When You Sometimes Wonder What The Hey?

Yesterday's haiku was all I could manage before packing up for another working trip to Lumut, and this is where I am at the moment. I was going to write about jellyfish (a Squidoo lens of the day) and Richard Brautigan (twigged on by a comment on Advencer Si Juru-rumahtangga) when I saw an aborigine catching a shark from a sampan with a length of rope (!) on Discovery Channel. Yes, I was really shouting and raving with unrestrained enthusiasm. That is how living with me is like: I sometimes shout out things like "Oi! Look! Look! Spiders are bonking on tee-vee! Oh! OH! SHIT! The bitch just ripped the fucker's head off! Wha-?? Bloody hell, and he's still going!" Then, sits goggle-eyed and mouth gaping watching animals having wild sex. Then, "Those arachnids are crazy. Hmm... now I'm hungry."

Anyway, after that (and between a discussion on where we can find shark's fin soup in the middle of the night) we were shown a curious tribal ritual. I must note here that I'm not sure which tribe of natives that Discovery was featuring because I have forgotten — no offence, but they all look the same to me. It was some-sort of warrior rite, the men in the tribe go up a rickety platform about 100 meters high (my estimation), bind a length of root to their legs and then launch themselves into the air to fall to the ground. Just like a bungee jump, except that the roots aren't elastic, and the purpose of the exercise is to land on the ground and survive the test. If you thought that you had the balls to bungee, try this and let's see those balls. (More on that in a couple of paragraphs)

All around the platform and the landing 'strip' a crowd gathers to cheer and jeer at the men. The commentary says that you can decide not to jump at the last moment, and there will be no shame upon your honour but you shall suffer the indignity of being the target of a jeering mob, and later, endless teasing — though I suspect that not so very long ago the ones who refuse might be banished from the tribe, or worse, stoned to death. The ones who do take the jump shall be considered 'real men'.

It is a test of courage and, for those who brazenly confess that they are prepared to face death, the way to prove that conviction. One of the men steps onto the platform and walks out on the plank like an olympic diver. He looks intoxicated; everyone does; they most probably are — the men are covered in only a loincloth, and — this is obvious to all watching — every one of them were walking around with an erect penis! ... I've heard about Red Bull giving wings, but this is ridiculous. The mob below is in a frenzy, shouting — screaming, rather — at the top of their lungs to encourage him. There is dancing, much dancing; all this drama comes with the air of festivity. The man closes his eyes, murmurs something and jumps.

From the top of the platform the landing site is just a tiny clearing in the midst of a sea of dancing bodies. From my experience of falling, it only takes a moment to reach the ground, but the sense of your guts being wrenched out of your body and then returning in a snap seems to take an infinitely long time. Watching from the camera's eye, it takes three seconds for the man to fall away from the platform, the rope of roots bound to his feet stretching out behind him. Then the rope goes taut and snaps. The man, his forward motion suddenly arrested, drops unceremoniously to the ground. The crowd converges on him to pick him up and carry the new hero joyously on their shoulders.

It was a spectacular moment. But I'd rather be in a sampan trying to catch sharks. Or swim in a lake swarming with jellyfish...



That should be adventure enough!

I am on the sixth floor facing west, looking out from the balcony with a view across the estuary. Somewhere behind me the sun is rising and the foggy land across water is bathed in golden light. I have half a mind to get on a ferry to Pangkor Island and go snorkelling over the weekend.

After Basho

summer stories &
spoken words breezing through
these lazy noons

see also: "Summer Stories" on Bibliobibuli
see also: "Noon Doze" on Puisi-Poesy

Sharks

Still working, past midnight. Sharks! Sharks! Discovery! An aborigine and a shark! The TV!!

Blue Comb For Four

Like a quicksilver droplet arrested escaping its wild descent groundwards never quite intersecting with the plane that stopped its fall but flows on wildly whole; it does not resist. Drenched in sunlight and the shimmer of vapour it is a condensate, not-quite-solid. It's a... chimaera, it must be!

