The Prof. Madder Chronicles

It's War!!

2011-10-24T20:32:00.002+08:00

Never mind the events in Libya, there is a bigger war going on all around us, a war going on in the world of mobile computing, a war with no apparent boundaries, a war with millions of dollars at stake. I am of course talking about the ongoing patent case between Apple, the makers of the iPad, and Samsung, the upstarts from South Korea who brought out the Galaxy Tab. It seems that Apple, perhaps buoyed by the sympathy vote after the tragic demise of their founder, are suing the pants off of Samsung, because Samsung have dared to release a tablet computer that resembles the Apple iPad2.

Injunctions have been issued in several countries stopping Samsung from selling its products. Counter injunctions have been fired by Samsung aimed at the latest half baked iPhone version. It is all very ugly, just like a real war. And like real wars, there are plenty of innocent victims. And these victims are the consumers.

Because of all this corporate skirmishing, the consumer, that's you and me, folks, cannot choose for themselves which tablet computer to buy, in some countries such as Germany and Australia. Their right to choose has been stripped from them by lawyers and corporate suits.

And this is a crime, because the result is a restriction of choice. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is every bit as good a tablet as the Apple iPad, in some ways better, because it can connect to a laptop with its own dock, plus a supplied USB cable. You cannot do that with the iPad without purchasing all sorts of dodgy third party pieces of hardware. Also, the Galaxy is cheaper, and wifi and 3G options are bundled together. Why should I buy a more expensive product just because of the large number of apps available to the iPad?

That just makes me want to reach for my pills, because quite honestly, I do not care if Apple thinks Samsung has violated its patents by producing a similar machine. All I care about is having the choice of which tablet to buy. That is my right, and it is the right of all those German and Australian consumers who have been denied choice because of legal fiat.

Apple accuse Samsung of stealing the design of the tablet from its own product, and admittedly the two tablets do look and feel suspiciously similar. However, tablet computers featured in movies and TV long before the iPad came along - in 2001 a Space Odyssey in 1968 and Star Trek the Next Generation in the 1990s. The design idea therefore has prior provenance. Consequently, suing Samsung for producing a similar product to the iPad is as logical as Mercedes Benz suing BMW because the beamer has four wheels and a powerful engine.

So I bought a Galaxy tab, before Apple stops it being sold here in Malaysia. And I haven't regretted it so far...

A day well spent

2011-10-15T21:50:00.001+08:00

A day well spent is a day helping someone with serious problems. Today, my missus and I spent the afternoon with a friend and colleague who has just been diagnosed with lung cancer. Now before you jump to conclusions, no, she doesn't smoke, nor does anyone else in her family. Neither does she live next door to a cigarette factory, as far as I know. But lung cancer it is, though fortunately (!) it is stage 1. Now, as you may or may not know, my wife had breast cancer four years ago so she is in a great position to offer advice and help to her friend, and so armed with some edible and drinkable goodies and a present, we went over to her lovely house outside Kuching.

I won't bore you with the details of our conversations, but it became obvious that one factor was shared by my wife and our friend - stress. Both of them have experienced a great deal of stress in the last few years and much of it has in fact come not from demanding work environments, but from demanding and draining families! Now I am not saying that families cause stress all the time, nor am I arguing that stress necessarily causes cancer. But many people suspect, doctors included, that psychological factors may have a correlation with certain types of cancer.

It was enormously satisfying seeing my wife and her friend sharing some of their secrets which we have not been able to share with anyone for so long. The sense of a heavy burden lifting was palpable in that living room this afternoon. But the stress will not go away that easily, especially if you have demanding and stressful families.

Many people struggle through illness, even though their families make unfair demands on them, physically and mentally abuse them and treat them as if nothing is wrong. All I can say is that such families are toxic. They do not or cannot care whether you live or die. But you have a choice. Don't let them get you down, as they say. If you need help, read a book, pray, play Angry Birds, anything. But most of all, find refuge in a good friend. A good friend will never cause you stress, and will never be toxic...

Back Again, again!

2011-10-14T23:05:00.002+08:00

Oh bugger it! Why not! Let's start the old blog up again and see what happens shall we? It's been so long, and so much has happened since my last post which was, oh, last year! I've got into Facebook, but that doesn't satisfy me enough. I've got into Twitter, but length really is everything! So, I've returned to the medium I love best. Continuous prose where you don't have to be careful how many words you type.

Of course, it doesn't mean I will stop using social media, oh no. But blogging is really where it's at for me, it's what crumbles my cookie, what dings my dong! There's nothing like the real thing, as they say....

Good Morning Shoppers...

2010-11-27T21:32:00.002+08:00

You can imagine what would happen if the following announcement came over the tannoy in the Spring shopping mall: "Good Morning shoppers! Would the car owner of QXX 9XXX please return to your burning vehicle immediately"!

I for one would suffer an immediate shed collapse in sheer and utter shock that something actually INTERESTING was being announced in those faux American, oh so nice and sisterly tones. Never mind my obvious pity and horror that some poor unfortunate so and so had to return to the Premier Car Park to watch helplessly as his HondaBastard VX9 roared away gloriously in flames with a nice healthy black plume of smoke hurrying off briskly into the wide blue yonder!

I might be moved by human feelings to go up to him, and say how sorry I am to see his pride and joy in such a conflagrous state. I might offer him advice about how important it is not to leave your cigarette lighter switched on in the blistering heat of the Sarawak late morning.

Because people do things like that you know! It says so on the Internet!!

Almost every day, I get these postings in my email box, many of which are forwarded on to me faithfully by my dear wife. They come in various categories, many of which are related to health and how to avoid cancer by taking carrots or drinking water and egg yolk mixed with a dash of pepper corns.

The ones I am focusing on here are those scary posts which are by way of an urgent warning to anyone who basically wakes up in the morning and does anything. They usually start with big bold letters in many colours and there is usually a hint or two that the writers do not have English as their native language.

One of them I read the other day warned of the mortal perils of starting your car up in the morning without opening the windows to let out the carcinogenic spores that rise up from your car seats. Another one revealed to us that according to scientists in China (!) drinking milk and eating meat causes cancer and that we should all remove these items from our diets or die horribly. Another one was a kind of security warning about what happens in some third world countries to travellers who forget to have their passport stamped when going through immigration.

Now don't get me wrong, folks. Some of these postings do have some good advice, even though they seem to resemble urban myths in terms of their possible truth value. But I can't help thinking that the creators of some of these posts really do think that we are stoopid. I mean, surely EVERYbody knows that it is a bad idea to start your car in the morning without opening the windows, right? Even in a tropical country where dengue mosquitoes are hovering near your car just waiting to slide through the open car window and kill you...

Oh and one more thing. I get really peed off by redundancy in human communication. When the Spring shoppers announcement says 'would the car owner of...' I can't help reaching for my pills, grating my teeth and wondering whether the announcement is also aimed at motorbikes and trucks and any other vehicle apart from cars. Why can't you just say 'would the owner of...' and get rid of the redundant 'car' because it's understood. At least by me..

Has that burning car gone out yet?

Madder's Back....an Lovin it!!

2010-11-20T22:45:00.002+08:00

Phew! I finally decided to re-join the blogosphere after a year of self-enforced absence. To my dear fan (s) I would like to apologise for my lack of presence during the last 12 months. I categorically deny all of the evil and unfounded rumours that I was kidnapped by aliens, or in prison, or that I had left the country. Luckily for you, my dear reader (s), none of these is true, and I am back, panting and moist with excitement at the prospect of continuing my rantings for your delectation...

So, why did I go away, I hear you all scream? The reasons are complex, but they boil down to a lack of ideas, pure and simple. I ran out of things to say, yet the things I really wanted to say could not be said, at least not in the ways I wanted to say them. Sounds paradoxical I know, but hey, sue me!!

But let us be friends once again, let bygones be bygones and water under the bridge, no need to cry over spilt milk, la de dah de dah...

So what should I write about?

Bumpy Sections - Part Two

2009-11-15T22:20:00.002+08:00

I was beginning to realise by this time that road maps of Borneo only represent reality in an approximate manner, like TV comedy programmes. Just before setting off on the trip, I had dutifully purchased two folding road maps of Sarawak, Sabah, Borneo and whatever, and they SEEMED accurate. I also traced the route from door to door on Google Maps several times, noting down the names of towns and villages.

But the trouble is that none of these road maps, paper or electronic, are anywhere near accurate enough. I am used to the military precision and accuracy of the Ordnance Survey maps back in the UK. These maps offer you so much detail, from street and house level right up to regional and national and planetary level. No wonder the army uses them. But, I discovered that Malaysia does not seem to have an Ordnance Survey standard set of road maps for Sarawak, Sabah and Brunei. And to make things worse, decent maps of Brunei itself are even rarer and less detailed than the Malaysian ones.

I daresay there are two reasons for this – one comes from the old days of the Konfrontasi during the 1950s and 1960s, when it was not a good idea to let too many people know where Bukit Whatever was, or where Rumah Such and Such was situated, in case there were communist agents lurking about. The other reason comes from the fact that Malaysia in general is changing so rapidly that the layout of towns and villages sometimes literally changes overnight. This is true in Sarawak where, less than a decade ago, the road I took up to Sibu was largely a dirt and gravel track whereas now it is paved and much more civilised.

