why wy?

It's come to the end of the year, and the time to be reflective etc etc but stuff it. I'm just going to enjoy meself, go shopping, party and hopefully get relatively sloshed. Had drinks with gnat and the non-irish half of team williams last night, and would have gone for a second round but my other friends wimped out. Non-journalists, bah!

work-related bit: we use a strange system at work, called coyote (because the old work stations were brown and tan, ha ha) and it has an instant messaging system of sorts built in. The man who oversees it was nice enough to create a little message group for us, back when we were wet-behind-the-ears bright-eyed interns. He called it 95, the year it was started. The message group still works today, which means, counting internships and part-time work, I have been at the company for - cue psycho music zing zing zing - 10 years.

Wah lao, I should have asked for stock options.

It is also strange but cool to see how well my friends have done for themselves. Most of them who are still around are supervising, trying to be patient with newbies and interns who can't string two sentences together or hit spellcheck. In the beginning, I remember getting messages from more senior people on how to write better, I just sent out one of those messages yesterday.

So, may your new year be filled with joy, peace and less stupidity.

I hope everyone is having a good christmas. I feasted on turkey and roast lamb and honest-to-goodness indian food, so I'm not complaining. On Boxing day, I had the most sinful lunch - double deep fried crispy thingies (ngoh hiang) with beer. Definitely need to start exercising - we are planning a diving trip to sipadan and maybe a spot of trekking in two weeks. Before this blog goes on vacation, here's a best books link for people also embarking on long journeys.

I caught The Promise yesterday, and I hope it doesn't get selected for Best Foreign Film. I mean, I like Asian films, but this is embarrassing OTT excess. There was one shot in the movie I thought, yes, that looks like Chen Kaige. (It was a man standing in a doorway with the light streaming down on him.) Everything else was generic CGI prettiness bordering on blandness, cheap-looking shots you expect from a made-for-tv release. I want my $7 back.

I tell you, the meme is the modern equivalent of the chain letter. But since I have been tagged by puck...

Five weird habits that I have:

1. I am extremely fussy about clean pots and pans. I blame my mother.
2. I don't have constipation normally. Everytime I sit at home and try to e-mail, I will feel the urge to go within 30 minutes. Better than papaya or prunes.
3. I will peel off all the sunburnt skin that I can reach, even if it hurts more at the end of the day. I like to try and lift a whole patch of skin, the bigger the better.
4. I can't dance unless I've had at least one drink. Must be my inhibitions.
5. I am anal about my music collection - everything had to be classified alphabetically, now on the ipod, I make sure that there are no blank spaces on the fields, otherwise you get a double entry, because it thinks that Queen and Queen(space) are different. It bugs me to no end.

The rules of this game as they stand:

The first player of this game starts with the topic five weird habits of yourself, and people who get tagged need to write an entry about their five weird habits as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose the next five people to be tagged and link to their web journals. Dont forget to leave a comment in their blog or journal that says You are tagged (assuming they take comments) and tell them to read yours.

And I now bequeath this privilege on Alvin, Karen, Gnat, tyger and team williams.

For those you love a scandal, the hottest brewing right now is the Downfall of NKF. As they say in the heartland, better than Star Wars part 3, the story of how an entire company set up for good was seduced by the dark side of first-class air travel and five figure "study trips" around the world.

There are heaps of links at tomorrow.sg, technorati and here, and good articles at alvin's site, but basically, my australian readers, it is the equivalent of finding out that the royal children's hospital has screwed you over. (note for singaporean readers: the RCH holds a big charity drive every year, similiar to what the NKF does here.)

The NKF was set up to provide cheap dialysis for kidney patients, but over the years morphed into an aggressive team of telemarketers, whose sole aim is to get more donations and build up the charity's reserves (which currently stand at $206 million). It has been run by a man, TT Dorai, who changed it into a personality cult, made it "his little empire'', setting factions against each other. If he liked you, you could get promoted many times a year, see your salary jump from $2k to $12k, and even get backdated pay and $150k bonuses when you leave. If he didn't, he called you a professional beggar (which is a really cruel way to refer to your volunteers). You even get fined for being 5 minutes late for work. The fact that former NKF volunteers are still loyal to him despite all his reported failings proves the man still has a hold on some. To be fair to him, the board members were just as bad, permiting him to run the show the way he did.

And just like a superhero or a greek tragedy, he had a fatal weakness. The worst part is that he could have got away with it for much longer if not for.... his ego.

He had already sued two men for spreading libelious rumours about his first-class travel (which turned out to be true), and won. So when a newspaper mentioned it in a column, buried in so much text that not many would have noticed, Dorai sued again. the inside scoop is that the paper was prepared to settle out of court, even at the very end, but Dorai insisted on turning up to court, in silk shirts no less. And then all the dirt came out (high-priced lawyers can be worth every cent). The joke is that the newspaper should make a contribution to either the charity or the man, as a thank you for giving us so many page ones, ha ha.

