Rice Rage

A while back, someone tweeted their displeasure at a video of a guy reacting to someone cooking "egg fried rice" on BBC Food, using a version of the archetypal Chinese uncle's accent reminiscent of Stephen Yan's.

They were irked at the notion of making comedy out of exaggerated accents, which they say debases people who speak that way, and panned such acts as entertainment for snobs.

Did "Uncle Roger", a.k.a. London-based Malaysian comedian Nigel Ng, assume this guise to poke fun at the stereotype? Were "snobs" supposed to laugh at him every time he went "Haiya!" or "recalled" some anecdote out of a clichéd Chinese childhood?

Probably not, but the clip Ng's persona reacted to made waves among Asian communities for how rice was cooked in it.

Too much water.

 

Probably not cooked enough.

Draining what looked like partly cooked rice in a colander and rinsing it with running cold water. 

 

Outrage coursed through the Twittersphere. Then, some pointed out that the chef in the clip was cooking rice the Persian way, leaving many of us chastened for jumping the gun.

However, days afterwards, more reactions to the BBC segment emerged on YouTube, with some replicating the recipe almost step by step. A BBC interview with Nigel and Hersha Patel, who demonstrated the recipe, also surfaced. The latter revealed that the recipe was the BBC's and she was following the station's script. 

 

Or maybe these guys were late to the party. What we can conclude from the later reactions is that you won't get "absolutely delicious" egg fried rice from that recipe; one commentator even said that the BBC dish was not "egg fried rice" but "fried rice with egg".

I'm probably not qualified to ask this but did they look at the part where the recipe says to use "150g/5½oz long grain rice or basmati rice"? What rice did they use?

Of course basmati rice would be cooked that way and of course someone from that part of the world would hanker for fried rice and should be allowed to make it how they like with what they have. Just look at how Jamie Oliver does it - do both recipes look authentic?

I've committed crimes against rice - overseasoning, too much water, etc. - when making single-portion servings of it by steaming during the first MCO, using a tip from Twitter. But I do it because it works and I get to eat every grain instead of scraping some off the bottom of the rice cooker pot.

Who'd be in the mood for egg fried rice or anything else Done Right™ when they have so much else going on?

In that light, someone mocking a foreigner doing rice different with an ah pek's accent is committing a worse crime than merely not being funny.

Many of us gleefully dunked on the clip, assuming it was one of a recent string of incidents where Westerners messed around with "our food", and got burned. A more mindful approach would have saved us the embarrassment and give us enough cred to write posts like this. 

 

With no mention of the type of rice being used and why it's cooked the way it was, the clip alone would have raised more than just eyebrows in East Asian homes.

Plus, the written instructions for the rice on the BBC website do not include the hackle-raising step of rinsing the cooked grains that's so prominent in the clip, which now seems to be location-dependent. Perhaps a response to the backlash, or confirmation that the recipe is tailored for certain audiences.

That doesn't change that fact that saying others can't enjoy making and eating certain dishes from certain cuisines because they didn't cook them right is conceited and racist.

Nest Cam Musings

Besides books, food and music, I'm also a bit of a history buff and enthusiastic about wildlife. What I haven't revealed here about that last bit here is that I've been following blogs and YouTube channels featuring nesting raptors.

Nest cams, to put it simply.

Around March until July - breeding season in parts of the U.S. - these channels usually buzz with activity, although this depends on the location and species. For eagles:

Breeding season varies by latitude. In Florida, egg laying may begin in November whereas in Alaska, egg laying typically occurs in late April through May. In Minnesota, the breeding season typically runs from late-February to early March in the southern part of the state through April into early May in the north.

Watching these birds nest and raise their young - and following the growth of their chicks - is my idea of a TV series catch-up. Few things are quite like it. Reality shows can't compare.

My introduction to this world was a camera feed of a nest of a pair of red-tailed hawks in Washington Square Park in New York.

Hawk couple Bobby and Violet became internet sensations in 2011 via The New York Times and its web cam when they built their nest outside then-NYU President John Sexton’s office on the 12th floor of the Bobst Library building overlooking the park. Violet sadly died later that year... After that, Bobby had two mates, Rosie, and then Aurora (also known as Sadie).

These cams have their fans and the drama on these nests can be quite gripping. However, the Washington Square Park cam is no more, as is the male hawk Bobby. But New York has other red-tailed hawk nests and birders keep an eye on these sites around breeding season.

As in many closely followed drama series, the death of a character is keenly felt. Red-tailed hawks do feed on rodents, and death by rodenticide is common. Bobby may have met the same fate, although a city has many other hazards.

From egg to grave, a raptor's life in the wild is tough. Baby peregrine falcons have died from complications brought on by swarms of black flies, or preyed upon by other raptors such as great horned owls. Birds such as ravens steal unhatched eggs, at times breaking them in the nest itself.

Early this year, a bald eagle chick from a nest in southwestern Florida apparently succumbed to rodenticide after it bled profusely from a broken pin feather, another potentially fatal condition. (Weeks later, this nest saw the birth of two more chicks that fledged successfully.) Pesticides and other forms of pollution affect adults, resulting in fragile eggs that break after being laid or non-viable eggs that don't hatch.

As in drama series, some viewers become too invested in the lives of these raptors. Following the death of a golden eagle chick by starvation on a nest in Latvia, angry comments flooded the chat window of the live YouTube feed.

"If they can instal a camera there, why can't they rescue the chick?"

"What's the point of the camera if it won't help save these birds?"

Anger born of grief, dismay and, perhaps, ignorance.

As environmental scientist Carie Battistone told TV station KCET, "We often do not intervene when bad things happen. In most cases, we choose to let nature take its course, even if it is difficult to see. This is a hard concept to grasp for people watching live video feed as it is normal for humans to be disturbed and emotional about what they see."

The point of the cameras is to show people how these birds nest and raise young. The antics of the chicks (baby hawks = eyasses, baby eagles = eaglets) are fun to watch, especially when they're in their fluffball stage. You can't imagine these chirping puffs of down growing up to become killers. But they have to, so that they can play their role in their ecosystem. They can only do that when they're raised by their parents.

Some behaviours are hardwired, but others are learnt by watching, like what to eat and how to pin down avian prey and pulling the feathers out before self-feeding. And, possibly, the realisation that they can fly.

When a chick hatches, it imprints itself on the first creature it sees. And if it is cared for, it will learn to trust its caregiver, whatever the latter may be. Human helpers can feed a chick and keep it alive until adulthood but they can't teach it everything it needs to survive as an adult.

And because of imprinting, wildlife raised by people from infancy will have a hard time in the wild. It can't function as it should in its own habitat. What if it becomes dependent on humans and actively seeks them out, risking death by trusting the wrong humans?

It's not just people. An odd case of a baby red-tailed hawk that was adopted by a family of bald eagles briefly became a sensation. Both species are rivals in the wild. The chick might have been intended as food but the eagle parents ended up raising it instead. Observers expressed worry that this fledgling hawk's familiarity with eagles might get it killed by one.

Life in the wild is harsh for raptors but members of their own species won't give them as much trouble as humans. They must learn to navigate their habitats to survive and thrive. Despite our good intentions, we can only do so much. Without a thorough understanding of how an ecosystem works, human meddling will only worsen things.

Watching a chick die can be traumatic and we do feel for the parents. However, be aware not to anthropomorphise these unwitting reality stars. They are wild animals and they get over such losses quickly.

Those yelling at "inhumane" or "uncaring" human cam installers probably won't be ready for the spectacle of a parent killing and eating its chicks, or older eaglets bullying their younger siblings to death when competing for food, sometimes killing them outright.

C'est la vie, man.

Unless their objective is research and tracking, many of those who put these cams are careful to minimise contact with these birds to allow them to live as naturally as possible. Their aim is more to educate than entertain.

If we are concerned about the welfare of these magnificent raptors who start out fluffy and cute, why not start with things we can control? For one, don't litter, and cut those damn plastic rings.

Limit or eliminate the use of pesticides. Keep their habitat pristine so that they and their prey can flourish. Don't chop down the trees where they might nest and certainly don't freaking steal their eggs or chicks.

And if you can't do any or all of these, petition those who can. Considering what we've done to the planet, it's the least we can do.

