Dentist = good money

"Hello, I would like to make an appointment for a teeth scaling."

"Of course. Let me check, I'm pretty sure we have an opening somewhere in May....."


Drawback of universal healthcare? All dentists in my town are booked solid before the summer months. I even tried using the "it's urgent" card but that only got me an appointment at an ungodly hour on an April weekday.

That's it. You want good money? Be a dentist.

My Teeth and I

After all these years living in France, I just found out something I would love to have found out a long time ago: teeth scaling fees are covered by social security. In fact, a lot of non-esthetic dental treatment fees are covered.

I have never done teeth scaling before because I didn't think it was necessary since I take really good care of my teeth. From what I read, good teeth brushing and flossing are enough to prevent plaque formations, caries, gingivitis and periodontitis, and God knows how I am a big fan of flossing. One of my guilty pleasures are flossing in front of the TV before breathing, or more precisely seeping air, through the clean gaps between my teeth until I hear the high-pitched whistling that is music to my ear.

It's not just that I want my mouth to be squeaky clean. It's also because one of the things I hate the most in the world is bad breath. You can put me at a fish market for hours I wouldn't bat an eyelid, you can make me lie on a sleeping bag on the street next to a pile of dog shit I'll sleep like a baby, but if you make me talk within striking distance to a guy who has the breath of a jackal, I'll pray that you be crushed by a Russian tank, skinned to the bone by a sushi chef, shot point blank by a seasoned sniper and burned in hell for three thousand years. And I'll throw in the foul-breathed guy in there with you.

Anyways, now that I know I can go for a teeth scaling FOC, I'm just going to go look around for the best looking dental clinic in my town. Might as well go for the best since I'm not paying for anything, right?

Free dental treatments - another thing I'm going to miss when I leave France for good.

Sudirman

I remember hearing Claude François' Comme d'habitude, one of France's all-time favourite songs and the song that had inspired Frank Sinatra's My Way, for the first time in high school during Hari Bahasa Perancis SBP. A few days after my arrival on France's soil six years ago, I heard the song again on the radio.

You can't live in France without hearing Claude François' name mentioned almost every day. He has one of the most recognisable voices in the French music industry, most of his songs have achieved great success, his fan base was (and still is) massive and his iconic status has passed the test of time, even long after his death. Now they are making a film on him (wonder what took them so long). It has not been released yet but people have been talking about it a lot. It is definitely going to slay at the box-office, I can safely bet my left leg on it.

That got me thinking: if I were to make a movie on a Malaysian (dead) iconic celebrity who is to us what Claude François is to the French, who would it be? The answer came to me literally within a split second - Sudirman. And somehow that got me mad. Why hasn't there been a film about the great Sudir? His voice is one of a kind (he'd only need to sneeze and you'd know it's him), almost all of his songs are well-known, he was among the few Malaysian singers whose charisma was able to transcend the race boundaries in Malaysia, and he has the stage presence comparable to that of Freddie Mercury. No, seriously.

With all the crap they've been putting out in the Malaysian film industry, how is it possible that no one has thought of actually making a film about Sudirman? I don't think anyone needs convincing, but if I have to break it down to you fools, here are 5 reasons why a film on Sudirman is such a brilliant idea:

1) This movie would obviously be a financial goldmine. Sudirman's fan base is huge. He was given the Asian No. 1 Performer award in London, he reigned on the Malaysian music charts for God knows how long, and he had the charm of an angel. His songs have themes encompassing a plethora of subjects, most of them dealing with Malaysians' everyday lives. It's no wonder why his songs are very close to people's hearts. How can you not like someone who sings songs with titles like Anak Gembala, Basikal Tua, Aku Penganggur, Horee Horee, Toyol, Chow Kit Road, and of course, Balik Kampung. 