Yet it still begs the question of why on earth the maps cannot be updated more quickly, when electronic equivalents are more up to date. Well, slightly anyway. The latest Google Earth map of my area in Kuching still does not show the Spring shopping centre, nor the new airport!

So the long and the short of it is that using a map to guide you from Kuching to Sabah via Brunei is a somewhat inexact science, full of adventure and tantalising uncertainty!!

I found that it is much better to follow the road signs, rely on my excellent sense of direction (“Sibu is behind us, so Bintulu MUST be in front!!”) and, if the worst comes to the worst, ask a passer-by. Which is what we did in Brunei, when we got lost.

But I am getting ahead of myself here! Let me fill you in on the trip from Bintulu to Brunei, on the Second day of the trip. So I woke up groggy and somewhat puky at an unthinkably early hour on 17th September. We showered, packed and after checking out trudged down to the muddy car park to find the car perfectly safe and sound.

After getting under way, we didn’t have too much trouble finding the road to Miri (Road signs!!!) and pointed the blunt nose of the Matrix towards that town. The road to Miri is bumpy and hilly, like a strip of dark grey chewing gum with big lumps and long gaps where some of the gum has stretched too thin. I drove but after a while my arse and my stomach began to regret it!

We stopped in the huge and sprawling Niah Caves Rest Stop, where we had breakfast, stocked up on drinkies and nibbles for the journey, and most importantly filled up the petrol tank. Here is another useful bit of advice, gentle readers. On long journeys, fill up your tank at every opportunity. Don’t wait too long to do it, because you never know, there might not be another filling station for 500 kilometres!

This is especially true if you are heading for Brunei, because that country does not allow foreigners to buy petrol and in any case, it’s twice as expensive in Brunei as it is in Malaysia because of the exchange rate! So use the Niah Cave Rest Stop wisely!!

After the Niah Caves, it was on to Miri, where a lack of road signs for the Brunei border made it slightly difficult to find our way but, thanks to the constant phone contact between Mordiah and her friend (who had drawn a map for us!!) we were able to find our way, haltingly, to the border. I say haltingly, because again the lack of road signs knocked us off course at one point and two sets of passers by were singularly unsuccessful at pointing us toward the Sungei Tujuh border post.

Which brings me to another bit of useful advice – bring someone with you who speaks the local dialect. Or something like it anyway. Asking for directions might seem straightforward but even if you know standard Malay, the locals will speak back to you in their own version of it. Just to give you a flavour of the problem, the standard Malay word for ‘one’ is ‘satu’ but it is ‘sigek’ in Sarawakian. And in Miri they have their own special variety of Malay which I know nothing about but which I understand is even more different...

So thanks to Mordiah, our intrepid local interpreter, we eventually found ourselves at the Sungei Tujuh border point.

More later......

Bumpy Sections - Part One

2009-11-07T23:39:00.001+08:00

Well here I am, back from a self-imposed three month break from blogging. I just got so fed up with people asking me when I was going to start blogging again that I decided I would take up my keyboard again and continue to serve my legions of fans.

So here goes...

“So what have you been doing with yourself all this while?” I hear you all scream. Well, my dear loyal readers, I’ve been up to many things, though most of my experiences since August are unutterably and mind-numbingly dull and not worthy of this august forum! But, I did do one thing that is worth mentioning. That is my mammoth drive across Borneo which I undertook at the end of September for the Hari Raya. I’ll happily share that one with you, dear readers, because I’ll never forget it, and neither will you...

Now, it’s bad enough trying to take a plane from Kuching in Sarawak to Tawau in Sabah at the best of times, let alone the Raya when just about every Muslim in Borneo is taking to some sort of transport or another at the same time.

So, imagine what it’s like taking the same trip by road? Yes, by road!!

Now I’ve been called many things in my life, including ‘screaming great lunatic’, ‘mad as a hatter’ and ‘silly as a box of toys’. Also, ‘one brick short of a full load’ and ‘out of his tree’. However, that’s nothing compared to people’s reactions when I told them I was planning a driving holiday from Kuching all the way across Sarawak, Brunei and Sabah to my wife’s ancestral pile in Tawau.

Why did I think of such a hair-brained scheme? Well, apart from the obvious savings in flight tickets, which are criminally expensive just before major public holidays in Malaysia, well, my wife and I just thought we would challenge ourselves, see a bit of the scenery that we had never seen, and basically do something that we had never done before. It’s the old NASA logic – we go there because it’s there!! Well, Borneo is there alright, as I found out.

Our trip was somewhat convoluted by the fact that my dear wife had different holiday starting dates to me. This meant that I had to set out two days before she did. She, of course, flew to Kota Kinabalu, by which time I had already driven there.

Needless to say, I did not travel alone to KK. There was my son as co-driver and our young friend Mordiah, an ex-student of my wife who knows all the local dialects and was brought along to help out and have a holiday. We set out from Kuching on 16th September at about 11.30 in the morning. We started so late because my dear son had left his passport in KL the day before and had to get it couriered over before we travelled. You can’t go through Brunei without a passport!!

As punishment for the passport incident, I made my son pilot for the first leg of the journey, from Kuching going roughly North sort of hugging the coast (well, waving at it from a safe distance anyway). We proceeded along a scraggly route to Serian (12.30 pm), Seri Aman (14.24) and Sibu (by 17.40).

Word of advice: DO NOT TRY TO DRIVE THROUGH SIBU DURING THE RUSH HOUR!! Or at any other hour in fact. We made the mistake of thinking we would look for a place to stay the night in Sibu, but the fact is that Sibu is so full of traffic and so lacking in places to stop, plus having a one-way system designed by Satan, that we decided to stop for a rest at a petrol station before driving through the dark tunnel of the night to Bintulu.

The trip to Bintulu was a night-driver’s playtime, which is why I took over the controls from Sunny. The road to Bintulu was narrow, bumpy and full of gargantuan trucks, and I was spending most of my time squinting past the blaring lights of oncoming vehicles and negotiating ways of overtaking without being smashed to pieces against an oncoming Hilux. We were nearly hit in the face at one point by a 4WD which must have swerved to avoid a pot hole (more about these later!). Further up the road we passed a car which had gone down in a ditch. Lots of excitement...

Eventually, though, after a 2 1/2 hour drive, the hot dark womb of the tropical night spewed us out at Bintulu, which is a very well lit oil town and major port with nice safe roads and, luckily for us, plenty of cheap hotels to choose from. Selecting a fairly safe-looking place called the Lee Hua Plaza, we checked in at around 22.00 and, after an excellent meal in the understandably deserted restaurant, we retired to our rooms for a well-deserved slumber.

Number of Kilometres covered in day one: 643. Number of petrol stops: 2.

Next Part will follow (honestly!!!!!)

The King of Fruits....

2009-08-02T23:12:00.005+08:00

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durian

It’s impossible to live here in Malaysia without encountering the objects in the photograph above. What are they? Well, despite appearances, they are not footballs, or the latest fashion in bathroom back-scratchers. If they were, believe me, H1N1 would be the least of the Malaysian health system’s worries, and the stock price for the company that makes Band Aids would go through the roof!

No, of course, they are durians! The King of Fruits!! Malaysia’s very own culinary secret weapon!!! And...it’s now the Durian Season!!! Yippeeeee!!

Before I recover from my entirely fake spasms of anticipation, I must justify why it is that durians, despite the fascination of their spiky exterior and their apparent pungent squishiness inside, do very little for me. I would have much more fun sucking my thumb, to be totally honest...

For one thing, the fruit is a dangerous weapon – large, heavy and covered in sharp spikes. I heard an awful story the other day of a man who was made quadriplegic because a durian fell out of a tree and hit him on the head. I’ll bet he doesn’t eat them either...

But the big problem for me is the taste and the texture, because I don’t go anywhere near durian trees and in any case wouldn’t know one if I saw one...

“Whoa there, Prof. Madder”, I hear you all call out indignantly, “surely you must have developed a TASTE for the King of Fruits in all your years in our beautiful country? Surely, you just haven’t tried enough of them.....”

Well, let me tell you a little story, a story about high hopes and broken dreams. It all started sometime at the end of the 1990s, when I first came over to Sarawak.

One evening, a neighbour took me to a vast, crowded and sweaty market (Satok, I think) to show me my first durians. I suppose my neighbour felt he was putting me through a rite of passage, a bit like eating deep-fried crickets in Bangkok, or sucking on the hookah pipes in Cairo. Part of the visitor’s itinerary...

I had heard a lot about durians then – they had already taken on a semi-legendary aura, based on stories passed on to me by friends who had visited South East Asia before and had been transported by the delights of this most strikingly original fruit.

So I was naturally delighted to be given the privilege of trying one for the first time. So, my new friend, a teacher from the same school as my wife, carefully selected a big, green particularly spiky and convincing durian from among a great heap on sale in the market. He tested it by shaking it gently, placing it against his ear (ouch!) and generally carrying and weighing it reverently, like a newborn baby with spikes!

Back home, we all participated in The Tasting.