Whipping Up A Storm

Like some under this partial lockdown, I've taken to whisking up the viral Italian-sounding dalgona coffee popularised by Korean actor Jung Il-woo, who tried it in a coffee shop in Macau and talked about it on TV back home.

The name comes from Jung's opinion that the beverage reminded him of dalgona, a type of Korean honeycomb toffee. But this Internet sensation isn't Korean or from Macau. Probably not even Italian. And to my ears it's not dal-go-na but more like TAE-go-na.

A little dive into the dalgona rabbit hole reveals clues that the possible origins of this frothy beverage might be in Europe (the Greek-style frappé) or the Indian subcontinent, where this beaten coffee is known as phenti hui or phitti hui. As soon as the dalgona craze broke, some observers from the latter eye-rolled the same way we Southeast Asians do at some Food Insider videos.

I won't regurgitate all the fruits of my research here, but had things been different, we might also be calling this beverage "Chow Yun-fat coffee" or 發哥咖啡.

The guy who runs the coffee shop in Macau and makes this frothy coffee briefly became famous after making a cup for the veteran Hong Kong actor, who was said to like it. The proprietor of Hon Kee, Leong Kam Hon, learnt how to make this beverage from a foreign couple whose nationality he's unsure of. Presumably, this is the same coffee shop Jung Il-woo stopped by. What's remarkable is that Leong uses a spoon.

But I'm here to talk about my dalgona experience.

What's nuts about this recipe is not that only three ingredients are involved but the sheer amount of them, specifically the coffee and sugar. If I took a glass of dalgona coffee on Saturday morning my weekend won't end until Monday night. It's THAT potent.

My first attempt with an electronic mixer failed because I only used about a teaspoon (and maybe a teaspoon and a half at most) of coffee and sugar - I quit my regular coffee habit due to my gastric and, recently, my anxiety. I had better results with elbow grease, i.e., a small whisk and my decades-old mug or, once, a ceramic rice bowl.

Tipping the bowl at an angle made the small amount of coffee "deeper" than it is, making it easier to whip. The foam was so stiff I could invert the mug or bowl over my head and the coffee would stay there.

The texture presented a challenge when drinking with the layer intact. It would float above the milk like a raft while the milk flowed into your mouth from underneath. The foam is supposed to be mixed with the milk a little, so you get something fluffier than your average latte.

When using less coffee and sugar than prescribed, a small whisk and a small vessel make more sense. I watched, amused, while someone from Buzzfeed's Tasty spent about 17 minutes, off and on, whipping up a sweat with a sceptre-sized whisk and a helmet-sized bowl. All I needed was about six to eight minutes, but perhaps it was the difference in portions.

The amount of water seemed to be key as well. Too much and it'll take longer to come together, or not at all. Too little and you get a viscous but sort of aerated toffee, though not something you'd invert over your head for a few seconds.

This is not a beverage to wind down with after a long day. All that caffeine and sugar make it strictly a morning pick-me-up for people with time to kill. And after all that exercise and coffee you're likely to get wound up for the rest of the day.

I guess I understand why it's so popular. Like a magic trick, it's something anyone can learn and do, and the results are brag-worthy on social media. When one is stuck at home with little to do and feeling unproductive, a successful dalgona coffee gives one a sense of accomplishment.

But given the return on investment ... I wouldn't make this a regular thing, even with power tools. And even though I use less than a tablespoon of coffee, it's still a lot of caffeine at one go for me. Minutes after my last mug I was sweating a little, which never happened before.


22/06/2020  Two months sure fly by in a blank or two of an eye, don't they?

Against my better judgement, I've been whipping up a dalgona more often than I should. Once I figured out that the foam forms faster and better when using less water or following the recipe to the letter.

When the whisk starts "pulling" the mixture when stirring or whisking, it's halfway there. Whisk or stir a bit more vigorously to achieve your preferred consistency.

Sometimes I stop when the dalgona looks like dripping toffee because I'd stir or fold some of it into the milk anyway, like how some might do phenti hui. But often, I go on for two more minutes on high speed. I whip it inside a mug and push down any splashed coffee on the sides with a small silicone spatula.

No point whisking further because by then you won't feel your arm any more and you might need it afterwards. So when the foam is stiff enough to form peaks, you can stop whisking because you've reached peak dalgona.

...If you know me and if you're reading this in KL you should have seen that coming from Sekinchan. Pay. Attention.

I also add salt, along with cinnamon and nutmeg or vanilla extract for something different. Salt in coffee isn't new. It cuts down the bitter tang, though it forms a saline layer on top, probably if not mixed well.

Despite the strength of the coffee, the cinnamon and vanilla come through. The nutmeg, not so much. Attempts with pandan leaf powder failed but I wonder if I should resort to artificial essences.

Some make the dalgona foam and keep it refrigerated for future use, but I wouldn't bother. I bottled some but the coffee would meld into each other, leaving a fragile tuft of foam on top. Isn't "drink it fresh" part of the novelty?

Using warm or hot milk is also fine. I heat mine with a water bath inside an open stainless steel shaker. The heat releases more of the spices' aroma, and each day starts better with a warm drink.

Strange to get so used to whipping instant coffee after doing it almost daily.

Notes From Confinement

The highway below is quiet - well, as quiet as highways can be. When I first moved in, the highway my apartment overlooks is constantly awake. It hums, roars, groans, buzzes and snarls around the clock. Not one waking hour goes by without some bellyaching from the miles-long, unsleeping tar-clad serpent below.

So it's a little strange to hear it so calm, especially at night. It's almost like it's taking a nap - or lying at home sick, like many parts of the world right now.

Almost two weeks have passed since the Malaysian government passed a movement control order (MCO), one of many steps to stem the spread of COVID-19, a new and potentially lethal illness currently zipping across the globe. People are encouraged to stay indoors except when buying daily essentials and seeking medical aid, and those found flouting the order would be detained and perhaps fined.

Those who came in close contact with the several contagious clusters or known COVID-positive individuals or suspect they might be infected are advised to get themselves checked at the hospital. Fines and possible jail time await those who aren't forthcoming with their health and travel status.

When the MCO was announced various arms of the company discussed how to work from home and what jobs to schedule. I think some of us expected the partial lockdown to go beyond two weeks.

Working from home is no dream to have when you're getting by, plus a mortgage. Without the convenience of restaurant kitchens, you have to carve out time for laundry, housecleaning, grocery shopping, remote bill paying (or ATM visits) and other errands while editing, fact-checking, and deciding whether something needs to be capitalised or italicised.

And not forgetting, making your own meals. Even taking a break from work to make and eat your Indomie can throw off your momentum. Once your stomach is full you don't feel going back to the laptop. Especially when it's a little underpowered for Microsoft Word 2016, when the file takes a minute and a half to save, and Word crashes - when it doesn't make the screen temporarily go black - while repaginating the document or saving the AutoRecovery file.

And if I didn't tell you I took two 15-minute breaks from writing this you wouldn't know. Home has too many distractions for those not inclined to WFH or freelance.

So, no, I'm not coping too well with this working from home thing, even though it's proceeding okay so far. I'm doing even worse with restrictions on movements and the lack of open restaurants and food stalls.

However, my shiny ceramic cooktop has seen more work in these two weeks than it has in a month, boiling milk for masala chai or turmeric milk, and boiling drinking water, and keeping it shiny and clean is tough. I've knocked out several meals in lieu of instant noodles. Still, it's distracting - and discouraging - when the smells of the neighbours' cooking drift through the kitchen window.

Even the old rice pot has been brought out and I'm finally dipping into the tiny bag of rice that laid idle in the fridge since I moved in. I'd only used a little to "sweep away" bad vibes from the empty apartment on moving day, nine months later. A seemingly bonkers tip from Twitter about how to cook single portions of rice with a bain-marie (hot water bath) method actually worked.

But breakfast these days is a smoothie of oats and nuts, with either cocoa powder or chopped carrot. Munchie attacks are soothed by plain oats, cookies or Gardenia cream-filled bread rolls. I only got fruit - apples and oranges - from the market last week. Only a few stalls were open and security guards stood ready with with laser thermometers and hand sanitiser.

I miss eating out. I miss going to a supermarket on a whim and browsing aisles upon aisles of produce for stuff that might be a purple carrot soup, a not-very-good butter chicken, a basil pesto pasta, or a tray of shortbread.

