If we are not supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?

It’s not easy being a pig.

On the one hand, you could feel like a leper in Biblical times, pursued by accusatory chants of “Yuck” or “Unclean!” 

And on the other, you might be regarded affectionately, even covetously. This is always perilous with flashing red lights written all over it. Heading for the hills with all possible haste is generally  recommended, as covetous eyes of that sort generally measure pigs as so much bak kut teh (braised pork ribs).

There’s even more swinish stuff in the adjectives associated with the beast. “Pig-like” is uniformly nasty whether in reference to one’s eyes or one’s behaviour.

But our story belongs to Buffalo, a city in the state of New York and close enough to Canada to render refrigerators redundant during winter. 

More importantly, our pig was a native of Buffalo and had been brought up by its owner, one Norman “Norm” Brezinzki, an affable Polish-American policeman who never met a beer he didn’t drink.

Everybody loved Norm because he loved life and lived it to the fullest. In 2016, for example, he gave up alcohol and women. 

He later confessed it was the “worst day” of his life. 

The life-loving cop also adored his food although he believed “you are what you eat” so he avoided fruit and nuts altogether. He thought steaks were as American as the flag and insisted bacon was an essential food group. 

In short, he did not so much eat food as inhale it and thought sacred cows made the best hamburger. 

He was also deeply prejudiced and felt vegetarians were Communist, homosexual, or both.

Even his friends noticed that farm animals like cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry seemed uneasy in his presence. Once, a goldfish in a neighbour’s tank actually suffered cardiac arrest after Norm stared at it. 

You can see which way this story is heading. By the way, did I mention that the pig he’d nurtured, nourished and fattened so lovingly was named Breakfast?

The same realisation did not escape the perspicacious porker either.  

As a sensitive swine of the sort that had seen Babe, Breakfast could read the writing on the wall. He could add up two and two just as well as the President and he’d noticed the signs: the covetous glances, those greedy eyes and, worse, the furtive sharpening of blades when Norm thought he was asleep.

He knew the stakes as well as anyone. A hen might contribute to bacon and eggs but, for the pig, it was a lifetime’s commitment. 

He was a sensitive grunter and so, as sensitive grunters go, he went. 

In short, Brezinski’s Breakfast Bolted. 

You might say the pig hogged the headlines the next day. 

Residents in Victor Place of Buffalo said their neighbourhood erupted into chaos Wednesday afternoon when “a large pig” ran through the area, chased locals and dug up gardens looking for truffles. 

Why truffles, you might ask? Why not, was the porcine perpetrator’s answer. 

He was terrified of Norm and had been planning the breakout for some time. The cop discovered a tunnel that led under his back fence. 

It was Breakfast’s finest hour or, as Hollywood would have it, The Boar Shank Redemption.

ENDS

“A malaprop walks into a bar looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.“

The joke lies in “malaprop,” a mistaken use of a word in place of a similar- sounding one. It made the sentence very funny.  

In truth, many grammatical oddities in English can be amusing, even banalities like collective nouns. 

 A collective noun is a word used to name a group of people, animals, or things so that they might be treated as a single unit. An example would be a “team” of players.

How might we break this down further?  

In Malaysia we have pesky Mat Rempit and far too many Datuks for love or money. 

Maybe they might be grouped like so: a “nuisance of Rempit” or  an “irrelevance of Datuks.” 

It was a diehard Communist Nikita Khrushchev who dismissed politicians as being the same the world over. “They promise to build a bridge even when there is no river,” he grumbled to then US vice-president Richard Nixon. 

A “mendacity of politicians,” perhaps? 

Collective nouns for people are unsurprising as in a “band of musicians,” or a “flock of tourists.” 

But there is also a “bench of magistrates.” And, an “illusion of magicians” and a “coven of witches”.

Lest we forget, there’s  also a “piety of priests,” a “lying of pardoners,” and a “confederacy of dunces.” 

How would we group women of the night, those red-light temptresses? 

A “stable of prostitutes” perhaps,  even a “warren of whores?”

We up our game considerably  with excellent substitutes such as: a “tray of tarts,” a “flourish of strumpets” and, wait for it, “an anthology of pros.”

