Menagerie Owner

2010-12-14T01:14:00.004+08:00

Muzaffar runs a menagerie of small animals and birds at Janda Baik. Most people who keep show animals or birds such as cats or ayam serama tend to keep only one type of animal for example there is a breeder of pheasants that I know in Ajil, near Kuala Brang, Terengganu. But Muzaffar has dogs, cats, birds, foxes and more. Most if not all his animals are pedigree and potential show winners implying they command premium prices. This is remarkable enough but what bowls me over is, as an animal fancier who normally would go only for the best, Muzaffar finds room in his heart to give a home to strays, not too many of course as his is a menagerie and not an animal shelter. Of all the animals he keeps, the largest number are dogs by breed and total number. He has Rottweilers, Shetland collies, French Bullmastiff (guessing), Miniature Pinschers (this one I'm also guessing), etc. Like all menageries, Muzaffar's observes a strict protocol for visitors for obvious reasons. You can't just walk in unannounced. Strictly by appointment only.

A show winning Bengal cat ...

I'm not sure what breed of dog this one is ... my guess is that it is a French bullmastiff aka Dogue de Bordeaux ... see, my knowledge of dogs is not too bad, eh?

A partial view of his menagerie ... it looks well designed and maintained ...

Muzaffar taking part in a dog show with his Shetland collies ...

A Rottweiler ...

... and this image of a stray dog really touches me ... the contrast in the expression of this previously neglected dog and the rest of the dogs in the menagerie is most telling ... I'm sure Muzaffar places the dog away from the rest of his menagerie to prevent the spread of disease ...

Visiting Jafree & Nusrat

2010-12-12T00:05:00.003+08:00

Jafree is a senior journalist with Malaysian Digest, an online newspaper; Nusrat studied law, psychology and communication but works as a housewife. She has done short work stints and travel in the course of which she has met Shamsiah Fakeh, Suu Kyi and Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Currently all sorts of artistic people come over to their big, rented bungalow in Taman Tasik Titiwangsa, KL. She writes poetry as a form of self-expression.

Jafree, Nusrat, me, singer Ito and film-maker Nasir at the couple's house today.

The couple's exquisite-looking Japanese clay teapot. Nusrat knows a thing or two about the finer points of drinking tea, explaining an octave or two higher than my level of tea tasting sensitivity.

The J & N enterprise has three dogs and 12 cats ... all rescued or given ... including a Bull Mastiff with a pedigree.

The 13-month old Bull Mastiff ... has a strong protective instinct of its owners ... she once made an aggressive move to a passerby while she was talking to the couple outside the gate because the woman raised a stick to point at something above their heads ...

Pentax K-5: In My 2011 Wish List

2010-12-11T01:43:00.000+08:00

I will want the 18-135 mm lens over the standard 18-55 mm for obvious reasons. Be prepared to pay a premium price. The lens are weather-sealed. So is the body. I'm choosing the K5 over Nikon D7000, Canon 60D and Sony ALT A55 translucent mirror camera. It will be my first SLR, digital or film.

English Cyclists David & Joan Wooldridge Spotted On The Kuala Terengganu-Dungun Road

2010-12-01T18:06:00.002+08:00

Dedicated long haul cyclists seem to pay scant regard to the weather as proven by this couple from England, David and Joan. Nor does age deter! He is 69 while she is 67! I spotted them at Kg Mercang, on the Kuala Terengganu-Dungun road, pedaling in the rain today while I was driving towards KT. I drove ahead of them for about two km and stopped at a bus shelter to ambush them with my camera. I had hardly finished taking a leak when they were upon me forcing me to hail them down with cries of "Hold it, Hold it, Hold it right there!" They cheerfully obliged and the photos were the results.

After exchanging pleasantries and some basic information, David gave me his calling card which says "Cyclists Welcome in Cambridge, England." Their website: www.davidjoan.me.uk.

Coming upon them and knowing their age gives me one more reason to continue with my global cycling plan which is taking a knock or two lately.

Midas Touch for Disaster: Third consecutive Day

2010-12-01T17:18:00.001+08:00

Today I came across this express bus on its side at Kg Pulau Kerengga on the KT-Dungun road at about 10.30 am. It must have happened more than an hour earlier by the cleared look of the scene. It was raining but there were many standersby under shelters and in shops still looking at the scene. I didn't stop longer to ask for details as it was raining and I had an English class in KT at 11 am.

Midas Touch For Disaster: Another Today After Yesterday's ...

2010-11-30T21:30:00.001+08:00

After yesterday's posting on the road accident in Cerating, Pahang, on my way to Kuantan by bus, I came upon this lorry which landed on its side on the road near Kijal, Terengganu, less than half an hour earlier while I was driving my car from Kuantan back to Dungun at about 1:00 pm today. The driver and his calendar escaped without serious injuries. And so the pattern of my Midas touch for disaster goes on.

Between Certainty of Cause-And-Effect and Randomness of Coincidence ...

2010-11-29T23:23:00.001+08:00

Between the certainty that a particular effect or event is the result of a direct cause and the randomness of coincidences by which the correlation should be once off or happening once in a blue moon, there is a gray area in which the frequency or regularity throws up an interesting pattern, to say the least. I dare not say remarkable and be liable to be guilty of romanticizing or sensationalizing it but I'd venture and say I seem to have the Midas touch for disaster: Wherever I go, some tragedy, both big and small, almost all having nothing to do with me, is bound to just have happened or soon after I left the place or situation.

Today, while riding in a Transnasional bus from Dungun to Kuantan, I came across this accident which must have happened less than 15 minutes earlier as a fire engine from a nearby station arrived at the same time. The time was about noon, it wasn't raining, on a straight stretch of road in Cerating in front of the Mardi agricultural station. As can be seen from the photo, it is a frontal collision, one car burnt, and, I understand, the victims are trapped in the burning car. The photos were taken from the bus.

Two Centenarians of Dungun, Terengganu

2010-11-26T17:24:00.003+08:00

Today I discovered not one but two claimed centenarians within a one kilometer radius of my house in Dungun! Semek, above, had had four children when the Japanese army reached Terengganu in 1942. Based on that, her looks, the fact of having four great-grandchildren and what those who know her say, she must have turned the century mark by at least a year or two. She says she has never been hospitalized and has no special diet. She goes for daily walks always stopping by the goreng pisang and drinks stall run by a 62 year old niece. She performs her daily prayers and recites the zikir - subhanullah ...

Zainab, above, is older than Semek, and is not as healthy. A caregiver says she is a little senile now. Her walking range is limited to the house compound. But she can still thread a needle and sew, she says. When the Japanese army arrived in Dungun, she had had five children. Both of them live alone in separate houses but their needs are taken care of by relatives who live close by.

Three Days Cycling From Bangkok to Hua Hin

2010-11-24T21:22:00.004+08:00

I've said many times before and it has happened again. There is a pattern to my travels as it is in my life. Not that I'm the cause of it nor does it happen all the time but often enough, hence the pattern. You see, whenever I travel, no sooner has I arrived or left a place, disaster strikes. I left Kuala Lumpur in April 1969 to travel overland to Europe. Soon after I left India and Pakistan, they went to war. Passed through Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and soon after civil war broke out. I left the Munchen Olympiad Village in 1972 and a week after the Black September shooting took place. This accident involving a young motorcyclist on Ekachai Road going out of Bangkok to the south happened less than a minute before I arrived on the scene.

9.30: Sunday morning. At Ibis Riverside Hotel, Bangkok, looking up Google Maps to plot my route out of the city before starting off my journey. The Google Maps is just as good as a GPS.

Stealth camping first day out on the grass verge of a gas station, somewhere between Samut Sakhon and Samut Songkhram. There were other nappers but they were in their cars.

A roadside market after Samut Sakhon. I had iced tea and fried bananas and something roundish made of fried mash potato.

Likenesses of living things including humans as well as religious icons are part of the Thai Buddhist culture and I found this collection for sale by the roadside between Samut Songkhram and Hua Hin.

See, folks, I'm not loath to take calendar shots such as this one. A view of a distant temple taken from the road to Hua Hin.

I pedaled 176 km (Google Maps), averaging 60 km a day for three days from Bangkok to Hua Hin. I had planned to ride 1,500 km from Bangkok to Dungun but it was not to be. The sun was too hot. My wrists, palms and butt hurt awful. On the very first day I collided with an insect and it got lodged in my eye for three days, the carcass breaking up into tiny pieces, part dissolving, part getting dislodged by manipulation and applying water. My knees, heart and mind were okay and I probably could have made it on a recumbent which would solve the problem of painful wrists, palms and butt. The heat could be made more bearable by constantly pouring ice water on the head and body. Many people have done it, cycling from Bangkok to any point in Malaysia including one partly supported Singaporean woman ending her ride on the island itself. I understand they rode dedicated long distance touring bicycles unlike mine which is a commuter bike, the Dahon Curve D3. The worst part of the three-day ride was the last 10 km to get to Hua Hin railway station. I spent the last night sleeping in a third class coach on the train from Hua Hin to Sungai Golok. At Haadyai soldiers on routine patrol got on the train and took a reserved interest in me but nothing interesting or untoward to report this time.

A Day Cycling In Bangkok

2010-11-20T18:15:00.006+08:00

A klong along Somdet Chao Phraya Road.

A row of bicycles for hire on Somdet Chao Phraya Road but no takers. There are discontinuous stretches designated for cycling but some are blocked by parked vehicles. The move to encourage cycling is not dead but it does nothing to ease the traffic congestion.

A marked bicycle lane.

Tourists taking a guided cycling tour along the Menam Chao Phraya with the Memorial Bridge in the distance.

A male cycling tourist mixing it up with the motor traffic. The cyclist in yellow is a female cycling tourist guide.

The sidewalks of Bangkok are filled with standersby, passersby, walkersby, starersby, sellersby, sitters-on and sleepers-on. Just as the shopping malls and traditional markets are filled with people so are the streets. The wealthy and the poor, high rise and low forms, the scantily dressed and the over-dressed, locals and tourists, dogs and humans, huge double deckers and teenie-weenies, the ladies of the night and the ladies out on the night rub shoulders, stand cheek by jowl and cut and mix it up in an atmosphere of tolerance and live and let live joie de vivre.

A loose group of them were standing apparently doing nothing except moving their heads like armored car turrets at whatever comes into their view when they were asked for directions to Kao San Road by a passing cyclist. Hardly stopping after answering the easy question, their latent vacuity exploded into fatuous curiosity over - oh for crying out loud - what is just a bicycle: How much does it cost, Where did you buy it, Do you want to sell it, What is its weight - and I'm rendering the questions into readable English, the actual line of questions sounds more like monkeyspeak, all the while hands beginning to reach out to test the gearing, brakes and ... so much for the monkey mind in man ...

People in some kind of uniform - greens, pinks, reds, and yellows - are a regular sight.

In full view of the pervading faith of the land, or at least a symbol of it, a man down to his last tether on life, hangs on to dear life by composing himself into the least undignified position and mangled posture he could think of it to get whatever his message across to the world. I dutifully witnessed and recorded the attempt but am still deciphering the coded message.

At this congestion of food and drink stalls constricting the entrance to a pier on the Menam Chao Phraya, I sat at a Pad Thai stall to have my lunch and watch the whole world descend on Bangkok in the form of a constant toing and froing of foreign tourists. Thousands of them pass through this bottleneck in any month. For the life of me I was clueless why so many come to Bangkok. Even the weak, as judged by the walking stick, comes.