I also miss the convenience of going to the pharmacy for my meds. Folks at home are concerned about my well-being; I have asthma and allergic rhinitis, so catching this bug is a huge no-no. Eating regularly has also been a challenge and my bad gut isn't helping. The latest gastric attack was horrendous.

We take too many things and too many people for granted. Cleaners, cooks, security guards, healthcare professionals, law enforcement, teachers, hired help, public transport, deliverymen, welfare workers ... I think it's starting to sink in just how crucial these functions are, and how tightly knit all of them are in a city environment. When several of these were disrupted, city life began to unravel.

When this is all over, hopefully these overlooked sectors and its workers will get the recognition and their dues. They are Malaysia and they're holding this country together and keeping it running. If we can't get them a raise and a better safety net, let's at least be kinder to them.

---

But not to politicians. I won't miss many of them, no matter how many bags of rice they send out with their faces on them.

In the days before and during this partial lockdown I bet we've begun to notice the difference between those who "serve" and those who "rule". Not me, that's the language being used by certain quarters. "Thank goodness they are back in power." "Thank goodness they no longer rule over us."

Speaks so much about how some of us (are conditioned to) perceive our MPs and ministers.

"Rule"? Since when do elected representatives "rule" over us? And why do we let them? And why do some people think of "ruling" like how some people think of freelancing or working from home?

Over these several weeks I've seen two groups of people: one bunch coasts by with doing just the bare minimum, leveraging on issues to make themselves more well known; while another works their butts off, putting the issues and those affected in the limelight instead.

Who'd you think I'd choose to have my back during a global pandemic, a global recession, or a zombie apocalypse?

Well, we might not survive the latter, but when it's go-time, I'll be glad that my elected rep will shoot the zombies rather than negotiate with them - or convince them to switch sides.

Another Kind Of China Syndrome

I'm not sure where and when concerns over COVID-19 were first raised but if it was in China, the authorities there screwed up imperial. The Middle Kingdom has always been preoccupied with its image in the eyes of the world, often to OCD levels. Remember the 2008 Olympics? The Belt and Road thingy? The Uighur "re-education" camps?

What I've read says news about the disease first surfaced last December, but now it seems that it might have emerged as early as last November. One should note that the first sightings of COVID-19 in China can mean that doctors in China spotted it first, not that this illness came from China.

But when doctors in China first raised alarms about it, Chinese authorities blocked the news from leaking out and silenced, vilified and even disappeared whistleblowers. Because every time a China-related crisis comes up, the first thing its officials seem to think about is "How do we make it look like it's not our fault?"

This might have been what Beijing spent precious weeks on, instead of warning the public and the world at large. And China being China, it's leery of sharing information with other nations, even if it does help. "Suppose they find something they can use against us in the data?"

For me, it's too late for China to rewrite the narrative. No matter how many remedial measures it takes now - which it should've taken much earlier, like, way before Chinese New Year - its role in the virus's spread and its handling of the pandemic locally must not be overlooked. Locking down the flow of information and repeating conspiracy theories don't make it look any better.

Had it acted like conscientious global citizen in the face of a growing (now full-blown) pandemic, China might have looked like the model country it sees itself as.

Some Novel Titles

At a café, I spied a row of novels. Some of these titles sound ... interesting.

吃定總經理 / Eyeing the General Manager / GM Sasaranku
總裁賴定你 / The CEO Relies on You / CEO Bergantung Padamu
惡魔大總裁 / The Devilish CEO / CEO Ku Setan
邪王的嬌妻 / The Evil King's Lovely Wife / Bini Molek Raja Durjana
壞總裁的剋星 / The Wicked CEO's Bane / Duri Dalam Daging CEO
替身格格 / Stand-in Princess / Puteri Gantian
惡魔的求婚 / The Devil's Marriage Proposal / Setan Datang Meminang
丫鬟不願嫁 / Maid Don't Wanna Marry / Dayang Tak Nak Nikah
絕情貝勒 / Heartless Lord / Kejamnya Tuan
公爵的豔遇 / The Duke's Encounter / Pertembungan Dengan Kerabat

I translated parts of the text with Google Translate, which deciphered zongcai (總裁) as "chairman" one day and "CEO" days later. Beile (貝勒) is a title for a Manchurian noble, and Tishen Gege (替身格格) sounds a lot like the premise of a popular Chinese drama series.

A small sample, but one can see a pattern and infer which eras the stories take place, from medieval era and Qing Dynasty to modern times.

Why a market for this is huge – and why such novels get written – is obvious. Not every book has to enlighten or educate. Books are also a form of entertainment, and not everybody wants to walk in familiar shoes on familiar streets. The boots of a mage or the greaves of a knight in a faraway or fantasy setting would be more tempting than the flip-flops of a weary executive seeking to "eat, pray, love".

Am I going anywhere with this? Not really. Curious about the titles, I tried typing them out and translated them later. I didn't want all that work to be wasted and it's nice to see something familiar in other languages.

Much Ado Over Masala Chai

When I think of tea, specifically the chai kind of tea, I'm reminded of the opening scene in Hindi film Dil Se, and vice versa.

In it, Shah Rukh Khan plays a journalist who ends up at at train station as a storm whips up. The wind tears away the shawl of another waiting passenger sleeping on a bench, who turns out to be Manisha Koirala.

Enraptured, Khan's character tries to flirt with her. When she asks for a cup of tea, he runs off and wakes up a sleeping chaiwalla nearby, entreating him to make two cups of the best, sweetest tea he can muster because "my future depends on it."

...Have your eyes stopped rolling? Good.

Of course, the train pulls away with Manisha inside while Khan stands in the rain like an idiot as fat drops of roof dribble splash into the cups of tea he's holding and as he stares wistfully at the long-gone train, he drinks one of them. Cue the first song, Chaiyya Chaiyya - which I'm not making puns on.

That scene stayed with me like a persistent suitor in a Bollywood film. Can you think of a better advertisement for whatever tea he was drinking? I believe the brand wasn't shown. Major missed opportunity.

One day, someone on Twitter made this claim: "...every 'chai blend' in American supermarkets is inferior to Wagh Bakri tea + milk + anything you have on your spice rack". Those who know this person would know she would know.

I've seen some of these Western-manufactured chai blends. Mine might be similarly outrageous.

A cursory search online revealed that this brand has some history, a part of which veers towards myth. The founder, Narandas Desai, started a tea estate in South Africa but then:

...racial discrimination forced him to return to India with nothing but a few valuables and a certificate from Mahatma Gandhi for being the most honest and experienced tea estate owner in South Africa.

Back in India, Desai established the Gujarat Tea Depot Company in 1919, and in 1925 he launched the Wagh Bakri brand, whose logo has a tiger and a goat flanking a cup of tea. Incidentally, wagh and bakri is Gujarati for "tiger" and "goat" respectively. Tea so good even mortal foes would set aside their differences over it, in line with the founder's aim to foster harmony, like Gandhi would.

And just how huge is Wagh Bakri in India? This huge:

No one can touch it in Gujarat, where over 50 per cent of the tea consumed is Wagh Bakri. And it sells enough in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Mahrashtra, Goa, Delhi, Hyderabad, Chhattisgarh and Karnataka to be the largest brand in the country outside of the HUL and Tata fold.

To reiterate, the biggest tea brand in India is literally called Tiger/Goat and its ethos is apparently Gandhi-inspired. Of such stuff are legends made.

As luck would have it, a mini mart nearby is a one-stop shop for many things from the Indian subcontinent such as Bru Coffee, dried round chillies, and even asafoetida. But the only tea leaves from that brand were in teabags, so I settled for a box of tea dust. As it's imported, it seems expensive compared to local brands of the same weight.

I was warned that Wagh Bakri tea was strong and hoo boy, the aroma that boiled out when I opened the foil package. Just the kind of product that's said to be tailored to "blend with the milk's richness and make its presence, and flavour, felt." I might need to store it in a proper airtight container soon or risk losing the oomph.

I only used one teaspoon of tea dust for the masala chai I made one evening. I roasted and coarsely ground some whole spices: black peppercorns, several "petals" of star anise, two cloves, one cardamom pod, and a pinch of fennel seeds. All these went in before the tea, followed by a pinch of Ceylon cinnamon and about a quarter teaspoon of ginger powder.