Collective  nouns for things or inanimate objects are more prosaic as in a “range of mountains” or a “fleet of ships.”

But there are phrases that trip off the tongue more felicitously such as a “giggle of clowns,” a “quiver of arrows” and a “riot of colour.” 

There’s also a “superfluity of nuns,” an ironic reference to the over-abundance of said species during  medieval times.

But the imaginative reach of the collective noun truly flourishes when used to group animals.

Who was the wordsmith who coined a “murder of crows” or a “parliament of owls.”  

Credit the  linguistic stylist who invented a “pandemonium of parrots” and a “shrewdness of apes.” 

There are stranger associations like a “plague of lemmings.” It’s largely associated with the animal’s propensity to  throw themselves en masse off the cliffs of Madagascar into the seas below. 

An Oxford wag used the trait as an argument for mass suicide. He scribbled this opinion on a bathroom wall in the university: “A 100,000 lemmings can’t be wrong.” 

Indeed, group descriptions pile up. There is a “flamboyance of flamingos”, a “crash of rhinos” and, a “business of ferrets.” 

Owing to their tendency to engage in deep and crafty machination, there is a “conspiracy of lemurs.” 

Finally, there’s an “unkindness of ravens,” a “wisdom of wombats” and a “tower of giraffes.” 

OK, this should satisfy even the most pedantic of pundits. 

ENDS

The only  constant, we are told, is change.

My wife can attest to it. In 1986 and still in her 20s, she led a Malaysian trade mission to Japan to promote our contract shoe-makers.

During the first bilateral meeting, the Japanese hosts belatedly twigged that   Rebecca-san was chairing the session. 

Scandalised, the all-male contingent walked out. In high dudgeon no less! 

Today, my wife’s Japanese friends are incredulous that it ever happened. 

As if to underscore the point, Sanae Takaichi, 64,  got sworn in as Japan’s first woman Prime Minister three days ago. 

That’s not the only change. Over the last 13 years, the yen has lost half its value against the US dollar. The upshot: tourism is booming in the Land of the Rising Sun.

We can vouch for it. Kyoto is so clogged with tourists that walking through its streets last week reminded me of trying to navigate Singapore’s Orchard Road on foot on a Sunday morning, 

There’s a difference: Orchard’s wider. Kyoto was relatively spared the heavy bombing the US dished out to other Japanese cities during the 2nd World War. 

Harry Truman thought, as Kyoto was a seat of Japanese culture, it should be preserved. 

Today, cities like Tokyo, Osaka and Kobe have been made over with skyscrapers and wide boulevards. 

In contrast, Kyoto has no skyscrapers to speak of and is fed through a network of narrow lanes that can make even a taxi ride slightly harrowing.

Throw in thousands of camera-toting,  guidebook-clutching tourists and you can see why walking the streets can be tricky. 

The massive influx of tourists isn’t universally adored. According to news reports, many Kyoto locals resent the intrusion and an attendant loss of privacy. 

If I never see a temple again, it will be too soon! Kyoto has 1,600 temples and our guide Tossy-san seemed determined to eradicate our alarming ignorance about all things Zen Buddhist. 

Tossy-san used to be the quintessential salaryman, a former Sharp executive who’d been to Singapore and the US for work-related trips.

Now 76, he relishes what he does, conducting tours of Kyoto’s shrines and tea-gardens, a sort of Zen-style-ramble through-the-bramble.  

Despite their Unesco Heritage status, the temples left me cold. But the gardens were different. Meticulously raked gravel, carefully  placed rocks, ponds with a bridge, carp and surrounding trees. It was, explained Tossy, meant to conjure a contemplative environment, a rest for the senses, if you like.  

You can get dinner at Lawsons, the Japanese 7-11. And their variety in vending machines is unbelievable – anything from pizza to hot noodles. 

The shinkansen (bullet train) from Kyoto to Tokyo travels at an average 285 km/hour and it’s an instructive ride. 

A crazy quilt of urban life rushes past, almost coming up to the train windows, a jumble of gray: houses, shops, hotels and factories sit cheek by jowl in an unending stream. The scene shifts suddenly,  giving way to fields of rice so green Pas would have cheered.