Waiting for my plate of fried rice (overpriced at 50 baht) at the entrance to the Tha Tien river pier near Wat Phra Chetuphon.

In front of the Princess Mother Memorial Park, a walled enclave along the Menam Chao Phraya off Somdet Chao Phraya Road. Next to it is a Chinese temple and a mosque.

I didn't know there are Petronas gas stations in Thailand until I saw this one on Charoen Nakhond Road.

Song of the Buzzard

2010-11-13T14:41:00.001+08:00

The Buzzard: In-Flight Play

2010-11-13T14:01:00.001+08:00

The Buzzard: Bird Intelligence

2010-11-13T13:53:00.001+08:00

A Tribute to Chan Meng Sing of Kuantan

2010-11-11T21:49:00.005+08:00

I was struck by a self-published book of photographs of the early days of modern Kuantan from 1903 to 1963 written by Chan Meng Sin. There are many books of old photos of Malaya written either by Europeans or Chinese. In the past all photo studios were run by Chinese except for a few ran by Japanese before WW2, so I understand. Thanks to these books and photos we can form an idea and image of the past. The original people were not interested in taking photos or having photos taken because it is against their beliefs. They believe that images are distractions to their souls' journey home. Nowadays this belief is all but forgotten and they take to taking their own photos and uploading them to FB with alacrity enjoying a new form of an old theme, narcissism.

Chan's photos show that any typical town in Malaya then, such as Kuantan, was already modern with many amenities such as schools, buses, shops, etc. Ordinary everyday life scenes which most people took for granted were recorded and now the photos are priceless documents of the past without which our imagination and attempt to make sense of the past would be much poorer. That the photographers, Chan Meng Sing, and his father, saw it fit to record the scenes, realizing its importance, speaks volumes of the breadth and depth of their minds unfettered as they were by superstition clothed as religion or what-have-you. That they don't make a meal of their farsightedness, that the original people don't even see any irony in the contrast between their lack of vision - forward and of the moment - and their taking-it-for-grantedness, is both typical and generic and is not about to change overnight or in a century. It is endemic ... and pandemic.

Chan is not only a photographer with a strong vision but his command of the English language is excellent, two qualities rarely found together in his generation or even now. Tell me how many photo studio owners you know can write a book. In the communications industry, among newspapers for instance reporters write copy, photographers take pictures. Don't ask the photo-boys especially to write anything. They either scowl at you or turn away on their heels swinging their cameras in a ready to shoot pose even if they happen not to carry one at the moment, or both, in quick order!

I heartily recommend this book to anyone who is interested in photography as an art and tool of journalism and in the past particularly of Kuantan.

This tribute is written without the knowledge or permission of Chan Meng Sing. The book is available for sale and I take this liberty to post this article on the basis of fair comment on a matter of public interest.

Dr Zaffa Razak: He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother

2010-11-08T01:59:00.006+08:00

This is the car that he bought over 30 years ago for $27,000 and is still using, a petrol-turbo engined Daihatsu.

This is the car he just bought a month or so ago for $230,000, a VW GTI ... oh, there's also a Honda Civic bought over a year ago for $100K plus ...

This is an area where he puts his maxim, Nature abhors a vacuum, into practice. He cannot see an empty area but deposits his stuff ... never mind that he rarely puts the stuff into practice ...

This is the living room partly taken over by four bicycles ... they stand sentinel as a stark symbol of the need to collect and hoard ...

This is the top of a cabinet where he leaves more knick-knacks to mark his territory ... the thing that looks like a GPS whatchamaycallit is a meter that tells you ambient temperature, etc, etc ... In the cabinet are a score or more of water-bottles ... yes ... he collects water-bottles, plastic, metal ...

A furry of cobwebs and a thin film of dust on the weights tells its own story ...
it got picked up and put through its paces for the first time in weeks by yours truly ...

Part of a collection of about 10 bicycles, some still in their boxes, doing homage to its owner ... like sabbatical whales ... If you have to ask the prices, you are not into collecting designer bicycles ...

He has a big fat Nikon camera with fancy lenses and all the photos he had to show were bunches of coconuts and fronds of leaves. So what's this all about then? Texture, he explains ... The empty boxes are not thrown away but kept on display taking up valuable real estate on the expensive cabinet ... ah but then that's where it is all at ... oh, another thing, he refuses to have his photo taken ... sigh ...

More boxes and stuff lending the cabinet an air of pride befitting that of the Comptroller of the Royal Household ...

The center of the house is the outdoors left indoors ...

He says it took him a long time to finally hit upon the design of his backyard ... now it is God's little acre ... where he sips his Starbuck coffee ...

A little more modest, the herb patch ... this is the Missus's handiwork ...

This idea of catching rain water is taken from the Whole Earth Catalog book ...

Up in the attic is an area of deep space to rival the Milky Way in having myriads of more books, boxes and other testaments to their owner's hoarding nature, which, truth be told, he shares with Mother who twists little plastic bags you put goreng pisang or kueh in and place them in all four corners of the earth which happens to be her house which she now never leaves same as her doctor son never leaves Kuantan for more than a day whereas his Missus and all four of his grownup children have been trotting the world from London, Ontario, to Machu Picchu, New York, Bristol, Yorkshire, Barcelona, etc. Why? He does not want to leave his hoardings, including his clinic (all paid for) unattended for longer than a day or two ... Oh, he has two kayaks taking up long-time residence in the attic. I understand, they have not been put to water in five years. Another oh: one of his children who is studying electronic engineering in Yorkshire is fully financed by him ... a figure of $70,000 was casually mentioned ... I don't know if that is a yearly thing or the estimated cost of the whole course. Any savings left (he used to have quite a pile ...)? Clean gone, was his reply. Not to worry though, I haven't mentioned his land bank yet ... Last oh: One twin girl is now back working with Petronas; the second twin is doing medicine in Bristol; eldest son is working in KL. No, no cucus.

The piece de resistance reserved for last ... a $500 Leatherman multipurpose tool right smack dab on the dining table next to a Machu Picchu tea set ... where there is a way, there is a will, where there is space, there is an item doing sentinel duty ...

To support his hobby he runs a little clinic in Jalan Beserah in Kuantan where he sits at his desk wearing a pair of shorts, a round-necked T-shirt and a beatific smile ... well, not always ... when he discovers that you don't know who Jeremy Clarkson is from Chan Meng Sing you better run for the door before he fires his salvo ...

One of his former patients, Jaafar Muhammad of Kemaman, who is besotted (sic) with a list of ailments longer than his arm, got to find that out in his direct line of fire and decided to call it a day...

View of the living room from the attic ... ventilation holes and wind vanes are a feature of the house located in Kampung Tok Sira, Kuantan.

A Brief History of the Meldais According to the Buzzard

2010-10-22T22:16:00.000+08:00

Correlating with the National Language Month (NLM), here is a brief rundown of the Meldais. It is not intended to run them down but to give them a leg up.

Not too long a time ago, the Meldais were living on trees. They swing from branch to branch rarely coming to the ground as their simple needs were all arboreal.

They had a simple but effective means of communication consisting of body language, vocalizations, and three words. They managed to order their social relationships using body English and vocalizations so they didn't need to have too many words.

The three words, translated into NLM, are babi, tahi and lalat.

Now fast forward to the present day. Have things changed? Naw ...

Their descendants are still crowded on trees sending body signals and issuing sounds and still using only the same three words.

Oh, forgot to mention earlier, there is a small change. The tree is now Facebook.

Manabolehistan

2010-08-27T13:00:00.003+08:00

Not too far off the mainland, a reconstructed island peopled by a reconstituted tribe called Meldai live on fresh air and water. They supplement their basic diet with a daily helping of words on a plate. Yes these guys eat words and anything symbolic before breakfast, after lunch, in time for tea, before dinner and after dinner. They are not too keen on meaning because finding it entails looking up the dictionary or reading in the language of the Mainlanders which they are loath to do because it is no fun and foreign-sounding, besides others from their tribe don't do it, they would look funny doing it.

The Meldais are pretty well-off thanks to the presence of oil fields in their territorial waters. The oil fields are managed at the top level, operated at the technical level by Mainlanders with a few Meldais holding symbolic positions as window dressing (also a symbol) to please the easily pleased Meldais. You know, just give them the same trite mantras from medieval times and they will lap them up like lap dogs.

Why do I say the island is reconstructed? Because the original jungle has been more than 80 per cent replaced by a concrete jungle - lengths of asphalt, squares of tarmac, very nice looking blocks and rows of housing and, hear this, symbolic buildings where words and symbolic acts are churned out and performed to keep up the Mythology-of-the-Word-from-the-Sky (Motwfts, colloquialized to Mothwit) which the Meldais cling to as if it is Mother's own sarong.

The long name of their belief system sits in well with their psyche. Anything long and wordy, especially if it is hard or impossible to understand, is taken as unquestionable proof of its mysterious power and it being a source of all their boons and banes.

Why do I call the Meldais a reconstituted people? Well, originally they lived in the jungle but since the jungle is associated with being primitive, they have reconstituted themselves to living in the concrete jungle replacing the old symbology based on nature, with Mothwit based on calling a plate of cow pad as King Solomon's saffron rice. Of course they don't say this. This is hidden from their narrow field of sight. It has been erased from the textbooks. Some observers also call it the Emperor's new clothes.

Everything about their lives is regimented and ritualized. No room for creativity, spontaneity and inventiveness. The worst sacrilege is having a questioning or critical mind. All signs of such aberrations have been nipped in the cradle or culled out and any escapee will be hounded, bounded out or done in. It is an Orwellian world which H.G. Wells and John Wyndham from the mainland are only too familiar with but its import is lost on the Meldais because of their own counterpropaganda not to read them.

Cadres and footsoldiers of Mothwit, many of them willing volunteers, ngos or niggoes, will rove about in bands (Meldai courage) snooping out nonconformists and mutants, all the while fetching and carrying mantras from the mother lode to feed the litter of devotees prior to or post meal times.

In their holy month of Mamasan, as if other months are less or not holy, especially in their holy navel place called Pusat, as if the rest of the island is not sanctified, they double their work rate in ferrying mantras on a plate ladling out the contents from the common pot on to individual plates for the consumption of the devotees.

They are not fired up by the principle of altruism which is a mainland idea, but by the Save Me first consideration to earn merit points because they have been brainwashed or promised so by Mothwit.

Why do they need merit points? What does it promise?

You see, the Meldais are taught, coerced, to believe that they are living on borrowed time. They have been told that the oil fields operated by the mainlanders will come to an end and their island and all the material wealth they are enjoying including the symbolic buildings - supplied by the mainlanders, by the way - will be swallowed up by the sea. A celestial ship, called Bahtera Kargo Kult, will be waiting to rescue ONLY those with sufficient merit points.

You see, you cannot reason with a Meldai, you can only motivate him with FEAR and threats. He is neither genetically nor culturally equipped to handle reasoning. Too much hard work. The moment he smells reason, he dramatically changes from being reasonable into a werewolf spouting mantras and obfuscations, excreting verbal diarrhea and turning into a ball of hysteria or going into a deep trance of silence resembling rigor mortis.

This posting may be added to from time to time as the mood fancies and the reader is invited to revisit it from time to time to see what's cooking ...

