Morons: Blessing in Disguise

There's this TV show called Anges de la Télé-réalité in France which chronicles the day-to-day happenings in the life of a group of young, relatively attractive but extremely stupid people, not unlike MTV's Jersey Shore. Nobody I know has any kind words to say about this sad excuse of a TV show, but almost everybody knows it. This show has spawned some catchphrases which, ironically, are mainly used by the same people who hate the show.

It made me wonder: how is it that a dumpster of a show ridiculed for its sheer idiocy can get such high ratings? This must mean that people are still flocking to watch despite all the negativity surrounding it. There must be a whole lot of them who actually like the show for whatever reason and watching it becomes a guilty pleasure. So I decided to dig deeper, going on to internet message boards, talking to people around me, and tuning in to talk shows which are bound to discuss this show. The hatred towards Anges de la Télé-réalité is unanimous, no doubt. So at first I concluded that fascination was the main reason. People are just fascinated by wreckage (in this case, the presumed brain damage suffered by the cast), the exact reason why we can't look away from a car crash.

But is that all there is? Fascination gets old fast. I was fascinated the first time I saw a sword-eater doing his trick on the street, but would I watch a TV show of that guy doing the same thing every day? Definitely not. After a while I'd just secretly wish the guy would choke on his sword already. So fascination is too flimsy a thread to sustain an audience of a TV show.

What is it then?

I decided to dig even deeper into the psyche of the French in general, what they like and what they don't like, what unifies them and what divides them. (Spoiler alert: Sweeping generalisation of the French coming up!) One thing stood out: their love for sounding intelligent which may stem from either a staggering superiority complex, or self-doubt. Many times I have been confronted with people who would used the entire Obscure Obnoxious French Words Dictionary in the hope of shutting me up. It's like they are born with Schopenhauer's The Art of Being Right pre-installed in their heads. The French have chauvinism and sarcasm down to a science, and damn do they know how to be sassy. In short, arguing with them sometimes feels like listening to a repeated chorus of "Look how smart I am!".

That's when it hit me: the French innate belief that they are all naturally smarter than everyone else still needs polishing sometimes, and shows like this make them feel better about themselves. It's really reassuring to see certified morons broadcast their lives on national television because it provides a huge ego boost for everyone. It's like the whole country is circle-jerking while watching the show, finally convinced of their superior IQ. As much as they hate the show, they wholeheartedly love the morons for merely existing and making everybody else look better.

I don't know if I hit it right on the nail, but I'm pretty sure that's it.

The Badge Conundrum

At work everyone has a personal badge used to enter the buildings, use the elevators, basically to have access to anything. The smart thing to do is to have it on you all the time which is why they also provide us with lanyards so we can have our badges around our necks. Surprisingly, people prefer keeping them in their pockets or just holding them in their hands because, you know, wearing your badge around your neck is "nerdy".

I still remember in high school, people would only put their name tags on display during morning assemblies or spot-checks, while the rest of the time people would bend over backwards just to hide their name tags for fear of looking like nerds. Some would turn their name tags around so the names weren't visible, and some would just keep them in their shirt pockets. The coolest guys already had their names etched on everybody's mind anyway so wearing name tags was beyond redundant to these people. Breaking rules, no matter how petty, was an essential part of being accepted by the cool kids. I had friends whose stationary sets consisted of a single pen because apparently having a pencil case was uncool. Why walk around carrying unnecessary stuff like rulers and erasers when you could just mooch off of the nerds who had them?

I, on the other hand, was already a huge nerd back then so I didn't bother breaking simple rules because I reckoned they made complete sense. I always wore my name tag with pride, never went to school without socks, never kept my hair long, never had 'cool' off-coloured pants that were not quite as olive as they needed to be, always had my shirt neatly tucked in my pants, so on and so forth. I figured that breaking rules was really more of a hassle than anything else and I was too lazy to go out of my way to look cool.

Fast forward 9 years, I am now working amongst highly intelligent adults and high school inferiority complex is way behind me, so it's still bewildering to see people trying their hardest to conceal their badges like it's some sort of skin disease. You can't spell school without cool, so it made sense back then. But now it just seems utterly stupid. In a company where high-tech airplanes are the default screensavers and everybody could spit out Star Wars quotes on command, it's safe to say that everybody here is already a bona fide gigantic nerd. We were hired because of it. If you think wearing your badge around your neck would make you a dork, well sorry but.. that ship has sailed long ago my friend. You can hide your badge all you want, but your fluency in at least 5 programming languages is proof enough that you're one of us.