Then the train hits  Yokohama and it pauses only to begin  zooming out a minute later. Indeed, speed is of the essence: even a minute’s delay can elicit an apology from the service. 

Therefore, a minute before the stop, passengers are advised to get their luggage, the better to leave without delay. 

An almost continuous urban sprawl flashes past now. And it goes all the way to Tokyo.  

That’s why you aren’t surprised to learn Malaysia’s entire population could fit into Greater Tokyo. 

With room to spare too.

ENDS 

The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity – Musician Frank Zappa

Scientists now believe that the primary biological function of breasts is to make males stupid – American columnist Dave Barry

They’ve their own Wikipedia page and have now broken into the Oxford English Dictionary as a genuine, if annoying, collective noun. 

It isn’t funny – according to the Star, they are at least 200,000 strong.

They are the Mat Rempit, Malaysia’s very own Heels-on-Wheels, hooligans on motorcycles, who engage in a variety of sociopathic behavior from causing public disturbances to violent crime. 

They only come out at night and they are the lean and hungry type. The bozos ride noisy motorbikes, are uniformly young and generally comprise ethnic Malays who count bike stunts as a 21st Century form of getting the girl. 

Why do they do it?

 “Why not?” would be the response. Tell that to the poor housing-estate resident  trying to get some sleep amid the roar of souped-up motorcycles racing around his neighborhood at 2 in the morning.

And it will get worse because they are Rebels Without A Pause.

They aren’t too smart. Given the risks of their “sport” – it’s against the law and dangerous to say the least. You’d think a fellow with a modicum of common sense would know better than to race in city traffic at terrifying speeds thereby risking liberty, limb, and life itself. 

It just goes to show that you can never underestimate the power of human stupidity in large groups.

The term “Rempit” is thought to come from “ramp (rev) it” or to ramp up the throttle. Mat is general slang for a young Malay male. 

Although their budgets only allow for the cheapest bikes, most of their vehicles have are extensively modified for greater speed. 

As if to complete their outlaw image, most of these Easy Rider-wannabes don’t have valid licenses, nor do they pay any road taxes. Indeed, police checks often show that many of their bikes are stolen.

The sub-culture isn’t peculiarly Malaysian where this region is concerned.  Similar motorcycle-based gangs exist in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, The Philippines and Cambodia. 

Not surprisingly, it does not exist in strictly-regulated Singapore or the rich and thinly populated Brunei. One suspects Laos and Myanmar have bigger problems – poverty and rebellion for starters – than to worry about hormone-crazed idiots suicidally bent on racing one another into the ground. 

The immediate menace of the Mat Rempit  has receded in Kuala Lumpur. This follows constant police crackdowns after violence by the bikers spiked in the early 2000s. Walkways between buildings also cut snatch thieving considerably.

Old Mat Rempit don’t die, they just putter away. Even so, there is a proposition that says everyone’s path to maturity is weathered by some semblance of “Mat Rempitism.”

Its proof is a form of Murphy’s Law and it goes like this:

Good judgment comes from experience and experience can only come from bad judgment. 

You see? There but for the grace of God, go we. 

ENDS.

The President of the United States isn’t worried about artificial intelligence (AI).

He thought it was no match for natural stupidity. In which case, you could say he had, well, a natural immunity. 

No, the  Overweight, Orange  Oddball did not think AI was a clear and future danger. Neither were the wars in the Middle East or Ukraine, climate change, a possible nuclear Armageddon, or another Covid-style pandemic.

The Rotund Robespierre had been invited to address the 80^th Anniversary of the United Nations  General Assembly. And so he did.  

With some caveats. 

First, he didn’t follow protocol, speaking for an hour instead of the allotted 15 minutes. And he was less than diplomatic. 

If anything, the Pugnacious President pulled out his primer on How-to-Lose-Friends-and-Aggravate-Everyone-You-Didn’t-Care-For-Anyway.  

And what was the major threat facing humanity in the World According to Fatso? 

Going by his speech to UNGA, it was renewable energy. 

The corpulent commander-in-chief was unambiguous about his disdain for climate change. He swept aside two centuries of data with a manly wave of his hand, dismissing the threat as “the biggest con-job ever” and “a hoax.”

