cookie-cutter comments

How the HELL do people come up with this?!

#111338 +(8918)- [X]

JonJonB: Purely in the interests of science, I have replaced the word “wand” with “wang” in the first Harry Potter Book

JonJonB: Let’s see the results…

JonJonB: “Why aren’t you supposed to do magic?” asked Harry.
JonJonB: “Oh, well — I was at Hogwarts meself but I — er — got expelled, ter tell yeh the truth. In me third year. They snapped me wang in half an’ everything

JonJonB: A magic wang… this was what Harry had been really looking forward to.

JonJonB: “Yes, yes. I thought I’d be seeing you soon. Harry Potter.” It wasn’t a question. “You have your mother’s eyes. It seems only yesterday she was in here herself, buying her first wang. Ten and a quarter inches long, swishy, made of willow. Nice wang for charm work.”
JonJonB: “Your father, on the other hand, favored a mahogany wang. Eleven inches. ”

JonJonB: Harry took the wang. He felt a sudden warmth in his fingers. He raised the wang above his head, brought it swishing down through the dusty air and a stream of red and gold sparks shot from the end like a firework, throwing dancing spots of light on to the walls

JonJonB: “Oh, move over,” Hermione snarled. She grabbed Harry’s wang, tapped the lock, and whispered, ‘Alohomora!”

JonJonB: The troll couldn’t feel Harry hanging there, but even a troll will notice if you stick a long bit of wood up its nose, and Harry’s wang had still been in his hand when he’d jumped - it had gone straight up one of the troll’s nostrils.

JonJonB: He bent down and pulled his wang out of the troll’s nose. It was covered in what looked like lumpy gray glue.

JonJonB: He ran onto the field as you fell, waved his wang, and you sort of slowed down before you hit the ground. Then he whirled his wang at the dementors. Shot silver stuff at them.

JonJonB: Ok
JonJonB: I have found, definitive proof
JonJonB: that J.K Rowling is a dirty DIRTY woman, making a fool of us all
JonJonB: “Yes,” Harry said, gripping his wang very tightly, and moving into the middle of the deserted classroom. He tried to keep his mind on flying, but something else kept intruding…. Any second now, he might hear his mother again… but he shouldn’t think that, or he would hear her again, and he didn’t want to… or did he?

melusine: O_______O

JonJonB: Something silver-white, something enormous, erupted from the end of his wang

JonJonJonB: Then, with a sigh, he raised his wang and prodded the silvery substance with its tip.

JonJonJonB: ‘Get - off - me!’ Harry gasped. For a few seconds they struggled, Harry pulling at his uncles sausage-like fingers with his left hand, his right maintaining a firm grip on his raised wang.

*falls over laughing my ass off*

More here! Spotted at Mr Brown’s.

Saw this at the Autoworld forums.

Link to Bernama article here.

KUALA LUMPUR, July 25 (Bernama) — Tengku Tan Sri Mahaleel Tengku Ariff will no longer be group chief executive officer (CEO) of Proton Holdings Bhd effective Sept 30, 2005 as his contract with the national car manufacturer has not been renewed by the board of directors.

He has been with the company for more than nine years.

Proton said Datuk Kisai Rahmat, currently Director of Operations and Datuk Kamarulzaman Darus, currently Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Proton Tanjung Malim Sdn Bhd, have been appointed chief operating officers of Proton Holdings effective Tuesday to replace Tengku Mahaleel.

Talk about being unceremoniously booted out:

Tengku Mahaleel, 59 will be on leave with immediate effect till the end of his tenure on Sept 30 this year, the company said in a statement to Bursa Malaysia here.

If he’s Mahathir’s golden boy, what’s the status of Mahathir’s perceived authority in Proton now?

I discovered Michael Moorcock about 6 or 7 years ago when, in desperation for anything fresh in the fantasy genre, I picked up what was described as an ‘omnibus’ featuring an effete-looking skinny white dude with the title ‘Elric of Melnibone’ emblazoned in orange-gold lettering just above that decidedly anorexic face.

I was looking for something fresh and I stumbled upon something that was written in the ’60s. Yay, me.

I read and read and read, and couldn’t stop myself reading; the next week, I rushed back to the old MPH in Holiday Plaza and bought the rest of the ‘omnibuses’ on display: one about Hawkmoon (super!) and another about Corum (my fave) in that whole Eternal Champion cycle.

Since then, I pretty much moved away from reading fantasy and started down other paths, which was all well and good, but I never lost the itch for a rousing, good yarn with assorted beasties and technicolor magical effects (heh). So last Friday, my colleague and I took a (long-ish) detour while our bosses were away and found ourselves in this tiny little second-hand bookshop tucked away in a dilapidated, terraced row of shop-houses somewhere along the road from Senai to Johor Bahru town.

We called the shop “Shakespeare” as a convenient shorthand for “Shaik Peer Bombay Bookstore” (the owner suggested it!). The place was no bigger than 20′ x 40′, but we were immediately assailed by decades of accumulated dust thick on the books and shelves.