To start off with, the spiky, hard surface of the thing had to be opened somehow. Durians are not like apples and oranges, which can be bitten into or easily pealed. If you try to bite into a durian it’s gonna make your dentist rich, and your mouth will have more holes than a Swiss cheese.

So to open the durian, my friend simply felt with his fingertips until he found the natural fault lines in the shell, and slowly pulled the thing apart until it split cleanly in two. It was at this point that I realised that durians, as culinary objects rather than weapons, are notable for what is inside the shell – in this case the soft, pulpy flesh that surrounds the seeds. It looks something like this:

Source: http://www.petertan.com/blog/2004/05/20/durians-durians-everywhere/

I was immediately struck by how much the insides of a durian resemble something alive, like the eldritch foetuses inside some alien creature’s womb. I could almost imagine them palpitating grotesquely as they feed on the life blood of their spiky host. I had visions of one of the grisly things suddenly quivering violently and popping out of the shell, blind eyes searching for a new host in the form of the nearest foreign visitor...

But, I am nothing if not a culinary diplomat, so I kept these thoughts to myself as I buried my fingertips in the yellowish goo and took out some of the stuff to try. It felt smooth. It felt soft. It felt gooey. But I put some of it in my mouth...

What happened next was a total surprise. Based on the somewhat pungent, gassy smell that comes off a durian before you actually eat it, I expected to taste something that was creamy, perhaps fruity, I don’t know... But what I got was a very strong flavour of tuna and onion mixed together with mayonnaise – just like one of my favourite sandwich fillings back home but definitely not what I would expect in a fruit.

I tasted a little more of the oniony, gassy mixture and was repelled by it. I threw it away, subtly so as not to upset my neighbour, and I decided then and there that durians were not for me.

It’s all about programming, I think. All my life, I have been programmed to expect sweetish flavours from fruits and savoury flavours from things that are not fruits, such as onions, tuna and cheese. I just cannot accept a fruit which doesn’t taste like a fruit.. And the pervy squishiness of the flesh around the seeds doesn’t help either.

Many people are put off by the smell of durians – “smells like hell, tastes like heaven” as the local saying goes. Personally, I can take the smell, which is like a slight gas leak, but the texture and the associations it sets up in my psyche mean that I have to avoid the king of fruits, deferring that pleasure for another lifetime.

Let me finish, then, with some Wikipedia quotes on durians which in many ways provide support for my own feelings about this contentious fruit. Firstly, Anthony Burgess, who would have known what he was talking about, likened eating durians to "[...] eating sweet raspberry blancmange in the lavatory”. Yessssss......Except I like sweet raspberry blancmange!

And let us hear from two chefs. Firstly, Andrew Zimmern compares the taste of durians to "completely rotten, mushy onions." Obviously, he has taste buds similar to mine! And finally, the excellent Anthony Bourdain says: "Its taste can only be described as...indescribable, something you will either love or despise. ...Your breath will smell as if you'd been French-kissing your dead grandmother.”

My thoughts exactly...

No Sensayuma

2009-07-18T21:58:00.002+08:00

I must be losing my sense of humour as I get older. Either that or the world is becoming less funny, or at least it’s becoming more funny but in a wicked, dry and decidedly ironic way.

Let me explain. The other day, a friend recommended the new book by David Sedaris, who is an American “humorist” I had never heard of. The book is called “When You are Engulfed in Flames” and has a black cover with a picture of a human skeleton smoking a cigarette.

When you examine this book, you are engulfed, not in flames, but in an armada of critic’s comments all screaming how “hilarious” the book is or how it “made me laugh out loud” or some other verbal attempt at telling the potential reader Just How Damn Funny this book is.

So I read it, fired up by the promise of dark wicked ironic humour from the striking front cover and all that painfully obvious symbolism connoted by the image of a skeleton with a cancer stick poking out of its mouth.

And...

Well, I have to say I was decidedly underwhelmed. OK, it starts off well, with a tale of the author’s sister and her typically American neuroses about touching the handles of supermarket trolleys and what have you, and indeed it moves on to a series of somewhat long tales from the author’s rather patchy childhood, his mysteriously unsuccessful academic life and his struggles with drugs and smoking and learning foreign languages etc but for some reason, I could not find it in my heart to laugh out loud.

There were a couple of moments which did raise the ghost of a titter to shake my gut into life, especially the description of an excruciating taxi ride with a driver who wouldn’t stop telling his passenger about his sexual activities. Oh yes and the time the hero hitched a ride in a limo where he was offered sex with the driver’s wife and finally realised he was homosexual!

I will give it that. But honestly, I expected to be unable to get up for laughing, and instead found the book an interesting and brilliantly written series of reminiscences, light-hearted yes, but gutbustingly hilarious definitely no.

Oh dear oh dear. So what do I find funny these days then, I hear you scream?

I find humour in everyday, silly and ironic occurrences. Like the other day when I was driving home from work. I was approaching a bend in the road and I noticed an advance party of small traffic cones ahead of me. I thought for a split second that maybe the local authorities had finally got round to fixing the road surface on this most bumpy and badly patched up piece of road this side of Afghanistan.

Instead, they were painting white lines down the centre of the road. I mean, come on, I’ve been driving on this same bloody road almost every day for the last nine years and nearly broken my suspension on the potholes and uneven road surface more times that I’ve eaten roti canai. I’ve never needed WHITE LINES down the middle of the road before, so why do I need them now? But there they were, in all their freshly painted whiteness, eagerly ready to remind me where the centre of the road is.

Another source of hilarity for me is when people’s problems and difficulties can be completely removed in one stroke by one small change in their behaviour or environment, but they just cannot see it.

I see this every day when I drive into my place of work and attempt to park my car. It’s like this – to get to my parking area I have to make a right turn into a very narrow road. Almost every day there are at least four cars parked on the corner of this road, meaning that if someone is coming the other way, I can’t get through, and have to reverse to let them pass. And why is this necessary? Because the bloody cars parked on the corner are there because their owners are inside the nearby staff room clocking in!

Aaaand the situation is made worse because now we all have to clock in using a decidedly mendacious post-911 thumbprint reading system which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t – resulting in colleagues forming a queue in the staffroom while the machine beeps and says “please try again” and everyone is anxious and impatient because their cars are parked illegally outside on the corner and they’re feeling guilty.

So as a result of all this silliness, I can’t get through to my parking place. Despite being overweight and unfit, I don’t have a problem to park my car, walk to my office, unload my bag, walk to the staff room and put my finger on the little green rectangle and wait for the machine to say “thank you!” in its camp little voice.

And the thing is that all this hassle could be removed in one fell swoop if people could just find the time to park their cars before clocking in! You just have to laugh at the silliness of it all!

But I’m sure that some of you probably don’t find this funny. Well, if you fall into that category, I suggest you go to MPH and pick up a copy of David Sedaris’ book. Only don’t come back and blame me if you don’t laugh out loud either!

Malaysian Odyssey...

2009-06-01T22:40:00.003+08:00

Anyone who has read this blog may get the impression that this writer is a miserable old ungrateful curmudgeon who needs to get a life and lose a bit of weight. No arguments there, so allow me to fill you in on some recent blog-worthy experiences which have largely re-charged my happiness batteries.

Now it's the Gawai season, I'm enjoying a well-earned rest after a couple of weeks of relentless travel. Yet two weeks ago, I was off to Kota Kinabalu, that jewel in the Sabahan Crown, for a one-day training workshop at my university's Kota Kinabalu campus. These things are regular gigs for me, and allow me to meet up with colleagues from different branches of my university as well as to earn some extra income...

I was giving a training workshop on how to write research articles, and my small but willing audience consisted of junior lecturers who for the most part had no idea what I was on about. That's life in the education field. Deliver your material, soak up the feedback, then make your escape....

Nothing particularly exciting happened in KK. The flyover which is supposed to reduce KK's traffic problems is still under construction (after about five years!), yet there is still a rather good fish and chip restaurant in the Warisan Square shopping mall where I managed to treat my niece and her friend to dinner. I was once again put up in my favourite hotel, the Promenade, and I felt like James Bond (your usual suite, sir!), as much as it's possible to feel like James Bond in Kota Kinabalu!

Luckily for me there were no belt buckle strain incidents, as I was travelling Business Class with Malaysian Airlines (bigger seats and marginally better food than Economy!) Lucky me! As Bond says in Casino Royale when he sees his new Aston Martin: 'I love you too, M!'

After that brief but pleasant trip, it was off to Perlis in Northern Malaysia for my next gig, accompanying my debaters for a week to a big debating contest in Arau, not far from the border with Thailand.

All went well at first on the day I departed for Arau, via KL and Alor Setar. I got seated in my Bizz Class seat on the plane at Kuching, no belt issues at all, with my boss and some of his bosses sitting in the row in front of me and a glamorous Chinese lady in the seat next to me. However, just as we were handing back the cold face towels and readying ourselves for the safety demonstration, the Captain told us to leave the aircraft while they fixed a problem with the batteries!

Now, I was under the impression that planes flew on jet fuel, not batteries, but what do I know! So we all trooped back to the departure lounge for nearly an hour, and I was sweating like a horse because for some reason the operators of Kuching International Airport don't seem to know how to turn the aircon up to a humanly acceptable level. Maybe it's a plot by the Health Ministry to make everyone look like they have H1N1 flu so that they have to spend a night in the airport's swanky emergency Swine Flu ward...

