Read Out Loud!

I just stumbled on this language joke whilst arranging my stuff at home. Reading it once again, I just realised how imperial the joke was and it did disguise the unequal power relations between the "native" language user and those who are not "qualified" to use their language.

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One day ima gonna Malta to bigga hotel. Ina Morning I go down to eat breakfast. I tella waitress I wanna two pissis toast. She brings me only one piss. I tella her I want two piss. She say go to the toilet. I say you no understand. I wanna to piss onna my plate. She say you better not piss onna plate, you sonna ma bitch. I don't even know the lady and she call me sonna ma bitch. Later I go to eat at the bigga restaurant. The waitress brings me a spoon and knife but no fock. I tella her I wanna fock. She tell me everyone wanna fock. I tell her you no understand. I wanna fock on the table. She say you better not fock on the table, you sonna ma bitch. I don't even know the lady and she call me sonna ma bitch. So I go back to my room inna hotel and there is no shits onna my bed. Call the manager and tella him I wanna shit. He tell me to go to toilet. I say you no understand. I wanna shit on my bed. He say you better not shit onna bed, you sonna ma bitch. I go to the checkout and the man at the desk say: "Peace on you". I say piss on you too, you sonna ma bitch, I gonna back home.

A Lesson for Everyone

Two English-language teachers, an American and an Englishman were sitting in a coffee-shop puzzling over why their Thai students seemed so slow at grasping the fundamentals of the English language. They agreed it was an appalling state of affairs.

Yank: Of course, the worst lot are the sophomores.

Brit: I didn't know we ran a signals class.

Yank: Not semaphores, you idiot. Sophomores, second-year students.

Brit: Why didn't you say so in the first place? Which are the most troublesome?

Yank: The lot on the first floor.

Brit: There aren't any classes on the first floor. There's only the library. The sec... sophomores are on the ground floor.

Yank: That's what I said, first floor. By the way, I don't think much of those drapes in the library.

Brit: Drapes? You mean the backward class?

Yank: The drapes on the windows, I can't stand the pink colour.

Brit: You mean curtains. I've got some like that in my flat.

Yank: You've a flat? There's a gas station nearby. They'll fix it.

Brit: No, my flat. Where I live.

Yank: You mean your apartment. How is it anyway?

Brit: Okay, but the lift's a bit of a pain.

Yank: You hurt your back? Why don't you take the elevator?

Enter an Australian colleague.

Bruce: Good-day! Where did you get those strides? They're beaut.

Brit: I beg your pardon.

Yank: He means your pants.

Brit: Where I buy my underwear is none of your business. If you must know, I got them from a pavement stall.

Yank: Those sidewalk stalls in Bangkok are something else. You can buy anything from sneakers to thumbtacks...

Brit: From plimsolls to drawing pins...

Bruce: By the way, what were you two having such an intense conversation about?

Brit: Our students. They just don't seem to be able to grasp plain English.

Bruce: That's right. I spent an hour last week trying to explain what a freeway was.

Yank: I couldn't make them understand what a throughway was.

Brit: What's a freeway?

Bruce: Don't come the raw prawn with me son.

Brit: Okay waiter. Make that fried prawns instead.

Footnote: The above conversation originally included a Scot, but nobody understood a word he said. However he did refer to Postscript as "just a wheen o'blethers" which is apparently something less than complimentary.

The Letter

Once there was a boy who loved a girl very much. The girl's father, however, did not like the boy and did not want their love to grow. The boy wanted to write a love letter but he was sure that the girl's father would read it first. At last he wrote a letter to the girl.

The great love I said I have for you

is gone, and I find my dislike for you

increases every day. When I see you,

I do not even like the way you look;

the only thing I want to do is to

look the other way; I never wanted to

marry you. Our last conversation

was very dull and in no way has

made me anxious to see you again.

You think only of yourself.

If we were married, I know that I would find

life very difficult, and would have no

pleasure in living with you. I have a heart

to give, but is not a heart

I want to give to you. No one is more

demanding or selfish than you, and less

able to care for me and be of help to me.

I sincerely want you to understand that

every I speak is the truth. You will do me a favour

if you consider this end. Do not try

to answer this. Your letters are full of

things that do not interest me. You have no

true concern for me. Good-bye! Believe me,

I do not care for you. Please do not think

I am still your loving friend.