If you're grinding the whole spices down to a powder, you won't need much. An acquaintance now residing in India says this is excessive for masala chai and I didn't even throw in a pinch of nutmeg. One of these days, perhaps.

One sip, then two, and I swear, from far away, a familiar voice crooned:

♪ Jinke sar ho~ ishq ki chaa~on
Paa~on ke neeche~ jaanat ho~gi
Jinke sar ho~ ishq ki chaa~on ♫

Oh my.

The box is expensive, about RM11, but it'll last me awhile. And as my sieve couldn't catch the finest bits of dust, there was no bottoms up for me. But I managed to find a little-used coffee sock for the next cup.

Pity the packets of local tea in the cabinet, which I'm now using in experiments with cold-brewed teh-C kosong. Steeping it in milk makes for a bodier brew, but I'd have to use more tea than usual, which I'm reluctant to do with the costlier Indian import. Though the colour is lighter than hot-brewed chai but requires less sweetening, I still find cold-brewing tea with milk wasteful, even with cheaper stuff.

But on some days, getting heat involved is tedious, not to mention having to roast, pound and grind the spices, wait for the beverage to cool down, and properly dispose of the strained-out bits instead of flushing them all down the sink.

I suppose if you need to enjoy a cup of spicy, warming and soothingly Zen-inducing masala chai, the brewing process should be meditative rather than a chore.

Hence, you need chill to chai.

Though I'd broken a half-year coffee fast, I've stopped my regular coffee intake, limiting it to the odd cup or two a week with only one shot of espresso, and switched to chocolate, tea, and the occasional haldi ka doodh (turmeric milk) to cope with life.

I wouldn't mind another six months without coffee if I had tea like this.

Over the years I must have chugged down litres of good and bad coffee under stress, which I guess borked my body clock and forced me to give up on caffeinated beverages - proof that you can't take things for granted, like your health and tolerance for certain foods.

Speaking of which, I might need to find another supplier of Wagh Bakri tea, just in case.

Traffic Laws Are For Everybody

Lax enforcement and perceived vulnerability have allowed motorcyclists to run red lights and ride between lanes, etc., with impunity sebab miskin, kasi chan-lah, and so on. But when they screw up they affect more than themselves.

Arguably, many motorcyclists are B40 or thereabouts. So in a city ruled by cars (read: rich people), riding a bike through red lights, traffic jams and road dividers is a way to beat the system.

So it's no surprise some of them are upset when people suggest they obey traffic laws to the letter.

While the risk of being a motorcyclist on Malaysian roads is much higher, assuming that all motorists deliberately make life hell for bikers is almost as gross as the liberties bikers take because of protections afforded to them.

When their asshole behaviours - like kicking cars that don't give way to them - are called out, they challenge you to throw down at the nearest police station, or make it about race or class. How is this anything but ketuanan rempit?

Traffic laws tend to side with motorcyclists because chances of them dying or being disabled are high. And so many riders rack up so, so many citations on the road, they're likely to be let off - not worth the paperwork, perhaps?

But such laissez-faire enforcement and an environment where motorists end up paying for the mistakes of a gung-ho rider would seed a sense of entitlement and untouchability, which there is already too much of elsewhere.

No doubt Malaysians are awful road users. While I've seen some good sorts who give way to other motorists and allow bikes, ambulances and police cars a wide berth, it still fells like they're the exception, not the rule.

Not all car drivers are rich. Nor can they deal with the distress caused by a reckless biker. Scratched or dented side doors? "Kasi chan-lah!" Or "Mai settle kat balai!" Hit a bike that ran a red light? Dead or alive, your fault. That's fair?

Who has time for an earful about road safety and etiquette, the good fortune of the haves and the struggles of the have-nots, and the dangers of the ego from a motorcyclist who ran a red light and nearly collided into your car?

Traffic laws are for everybody. You can't pick and choose which to obey or break at your convenience, especially in situations where lives are at risk. You might be inconvenienced on occasion for toeing the line, but you'll live.

I'm still a fan of equal penalties for everybody, which I think is an effective short-term solution while we get our act together. Malaysians, among many other things, become more careful when money's involved.

True,the roads here are dangerous for motorcyclists. But motorcyclists can be awful too. However, we can all agree that nobody wants accidents. So can drivers and riders meet halfway on this to make our roads safer?

Bane Of The Broken Ballot

Parts of Twitterjaya erupted when the nascent #UndiRosak movement emerged to crow about the failures of the new government, calling it a vindication of their stand that neither BN nor PH can form a viable government and when forced to choose between two evils, pick neither.

They also seem to be anticipating a surge in spoilt votes now that the voting age has been lowered to 18, perhaps to allow more angry youths to partake in this sort of thing.

But how many voters take this crew seriously? And if this movement gains momentum, can we expect at least half the votes in the next general election to be spoilt? What if all the votes are?

For much of modern Malaysia's history, it's been ruled by one party for so long the rot has seeped in, in the form of corruption, lack of transparency in key decisions and spending, and flagrant abuse of power.

An election has become a game of numbers. Any political party, however altruistic, has to contest in this field according to the rules. Those who don't, lose out. And when an increasingly corrupt, paranoid and power-hungry incumbent is willing to use state machinery to hold on to power, what chance does an opposition have to change things?

A six-decade incumbency also means you have groups that have been disenfranchised from their country's development. Some are kept there with occasional crumbs or populist propaganda about how this is all they have and if they vote for anyone else "others" will take even that away. Others are told to "know your place" and "don't ask too much", or "go back to where you came from".

Bent and broken, these groups keep returning the same people to power, convinced that this will be their lot forever, and that any change will only be for the worse. And it'll be business as usual for the long-ruling incumbents.

Such is the democratic arena in Malaysia, where parties play for points and the downtrodden resignedly sigh "Change is for the rich" when told they can change their lives for the better through the ballot.

This is what #UndiRosak ends up perpetuating while waiting for the arrival of the right party to throw their weight behind, in the hope of changing the country for the better. Their idea of "better", that is.

Many have called them dangerously naive, not without reason. They seem to behave as if all Malaysian politicians care about their constituents and that spoilt votes will terrify them into contrition and make them do better. And if nothing changes, perhaps Malaysia should weather a few more election cycles with the old guard until "better" comes along.

Ha ha ha, nope. And nope.

Do they not sound like someone who will only wait for the right gym and right personal trainer to come along before starting a fitness regime?

Like a long-time couch potato, this country isn't as nimble or hale and hearty enough to adapt to global changes. We've left much of the heavy lifting to the elites, who by now is clear that they don't necessarily have its interests at heart.

A rotting structure is already weak and will degenerate faster, despite being under the same degree of stress. And when there are two evils, not voting for the lesser one will hasten the inevitable.

Fixing such a structure is taxing. Some things will have to be replaced. The transition will be long and painful. Yet we have quitters whining about how terrible the new government is and pledging to switch sides on the next general elections.

You mean, putting the old guard back in, warts and all? When they have demonstrated little to no worth as an opposition and are willing to stoop even lower to regain power, stifle dissent and cover up their tracks? You can hear their desperation screaming from recent headlines, like a banshee's portent of doom.

This country cannot afford to wait for "better". Undoing nearly six decades of damage might take twice as long. Many of my generation will probably be dead before the shift engendered on May 9 starts bearing fruit, but this country will still be around to reap the consequences of our choices now.

#UndiRosak ultimately encourages disillusionment and despair, especially among the "change is for the rich" crowd. People are trying to get them to make themselves heard in a meaningful way, so telling them to spoil their votes is like telling them to scream "We're not voting for anybody because they all suck!" into the void.

It accomplishes nothing, and their grievances are neither conveyed nor addressed. Contesting parties in general elections don't care because their die-hard supporters will vote regardless. In that sense, even voters with a destructive ethnoreligious bent understand the significance of their ballots and respect the election process.

If #UndiRosak wants to damage something, they could start - if they haven't already - by campaigning for local elections. Pockets of the disenfranchised throughout the country can be an intimidating force when empowered and gathered, which is probably why some people want them kept apart and under heel. People, to whom these groups are nothing but vote banks.

If they're sincere about fighting tyranny, they should begin by helping these groups gain some degree of autonomy. As long as they're dependent on federal or state authorities for essentials, these minorities will have no choice but to pick the side that lets them live.