The masculine myth-buster went on to assail the UN for pushing the “nonsensical notion.” 

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle said “A lie cannot live.” The poor fellow clearly hadn’t met many politicians.   

The Donald, however, was of a different stripe. The news channel France 24said Trump’s UN speech was “peppered with lies.” 

“Lice?” said His Stoutness in horror. He thought it was bad enough the UN pushed the climate change poppycock and now it was harboring vermin? 

Actually, Fat Head was furious with the UN. He felt he’d been  “sabotaged” by the august body. It was an ingrate, he concluded bitterly, because he had single-handedly settled “seven wars in six months” and it didn’t even notice. Nor was he a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize. 

The “sabotage” was three-pronged, therefore, thought through, and a Clear and Present Danger. 

His escalator had stopped mid-climb: his teleprompter had gone on the blink, and his mike had gone out.  

Prime facie, it was the stuff of treason. The First Twerp’s  bloodthirsty press secretary, Karoline Levitt, enthusiastically agreed threatening “severe punishment” to Whom It May Concern. 

The one thing the portly  POTUS agreed with was his greatness. Don’t believe me? Just ask him.

Indeed, he revealed it to the entire assembly. He predicted ruin to Western countries which allowed unchecked immigration.

“I can tell you I’m really good at this.” he confided modestly to a surprised assembly. His bleak prediction: “All you countries are going to hell!” 

He told them because he knew that he knew. And it seemed to be a person-to-holder thing. 

While decrying the climate-change bunkum, he revealed: “Trump has been right about everything. I don’t mean to sound braggadocious but it’s true.”

He continued in a quieter, even admiring tone, “I have been right about everything,” he said as an awed smile crossed his face, leaping from wrinkle to wrinkle like a nimble mountain goat across the Alpine crags. 

“My work here is done,” thought the portly potentate proudly.  

Not quite though. Before he retired, El Rotundo advised pregnant women to skip Tylenol – the US version of Panadol – if they didn’t want autistic babies. 

That was his genius. Women can sometimes make fools of men but The Donald was strictly a do-it-yourself type. 

ENDS 

If you are a sensitive person, the 21^st Century, with its relentless bombardment of sensory info, may not be the place for you. 

Say you understand the Morse code: a tap dancer would drive you crazy. 

Similarly, all the info out there could make any would-be scientist  unsure. As was Tomaki Kojima who felt he might be indecisive but wasn’t sure.

So when he finally hit on an idea for scientific study, sure enough, it was a doozy.  

Tomaki et al  wondered if painting cows with zebra-like stripes would prevent flies from biting them.  

The Japanese team meticulously put tape on beef cows and then spray-painted them with white stripes.

It was Tomaki-san’s eureka moment: fewer flies were attracted to the cows and they seemed less bothered by said insects. The zebras carped that they knew all along but their grumblings were dismissed. 

There’s only one problem. The intrepid scientist admitted it might be “tricky” applying his findings on a large-scale.

Tomaki-san and his team won this year’s Ig-Nobel Prize for Biology,

Since 1991, the Ig-Nobel Prize has “honoured” research that “first makes people laugh and then makes them think.” 

The Prizes are awarded by actual Nobel laureates with the prize money being another doozy: a solitary banknote for the amount of 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars (USD 0.40). Even so, the note has since become a collector’s item.

Mr Tomaki’s award for a zebra’s fly-resistant powers left both thrilled.

The zebras chastely declined comment but Kojima-san was rapturous. “Unbelievable. Just unbelievable,” gushed the ignoble biologist who painted himself with stripes to honour the occasion. “It’s been my dream.” 

Another penetratingly perspicacious paper pondered the types of pizza lizards preferred to eat. Today’s lizard diet could be tomorrow’s Herpes Defence. Who knows?

The year’s winners, honoured in 10 categories, also include a European group that found drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak a foreign language, and a researcher who studied fingernail growth for decades. He’s come out with a book for the ages: Watching Nails Grow; How To Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting To Kill You. 