The girl's father read the letter. He was pleased, and then gave the letter to his daughter. The girl read the letter and was very happy. The boy still loved her.

Abort, Retry, Ignore

Once upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped and vision bleary,

System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,

Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,

Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets;

Having reached the bottom line

I took a floppy from the drawer.

Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE command

But I got a reprimand: it read Abort, Retry, Ignore.

Was this some occult illusion? Some ethereal intrusion?

These were choices Solomon himself had never faced before.

Carefully, I weighed my options,

These three seemed to be the top ones,

Clearly I must now adopt one:

Choose Abort, Retry, Ignore.

With my fingers pale and trembling,

Slowly toward the keyboard bending,

Longing for a happy ending, hoping all would be restored,

Praying for some guarantee

Finally I depressed a key --

But on the screen what did I see?

Again: Abort, Retry, Ignore.

I tried to catch the chips off-guard

I pressed again, but twice as hard.

Luck was just not in the cards.

I saw what I had seen before.

Now I typed in desperation

Trying random combinations

Still there came the incantation:

Choose: Abort, Retry, Ignore.

There I sat, distraught exhausted, by my own machine accosted,

Getting up I turned away and paced across the office floor.

And then I saw an awful sight:

A bold and blinding flash of light --

A lightening bolt had cut the night and shook me to my very core.

I saw the screen collapse and die

"Oh no - my database," I cried.

I thought I heard a voice reply,

"You'll see your data Nevermore!"

To this day I do not know

The place to which lost data goes.

I bet it goes to heaven where the angels have it stored.

But as for productivity, well

I fear that IT goes straight to hell

And that's the tale I have to tell

Your choice: Abort, Retry, Ignore.

-- Author unknown

A Trivial Conversation

This entry has nothing to do with a film or a book, but a person. I read Daily Express, a new Thai newspaper that is given free of charge at various outlets in Bangkok. It's run by the Nation group and I think it's quite a good attempt to please both readers and advertisers. After all, who wouldn't love freebies?

But the subject today is not about this newspaper, but an interview inside with a Thai tennis player. He's just finished his time as a monk at Wat Bowonniwet. According to the interview, he said that 'I used to be consumed by rankings and ended up playing poorly. But now I let go.'

Reading up until then, I thought that his time at the temple must've changed this man as it'd made him contemplate on life and desire for material goods or superficial stuff, such as winning and rankings. However, I continued to read on and couldn't stop laughing, especially in the last paragraph when he said 'before I left the temple, I prayed to the Buddha that if I ever crack the top 100 again I will come back and be a monk for three months.' What? I thought he no longer cared about rankings and stuff!

I couldn't help but wondering now how little he had gained from his temporary monkhood. It does give a telling index, though, of how Thai people in general approach Buddhism. How much do we understand the religion? Do we practise Buddhism as a sort of superstitious belief? Or is betting our incurable nature, so indelible that we need to bet even when we practise a religion?

Reading the whole interview once again, I couldn't help but feeling sad that we seem not to realise how Buddhism can effectively be beneficial to our way of life if we do understand its essence. Our lack of understanding and the general malpractice by some practitioners of the religion may one day destroy this religion from the face of the earth. Let's hope this is not going to happen.

Myths Demystified

Merry Christmas everyone! It's Christmas Eve today and I haven't done much but reading my students' work. I'm not going to write any reviews today, but will set out to demystify some of those beliefs that we've heard so many people say. The source is from Bangkok Post (Sunday 23 December 2007).

Here's the list:

(1) We need to drink eight glasses of water a day.

(2) Reading in dim light is likely to damage your eyesight.

(3) Shaving makes hair grow back faster and coarser.

(4) Eating turkey makes you drowsy.

(5) We use only 10% of our brain.

(6) Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death.

(7) mobile phones are dangerous in hospitals as they interfere with medical equipment.

All these are untrue! This comes as a blessing on Christmas Eve, as I can't drink eight glasses of water, but rather prefer to drink eight cups of coffee instead.

Now I'll list another 7 myths that turn out to be true:

(1) Reading someone else's blogs means you're nosy.

(2) Writing too many blogs interferes with my work.

(3) Interesting people don't write blogs; they socialise.