40 km Training Ride, Sura Hujung to Tok Kah, Dungun, and Back

2010-08-03T23:27:00.003+08:00

After tea of fresh kerepuk lekor, yesterday's leftover fried bananas and orange-colored sweet potatoes, an East Coast tea-time favorite, microwave reheated, I rode from DdD in Sura Hujung to my usual air nira stop in Tok Kah, a village on the road to Jerangau. This time a neighbor, Karl, a Kedahan who has settled down in Dungun, joined me for part of the way. He was riding a racing bike and after a short while sped off ahead till Bukit Tebuk where he waited for me to catch up. Then he decided to turn back as it was getting late and he had a night class to teach at UITM. He is a lecturer in marketing. It was already nightfall and raining heavily by the time I was half way on the return leg. As I got on Jalan Pantai for the last 20 minutes, the wind coming from the sea was quite strong. I was using an umbrella which I could hold in one hand while steering with the other. It wasn't a problem; in fact it was part of the enjoyment of riding.

Above: Karl (right) and a Bukit Tebuk villager, Salman. Salman is pure-blooded Indian but is assimilated into Terengganu Malay society being second generation. His wife is a Malay. The road we are standing on runs closely to the old Bukit Besi railway track now completely gone. The famous tunnel, Bukit Tebuk, can be seen from this spot.

Above: The famous Bukit Tebuk former Bukit Besi railway tunnel now connecting Kampung Nibong Station to the main Dungun to Kuala Terengganu road. Kampung Nibong Station as the name suggests was the railway end terminal serving the town of Dungun. Passengers embarked and disembarked here while the actual track went on for another 5 km to Teluk Lipat on the coast facing the South China Sea ending on a pier where iron ore from Bukit Besi was loaded onto barges for export first to Japan and later to Australia.

Is Pornography a Factor in the Making of a Monster?

2010-08-03T10:43:00.005+08:00

Many people say pornography contributes to the sexual crime index. The argument is that watching freely available sex online causes men - yes, I know I'm being gender biased here - to seek outlets for their "urgencies" and if legitimate outlets are not as freely available as the show men may resort to illegitimate expressions which in a repressive society are also criminal. The legitimate sex window - marriage - is not available to everyone and even in marriage there are problems which may cause men - that bias again - to seek extramarital - read, illegitimate - outlets.

I beg to differ. Watching the Mats and the Meks banging away in gay abandon, or the birds, bears and baboons doing it, is a natural thing. The sex act is one of the most beautiful to engage in and to watch if one wants to be open and not hungup. Only people with psychological complexes engage and engorge with guilt, fear and other hidden agenda. People with no hangups to hang on for dear life and up as public decoy feel no siege or suffer no illusion.

Take Denmark f'stance. I watched Deep Throat in Copenhagen in 1973. It was running continuously in cinemas and you could come and go in the middle of the show. I saw single nubile girls looking like they are going to a cricket match doing exactly that. Denmark, as every furtive Malaysian official on an official junket knows, has sex easily if not freely available in the streets. I don't know for a fact but I doubt Denmark has the highest sexual index crime at all and because of pornography. I also doubt more Danes deposit new lives at the end of umbilical cords on doorsteps than Malaysians. I also doubt in Malaysia more Chinese or Indians treat school toilets as emergency labor wards. It is not as if they watch porno less. But their range of culturally tolerated outlets are wider. They can at least neck, Malays can't. Aha, now I know what I'm driving at. It is a MAALAAY problem. Why? Watching too much risque video on the Net? Naw. So then what?

REPRESSION written in capitals. That is what it is all about. What represses them is their mono (as opposed to stereo) belief-political-cultural-neo-feudal-tribal closed matrix. The Malays are a repressed lot. It is a wonder they seemingly manage to live just fine like others, by and large. But their pathology is embedded in their normalcy. They call it dah jadi darah-daging. In the late sixties at Trafalgar Square, London, on New Year's Eve, I'd be there to join the crowd necking en masse. A fellow Malay who would later rose in the UMNO hierarchy and became a minister dropped his initial diffidence and followed my example in joining the pagan rite.

There are too many pantangs and larangs, snoop police, faith police, dare-not-be-different, bidaah, single faith and other monolithic totems in Malay society. No alternative lifestyles or opinions allowed. Windows of opportunity and legitimacy are severely drawn. Repression leads to OPPRESSION. Oppression spawns simmering mutiny and deviancy. Hence the monsters, hence the trailing umbilical cords.

People who blame pornography have other agenda and are playing to the gallery as well as their statements are a sop to their monolithic belief systems. By saying so they are throwing a stone at an erected effigy, the strawman of their own hangups and failures. For as long as they continue to do so - and my personal octopus says until kingdom come - they will suffer the consequences of their own making. But the Malays and the barking-at-the-wrong-tree phenomenon have known each other for so long they have accommodated each other so well the lines are blurred.

See what I mean or not ...

Four Long Distance Cyclists Spotted on the Kuala Terengganu - Dungun Road Today

2010-08-01T22:59:00.002+08:00

The east coast road of peninsular Malaysia from Kota Bharu, Kelantan, in the north, all the way to Johor Bahru, Johor, in the south, is a popular route among global cyclists coming down from Thailand heading to Singapore. I often spot them whenever I travel along the road from Dungun to Kuala Terengganu. Today I spotted two pairs of them in the space of one hour.

Welshman lawyer Rhys (right) and Scotsman mechanical engineer Alistair spotted cycling along Jalan Pantai, Dungun, on their way to Cerating, Pahang, for the day. They started in Bangkok and aim to finish their journey in Singapore.

I spotted this Dutch couple astride world crunching Koga Miyatas 5 km north of Rantau Abang. The Groningens come from ... wait ... Groningen, a city in north Holland. Groningen is a city where many Dutch, you guessed it, bicycles are made.

TW-Bent Cobra Folding Recumbent Bike

2010-07-31T00:43:00.001+08:00

No sooner had I thought I've found my ideal long distance travel bike than a new one appears on my interest radar that stops me in my track. Sometimes it is a bike previously considered but put aside only to be worthy of reconsideration after gaining fresh inputs on its qualities and new insights into my travel priorities. One such bike is the Made-in-Taiwan TW-Bent Cobra. The qualities that tip it in my favor are:

it can be folded;
it is a front wheel drive, meaning a shorter chain run;
higher specced than previously thought; fitted with SRAM dualdrive and single chain ring; no front derailleur;
comes with a folded bag to carry the folded bike in;
it has a mono chain stay - easier to take off the rear wheel;

Cons:

No place to fit racks; this means must use a trailer to carry luggage;

The Cobra folded.

Football Jerseys, Nooh Gadot & Wilbur Brothers

2010-07-19T17:58:00.007+08:00

KOSMO! carried a report about Muslims who wittingly or unwittingly wear football jerseys which display images of crosses, liquor brands and devils.

Johor Religious Council adviser Datuk Nooh Gadot said wearing such jerseys were forbidden in Islam.

“It is as if Muslims are worshiping and exalting the symbols of other religions. Islam does not compromise on this matter, regardless of whether it is worn for fun, fashion or sport,” he said.

The above is an excerpt of a story in the Star today.

Removed from intentional contexts such as the wearing of uniforms by soldiers, St John Ambulance members, red T-shirts en masse in Bangkok, a Germany football team colors, does wearing a T-shirt carrying a picture of a pagoda bought during a holiday trip to Seoul means you worship whatshisname, a picture of Osama bin Laden means you support his cause, such words as F**K the World means - now what does it mean? - a slogan such as Cintailah Sungai Kita really means that, a Tak Nak really means it, the name Manchester United, automatically means you're a supporter?

Non-English speaking countries like Japan and China are notorious for emblazoning English language phrases on their T-shirts and tattoos with many wearers not knowing or caring what they mean. Recently a picture of a Muslim wearing a black T-shirt with the F-word on it nonchalantly praying in a mosque was doing the round on the Net.

One may carp or express one's disagreement over the rampant and senseless abuse of language - just like SMSing creeping into blogosphere and Facebook - but to throw down another fatwa is, again, to fall into the stock trap of overreacting, making a mountain out of a molehill. By reacting you draw attention to it and what is a non-issue becomes an issue while real issues requiring urgent debate and action are put to pasture or left to fester.

The argument that using a symbol or product whose image is contrary to one's belief system is wrong is valid in context but should not be generalized or formalized into a fatwa.

If one were to stand on this rationale then one should not confine it to T-shirts only but to everything. For example, Muslims should then not be allowed to fly because aeroplanes were invented by the Wright brothers who were sons of a Protestant bishop. The brothers, Wilbur and Orville, were brought up according to strict Christian teachings and it is the Christian work ethics of discipline, determination, experimentation and innovation (bidaah is a neg in Islam) that were brought to bear on their long years of effort to make the world's first aeroplane.

Muslims should instead make their own aeroplanes.

By the same logic, Muslims should not drive cars made by unbelievers. After all, they are products from an economic system which is financed by riba which is haram in Islam.

Instead, Muslims should make their own Islamic Car! Same like banking system. Now the world is beating a path, it seems, to Islamic banking. Maybe they can leapfrog over the state of the world and make a car that flies. Like flies, the world will flock to it.

It is most unfortunate that Muslims are living in a world full of symbols, products and services contrary to their beliefs but most of which they are dependent upon for their very human if not political survival and so they afford themselves to close one eye on the sly and take pot shots at on the fly.

This siege mentality trap is one out of which there is no escape. Many historical personages have faced this dilemma. How they handle them make interesting reading - Hamlet, Napoleon, Hitler, Hirohito, Saddam, Capt Smith (Titanic), Anwar Ibrahim.

... and only the Sungai Golok separates us from this ...

2010-07-18T22:25:00.005+08:00

Pickup truck canopy maker Carryboy of Thailand is now making this:

And this!

Ford Malaysia has just announced two variants to their Ranger pickup trucks lineup and of interest to me is the Single Cab 4 x 4. No pics are available yet but it looks like this:

This pic shows a Ford Ranger Single Cab fitted with a canopy (UK):

So what am I driving (pun intended) at?

Hey, I've just found the perfect (well) formula for my own motor home which I've been salivating after all these years. Don't want the mobile home version because it is too luxurious for my rugged lifestyle. I put it up there for comparison.

It is the more modest and bare version which suits my needs. Can dunk my recumbent, folded kayak, collapsible bed and camping stuff into the car without them looking out of character.

Now there's this small matter of how or where to buy the thing, Container 1050, as Carryboy calls it. You see, the Malaysian agent doesn't stock such heretical stuff. Malaysian entrepreneurs will not import, or make, and the Malaysian Joe will not buy or do something that other Joes don't. Mobile homes, caravans and other lifestyle boxes on wheels simply do not appeal to Malaysian taste. Except CGOABs (Sir Goabs) like me. We nuts - oddballs - on saddles, thrive on being lifestyle rebels. Looks like I've to cross Sungai Golok to have one fitted to my future Ford Ranger Single Cab. But then there's this small matter of JPJ and Kastam syariat to get around ... all this is symbolic of the repressive pantang-n-larang regimentation of the country I am a citizen of.

CGOAB? Crazyguyonabike.

A Silence of Buffaloes

2010-07-05T22:22:00.013+08:00

The lone albino buffalo standing on high ground looks hard at the gray water buffaloes wallowing in a mud pool. "Come and join us," one of the grays calls, "don't be different." A Mexican wave of snorts ensues from the rest of the grays. Something rises from the spleen of the albino but he lowers his head and starts to eat grass. "How come you're white?" This pipes up from another gray hidden behind another. Another wave of snorts is quickly followed by a string of calls. "You are scared of water, aren't you?" "Say moo!" Guffaw. "Yeah, you moo more than snort." Snort. "We saw you visiting the cows!" Guffaw. "Yeah, and I heard you apologizing to them for being a buffalo!" Shocked silence.