What it would be like if the tables are turned isn't hard to imagine. Seeing the decisions made by some politicians of late, it doesn't look like they're in charge. The right thing is easy to do, so why isn't it being done in many cases?

Because much of the power is still in the wrong hands, and efforts to return that power to the right people will be resisted by those #UndiRosak might relish tripping up.

We've only begun to awaken to the potential of change and some have started grumbling about "the good old days". If the undecided and those who still hope to vote for change are persuaded to spoil their votes for the next elections, I can see only one outcome, and that scares all of those who rejoiced at the results of GE14.

Drug Abuse: Time For Another Approach

Critics are railing against the government's plan to decriminalise drug use. Predictably, the loudest and staunchest critics of the move are the more conservative ones. Of course they would. What else to expect from those who want to amputate the limbs of petty thieves as a deterrent?

"You're not punishing drug users any more? Drug use will explode!"

"Now everybody can shoot up!"

"The drug lords will be happy!"

Decriminalising drug use is not a free pass to use drugs. It must come with measures to deter relapses to be effective. If you're a user, the money they'd spend to try you in court and jail you will be used instead to detox your ass and send you back out to society. If you repeat the offence, well, good luck.

People who resort to drugs to cope with crap in their lives need help. Considering the state of local jails, locking them up will either break them or mould them into criminals of a worse stripe. Then there's the stigma of being an ex-convict, and as Malaysian society in general doesn't believe in mercy or second chances, they're going back to their old habits again.

Drugs will f— you up, but people who see them as a better alternative won't know that until it's too late. Penalties for users are almost as harsh as those for traffickers, which means they are reluctant to seek help - or snitch on their pushers.

Users, mules and peddlers are the most visible parts of the drug trade, so they're easier to catch and report on. Rarely do we see kingpins, manufacturers and their enforcers punished. More must be done to move against the latter bunch. They peddle misery and ultimately death. Among the worst are those who pretend to be friends with people and get them hooked on drugs to line their pockets.

Some will ask, "But wouldn't pushers pass themselves off as users when caught and get off the hook?" While some pushers are users, I doubt many are. People deal drugs to get rich quick and being your own best customer is a no-no. I doubt cola manufacturers would allow their kids near a bottle.

And who funds our prisons? Rather than jailing users, why not clean them up and return them to employment? Most, I feel, won't turn to drugs again after a stint at rehab. Every user jailed is out of the workforce and not contributing to society or tax coffers, and money is wasted on unnecessary prosecution and incarceration.

People who want the retention of heavy penalties only want to sleep better at night. I don't think they've ever been involved with or witnessed the effects of the drug trade. Because they don't see it, and with reports of the arrests, trials and executions of traffickers and mules, they think the laws and penalties are working.

"Only fools - and bad people - would get involved with drugs."

"Drug users and traffickers are bad for society. Hang them all."

"Problems? Be positive! Pray! Spend time with family! Why turn to drugs?"

People who bark this sort of thing tend to be unaware - or wilfully oblivious - that they're doing so from a position of privilege. Two major factors driving the drug trade are extreme poverty and crippling psychological problems - which they probably have never faced in their lives, or have the means to overcome.

Society needs to be less crappy and not rely on the government to wage war on drugs. We need to be less punitive and judgemental. While some willingly go into the drug trade, many who resort to it tend to do so out of desperation. Why punish or stigmatise the latter?

Killing or jailing mules and users might disrupt the trade, but there are far more suckers out there, and the suppliers can just go elsewhere. As long as the raw materials and the need for drugs is there, the suppliers will bounce back.

The big-stick approach to the war against drugs has been tried to death and hasn't really proved itself. Why not kill the trade with kindness? Bet that's never been tried in these parts before.

Saving addicts from their habit and keeping ex-addicts from relapsing will go much farther than merely punishing them. Their stories will serve as a deterrent - drugs are no solution to one's problems = and a message of hope for those struggling to overcome their addiction.

Dry

When the recent water supply disruption ended sooner than scheduled I was grateful. Then, last Saturday afternoon, I returned to dry taps.

Again.

Though supply was normal, it seems water isn't reaching the upper floors of my apartment block. The weekend was ruined.

Any time they announce a water supply disruption, I remember the drought in ... 1998, I think it was. Water was rationed, and neighbourhoods were grouped into zones with each zone taking turns to go dry for a few days.

I remember the nights I spent filling all the buckets I could when the taps ran, my blood running cold at the thought of another few days of a parched throat, an unwashed body, and no plumbing.

Twenty years later, it seems nothing was learnt or done about it. The Klang Valley is becoming more uninhabitable. Neighbourhoods suffer shorter water cuts every time a pipe bursts, whether from age or the actions of a clumsy contractor or pipe thief. Every burst or leaking pipe gives me the shivers.

Don't come at me with "at least we're not some other country where you don't see a drop for months". We are NOT that country. We ARE NOT supposed to be that country. It rains here, and frequently. Where is all that water going?

We could have nipped all this in the bud but we didn't. Why? And once this round of water cuts ends, will anything change?

It better, and fast. Twenty years from now I won't be in any condition to fill buckets in the middle of the night. Heck, the next major water rationing exercise in the Klang Valley might happen sooner.

Is The World Being Over-engineered?

Simon Winchester's concise history of precision engineering and its impact also asks some incisive questions

first published in The Star, 18 December 2018


"My father was for all his working life a precision engineer," British author and journalist Simon Winchester writes in The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World.

In his childhood, his father would show him around his workplace. He also describes his first encounter with gauge blocks: non-magnetic metal tiles "used for measuring things to the most extreme of tolerances" with ultraflat sides that would bond when placed on top of each other.

These memories were triggered by an email from one Colin Povey from Florida in the United States, who managed to persuade Winchester to write a book about the history of precision and had a personal reason for it. So now we know who, apart from the author, to thank for The Perfectionists.

Besides a brief history of precision engineering through selected milestones in the field, it also has ruminations on the nature and importance of precision and what we stand to gain and lose in the quest for more precise measurements.

The author also argues that the word "precision" is a much better word than "accuracy". "‘Accurate Laser Tattoo Removal' sounds not nearly as convincing or effective ... And it surely would be both damning and condescending to say that you tie your tie accurately—to knot it precisely is much more suggestive of élan and style."

As expected, perhaps, of someone who wrote two books about the Oxford English Dictionary (The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1998 and reissued in 2005; and The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2003).

Each chapter in The Perfectionists is a part of a timeline in the history of precision engineering, from the discovery of the Antikythera mechanism (an ancient Greek analogue computer) to advances that would usher in the digital age. Some chapters feature vignettes from the author's life and his research for the book, which suggests the project is more than just a scholarly pursuit.

Humankind has for most of its civilised existence been in the habit of measuring things. ...All life depends to some extent on measurement, and in the very earliest days of social organization a clear indication of advancement and sophistication was the degree to which systems of measurement had been established, codified, agreed to, and employed.

The narrative begins with how British inventor Joseph Wilkinson fixed problems with leaking steam in the early builds of Scotsman James Watts's steam engines. Wilkinson pioneered a method to make cannons out of solid cylinders of iron, and he applied this method to the engines.

We are also told of the lives and accomplishments of Winchester's gallery of "perfectionists", including English clockmaker John Harrison, whose marine chronometers revolutionised navigation and made long-distance sailing much safer; Swiss inventor Carl Edvard Johansson, creator of the gauge blocks that once fascinated the author; Kintaro Hattori, founder of Seiko, which released the world's first quartz watch; and Frenchman Honoré Blanc, who mooted the concept of interchangeable parts for guns. Curious how some of these early engineers cut their teeth in the firearms industry.

All in all, this book is a solid piece of literary engineering comprising intricately fitted components, tempered with academic rigour. The hefty and deeply intellectual material, however, demands the reader's full attention, which is challenged by the staid, schoolmasterly prose and verbosity.

Even the trivia and the occasional display of that trademark British wit, mostly in the footnotes, don't help much. A titbit: Apparently a genetic descendant of Sir Isaac Newton's apple tree is growing somewhere near a lab in Beijing.

Things get more interesting around the third chapter, as the author warms up even more to his subject – that is, if one hasn't quit the book by then. Which would be tragic, given how much effort went into it.