The 35th annual Ig-Nobel prize ceremony is organised by the Annals of Improbable Research, a digital magazine that highlights meaningless research weeks before the actual Nobel Prizes are announced.

This year’s ceremony included a section called the 24-second lecture where top researchers explain their work in 24 seconds. 

Among them was Gus Rancatore, who spent most of his time licking an ice cream cone and repeatedly saying yum and Trisha Pasricha, who explained her work studying smartphone use on the toilet and the potential risk for haemorrhoids.

Other winners this year included a group from India that studied whether foul-smelling shoes influenced someone’s experience using a shoe rack, and researchers from the United States and Israel who explored whether eating Teflon is a good way to increase food volume. 

There was also a team of international scientists that looked at whether giving alcohol to bats impaired their ability to fly.

Flying under the influence might be batty? Stranger things have happened. 

Finally, there was an Italian  paper on the physics of pasta sauce. As an aside, this team was bet by a Chinese scientist that it couldn’t make a car out of spaghetti.

To quote one of the Italians: “You should have seen her face when we drove paste.”

ENDS

Waitress: “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!” 

Actress Mae West: “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.” 

Despite its rules, the English language is supple enough for us to have fun with it. 

There’s word play, for instance. Take palindromes which are words or sentences that read the same forwards or backwards. 

Simple ones would be “civic” or “madam.” Or my mother tongue, Malayalam.  

The classier ones would include this most-referenced epigram: A man, a plan, a canal: Panama 

Or this, famously ascribed to Napoleon: Able was I ere I saw Elba. 

This was how the First Meeting began a very, very long time ago: Madam, in Eden, I’m Adam. 

And this guy seems to have a serious problem: Murder for a jar of red rum!

Then there are oxymorons which are phrases where contradictory words are put together to produce an unexpected, even comic, effect. In the original Greek, it literally means “keen stupidity”.

Shakespeare used them (“Sweet Sorrow”). So did the Beatles (“A Hard Day’s Night”) and Paul Simon (“Sound of Silence”).

Some movie titles had them in genuinely intelligent ways. Some  examples would certainly include True Lies; Eyes Wide Shut; and Back to the Future. 

There are funny, even ridiculous, examples. “Friendly fire” isn’t, while “controlled chaos” has never been held in check.  

Another  “definite maybe” is  “civil war.” It’s an absurd and     lunatic phrase. Wars are never mannerly, courteous or polite. If anything, they are frightening, beastly and heartless. 

It gets worse in a nuclear war. In that instance, Abraham Lincoln’s famous condition takes a turn for the hearse, morphing into: “All men are cremated equal”. 

The latter was a pun, craftier jokes that exploit the different meanings of words. Most are self-explanatory as in: my friend drove his expensive car into a tree and saw, first hand, how a   Mercedes bends.  

Life is a series of ups and downs which in jokey fashion might be described thus: One day you’re the best thing since sliced bread; the next, you’re toast.

Rodney Dangerfield was a New York comic famous for delivering killer lines in woebegone fashion: “My ex-wife still misses me but her aim is improving.”

He also had this: “I just found out I’m colour blind. The news came completely out of the green.”

Some jokes come fast and furious: Have you heard about the dyslexic who walked into a bra?

When asked to make a sentence with “lethargy,” TV host Johnny Carson famously replied with a lisp:  “What the world needs is more, not leth-argy”.

And the comic cracked this after the film came out: “Never argue with a dinosaur; you’ll get jurasskicked.”     

Then there’s wit, the ability to come up with intelligently funny, even scathing, stuff. 

This from John Lennon: “So what if I don’t know what apocalypse means? It’s not like it’s the end of the world”.

The poet and writer Dorothy Parker could be sarcastic. She had this to say about Katharine Hepburn’s performance on Broadway: “She ran the  gamut of emotions – from A to B.”

But she could also be practical: “Brevity is the soul of lingerie”.

Even so, the master of the bon mot would have to be English writer, playwright, and full time cynic Oscar Wilde: “Some men cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” 

And there is very little to beat his wry observation:  “True friends stab you in the front.”

ENDS

You know what they say about two wrongs? 