(4) The film Love of Siam can turn straight people gay. Being gay has never been so cool. Mom, I want to be gay and lonely ...

(5) Cats are dependent, needy, and greedy. They want someone to be next to them all the time!

(6) Life has never been fair. Sorry, folk, that I am too lucky sometimes. Also, sorry to hear that your life is shit.

(7) My attempt to get rid of my cynicism fails miserably.

Have a great time this Christmas and hope you'll come back and secretly read my blog again. Let me thank your whole-hearted attention for the whole year with this lovely image of Santa, who is not quite amused.

This is what I look like in the Simpsons' World

Erm ... it's not quite similar, actually ...

A Poem

Here is some pronunciation.
Ration never rhymes with nation,
Say prefer, but preferable,
Comfortable and vegetable.
B must not be heard in doubt.
Debt and dumb both leave it out.
In the words psychology,
Psychic and psychiatry,
You must never sound the p.
Psychiatrist you call the man
Who cures the complex, if he can.
In architect, ch is k.
In arch, it is the other way.

Please remember to say iron
So that it'll rhyme with lion.
Advertisers advertise,
Advertisements will put you wise.
Time when work is done is leisure,
Fill it up with useful pleasure.
Accidental, accident,
Sound the g in ignorant.
Relative, but a relation,
Then say creature but creation.
Say the a in gas quite short,
Bought remember rhymes with thwart,
Drought must always rhyme with bout,
In daughter leave the gh out.

Wear a boot upon your foot.
Root can never rhyme with soot.
In muscle, sc is s,
In muscular, it's sk, yes!
Choir must always rhyme with wire,
That again, will rhyme with liar.
Then, remember it's address,
With an accent like possess.
G in sign must silent be,
In signature, pronounce the g.

Please remember, say towards
Just as if it rhymed with boards.
Weight's like wait, but not like height,
Which should always rhyme with might.
Sew is just the same as so,
Tie a ribbon in a bow.
When you meet the queen you bow,
Which again must rhyme with how.
In perfect English make a start,
Learn this little rhyme by heart.

English as she is worst spoke

Rummaging through my old piles of paper, I've found this treasure. Check it out!

The English language has been taking a terrible pounding, according to an EC investigation reported in the Wall Street Journal. The report provided a charge list of grievous bodily harm inflicted on the Queen's English by hotels and other businesses. A notice in one Japanese hotel told guests: "You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid." In Paris, visitors were posed with an ethical problem, "Please leave your values at the front desk", while diners at an Acapulco hotel had their thirst slaked by a notice saying, "The manager has personally passed all the water served here". Visitors to a zoo in Budapest were exhorted not to "feed the animals. If you have any suitable food, give it to the guard on duty." In Hong Kong a dentist extracted teeth "by the latest Methodists", and in Copenhagen an airline office promised to "take your bags and send them in all directions". The laundry industry fared no better. A Bangkok dry cleaner extolled customers to "Drop your trousers here for best results", while a Roman laundry was equally brazen: "Ladies," it declared, "leave your clothes here and spend the afternoon having a good time".

Source: Unidentified. If anyone knows where this excerpt is from, please let me know.

Food for Thought

• All those who believe in psychokinesis raise my hand.
• Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
• If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
• Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
• Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.
• Drink 'til (s)he's cute, but stop before the wedding.
• Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
• If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
• A conclusion is the place where you get tired of thinking.
• Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
• He who hesitates is probably right.
• No one is listening until you make a mistake.
• Success always occurs in private, and failure in full view.
• To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.
• To succeed in politics, it is often necessary to rise above your principles.
• Two wrongs are only the beginning.
• You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.
• Monday is an awful way to spend 1/7th of your life.
• A clear conscience is usually the sign of bad memory.
  

Madge the Cat

Some who read this weblog might have thought that I'm such a dork, doing nothing but watching films and reading books. Mind you, I've got a life too, you know, and it's time I introduced you to our little Madge. She's a beautiful tabby, who loves to watch birds flying by and pee right after the litter tray is cleared.

I fell in love with her at first sight when I saw her at CU's Friday Fair. Thanks are due to those people at the SOS (an animal rescue institute), without whom this little Madge would almost certainly still be left to fend for herself somewhere in Bangkok.