Precision is a much better word, a more apposite choice than its closest rival, accuracy. “Accurate Laser Tattoo Removal” sounds not nearly as convincing or effective ... And it surely would be both damning and condescending to say that you tie your tie accurately—to knot it precisely is much more suggestive of élan and style.

To a degree, Winchester has achieved his (or maybe Colin Povey's) aims with this book. Some questions arise: how far should the quest for precision go? Is there a breaking point? Might the frenetic pace of contemporary life, shaped in part by precision engineering, have moulded us into perfectionists as well? Is a "perfect" world a good idea?

With regards to the last, probably not.

As measurements become more precise, the margin of tolerable error shrinks, raising the risk of human involvement in engineering. According to Winchester, an error measuring 1/50th the thickness of a human hair caused the Hubble space telescope to capture fuzzy, unusable images (a NASA optical engineer found a way to repair it after a eureka moment in the shower). We also hear of aeroplane crashes caused by human error.

Perhaps that's why people don't think about precision, except when baking. Nor should the non-engineering majority be obsessed with "the need for endlessly improving exactitude".

So Winchester looks to Japan for a "third way". Among the aspects of Japanese culture he explores is wabi-sabi, which he describes as "an aesthetic sensibility wherein asymmetry and roughness and impermanence are accorded every bit as much weight as are the exact, the immaculate, and the precise". One gathers that the Japanese worldview regarding transience and imperfection asserts that everything, no matter how precise or flawless, won't stay that way forever.

Humankind would perhaps do well to learn to accept the equal significance, the equal weight, of the natural order. If not, then nature in time will overrun, and the green strands of jungle grass will eventually enfold and enwrap all the inventions that we make ... Before the imprecision of the natural world, all will falter, none shall survive—no matter how precise.

Even these "perfectionists" weren't perfect. For one, who knew that Eli Whitney of the cotton gin fame had scammed the US government by pretending he could produce muskets from interchangeable parts?

Regardless of what one takes away from this book, at least we now have a measure of how high these innovators towered, how fascinating their disciplines can be, and how epoch-making their creations were.

---

The Perfectionists

How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World

Simon Winchester
Harper
395 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-0-06-265255-3

Whale Of A Scam

To say Malaysians were hyped about Billion Dollar Whale is an understatement. Thank goodness for 9 May, otherwise we'd never get our hands on books like it. But the unexpected GE14 results delayed the release.

"When we first wrote it, (former prime minister Datuk Seri) Najib Tun Razak was still in power," co-author Tom Wright told The Star, "we had to change the ending. We never thought the book would ever be released in Malaysia. We thought perhaps, we would be selling copies from Changi Airport."

Nor did the publisher expect the book to zip off the shelves. The first several weeks stocks kept running out. Lines of people stretched outside the local Kinokuniya waiting for autographs by Wright when he dropped by. A pirated digital file of the book circulated on WhatsApp was later revealed to be an earlier edition, sans the GE14 aftermath.

(Someone even reviewed the pirated e-book on Goodreads and got called out by Wright. That a stolen copy of a book about stolen billions is being read and circulated might be a reason this scam was possible.)

To be expected, I guess. A senior figure in local publishing thinks it's because Malaysians love reading about themselves, especially when written by Mat Sallehs. As is the case with this book about the 1MDB heist by Wright and co-author Bradley Hope, both journalists from the Wall Street Journal.

Instead of boring money flows or dry blow-by-blow reporting, what we have is a gripping, cinematic financial thriller that sucks you in within a few pages, regardless of where you open it - not the ending, please. That's how I ended up reading it twice, cover to cover.

The focus is more on how the plot unfolded, even as the main characters are fleshed out. The protagonist is the titular whale, Low Taek Jho, now better known as Jho Low, thanks to, among other things, reports of his wild profligate parties and a track called "Check My Steezo".

The prologue, describing Low's decadent Las Vegas birthday party in November 2012 that stunned even the now-late host of the TV series Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, sets readers up for the displays of debauchery and ostentation to come.

On campus, [Low] drove around in a maroon-red SC-430 Lexus convertible, which he had leased but passed off as his own. He deliberately didn’t correct rumors that he was a “prince of Malaysia”, a claim that made the other Malaysian students laugh when they heard it.

Wright and Hope trace the rise and fall of 1MDB and its players, with Low in the centre. Just about everyone is here: his immediate family, his collaborators, and those who helped to unravel the scheme.

In the book, Low is portrayed as a bullshit artist who could sniff out rich, powerful yet gullible patrons for his schemes, dazzling them and his collaborators with his charm, other people's money and his connections with celebrities, artistes and assorted power brokers.

He started young, from online masquerades to passing off a family friend's yacht as his. Parental influence is cited as another factor; his dad Larry Low may have cultivated Jho Low's social-climbing tendencies by sending him to Harrow, and then Wharton, to cosy up with scions of the elite. One of those Wharton connections led him to the Middle East and planted the seed of what would end up being the biggest kleptocracy case in history.

I had few nits to pick with this book. It is the hot read we've been promised, and it's such a rollicking ride from start to finish you barely notice the typos, no doubt due to the rush to release it for the Malaysian and Singaporean markets. Even those well acquainted with the scandal will be whisked away, breathless as they try to keep up with the heart-thumping kin cheong pace.

No surprise many readers are outraged, disgusted and dismayed. The whale and his fellows used the global financial system and the help of greedy bank executives to put up Malaysia's natural wealth as collateral for cash that went to extravagant, eye-watering spending sprees at nighclubs, designer boutiques, jewellers, casinos, hotels, art auctions and real estate markets; producing a movie about financial fraud, believe it or not; and possible attempts to rig an election.

And we could be footing the bill for years.

...in a cascade of bad luck, taking all of ten minutes, [Jho Low] lost $2 million. The stunned entourage couldn’t compute the way he parted with money—seemingly without breaking a sweat—and some began to whisper about this guy, and how he acted like the cash wasn’t his own.

Speculation about Low's motives are rife, but I think bukan duit punya pasal je. The authors' profile of him suggests a guy who wants more than what money can buy. And what's better than being the sun of his own galaxy, the fairy godfather of the top one per cent, the genie to these upper-upper-crust Aladdins?

The billions he allegedly stole let him play that role, but how he went about it, like he did with the 1MDB caper, was crude. If he couldn't throw money at a problem, he would try to talk his way out of it, or rely on the clout of his influential friends.

Reading about the excesses is like witnessing a Lovecraftian beast feeding itself with humongous fistfuls of humans: maddening, horrific, gory, yet so fascinating that one is compelled to watch with clenched jaws as it shambles along, leaving destruction and despair in its wake.

But the beast was careless, and for that it would be taken down. Almost all the perpetrators soared stratosphere-high before exploding spectacularly and crashing to earth like spent bottle rockets.

As in most crime thrillers, you know who the good guys and the bad guys are. This is the Jho Low, Najib and Rosmah many of us have come to hate. The at-times cartoonish villainy of culprits here earn them no sympathy and all the derision we can muster, to the point we forget that for all their faults, they are still people.

Other allegations such as the murder of Kevin Morais and UMNO-BN campaigning in GE13 with 1MDB money spice things up, raising the book's popularity among those who already assume the worst of them. Is there more to the tale? How much did the authors omit to keep the book at a mere 379 pages?

...Low would offer [Jordan] Belfort $500,000 to attend an event in Las Vegas with [Leonardo] DiCaprio. Red Granite had paid him handsomely for the rights to his memoir. But Belfort was starting to distrust this group. Eager to stay out of trouble, Belfort turned them down...

Damn kwa cheong hijinks with billions of brazenly stolen dollars leave us gasping, time and again, "No way all of this is true." The authors say it is, backed up by dozens of interviews and piles of documents, records and correspondence the DOJ is using to make their case, with editorial and legal oversight from the WSJ.

And it seems Wright had said the book was written for the sake of the story, not to rescue Malaysia or for a movie deal, and he was uncomfortable with the notion that he and Hope "saved" the country with it.

But wouldn't the publication of this book prejudice the ongoing 1MDB case? So far only several people have been formally charged by the United States' DOJ. Or is it fine because the guilt of the thieves have long been established?

At least, the guilty plea by former Goldman Sachs executive Tim Leissner suggests there is some truth to the allegations, and it looks like he's started spilling tea.