An alchemickal bauble of argentum & lapis lazuli (better than mythickal beast) magicked to be set adrift whilst immobile. What force could hold this — can we be certain — it would not slide away silently, its inertia broken by a whimsical wind, to be swept away wantonly bobbing merrily willy-nilly on its course so if breathed life: it is that gleaming sha-sha-ing tadpole, sh— it's a shoal-stopper.

Drenched in sunlight and the shimmers of vapour, the world caught in the space of an inversion between a mirror and the eye: Fata Morgana; don't go near, it might disappear.

Two girls: at their age looking as all girls their age do; at my age, look the same as girls their age do. Coming from the grocer's. Seemingly sisters, looking alike as they do. What female heart can resist — they drift from their course from the grocer's, to stand before it.

The taller steps in, peers in, steps out
and sees her self, framed in rakish silver.

What female heart can resist?

A blue comb appears. She starts to preen.

Fast & Furry-o (The Sixth Day)

Mel & I went for camp last night when we started to search our music bins for — heaven have mercy — Tommy Page for some singalongs while we work on our laptops in the living room — Paintings In My Mind, A Shoulder To Cry On, I'll Be Your Everything... anyone? (mimes gesture shooting head...). Michael Learns To Croak ain't got nothing on Tommy!

Yeah for all that mercurial motor-mouth hustling façade, Mel is sugar to the core and, I swear, her heart is congealed gula melaka (but she ain't as schweet as that Neela chikáro from F+F3: Tokyo Drift ... Nathalie Kelley (sha-wing!) ... Nat joins Nicole Kidman and Natalie Imbruglia as the women with names that start with the letter 'N' from Down Under that I am stalking am in lust with... through, strictly speaking, she's South American. Dear Nat, my Drift Machine is back from the paint shop next week; come be my DQ, my lust. I promise to drive safely.)

Anyway, (I'm almost relieved to report that) we do not have any Tommy Page in our collection so we resorted to memory for the butchery to great hilarity for all present.

So Bosson's One In A Million served as fodder while waiting for the F+F3: Tokyo Drift soundtrack to arrive, byte by byte through the wire — The Teriyaki Boyz' track is dope but I'm bumpin' wit' DJ Shadow & Mos Def's Six Days mo y'all! ...

Shot!
Escalation
Never Station
Generation
Separation
Situation
Dissipation
Shot!
...
You hear a whistling overhead
Are you alive or are you dead?
It's only Thursday
You feel the shaking on the ground
A million candles burn around
Is it your birthday?
...
Tomorrow never comes until it's too late.
Think tomorrow's come I think it's too late

Woof!

See also: Brian Tyler & Slash's Mustang Nismo,
See also: Far*East Movement's Round Round and
See also: 5 .6 .7 .8's Barracuda

But the sixth day came to a close with news that The Saint's grandmother has just passed on. He is keeping vigil over the body tonight with Mel. As is my wont in times like this, I withdraw into my library and contemplate Dylan Thomas' villanelle, "Do not go gentle into that good night". As ever, as ever, the words to say it comes down to these that came to mind, to we who are left behind:

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Browse / Chat / TV

Ands another week comes to a close

1545hrs
drstrangemoves: streamyx or gsm... outdoor in KL

1640hrs
"Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws." S.J. Perelman (1904-1979)

1650hrs
[The Patriot is on TV]

"Ah, it's Mel Gibson. He was William Wallace, and now he's a Yankee."
"Yeah, he was Jesus Christ one time too."

[a conversation on the American War of Independence ensues...]

"Yeah! yeah! ... and Monica Belucci was Mary Magdalene. That's one hot momma."