Just then the owner of the buffaloes appears. Cackles he: "To market, to market! Alright grays, get up and get into the lorry. Yeo canned meat factory is low on stock. You, Bino, can stay back. The Yeos are a bit superstitious with anything that looks and behaves differently. To market, to market!" Sell-shocked silence.

Mass Hysteria Reined, Bicycles Reign ... Holland Shows the Way

2010-07-03T09:13:00.009+08:00

Be honest now, how many of you consider driving around in cars as a form of mass hysteria? Admit it, you think you need a car only because you see other Joes having them and then you go out and buy one rationalizing you need it to ferry the kids to the karate class or be seen to go to congregationals. If only the rest of the lemming-like, car-crazed world were to take a leaf from the Dutch tree. Sure, once cycling has reached the critical mass mark, it could be seen as a new form of mass hysteria but it is one that is kind to the environment and does wonders to your lungs and arteries. In truth, I'd rather want to see it as mass sanity if we humans are capable of achieving it for a reasonably stable period of time before plunging headlong over the cliff again as history has shown the record has been a bit of a yo-yo between the dumps of emotionalism and the peaks of rationality.

The following video clip shows a typical morning rush hour of cyclists going to work in Utrecht, Holland.

Performer Recumbents

2010-06-25T00:36:00.007+08:00

I think I've finally settled on the bike I'll be using for my China cycling trip. It is the Made-in-Taiwan Performer Goal-X recumbent touring bike. I choose this bike because I think it is as good as the European and American made ones at half the typical price. As everyone in the know knows many western brands are actually made in Taiwan anyways. For more details on models and specs, click on the company website here: performer recumbents.

The choice is also one between a recumbent and an upright bike. I choose a recumbent because it gives an excellent view, it is very comfortable and it does not strain the neck, wrist, palm and butt like an upright would to those of many people including myself.

The Performer Goal-X - er, overlook the name - does not fold but the seat, wheels and rear assembly can be disassembled for packing into a suitable case as luggage on public transport including airlines. Details are not given though. One thing about many non-native English speaking bicycle websites is that they do not address fully the visitor's need for information nor do they write in the tone and style of a cyclist talking to another cyclist.

Below is a photo of a Goal-X 26/26 self-assembled by noted HPV enthusiast Warren Beauchamp of Australia:

The story of how he assembled it can be found here: http://www.recumbents.com/home/?view=plink&id=129.

Above: Another photo showing OSS steering and 26/26 wheels.

Above: OSS steering with 26/20 wheels.

Above: A yellow Performer Goal-X 26/26. Photographer unknown.

Frenchwoman Barbara Buatois on a Performer Low Racer during the 2010 RAAM in which she won in her category, Female Solo.

80 km Ride on the Dahon D3 Curve Folding Bike

2010-06-20T22:25:00.001+08:00

A long distance bike ride is like a play with a cast of actors - the bike, the rider, the weather, etc. My 80 km ride from Dungun to Kuala Terengganu on Saturday on the commuting bike Dahon Curve D3 with its three speed hub gear throws the weather and the bike as the two main players. I rode in the merciless heat of the sun and that was what got me most. I was wearing a wide brimmed fabric hat, all-white T-shirt and long pants, and applied sun block on the back of my hands and arms for protection. Apart from some drinks I brought along aboard the bike, I also frugally gorged (work out the paradox yourself!) on watermelon, nira and sugar cane at roadside stalls.

At a spot along Jalan Pantai at the start of my ride. A fishing competition was being held.

The Dahon is a fine bike for commuting short distances but rides longer than 50 km are going to show up its shortcomings i.e. the three speed gear, it is slow and your hands, wrists and butt will feel the pain more and more as the ride gets longer. As I approached Cendering, a young cyclist on a mountainbike overtook me without a backward glance. It showed me how slow I was. There was nothing I could do with the pains except took four long breaks at two hourly intervals during which I would eat, drink and lie down. At one point I got off the bike and pushed it for two kms just to seek relief and give my muscles and joints a different workout.

At a sugarcane stall between Rantau Abang and Mercang. The ficus tree is the best shaped I've seen on the east coast road between Kota Bharu and Kuantan.

As this ride is also part of my training for my five-country, three-month cycling trip starting September, I've learned a valuable lesson - the upright bike is not suitable for me. I'll have to go for a folding recumbent bike and there's only one that I know of - the HP Velotechnik Grasshopper. A bit pricey at Euro 2000 but for long distance comfort it is the best choice for me. I have ridden a recumbent tandem bike and recumbent trikes so I know what I'm talking about.

I parked the Dahon in front of the fishes and stingrays hung up under the fishing competition secretariat tent. The biggest catch will earn its owner a prize of RM11K. The winner would have been announced in Berita Harian, the joint organisers, by the time you read this.

Challenge Ventus and Nazca Paseo: Side by Side

2010-06-09T22:53:00.003+08:00

These two Dutch-made short wheelbase non-folding 26/20 recumbent bikes sit in the same niche - upmarket touring bikes capable of serious long distance journeys with the addition of a few accessories. Pricewise, they hover around Euro 2K depending on accessories added.

My bike of choice in this category for now is the 20/20 Velotechnik Grasshopper because of its folding ability but the bigger 26 rear wheel size of Ventus and Paseo does give them a slight advantage. For some riders, the difference between folding and nonfolding may make a bigger difference than the difference between rear wheel sizes.

Challenge Ventus

Nazca Paseo

Taming the Mind Puppies

2010-06-04T17:33:00.035+08:00

Hey, how do you explain the funny thoughts
that arise unbidden in our minds?
Often it's not funny:
often scary, often murderous.
Most people, most of the time,
are able to show the demon the door,
but not all people all times, hence
the newspaper headlines.
Freud would only describe them
but not answer why. Psychiatrists
ask us to pop pills; priests ask us to pray.
Motivational writers ask us to see our brain
and its workings as a separate entity quite below
the "I" above the storm.
I'd go with the last, me being one, kiki.
To manage mine I play this mind game:
I see these thoughts clamoring
as a litter of puppies at feeding time;
if you don't teach them discipline -
Sit! Stay! Dinner! -
chaos will be the order of the puppy place.
Nature reined in, nurture reigns.
Method, order all set is such a beautiful sight to see;
If you have never had the privilege of detailing discipline
to your own litter of puppies,
you don't know what you are missing -
if you haven't disciplined your own mind puppies
your mind might just resemble
a doggy pound or a free for all feral dump site.
Desire, Discipline, Dinner! -
that is the inviolate and invariable
law of the universe.
Violate it and you are liable
to end up as someone else's dinner - gulp.

Or, you can see these stream of unbidden thoughts
as play clay for you to express into a visible form
and impress a mark on the sands of time.

And, early in the morning,
or late in the day,
get your blood circulation flowing
by walking, jogging and yoga
and your disturbing thoughts
will dissipate away along with
your cortisols, free radicals
and low-density lipoproteins.

And as to why these thoughts arise in the first place,
some say they are embedded in the brain cells - manipulate
their chromosomes and they will be under control;
Fair enough, but that is process.
But who is behind the process, and why?
Others say Manitu was bored and lonely and
wanted someone to play with
so he created the game of creation - G vs E,
and us to play dice with;
hence the consequences,
suffer the synapses ...

As above, so below,
As with puppies of the mind,
So the patterns in your life and mine.

2009 Dec Photos: Sara At Seven and a Half

2010-05-16T21:43:00.000+08:00

Sara visiting a second cousin in Kijal whom she met for the first time. They got off like a house on fire almost immediately.

Sara doing the backward free fall in a show of water confidence gained on the second day of her visit to the swimming pool in Kuala Ibai.

Sara doing another variation of the back flip. Confidence grew with each repetition. Old Man stayed out of the water watching and falling asleep like a jaga as two hours or so passed by ...

With the victory sign, confidence is complete ... she has found her sweet spot ...

Leaving her with another first met second cousin, this one in Puchong, while I went away to attend to other matters, I got a cheeky "Take your time," body language from her when bidding her a "See you later." Oh well, what are fathers for if not fetch-and-carry-boys ...

Time to see Sara off at the KLIA for her flight back to Kota Kinabalu after six weeks with me in Terengganu and KL.

This pic should be placed at the top because it is the first taken during her visit. It was taken at KLIA when I went to fetch her on November 28, 2009. The photo shows her reacting to her shot being taken meaning she was camera shy meaning the people she was with did not teach her to be natural with the camera perhaps recalling their own experience when they were kids perhaps reminiscent of camera-shy Orang Asli children. I had to "trick" her to make her realize having her photo taken was to her advantage. I set her up feeding her "Baby Alive" doll and took a shot of her and showed the result to her and she was pleased with it. After that she engaged me as her royal photographer, my princess did.

Link to an excerpt of my article, A Collegian's Round, in MCKK: Impressions 1905-2005

2010-05-08T15:40:00.002+08:00

http://books.google.com.my/books?id=zxKLiRMVga0C&lpg=PA117&ots=f2HCkRdCXi&dq=zaharan%20razak&pg=PA114#v=onepage&q=zaharan%20razak&f=false

MCKK: Impressions 1905 - 2005, book published by Utusan Publications

2010-05-08T02:12:00.009+08:00

A fellow blogger whom I shall not name has been following my nonsense at both this blog and my other, zaharan.blogspot.com, as though he/she is doing a thesis on me! He/she also has been googling my name, Zaharan Razak, and seems to have harvested all kinds of flotsam about me so much so he/she quickly succumbed to the temptation of calling me a weirdo. I really felt ashamed not because of the W-word but because he/she now knows more about me online than I do myself. So to set things right, I googled my own name and whaddayaknow - among the references that I already knew, up popped the title of this book with my name in bold in the reference. Ok, I know this old school of mine, but I didn't know there was a book published with the title, what more with my name in the marketing mix. Curious, I clicked on it and, whaddayaknow, an article I wrote in 1965 when I was in the lower six class, is included/featured in the book! Yahooo! I'm a published and famous writer now! I have completely forgotten I wrote the article and as I read through excerpts of it, I hardly recognized it was my writing ... ehem ... I must admit I'm pretty impressed myself! Apart from the need for some editing, the article has a, ehem, refreshing style which took more than a minute for me to see the seeds of my writing style of today. Seems that I was already blogging then as now.

My article, named "A Collegian's Round," is number 26 out of 108 contributions gathered to represent a hundred years' history of the MCKK. To me it represents a small mark on my virtual tombstone. I've been immortalized.

Here is the cover of the book:

Malay Annals Emanating From Kelantan Palace Since Tok Janggut Days ...

2010-05-06T14:24:00.011+08:00

I'm a student of Kelantan history. Also Patani. They are related. Shahril Robert's book is a good source to start with. Otherwise just google. Google may know more about Kelantan history than either Shahril Robert or the sultan of Kelantan himself even before his incapacitation. And this Shahril Robert. What a good mix of name. Having met the guy, the looks provide even a better mix - he is a redoubtable professor of history with an impeccable mastery of his metier - factual writing. Sports long hair, is youthful looking, small and spry with a friendly, self-condescending smile. Add to this the fact that he may know more about Kelantan history than Nik Aziz, then you have enough ingredients to whip up a new sleaze, not on the shy Shahril, but the loudmouths who lost territory. But I haven't mentioned whether he chain smokes or what his wife does ... hint, she's an expert on the makyong ...

