Everything around was simply simple. We don’t see much private cars; there were more kereta sapu than private cars if my memory didn’t betray me. We took bus because it was cheaper, and the conductor was a really nice person with a great smile. Laksa was only 10 cents; my school pocket money was 15 cents, 20 cents and finally 40 cents. I no longer take buses now, laksa is now HK$20 per bowl and my daughter’s pocket money now is HK$20 per day. How time have changed. They say it is something to do with inflation, that might be true but I am thinking of something else.
It is something to do with people doing less and charging more. When I was young, everybody work like shit all day long and paid miserably low….more like you are being paid in terms of speck of dirt. Today we work lesser, and being paid more! Some even work on a newer platform called ‘working at home’. Gee! If my mum were to be like that in those good old days, we get to eat stuffed ‘tau hu’ all the time! What is working at home? More like ‘dream at home’ rather, and create innovative ideas to make all of us working less and getting paid more for doing some other menial stuff. The world has come to accept what I believe is truly neurotic ideas for inept old timers like me. It is call automation. Everything, with the exception of my Caltex Ah Pek, is going towards that direction. I give you a few examples to set your mind rolling:a. Escalators – stand there and wait for 30 seconds and you will arrive at level 2 unless you are Mr. Bean
b. Toilets – pee and press a button. Maintained your seat posture and jets of water will ooze out. Don't not stand up after pressing the buttons, else you will have water on your face
c. Touch-n-go – touch your card against a board, PLUS will bill you later with more chances of over-chargingd. Credit cards – swipe and go. Simple and no hassle with paper money and coins (I hate coins!!!) except when faced robbers you had better remember those 6 alpha numeric PIN
e. Machine car wash – drive through and it squeaky clean at the exit, except if you left your windows opened
f. Digitize dashboard – touch sensors allowing you to switch CD, air-con, lights etc except these little silicon gadgets have short life span. Malaysian are notoriously sustainable in this manner, they use their car even when their cars habitually exhaust a cloud of black fumes
g. Ultra Slim Laptop – they look good, gives you the feel that you are in league with the progress of technology except someone may sit on it……….
h. Hong Kong’s Octopus – nobody leaves home without it. Except if you forget to charge up or lose it, you will find it is gone forever
i. Jacuzzi – you no longer need to go to Japan, your local spa has a series of them. Except those little air holes are places filled with bacteria.
j. Intelligent Lift and Info TV in the Lift – you can’t have these!
Intelligent lift gets you to all floors except your floor. The whole idea of intelligent lift stems out to reduce your travelling time by letting you onto designated floors. What they don't tell you is, you must indicate your floors at the lobby. Well……..chances is that we all rush into the first available lift and that’s when your trouble begins. You go all the way up, and then come down to where you first started. Hops onto another only to find out it wont stop at your floor either. And after many trials and errors you finally managed, if you are lucky, to get where you had originally intended but you are either too late for your appointment or it is time to go home.
Lift with Info TV is really bad because when you are engrossed on the news, you naturally forget your way out. It is also a place where the TV sound may conveniently camouflage someone’s discreet fart.
Computers are another trouble invention. With computers comes email, don't you all dread mails popping out all the time? You write something, you are given a reply almost at the same time it pops out of your computer. Not much of feeling, isn’t it? Unlike those good old days when you waited patiently for a letter of reply. Then there is that all new, blue tooth, blu ray, MP3 or 4, built-in camera etc etc. I never really know how to use them, and I honestly don't know why they are there for. If I want to send something to a person near to me, I would send it via email. Why blue-tooth? In the first place, how on earth do they come up with names like blue-tooth when it is supposingly white! What is the difference between MP3 or 4 and DVDs? And the built-in camera……..ohhhhh I am ugly enough but the camera made me even uglier!
I think one of these days; these creative people from the moons of Saturn will invent a fully automatic head styler. Hey, we used to call them barber, and then we upgraded them to hair stylist, now it should be the head styler! Imagine putting your head into a head chamber with thousands of little razor sharp knife manned by an on-board computer made of silicon chips. At a press of the button, you will hear music through the MP10 with MC Hammer doing the Hippopotamus Jam Ram (hey, they wouldnt call it Hip Hop no more!). At the press of another button, the thousand and 1 knives will start clicking, and in less than 5 seconds you will receive an email telling you the service is done.
It is in the prototype stage, ladies beware
You could also end up like these boys, rather nerd looking!
But if you want hairstyle like his, you need to wait for another 100 years
This oil crisis is going to make our life a living hell. I still remember my first encounter, as a child, of the oil crisis back in 1973. I hear words i don't understand like oil crisis, oil embargo, Arabs etc etc when the said oil price was something like US$23 per barrel! Today it is US$128 per barrel but I don't hear and still don't understand oil crisis, oil embargo or the Arabs. Why huh?
Making our household electrical applicances redundant
Fight Inflation
Drive less but keep our car in good use
Above all, try alternative energy
What is wealth when you are over a certain threshold? You wont be able to use the money, they are just figures but with many many zeros behind the front number. You probably need a hundred accountants to keep track of your wealth for which you, or your future generations, will not be able to use it to the fullest. To get a better perception of this astronomical figure, a US$1 billion is equivalent to length of 5 times the earth's circumference covered by US$100 when aligned edge to edge, or if you start counting U$1 per second, you need ten years to complete this feat, notwithstanding the compounded interest! 