1710hrs

Or maybe we stopped talking about the Future around the time that, with its microchips and its twenty-four-hour news cycles, it arrived. Some days when you pick up the newspaper it seems to have been co-written by J. G. Ballard, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick. Human sexual reproduction without male genetic material, digital viruses, identity theft, robot firefighters and minesweepers, weather control, pharmaceutical mood engineering, rapid species extinction, US Presidents controlled by little boxes mounted between their shoulder blades, air-conditioned empires in the Arabian desert, transnational corporatocracy, reality television—some days it feels as if the imagined future of the mid-twentieth century was a kind of checklist, one from which we have been too busy ticking off items to bother with extending it. Meanwhile, the dwindling number of items remaining on that list—interplanetary colonization, sentient computers, quasi-immortality of consciousness through brain-download or transplant, a global government (fascist or enlightened)—have been represented and re-represented so many hundreds of times in films, novels and on television that they have come to seem, paradoxically, already attained, already known, lived with, and left behind. Past, in other words.

Michael Chabon, The Omega Glory

(And some might say Douglas Adams invented the computer. Where does he fit in?)

1720hrs

Since so much of our experience is mediated in some way or another, we have deep sensitivities to the signatures of different media. Artists play with these sensitivities, digesting the new and shifting the old. In the end, the characteristic forms of a tool's or medium's distortion, of its weakness and limitations, become sources of emotional meaning and intimacy.

Although designers continue to dream of "transparency" - technologies that just do their job without making their presence felt - both creators and audiences actually like technologies with "personality." A personality is something with which you can have a relationship. Which is why people return to pencils, violins, and the same three guitar chords.

Brian Eno, The Revenge on the Intuitive

(Brian Eno, my hero)

1725hrs
drstrangemoves: no worries
floyd: aku nak discuss ngan hang pasal opportunity MSC tu
drstrangemoves: true
drstrangemoves: have to
drstrangemoves: not a lot of time left
drstrangemoves: aku dah overdose with information
floyd: patutlah hang dok meracau
floyd: leaking kot ..
floyd: jomlah kena kopi
floyd: best hujan2 ni

raving. leaking. and hot coffee best in the rain)

1735hrs...
A feature on newspapers on Discovery Channel — "Woah! Cool robotics!" — ... (lapses into distraction)

1750hrs
(Musing on balud in Shanghai)

1800hrs
Off for coffee.

1801hrs
This just in: competition at Evil Editor: take a stab of writing a summary of one of these three books:

• The Da Vinci Code
• The Catcher in the Rye
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Criteria: creativity and humour. I'm gonna keep an eye on whoever does Hitchhiker — you'd have to be very brave, or starking mad. I'll pass.

1815hrs
Off for coffee
... and the Pussycat Calls are dolling, might it become a happier weekend? (Happy Weekend)

eh?

2020hrs
if
//this (doesn't work out
then)
else
where next?


How do you pass seasons in the tropics? Everyday is the same. 42 years of rain or shine.

Coffee delayed. Raving mad.

"Information That Enhances Wonder"

I linked to Science Musing a couple of weeks ago when Chet Raymo blogged about science books for children. The next day, Chet followed up with a post that includes a poem from Randall Jarrell's The Bat-Poet.

Chet says that we can learn some interesting things from science books. "From a science book", for example, "we might learn that a flying bat might snap up 15 insects per minute, or that the frequency of its squeal can range as high as 50,000 cycles per second." But consider this poem:

A bat is born
Naked and blind and pale.
His mother makes a pocket of her tail
And catches him. He clings to her long fur
By his thumbs and toes and teeth.
And then the mother dances through the night
Doubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting —
Her baby hangs on underneath.

The mother eats the moths and gnats she catches
In full flight; in full flight
The mother drinks the water of the pond
She skims across. Her baby hangs on tight.

There are facts, more facts, and then there is information. But what one could learn about the bat from this poem, is the sort of "information that enhances wonder", says Chet.

Incidentally, there is another poem about bats that I read recently. It is D. H. Lawrence's Bat, which Bibliobibuli posted last month on Puisi-Poesy.

Excerpt:

Pipistrello!
Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe.
Little lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive;

Wings like bits of umbrella.

Bats!

Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.

Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.

Bats!