2) A good film needs drama and Sudirman's life has enough drama to create a big enough story arc. His mom was a politician and she died when he was 5, then his father died when he was 24. He passed the bar and became a bona fide practising lawyer but he quit to become a performer. He was hated by the Muslim authorities who wanted to ban every concert he intended to do. His free open air concert in Chow Kit Road gathered a crowd of 100 000 people and created controversy when some fans who turned up fainted and suffocated. He had to fight gay rumours his whole career. He knew he was sick quite sometime before his death but he put on a brave front so his fans would not see his illness. He even asked Habsah Hassan to write a farewell song, Salam Terakhir some time before his death, as if he knew his time was coming. Listening to that song still gives me goosebumps even after all these years because it's hauntingly beautiful and because of these two lines

                 "Usah bertanya mengapa aku mengucap salam terakhir kepadamu
                  Kerna waktu berputaran, bimbang tak berkesempatan..."

3) You want a good example for the kids? This is a good example. Sudirman was not only an excellent entertainer, he was also a smart student at school. So smart that he got a scholarship to do medicine overseas but he refused. And did I tell you he became a lawyer afterwards? Kids today quit school at the age of 15 to pursue their dreams of "nak jadi penyanyi" after being inspired by Akademi Fantasia and Mentor and whatnot. There's nothing wrong with chasing after your dreams, but remember, a country only needs so many singers. We have more celebrities per capita than we do doctors, and to me that is unhealthy. Sudirman finished his studies before becoming a superstar. He was lucky he made it big, but if he hadn't, at least he had his degree to fall back on.


4) Kids today need a lot of education on the prosperous Malay music industry of the olden days. They need to realize that today's local album sales are poor not just because of illegal Internet downloading, an excuse widely used and rehashed by musicians to justify their failures, but mainly because a lot of local musicians are coming up with stinkier shit than ever before. Seriously, I'm all for supporting the local music industry, but I wouldn't be caught dead even illegally downloading some of the shit that's on today's local radio, let alone buy the song. In his heyday, Sudirman could sell more cassettes per day than today's average singer can for their whole career because Sudirman's songs were actually worth buying and listening to on repeat. Malaysians are not stupid. Believe it or not, we are a tough crowd. We know quality when we see it, and we are not afraid to call shit shit. We are honest people, so if you don't deliver, we don't buy. Simple as that. 

5) People love motivational movies. What's more motivational than a movie about a small man who came from a small village, with a stature of merely 147cm tall, who went and conquered a whole nation with his charisma and his voice? This is a truly Malaysian from-rags-to-riches story, and such a beautiful one at that. It's potential is a no-brainer.

There are of course other reasons, but even with these 5 people can see why a Sudirman film needs to be made. Did you know that not long before his death, he was flown to London to record songs for his English album that was supposed to jumpstart his international career? And it was not just at any London studio: it was on Abbey Road. Yes, the one used by The Beatles. That could be the ending of the movie. A tragic death that cuts him short on his path towards international superstardom, as if he knew that us Malaysians preferred to have him as our national treasure and didn't want to share.

So, are you convinced yet?

To Lenina Huxley with Love

I just spent an hour watching Sandra Bullock interviews. Haha.

Sandra Bullock is the epitome of wit and femininity. And a real ball buster which is good if you're a woman wanting to survive in today's world because according to statistics (and today it's all about the statistics concerning women's plight, you know, today being the International Women's Day and all), women have been discriminated against by men for centuries and it's not about to stop. I don't think that is entirely true because women's true enemies are other women and they actually bring each other down, but that's a story for a different day. For now let's focus on Sandra Bullock.

I've been a fan of hers since her Speed days because she was this hot chick who drove a bus. The only thing hotter than a pretty girl driving a bus at full speed is a pretty girl driving a bus at full speed in a golden bikini. But well, you can't have it all. And I don't think that would have fit into the storyline. They should have let Michael Bay direct it. He always finds a way to make hot girls in barely-there clothing somehow look pivotal to a movie's plot.

Then there's Demolition Man, in which Sandra plays a (hot) cop, partnering with Sylvester Stallone. Their mission is to track down a criminal coming from the 90's, who somehow managed to escape cryogenic prison. It's my all-time favourite film. I'm pretty sure I wrote about this already. I've watched it so many times I've lost count. I've been known as someone who romanticizes a lot when it comes to things I like, but I seriously think Demolition Man is the perfect combination of action, comedy and romance.