I am also a little annoyed by the author's descriptions of "palm-fringed" Penang and "jungle-covered" Sarawak, as if this part of the world is still Noel Barber's exotic, inscrutable patch of green. Environmental NGOs might argue to the contrary.

The authors' real-life thriller approach has paid off, but I won't blame those who feel the book is a hit job. At some point I wonder if the authors are as guilty of exaggerations as Low. For one, Malaysian officials smuggling files locked with the password "SaveMalaysia"? Why not just go with "HelpMe06biWanKenOBIYouAreMyON1yHopE"? #UseStrongPasswords.

If it gets Malaysians to read...

[1MDB] was supposed to have created jobs for Malaysians, but instead would be a burden on state finances for years to come. Most of the borrowings weren’t due for repayment for a few years, but 1MDB’s debt was a ticking time bomb, waiting to go off in the future.

Months after publication, whale fever hasn't abated - how else to explain why Kinokuniya is always "out of stock" every time I go there? (I know my luck isn't great but come on!) Also, the leviathan is still at large. The scheduled release of a Malay-language edition this month, the upcoming movie adaptation, and latest developments in the investigation are keeping temperatures high too.

Perhaps miffed that her victory lap was overshadowed by the hype over Billion Dollar Whale, Clare Rewcastle-Brown of Sarawak Report has accused Wright, Hope and their paper of not being honest about the source of their 1MDB reporting, plus other stuff. And who knew she had plans to shoot her own "how I broke the case" blockbuster?

(They did credit Sarawak Report for breaking "the first stories on Jho Low" and stated that it "was an important resource for us", but that probably wasn't enough.)

Whistleblower Xavier Justo meanwhile has disputed some of the details in the book regarding himself and announced that he's going to pen his account of what happened. However I look at it, it was about the money (not a cent less or more than what he believed his old bosses owed him) until - from what I could gather from this interview - he became a dad and, later, was convinced to do the right thing by Sarawak Report and The Edge.

And no one is blind to the whale-sized void in the narrative of how a supposed tukang kelentong from Penang managed to get Wall Street, Hollywood, and the world to dance to his tune, past raised flags, gatekeepers and blaring alarms.

How far did the con go? Who else was involved but not named? Why did Low do it? Why, as Wright asked, did he not stop when the financial hole got too big? Why didn't he put that money to work instead of living large? Given his pull, he could've gotten qualified professionals to manage and invest those billions.

It’s easy to sneer at Malaysia as a cesspool of graft, but that misses the point. None of this could have happened without the connivance of scores of senior executives ... Low straddled both these worlds—Malaysia and the West—and he knew exactly how to game the system.

What little that's published of him so far does not indicate any inclination towards candour. Nor should we expect any writing flair from his lawyers or PR advisers, who I expect will ditch him once what remains of his money runs out, or if the evidence piles up.

If that happens, wouldn't it be ironic if he ultimately had to approach the guys who helped expose him to write his side of the story?

---

Billion Dollar Whale
The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World

Tom Wright and Bradley Hope
Hachette Books
379 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-0-316-45347-9

Peckish For Pizza At Patty And Pie

"There's this pizza place that's better than your favourite pizza place," I was told.

Challenge accepted, which meant going to Aman Suria, which I tend to avoid because of the traffic, where Patty and Pie was. I can't believe it's been there for four years. Although, I think that's almost how long I stayed away from the area.

My informants claimed that the pizzas are good here - perhaps even better than - my "favourite pizza place" - because of the centrepiece of its sedate cement and wood interior: a wood-fire oven. However, as its name suggests, Patty and Pie also offers a interesting array of burgers.

Unfortunately, I have only one increasingly picky stomach, and my informants were occupied elsewhere, so I settled for pie rather than patty.

I was also nursing a bit of homesickness for my "favourite pizza place" that had packed up for greener pastures but seems to have neglected informing others of where it had moved. The Other Pizza Place, of course, uses an electric or gas oven. Certainly no wood was involved.

The charm of a wood-fire oven isn't just that it's old-school, burns wood, is made of bricks (which adds to the aesthetics of a hipster-luring décor) and adds smokiness to whatever it bakes. It can achieve higher temperatures that can bake a pizza quicker, giving the crust a better crispy-chewy ratio and keeps the toppings from drying out too much from long cooking times.

This is akin to the afterburner-like stoves in Chinese restaurants that bestow woks their searing temperatures - the wok hei - that flash-cooks ingredients while stir-frying, preserving their goodness.

As it is with old-school equipment, wood-fire ovens are more mercurial and messy and require more skill and work to use compared with modern gas or electric ovens, but it means bakers who know the former inside and out have added hipster cred and bragging rights.

Of all the pizza flavours, two stood out almost immediately: Anchovies, and Quattro Formaggi, which blends four types of cheese. I also noticed the Half-and-Half option, which allows you to try two flavours, albeit in one 14-inch pie.

As the waiter left with my order, Sade's voice drifted in from the sound system. Funny, it doesn't sound like the original edition.

Face to face, each classic case
We shadow box and double cross, yet need the chase...

I'm hungry now, I mused. By the time it's baked I'll be famished enough - probably.

I had the chance to see Patty and Pie's wood-fire oven close up (not too close, though) and in action. The action inside is pretty sedate, sonically, but I could feel the heat. Anything will cook fast inside that flaming cavern at maximum temperature.

The guy at the counter claimed that only a handful of restaurants - presumably in the Klang Valley - have wood-fire ovens. One SOULed OUT branch has one, and I know of Coconut House and Enorme at Petaling Jaya. It's not just the hassle of building and maintaining one. The guy who helps build these ovens is an Italian, apparently, and he has his own restaurant.

Makes sense. You wouldn't want too much competition, and how much wood is out there to comfortably burn for cooking?

My Half-and-Half: one part Carne (meat) and the other Anchovies, eventually arrived. A warped disc, rough and charred at its uneven edges. One one side, strips of beef brisket, minced meat and sausage slices with the odd jalapeño ring, and on the other, pitted black olives, capers, brown bits of canned anchovies and silver-grey countershaded chunks of brined anchovies - all on a bed of melted cheese.

As I admired the shine on the pie, Sade's mellifluous voice was replaced by a guttural chorus of deep voices chanting in an alien language, followed by another voice and some familiar words.

I can't stop this feeling deep inside of me
Girl, you just don't realise what you do to me...

Oh, yes. Feed me now.

Out of respect for the wood-fire oven and the hands that baked it, I dispensed with the cutlery and dug in with my hands. Ooh, the tactile feel of the crust and the aroma of superheated cheese, animal flesh and spices.

Was it hunger, the ambience, or the mix of cheese, grease and meat juice that hit the spot that made the slice of pie so good? Or the fact that my longing for pizza was fulfilled?

Whatever. Being able to eat pizza again felt great. I can't say I took my time, though. I was famished, after all.

After two more slices, I was curious about the other side. A kopitiam-based pizza stall turned me on to the pungent, saline tang of anchovies, and I've cooked with it once, substituting salt with canned anchovies.

The taste reminded me of what I had read about garum, an ancient Roman condiment made of fermented fish guts (anchovy was supposedly one of the species used). I hesitate to compare it with belacan, mostly because I have no idea what garum tastes like.

Also, John Lennon's crooning made it hard to visualise myself lying on a divan, eating bread dipped in a salty, umami-laden ancient fish sauce while looking over the shoreline in a Mediterranean setting.

Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try
No hell below us, above us only sky...

The whole pitted olives were a bit of a handful, so I pulled them apart and distributed the bits as evenly as I could across the anchovy half of the partially eaten pie. Then I picked up a slice, folded it and went CHOMP.

BAM went the first sharp tang of salt. This was from the canned anchovies, the small brown slivers of fish I was familiar with. What was less familiar were the anchovy chunks that resembled the fish they used to be - fresher-looking, and tasting and smelling of fish oil, with a somewhat flaky texture reminiscent of salt-cured ikan kembung.

This would've been good, if not for the salt level. One time I wished they used less toppings on a pizza. Did I mention there were capers in there, too? Dear g*d, this should have come with health warnings for people on low- or no-sodium diets.

By the time I decided to switch back to the more bearable meat pizza slices, Lennon was joined by the rest of his gang for a rendition of one of their greatest hits.