I often told my friends, my siblings and even to new acquaintances, money not spent is not yours. I should make it clear that I am talking in literal terms here. Say how much did you spend this year? “Oh! Let me see, I spent a million on LV on one of our spontaneous jest in Paris and won the bet because I spent a million bucks in under 2 hours. And a couple of thousands euros at Hotel De Paris in Monte Carlo, serenade with a choice of vintage wine and won handsomely at the baccarat table. Auctioned at Christie’s for a few bargain prices portraits and sold recently with an unexpected profit margin. And………..all in all, I did not spend a cent from my coffer, come to think of it, love.” See, it is still not your money!! Geram lah!!!
I am not rich per say, but I am also not poor on the very same par. I can’t say I will be a billionaire in my living years but I will say I won’t be in the billionaires’ club even when I have long gone to heaven. Don't get me wrong, I am no sour grape or a green eyes monster (as my younger sister so profoundly puts it), but I do care about the milestones to chart a few dollars in my journey of life. I am happy if I have $10 million in the bank and I will not be any happier if I have $100 million in the same bank. Indeed, I can only cope with a limited number of zeroes in my bank account else the excitement will increase with my blood pressure.
Given the fact I am not hungry for anything more than 7 zeroes, I reckoned I will be wealthier if I can have the best health than anything greater than 8 zeroes. You can either agree with me or dispute my claim as ludicrously illogical. I have just calculated my life-time savings, which is about 1.01 billion Vietnamese dung (ehhh…sorry Dong). I am now in the same league as the rest of the billionaires in Malaysia; perhaps Forbes should now consider listing my name at the very bottom.
Latest list of Forbes Malaysia Billionaires
Incidentally, why do we insist on US$ as the benchmark? Why can’t we have the Vietnamese Dong instead? It will certainly make our esteem a bit more sweeter and make at least a couple of millions of us billionaires except for my poor niece who squandered her would-be billion dungs on Hari Botak and the sequels of half baked potatoes! Or we could also use the ringgit as the benchmark, and it would make a further handful of people in dire need of explanation as to how they make their billions! ding ding!!!! 
The US mustered all efforts to refrain from calling a lie a lie; they used more tactful terms to avoid the obvious. They use words like:
Cyclone Nargis was heading for Bangladesh but took a 90ยบ turn and headed towards the Irrawaddy delta without any warning. The devastation that ensued needs no further reports. In short, either Burma was caught off-guard or the country just doesn't have the infrastructure to withstand the on-slaughter. Over in China, the Sichuan Basin is known to be notoriously active, tectonically speaking. The Longmenshan fault is very active and has been constantly monitored for any seismic activity. The possibility of a major quake coming is then known well before it came. In the aftermath of the quake, the seismological institute predict a massive aftershock to occur at 2pm 13th May, amongst the 2000 over aftershocks. The massive aftershock came at 3pm and on a Richter scale of 6.1. I quote this example to show how much China knew about earthquakes and, on a similar scale, how little Burma knew about cyclones. 
Once the awareness got into their system, they started to blog and to share their views. Blogging is free in the first place, it is also the trend and you are also free to talk about anything under the sun. But more importantly it frees you from those boring social gatherings or getting yourself trapped in the worst ever flash flood in town. And when everyone started to say what they had in mind, the topics got hotter. Then one fine day, it just happened, the impossible has become a reality. Political analysts from the world over capitalized on the occasion and coined the terms ‘change’, ‘ripples’, ‘tsunamis’ and many others endless in-words of the day. To some, perhaps peasant like me; it is still the same analogy of getting the change from Starbucks.
The wave of transformation, however, has taken the majority were taken by surprise and to an unprecedented scale. There were talks, and more talks, getting bolder by the day through the static or electronic media. As sudden as it came, most of them still in the hangover state, a story-teller was charged. A charge no one knew and understood for some unknown reasons but becoming more apparent as the drama unfolds.
To me, this is no game of chess, nor is it a game of poker. It’s a game called Bullshit. It is a simple game where he who bluffs the most ends up a winner. He who attempts to say the truth, or implicitly hinted the truth, is the loser. As simple as it may seemed, the complications arose when the person who had been ‘quoted’ as speaking the truth now lied about things he may not have in his bag of tricks.
Since the game of Bullshit is getting so much publicity, it is also high time to rename the name of the game. Some thought it was really a dirty game because the whole game is about saying something immorally wrong to be a winner. Some thought otherwise because the legal eagles and the politicians are separated by a very fine line, and they really know how to play the game of Bullshit. It is also a game by two players, but usually attracts enormous audience, for some strange reasons. But by and large, it was decided that the Latin equivalent name for the game is to be adopted since it is becoming too popular. Bullshit hence was renamed as Taurus Fimus. The grandeur of Latin seems to have masked the dirtiness of the game thus far. Sounds better, is it not? 
I think I have said enough and play this game of Taurus Fimus in the mildest manner without hurting anyone except making all of us a little bit more conscious on our peers ‘intellectual’ lies. In the words of good old Abe, “You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time”. Q.E.D (Quod erat demonstrandum). .bmp)