Now, used to be, the four provinces of south Thailand - Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat and Songkhla - were ruled by Malay rulers. Needless to say the population were Malays. According to Shahril, the Malay rulers and their hangers-on were having cat fights all the time just like the wife of the army guy and his girl friend in a hospital ward in Subang Jaya the other day.

This did not escape the roving eyes of the British who cleverly asked the Thais to step in and annex all four provinces to provide a buffer of stability so they can rule the lands to the south - Perlis, Kedah, Kelantan - in peace. That is a large tract of territory to lose, quite apart from losing dignity, pride and sovereignty. Er, some of the rulers were dragged to Bangkok and charged with rebellion, treason, whatever and ... Meanwhile the Chams in Vietnam and Cambodia had long seen the sun set on their own territories ...

The same historical leitmotif almost wiped out Kelantan but for some lines drawn in London. The Malays in Kelantan were living in scattered districts ruled by overlords with Kota Bharu being the most powerful and Pasir Putih providing the strongest challenge. The scene was thus set for the British to back the strongest and pulled in the challengers or recalcitrants. Tok Janggut of Pasir Putih lost his bet and his janggut but until today the rivalries continue, in ever the subtlest of forms, all hushed from public view, seething and slithering below the surface calm. The feuding and intrigues are not only between clans and families but even intra-families. Another interesting observer of local history is Che Husna Azhari. Like Shahril Robert, she is also an interesting mix. She herself is an ensue from the Kelantan melting pot just like Syed Kickdefella. A Kelantan with a trace of Arabic or Afghanistan blood will make no effort to hide it whereas if he has Chinese blood you better not mention it. Pak Idrus has studied this social anthro phenomena more than me. Ask him. But don't mention he looks mixed too! Capt Long House, however, admits it over at his blog.

So what's all this about our leaders hopping over to Singapore, Australia (Harun Din not excepted), Germany and the US seeking medical treatment? Is Kubang Kerian good only for four-footed kubanghoggers? Methinks it is an insult to the local kangkong (rich in iron, fiber, etc) when our leaders favor broccoli.

When are we going to have pride in our own dignity and ability or has that been compromised by history as much a mind boggling mix as it is? Well peeling the layers of history is as good an exercise for the mind as peeling onion is for the soul ... and humility.

Dungeon di Dungun: First Overnight Visitors ... From Another Planet!

2010-05-05T23:25:00.003+08:00

Jim (Petersson) and Maria are a young Swedish couple who stayed overnight at my new abode, Dungeon di Dungun, on their journey in Southeast Asia. They are teachers and caregivers of disabled children in their country and they are traveling with a mission - to raise publicity and seek donation for the plight of cancer patients through their website. They are traveling on a budget and their trip is subsidized by many sponsors.

They are the first overnight visitors to the not yet "completely completed" DdD. There's electricity but the water supply has not been connected to the house yet. The six-foot wall is completed but the gate has yet to installed.

The inside of the house does not have that settled in look yet with stuff half strewn about as Mydin Mall Kuala Terengganu has no stock of the furniture I want.

I'm saving the tag " ... from another planet ... " concerning the Swedes for last because it is the "best" feature of their travel. They started from Chiangmai (Jim pronounced it as Shanghai) on a 3,000 km journey through Malaysia to Singapore on a - you wouldn't believe this - SKATEBOARD called LONGBOARD.

I knew what a skateboard was but I didn't know until today there is a variety called Longboard used for cruising or travel.

"Travel on a skateboard? Which planet you come from?"

Their website: mrjimonlongboard.com.

Maria had to give up her skates in favor of a bicycle after she hurt her foot midway in their journey. They bought a cheap bike in Penang. The bags of cement suggest building work is still ongoing.

Here you can clearly see what a longboard skateboard looks like ... a skateboard! Finer points like degree of curvature, taper, board length, end shape, tortoise tail, all determine and contribute to the essentials of a longboard - excellent drive, long momentum, braking, balance, comfort, yes, comfort ... In the background you can see the plastered wall. The ground is as bare as the little guest room is barren!

See how Jim can stand on one leg to put his shoes on. Now you try that at home. I have a balance issue but I can do what Jim does because I practice yoga.

Aminulrasyid,15, Shot by Police: What Is At Issue Here?

2010-05-04T23:38:00.004+08:00

The Aminulrasyid Incident is a price we pay for being an open society. I'm sure there had been similar incidents in the past when we were a closed society going back to our feudal, colonial and Japanese occupation eras. The cases were hushed up on orders from on high and/or out of fear and/or fatalist acceptance. It provided cold comfort and closure.

Nowadays the media, politicians, lawyers, ngo's, family members spew comments and opinions and pounce on the spillage in a feeding frenzy that further cloud the issue and the established process of finding out the truth and dishing out justice especially when the process itself is being called into question.

The issue here is someone getting killed in a brush with the law. How do you assign the blame? The individual policeman or policemen involved are not going to tell the whole truth if it is against them. They will twist the "facts" of the case in their favor. Just like a defendant or a defense lawyer would in court.

Equally, the aggrieved party will wring the story dry to press their case. The courts can only adjudicate on the relative merit of the evidence presented in court. Can the truth and justice be served when the process in whole or in part is tainted? This is already indicated by the fact that there so many different versions of the stories reported in the media depending on who the source of the story is. The police started the circus rolling by telling their version which everyone finds hard to believe. The police chief does not help matters by going on the defensive when he should have been more impartial and professional.
He should also not put out a cynical smile in front of the tv camera as though arguing at a club. Instead he should show a concerned face to reassure the public. The press and some local politicians with the help of family members add to the murky picture by hastily staging a press conference in which the youth who escaped tell his version which differs wildly from the police version.

And then Karpal Singh has to get into the act. Are there no other lawyers competent enough to handle high-profile cases - all controversial cases are high-profile nowadays - other than Karpal and son? I wouldn't be surprised if the dead boy's mother had never heard of Karpal or at least cared less who her lawyer was until somebody pressed Karpal's name into her lap.

Another pertinent issue is related to the death of Manja Ismail's son in a road accident last month. I see both cases as signs of a new trend among well-to-do Malay families to see their teenage sons if not also daughters seizing the family car for late night or early morning jaunts when they should be in bed. This trend is one of many which form part of a larger phenomenon in which Malays - rich or poor - show they do not have an inner peace and integrity and must reach out or grasp outside symbols and straws as a surrogate for their emptiness and, worse, to hide from or deny it.

Perversely, the Malays love to wear their hangups on their shirt sleeves and make a Harian Metro of it. This is nothing new. The Malay tabloid is only a wolf in sheep's clothing, or, to put it more bluntly, it is the Sejarah Melayu in contemporary getup, full of stories of Malay mighthavebeens. A Malay cannot help himself but be true to form. Hint, hint ... gotcha!

Ban on Burqa: Seeing Shrouds from Both Sides Now

2010-05-01T12:00:00.005+08:00

You can argue the ban on burqas both ways.

Pro Burqas:

Personal freedom to wear anything in public so long as it is not indecent, revolting, provocative, etc;
The wearing of burqas is not something new, frivolous or churlish - it is an ancient, religious practice; it is not an act of rebellion against contemporary norms;
It is not much different from wearing face masks against H1N1; the day will come when a bank robber wears a surgical mask; are we then going to ban it also?
Security threat. Not only burqas can hide bombs. A nun's habit can too. If security personnel sees anything amiss in a burqa he has the right and duty to check but it must be on a case by case basis and not blanket suspicion;
What about other religious forms of dressing? Sikhs' turbans, a Jewish robe, nun's habit? Ok, they don't cover the face but all dresses are meant to conceal, certainly modesty, but also weapons;
What if a sub-Saharan native with a face cloth such as the one that adorn the Paris-Dakar logo were to arrive at the Paris International de Gaulle airport, fine Saharan dust wafting off from his face cover and all - I know there ain't that many, but shall we ban his fetish and rob him of his dignity recognized by the Paris-Dakar phalanx?
What if Paris or Brussels were to win an Olympics bid and parade ethnic dressing during the opening ceremony and some of which may be, er, erroneous by contemporary norms, such as loin cloth, face mask painting, lurid tattoos, Papua penis gourds, what else, are we going to ban them also to be fair to burqa spotters?
What about Halloween nights? Can we make a special case for not banning the burqa on just one evening a year, somewhat akin to allowing double parking, read that as haphazard parking, every Friday afternoon in Malaysia?
That some cultures or religions see the face as a body part of modesty no less than the genitals and must therefore be covered up is their own business no less than a nudist camp seeing the opposite or Adam and Eve wearing fig leaves;

Contra, just two:

It is highly probable that what is abbreviated but chic on a summer's day in Montpelier will be banned on the streets of Morocco, so if Peshawar can ban bra, so can Paris burqa;
I had two students wearing burqas in my Feature Writing classes at University Malaya in the 80s and 90s. One was plain, the other was pretty; the plain one came from the plains, the pretty one came from Al-Arqam; the Pretty One gave me "eyes" and postcards even after she graduated including a wedding invitation ... so you see the burqa may be an icon of modesty but if the wearer is pretty the radiance still shines through and then the veil can give the opposite effect of its purported purpose; female mystique types may even use it as a weapon of wooing or a piece of provocation ... you know, show a bit of leg or hiding the best for last sort of gamesmanship.

Sex Education: the Cons

2010-04-27T16:10:00.003+08:00

Teaching sex as a subject is to isolate it from its natural, social and cultural context and may be viewed as a rearguard action or reaction to its seeming rise as a social problem.

The facts of sex and its social context are already well placed in society. Facts about sexual functioning are to be found aplenty in biology and medical texts. Popular renditions are found in magazines and newspapers. The social context of sex are also in abundance through traditional or folksy sources, in law books and in many religious texts. Some government agencies, e.g. the health ministry, produce informative leaflets from time to time.

There is little excuse for anyone living in open society and not living in caves not to know about sex enough to go about it safely and with the least trauma. Even cavemen, who happen to be our ancestors, knew a thing or two about sex enough to engender our existence.

To teach it as a formal subject is to place it in an artificial context - like the classroom is not the best of places to discuss it - and bring in a train of unintended effects and peripheral pressures. How could a young - or old - female teacher teach such an emotive and sensitive subject in a detached and cold voice to a bunch of readyforanything teenagers? Sniggers, embarrassment, outofplace comments might follow. It also indirectly suggests that sex can be seen as something impersonal and textbookish - it is depersonalizing. It is ok to talk about volcanoes like that but sex is best talked about among intimate friends, or learned on your own from books, magazine or newspaper articles. To add insult to injury, some more, you have to sit for an exam on it! If you fail the sex paper, then what? No marriage license?

The current sexual issues are an ongoing thing carried over from a bygone era when the press was less forthright and open about sex. Now they are everyday fare giving the impression that they are on the rise. That they are more in the news is more a question of demographic pressures, society opening up and press freedom rather than people's ignorance about sex such that they must be taught at school.

Sexual issues are the outcome of other issues - morality, adult freedom, societal and cultural norms acting as repression, basic human emotions of jealousy and envy, criminality and human expression.

The most cogent argument against the need to teach sex at school is the fact that we and our ancestors never underwent it and we are none the worse for that. If sex were to be taught at school, additional manpower, man-hours and classrooms have to be allocated for it.