FYI, Madge loves the Gourmet Seafood Flavour Whiskas. (We did try all sorts of flavour but turns out this is the only one she favours.) She also likes me to rub my chin against the back of her neck. She finds ribbons irresistible. She loves to leave a lot of fur around, which makes Mat mad.

She also looks somewhat like the cat on the cover of Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore (Thai version). But I guess she's not as alienated as those characters in that novel.

A Guide to Pronunciation

I've come across this poem while surfing the net. The poem is called 'The Chaos' and it's written by Gerald Nolst Trenite (1870-1946), a Dutchman. It's meant to show how unruly and whimsical English pronunciation is.

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Pray console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear sew it.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Feoffer does, and zephyr, heifer.

Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.

Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,

Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation -- think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough --
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

Mother Figure

I thought I was not going to complain but hey this has gone too far. For the past couple of weeks, it was my destiny to meet two powerful figures, both mothers, whose sons were King's scholarship grantees. Of course, I have nothing against the King's scholarship, as it was established back hundred years ago and loads of people having this have done good to the country.

But seeing these mommies flexing their muscles just gave me creeps.

I had a chance to meet the first mother when her son was interested in what I was doing in my professional avatar. Of course she couldn't stop when she had a chance to brag about her son, but at least she had a modicum of intellect to disguise it quite well in a veneer of recognising her son's success. But what I couldn't understand was that after our talk she did take hold of her son's hand and lead him around like he's a soulless moron. Come on! Your son's got King's scholarship. You should let him get a life, an independent one at that. Maybe she forgot that the mother didn't live forever, but there'll be someday in the future that he'll have no one to guide him. Well, that's when the role will be relegated to the wife, I guess.

As I left from the first couple, hoping that my life couldn't fare any worse, fate led me to meet another power-lust mother, this time in a one-woman show without her son. It was a PEN event where they announced short-listed winners and her son happened to be one of them. Sadly, he's in the States and "couldn't find a flight back" so she needed to jump onto the stage herself, blabbering away about her son's magisterial (almost god-like) capabilities. To the audiences' dismay, she talked about how she became a person who distracted him from his study and persuaded him to go to a concert instead. We all knew that she tried to trick everyone into thinking how humbly she tried to portray all this, that her son was good at dancing apart from studying to become a meteorologist. In the end, I felt embarrassed for her that I decided to leave prematurely, even though the novel her son wrote was one of my favourite in the list. It's a shame that he couldn't make it. But who knows, if he had made it with his mother there, he might have regretted it. The audience felt the same: they went to the event, hoping to know more about the novel, but instead they ended up being forced to pry into a private business of how a mother has destroyed a son's life willingly and innocently.

I'm glad I'm not going to be a mother, gender-wise and attitude-wise. I know that I'm far too uncaring (and too sensitive at the same time) to be one. I hate to destroy people I love "innocently" and "with all good intentions". I wonder what the future will hold for these two sons but I wish them for the best. One piece of advice: get rid of your mom before it's too late!

Aliens

Those of you who live in Thailand would have probably heard by now the news about an alien from the sky in the shape of an almost transparent worm-like cone. The moment the media knew about it, they rushed to the scene and the rest is history. The owner appeared on TV and tried to safeguard her new treasure, believing that it was something given by gods to cure her illness. Loads of people rushed to her place, some with incense sticks and candles, asking for "divine numbers" for the next lottery draw.

However, soon after, it turned out that the alien was just a cool-aid pad left in the water. The chemicals in the pad will naturally form an ice-like layer around the pad. Now loads of people, especially those in the city, stormed into their nearest 7-elevens to get these pads (which are now being sold like hot cake) and enjoy their new home-made aliens.

I've found this event rather amusing and thought-provoking. It shows how differently people in the country and the city approach the same object of mystery. The former group, still holding a deep faith in pre-Buddhist paganism, reluctantly submits this object for scientific inspection, whereas the latter group, with a rather alarmingly high level of irreverence, does not seem to take this event seriously or question why almost every popular newspaper choose to give space to this type of news. They rather think that this is an opportunity for a new toy and not a situation showcasing gullibility and sheer nonsense. Maybe it's just that the culture of serious criticism has yet to be formulated, especially among those middle-class kids heading towards their nearest convenience stores to get these pads.

Saying that, I think I'll go to buy one of these pads tomorrow and make my own little alien. I think my colleagues would love to see it! :)