What does that tell you about bats? Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe — ever heard how bats sound like? You can't because they emit sounds beyond the human range of hearing, but here are some ultrasound recordings. Wings like bits of umbrella. Definitely! Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags / And grinning in their sleep... yeah, they do look like that. Kinda.

As it happens, as I was reading Chet's post that day, I was half-watching Jeff Corwin fiddle with an eagle on Animal Planet (As I remember it, there were also pelicans and a pit viper, but that eagle was cool!) To cut a long story short, I was reminded of Tennyson's The Eagle and set about to look for it.

It is my turn to post a poem today at Puisi-Poesy and that is the poem that I have chosen to share.

As you will find out, the poem means more to me than just a poem about an eagle, but it did at one time enhance my own — and many others too, I bet — wonderment at that lord among birds, having never seen one before... those were the days before Animal Planet and the National Geographic Channel (imagine, without television, zoos would still be cool) . Even Walt Whitman's gripping The Dalliance of the Eagles, which could not be more different, but just as fantastic as Tennyson's homage to the eagle, does not inspire such wonder at the majestic eagle. Of course, it's a case of apples and oranges, but find out why Tennyson's Eagle is so good. Enjoy!

Infamy in Berlin

If Zinedine Zidane really had his wits about him when he head-butted Marco Materazzi then he really is a genius. Now he is immortal, albeit as a villain. If I remember Eric Cantona's assault on a spectator in 1994, then I will always remember this particular World Cup final, and how Zizou one-upped Cantona — at a World Cup final, no less!

Diego Maradona has his 'Hand of God'; nobody will wear Pele's shirt number; Zidane would be a cultural icon like Asterix for years to come.

The Gaul who rammed a Roman in the land of the Goths.

Proof That I'm Malaysian

(excerpt from a chat about a trip to Tioman Island)

kenterong
otherwise, i'd love to see the underwater life at tioman

me
but looks like it's just going to be a snorkeling visit [we were just discussing the budget; none for SCUBA]

kenterong
tioman would be an excellent start

me
i've been to tioman
while snorkeling i took off my life jacket and dived in

kenterong
i see

me
of course, tak lah dalam sangat [trans: not in deep waters]

kenterong
anyways
that's just one aspect of the whole thing

me
lots of interesting fish.... but i figure to enjoy it more i'd have to start looking at some fish pictures

kenterong
haha yeah
i get that a lot

me
at least i'll know what i'm looking at, and when to run

kenterong
i'd go, ooh nice fish
tapi tak sure nama dia apa [trans: but I'll be damned if I know what it was]
hehe
i went on a dive where one of the fish attacked another diver

kenterong
quite belligerent triggerfish

me
tu lah....... errkhhh i don't even know what a triggerfish is
can eat?

kenterong
...

Hello! I'm Malaysian and the first thing I think about when encountering a new animal species is, Can I eat it?

Geek Life

Cuz I'm non-stop, and I'm always hustlin'
twenty four seven, ain't nothin buck
but when a young G's flippin keys for a livin'
Try to make a mill off the time I'm givin'
trippin'
mad
I'm crazy
Can't nobody fade me
And I been goin' insane lately
And everybody tryin ta hold me back
I'm about to snap
You better move back
You know I led a...

To paraphrase the poet Tupac from Stay True, "Geek Life, y'all know the rules, gotta do whatcha gotta do... Stay True."

Taking a break from my drawings, I was googling about tools and blog-surfing while making mental notes about how stylish the two Italian goals against the Germans were, the next meeting with my clients, the various ways how we employ tools i.e. toys in everyday social life and then how we make friends. Then who you choose as your partners, socially in the former sense, and professionally: how well you work as a team to face the various daily challenges in life.

When I went to work with my father early this year, it was to be a start of a father and son team. He is a father preparing his heir, I was a son looking for shelter. Then some opportunities arose from contacts from my former business, the few that I claimed from the old partnership. It changed the structure of the relationship of the father-son team from a vertical to a horizontal one: I sought greater autonomy, wanting the flexibility; he offered his support and supervision as a business partner — I was moving down the road, just over the horizon, no more shelter required. While I grapple with the produce of my business, he makes sure I don't turn around and find no Company behind me.

