An Honest Confession

Dear Blog,

Please accept my apologies for not updating you. I've been too busy with work that I spent my free time doing what I thought was necessary to keep my sanity. Will be back soon!

Shuks

Mrs. Trunchbull

DBKL is back! Ever since they completed the road-widening works on Jalan Sri Semantan 1 to accommodate more parking spaces, the hungry men in blue has returned. This time, they brought Mrs. Trunchbull along to tow the cars away.

Ariff jokingly (I hope!) told the makcik to tow my car away, but got told off and asked to shut-up instead. Way to go ma’am!!! :P

Jokes aside, a car did get towed away. In fact, I was the one who sent a mass email to the whole office. Thinking that I will be doing the owner a favour by letting him/her know about the bad news, rather than having thought their car was stolen, I felt good… until the “read reply” messages started bouncing back furiously into my mailbox… I forgot to turn off the “Request Read receipt” mode!!! Not a pretty sight considering the number of staff in the group… Argh!!!

Alchohology

A colleague forwarded this to me. I reckon, either it was written by a beer drinkin’ female journalist who hates Irish men, or, the fifty bartenders interviewed for this survey were bias barmaids… read on!

A recent magazine survey, interviewed fifty bartenders and they were asked if they could identify a customer's personality on what drinks they ordered? Although interviewed separately, they concurred on almost all counts. The results:

If Women Drink…

1. Beer
Personality: Casual, low maintenance; down to earth.
Approach: Challenge her to a game of pool.

2. Cocktails or Blender drinks with umbrella
Personality: Flaky, annoying, dizzy, and a pain in the ass.
Approach: Avoid her, unless you want to be her cabin boy.

3. Mixed drinks - no umbrellas e.g. Scotch and soda
Personality: Mature, has picky taste; knows what she wants
Approach: If she wants you, she'll send YOU a drink.

4. Water
Personality: Pretentious and is looking for a serious relationship.
Approach: Don't.

5. Wine - (bottled, not 4-litre cask)
Personality: Conservative and classy, sophisticated.
Approach: Try and weave Paris and clothing into the conversation.

6. Bacardi Breezer, Red Square, Archers Cooler, Smirnoff Ice, etc.
Personality: Easy; thinks she is trendy and sophisticated actually has no clue.
Approach: Make her feel smarter than she is... and you're in.

7. Cape Velvet
Personality: Annoying voice; bit of a tart.
Approach: Stand close and mention the alley next to the pub.

8. Shots and Slammers (Tequila, Vodka, Aftershock etc.)
Personality: Hangs around with male work pals or looking to get drunk... and naked.
Approach: Easiest hit in the pub; Nothing to do but wait…

If Men Drink…

1. Cider
He's probably under-aged and wants to get laid.

2. Cheap Domestic Beer
He's poor / a student and wants to get laid.

3. Castle Lager Beer
He likes good beer and wants to get laid.

4. Imported Beer
He's old; likes good beer and wants to get laid.

5. Guinness
The man is a rapist and will get laid one way or another.

6. Water
He just threw up and is trying to wash the taste out of his mouth so that he can still get laid.

7. Wine
He's hoping that the wine thing will give him a sophisticated image and help him get laid.

8. Vodka or Brandy
Extremely horny hound, would shag a warm scarf. Desperate to get laid.

9. Port
Thinks he's sophisticated, secretly likes men and wants to get laid.

10. Whisky
He doesn't give two fucks about anything and will hit anyone who will get in his way of getting laid.

11. Jack Daniels
Not as masculine as the whisky drinker, knows all about feminine activities (knitting, crochet etc.) to weasel himself into getting laid.

12. Rum or Tequila
Likes fighting almost as much as getting laid.

13. Bacardi Breezer, Red Square, Archers Cooler, Smirnoff Ice, etc.
He's gay (blatantly) - don't turn your back or pick up any dropped change.

Someone asked about a girl who drinks champagne and he got:

“High Maintenance Upper-class Socialite”…

or so I thought.

Cheap thrills and Brickfields...

The car bearing no: BGW 1937 please take note that your car screen has been smashed. Kindly attend to it immediately.

Thank you.

Zaida Ya’cob

Not again?!!!

Great. Another visit to not just one police station, but two – one to lodge a report, and the other to repeat the whole story again to an IO in order to initiate an investigation (What investigation?). The only difference was this time, it rained.