Anyway, eventually, we were allowed back onto the plane, and the whole rigmarole started again - cold face towels sir, orange juice or water sir, safety demonstration, then finally a lovely flight over to KL, with some superb Bond-like food, arriving about 5.30 in the afternoon.

I needn't have worried that I might miss my connecting flight to Alor Setar, because the plane was held up by another flight to Labuan that was supposed to have left three hours previously, and eventually filled up and crawled out of the airport at 6.30.

Finally, after a lot of waiting around, our plane arrived and we boarded. The flight to Alor Setar in Kedah state was just under an hour and I couldn't see a thing out of the windows because it was of course dark by this time! But it was nice to see what food they give you in Bizz Class on a short flight. Little pieces of French bread I think it was with some presence of salmon or strawberry or something. And some spicy peanuts which made me cough so much I was afraid they might quarantine me for having Swine Flu...

Part Two tomorrow....

Below the Belt

2009-05-05T23:25:00.001+08:00

It’s bad enough having to pay extra for a seat that comes nowhere near big enough for a man of my size, and it’s humiliating enough trying to fit my butt and gut into the little square padded bucket they call a Hot Seat. But when you have to use the dreaded Air Asia Seat Belt Extension (Mark III), then you know that something has gone drastically wrong somewhere....

Luckily, when I went on a conference trip to KL last week in one of those sparky red Air Asia A 320s, I just managed to avoid having to ask the flight attendant That Embarrassing Little Question that goes something like ‘excuse me, can I please borrow the extension?”

But only just. You can imagine me, squeezing myself into my ‘hot seat’ at the front of the plane (RM 25 extra for the privilege of suffering marginally less thrombosis and crushed diaphragm), with a grandstand view of the shaved grey hair on the back of the Captain’s neck, thinking ‘I bet he doesn’t have this trouble...’

Once I am inside my new Hot Seat, I think of what it must have been like for the brave fighter pilots of World War Two. Did they always manage to fit into their tiny little seats in the cockpits of their dashing Spitfires, or furious Messerschmidts, or did they sometimes experience a little bit of pushmepullyou whenever they had consumed too much rice pudding in the Mess? I suppose it would have been Bratwurst for the Germans, but...

Anyway, anyway...

Back to the present - there was me tightly ensconced in my Air Asia seat and optimistically pulling the existing red seat belt to its furthest extent to see if it will accommodate my gut. Now at this point, usually one of two things are bound to happen. Either the chasmic gulf between belt and buckle is so uncrossable that one just has to say those magic words to the flight attendant, one of which rhymes with ‘pension’.

The alternative, the oh so happy alternative, is that the buckle and the belt meet together as effortlessly as train carriages at a siding. Just like they do on Malaysian Airlines planes, I’ve noticed, but that’s another story....

But last week, I navigated a middle course between these two points. I discovered that, with considerable contortions of my stomach and my face, and a lot of holding of breath, I could actually get the seat belt to fasten properly and safely. But in order to do it, I had to wrap the belt buckle round my gut to meet the fastener which seemed to be buried somewhere deep inside the left hand side of my seat.

The strain of doing this (with one hand) was akin to that experienced doing handstands in a toilet cubicle, and I had to manoeuvre the belt so that it only covered my lower stomach near to my lap.

But I tell you, the ecstasy of eating a 150 g bar of Cadburys Dairy Milk in one go is nothing, NOTHING in comparison to the sheer exhilaration and sense of triumph and joy that I experienced when I finally felt the belt buckle emit that utterly satisfying metallic ‘clunk’ that signified Victory!

Ah, such sweet sweet pleasures.....

In a Saucy Mood

2009-04-11T22:50:00.002+08:00

It’s just amazing just how much a plate of roti canai and curry sauce can ruin your day. Normally, this delicious local repast will set me up for the whole day – the crispy, thin and utterly delicious flat bread smeared with pungent curry gravy and a chunk or two of curried chicken always provides me with the positive kick start I deserve.

But, last Monday, everything went pear-shaped. On the way to work last Monday morning, I stopped off at the nearest branch of J & J Cafeteria – another one of Kuching’s best kopitiams. As usual, I sat at a table facing my car in the manner prescribed by all good spy manuals, and I ordered my usual two pieces of roti canai, accompanied by curried chicken drowned in J & J’s signature curry sauce which can strip the paint off any wall you choose to throw it at.

Now, everything was groovy, for a sweet moment or two, as I sipped my ginseng coffee, and tucked into the roti, cutting it up into stringy, crunchy pieces and dipping said pieces into the sauce. I felt a bit like Hemingway, or Somerset Maugham, or any of the famous expats who lived life to the full in their chosen countries of exile and felt Pretty Damn Good doing it.

But, seeing as it was Monday, I was wearing my lovely white shirt with the blue stripes. And, I received a sudden and brutal lesson on the effects of curry sauce on textiles. Yes, I got industrial quantities of curry sauce all over my lovely pristine smart business-like shirt!

All it took was one simple accidentally spastic backwards flick of the spoon on my part. It was a spoon which was loaded with sauce which was meant for my mouth. The result of this was that the entire left side of my shirt, as well as some of the fingers on my left hand, became be-speckled and peppered with little humiliating islands of brown, rich, and definitely not stain-free curry sauce.

After I had finished effing and blinding very quietly to myself, I struggled to my feet, and went over to the wash-basin. Water. Water. Water. Dab dab dab. Rub rub rub. Rinse. Dab. I managed to get the curry sauce itself off, but my shirt was still decorated with sickly-yellow patches which hardly got any less yellow with further applications of H2O and soap.

I was at this stage faced with a choice. Do I drive all the way back home and change shirts, which would make me late for work? Or do I brazen it out and walk with my left arm folded just so in the perfect position to cover the stains?

And you know what? Being a lazy sonofabitch, I opted for the stains. And the stains stayed until home time, staining my self-respect, and making me thoroughly depressed for the rest of the day.

I now know why Mafia bosses never wear bright-coloured shirts. Ever noticed? They always seem to wear dark shirts? The reason is now obvious. It’s to hide the stains from where they spill spaghetti sauce all over their shirts. So from now on, when I eat roti canai, or spaghetti for that matter, I’m gonna wear a nice black shirt. Just like the Sopranos.

KK Again...

2009-03-01T20:50:00.002+08:00

Just returned from another debate trip to Kota Kinabalu, that gorgeous ocean-side city in Sabah. Once again, I took some of my students to participate in the Borneo Cup debate (or was it Borneo Open debate? Can't remember!)

This is an annual debate competition which was originally set up as a showcase for student debaters from Borneo universities (i.e. Sarawak, Sabah and Indonesian Kalimantan). So far, it has been a very successful event (well, my university has won it twice!) but I can't stop myself from commenting on a disturbing new trend that has started this year - opening the competition to teams from the Malaysian Peninsula.

As anyone who has taught English in Malaysia knows, it is generally the case that students from the Peninsula universities, such as University of Malaya and Multimedia University, tend to have a better command of English, as well as better access to debate training and competition opportunities, of which there are many over there.

Also, it is often the case that many of the students in teams from Borneo universities, such as UNIMAS (Sarawak) and UMS (Sabah), are also from the Peninsula! So, what happens? You get a Borneo debate competition which is in reality a Pan-Malaysian debate competition!

It's rather like the English Premier League, where a great deal of the players and Managers are not English!!

So, to address this anomaly, the organisers are re-branding the Borneo Cup as the Borneo Open. Yes, it's Open, but the only thing Borneo about it seems to be the location!

I've got nothing against Peninsula students, and I'm not trying to get political with this, I just want to see more debate competitions and training opportunities in Sarawak and Sabah for young debaters to cut their teeth.

I would so much love to see the standard of English rise this side of the South China Sea, and debating is one of the best, and most enjoyable, ways in which this can be achieved.

What Goes Around...

2009-02-04T23:15:00.002+08:00

Let’s face it, folks, there is nothing romantic about being overweight. None at all. You don’t get any street cred points for being a gut bucket, at least unless you are one of those comedy actors who appear in American family movies.
And I don’t fit into that category. In fact I don't fit into much these days...

So I have come to realise that it’s about bloody time that I stop making excuses and do something about my health. Or rather my rapidly increasing lack of it.
So, on the advice of one of my colleagues who is in a similar situation to me, I took myself off to a local doctor who specialises in heart illness, and asked for a check up.

The doctor was very nice and kind, and took some of my blood, asked me to give a urine sample (“what from here?”) and put me on light medication for my somewhat high blood pressure.

The results come back next week. God knows what they’ll say, or what action I might have to take, apart from a massive diet and more exercise. But at least I have decided to take my first feeble, heavy steps on the road to recovering my health, before it is taken away from me forever.

I have decided that there are still many things I want to do before I go gently into that good night from which there is no awakening. I want to carry on with my blog, write more articles, become a bestselling author and retire to somewhere nice with my wife.

I want to keep on experiencing things and writing about them so that you, my gentle readers, can carry on enjoying them!!

It’s That (BANG!)Time Again!

2009-01-26T21:11:00.000+08:00

Bang!