It's set way into the future but there's no flying cars, talking robots or any of that hologram people bullshit. I hate futuristic movies that have flying personal cars just swooping around, as though flying private vehicles are the hallmark of the future. In our times, we already can have flying cars if we wanted to. But just because we can, doesn't mean we should. People already have more than enough trouble driving bi-dimensionally on the street, can you imagine the massacre if people start driving in the air where they need to also take altitude into account? If two cars have a head-on collision mid-air, they won't just remain stationary mid-air until the pediatrics arrive. They will fall on the ground, endangering the lives of the people below. The reason why we don't have flying cars is not lack of technological advances. It's just common sense.

Anyway, since Demolition Man, I've fallen in love with Sandra Bullock. I didn't like her acting in Crash or The Blind Side, two films for which she was highly acclaimed. She nabbed an Oscar for her performance in the latter. In my opinion, her best performances are in While You Were Sleeping, The Proposal and of course, Demolition Man, for which she got a Razzie nomination for Worst Supporting Actress. Well, Hollywood is a crazy place. I mean, they gave an Oscar to Natalie Portman for Black Swan. As much as I like her, I think her Oscar nod was a big pile of steaming bullshit. So if Sandra got nominated for a Razzie, I'd say at least her acting has got people's attention. That goes to show that even during her debut as an actress, she didn't go unnoticed. After all, no press is bad press, right?

So yeah, I watched her interviews. She's a home girl who takes motherhood very seriously. She's very funny, but very grounded at the same time. And she speaks fluent German. Ooh.

Sandra, if you're reading this (and I know you do), please know that I'm your biggest fan and if I had the money, I would literally fly there and kick that cheating asshole Jesse James' ass. And I'll help you raise your kids and be your partner when you need to practice your lines. Or even kissing scenes if I have to.

Aha.

You're a hair hooker and you don't know it

I met a Norwegian friend in Paris a few weeks ago. She came with a girlfriend whom I didn't know so I introduced myself.

"Oh you're Malaysian?" she asked, eyes twinkling. "My hair is Malaysian too!"

I was puzzled. How is.. umm... well... what? I looked at her very straight, shiny hair. She was black.

"You see, black people don't get to have straight hair. So I had hair extensions put on my head, and the hair is Malaysian. You guys have the best hair, so it's the most expensive on the market. The most expensive hairs in the market today are Brazilian and Malaysian. Google it if you don't believe me."

Inneresting.

"How much did your hair cost?" I asked, not just out of politeness because I was really interested to know. You know, if anything happens to me and I can no longer work, at least I know there's something on my body that people would pay good money for that doesn't require me to do hard work. Wait, isn't that the definition of prostitution?

"I paid around 800 euros for my whole head, and it lasts 6 months. You can get Indian hair for a lot less, but it is not as moisturized as Malaysian hair so it doesn't last as long. And Malaysian hair is a lot shinier."


So I asked her how in hell's name these companies got hold of so much real Malaysian hair, and here comes the crucial bit of information I wish I didn't know.

"It's easy. When Malaysian girls go to the hairdressers, where do you think all the cut hair goes? They don't just sweep it off the floor and throw it away. They sell it. That's why they have to cut your hair properly in order to preserve the length."

Badam bam... pishhhh!

Yeah. If you girls are reading this, please imagine your hair being on another girl's head at the opposite end of the globe. At least a part of your anatomy has travelled the world.

Haha.

Pompeii

"So how did you like Pompeii?" I asked this girl at my hostel in Naples. She was studying arts in Rome, so I assumed she had spent the whole day in Pompeii just admiring the ancient architecture amidst the ruins.

"Well, I'm not gonna lie to you. It was boring," she said. "I know it's kinda amazing that you can still see the remains of a city, like, this used to be a temple, this used to be a school, that used to be a court, and all that stuff. But at the end of the day, you're just walking around looking at rocks."