It's My Birthday!

The day was flooded with phone calls. And one in particular was an invitation to a family dinner at Sheraton Subang. Luckily, time flew in my favour due to the workload I was handling. Great! Time to meet the family!

As usual, I was fashionably late. But then again, so was everyone… it’s the family norm. Funny, but somehow it works for us ‘coz we always turn up at the same time even if, we’re not on time.

I love family gatherings. It makes me feel so important; being the youngest uncle and all. Not just that, but also the fact that our family is huge! Every time we go out, we always have to split the table… the kids and their au pairs, and the adults… us. Both our parents come from families that value the principles of togetherness and respect – “Big equates Power”. So naturally, our upbringing too was nurtured with these principles we have managed to preserve, and hopefully carry on.

Besides, how often do we get free dinners, eh? :P

Birthday Eve

Nothing much happened today apart from getting mad at Jon for being so insensitive. As a result, I turned into a self-righteous bitch that barked at everyone the whole afternoon, just because tomorrow is my birthday.

We played Taboo! again that night. It was a wonderful night. Ariff, Timoer, Nadia, Lyn and Adrinna were around to wish me Happy Birthday when the clock ticked past. We toasted to the occasion with a bottle of Burgundy and chatted the night away.

P/S: Congratulations Timoer & Lyn :P

Baked Beans & Japanese

Thanks to one of Rina’s silly emails, I started the day talking about baked beans and English breakfast, of which the former I have grown to hate.

I managed to catch Nik’s attention and reminisce the days when we woke up to a freezing winter; him in Edinburgh and me in a boarding school in Brighton. The typical breakfast menu would consist of hash browns, bacon, pork and/or chicken sausages, scrambled eggs, French toasts, sautéed mushrooms and onions, some other usual stuff du jour, and last but not least, the baked beans. If I could recall, Nik’s favourite was cooked with a dollop of HP Brown sauce, diced onions, oregano and pepper to taste and a dollop of melted butter, on top of a sunny side up egg laid over 2 pieces of cheese toasties, grated cheddar, garlic butter and 2 thick pieces of wholemeal bread… phew!

It all sounds so yummy doesn’t it? Not for me though. Too much of the same had turned me into a ‘baked-beans-o-phobic’. I can no longer stand the sight, the texture and most importantly, the smell… Buehhhk!!!

Beans aside, I decided to have lunch with Timoer and the girls at Sugimoto. For some work-related reason that day, I was in a foul but polite mood. This odd calamity was even more threatened by the waitress who conveniently, started to misbehave. Let’s just not go there.

The food came and went. Surprisingly, they didn’t taste cheap. For dessert, we had ‘tarot’ and ‘divorce’ served on the table. Come to think of it, we still haven’t finished debating our thoughts on the latter. But at least now I know why Timoer wanted to sit ‘there’. :P

To: The Happy Couple...

It’s now 3 days before my 25th birthday, and I still haven’t made plans to celebrate yet.

Last night, I loaded a big corrugated box into the car. It’s a long-overdue wedding present for the newly weds; a sweet and darling couple I got to know not long ago. I must say, the distinctive ‘senyum kambing’ is merely a façade to… a fiery and aspiring investment banker-cum-strategist extraordinaire.

So, that night he dropped me at my car that’s usually parked in front of Sara’s house, and transferred the goods to his boot as quickly as we could - I swear it might have looked like some illegal activity taking place! :P

Dear Shahrir and Mardiana,

Congratulations! I hope the gift has proven useful in your newly established household. All the best in the years ahead and may God bless you both with everything beautiful…

Kind regards,
Shukor

What is left after smoking 10 joints a day for 30 years...

Claim ONE: "Critical skills related to attention, memory and learning are impaired among heavy users of marijuana . . ."

Most people think of marijuana users as dreamers with the attention span of a gnat and no memory worth the name. Wrong. The picture emerging from psychology labs is that there is at most a kernel of truth in this stereotype, while some studies find no evidence of even subtle mental impairment in heavy users. And even those that do are open to a range of interpretations -- not necessarily worrying to marijuana users.

Take the latest findings on which the above claim is based. Harrison Pope and his team at Harvard University compared 65 college students who smoked marijuana daily with a control group of students who smoked it most every other month. After a drug-free day, the subjects completed a range of standard mental tests. Mostly, differences between the two groups were slight. When it came to remembering lists of words, for example, the heavy users recalled about 1 in 10 fewer words than the light users.