They’re only the beginning. Look at North Korea. First there was Kim Il Sung, a self-professed military genius who invaded South Korea in 1950 only to be booted out at great cost to life, limb and everyone but himself: he continued to flourish as North Korea’s Great Leader. 

He could be counted on to run any economy into the ground. And he did it with a skill not seen since Bernie Madoff. 

His greatest triumph came in 1990 when the North Korean economy collapsed following the break-up of the Soviet Union. 

His successor was the pudgy Kim Jong Il. Dear Leader tried to make North Korea an export-driven economy not unlike Malaysia but his plan of exporting large, ornate and grandiose statues of himself didn’t find a ready market until the self-confessed economic genius hit on the idea of slipping in nuclear bombs as sweeteners. 

The international outrage that followed forced him to reconsider. Even so, he  took comfort in the advice he received from Vladimir Putin: “If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your preferred choice.” 

His son thought he would not follow in the footsteps of  his less-than-illustrious ancestors.

“Not by the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin,” cried North Korea’s soon-to-be Big Enchilada and he turned out to be prescient. The  beefy boy grew into a dumpy despot with more chins than Elizabeth Taylor.

He thought he’d done a better job than his predecessors.

For one thing, his country had more nukes, tanks and soldiers than they had food for the people but that, thought the ample autocrat, was “neither here nor there.” 

The trick now was never to allow his enemies any access to his  heath records.

Example: When Fatso recently met Vlad the Russian in Beijing, the portly plenipotentiary’s staffers wiped down all items he touched. The “Look Ma, no DNA” routine comprises part of security measures to counter foreign spies.

It gets weirder. The corpulent Czar even packs his own toilet. Where Supreme Leader is concerned, it’s “Love Me, Love My Crap.” 

Nothing is beyond belief: he even has his own Patrol for Poop-Protection. 

Such measures, apparently, are standard protocol since the era of Kim’s predecessor, his father Kim Jong Il.  The special toilet and the requisite garbage bags of detritus, waste and cigarette butts are so that a foreign intelligence agency, even a friendly one, does not acquire a sample and test it. 

Apparently, Israel’s Mossad spy agency had charted Yasir Arafat’s complete health profile through a stool sample. 

It’s routine so to speak. In 2019, after a Hanoi summit with U.S. President Donald Trump, Kim’s guards were spotted blocking the floor of his hotel room to clean the room for hours, and taking out items including a bed mattress.

You might say paranoia ran deep in his heart. But the tubby tyrant didn’t care. He knew his enemies were just jealous because “the voices only talked to me.” 

In truth, Korea’s Jabba the Nut was a Marxist so he should have  been an atheist. But he played it safe and declared he was agnostic. 

Even so, he is still a mental mess having been diagnosed as a paranoid dyslexic. The armies of paranoia marched behind his eyes. 

That’s why he spends all his time worrying if there is a Dog. 

ENDS

In the 1960s, the thing was to show patriotism. 

But it had to be carefully stage-managed. Which meant, whenever a Minister of Education visited Seremban, the schools could be relied on to have smiling pupils lining his route waving delighted flags.

The carrot:  we were each rewarded with a paper cup of ice-cold Milo, sweet enough to render a troop of monkeys catatonic with diabetic shock. 

Compulsion has its benefits. Had my school been more democratic, the practice would never have begun.  

To a boy, we loathed it. 

We had to wait at least half an hour before the worthy trundled past complete with sirens, outriders and the paraphernalia of power. We’d be sweating, sticky and hot at a time when air-conditioning, like colour television, was unheard of. It seemed pointless anyway – the car’s windows were usually tinted so you couldn’t see anybody. 

I remember waving an unenthusiastic flag at someone in a big car, said to be Pak Khir, on at least three occasions. 

Many years later, when I met Khir Johari, the amiable, former minister of education, I told him about those compulsory turnouts. To his credit, he looked mortified and apologised immediately. He did that so naturally, I melted. 

Indeed, he turned out to be a very lovely fellow. Moreover, he had a fount of funny stories about Malaysian politics that kept his audience in stitches. He was that rare politician, a former teacher with a  marvelous sense of humour.

Let’s face it, it’s more than I can say for the bunch we got saddled with in the 1980s onward. 