Bang bang bang!!!

Boooooooooooooooooooooom!

Bang bang whooooosh ...

BANG!!!

Yes, dear readers, it’s Chinese New Year once again. This year will be the ninth time that I have experienced what is perhaps the most colourful – and the loudest – of Malaysia’s pantheon of cultural festivals.

Despite a month or so of almost continuous monsoon rain, the firecrackers, rockets, bangers and ‘bunga api’ (fire flowers) are out in force, to celebrate the coming of the Lunar New Year of the Ox.

Well, I say ‘in force’, but I can’t help noticing a slight downturn in the amount of firecrackers lighting up our sky last night, nor could I avoid the impression that the decibel level and duration of the cannonades was somewhat reduced compared to previous years. It just goes to show what the economic slowdown and the credit crunch can do to sales of firecrackers for the Lunar New Year season. Or perhaps the authorities have been a little bit more successful in confiscating illegal fireworks this year. I don’t know.

But whatever the truth is, it is heartening to see that tradition and culture still triumph despite the vagaries of economics, and rain. Long may it continue (though next year, give me some cotton wool for my ears, ah!).

So here’s wishing all my Chinese friends, colleagues and neighbours a hearty Gong Xi Fatt Chai and much prosperity and happiness for the year of the Ox. I have a feeling that we are all going to need it....

2008 - a Retrospective

2009-01-02T22:22:00.003+08:00

This one has come a bit late because of an irritating computer failure which meant that my dear PC had to be taken back to the shop and reformatted! Luckily for my dear reader(s), my computer is perfectly well now, so I thought I would look back on the year that just was.

Most newspapers every year publish predictions for the coming year, predictions about political events, the economy, you know, just the very things that are totally impossible to predict but which make great copy and sell papers. So, last year, just before 2008 started, I did just that - I made a number of (totally safe) predictions about 2008, just for the hell of it.

Let's see how many of them I got right!

Now as I said earlier, my predictions for 2008 were of course totally safe, so effectively they were bound to come true. But you never know, in these turbulent times, anything can happen! So let's see....

Here is the first prediction I made about 2008:

1. A lot of people will die in 2008, and a lot of people will be born too.

Yep. Got that right! 2008 was an absolute bloodbath, with the usual atrocious numbers of people being butchered and slaughtered in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur and of course the good old U S of A. Also, there were plenty of sad losses of famous people, notably Heath Ledger, Paul Newman and more recently Harold Pinter. And Eartha Kitt...

As for lots of people being born, on the positive side, yep indeed, there were plenty of births to replenish the species, though I don't have the full figures for you offhand....Welcome to Earth, little ones...

2. In 2008, some people will make a lot more money than they did in 2007, while unfortunately others will not be so lucky.

Well, true I suppose, unless you are in the property markets, where a lot of people unfortunately lost their shirts due to the collapse of the US sub-prime market and the financial tsunami that followed. I guess the usual suspects will have done alright, such as arms dealers and manufacturers, funeral directors and people who write books on how to get rich.

3. Sometime in early February, there will be a lot of firecrackers going off in Kuching and other parts of Malaysia.

Yep. Definitely happened! Though I detected a slight reduction in the noise levels during CNY in 2008. Let's see if it gets any quieter this year what with the slowdown!!!

4. By the end of the year, there will be a new President of the United States. And it will not be George Bush.

Well, yes, though technically the Lord and Saviour Barack Obama takes over on January 20 this year, but we definitely knew he was the annointed one by the end of 2008!

5. The President of Russia will, in 2008, be of Slavic extraction.

Yep. Both of them!!

6. It will be very hot in most parts of Australia, South East Asia and India.

Oh yes!! My bottled sweat could fill a couple of olympic sized swimming pools by now I'm sure...!! (Grosss!!)

7. Computers will mostly run on electricity.

Though I'm sure the Japanese are working on a sushi-powered laptop AS WE SPEAK!!

8. The Moon in the night sky will change its shape slightly every day.

True, though it would be nice if you could actually SEE the process in action once in a while!

9. The Pope will be a Catholic.

Is the Pope a Catholic? Do Bears do their stuff in the woods?!?

10. The price of petrol will go up in Malaysia.

WRONG!! Well, actually right also because of the steep hike in petrol prices which shocked me when I returned from my holiday in Spain back in June. But then they just kept going down and down like a ski slope. When will it end?!?

So, as you can see, folks, it is easy to make predictions that will come true about the coming year. So, here's my safe predictions for 2009, though this time there is a touch of irony. Read them and weep with mirth....

1. 2009 will prove to be a very different year from 2008.
2. The Guantanamo Bay concentration camp in Cuba will be closed down. And sold to Disney.
3. Someone will have a pop at the new US President (then again, I said the same thing about Bush!)
4. Former President George W Bush will record a hip-hop album with Beyonce and Kanye West.
5. Aliens from another planet will make contact with us. And immediately regret it...
6. Michael Jackson will play the Joker in the next Batman film.
7. Someone will finally make a movie about World War Two without any American soldiers in it..
8. Osama Bin Laden will publish his memoirs and they will outsell Bush's autobiography...
9. President Obama will order an investigation into what REALLY happened on September 11th 2001.
10. The price of petrol will go up in Malaysia....

That's it!! Happy New Year!! Happy Happy Happy!!

An Attack of Politeness

2008-12-12T21:36:00.002+08:00

You can imagine my shock the other day when I went into my local petrol station to buy a loaf of bread on the way home. Instead of the usual indifference and stony silence from the staff, I was greeted, as soon as I had got through the door, with a friendly smile from the cashier and a "selamat datang sir!" ('welcome sir' in Malay).

More or less stunned into embarrassed silence by this sudden assault of unusual chattiness, I proceeded to pick up my loaf of bread, and was met with a warm smile from one of the girls who operates the pumps. As far as I can recall, this is the first time I had heard her voice. And all this corporate pallyness didn't end there! When I went to pay for my items, the cashiers, BOTH OF THEM, greeted me and thanked me in Malay like they were my long lost friends!

What's going on?, I thought to myself, climbing back into my Aston Martin and checking the perimeter for Quantum agents. Then it dawned on me. The staff have obviously been on a team building course! Or most likely they have been to a Customer Service training workshop, where they have been taught to smile and say nice things to people and make it look realistic.

These are the sort of courses where people are taught the right things to say to people to make them feel good and want to come back to the shop or hotel or whatever. Courses like this also teach staff how to produce that ubiquitous Stevie Wonder smile you see everywhere in hotels and bank advertisements - all teeth but no emotion in the eyes!

Not that I have anything against politeness, oh god no. A little more politeness in this world would make things a whole lot finer and dandier, in my humble opinion. But what freaks me out is this sort of manufactured obsequiousness that pops up like mushrooms whenever corporate entities feel the need to "focus on the customer".

It operates on so many levels, from the bland, emotionless canned discourse encountered in fast food outlets to the sometimes irritating chattiness of the staff in popular coffee outlets. I love going to my favourite airport coffee outlet but I can't help feeling that all those personal questions they keep asking you is part of a script learned by heart at the training school. You know, Step 1: ASK HOW THE CUSTOMER IS, Step 2: ASK ABOUT HIS DAY etc...

In the words of the song, you are left to ask yourself: "where is the love"? Do they actually mean all this politeness and is there anything behind it all apart from a cybernetic drive to squeeze extra profit out of you? The answer to both questions is of course NO. Yet we live with it, because they are after all 'only doing their jobs'.

And of course, an attack of insincere politeness is much more preferable to an attack of sincere impoliteness!

Home Alone

2008-12-07T18:29:00.002+08:00

I'm experiencing the Home Alone syndrome at the moment. You see it's like this. My dear wife has gone back to see her mother - it's not what you think, honestly!! Everything is fine and dandy in the Madder household, so back, back my cuties!!

My dear wife had some business to deal with in her home state of Sabah, so she went back there for a week or so, leaving me to wallow at home like a kitten. The reason why I'm not following is simple - I've run out of annual holiday. So it's me, the house, my books and a stack of DVDs!!

I believe that every relationship needs to have a bit of breathing space from time to time. Especially when, like me, you are a TV widower. Yes, I actually don't get the chance to watch much TV when my wife is around because, bless her cotton socks, she likes to watch all these Indonesian TV dramas which I wrote about last year in these pages. Me, on the other hand, I like occasionally to watch movies and the BBC news, which I think is reasonable for an intellectual like me.

So, you can imagine, I have been busy filling my evenings with several movies that I either missed when they were out in the cinema, or missed because I couldn't watch them on TV! So, what have I been watching?

Last night I finally saw Scorcese's excellent The Departed, which is a kind of Godfather with Irish accents. Matt Damon and Leo Di Caprio are excellent, and were not too overshadowed by the veteran Jack Nicholson who was his usual menacing and witty self. If eyebrows were weapons, Nicholson would have an arms limitation treaty just for him!

I also caught up with some very well-done superhero movies namely The Incredible Hulk (latest version), Iron Man and Hancock. It's good to see cartoon characters translated to the screen in an intelligent, witty, story-driven way without overt moralising or skimping on the action. Very enjoyable. Looking out for sequels....