I've made peace with my geekiness and now I embrace it fully, so it's hilarious to see others still struggling with their inner nerds. Or maybe, just maybe, they are so afraid that displaying their badges would burst their nerd-o-meter and they would be catapulted onto Nerd Planet with no way of getting back down. In that case, I hold nothing against them.

The Sweetest Mother of All Evil

Sugar is evil.

I've phased out sugar from my diet almost two months ago, and it feels great. Well, technically I still get sugar from my daily intake of carbohydrates (I make sure to keep carbs at a minimum), fruits and milk, so I'm not exactly sugar-free. But I've managed to stay away from sweet cereal, dessert, sugary drinks, sauces, vending machine junk items, and I drink unsweetened coffee, dark as night.

For the longest time my staple breakfast menu was sugary cereal at around 7.30 a.m, inducing an insulin spike in my body. This, in turn, would drive me into a trembling fit at around 11am and I'd find myself racing for the cafeteria. On several occasions, I got dizzy during afternoon classes due to sugar crash, resulting in a trip to the vending machine for a quick sugar fix.

Cutting back on sugar has been a wise decision. I now find myself rarely hungry, and more energetic than before. I can now survive on as low as 1400 kcals per day, and my bowel movements have never been more luscious. I also drink a shitload of water every day, making my pee look like a glistening stream fit for salmon rearing.

Now that spring has finally graced its presence upon the city of Toulouse, I make it a point to go cycling any chance I get and to go for a run every day. I've been doing a 5km run every day for the past week by the Garonne river where the air is pure and the view is just lovely. Toulouse is such a beautiful city with its old, pink buildings and sunny climate, it's a shame that I didn't take up running earlier.



This is Pont des Catalans, the bridge I cross on my daily runs. It's hard to feel tired when the view is this amazing. As much as I'm thrilled that my sojourn in France is coming to an end, mundane stuff such as this bridge always makes me think twice about leaving this country for good. Besides, I'm pretty certain that once I set foot on Malaysian soil, sugar is going to get to me and never leaving.

Given my genetic predisposition for diabetes (both sides of my family have had a history with this bitch of a disease), I can't help feeling that unless I do something about it, sooner or later it's going to get me.

Ted

I've been watching a lot of messed up films back-to-back this weekend so I thought I needed to watch something more mellow, maybe a comedy, to retrieve my faith in humanity. A quick search on Google returned a lot of recommendations for Ted, one of the highest-grossing films of last year. Yeah, why not. A story about a good-for-nothing guy whose best friend is a vulgar pothead teddy bear. Original? I think so. Even Roger Ebert, I mean, the late Roger Ebert thought it was pretty damn funny, and I've always trusted his taste in movies.

Well, big mistake. I found Ted neither funny nor original. The script is lazy, at best. Too many references on today's pop culture is the quintessential attribute of lazy writing. Yeah, poking fun at Justin Bieber and Katy Perry might be somewhat funny now, but I doubt these jokes can stand the test of time, and I'm not talking about decades to come. I bet in 5 years, people will forget who these people are and the jokes will become obsolete.

Then again, it's a Seth Macfarlane movie. I should have seen that coming. I've never found Family Guy particularly funny, and the running gags get old really fast. Ted sometimes feels rushed and lost in its own mediocre storyline. Whenever that happens, they will resort to cheap non sequiturs like the flimsy filler subplots of Patrick Warburton's and Ryan Reynolds' cameo as a gay couple, or the appearance of Sam Jones from Flash Gordon doing shots and snorting coke.

To be honest, the reason why it took me this long to finally give Ted a watch was because I knew exactly how the story was going to unfold and I didn't find the original idea appealing. But again, I was beaten by an overwhelming majority of people who enjoyed it, so I finally thought yeah, let's give it a go. Disappointment ensues. Even Giovanni Ribisi can't save it.

The only redeeming factor of Ted, and also the only reason why I didn't turn of my VLC player midway through (the internet pirate equivalent of walking out of the movie theater) was Mila Kunis. She's just really, really, really, really hot. And she speaks fluent Russian too, which for some reason amplifies her hotness. To top it off, she's also a good actress. I have to salute the producers for casting her, it's as if they knew that the storyline was sub-par so they needed an American-Ukrainian bombshell to distract the male brain and keep it from thinking straight.

I give Ted 7/10, with a breakdown of 0.02/10 for the storyline, 0.08/10 for the fact that Ted looks extremely lifelike, and 6/10 for Mila Kunis. I'm pretty sure this is exactly how it got the 7.1/10 rating on IMDb anyway.