By that logic, we could look at the paintings at the Louvre and say, "Oh these are just paints mixed together to create the illusion of people." Obviously, I was quite taken aback by her comment, because I had a totally different opinion on Pompeii. You don't go to Pompeii expecting to see Starbucks and big yellow taxis and Chinese take-aways. You go there to see rocks.

"That is the whole point," I said. 'People don't go there to see a city. They go there to mentally put the pieces of rock together and use their imagination to rebuild the city. And it's not just rocks scattered around. You can see pillars with carvings, amphitheatres, houses, bathhouses, and even when it's just rocks, you can still see the solid foundations where the rocks used to be part of great buildings."

"Yeah, they used to be buildings. Now they are merely rocks, very old rocks nonetheless, but still rocks. We were there for 2 hours and after a while we got really bored."

I shrugged. Just because I liked it, doesn't mean everybody has to. It's just a matter of taste, I guess. Besides, it's not that I liked Pompeii. People don't like ruins, the way they don't like paintings. It's more of a fascination. I know I'm fascinated by something when my head is full of unanswered questions about it and when I feel like touching everything. In Pompeii, whenever I touched a wall or a cobblestone, subconsciously there was this voice saying, "You're touching something that is almost two millennia old."

So I could see why the girl was bored, because if you don't have this fascination, you would indeed only see rocks lying around.

Adele

Almost a year ago I got hold of Adele's new album and wrote about how good it was. I'm not a sucker for overly melodramatic, sappy songs but somehow her voice and her unorthodox music caught me. Yes, I said unorthodox, because while sappy love songs were once the bread and butter of the music industry, for the past decade it has been considered somewhat passé. Chart-toppers of the new millennium are upbeat, catchy tunes full of sexual euphemisms repeated over and over again during the course of the songs. The lyrical poverty and lack of vocabulary are generally compensated with overbearing bass sounds and synthesized electronic noises hinged on well-known riffs stolen from oldies. They call it sampling, I call it easy money. Why bother coming up with new melodies if you can rehash old ones and distort them to make them sound fresh again? Yes, Will-I-Am, I'm talking to you.

So when Adele came in, she caught people off-guard. Not a size zero, no cheap publicity stunts and quirky fashion sense à la Lady Gaga, no sexual innuendos in her lyrics and no overblown marketing. Just simple love songs written from a broken heart and her powerhouse voice that made everybody stop and say, "I missed this music. It has soul."

21 is a gorgeous record. Flawless execution of every song. A normal album would have 3 good singles and 7 filler songs to make it a whole. 21 has 17 perfectly good songs, all potential chart toppers. One and Only has the same top-notch production quality as Someone Like You, and Turning Tables is just as good as Set Fire To The Rain. These days, not many albums have that quality.

Another great thing about 21 is its congruity. The album encapsulates a tragic love story and all the songs are related to one another. It might sound trivial, but I like an album with a coherent storyline. Without it, an album is just confusing. Take Rihanna's latest album Loud for example. She sings about her love for sadomasochism in S&M, and then about a rape victim killing her rapist in Man Down before languishing about an unrequited love in California King Bed. All in the same album. While all of those are relatively good songs (the keyword here is 'relatively' because while I'm not an advocate of Rihanna's music, I have to agree her songs are pretty catchy), they don't have anything to do with one another. What gives?

I just realized that this post about Adele is starting to look like a sad excuse to hate on Will-I-Am, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and to a certain extent, all of today's music listeners whose taste in music is questionable. But seriously, there's a reason why Adele is such a huge success. She is just a simple reminder to people that there was a time when artistes were valued by their pure, unadulterated talent and that we could be entertained simply by a singer with a beautiful voice accompanied only by a piano.

Adele brings us back to that moment in time when listening to music also means appreciating the lyrics, and that sex was something people do behind closed doors and doesn't need to be advertised on top of the Billboard charts.

Feelings

I had this long debate with myself this morning, and we (we refers to me and I) started with this one umbrella topic which spawned numerous sub-topics and ended up talking about feelings. Or more precisely, emotions. I (we) saw this documentary about how people measure emotions. Most physicians use ECG responses. Emotions are consequences of hormones secreted from various parts of the brain so they would just localise the area corresponding to an emotion and observe the neuron activity in said area during stimulation.