The compulsory conscription of pupils no longer occurs but only because present-day parents no longer countenance its practice.  

But give me the old days anytime. It was easier to be patriotic then. We all went to the same schools, learnt the same things and played the same games. There was a common sense of identity, certainly more than a semblance of it.

The cynical playing up of ethnic and religious differences to win popular support is not a recipe for fostering patriotism on any given day, let alone the nation’s 68^th birthday. 

Why is it impossible to believe that a shopkeeper or anyone else simply made an honest mistake when he flies the flag upside-down? 

The mere fact that they took the trouble to fly the flag at all should win them some appreciation, not condemnation.  

But no, mistakes are punished severely. Two businesses in Johore were ordered closed for 30 days over flag gaffes. 

Now does anyone in his right mind seriously think the same  businesses in Johore might feel inclined to hoist the  national flag again next year? 

People in authority should be less prone to being judgmental. Perhaps leaven small issues with humour instead of vituperation. 

When US actress Raquel Welch donned a bikini made out of the American flag, there were those who grumbled about the propriety of the star spangled swimsuit. 

Nonsense, scoffed the New York Times. If anything, said the paper, it glorified the flag because Ms Welch “is a marvelous breathing embodiment to womankind.”

Happy Merdeka folks. 

ENDS

If we’re familiar with two things, it’s food and where to get the good stuff. 

Before Michelin introduced “two-stars” to indicate “excellent food worthy of a detour,” Kuala Lumpur residents had their own BKT index which showed precisely where, in Klang, a 30 minute drive from KL, the best bah kut teh was served. 

So it came as  no surprise when a national culinary team won gold at the Best National Dishes in the World Competition, held in Dubai last Saturday. 

Yes, it was titled as such. I’d blame the copywriter but maybe that’s Dubai for you.

First, a pointer.  Whenever you patronise a place that uses  “cuisine” instead of “food,” expect your bill to be at least 60% higher than normal. 

Now, back to Dubai. What was the best international dish in the world, according to the Dubai Deemsters? 

It was Nasi Kerabu aka Herb Rice. 

You could say the said rice leaves an impression. It’s in a hue so virulently blue that it may have driven US pop singer Halsey to dye her hair turquoise.

These actions have karmic consequence. The blue tinting of Halsey’s hair was what finished off poor Cyndi Lauper who’d thought orange was the way to go.

Everything’s up in the air now. The fat fruitcake currently occupying the White House has proclaimed Orange the new Plaque so who’s to know how the karmic wheel will spin? 

But I digress as we were talking about the competition, no? Apart from the signature rice dish, the six Malaysian chefs prepared chicken and shrimp dishes delicious enough to convert the heathen. 

The two dishes were also chili-fiery so the sweet and ice-cold cendol served as dessert later may have been such a relief to said judges that it pushed Malaysia over the top. 

As the lead chef said after the fact: “I love it when a plan comes together.” 

He was quoting someone, not the Cannibal for sure, but certainly some Hannibal. 

The Syrians came in second which was no mean feat. Its head chef Youssef Youhanna was already famous for his best-selling book A Device Dodger’s Directory of Damascus but this had to be icing on the cake. 

No, he didn’t make cake but sensibly had opted for what he generally prepared in his house. And everyone knew hummus where the heart is. 

Surprisingly, the Italians were eliminated early: “We just-a needed some Gouda luck.” The Japanese felt bitter thinking they had been given short shrift; “Udon even know our cuisine.”  

But the French were the most outraged. They had been placed third which was wholly unacceptable to a nation that had gifted the baguette to the planet. 

Much to the fury of central banks the world over, they’d also been the people who’d invented the Michelin star system of grading restaurant fare. Over the years, it’s had the effect of boosting food prices and thus, central bank chagrin. 

But the Dubai dilemma was different and delicate. The judges thought alcohol was as necessary to cooking as a bicycle was to a fish. 

“Sacre bleu!” exclaimed the French head chef as he wondered how his coq was to be prepared without the vin? ( His coq au vin was, essentially, bone-in chicken slowly braised in red wine).

“Don’t go bacon my heart,” he  pleaded.

But the judges were unrepentant.

“Dill with it”. 

ENDS