On a Saturday June 28, 2008, I went to have lunch at the famous Chan Sow Lin Jalan 3 FishHead Restaurant. That was when I received first hand information from the boss himself that, that day will be the last day of operation at that premises. "We will be moving to Jalan 5," he said.
This was the picture of him telling me.
I duly wrote a post to inform readers and this will link you there.
Recently I went there to the new place for the first time. Same handsome boss. This is the huge non-air conditioned outside covered area.
This is the inside air-conditioned area.
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This place is quite easy to find. Just drive straight in along Chan Sow Lin Jalan 5 until you think you have the wrong road. Then drive in some more further and after crossing a bridge over a huge drain, you will see this place on your right.
No change in the food quality and no change in the prices. Great food at great prices.
All you guys who eat on non company expenses will like this place. Guys on company expenses, just take me with you to whatever places.
Yah, this place now opens on Sundays as well.
I went pass the old place and can still see the 37 year old tree standing. Wonderful sight!
Like many people, I have no idea who Elizabeth Wong was until the day before yesterday.
I have seen a couple of unflattering pictures of her. I would not show you here as that would not be right.
I think she didn't do anything wrong and should not be discriminated upon. The pictures I saw showed her semi-nude. There may be some other nude ones. She may not be party to the photo-session willingly or she may not have agreed for them to be made public. The ones I saw are not in the same category of those on Chua Soi Lek.
It certainly is sad to see her career cut short because of this senseless expose.
This year, the Canon Annual Dinner was held on Valentine's Day.
I did not get to go as I wasn't invited. I know their big excuse was that I am no longer in Canon Marketing (M) Sdn Bhd. I say "So, what has that got to do with It."
From some of the photos that I saw, it was a really colorful event. From the faces that I saw, it must have been a real fun event. From the faces that I saw, there were very few people that I know personally. Frances Yip yah, Christina Lee yah, Mike Cheong yah, Cheng Siew Ho yah, Shareen Thum yah, Jackie Leow yah, Danny Cheam yah, Dorai yah, Alicia Hooi yah, ..
Happy Valentine to all Mothers with Teenage Daughters. (a day late, right?) I know you would sing along, watching the following video if you know how.
This came by mail to a group loop of which I am part of, from Derek Goh.
The William Tell Overture Finale was most well known in the Lone Ranger Television shows.
Just ignore the next 2 videos if you listen for a minute and you do not like it. However, should you sit through them, it is very likely that you will enjoy them.
The accompanying credits say, William Tell overture by Gioachino Rossini performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker with Claudio Abbado, conductor
Before you continue, let me caution you, that a spoken command of the Cantonese language is necessary.
So, this girl spoke to her younger brother and he in turn spoke to his college mate and she spoke to me.
Unlike the Tortoise and Hare story, this one has three parts.
Char Siew Pau and Man Tou went to watch a sad movie. Char Siew Pau cried and Man Tou didn't. Why?
Char Siew Pau and Lin Yoong Pau went to see a Comedy. Lin Yoong Pau laugh and the other didn't. Why?
Mr and Mrs Char Siew Pau took their kid across the road and a truck ran over the kid, smashed into and broke open the kid. Mr Char Siew Pau slapped the wife. Why?
Answers after this video clip. (like a commercial break mah)
1. Man Tou has no 'feelings'.
2 Char Siew Pau and Lin Yoong Pau have different 'feelings'.
3 The fillings in the kid was not 'char siew'.
The younger brother of the first girl of whom this piece came from, is called Park Leng, a student of Brickfields Asia College.
My post on the 2nd of this month introduced Johann Hari and his article I came across on Stand up for the right to criticize religion.I found what he wrote interesting and I trust you may feel the same OR you may be totally outraged. If it is the latter, then blasphemy would be the appropriate word.
This morning I read this follow-up article on his blog. "Despite the Riots and Threats, I Stand By What I Wrote".
Instead of just providing you with a hyperlink and run the risk of you ignoring it, I chose to reproduce here the full text.