It's been a hard day's night and I been working like a dog
It's been a hard day's night, I should be sleeping like a log...

Not that it helped. My cardiovascular system was sending (imaginary) alarm bells over the level of sodium I introduced into it - how was I to know? And two slices remained, challenging me to take them home for later instead.

I was also starting to feel full. Now I began to slow down.

I alternated between slices of DAMN SALTY and not salty pizza until the plate was empty. I was going to need something to counter all that salt from the anchovies and capers. Meanwhile, Lennon and gang moved on to another tune.

I'll give you all I got to give if you say you'll love me too
I may not have a lot to give but what I got I'll give to you
I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love...

Perhaps, but money can buy me pizza, and on some days that's just as good. But the days I could wallop a 14-inch pizza by myself without a sweat are behind me. I won't be doing this for a long while.

Leaving to explore the neighbourhood, I found a fruit shop - one or two doors away from Patty and Pie - that had what I needed: a healthy after-dinner snack of papaya and dragon fruit.

Oh, nuts, I should have asked for a banana to balance out the sodium.

Is P&P better than my favourite pizza place, which has relocated to g*d-knows-where in SEA Park? (Somebody let me know if you find it; I was told they were going to share space with another retailer.) It's good, I grudgingly admit, but the favourite has my preferred flavours and sizes, with more tolerable levels of sodium.

And I'm still hoping that I'll find That Other Pizza Place again. (Then again, maybe not. Oh well, life goes on.)

Well, at least now I have another venue for entertaining guests. Preferably during weekends, when the traffic isn't so heavy.

---

Patty & Pie

40, Jalan PJU 1/45
Aman Suria
47301 Petaling Jaya
Selangor

Probably pork-free

Tuesdays to Sundays: Noon–3pm, 6–10pm
Closed on Mondays

+ 603-7886 5352

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Inhumane

When the radio broadcasted highlights of the day's parliamentary session, I should have turned it off. Wednesday's Twitter feed left me angry. After the broadcast ended, I was thoroughly INCANDESCENT WITH RAGE.

Of course they mentioned the removal of two portraits of alleged LGBTIQ icons from a photo exhibition celebrating Malaysians and the upcoming Independence Day. And they JUST HAD TO play audio of the Minister of Religious Affairs defending the decision. "Takde ikon lain ke?" he added.

(Cis. Terus naik minyak.)

Now the incident has blown up and everybody knows who the "gay icons" are. Either this was a serious case of shooting oneself in the foot or a sneaky way of spotlighting the issue to generate pressure on the relevant authorities. Either way, tahniah, pak menteri.

I did spare a thought for the minister who was, after all, sockpuppeting for the current government, perhaps against his own personal views and principles. In spite of that, it felt as if we travelled back in time about eight years.

Religious people have tried to convert me, and once I was told that, according to the rules, if I didn't join I was going to hell. No salvation. I don't hold it against them, though. Religion might have been the best thing that ever happened to them, but their messaging could have used a little tact.

However, none of the LGBTIQ community have propositioned me: "Y'know, it's great to be gay. Why don't you join us?" NONE. Yet they are being spoken of in some circles like the Falun Gong, the Aum Shinrikyo, or Herbalife.

And, as many have pointed out, one's sexuality isn't something you can pick up and let go of, like smoking, drinking, pergi Big Bad Wolf book sale, or two flat whites a day.

Nor have the LGBTIQ shoved their "lifestyles" in our faces by, say, making out in public - that's the only thing their critics ever think about, isn't it? Such a point of view defines the LGBTIQ as objects of perverse sex rather than human beings, which they struggle to be recognised as.

I believe that LGBTIQ is all nature. Of course, some don't want to accept that, or that such people exist in their families, communities and institutions. And when they learn that they do, and in the tradition of those who are incapable of introspection, what better scapegoat than the Gaylluminati?

So, our LGBTIQ bros and sisters are shunned, persecuted, tortured and even killed. Why? Because their behaviour is sinful and immoral? Against the order of nature? Does the state or one's religion allow one to publicly humiliate and harm them? Isn't there a line in the scriptures that says the numerous races and types were created so that they may all know each other?

And it's said that how you treat other living beings is a mirror to your soul. So if the LGBTIQ were created as a secret test of our humanity, from what I see so far, we should've been wiped out many times over. Maybe our impending doom is being pushed forward just so we can gather more bad karma.

Ostracising certain people means denying them their rights as human beings: to love, friendship, health care, security, education, and the chance to realise their potential. It opens the doors to hell on earth, and only allows hate, fear and anger to grow.

I know a bit about anger. I've been angry for years, mostly for nothing. Then I stopped and realised how much emptier it made me feel. Even if I can't help minorities like the LGBTIQ, at least I try not to make life hell for them. Many other worthier causes are out there waiting to be championed.

As human beings we are all born with needs and wants. When some of those aren't met we are left with voids. These can be filled with better things, so why choose something that will poison you and hollow you out further, making the void in you almost impossible to fill?

More than how minorities are treated here, I'm more incensed by the the government's stance. Instead of taking the lead in promoting kindness and justice towards minority groups, they're pandering to the reactionary segments of society.

We punish those crying out for mercy, justice and a fair shot at life and protect those who hate, rage, lie and worse. How is this even remotely logical, humane or even spiritual?

Excuses such as "this is what we inherited from the previous government; we should tread with caution" should not apply here. This is not one of those underground peat fires; the flames are now above ground and they need to be extinguished.

Even as a temporary measure to keep the reactionaries away from sabotaging efforts at reform, letting the mob have their way is a terrible strategy. Anger and hate need fuel, and once a bugbear is gone that hate will find other targets. All it needs is someone to point the way.

Sadly, the government will never engage with or hear from the LGBTIQ community and their allies. For political expediency, it's easier and safer to operate on their own assumptions of the LGBTIQs rather than risk anything that would soften the stance against this group or heighten tensions further.

The gulf between our minorities and the rest of us is a gaping, festering wound, and for it to heal it has to hurt first and some appear unwilling to start the process.

If this persists, the renewed hope we have as a nation with a better future remains under threat by the negative elements that strive to keep this wound open - not by the LGBTIQ and their allies, friends and loved ones.

---

Someone told me the above was a much more measured response than they could muster, so I thought I did well.

Then I read more bad takes about the issue and I stayed boiling for much of the day, during which I penned the following. I never thought I'd feel this close to the subject until I delved further into my experiences and realised this affects me too.

Yes, I'm angry. Not just because of two photographs but the mentality, the myths and outright lies that led to their removal. The mentality that compels educated professionals to be openly hateful towards the LGBTIQ group and young politicians to tell an already oppressed minority to "stay in the closet".

That mentality also boxes the LGBTIQ community in a metaphorical prison where all they are apparently good for is feed or satisfy perverse sexual fantasies and suffer and slowly perish from whatever ailments that result - because, haters claim, that's all they do anyway.

As a result, some of our best, creative minds and talents, locked up or driven away because of who they choose to love, regardless of their achievements and what they might contribute to the nation's development one day.

That mentality also targets those in society who care about this community, and obstructs their efforts to help them. It potentially tars others who are more sympathetic to their plight, including parents who love their LGBTIQ children, tutors of LGBTIQ students, clergymen with LGBTIQ congregations, and bosses with LGBTIQ employees. Are they to be shunned and pilloried too?

Masih ada hati nak capai wawasan TN2050. Kalau macam ni TN5050 pun tak boleh capai.

Angry, fearful and hateful some of these bigoted voices may be, what they lack is knowledge, experience and interactions with minorities, which might explain their ignorance and lack of empathy.

I don't feel the same way not because I'm woke or anything, but because I had a relatively good upbringing and the privilege to know and interact with LGBTIQ people. THIS is what the other side needs.

But it seems certain forces want them to remain ill-informed and indignant for selfish and possibly nefarious reasons. Forces even the progressives within the new government are afraid to move against.

Which is why anti-LGBTIQ statements from politicians are irresponsible, to say the least. Telling the group to sila duduk dalam almari is a polite way of telling them to sila meninggal. Even if they're gone, the hate will remain and find another target. And another. Until there's nothing left.

That is why I am angry.

Our society, our nation, and our very souls are dying a death from a thousand cuts - and counting - and we seem powerless to stop it.