I think the best alternative for achieving the same purpose is for the authorities and publishing companies to produce informative booklets and leaflets teaching and reminding the public of what responsible sex is all about and the dangers of irresponsible sex. The information should be written in a level tone - not with didactic, holier-than-thou, moralizing, a "funny" tone or superior airs. The information should not be presented in an amateurish, slapdash or insensitive (too forthright and obvious?) style that insults the intelligence of the reader. Different authorities can emphasize different aspects of sex - legal, moral, abuse, health - in short summary leaflets while a booklet can include information that goes deeper into the subject.

What say you, kerajaan and ngo's?

Nihilism: No, Nahi, Nay, Nothingness, Negation - Nirvana

2010-04-23T11:53:00.013+08:00

Don't tell this to anyone, but, secretly, everyone is a nihilist, even if they say nay to it! Why so? Because nihilism is in essence the path to Nirvana. Different cultures and persuasions may call it by different names - Christians say the path to heaven is only through Jesus; Muslims say the path is the siratal mustakim; Buddhists say deny all desires and you'll achieve enlightenment - instantly, in one's lifetime or over many reincarnations; Hindus say free yourself from the karmic trap and you'll find the dharma ... etc. What they share in common is the unification of the diverse and the bringing out of one from the seemingly many: the ability to see the woods beyond the trees.
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I say you are already in paradise or at least enlightenened the moment you can see the relationship between the many layers and veils of contrived meaning and value by which we abstractedly live and the nothingness lurking below its surface.

There are three bit players here.

First, the surface values and meanings which so detract us as we go about our daily lives. We cannot but travel down this path.

Then bang! A BMW carrying a family of five crashed into a parked lorry on the Utara-Selatan Lebuhraya. All died in the ensuing inferno. All the meaning and value we had worked so hard to achieve - big car, big house, big family - has come to nought.

Ouch, groan, aduh, tolong jangan bunuh saya!

All the meaning and value of having a big house, big car and big family comes to nothing when dem rich men's diseases - HBP, diabetis, osteoporosis, renal failure, heart attack, strok, kolon kanser, obisiti - place a damper on your pulse and when a housebreaker, always a foreigner, puts a parang to your neck.

Hey, it happens in the news every day! It doesn't happen in one's real life though ... until it does!

All for what? For nothing, ultimately. But while traveling down the path of life, it is good to be living in a BMW or driving in a bungalow ... until the bang at the bend or parang at the neck breaks the bubble.

That is the second bit player - the inescapability of the path and the thought trap that one might as well live in a BMW and drive a bungalow instead of pushing a bicycle while traveling down the path of life.

The third player, this scythe-bearer waiting to take a swipe at your presumptuous reassuredness, at your erroneous reading of reality, at your self-deception and delusion, is the destruction, the nothingness waiting, not at the end of the road, but in the middle when you least expect it while effectively marking its earlier than expected end! Forgive me the convolution ... trying to kill two birds with one stone by way of suggesting that we do go through a convoluted process in living, leading to nothing. Remember the dinosaurs, ancient Egypt, the ruined Roman empire, the world wars, the invasion of Iraq? All for what? So children can learn history at schools?

So do we hail harakiri committers, Bruce Lee, Elvis Presley, Hitler, Saddam, Osama Laden and his say-die followers, baby-throwers, street protesters, errant judges, the Myanmar military junta, etc, as nihilists sent down from heaven by the Top Lop Dog (try reading it backwards for its subliminal message) and taken back after the day's done deed is done?

Nothingness is both the ultimate tyrant and nurse-maid of existence. Space is nothingness. Without space nothing can exist. That's spatial. Nothingness is something you cannot perceive but most certainly can feel. Hey, that describes God! Without God nothing can exist. (Write this next sentence yourself). Now that is special.

Hail nihilism!

BWT: Taiwan Route Plan

2010-04-21T22:05:00.002+08:00

Bike route 343918 - powered by Bikemap

The blue line marks the West Coast route. This is a tentative plan. I may prefer the East Coast route or do the whole round island tour.

Thai Politics: Red Shirts, Green Fatigues, Saffron One-piece and Royal Robes

2010-04-20T16:17:00.013+08:00

Don't know much about Thai history,
Don't know much about Buddha books,
Pom pud Thai mai dai,
Tae Pom rak all things Thai!

Looking at the unfolding drama in Thailand, I can't help noticing that some traditional role players are missing.

First, the King. Why he no turun padang? At least wave a gloved hand if not issue decrees from the balcony. Why no go to the ground and mencemar duli and pour all that feudal fizz? Chulalangkorn or his grandfather, can't remember which, used to enter the arena himself with roped fists and beat the daylights out of a Burmese warrior and claimed back Thailand from the invaders which is somewhat akin to Kelantan losing Besut to Terengganu in a wager over a cockfight. All that is old-fashioned kingship gone with the vikings. Today all kings do is chew cheroots, chair cricket clubs, contribute to charities and let the rakyat vie for Olympic medals.

Second, how about those in shirts of different colors except red - the silent, uninvolved majority selling tom yam and watching satellite television? They seem to go about their lives unaffectedly and continue to throw water on one another come Songkran day.

Third are the saffron robes. No going to the ground this time? They used to make headlines in Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Thailand, sacrificing their lives on the front lines of their causes. This time around they are conspicuous by their absence.

Now things are coming to a head with the commercial center of Krungthep under threat from the swarm of redshirts. Enter the green fatigues. I almost call them greenies but that would not be appropriate. Enter the camoes. Ah, Thailand has a long and colorful history involving camoes. Along with Myanmar and Vietnam, Thailand is the third country of southeast Asia with an active military presence in their politics. Ok, you might want to add Kampuchea ... and Laos. Yep, we aseanies are pretty hot on strutting the gunny stuff. No celebration, including weddings, would be complete without gunshots being fired into the air. Oops, that's the Middle East, the 'stan countries, some African states. It is the equivalent of blaring vehicle horns for any reason other than to alert others of your presence in a potentially hazardous situation. Where gunshots are cause celebration, car horns are cultural siamese twins.

Over in Malaysia, on the other hand, we tend to be quietists except for the occasional stray bullet or loose horn. Better the sound of silence, than the silence of sounds.

We Are Our Own Worst Enemy

2010-04-20T15:13:00.004+08:00

Looking at the daily newspaper fare, recalling the history of the world, reviewing my own track record, I've long suspected I am, along with the rest of humanity, my own worst enemy. Of course I excuse myself and blame others.

Now a book, A Mind of its Own - How the Mind Distorts and Deceives by Cordelia Fine, backs up my suspicion with facts and studies. The basic premise of the book is that our brain is wired to protect our fragile and vulnerable ego by denying its very fragility and vulnerability through distortion of reality and deception of the truth.

The writer says the way out of the morass is self-awareness and frankness, which, paradoxically, is easier for those who are mentally sick (like me) than for mentally healthy people (like you)! Mad people it seems are better at cutting the gordian knot of life's many impasses which so called normal people spend their whole lives trying to untie and never quite succeed!

Well, not the utterly, out-and-out mad, but rather people who are subject to frequent bouts of depression, often morose, cheerless and habitually dour and cynical. Ah ha, now I feel better ... but not for long ... back to my old routine.

It seems that cheerful people are the best at distorting reality and hiding from the truth. They resort to deceiving themselves and others to keep up their cheer and other sundry false pretenses so they can face another day, postpone right or timely action but eventually incurring penalties in terms of loss of time, money, opportunities, damage to their health, never achieving self-knowledge or enlightenment in their lifetime, not to mention probable tardy salvation in the afterlife!

It would seem that our brains are wired with a self-destruct, a death wish strand, an evolutionary insurance to ensure our passage on to the next phase of our existence making way for new and younger members of the species to fill the void we vacate.

Here are a few more book titles which explore the theme of we humans being our own worst enemy and how to balance the subconscious drive with learned reason.

On Being Certain: Believing You're Right Even When Wrong - Robert Burton;
Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things - Madeleine van Hecke;
Don't Believe Everything You Think - Thomas Kida;
Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior - Ori Brafman;
Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently - Gregory Berns;

May we advance on the path of enlightenment and liberation even if only inch by inch!

Malay Schindler's List Update: And The Beat Goes On ...

2010-04-18T16:54:00.033+08:00

I'll be brief, this updating of the list of prominent Malays who get killed before the mean Malaysian life expectancy of 75. Today, it's Achik of Spin; a few days ago, a 27-year-old female Malaysian national cyclist crashed and died during training; two weeks ago, Din Beramboi; a month earlier, Dr Zainal Abidin of PKR of Hulu Selangor; about two months ago, a whole family from Seremban selling bottled herbs got killed in a BMW on the Lebuhraya; some months ago some sweetyoungthing, a tv newscaster, died in a car crash on the road to Kuantan. It is not proper to say, now next, but this is an open list, and so the beat goes on ...

By contrast, I'd like to make up a list of prominent Malays who go cycling long distance ... haha ... none ... well, leave out the word "prominent" and we have a few - there was this district officer, Hasan Nawawi (he became prominent after cycling) who cycled 26,565 km rtw in 389 days; one Adnan Osman; some guy riding a trishaw, a blogger called Mat Touring (bicycle-touring.blogspot.com), Adam Kadir (before he became prominent), blogger Pak Idrus (before he became a blogger) a Samad Yusof (2709 km in West & East Malaysia), Khalib (39) & Aswad (23) (4547 km West and East Malaysia, Brunei; Malaysia-Vietnam-China: 8590 km in 95 days).

The Pragmatic & Syncretic Chinese: If It Works, Awright, If It Appeases, Why Not ...

2010-04-18T01:11:00.003+08:00

This is a Chinese shrine paying homage to a Malay fella of the 19th century who, if he is no figment of imagination, no doubt must have benefited them in some way. The roman inscription says "Dato' Awang Najib" born July 15, 1818. A cursory google failed to provide any info.

Chinese culture and religion will accrue and add on anything to its already rich heritage giving it local, period and even personal flavor, if it serves a purpose. This is the mark of all great and winning civilizations - the ability to adapt, add, survive and thrive. This is the opposite of born-loser societies who cling to feudal or medieval beliefs and practices in the self-delusion of purity. There have been periods in Chinese history when even they subscribe to this short-sighted and eventually self-defeating outlook but they always return to their eclectic - syncretic, if you insist - pragmatism.

The Chinese has only one purpose in life - to achieve prosperity in this life and continue to keep it in the hereafter.

So if one obscure dato' of the 19th century can still help to push the envelope of prosperity for some hopeful souls, why not?

The photo above was taken by Penang blogger Nazlina Hussin. It is situated in an alley between Green Hall and the new Penang Supreme Court, she says.

Anyone knows more about this shrine or Dato Awang Najib?

I Didn't Know I Have Nieces For Geniuses!

2010-04-16T02:37:00.002+08:00

The Internet, as everyone knows, is a mighty useful thing. As if I didn't know that, I came across this 2005 news item only today:

TWINS ACHIEVE OUTSTANDING RESULTS

0 Comments | BERNAMA; Malaysian National News Agency, Mar 10, 2005

KUANTAN, March 10 (Bernama) -- Revising three subjects together everyday was the key to success for a pair of twins who were among Pahang's top scorers in the last year's Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) examination which was announced yesterday.
Farisa Mohamed Zaffa and younger sister Fardia, both from Sekolah Menengah Abdul Rahman Talib (Smart) here, obtained 11As and 10As respectively.
"We would sit for about four hours each time and discuss the best ways to answer questions," Farisa said.
The daughters of a medical practitioner Dr Mohamed Zaffa Abdul Razak and Rohani Awang were also active in co-curriculum activities, besides being school prefects.

