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Youngest kid of six with an inferiority and black sheep complex, but determined that God saves not just his soul to heaven but the remainder of his manic-depressive life, so others won't say he became a Christian and remained a jerk.

MAIN THEMES

On identity
i won't be transparent before i'm opaque. and you'll get to know me starting from the small things: who my favourite bands are. what kind of movies i like. who are my heroes.

On Christianity
I’m convinced that when confronted with sincere, real love, the Jesus factor will become obvious. But let’s not plant the cross before we carry it. I’m not trying to con you.

On dreams
Some dreams are meant to be achieved. I know that. But maybe other dreams are meant to drive us, privately. Never known to anyone but ourselves.

OTHER THEMES

On melancholy
It is a sadness that, when choosing between crying and sighing, will choose sighing. I'd almost say that melancholy is being sad about sadness itself.

On memory and nostalgia
It saddens me when life moves forward and people decide that certain things are worth forgetting.

On language
I've learnt that the word irregardless is filed as a non-standard word in the English language. That's a lexicographer's way of saying it's not a real word.

On politics
Crowds are fickle things. So when we stand in the thousands and cry against the present government, do we know who we're actually crying for?

On society
People always want the best for themselves. But I want to sometimes take second or third or fourth best, just so that the loser down the road doesn't always have to come in last. It must feel like shit to always come in last.

On growing old
Leasehold property make me feel sad. It doesn't matter how old the family photos are that you put on your wall. It's your family but it's not really your wall.

On philosophy
I ask you, if God loves everyone, and if God is also incapable of loving evil, how can there be such a thing as an evil man?

On a daily basis
One line quips, like this.

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Tuesday, April 18, 2006

I’ve never been a motorphilic guy.

Sidetrack: Sorry to sidetrack so soon, but a lot of people use the word “auto” when describing “things pertaining to cars”, eg auto shop, or the auto pullout in the newspaper – and that annoys me, cos it’s wrong. “Auto” means “by itself”, and has nothing whatsoever to do with cars. The prefix you’re looking for is “motor”, as used above. Now that’s fifty cents.

And a car for me is only a means to an end, where the end is getting where I want to go. So when I passingly announced over dinner with my friends that “I’m spending my salary on new rims for my car”, it must have sounded like I was possessed by the ghosts of leng chai ah beng past, present and future. But it’s true. I probably do need to splash out on new rims.

Apparently, three out of my four rims are dented. For the equally unmotorphilic, the consequence of this is tri-fold: (1) air might leak out of the tyres, (2) at high speeds, the car might wobble, because the wheel is not a perfect round, and (3) the tyres will wear out unevenly because of said lack of roundness. (Now, that’s a dollar.) And unlike your jinjang correspondent down the road, I’m not too chuffed about this at all.

I asked carol the other day, “Carol, are there any precedents in Malaysia for suing the council, for like, say, potholes wrecking your car?”

It seems that there aren’t. In fact, my junior lawyer correspondent tells me that all the laws will conspire against anyone suing the Malaysian government. Which I guess is foreseeable. But I had it all imagined – it was going to be a landmark decision. Ong v MPPJ, ends up at the High Court as MPPJ v Ong. Lawyers will simply call it The MPPJ case, or affectionately call it the New Rims case. The headlines will read:

MAN SUES COUNCIL FOR NEW RIMS

The man who sued his local council MPPJ for damage to the rims on his car wheels has succeeded when the High Court dismissed the council’s appeal. The damage was said to have been sustained while the respondent, Ong, drove into unexpected potholes in Bandar Utama between January and April 2006. At trial, damages were set at RM520. While the sum is small, and the matter trivial, MPPJ v Ong is a major landmark decision, and is expected to open the floodgates on members of the public bringing lawsuits against negligent town councils. Suffice to say, the New Rims case has changed the entire landscape of tort litigation in Malaysia.

Waaaaaahhh… ok, so that’s not gonna happen. Never mind.

So I was in Eneos, and the kind gentleman there showed me the range of rims they have. It’s ridiculous! I mean, ever heard someone say that they’ve installed “sports rims” on their car? Well now I bloody know why – all the rims they sell are sports rims. Not a single one – NOT ONE – would have looked out of place on a disfigured Wira with blue lights and an exhaust pipe the size of the JB-Singapore water pipe. So of course, it freaked me out, because all the rims cost so much!

“Uhh… ada yang lebih hodoh punye tak?”

I’m led to the cheapest of them all – and it still looks like a sports rim. No wonder it still costs so much.

“Tak. Nak yang betul-betul hodoh punye. Yang skarang ada kat my car tu…”

Ok, so just looking around makes it evident that Eneos isn’t in the business of selling ugly generic rims for cheapskate unmotorphilic 26 year old Chinese guys like me. Fine. My tyres were balder than zidane so I told him to slap four new ones on, paid him five hundred bucks and went on my way.

As for the new rims? Another day, perhaps. Maybe if I’m initiated enough, I’ll go look for some generic proton dealer full of cheap ugly accessories, where the only patrons are clueless aunty-aunty types and where the operators are ageing uncle-uncle types, and the only cars being souped up there are a 1985 Proton Saga and a rusty Tiara. I’ll look at their gear and be greeted by horrendous looking pieces of car parts. Maybe, when I find this shop, I’ll find the rims of my dreams.

Final notes: (1) malay dialogue above grossly exaggerated, and (2) no mummy, my car isn’t falling apart.

Labels: happenings

Genusfrog [ 11:38 am ]

1 Comments:

Actually, suing MPPJ may not be impossible. The council is quite unpopular right now, due to mismanagement and corruption that is now being exposed. You can see some of the proof here:

http://www.sun2surf.com/section.cfm?id=275

Perhaps you will be the V for Vendetta to unit the people, heh...

By Anonymous, at 9:33 am