Here’s how it happened. My column reported on a startling development at the United Nations. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has always had the job of investigating governments who forcibly take the fundamental human right to free speech from their citizens with violence. But in the past year, a coalition of religious fundamentalist states have successfully fought to change her job description. Now, she has to report on “abuses of free expression” including “defamation of religions and prophets.” Instead of defending free speech, she must now oppose it.
I argued this was a symbol of how religious fundamentalists – of all stripes – have been progressively stripping away the right to freely discuss their faiths. They claim religious ideas are unique and cannot be discussed freely; instead, they must be “respected” – by which they mean unchallenged. So now, whenever anyone on the UN Human Rights Council tries to discuss the stoning of “adulterous” women, the hanging of gay people, or the marrying off of ten year old girls to grandfathers, they are silenced by the chair on the grounds these are “religious” issues, and it is “offensive” to talk about them. This trend is not confined to the UN. It has spread deep into democratic countries. Whenever I have reported on immoral acts by religious fanatics – Catholic, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim – I am accused of “prejudice”, and I am not alone. But my only “prejudice” is in favor of individuals being able to choose to live their lives, their way, without intimidation. That means choosing religion, or rejecting it, as they wish, after hearing an honest, open argument.
A religious idea is just an idea somebody had a long time ago, and claimed to have received from God. It does not have a different status to other ideas; it is not surrounded by an electric fence none of us can pass. That’s why I wrote: “All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don't respect the idea that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. I don't respect the idea that we should follow a "Prophet" who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn't follow him. I don't respect the idea that the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the Palestinians should be bombed or bullied into surrendering it. I don't respect the idea that we may have lived before as goats, and could live again as woodlice…. When you demand "respect", you are demanding we lie to you. I have too much real respect for you as a human being to engage in that charade.”
An Indian newspaper called The Statesman – one of the oldest and most venerable dailies in the country – thought this accorded with the rich Indian tradition of secularism, and reprinted the article. That night, four thousand Islamic fundamentalists began to riot outside their offices, calling for me, the editor, and the publisher to be arrested – or worse. They brought Central Calcutta to a standstill. A typical supporter of the riots, Abdus Subhan, said he was “prepared to lay down his life, if necessary, to protect the honour of the Prophet” and I should be sent “to hell if he chooses not to respect any religion or religious symbol… He has no liberty to vilify or blaspheme any religion or its icons on grounds of freedom of speech.” Then, two days ago, the editor and publisher were indeed arrested. They have been charged – in the world’s largest democracy, with a constitution supposedly guaranteeing a right to free speech – with “deliberately acting with malicious intent to outrage religious feelings”. I am told I too will be arrested if I go to Calcutta.
What should an honest defender of free speech say in this position? Every word I wrote was true. I believe the right to openly discuss religion, and follow the facts wherever they lead us, is one of the most precious on earth – especially in a democracy of a billion people rivven with streaks of fanaticism from a minority of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. So I cannot and will not apologize. I did not write a sectarian attack on any particular religion of the kind that could lead to a rerun of India’s hellish anti-Muslim or anti-Sikh pogroms, but rather a principled critique of all religions who try to forcibly silence their critics. The right to free speech I am defending protects Muslims as much as everyone else. I passionately support their right to say anything they want – as long as I too have the right to respond. It’s worth going through the arguments put forward by the rioting fundamentalists, because they will keep recurring in the twenty-first century as secularism is assaulted again and again. They said I had upset “the harmony” of India, and it could only be restored by my arrest. But this is a lop-sided vision of “harmony”. It would mean that religious fundamentalists are free to say whatever they want – and the rest of us have to shut up and agree. The protestors said I deliberately set out to “offend” them, and I am supposed to say that, no, no offence was intended. But the honest truth is more complicated. Offending fundamentalists isn’t my goal – but if it is an inevitable side-effect of defending human rights, so be it. If fanatics who believe Muslim women should be imprisoned in their homes and gay people should be killed are insulted by my arguments, I don’t resile from it. Nothing worth saying is inoffensive to everyone. You do not have a right to be ring-fenced from offence. Every day, I am offended – not least by ancient religious texts filled with hate-speech. But I am glad, because I know that the price of taking offence is that I can give it too, if that is where the facts lead me. But again, the protesters propose a lop-sided world. They do not propose to stop voicing their own heinously offensive views about women’s rights or homosexuality, but we have to shut up and take it – or we are the ones being “insulting.”