I depend on my partners take care of apparatus — finance, government (i.e. the servants), machinery, etc. — that I haven't the resources for, be it in terms of knowledge or energy. Another partner is The Saint of the Streets, a very practical man. He handles stuff like the scissors, the forklifts, and the customers.

I understand a person, somewhat mechanistically, as a biological system that eats, walks, talks and bleeds, and thinks and behaves through a conditioning of odd mixtures of nature and nurture. When you have a concept of a thinking soul as a piece of software — critically applying various forms of analyses: performance;interface; "user-friendliness" (referring to how easy to interact with); functions, etc. — and keeping your debugger active — when faced with a real human being, it becomes a discomforting experience.

Obviously, a mind is not a piece of software, and idiosyncrasies become more pronounced to the keen mind searching for order and predictability in the seething mass of a sentient organism across you; individuals are marked this way, yet how much of you is like me, a normal human being, is what defines you as one of my kind. To extend the software-engineering metaphor, the process of getting to know a person is an information-gathering task: query, observe, interact, inter-react. You may not be able to apply a completely scientific explanation of the human mind and its behaviour (yet), but at least you can apply a scientific approach to understand it, even in daily life. So I use what I know, I deconstruct a person the same way I reverse-engineer any object or idea.

The problem is, you can't reboot people or put them back together the way it was when you crash them or when you take them apart. And you can't just put commands into the debugger window to amend their behaviours when they run:

show variable 'foodintent'

or

setvar 'mood'='funny'

Just as there are poorly-developed software, there are poorly-developed people. I am painfully aware when I am dealing with a difficult person just as when I am using a badly-designed piece of software. An unwieldy person is a difficult person. (Of course, in software-engineering, the user is a huge part of the big picture, and a clunky bit of software that failed to take its user's needs and expectations into account in its design is bound to create many unhappy users. There remains the fact that some people are just morons inept. So it is not just a case of people being difficult, it is also highly possible that I am also inept at dealing with certain kinds of people.) Anyway, that's why The Saint handles the customers and I concentrate on the solutions — a potent partnership.

This line of thought came to me as I was having supper with friends and a couple of their friends last night, whom I have met many times before, but do not know personally save for some passing pleasantries. A juxtaposition of the repeat of the Germany-Italy game on television and the teasing conversations led me to think of the various ways that we interact, and the tools we use to bond.

In this case, it was the football, and I remember the time when the three of us drove around all night in the city looking for something to do. We decided to go to the new, at the time, park at KLCC and was promptly asked to leave by the security guards: the park closes at night. We ended up kicking a can around in the deserted parking lot. Kicking a can around quickly became old, so we acquired a proper football (in the middle of the night, this was an adventure in itself.) This was fun, and for several days after we started to hang out in the parking lot kicking a ball between the three of us and generally while away the nights. Then, another group of youths noticed us playing and came around asking to join us. Before long, we were having four teams of three playing football at night at the KLCC parking lot and the requisite spectators. Goal posts were made with traffic cones, leagues were formed, and soon there was a burger stand serving food and drinks! Overwhelmed by the crowds that started to form in what we had claimed as our private playground as it fell into disuse at night, we stopped going there. I don't know when futsal got popular in KL, but it may have taken root at the time when three guys started to kick a can around in an empty parking lot.

The best way to bond with another is to play together. An object in play is a toy, it is a tool that facilitates play. When you are getting to know someone, what do you bring to help you do that? I realized quickly that the reason why I don't know these friends of friends all that well is because we have not played any games together, not pool, not scrabble, not poker, not even an idea to toy with.

Let's look at this another way.

This is worth considering if you want to build a business relationship — how do businesses play with each other and cement alliances? In my opinion, there must be a venue for businesses to play with each other in the field of ideas and knowledge, its toys being the ideas themselves, its tools, technology — and I am using a very broad definition of 'technology'... things like language, literature, philosophy, etc. included. For in computation, where 'garbage in, garbage out' rules, finding the right questions and saying it the right way is as important as figuring out the answers. The answer might be something totally ridiculous for all we know. "42!"