Tonight will be V for Vendetta, another movie based on a comic, and finally next week, I will watch Kubrick's 2001 a Space Odyssey, which I saw God knows how long ago, but I think it's one of those films you need to revisit several times in your life, you know, like re-reading Lord of the Rings (which I have read three times by the way).

So on top of doing the washing, going to work, cleaning the dishes, eating, and sleeping, I should think my home alone period will be over before I know it, and I will soon be re-united with my little sweetie.

And our household will once again boom to the sounds of Indonesian voices screaming and shouting at one another, and I will retreat to my home office where I will surf the BBC website on the internet instead!

Opposites attract, they say...

What's in a Name?

2008-11-30T22:00:00.003+08:00

Hey, guess what? We’ve got an infamous world dictator working at my university!

That’s right!

Mr. Hitler works in our administration office and is responsible, among other things, for helping me to renew my immigration visa every two years. Despite his name, he is in fact a wonderfully peaceful and pleasant man and always smiles at me when he sees me. And he definitely does not have a moustache, nor does he strut around the campus with his arm pointing skywards and trying to invade Poland!

In fact, I am spoilt for choice if I want to speak to a historical figure in my university. For instance, there is a lecturer called Stalin working in our place. Unlike his infamous Russian namesake, he definitely lacks a moustache and is apparently not inclined to butcher millions of his people or purge his intellectuals. As far as I know, anyway...

And why stick to the Twentieth Century when you can go back to Ancient Rome! In my place of work, I have two colleagues named after great Romans. We have a Nero, and a Caesar. Unbelievable! History come to life here in tropical Borneo!!

It would appear that here in Sarawak at least, there is a tendency among some families to name their sons after famous figures from history, sport, entertainment or politics. Now, I’m not against naming children after heroes such as John Wayne, Superman, Clint Eastwood or even Churchill or Roosevelt. But naming your kids after the bad guys?

I mean, what were these parents thinking when their little bundles of joy popped into the world, kicking and screaming and waiting to be given a name, only to be given the names of two of the most murderous bloodletters in the history of humanity, Hitler and Stalin!

As Larkin said in his poem ‘This Be The Verse’: “They f*** you up, your mum and dad. They do not mean to, but they do...”

Of course, I suspect that this kind of gratuitous misnaming could only happen over here, where perhaps Hitler and Stalin had a somewhat minimal impact historically and culturally, but you never know.

What I do know is that if someone goes into a bar in the UK and says their name is Hitler, they wouldn’t get out of there alive, unless the bar is full of skinheads, in which case they might buy you a pint. And if you go into a bar in Warsaw claiming to be called Stalin, they might set fire to your moustache!

So, given this penchant for interesting and iconic names, here is a list of Prof. Madder’s top 10 predictions for the most likely unlikely names to be given to babies born this year:

1. Subprime

2. James Bond

3. Beijing Olympics

4. George Bush

5. Obama

6. Iron Man

7. Harry Potter

8. Credit Crunch

9. Britney

10. Hitler (?!)

Madder's Back...an' Lovin' It!

2008-11-28T21:56:00.005+08:00

Just back from a well-deserved bout of writer's block, I thought I had better put something on my blog before it gets taken away by the people who provide the blog service. So here goes...

I have just come back from an eight-day stint at our mother campus across the South China Sea, to attend a debating competition. This was a lot of fun and a good rest, because although the event was organised in the usual haphazard way, all went very well for our students, and we all had a very positive experience which I may write about in my next posting. I also got to do some book hunting in KL....

But I hardly had the chance to cool my heels back in Kuching when I had a forced encounter with one of those banes of modern corporate life, the Team Building Course. This course was organised by my department. Compulsory attendance, no backing out unless you have a bad knee or are otherwise engaged. Unfortunately, the minor gout in my left big toe wasn't giving me any trouble, so I had no reason to get out of this one.

Now, call me a boring old fart, a killjoy, or any other similar epithet, but surely Team Building courses should be ranked alongside karaoke as among the top 10 Time Wasting and Undignified Activities of All Time!

Why? Well, basically because I personally don't have trouble working in a team. I work well with almost everyone I come into contact with, and my track record proves it. I don't need some overpaid consultants (sorry, 'Trainers') to show me how to 'mould synergies to attain common goals' or to 'maximise group strengths' or to 'turn the me into we'. I mean for God's sake! I'm a bloody university professor not a car salesman! What is this?!?!

I suppose it could have been much much worse. I mercifully managed to miss the first session of the course yesterday morning as I had my twice-yearly appointment with the Malaysian Immigration Service, to renew my work permit. I also managed to put my toe on the first rung of the long, high ladder towards Permanent Resident status.

So, eventually, I made my way to the venue, which was a training school belonging to the Malaysian Customs department, and I must admit I was feeling fairly positive despite the prospect of spending another night and day away from home.

When the first session started after lunch, however, any good feeling or hope I had leeched away fast, because it was explained to me that the whole session was being conducted in Malay, which I have difficulty following, especially at conversational speed. I am much better at reading the language, but then again I always was a passive old so and so!

So from the very start, the team building workshop completely failed in its purpose from my point of view by linguistically excluding me from the whole shebang! So you can imagine me sitting in the corner, trying and failing not to look REALLY MISERABLE AND PISSED OFF because after all, I do have to go back to work with all these people on Monday and I genuinely like them, and so the last thing I wanted to do was to spoil everyone's fun just because I wasn't having any! But it was sooooo hard!!!

The last straw in any hope I may have had of a good time came in the late afternoon, when we were all broken up into groups and had to come up with a group name, a group colour, a group animal and a group war cry. Something like the warlike Maori Hakka was intended, but we ended up stomping round the car park with everyone pretending to be snakes or something like that.

Except by that time, I had gone inside to cower from the spectacle (and the afternoon heat) in sheer embarrassment. It seemed such a pity that a bunch of highly trained knowledge creators and educators were being reduced to making animal noises and prancing around the car park like primary school kids.

Am I boring?

Am I dead from the neck up?

Am I out of touch with my Inner Child?

Or am I just a ridiculous old fool who shouldn't be here in the first place and should just go home?

Maybe, but what I did know at that point was that I was seriously out of touch with the situation I was finding myself in, and that was not a nice feeling to have, especially when I had started the day with such hope.

There is nothing worse than a good dose of alienation to really make your day. This depressing sense of disconnectedness was now washing over me like tears. I suddenly felt so very alone, and sad, and I suppose guilty too because really and truthfully it wasn't the situation that was stupid or silly, because everyone else seemed to be enjoying themselves. The stupid and silly one was me, and of course that made it worse!

Perhaps if I wasn't so out of shape and grey haired, or if my language skills were a bit stronger, I would have been out there, running around making animal noises to my heart's content. I would be the king of the jungle! But I couldn't do things like this, just cannot bring myself to do them at any time, so I have to make up for it by doing the things I am good at, which is writing, doing research and basically being a boring old professor. However, being stuck in a team building camp for two days going nuts completely cuts me off from doing the very things that make me happy, and which give me a sense of fulfillment.

So this wonderful and happy frame of mind kept me miserable throughout today's activities too. There was singing, group hugging, photo taking, group puzzles and games, and I just couldn't connect to any of it. The only solace I could claim was in the cool, air conditioned confines of the room I stayed in last night. At least I could go there and drown my dissatisfaction in tears, a book and sleep.

When the torture finally ended this afternoon, to the tune of one of Stevie Wonder's least pleasing ballads about friendship and all that, I staggered to have something to eat, furtively said goodbye to my colleagues, and I took myself and my bag to the car and made my exit as fast as I could.

Why am I writing this? Because I want to say that, no matter how well intentioned they may be, team building courses only work if EVERYBODY in the group is singing from the same hymn sheet, and if everyone is fully included. In my case, although I get on with everyone in my department and am known as a happy and friendly person, I am deep down a very serious intellectual with a strong orientation towards research and scholarship. I am also from a different culture to everyone else, which was a definite disadvantage during this workshop.

It's like this. I just don't do group games and huggathons and dressing up in women's clothing and doing animal noises in front of my colleagues. I find it deeply undignified and unprofessional. I feel embarrassed, especially if I have to do it as part of some organised programme. However, if I do want to play around and be silly and sing songs, I will do it in the privacy of my own home, with my family, because if they laugh at me, it will not affect my career, and I won't feel bad about myself.

So, this particular team building course succeeded only in building teams that I wasn't a part of. I myself was left out in the cold, as usual...

Ho hum.... No Christmas cards for me this year...

Off the Leash...

2008-10-26T23:20:00.003+08:00

Well, I finally decided to forgive the Starbucks at the Spring for past insults, so I bit the bullet (or biscuit as the case may be) and paid them a visit yesterday.

It is very rare that I am let off the leash on a Saturday afternoon like this without the family being with me, but this was a very special Saturday. It started off really well. The wife and her friend went off to the kampung to see some sick friends, and I went up to the campus ostensibly to attend a presentation to be given by an overseas visitor.

I went to the auditorium just before the appointed time (2 pm), because I am punctual like that. The place was empty, so I didn't have to fight for a seat. Sitting down, I started to revel in this unexpected opportunity to appreciate in fine detail the exquisite wood carving of the auditorium seats, and the elegantly tantalising array of light switches tastefully arranged on the wall near the entrance.