It’s also worth going through the arguments of the Western defenders of these protesters, because they too aren’t going away. Already I have had e-mails and bloggers saying I was “asking for it” by writing a “needlessly provocative” article. When there is a disagreement and one side uses violence, it is a reassuring rhetorical stance to claim both sides are in the wrong, and you take a happy position somewhere in the middle. But is this true? I wrote an article defending human rights, and stating simple facts. Fanatics want to arrest or kill me for it. Is there equivalence here? The argument that I was “asking for it” seems a little like saying a woman wearing a short skirt is “asking” to be raped. Or, as Salman Rushdie wrote when he received far, far worse threats simply for writing a novel (and a masterpiece at that): “When Osip Mandelstam wrote his poem against Stalin, did he ‘know what he was doing’ and so deserve his death? When the students filled Tiananmen Square to ask for freedom, were they not also, and knowingly, asking for the murderous repression that resulted? When Terry Waite was taken hostage, hadn’t he been ‘asking for it’?” When fanatics threaten violence against people who simply use words, you should not blame the victim.
These events are also a reminder of why it is so important to try to let the oxygen of rationality into religious debates – and introduce doubt. Voltaire – one of the great anti-clericalists – said: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” If you can be made to believe the absurd notion that an invisible deity dictated The Eternal Unchanging Truth to a specific person at a specific time in history and anyone who questions this is Evil, then you can easily be made to demand the death of journalists and free women and homosexuals who question that Truth. But if they have a moment of doubt – if there is a single nagging question at the back of their minds – then they are more likely to hesitate. That’s why these ideas must be challenged at their core, using words and reason. But the fundamentalists are determined not to allow those rational ideas to be heard – because at some level they know they will persuade for many people, especially children and teenagers in the slow process of being indoctrinated. If, after all the discussion and all the facts about how contradictory and periodically vile their ‘holy’ texts are, religious people still choose fanatical faith, I passionately defend their right to articulate it. Free speech is for the stupid and the wicked and the wrong – whether it is fanatics or the racist Geert Wilders – just as much as for the rational and the right. All I say is that they do not have the right to force it on other people or silence the other side. In this respect, Wilders resembles the Islamists he professes to despise: he wants to ban the Koran. Fine. Let him make his argument. He discredits himself by speaking such ugly nonsense. The solution to the problems of free speech – that sometimes people will say terrible things – are always and irreducibly more free speech. If you don’t like what a person says, argue back. Make a better case. Persuade people. The best way to discredit a bad argument is to let people hear it. I recently interviewed the pseudo-historian David Irving, and simply quoting his crazy arguments did far more harm to him than any Austrian jail sentence for Holocaust Denial.
Please do not imagine that if you defend these rioters, you are defending ordinary Muslims. If we allow fanatics to silence all questioning voices, the primary victims today will be Muslim women, Muslim gay people, and the many good and honourable Muslim men who support them. Imagine what Europe would look like now if everybody who offered dissenting thoughts about Christianity in the seventeenth century and since was intimidated into silence by the mobs and tyrants who wanted to preserve the most literalist and fanatical readings of the Bible. Imagine how women and gay people would live.You can see this if you compare my experience to that of journalists living under religious-Islamist regimes. Because generations of people sought to create a secular space, when I went to the police, they offered total protection. When they go to the police, they are handed over to the fanatics – or charged for their “crimes.” They are people like Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the young Afghan journalism student who was sentenced to death for downloading a report on women’s rights. They are people like the staff of Zanan, one of Iran’s leading reform-minded women’s magazines, who have been told they will be jailed if they carry on publishing. They are people like the 27-year old Muslim blogger Abdel Rahman who has been seized, jailed and tortured in Egypt for arguing for a reformed Islam that does not enforce shariah law.