There are so many shocking facts to this case that it is impossible to list all.
- his gold taps, like real gold.
- first class travel, which he defended by saying he got it at business class rates. Which begs the question, wouldn't he have saved more if he got business seats at economy rates?
- his enormous salary (upped to $18k a month), 6 month bonus ($60k) and bought-back leave ($73k), company car, insurance policies (beneficiary, his wife, not nkf). Total annual payout - $600k, which is heck of a lot for the head of a charity.
- through some accounting juggle, by refusing a pay increase and bonus payout, he actually GOT MORE MONEY in the end, by s strange combination of backdated pay and special bonus ($30k).
- no proper chain of command, so 48 heads reported directly to him and had no idea what the others were doing.
- he personally went through the appeals for kidney dialysis, and had the power to deny subsidised treatment to patients, instead of having a board to decide.
- treatment wasn't that cheap anyway.
- they claimed at least half of every dollar raised goes to patients, the real figure was 10 cents.
- they claimed to treat more people than they did, and inflated treatment costs (to make them sound more pitiful).
- they got a subsidy on drugs, which they didn't pass on to the patients. Instead, the savings ($1 million a year) went back into the reserves.
- they spent more on fundraising than the legal ratio.
- they gave contracts to companies connected with board members. And continued the contracts even after the companies had not delivered.
- they held massive charity tv events, raising around $5 to $6 million each year, getting starstuck fans and aunties to call in to donate anything fom $5 to $45. A taiwanese boyband got 200 000 calls, which works out to a minimum of $1 million raised.

what is particularly galling for most is that everyone, rich or poor, donated. I remember reading "inspirational" stories of kids who saved up for a whole week to donate their allowance to nkf. They must feel like stiffs now.

It was bound to happen sooner or later... I've maxed out my 30GB ipod. Sigh. The new 60Gb, video model looks tempting and is $728, what I paid for my old one two years ago. I wonder if I can trade it in. Or should I get a portable harddrive? That's the trouble with working, things I would never have considered become affordable. And what I was hoping to be a cheap holiday to either Sipadan or Sri Lanka is rapidly ballooning into something luxurious, measured in US$.

one of my bestest mates got married sunday night and while it was a traditional wedding, there were plenty of laughs to be had. A chinese wedding is traditionally a dawn to dusk thing, with the poor couple rushing from one place to the next, standing in the boiling sun trying not to melt during photo taking sessions, many rounds of drinking over dinner and then, finally, they have to start making grandchildren that very night.

There's a relatively civilised custom called the tea ceremony, which actually involves drinking tea. So your elders (mum, dad, grandparents, older siblings) sit in a chair and the newly married couple have to serve them tea, and address them as grandma, grandpa et al now that they are part of the family. The best part is that they get red packets of money in return but it can become a relatively expensive cup of tea for the giver. The bride sometimes gets presented with jewellery, family heirlooms if you are lucky, but these can be very ugly at times.

Then, there's a uncivilised activity where the groom has to bargain for the bride, he has to pay an auspicious number to take his bride away. This can range from $88 to $8888 (people like 8s). The girl's friends are in the house, the groom and his friends are outside, and the groom gets to go inside if he and his buddies perform a series of stunts. Usually, there is a disgusting drink involved (raw egg, coffee, chilli powder), some physical activity (gaining items, dunking someone in the pond) and plenty of grovelling.

These days, it is a formality more than anything. I mean, you're not going to quibble about money when the dinner's booked, guests are turning up.

I still don't like the practice though.

In the first place, it's a more sophisticated version of being traded for cattle.

Second, the games can often get out of hand. The groom's buddies actually tried to dismantle the gate and sort of broke it, when one of the bride's friends slammed into it. And this was because she was holding on to a baseball bat, one of the items the guys were supposed to get. To be fair, the bat was being wielded in a threatening fashion by the ladies a while earlier. And then the guys took someone from the bride's side hostage and threatened to dunk him in the pond instead...

now you know why wars start.

Third, I have actually heard a story where the groom when, what, so much? Okay see ya later and walked away. A very frantic bride and mother in law called him half an hour later.

So I will not be observing this custom when i get married, unless the money goes to charity and if my aikido buddies are not on joe's side.

When they finally film Iraq: Return of the Bush, guess who has my vote to play Saddam? Poor Mel Gibson, I guess they don't have razors up in the Andes, or where ever he is filming another saga in a little known language.

alvin posted on censorship, and it gave me pause for thought this morning. A former president of Singapore, Devan Nair, just passed away. Three pages of glowing tributes, and I'm sure he was a wonderful father, trade unionist, speaker, leader etc, but all I remember is that he was very very fond of his sundowners. In fact, he had to quit the presidency because he was outed as an alcoholic. I remember the jokes from when I was growing up. But was he really that big a drinker? Nair claims it was all blown out of proportion, because he fell out with the big lee. He died in canada, whether his exile was self-imposed I don't know. So I guess the sad thing is that I am a product of that censorship or propaganda, because I don't know any more about him than he was the drunk president.

Get this: Man looks like he is having a stroke, someone calls for the ambulance. Man becomes nasty, steals ambulance, crashes it and dies. Talk about being dumb.

What's different about this plate?
The amazing roast duck, which comes with crispy pork? Not quite. Notice the total absence of veggies. And I'm not complaining for once. This is one of the few dishes that can turn me into a complete carnivore.

What to get grumpy adults for christmas - an anti-teenager device.

If anyone is wondering about my increased grumpiness, I have started work again at an ungodly hour. Just three times a week, which is how much everyone should work, I reckon.