So, while enjoying all this architectural detail, I simply sat there and waited for someone to turn up.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Until, at about 2.30, I received a call from one of the organisers informing me that the presentation was cancelled and that she had already called me at mid-day to let me know.

Funny how my mobile phone's call log did not record this fact, but there you go. If it had, I WOULD NOT HAVE BLOODY WELL WASTED MY TIME COMING ALL THE WAY TO WORK ON A SATURDAY AFTERNOON!!

But I am one of those people who tries as hard as possible, when misfortune befalls them, to extract something positive out of the negative. So I decided to make my way to Starbucks, in the Spring, for a well-deserved coffee-fix.

Now this place was diametrically opposite to the auditorium where I had earlier been humiliated. It was packed to the walls and buzzing with clumps of trendy, shiny-haired young people with trendy bright young faces, clothes and limbs, all yapping VERY LOUDLY and sipping coffee and surfing the net on their lappies. There were hardly any seats but luckily, spotting two of my work colleagues, I managed to sit near to them.

We were sitting right next to the window, which is never my favourite place to sit because you feel like a goldfish. All these people are sliding past outside and none of them can resist the temptation to look in at you while you are drinking your coffee. Which must be nice if you are young and fit and handsome like nearly everyone else in that coffee shop seemed to be.

You can imagine what it must be like to be on TV. The camera is pointing straight at you, and every zit, every blemish, every loose nose hair and every fold of flesh is exposed for the whole universe to see. And of course, you are totally unable to resist the temptation to look outwards at the passers-by, and evaluate them. My colleague kept evaluating the womens' shoes. Me, being a family man, kept as quiet as I could...

I then came to realise one of the main differences between the Spring Starbucks and the Airport branch. And that is the noise level. At the airport, the background sonic ambiance consists of pleasant aural contours of gentle music combined with airport announcements and the polite buzz of conversation among mostly well-heeled business travellers and foreign tourists. It's all so very civilised.

But the Spring branch is like a zoo in comparison - here the ambiance is shot through with loud chatter and, yesterday, strident sounds of babies screaming from the group of young parents behind us, turning the place instantly into a family restaurant, rather than the trendy, cool coffee joint that Starbucks usually is.

I think next time I go there, I will make sure I invest in an iPod, or some other device for blocking out the sound. I definitely would not have been able to read a book there, as I would have in the airport branch.

But despite all that, the afternoon hadn't turn out so badly after all. After finishing my coffee and shouting goodbye to my colleagues, I went for my chicken cornish at Secret Recipe, then went on an extended trawl through the miniature MPH upstairs, scouting out future purchases. And then home, to wait for my wife to return from her day.

And unlike the situation at work, I didn't have to wait all that long for Annie to come back. She never lets me down. So it was a rather satisfying day off the leash after all!!

By the way, I would like to finish with an apology to my reader (s) for my long absences from this blog. These days, it seems, the most interesting topics to write about are forbidden ones, and the most forbidding topics are the most interesting!

But don't despair, Prof. Madder will not desert his readership just yet!!

Raya Riders, Mat Rempits and the Angels

2008-10-03T18:24:00.005+08:00

For those of you who don't know much about Malaysia, this time of year is the season of Hari Raya Aidilfitri, the celebration of the end of the Holy fasting month of Ramadan. The Hari Raya has the same immense power of social focus as that of Christmas back in the UK. You can be sure that during the Raya period, everyone in Malaysia, especially the Muslim majority, will be busy doing the same things - preparing and eating food, watching special programmes on TV, wearing colourful traditional clothes, and of course visiting each others' houses.

These house visits, or Open Houses as they are usually called, start right from the first day of the Raya, and can last throughout the following Muslim month of Syawal, In practice, though, most open house visits, at least in my part of town, tend to happen in the few days following the first day of the Raya, which this year fell on the 1st October.

The Open House seems to be a uniquely Malaysian phenomenon - almost all of the major religious festivals now have them - Chinese New Year, Christmas and Deepavali, and the Open House concept is intended as a social, religious and even political leveller. Everyone goes to each other's houses during these times regardless of their social or cultural background.

Even the Prime Minister of Malaysia holds a huge open house, but I guess there are too many people who want to see him for it to be held in his actual house, so the PM holds his at a major Kuala Lumpur hall. And the Chief Minister of Sarawak even holds his Raya Open House in the local sports stadium.

But the rest of us hoi polloi are content to hold our open houses in, well, our own houses! Yesterday, my wife and I went on the first round of Raya visits, and tomorrow is the day of our own open house.

Now I am going to be a little bit naughty here and, rather than give you a blow by blow account of the Raya Open House, I am going to save that bit to another posting and rather describe a typical Raya phenomenon which in many ways epitomises the spirit of the Hari Raya as it is practiced in many of Malaysia's Muslim areas.

Now, as you can imagine, if everyone is visiting each other for the Raya, they have to get themselves around somehow! Many people of course drive their cars, like us, and a lot of people take buses, if they can.

But, those who don't have access to such modern luxuries as cars and buses must fall back on that other staple of South East Asian transportation: the motorbike. And, during the Raya, the roads, especially the rural ones, are festooned and clogged by a veritable mobile army: the Raya Riders!

The Raya Riders are mostly young men and women who get on their motorbikes to visit their friends and families during the Raya Open House season. You will see them, usually riding in clumps of ten or twenty, or waiting at the side of the road for more to join their convoys, all dressed in brightly coloured traditional costumes that definitely break the traffic laws, but somehow look so right at this time of year. Imagine riding a motorbike in heels, or simple rubber slippers! Very dangerous, you might be thinking. Yes, but very Raya!

In the rural areas, in the kampungs where the roads are often so narrow you can only get a motorbike though anyway, the Raya Riders are in their element - sliding between the paddy fields with happy smiles on their faces, calling to each other on their mobiles, the colourfully-dressed girls with long flowing black hair poking out from behind their helmets (if they are wearing helmets at all that is!), and the boys with their Malay songkoks (hats) plastered down precariously atop their wind-blown faces, and definitely no helmets!

Often there are two or three to a bike but in the kampungs, the rules are waived, it seems, because the cops are nowhere to be seen - they are visiting their relatives' houses in the next village probably, and in many cases they are riding their bikes too!

This afternoon, on the way home from work, I passed a posse of the Raya Riders going towards town, all young, gaily coloured people and this time wearing their crash helmets like good boys and girls, because it was the main road. There was a happy innocence about them, like the bicycle rides I used to go on when I was a little boy.

How different this was from the last time I passed a gang of young people on bikes, when I went to see my son in KL recently. On that occasion, we were driving along the motorway at 2.30 in the morning when we were suddenly surrounded on both sides by 40 or 50 of Malaysia's very own Hells Angels, the Mat Rempit.

The Mat Rempit are a particularly Malaysian expression of male motorbike madness, and are very much the opposite of the Raya Riders, although they share some of the same characteristics (and members, I'm sure) in that they ride motorbikes, they are Malaysian, and often break the rules.

The Mat Rempits who zoomed past us in KL that morning were doing all the usual crazy Mat Rempit things, like weaving from right to left like stunt riders, zooming along doing wheelies like Evel Keneivel, and even hanging onto the handlebars and letting their legs flail outwards behind them!

But for some reason, the Mat Rempits, and especially their more peaceful seasonal counterparts the Raya Riders, just don't hack it in the Evil Biker Attitude stakes compared to the Hells Angels back home. I mean come on, folks, how can a young Malay rich kid doing handlebar stands on his souped up moped, or a Raya Rider going along kampung roads without a helmet hope to compete with the serious, mean-looking, hard-staring black leather-clad, bearded and tattooed Angels on their grumbling steel horses?

I mean, it's like Datuk Siti Nurhaliza recording an album with Metallica!

Selamat Hari Raya, Maaf Zahir dan Batin to all my Malaysian readers (both of them), and may all riders ride safely, whatever your flavour!

Stegosaurus Never Tasted So Good

2008-09-20T21:25:00.003+08:00

In uncertain times like these, you need something to take your mind off all the "petrol pricesAnwarStockCollapseAfghanistanIraqObama" going on around us. You need something to remind you just how good life really is, despite all the pain and misery. And I have found that thing, that island of solace and rightness that I can take refuge on and smile again.

I am of course talking about the excellent chicken Cornish pasties sold by Secret Recipe (see above).

I mean, where else can RM 7.50 bring you such unutterable joy and satisfaction? Even a cinema ticket these days costs more. Just look at the sublime golden yellow crustiness of this absolutely divine creation from the bakeries of the Secret Recipe chain! Notice that distinctive stegosaurus-like ridge atop that temptingly bulging crust beneath which lies untold riches!

Ah, I salivate about it as I write!

I remember when I first laid eyes on these amazing pies. It was when I took my family to the Secret Recipe in the Spring shopping mall, just after it opened. I nearly had a heart attack when I spotted the chicken Cornish, because I had never seen a Cornish pasty as big as that before! Back in the UK, where of course the Cornish pasty was born, the ridge-topped version of the pie is half that size, usually. And the filling is traditionally made from potato, minced lamb or beef, and carrot or swede.