I found that ridiculous. I mean, it's great that they have found a way into understanding how the brain functions because we know we all could benefit from a cure for Alzheimer's. But the fact that emotions are being put under the microscope makes me feel uneasy. If serious money is being channelled by big companies into research on human emotions, I would like to know why. These companies, no matter how charitable the image they try to project, surely await a greater profit from the results of this research. If they finally found the exact formula for the stimulus that triggers crying in humans, how are they going to exploit this knowledge to their benefit? And at whose expense?

Will we end up being puppets whose emotions can be controlled by global think tanks? If microwaves from mobile phones can alter your brain functions, is it possible that the human brain can actually be remote controlled? Or are they doing it already as we speak?

I can't answer any of these questions, and in a way, I don't really want answers to them. I just like to ponder on them until I move on to something more exciting and I'll forget all about them, you know, the way a cat ferociously plays with feather until he sees a moving laser light and forget the feather ever existed.

One thing I am fairly certain though: one of the best feelings in the world is when you find out the person you like likes you back.

Okay my code has finished compiling so I've got to get back to work.

Somebody Fire This Casting Director

Just saw the cast for the upcoming movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby.

This is what we call a miscast galore. DiCaprio as Gatsby? No. Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan? I don't know who that guy is, but since Baz Luhrmann is Australian, it's only fair that he puts one of his people in the top billings. Isla Fisher is plain annoying, but that's not the main problem with her casting. In the book, Myrtle Wilson is a plump lady. If Hollywood's idea of plump is Isla Fisher, then I reckon that America's obesity problem is just an overblown affair because the obesity threshold is Tina Fey.

After Aishwarya Rai and Freida Pinto, Hollywood realized that putting bigwig Indian actors in their films is an easy way to tap into a massive market of a billion Indian cinema-goers, which explains Anil Kapoor's lame-ass role in Mission Impossible 4. And now, they are putting Amitabh Bhachan in the role of a Jewish master gambler, because you know, Indians and Jews look so much alike they can play each other in movies if it means big bucks for the producers. Next thing you know they'll be putting Natalie Portman in the role of Mowgli from The Jungle Book.

The only good thing going on for this movie is Tobey Maguire. It's far from a spot-on casting but next to the others, the casting of Tobey as Nick Carraway looks like that of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones.

Gemma Ward doesn't count as an actress because she is a languid girl in real life. And she's Australian, so she most probably was personally handpicked by Luhrmann.

What Freedom of Speech Really Is

To some people, one of the most important basic human rights is freedom of speech, and that means being able to express any words or ideas freely without censorship.

Which I think is stupid.

Freedom of speech doesn't mean you can say/write anything you want. As an existentialist, I truly believe that you are free to do whatever you want to as long as you do it responsibly and execute your actions without being offensive to the point of endangering others in any way.

While I was in Trondheim, Norway, a very wise Afghan ex-minister closed one of her speeches by saying, and I'm rephrasing her quote due to bad memory, "Freedom of speech is like a long piece of wood. You can do whatever you want with it, play with it, throw it, or swing it like a whip. As long as it doesn't hit anyone, it's fine. The moment someone gets hurt, that's when you're in the wrong."

The next time I hear someone using freedom of speech to defend their being insolent, instead of applauding them for exercising their rights, I'll just dismiss them as another bigoted imbecile. Like we need any more of those.

At Last

Etta James passed away this week. I've never been a big fan of her voice, but I like some of her songs.

People have been giving tributes to her by singing her most famous song, At Last. I guess it's kind of a tradition that when a famous singer dies, people would pay homage to them by singing their most well-known song at their funeral.

I just find it weirdly inappropriate that when Etta James passed away, everybody starts singing At Last. It almost sounds like we've been waiting for her death for so long that when it finally happened, people are like, "At laaaaaaaaaast!"

But not singing it would also be inappropriate.