Today I Am No Longer A Functional Human Being

I'm a sucker for graphic horror movies. Gore, chainsaw, decapitation, sick cannibals, you name it, I've seen it. I've seen them all.

Well, at least that's what I thought.

Tonight proved otherwise. I just went through the most disturbing, gut-wrenching, mind-numbingly sick and twisted cinematic experience. It was so disgusting I think I officially just became dead inside, more so than I ever was. This movie is so fucked up it makes The Human Centipede look like The Sound of Music.

I can't believe I let myself watch the whole thing. For the entire duration of the film I was like a deer in the headlights, can't keep watching but can't look away. I am now just a hollow shell of my former self. I doubt I can ever recover from this.




Serbians are just... fucked up.

My Brain and I

I used to have an incredible memory. I had this ability of finding space in my brain to store the most trivial stuff I came across, and because of that I think I'm running out of memory space. Sometimes I wish I could delete some stuff in my head to make room for new stuff. It is frustrating when I keep forgetting super important things like deadlines and meetings, all the while still remembering stupid rubbish I committed to memory 11 years ago such as all the names of the women in Mambo No. 5 with their respective attributes, and in the correct order.

Sometimes I don't even understand my own brain. I could be analysing super complicated numerical analysis stuff for a whole week to get a full grasp of it for work purposes, but comes the weekend, my brain would conveniently forget everything I just acquired. But of course, that embarrassing thing that happened to me a billion years ago? Yeah, still remember every detail of it like it was yesterday. Get your shit together, brain, and sort out your fucking priorities.

Maybe this is an early onset of Alzheimer, in which case I'm screwed. But I really just think that I need to free up some space up there.

But my fucked up memory could also be awesome sometimes. The other day a colleague asked me to help her with a German technical document about composite materials (she doesn't speak any German). So I went over, had a quick look at it, and somehow my brain managed to dig up a lot of German vocabulary that I thought was already history. I was especially surprised when it managed to correctly translate the word Rücktrocknung because honestly, I don't remember ever having learned the word. Yeah, I speak of my brain as a detached part of me because most of the time it truly feels like it's controlling itself and I'm just in for the ride.

Now if only it could ignore stupid trivia and focus on things I actually need to remember, that would be great.

The Iron Lady

I watched The Iron Lady on a flight last year, and didn't like it one bit. Yeah, yeah, Meryl Streep is a great actress, what else is new? The woman could play a kitchen sink and everyone would be in tears. She should be given a lifetime achievement award of some sort already and then we could all move on. The movie itself was a drag.

Well I might have been a bit biased when watching the movie because I already established a strong dislike towards Margaret Thatcher since I read about her a couple of years back. I don't really remember what good things she did while she was in power, but she used to be a supporter of the Apartheid in South Africa. To me, that one detail about her eclipses any good thing she ever did, if any.

And I don't really get how people say she paved the way for female leaders everywhere. If anyone should get that accolade, it should be Hatshepsut, the first and longest reigning female pharaoh, and that was over 3500 years ago. And she did a damn good job governing Ancient Egypt. There has been a lot of great female figures ever since, so why are we fixating on this one woman as though she changed the face of the Earth?

I'm not trying to be disrespectful, because a life is a life and her death (or anyone else's for that matter) shouldn't be celebrated. But I've been seeing a lot of Tweets and Facebook statuses praising this woman in the wake of her passing. Just because she was the longest-serving British Prime Minister and a woman doesn't make her the greatest one. Well, to be honest, I don't really understand British politics that much and I really couldn't care less about the debates on Tory or whatever the hell the Brits always yap about. One thing I do know is that Britain is one of the most powerful countries in the world but as of late, their Prime Ministers have all been unremarkable on the world stage. It's safe to say that 10 Downing Street has merely turned into a cross-atlantic extension of the White House.

Well maybe I read the wrong book about her where she was portrayed in a bad light, and I let myself be influenced by the author's own inclination. But for a person as influential as a British Prime Minister, it's one thing not to step up to combat a policy as hideous as the Apartheid, it's another thing to fully support it. To be fair, she did a complete turnaround and opposed the Apartheid towards the end, but only after extreme pressure from all around the world. That's like apologizing for something only because you got caught: it doesn't count.

So there is my opinion about the late Margaret Thatcher. I might be oversimplifying things and I certainly overlooked a lot of great stuff she did. After all, you cannot maintain power in a democratic country for 11  years without doing something right. But I'm pretty sure she doesn't deserve all the credit she's been getting.

For what it's worth, rest in peace Madam Thatcher.


ps: Apparently I've written about her before, also in a relatively bitter tone. Yea, I might need a Thatcher chill pill.