Incidentally, there is another version of the Cornish pasty, or 'tiddly-oggie' as it is known colloquially. This version is flat, semi-circular, with a crimped ridge running round the leading edge. The story goes that the original Cornish pasties were invented to feed the Cornish tin miners in Cornwall, that South-Western bit of England that looks like a foot. Because the miners had no hand-washing facilities underground, the little ridge round the edge of the pie could be easily grasped by dirty fingers and presumably thrown away when the rest of the pie was eaten.

But here in Malaysia, I have only ever seen the 'stegosaurus' type of Cornish pasty on sale. So far, I have been disappointed, because most bakeries sell the 'beef Cornish' which is not only small and easily falls apart, but is usually filled with very spicy and unpleasantly chewy minced beef.

But I was born again when I first encountered the giant Secret Recipe chicken Cornish. The real secret of these delicacies' hold over my palate is in the filling, which comes in two flavours, original and spicy. I personally prefer the original flavour, which is a real discovery. When you break open the crust, you are assailed by a pungent, rich, meaty aroma emanating from a golden mass of succulent chicken strips, carrot, celery and raisins, in a tangy thick sauce which is unthinkably good. Especially when heated up.

And the spicy version is made of a hot curry flavoured chicken and vegetable mixture, which assails the tongue and overcomes the senses like a wind from the East. However, I find that sometimes it assails the senses a bit too much, and I need to quench the fire!

During this Holy Month of Ramadan, I have sometimes broken my fast with a chicken Cornish, because it is a meal in itself, and so filling. Just think, all that unthinkable goodness packed into a small hand-sized package. I bet those hardworking Cornish tin miners really looked forward to their tiddly-oggie every time they went underground!

Well, I can tell you folks, I definitely look forward to my next fix of this amazing creation. In fact I will probably be having one tomorrow morning at Zohor time before commencing my fast!

Ah, for a life of the senses!!!

K-K-Kuala Lumpur!!

2008-08-31T20:59:00.000+08:00

Kuala Lumpur is another planet, all right. Whenever I go there I feel I am in a place where the rules change drastically. Especially when it comes to driving. When my wife and I went over the South China Sea last week to visit our son in KL we immediately knew, minutes after being picked up in our boy’s white MyVi, that things are done very differently over there.

The first sign of trouble came as soon as we hit the expressway. It became apparent straight away that everything is done in hyper-fast motion on KL’s roads. Now I’m no coward when it comes to speed – but over here in Kuching it’s impossible to drive safely at a speed greater than 100 KPH simply because the roads are too bumpy and not wide enough. But in KL – ah that’s a different story.

For instance, it seems that the way to go is to drive as fast as possible, as close as possible to the rear bumper of the car in front. You should have heard the screams of panic coming from my dear wife in the back seat: “Sunny slow down! Stop stop stop!! Adoiiiiiiiii! Careful the bike! Careful the taxi!! Don’t go too fast bahhhhh!” I must admit, even I was gripping the floor of Sunny’s car with toes that cut into the metal floor like the talons of a bird of prey.

It was arguably even more scary when Sunny took the car round a sharp bend. Doing 90! My face must have left a permanent imprint in the glass of the passenger side window as my body was shoved by centrifugal force outwards towards doom. My right hand nearly forced the safety handle out of its mounting. And that was with a seat belt!

But all my son could say is “don’t worry mum, don’t worry dad, no problem” as he took one hand off the wheel and narrowly avoided a taxi before coming to a racing halt at the first toll booth.

Once we neared the silver towers and concrete canyons of central KL, I also noticed that my son’s digital fuel gauge was blinking urgently, something which I rarely allow to happen when I am driving back home. I suggested he look for a petrol station and pronto. This scared, hungry and overweight orang puteh didn’t feel like pushing a Myvi for miles and miles along KL’s murderous motorways in search of a petrol station thank you very much!!

But before we could get to our quarry we had to endure that most ubiquitous and compulsory of Kuala Lumpur driving experiences: The Jam. Now traffic jams are natural features of cities all over the world – you should see London! But in Kuala Lumpur, jams are something special. For one thing, they are pronounced ‘jem’ by locals, not that that makes them any more comical. Furthermore, they can and do happen absolutely everywhere. They can hold you up for hours and hours. And they are frequently caused by stupid things like rain, broken down trucks on the side of the road, people stopping to look at accidents and, in the case of our ‘jem’, the police conducting a check, presumably for road tax dodgers.

After an hour or two in a KL traffic jam, I really understand why most Malaysian drivers prefer driving automatics over manuals. I personally am a lifelong manual driver, as I believe that driving an auto is like driving a go-kart or a milk float. There is no real skill in it – you just put your foot down and the car does the rest. James Bond, for one, definitely would prefer the power and control one has over a manual car but I bet James Bond has never dealt with KL traffic jams.

You see, in jams like those, if you have to keep changing gear with your left foot on the clutch, your left foot will very soon turn to jelly and need amputating. Anyway, automatics allow the car to move off quicker and more smoothly than a manual. Maybe I should think of converting my car to automatic transmission when Kuching’s short jams become as bad as those in KL....

Finally, one very dangerous thing about KL jams is the frightening way that all drivers have of constantly changing lane. You really have to be on your toes, and allow absolutely no space in front of you whatsoever, because if you do, if you allow a micromillimetre of space in front of your bumper, some bike or car or truck will barge in front of you. I remember one hair raising experience, just after we filled up the car with petrol, when we were in a jam not far from the Petronas Twin Towers. There was a stream of cars to the left of us, a humongous car transporter filled with colourful Honda Jazzes to the right and even more cars and bikes in front, all jockeying for position like Formula One drivers and honking their horns like each honk brought them money.

Suddenly, a van came out of absolutely nowhere on our left and loomed up right next to me, trying to push his way through in front of us, even though the way was clearly blocked. I swear that if there had been one more coat of paint on our car, he would have hit us! You can imagine the language that slipped out of our normally civil and polite mouths as this crazy lunatic tried to kill us. Luckily, he fell back and we didn’t see him again...

So the long and the short of it is, KL is one hell of a ride, with an emphasis on the hell part! You need eyes in the front, back, sides and top of your head and nerves of steel as well as a well-tuned automatic transmission. But I must say, our son proved himself a very capable driver in such conditions and I would gladly ride with him again, though maybe next time I will bring a crash helmet!

Travel Broadens the Mind...

2008-08-30T19:51:00.002+08:00

Travel Broadens the Mind, they say. Well, it certainly does something, especially if you've had rather too much of it...

The last seven days or so have been, to put it mildly, rather hectic, and as a result, I have come down with my annual flu a couple of months early. Never mind...

It all started on 23rd August last week when my university was the host of the annual Yayasan Sarawak World-Style Debate tournament. For those of you reading this in a cybercafe in downtown Manhattan, or wherever, Yayasan Sarawak is a public body dedicated to funding and developing all kinds of educational activities for young people in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. And every year, since 2003, Yayasan Sarawak has been kindly helping to organise a debate competition, which involves university and college teams from all over the state.

This year, it was my university's turn to host the event, and as one of the main organisers, I was quite busy with the debate for a couple of days or so. Then, in what must have been one of my least finest hours in terms of scheduling, I had to fly off to Kota Kinabalu, just before the preliminary rounds came to a close.

So there was me, jetting off to KK in my business class seat feeling like a traitor instead of the globe-trotting flying professor that I really was. You see, debates produce a certain camaraderie. You really get involved with the action and come to care very much about the students who take part. You desperately want to know who is winning, and who is not. So as soon as I got to KK, and reached my hotel, I was furiously SMSing my colleagues back in Kuching to find out how everything was going! My body was in a suite in my favourite KK hotel the Promenade, yet my mind was still in Kuching! And I felt like I was letting the side down for not being there.

When the little letters started appearing on my mobile phone screen, they told of far off wonders in another land, a place I really wished I was in. I found out about our university team getting into the finals like it was news of the discovery of another planet with intelligent life. Yet I couldn't share in the celebrations and the inevitable partying because, the next day, I had to give a seminar on research methodology to a group of lecturers.

Not that Kota Kinabalu is a bad place - far from it. In previous posts I have sung its praises but this time the calm beauty of the place largely passed me by as my stay was so short. Is this what those globe-trotting business types feel like when they are going from meeting to meeting in different cities?

Anyway, after flying back to Kuching it was off to Kuala Lumpur the next day with the wife, to attend my son's graduation. That was quite a trek - I think I'll dedicate my next posting to it - but the long and the short of it was that I spent three days in KL sweating, being driven around, going to bed late and waking up early, going to bed in cramped conditions, and sweating.

And then, back to Kuching last Tuesday, and a taxi straight from the airport to attend the final of the debate. Our team did not win, by the way, which was a bit sad. And by the time I got home that evening, my nerves were shot to pieces and I sunk into an early and welcoming bed.

So no wonder the nose started to run, my body to shake and I felt like I had been run over several times by a truck. I don't know, is it because I'm getting old, or is it my chronic obesity? Or is it because I don't drink enough orange juice? All I can say is, thank God that Monday is the start of the holy month of Ramadan aka my annual diet. Maybe, just maybe this time I will lose some weight during the fasting month and keep it off.

Some hope...