But in one test the heavy users underperformed more noticeably. The test involved watching and mimicking the simple rules used by an experimenter to match cards with coloured shapes on them, and then adapting whenever the rule changed. Students who rarely smoked marijuana mistakenly carried on with the old sorting rule on about 5 out of 100 occasions, while heavy users made about 8 mistakes. Pope takes this seriously. "In the real world," he says, "people have to deal all the time with situations in which rules are changing..."

Fine. But over the years, much stronger claims have surfaced: heavy marijuana users do badly at work or school, are more likely to be delinquent and develop psychiatric problems, or have abnormal brain waves. Time and again, however, such studies encounter the same objection: are the problems caused by smoking marijuana, or is it just that people with problems are more likely to end up using marijuana heavily?

In the case of delinquency, schizophrenia and mental illnesses, the balance of the evidence points to the second explanation. Marijuana doesn't cause the problems, although it may make them worse. Some schizophrenics, for example, are drawn to the drug because it eases their sense of alienation. And most researchers now accept that the evidence linking marijuana to abnormal brain waves vanishes when people with psychiatric problems, illnesses or a history of general drug abuse are excluded from studies.

But what about subtler problems like the card sorting deficiencies? After all, it might just be that smart college students tend to smoke lightly while others smoke heavily. In which case the card sorting results may have little to do with marijuana.

Here opinions diverge. Pope believes the deficiency does have something to with marijuana because his team controlled for such obvious things as IQ differences, psychiatric histories and heavy use of other drugs. But others are not convinced. What worries some critics is that in this study, as in others, the women drug users did so much better than the men in most tests.

Deviant Males, John Morgan, Pharmacologist

"I know of no reason why there should be a gender difference in cognitive response to cannabis," says John Morgan, a pharmacologist at the City University of New York Medical School and co-author of a controversial new book advocating decriminalisation, Marijuana Myths Marijuana Facts. Morgan believes the reason the males underperform in such studies is that they are "deviant" in subtle ways that escape the researchers' notice.

And what if the poor test results do turn out to be linked to marijuana? It doesn't automatically follow that heavy marijuana use is causing long-lasting brain damage. One possibility is that, deprived of their favourite drug for a day, heavy users suffer withdrawal symptoms or become so grumpy and distracted that they do badly in tests. Another is that a single drug-free day is not long enough for the effect of their last smoke to have disappeared. The Harvard team's follow-on experiments, in which marijuana users are being tested over a 28-day "dry" period, should provide answers.

Other research suggests that evidence of dramatic mental decline is unlikely to be found, even as a result of long-term heavy use. Over the past 25 years, Jack Fletcher at the University of Texas in Houston and his colleagues have been visiting Costa Rica to test the mental skills of very heavy users. Although some of them have smoked 10 joints a day for more than 30 years, their ability to learn and remember lists of words is only mildly impaired. And even when struggling with more demanding tasks, such as recalling information while pressing a tapper as fast as possible, their scores fall well within the normal range.

Spot the difference: What cannabis does to memory skills

"The effects are subtle and subclinical," says Brian Page, an anthropologist from the University of Miami, who was involved in the study. "Although they could be bad for somebody who's trying to be an arbitrage trader or Wall Street lawyer." And, Page adds: "People who sell bicycles had better not ride while under the influence."

Or at any rate common sense suggests they should not. The verdict from research into the impact of marijuana on road safety skills is less clear. In Britain as many as 1 in 10 motorists involved in serious accidents test positive for cannabis. And figures as high as 37 per cent have emerged from studies in urban areas of the US. However, many of these drivers also test positive for alcohol, and even the cases involving just cannabis cannot be equated with people driving under the influence because the drug lingers so long in the body.

In driving simulators, marijuana does impair visual skills and mental dexterity. But studies of actual driving show that even high doses of marijuana have less impact than alcohol, perhaps because smoking it doesn't usually make people so reckless. In one study, low doses of marijuana made drivers more cautious.

The same broad message is likely to be true for the subtler, longer-lasting effects of marijuana on the brain. Researchers like Pope and Morgan may look at the data very differently, but they agree about one thing: heavy boozing is worse for your neurons than dope.