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too much and too little |
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What is good, Phaedrus? And what is not good? Need we anyone to tell us these things?
Reminder to self: Purchase latest Dawkins book
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7939629
Redang
The first thing you notice about Pulau Redang's water is your feet. "Hey man, look at this," said KK, my fellow traveller, in awe. "You can see your toes in the water!" I look down. I do see them, pink and yellow and crisscrossed with refracted sunlight beneath the waves. I also see the shitload of dead coral that's deposited on the beach with each wave, marring the clean, fine sand. They stab at my soles when I walk but if I try to remove them and take them home I can go to jail for fucking with the environment. I touch the water with my fingers and I sniff. It smells salty, but clean. In Singapore the seas have a strong, stinging taste, like Dettol mixed with soy sauce and urine, and are filled with a deadly, glutinous mass of poisonous jellyfish that populate the waters since the demise of all vertebrate marine life by the shoreline. Here, the water is pleasant. No jellyfish. I wade out, and KK yells that he saw fish darting about. Fish. Fish in the sea. What a thought. Getting to Pulau Redang, a resort island and marine sanctuary in the South China Sea some 45km offshore from Terengganu, Malaysia, is a pain. KK and I went by coach from Singapore. I hadn't gone home to change my clothes or wash up and I felt gross and sweaty. We boarded the bus at 10.30pm last Friday and it left Golden Mile on the dot. The airconditioning that blasted through the bus sent its passengers into quivering, fitful sleep. For the first time in my life, I discovered how it feels to have slick armpits and chattering teeth at the same time. Never again. We were like a shipment of chilled pork, heading north on dark roads. We arrived at the jetty, overflowing with tourists, half a day later. It was 9 am. Because we forgot to register at the counter for a ferry ticket, we had to take one 15 mins later than the one we should have. The boat took an hour to reach the island. We were taken to an open hall near the terminal where an excitable Malay lad briefed the restless and exhausted army of visitors on the itinerary and the wonderful facilities of Laguna Redang Island Resort. A hearty buffet lunch followed, for our rooms were not yet ready. We only made it to our quarters at 12.30pm. To our relief, it was clean, and had a poolside view. I would have collapsed on my bed there and then if I were not then the singularly most filthy human being alive. So I went to the bathroom instead. The water that poured out of the shower at a rate just a notch higher than a trickle was warm - and sheer bliss. I wanted to sleep. KK wanted to go to the beach. To the beach, then. -- Snorkelling was the reason we went, and the island of Redang is blessed with that bounty of coral reefs and baby sharks that make tourists splash out foreign currencies and give governments the will to repel Japanese trawlers. But snorkelling is gross when you have to rent equipment. First, you are supposed to slather saliva on the mask to prevent it from fogging, and second, you're supposed to put the snorkel in your mouth and bite on it. Imagine a hundred dudes using it before you. It's like chewing on used bubble gum. But when you drop into the warm-cool waters and witness for the first time the spiky horn-like coral that sprout from a sea-bed shimmering with life, you forget anything else exists beyond this watery domain, at least until salty water creeps inside your mask, which you forgot to tighten properly, and into your nose, and you snort, flailing in the waves, like a deranged mime. Of course, KK and I weren't the only ones there. Let's not bother with the professional divers from the resort - one and all they fitted the stereotype of "beach boy" - but the fellow tourists. Let's ignore the men, because most of them were fat and ugly and wore pretty much the same thing. The women, however, were interesting. I divided them into the Bikinis and the Tudungs, depending on what they wore. There weren't too many hot Bikinis, though some did catch the eye. But there were a couple of fat ones or ones with strange markings (like an angmoh woman with a weird flower of black, vein-like lines in a patch on her back) which, if I were in any way religious, would make me pray for the eradication of cellulite. So many tubby thighs. The Tudungs, on the other hand, were uncompromising in the defence of their modesty. They wore a strange, almost comical combination of wetsuit, t-shirt, pants, and head-scarf. With their snorkels on, they resembled underwater ninja/farmers. None of them were any good looking. When one pulls herself unto a boat after a dip, sometimes the headscarf gets dragged off by its own sodden weight. I saw one of them valiantly tugging at the cloth, trying to cover exposed hair. Of course, nobody other than them cared about whether we saw hair or not. But I admired them - sitting on a boat, their backs to the ocean, with damp cloth on their heads dripping into their faces. I would have found it cold and dreary. But such are the comforts of faith.
Is it safe to blog about Sep 11 yet?
It is reflexive and understandable to resist the tyranny of free trade, imposed on the many by an elite, and its many injustices, all done in the name of an ideology which has little scientific value and has resulted in a world no more peaceful or more wealthy, except for a select few. It is expressed as a robust American imperialism, backed by guns and loans. And I think we are duty-bound to resist it in what ways we can. But it is not true that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. One cannot be progressive by standing on the side of medieval fundy jihadists whose idea of progress is regress, all the way back to 630 AD, who would divide the world between belief and unbelief, who believe that the only workable system is a radical Islamism, who would impose on us a world that has no place for dancing, or painting, or equality. One must spit on both.
630AD
I just saw a message through the newsroom computer system. It was about the phrase "Mecca for shopping". The editor was telling us to be sensitive. -- Do not use Mecca as a reference unless we are talking about THE Mecca. -- Apparently it's sensitive in the local context. Madness. Madness. Madness. Stop killing perfectly good metaphors, even one as overused as that one. IS LAM CHEE LEONG IN THE BUILDING? *** I recently interviewed a Malay girl, who went to London and got hooked on New Age from a Peruvian artist. She visited temples, and got really into the whole spiritual stuff, meditation, all that. Is she still Muslim? Who knows. What does it matter, really? Anyway, I submitted the draft, and got told to delete all that. I'm not complaining about it. My ed's point - and it's quite correct - was not so much that we can't write it, but that we would get that girl into trouble with members of her community. It felt to me fairly trivial stuff. I mean, there are Sufis out there who get into more esoteric stuff, surely. When did those guys stop being Muslims? When did Iran-Saudi Arabia win? For the love of Mecha-Buddha, whether that girl wants to be a good follower or a bad follower or drink alcohol or not drink alcohol or dance nude in a forest ceremony to sacred Gaia is not your bloody business, ummah or not. --- However, would a film like 'Monty Python's Life of Brian,' criticized at the time of its release for being anti-Christian, be judged under the proposed law? Or that excellent joke in 'Not the Nine O'Clock news' all those years ago, showing worshippers in a mosque simultaneously bowing to the ground with the voiceover: 'And the search goes on for the Ayatollah Khomeini's contact lens'? Not respectful, but comedy takes no prisoners. However, in period and in context it was extremely funny and I believe that it is the reaction of the audience that should decide the appropriateness of a joke, not the law of the land. -- Rowan Atkinson
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