We’re in the home stretch and seeing the feeds go ablaze with election coverage, it occurs to me that I do have a few thoughts that have gone unsaid:
1) Vote! Whoever for doesn’t bother me (much) but if I don’t see indelible ink on your finger, I will think less of you. A vote not cast isn’t just wasted but makes room for the shady and fraudulent. If you don’t claim that ballot, someone else might, no, will. Maybe not in your name. But seeing as we can’t have 101% voter turnout, your turning up matters. If you are registered and still on the fence, you can stay there, so long as you get to a polling booth and cast your ballot.
2) Your politics can be private. Much like a new romance, nobody needs to weigh in on sh*t but you and your chosen one. Not even your mama! Unless you’re a running candidate, most of the political discussions you’ll be having over the next week are not going to be constructive or productive. So, in the home stretch and on election day: zip it, mark it and cast it!
3) When we win - ;-) - or if we lose, don’t take the bait. You don’t need to defend diddly squat on the street, at the table or in a damn shopping mall. The fate of the nation is not gonna rest on your immature need to whip out and measure. Stay cool and stay smart.
There’s that old backhanded blessing which reads, “May you live in interesting times.” Well do we ever!
Remember to keep your wits about you this election season.
See you at the polls!
Now imagine if he had watched a hundred pornos and defined beauty by the oversized and oversexed. Imagine if she defined romance by Nicholas Sparks, Nora Efron, and the 80 things her friends told her any sane girl would want.
34 years and, yes, arranged, but why wouldn’t we want that arranged?
While I know my bliss isn’t in the off and farming of tea dept – and I cannot see myself marrying somebody that someone else picked out for me – I’m beginning to realize that each bullet on a wishlist is a shot against contentment. Lasting fulfilment sits on the corner furthest from quickest bliss, which conventional wisdom beg we follow.
34 years. Who wouldn’t want that arranged? But a “For Love” touting, tradition flouting, iPad-armed soul. For him contentment just isn’t in the leaves. And there won’t be 34 years to be had, when,“for love,” he convinces himself, he can finally be, “happy.”
So I took FB’s new toy out for a spin. Here’s how it went. I began by searching for…
Restaurants: Dug the fact that Fierce Curry House came out on top but I’m surprised Starbucks is as popular with my Independent-business loving clique as it is; actually, I’m surprised Starbucks counts as a Restaurant.
Shops: I don’t think we actually take the time to “Like” the shops we like, so this query, which gets recommended to you often, might be a ways away from being useful.
Bars: Hell no! A little too mainstream for my tastes, but then again I don’t think our favourite bars actually have Facebook Pages. Just a note on this though, your local really shouldn’t be attached, housed-within or adjacent to a damned shopping mall.
Music Stores: None in KL, apparently. But when I widened the search to “Anywhere” the first hit was Singapore’s Straits Records and the second, Backside in Burbank California, all liked by Malaysian friends of mine - which means, like me, you will travel for the right music. Love that I’m not the only one!
Music liked by my friends: Mmmm… Not feeling ya’ll. Radiohead BELOW Tony Fernandes? You n****s on crack? Didn’t know Tony had an album out.
Movies: All good. Can show face wanlah!
TV Shows: Mostly good, except I think a few of you have forgotten to “Unlike” How I Met Your Mother. It has jumped the shark. It has jumped a few sharks.
For a wildcard I tried asking, “How do my friends feel about our Prime Minister?” Also tried different iterations of this question. It turned up nothing.
Tried: “How do my friends feel about Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters?” and “My friends who liked Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters”. Both turned up nothing as well.
What Facebook would be smart to do is to build in an engine that can detect and tabulate data on general sentiment. A meta-critic for everything from movies to current affairs. That’s truly something no one else would be able to offer me.
For places of interest (POI) data, FB’s dataset is still too limited for Graph Search to really be useful to a Malaysia user. Until that gets better, I don’t see myself using Graph Search much.
It’s been a shitty day to be Malaysian. I got more coming, but let’s just start here.
You want to burn Bibles?
The sight of a God-made, beautiful female breast offends your sensitivities and impinges upon your religious beliefs so much we gotta cancel Beyonce but you want to burn Bibles and political parties with Christian members aren’t allowed to complain???
Seriously?
I live in a nation where self-censorship is the height of good sense and propriety for any minority citizen. Our liberties are borrowed. Sh*t, our citizenship is leased. And I can’t even ask for the option to buy - no matter how much money I earn for your ass - because the asking would do undue harm to your tender sensi-f*cking-tivities.
What about mine, “Negro”? Where do my sensitivities figure into all of this, when you threaten to burn my religious holy text?
Where are the arrests? The arrests that usually follow any racial or bigoted comment that crosses someones lips or keyboard? Or do cuffs only click when the offended party is Muslim?
Act, my love, my Prime Minister, to whom the law declares I can never show disaffection. Act for the sake of this love. Because I can’t hold my tongue no more. Not even for a peace on the brink!
I can’t shut me up. Not as the plight of dogs and cats are compared to the plight of minority Malaysians - thank you, Sharifah Zohra Jabeen, for that sh*t. Not when Tun Mahathir can equate third generation Malaysians to illegal immigrants. I got no more acceptance left in me.
Round them all up and give them consequences for squandering the free speech I do not, might not ever, have.
Please. Do something. Because, damn it, I. Am. Mad!
Google Now leverages two of the company’s strongest products, Search and Maps, to deliver an experience for the Android platform that is extremely compelling.
This is what keeps Siri, Cupertino’s own ‘D’ student, up at night.
The heir apparent in Asian Pacific markets is already Android - Google’s OS taking over from the steadily declining Symbian. Apple has a grip on North America and much of Western Europe, due in no small part to the strength of its content and media ecosystem. But where search, maps and voice recognition are concerned, features that are becoming increasingly important to users, Apple has a lot of catching up to do.
BTW: 2 minutes in, when Scott Huffman (Engineering Director for Search at Google) goes into the “knowledge graph” that “forms links” between, well, everything - that xylophone music really creeped me out. Big brother, dude. Google Now = big brother :P
Love the fact that this launched the same day as Windows 8, wasting no time at snapping up users of Microsoft’s new OS. It’s so simple, when compared to Microsoft’s recent Internet Explorer and BingItOn ads. And yet it’s way more effective in making Google Search and Google Chrome seem desirable.
The Verge’s hands-on with the new (razor-thin) iMac
Q&A with Dato’ Sri Idris Jala in this month’s Monocle
Opened up the latest issue of Monocle and guess who I found: Dato’ Sri Idris Jala speaking about transforming Malaysia.
Cliffsnotes: He’s to the right “when it gets down to allowing the private sector to ride the economy.” And to the left, “when you need to make sure you have enough money to help the poor.”
He avoids marking our democracy out of 10, by simply stating that with the ISA repealed, we’re doing “pretty well.”
Personal highlight for me though, was this:
“We believe in dissent. For a functioning and modern democracy to exist you must allow for constructive dissent.” He adds that, “What you do not want is dissent that leads to anarchy…so we’ve got to find the right balance in how you do this.”
God bless you, sir! That answer does us proud and please let your boss know, we’ll be holding his administration to that.