It would be a betrayal of them – and the tens of thousands of journalists like them – to apologize for what I wrote. Yes, if we speak out now, there will be turbulence and threats, and some people may get hurt. But if we fall silent – if we leave the basic human values of free speech, feminism and gay rights undefended in the face of violent religious mobs – then many, many more people will be hurt in the long term. Today, we have to use our right to criticise religion – or lose it.
Finally we have somebody kind enough to upload onto youtube the Paul McCartney 51st Grammy Night "I Saw Her Standing There" live with Dave Grohl.
The quality of the clip is not excellent though.
The elegant hottie who introduced Sir Paul McCartney is Kate Beckinsale. Don't you think she is 'smoking'?
Ladies and Gentlemen, 36 years old English Actress Kate Beckinsale!
She is known for her roles in the films Pearl Harbor (2001), Underworld (2003), Van Helsing (2004), The Aviator (2004), Underworld: Evolution (2006) and Click (2006)
I received a mail from Jack Lim, Canon former Managing Director on subject speech.
Jack said. "A speech worth reading. With the bold steps taken to overcome the present economic crisis, by the time the global economy recovers, China would leapfrog more than half the developed countries in advancement."
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You may too remembered that this was the same occasion when a shoe was thrown and missed him by about a meter.
I have here the appropriate link in case you want to read what Premier Wen Jiabao said on the 2nd February 2009 at the University of Cambridge, London.
I watched the 51st Grammy Awards yesterday and all the performances by various artistes were beyond reproach. The only exception being that I did not like the version done by Neil Diamond on Sweet Caroline. However, I was particularly drawn to Paul McCartney doing "I Saw Her Standing There" with Dave Grohl playing the drums.
You may recognise Dave Grohl currently with the Foo Fighters and previously with the late legendary Kurt Corbain in the group Nirvana.
It is too early to find an upload of that performance on youtube. However, I find this concert by him in Kiev, last year June to be really good.
Incidentally, Paul McCartney played in front of 350,000 then and the songs performed by him include:
'Drive My Car' 'Jet' 'All My Loving' 'Only Mama Knows' 'Flaming Pie' 'Got To Get You Into My Life' 'Let Me Roll It' 'C Moon' 'My Love' 'Let 'Em In' 'The Long And Winding Road' 'Dance Tonight' 'Blackbird' 'Calico Skies' 'I'll Follow The Sun' 'Mrs Vanderbilt' 'Eleanor Rigby' 'Something' 'Good Day Sunshine' 'Penny Lane' 'Band On The Run' 'Birthday' 'Back In The USSR' 'I Got A Feeling' 'Live And Let Die' 'Let It Be''Hey Jude''A Day In The Life/Give Peace A Chance' 'Lady Madonna' 'Get Back''I Saw Her Standing There' 'Yesterday' 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'
I think all mentioned songs performed then are available on youtube if you care to look.
You would probably not be interested. But Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, has a population of 2.7 million people. And can you imagine 350,000 of these turning up to watch Paul McCartney! (granted, there were out of towners and other foreigners.)
Meanwhile, back to the 51st Grammy Awards:
Jason Mraz should have won the Song of the Year yesterday, according to a relative of mine. Go listen to "I'm Yours" again and you may agree.
My favorite person there was LeAnn Rimes. I did not like her outfit though. This lady won her first Grammy at the age of 13. The youngest winner ever. Remember her song "Can't Fight the Moonlight"?
I was surprised to see Robert Plant garnering 5 Grammies together with Alison Krauss. Robert, as you know was the rocker singer with Led Zeppelin. I thought he has ridden off into the sunset whilst his partner Jimmy Page was still being a bit active. Beijing Olympics? King Kong soundtrack?