The books on display looked older than my grandfather, which in turn seemed to be confirmed by our hosts, an Indian Muslim man and his wife, who looked as old as dirt itself. But he had all the charm of my dearly departed grand-dad, and so we got along well, though I was more interested in ploughing through his books.

And boy did I find some gems! Buried deep in a pile of Barbara Cartland-ish pulp romances, I found Michael Moorcock’s Masters of the Pit! Which isn’t saying much since, at the time, I didn’t know just exactly what I had in hand. I had the vague notion that it was a hard-to-find book (if not out-of-print; it definitely looked old enough!), but being a Moorcock it had to be good, lah. I didn’t know or care, I was like a puppy with a freshly-mangled bone :p.

Later that night, I got down to reading ‘Masters of the Pit’, and found it wasn’t all that bad. It’s told in the first person, and written in short, even terse, paragraphs and sentences. Much of it is narrative with bits of dialogue interspersed here and there; it felt less like a book and more like a rehearsal of a plot outline. It definitely lacked the polish of some of the later Elric stories I’ve read, and plot lines quite literally disappeared or were artificially resolved prematurely in some places.

But damn, was it funny! There was one particular part in the book when the main protagonist, Michael Kane, has this sort of interior monologue about society and such:

“Fear,” she said

I nodded, wondering if that deep emotion was not the essential cause of most ills (wah, very like the stuff in the movie ‘Equilibrium’ – ed.). Were not all political systems, all arts, all human actions channelled towards creating that one valuable sense of security we all, in our own ways, sought – an absence of fear? It was fear that produced madness, fear that produced war. Fear, indeed, that often produced the things we feared most. Was this why the fearless man was lauded – because he did not represent a threat to others? Perhaps, though there were many kinds of fearless people, and a total fearlessness produced a whole man, a man who had no need to display his fearlessness. The true hero, in fact – the often unsung hero.

Ok, I must admit, not only did I laugh, I was reminded of that short cartoon in Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine”. I don’t know why.

Imagine a Michael Kane in a ’60s retro-futuristic costume on the set of a faux Mars, intoning the above with dead seriousness (cue cheesy violin set pieces)… you get the idea .

Time to start digging into the other books I found!

I was struck by Brendan Pereira’s article on Sunday about perceptions and reality, and can’t seem to get my head around what he meant by that article.

Globalization’s a word much bandied-about these days, representing, in turns, salvation or doom for countries. There have been detractors, and there have been others who ardently support it. A few years ago, friends of mine reflected how ‘Globalization’, like ‘terrorism’ today, has been co-opted to mean many things, and in that vacuity of precision, it has come to mean very little at all. Close to its heart, I figure, are probably things like the free communication of ideas, the mobility of labour and ideas of an open, ‘globalized’ market.

Take mobility of labour and capital for instances of globalization at our doorstep. Garment manufacturers in Batu Pahat and Johor Bahru now have widespread operations in China and Cambodia. Whilst handling one of their jobs, I caught the Finance Manager of this company commenting on the need to move. Cheaper markets, he said, and cheaper labour. We obviously can compete here any more.

That same manager entertained thoughts of returning to the UK for work. I think that’s even more worrying.

Skip several steps ahead, and the thing that’s been bothering me becomes this: wherefore nationalism if globalization demands and encourages this very sort of mobility? Is nationalism feasible in such a scenario? I believe Singapore’s been trying to deal with this for some years, where the debate still rages on how to maintain an effective labour force in the light of a ‘brain drain’ of talent plying their skills beyond Singapore’s shores.

And it doesn’t help that there is a underlying perception amongst non-Bumis that this country in which has become and is becoming less and less hospitable to live and work in.

I’ve been thinking about this because Mr Pereira mentions this:

“Here is the reality. Malaysians are not competing against each other. The day we adopt such a myopic view will be the day Malaysia will become a backwater for investments and economic development.

The day we adopt that myopic view is the day we will abdicate our position as among the top 15 destinations for foreign direct investments or be ranked among the top 18 exporting nations in the world.

Meritocracy is based on the concept of survival of the fittest. In the context of a globalised economy like Malaysia’s, this is a contest between Malaysia and the fast developing economies of its neighbours.

It is not a contest between Malays and non-Malays or a contest between those in rural communities or urban centres. This is the reality.”

He has a telling point; we should band together as one and leave petty ethnic divisions aside to, presumably, fight for a viable nation-state that can stand tall amongst others. That’s the context within which his article operates. But it’s pretty idealized, even more so after the pronouncements coming out of the UMNO General Assembly.

Here’s another reality check: there are some sectors of the population who do in fact feel that they are being side lined. It’s a plain and simple fact. More to the point, there are those who do believe that the sort of chauvinism that engenders this sort of side lining is necessary for the betterment of other sectors of the population.

So, what does one say to the non-Bumi student who, having been side lined, decides to study medicine overseas, and then refuses to return?

“Malaysians for Malaysia”? Some are already giving pointed opinions about the latter by voting with their feet.