Er, I should add, the twins are nieces of mine. Farisa is in London, Ottawa, Canada, while Fardia is in Bristol, UK. Farisa is an active blogger just like her uncle. You can read of her antics at farisaz.blogspot.com. A belated CONGRATS from your Uncle Long, Farisa and Fardia!

BWT: Global (Been There) Cyclists Who Inspire Me

2010-04-15T14:19:00.004+08:00

Taking on any endeavor, most people would have been inspired by those who have come before them. In my plan to travel the world by bicycle I've been inspired by the writings and photographs of not a few accomplished global cyclists. Here are four of them:

Ken Kifler:

I cursorily came upon Ken Kifler's website and noting its relevance to my own travel plan, I bookmarked it for later perusal. It seemed active and chock-full of information. Imagine my shock when visiting it again I discovered that he had been dead for seven years, killed in a road accident by a drunk driver in Alabama in 2003. Ken is/was a dedicated cycling advocate par excellence with a huge fan following. Untold numbers of cyclists have been inspired by him. One added bonus for me is the fact that Ken was a fan of writer Henry David Thoreau who also inspires me. He's the guy in the studio shot. See www.kenkifer.com/.

Heinz Stucke:

Next is Heinz Stucke, the most traveled man in the world, and on a bicycle too. He's 70 now and is still at it, and and has been on the road for 48 years since 1962! Not surprisingly he does not own a car or a house. Everything he owns he carries on his bicycle. Just google his name. Loads of info.

Josie Dew:

Josie Dew is the grand dame of women global cyclists. She has written several books about her travels. See www.josiedew.co.uk.

Tzuo Hann Law:

But the most inspiring of them all is our own Malaysian Tzuo Hann Law. He started his epic bicycle journey in 2007 at age 23 from the Pacific Coast to the Atlantic Coast of USofA, flew over the Atlantic to Ireland, cycled across Europe, the 'stan countries, China, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia, some 28,571 km of it as recorded on his bike computer. I don't know how to pronounce the unusual spelling of his name - Tzuo - but this guy is a true blue Malaysian with a veneer of American and Chinese cussiness, hit-the-bottle abandon, shoot-from-the-hips politics and off-the-cuff philosophy but his guts, gumption and grunge makes him an individual in his own right. He read The Brothers Karamazov in his tent in the bush or a derelict building while waiting out the night or storm raging outside. Realizing he doesn't carry the looks of Jackie Chan, he sidles, cusses, barges in through half open doors, past sour officials, annoying crowds, rude Chinese (in China), chasing dogs, exuberant mostly, risible many a time. He cycled mostly alone but teamed up with his lawyer dad riding the Gobi desert, with our seven-summiteer Qobin in Vietnam and a Britisher Richard in Thailand. In my book, he is up there with Datuk Lee Chong Wei in accomplishment. Zambry should give him a datukship. I read every page of his 276-page journal of his journey over at http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/longwayhome/.

Forget iPad, Get WePad

2010-04-14T22:23:00.002+08:00

Wetpad, sanitpad, petpad ... aw, never mind! I do not know enough geekery to go into details but after reading about them online, I think the new WePad tablet computer is better then Apple's iPad. Read about it yourself here: http://wepad.mobi/en.

Pacific Reach Trail: Small Wheel Folding Bike: Cross-Continent Capable?

2010-04-12T15:50:00.003+08:00

The Pacific Reach small wheel folding bicycle has been in existence for some years but it is not as famous as Moulton, Brompton, Birdy, Bike Friday, Airnimal and Dahon in the small wheel folding or separable bicycle category.

In fact the Reach is a unique, well-engineered and capable machine. Made in Taiwan by a company whose initial and main business was to make frames for other brands of bicycles including some mentioned earlier, the Reach comes in several versions all sharing the same basic frame setup. The one being considered here is the Trail, rigged for long distance travel including going offroad.

The formula behind the Reach is that the Taiwanese frame manufacturer would have a bike designer design a frame incorporating design ideas from the well-known companies to whom it supplies frames and come up with a design all of its own, thus entitling it to have its own name - Pacific Reach.

The PR folds like an Airnimal, has front suspension like that of a Moulton (no, it doesn't supply frames to the proudly British-made Moulton) and rear suspension like that of the German-designed Birdy!

And the formula is a success judging by the reviews and market acceptance. All things considered, it is a well-specced rig with performance (speed) and suspension being its high points. I have no personal experience of the bike and hope to remedy this deficiency by test riding it in Singapore, where it is available for sale, soon.

The Pacific Reach Trail is one of the bicycles I'm considering purchasing for the Taiwan-China-Vietnam-Cambodia-Laos-Thailand three-month bike tour starting September 2010. The other two are Birdy 3x8 and Dahon Speed TR. I'll make my choice and buy in Taiwan. Maybe I'll buy two, ride one and post home the other.

My New Eye Shades: Serengeti 7395 Fasano Polarized & UV

2010-04-12T14:11:00.005+08:00

Bought my first "expensive" eye shades a month ago at the spanking and Stateside reminiscent Mesra Mall sprawled along the Paka-Kertih road. You can hardly miss the vast single-floor shopping complex, probably the biggest in Terengganu state, as you drive along the road on your way somewhere. It has become my regular stop on my way someplace.

In the past I had almost totally ignored this, I must admit, quite useful and ubiquitous everyday need, associating it with fashion and pose which is of course a no-no in my nature-conserving and treehugging lifestyle. Over the years I had acquired only two or three pairs, all for less than RM100, losing them one by one in the vast nether where all lost and never found items go to.

But then my active outdoor lifestyle brings me out in the sun and not having a pair of eye shades can be quite a pain. So, having lost my last sub-RM100 pair a few months ago, I was eyeing for a replacement when I spotted and tried out this new "darkies" at an outlet at the Mesra Mall. Of course I had never heard of Serengeti except the desert. But it felt very comfortable and was the right fit when I tried it on and it caught me in a rare generous mood. I bargained down the markup price to RM600 (600 % increase in what I was willing to pay for a pair of dark glasses before!) and bought it.

Later, today, I googled to know more about this "pig-in-a-poke" thing I had bought. I didn't even know its full name - Serengeti 7395 Fasano. All I asked was for something "polarized." Forgot about UV! Luckily, its claimed characteristics bear out my expensive buy - it had everything and more! BUT the online US price of $159 (RM450) tells me I was shortchanged (legally too) for RM150. No cheap lesson there: Google first, shop around. Don't buy on impulse or from the shop window.

The thing will come in handy as I eat up the kilometers pedaling my bicycle in the climatically-changed heat of the day.

Here is the online description of my shades:

Serengeti 7395 Fasano

Photochromic and polarized properties are combined with lightweight polycarbonate, shatter resistant lenses with anti-glare coatings, resulting in superior durability and clarity. This is the kind of treatment every driver deserves.
Serengeti Polar PhD lenses built on the NXT lens platform feature the newest evolution of polarized and photochromic lens technologies. With Serengeti's Spectral Control technology, you can enjoy a crisper color representation and clearer images. Polar PhD lenses block irritating blue light to prevent eye strain and provide 100% UV protection. Serengeti PHD technology features an anti-scratch hard coat, seven layer backside anti-reflective coating and oleo phobic coating technology for oil and water resistance.

Serengeti Polar PhD lens technology for incredible optics
Anti-scratch, anti-reflective and oleo phobic coatings
100% UVA/UVB protection

Plan to See the World from the Seat of a Recumbent Bike

2010-04-06T23:41:00.030+08:00

The Plan:

To undertake a series of self-supported bicycling travels of one to four months duration two or three times a year to parts of the world using other modes of transportation whenever necessary;
Latest (June 25, 2010): As the day of departure approaches, I've narrowed down my choice of bike to a recumbent bike, folding or separable;
The use of an electric motor assist is an open option;

The Aims:

To promote cycling as a healthy lifestyle;
To promote bicycle travel as recreation and way of life;
To promote cycling and bicycle travel among seniors;
To promote the bicycle as a practical means of commuting and touring;
To promote the bicycle as a more frequent replacement of the car for personal transport;
To promote the bicycle as a thing of beauty in its own right;
To promote Malaysia;
To promote people to people contact;
To promote goodwill and social networking among different peoples of the world;

Motivation:

Strong interest in geography, history, world cuisine and cultures;
Strong interest to see the world;
To have something to write about and take photographs of;
To feel the joy and satisfaction of riding a well-made bicycle with the world as a stage;
To bond with the bicycle in its own right and as a surrogate for life's missing links; to feel one with the bike;
To watch the world turn with the bike as axis;
To watch the journey unfolds with the bike playing chase, or lead;
To monitor what bleeds from the cranium above while the patella pushes the pedal below;
To experience the world as a backdrop to self-discovery and personal growth;
To explore remote places;
To meet people;
To make my life over;
To turn my life on its head;
To feel one with the world;
To learn to take the highs with the lows, the thrills with the spills, the sighs and the blows, getting around obstacles and going with the flow;
To learn to survive, thrive and feel more alive;
To rejuvenate flagging spirits, to sooth the crying soul;

Strategies:

Take photographs;
Write articles/journals for online bicycle touring websites;
Blog;
Contact local media;
Contact Malaysian embassies;
Contact relevant government agencies;
Flags and identity alerts on bike;
Give English language lessons whenever appropriate;
Seek out mosques and Muslims in non-Muslim countries;

Travel Style:

No expensive luxury;
May consider budget accommodation;
Self-supporting: tent, stove, a week's food supply;
Will accept, sometimes seek, local hospitality;
Two styles of camping for bicycle travelers: stealth or commando camping and camping with permission or at approved sites;

Equipment:

The bike choices: Pacific Reach Trail, Pacific Reach DC (electric), Dahon Speed TR, Koga Miyata Adaptor, Pashley-Moulton TSR 27, Sinner Comfort Ebike, Flevobike Green Machine (Latest: June 25, 2010: I've narrowed the field to Taiwan-made Performer Goal-X and German-made Toxy Flite - both are recumbent bikes);
Handlebar bag, front and rear panniers;
Trailer (?)
Repair tools and spares;
Stove, pot, pan, mug;
Tent/Clark Jungle hammock;
First aid;
Toiletry;
Three sets of clothing: two pairs of warm weather for the road, one rain or cold weather; one for sleeping; one for town;
Sun hat; sun glasses (Serengeti); sun block; riding gloves;
Food (standby, supplement): rice, noodles, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tinned meat and fish; powdered milk (Ensure), powdered packet drinks (tea, coffee, Milo), packet drinks (green tea, barley, ginger), filtered water;
Subnotebook (Acer Aspire 1810TZ);
Rugged Camera: Pentax W90 or Olympus Mju 8010;
GPS: Garmin 60 csx; Bike Computer;
Solar charger (?);
Inmarsat telephone (?);
Binoculars;
A clear plastic holder containing A4 paper saying "English teacher from MALAYSIA bicycling around the world, zveloyak.blogspot.com," in two languages, English and the local language;

Travel Companion:

I may take a small dog along! It may prove to be a boon or a bane, an aide-de-camp or an added complication.