What I see lacking in the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) project is a facility where creative play is encouraged and organized, a facility where the unlikeliest alliances could be striked to test a seemingly bizarre, and potentially wasteful, idea. For many small companies who have no research efforts of their own, and isolated with other disciplines, the playground of ideas is fertile ground for finding fresh ideas and others to work with. This is why the MSC has been so unimpressive so far. This is why it is not the Silicon Valley no matter what you do — the small fish has no chance to play.

That's my theory anyway. So this is where the proposal comes in: let me test it out, this hacker's playground. Give me the resources to bring together universities, small businesses, knowledge workers, artists and build a knowledge playground where play is the work ethic and innovations are produced through a massive, organic, co-operation. It is a business of knowledge and innovation management, an ideas broker, a brain trust, a think-tank, a corporatized Leonardo's Workshop for the commons... heck, think Willy Wonka and his Chocolate Factory, or Dr. Frankenstein's Lab. It is not an original idea; it is the honoured hacker ethic at work. There are many success stories, and it is the model on how universities secure sponsorships, how Apple found success, how Google was founded, how the internet was invented. The challenge is adapting the attitude and promote it. The first step is to come up with a plan, find the right support, equipping yourself with the knowledge — hence the degrees — and tools.

My father said, in the same vein that you define a writer because he writes for a living, "For a businessman, the business itself is his product, his work". I am no businessman, after three ventures I know that I am always more interested in the solutions than the actual business, and the businesses invariably failed to satisfy me, if not financially, then personally. But this... this I can find a way to make it work. I am, after all, the Madcap Machinist.

The plan? Step 1: I have to figure out my limits first. It always begins from the heart.

While I was writing this entry, some other blog posts were catalytic: Sharon's perspectacles on coffee (doc told me to take decaf too, but I ignore him); here is synchronicity in action, at a time when I was thinking about tools, Bibliobibuli on Writer's Desks (check out that word processor on Stephen King's desk! How old-skool is that?); PokKu's musing on new words; how it feels like to be Superman on Puisi-poesy...

Superman wants to lick scallop juice from a woman's chin. I just want oysters au naturelle, no woman required.

Tell Me Something Good

DiGi disappoints; all I got is that loopy 'tune.

"Russian Roulette", I reckon it's called.

It's jukebox update time. Rock is dead.

Dr. Madcap Machinist

I know that I am equal to the task of getting a Masters degree. It is simply a matter of time and money, and I haven't had the opportunity of having both at the same time. Today, I envisioned attaining a doctorate and liked the idea very much — "Dr. Madcap Machinist"... swoon! swoon away! Haha!

I found out the other day that some of the staff at my watering hole in Bangsar have long thought that I was a doctor (with a House Complex, no doubt; "Medical screwing. It's what I do.") — one of the bargirls surreptitiously came to discuss some, erm, complications. I have no idea how people could have come up with that conclusion. Apparently it was something to do with the glasses I used to wear... the stereotypes we all have, eh? I said, Girl, the only time when I was a doctor was when you all had those kinky nurse outfits on... and you're no nurse! She pouted and then, without any warning whatsoever, slapped me. Hard. I really don't know what gets into these girls sometimes*. These days they put on police dominatrix costumes and I'm the baddie... except, this being Malaysia, they leave me alone.

So there's a slice of personal information for you. If you know the place I'm talking about then we should really be friends. Or maybe not.

Anyway, I am being courted for a research position, with the long-term benefits of going all the way to getting a doctorate courtesy of venture capitalists. Yeah baby, that's what we're talking about! *Love all youse capitalists*

The catch is that I have to pitch a research proposal by the end of the month and, we'll take it from there. But there has been so much going on lately (as you might have surmised from the slim postings) so...

Fuck it. I want it. Die lah like this!

*sucker for punishment