Tentative Timeline:

2010: September - December: Taiwan-China-Vietnam-Cambodia-Laos-Thailand; Bike: Pacifif Reach Trail or Pacific IF Reach DC;
2011: March-May: Myanmar-Nagaland-Bhutan-Sikkim; Bike: Dahon Speed TR;
2011: August - December: Holland, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, India, Myanmar, Thailand; Bike: Sinner Comfort eTrike or Flevobike GreenMachine;

Charity:

In the past, my route and style of traveling more often than not brought me in close contact with the common people. Many a time I would find myself in situations where a gift or handout would be most appropriate. But traveling light and on a budget precludes the possibility of playing the role of a giver too often. Carrying extra cash with a view to handing it out at appropriate times incurs no weight penalty but then I cannot afford the extra cash myself! I regret the loss of opportunity to make a difference, however small, in the lives of some of the people I meet while traveling. My plan this time around is to appeal for contributions from readers. Whatever monies I get I'll hand them out as the situation arises and report them here - with photographs if appropriate. If large amounts are involved receipts would be in order but for small amounts, say, less than US$10 to $20, readers/contributors will have to take me on trust. I welcome offers from readers. I also intend to write to individuals or bodies asking for contributions.

Inspiration:

http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/longwayhome;
Heinz Stucke;
http://www.kenkifer.com/bikepages/touring/index.htm;
http://www.bikechina.com/index.php;
http://www.bicycle-adventures.com/
http://www.downtheroad.org/;
http://bicycle-touring.blogspot.com/;
http://www.hittheroadat.blogspot.com/

Barisan Nasional Direct Membership

2010-04-06T21:28:00.000+08:00

Right off I say the option of direct membership of BN is a move that is long overdue and ought to have been offered right at the very beginning. Voters then have many choices to choose from. They may vote without being a member of any political party - the so-called fence-sitters - or they may join UMNO, MCA, MIC, some other component party of BN, or join it direct.

These choices reflect the spectrum of political leaning from the non-committed, to the partisan or ethnic-based and the true Malaysian nationalist.

Thus BN direct membership provides a much needed platform for Malaysians who want to wean themselves from the narrow-based identification of race to the broad-based identification of being a Malaysian which is what we as a nation is striving to be and what nation building is all about.

In the larger context of humanity, an aspiration to be identified with the largest ring in the concentric circle of identifications - the human race, a united world - and a life of struggle to uphold universal, non-partisan concerns, marks a true human and humanist. Against the tide of world strife and conflict, history has thrown up countless individuals who rise above the divisiveness to leave their mark in bringing the world closer together. The names of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Abraham Lincoln, Dag Hammerskjold, Alfred Nobel, come to mind. These individuals didn't struggle for their own race but for all mankind, whereas our Malaysian leaders are more known for fighting for their own race and other partisan interests.

Given our multi-ethnic background we can accept the reality of our race-based parties and other divide-and-rule and slash-and-burn politics but we should also move forward and expand sideways to accommodate and encourage a non-partisan consciousness and movement.

Opening BN to direct membership would be a step in this direction. I have a sneaking suspicion that over time this option may well prove to be more popular than membership through the component parties. I think it would appeal particularly to the educated young.

Of course the rules and conditions of membership must be spelled out to ensure the best possible outcome.

In the spirit of parliamentary democracy, the opposition Pakatan Rakyat should also do likewise and offer direct membership.

Two Normal (26" wheels) Size Ebikes: Wisper 906 Alpino & Koga Miyata Tesla

2010-04-05T22:09:00.008+08:00

A normal sized ebike gives you better performance in terms of battery range, ability to roll over road surface imperfections, go off-road, arguably go faster, and bears higher load compared to small wheel bikes. But it costs more and is more difficult if not impossible to transport. One argument in its favor is that it is a cheaper and more practical option than traveling by motorbike which is of course another of my many interests. Here are two choices which I've lassoed for my future consideration:

Wisper 906 Alpino, designed in UK, fabricated in Shanghai:

If looks can kill, the Alpino is an assassin.
80 km battery range.
25 km kph.
Rear rack: 25 kg.
Wt: 25 kg.
Load: 130 kg.
RST Viva front suspension.
Lights: Spaninga LED
Computer
Lithium Polymer Battery: 36V, 14AH, 504W.
Motor: 36V/250W Dapush front hub.
Rear hub: Shimano Alfine 8.
RM10,000.

This is the king of all touring bikes, electric or non-electric, the Koga Miyata Tesla. Designed in the Netherlands with Japanese collaboration, fabricated in Taiwan. State of the art bike frame and components.

Battery: 264W.
Motor: 40 Nm/250W.
Front hub: Shimano XT.
Rear hub: Koga electronic.
Lights: Koga Rayo front, B&M rear.
Computer.
28.5 kg.
Rear rack: 30 kg.
No suspension.
RM12,000.

Malay First or Malaysian First: The Ascending or Descending Identity Order, or Disorder

2010-04-05T12:16:00.005+08:00

Muhyiddin! So you are a Malay first, Malaysian second!

The need for identity and with it a sense of dignity and security, is very strong in humans. We humans do not belong to just one grouping but a concentric circle of groupings which can be seen as ascending from the smallest unit to the largest or descending from the largest to the smallest. Half, say, of these groupings which we belong to are a matter of choice while the other half is a given.

The smallest but most crucial unit is our own self, in itself a grouping of many levels of consciousness from the physical, the social, the geographical, the temporal, the historical, to the spiritual.

The second is the family unit. Third would be ethnicity. Some would contend religion or nationality as the third identity level. Yeah, they do shift about a bit even in the same individual. Nothing is written in stone. Next, there's a whole cluster of more shifting identities. Throw in your housing block, which floor perhaps, neighborhood, village, town, political affiliation, recreational or sports clubs.

You may have noticed the above delineation of identity groupings reflects both an ascending and descending order.

In the Malaysian socio-political context, the question of identity is a big issue. Like everyone else in the world, Malaysians (aha, a ready-at-hand identity) are bunched into deeply entrenched and diverse identity groupings which for the most part cohere, overlap and co-exist peacefully like so many strangers queuing up to buy tickets but could also be divisive or alienating. This is a reality which is endemic to all societies and not just Malaysian. It is part and parcel of the socio-political dynamics of human societies. Come to think of it, we share this trait with all social animals, baboons, f"nstance.

All nations, whether more or less democratic, are faced with the challenge of nation building - economically, socially and politically. Any threat to a nation's growth and stability must be dealt with or else suffer the consequences.

Given its diverse ethnic, religious and cultural composition, Malaysia has to come up with a nation building plan which can unite its peoples or else ... suffer the consequences.

One issue in this plan is the question of identity or rather the emphasis of identity. Are we going to encourage Malaysians to think of themselves by race first or as Malaysians first. Both standpoints are valid and have their pros and cons so it is up to us to make our stand one way or another.

My opinion is that racial identity is retrogressive, taking us back into the caves while the larger identity of being a Malaysian first is a small step which everyone can take for the advancement of their own personal growth and emancipation from narrow, self-emaciating and, if carried too far, illusory identities.

The more you are aware and think of yourself in the larger picture of the nation and at the same time can feel a sense of belonging to one universal race, the human race, the better it is for you psychologically and spiritually. After all, no matter whether you are Malay, Chinese or Orang Asli, we all descend from a common ancestor, Lucy, who, we are reliably told, came from an area somewhere in present day Ethiopia.

Politically, it is up to Muhyiddin to think of himself as a Malay first, but personally, I think of myself as an ape first, human second, Malaysian third and Malay I'm trying to wean myself from. Enough is enough.

Bicycle Travel: Small Wheel Folding Electric Bikes

2010-04-04T23:54:00.004+08:00

For quite some time now, electric bikes have quietly been adopted by city commuters the world over to beat traffic and rising fuel prices. Again, like in almost all aspects of bicycles and cycling, China leads the world in number of riders and manufacturers. Europe and America are a bit behind but they particularly Europe lead in technological innovation and design and then get their bikes manufactured in China or Taiwan.

Most electric bike cyclists use it on a daily basis for commuting but the trend of taking their ebikes for longer rides i.e. touring, is growing. One guy is going around the world on an electric bike. See http://www.electricbicycleworldtour.com/en/

There are many manufacturers and models to choose from and for my purpose I've narrowed them down to two, the Dahon Boost and the Wisper 806 Alpino.

Dahon Boost:

Folding
20" wheel
Speed: 3
Front hub: Kinetix Neutron
Rear hub: SRAM iMotion 3
Motor attached to BB and drives chain
Tires: Schwalbe Big Apple 20" x 2"
Lights: Spanninga LED.
Rear rack.
Load: 105 kg.
WT: 19 kg.
Folded size: 14.2" x 26" x 32.7".
RM8,000.

Wisper 806 Alpino:

Folding
20" wheels.
Shimano Alfine 8 rear hub.
Dapush 36V/250W motor in front hub.
Battery: Panasonic Lithium Ion: 36V, 9AH, 324W.
LCD Display.
Lights LED.
Range: 60 km.
Load: 100 kg.
Rear Rack: 25 kg.
Tires: Kenda 20 x 1.75.
Maximum speed: 25 kph.
19 kg.
RM7,500.

Folding Vs Separable Recumbent Bicycles: HP Velotechnik Grasshopper Vs Volae Expedition

2010-04-03T02:02:00.003+08:00

As part of my lifestyle makeover by which I've chosen long distance travel by bicycle as a way of life, I've resumed searching the Internet for bicycles which fall into the category of folding or separable for their ease of transport in multimode travel. There are occasions when cycling a bicycle is not advisable such as falling sick, inclement weather and security risks whence it is better to take a train, bus or plane. A folding or separable bike can be packed into a bag or case and transported whereas a bare bike would incur not a few hassles if not outright rejection.

From this search I've narrowed my choices to two: the German-made HP Velotechnik Grasshopper folding recumbent bike and the American-made Volae Expedition ES. The Volae does not fold but can be split into two by a clever mechanism and packed into a standard-size, airline-acceptable case.

Volae:

lighter
faster
26" wheels
many options and accessories
elegant and clean lines
no suspension
same price category

Grasshopper:

a little heavier
slower
20" wheels
many options and accessories
elegant curvy lines
with front and rear suspension
same price category

Folding Bicycle Travel: Equipment Wish List

2010-04-01T22:06:00.046+08:00

Second pic shows the Carry Freedom City bicycle trailer. It is versatile, serving as suitcase, shoulder bag, trolley, can be folded and it can carry more stuff outside the provided bag. Load: 45 kg. Rarely would a bicycle toure want or need to carry more than 40 kg of stuff.

The Veltop windscreen and canopy for recumbent trikes. Not for the shy. Don't buy this if stares annoy you.
The Carry Freedom Y-frame trailer. Capacity: 90 kg.
Veltop windscreen and canopy for bicycles. Cool, huh?
Garmin 60 csx. Versatile.
Moonsaddle. No more butt woes.

Acer Aspire 1810TZ subnotebook. RM1,800. Bought this one earlier this month.

Olympus Mju Tough 8010. RM1,200. (Malaysia: RM1,500)

Above: The German-designed, Taiwan-made, Rieser & Mueller 24-speed SRAM Dual Drive Birdy Touring.

Folded size: 34" x 22" x 11".
Dual suspension
RM4500. Add RM2,000 for a Rohloff hub gear.

The Pacific IF Reach DC folding, 20 " wheel, ebike. The motor drives the bottom bracket, rather than the hub which is more common. Centered and balanced, lower center of gravity, benefits in better handling and ride and is more efficient in power usage, say its exponents.

Below: Suunto X10 GPS wristwatch. RM2,000.

Garmin Edge 705 GPS. RM1,500.

Wild L7 camping stove. RM25 in China, RM60 in Malaysia.