The Curious Diary of Mr Jam

Of dead chickens and strange diseases

The ten plagues of the age of irony are upon us

By Nury Vittachi

*

I was walking through a wet market with my children when we noticed something odd. One whole row of stalls had no customers except us. Even the stallholders seemed to have disappeared. It was the poultry section.

                Then I realized why. “It’s empty because bird flu germs were found at a market on the other side of town,” I told the kids. “Bird flu is a killer disease people catch from uncooked chickens.”

                “Will we die, daddy?”

                “No, dear,” I said, laughing. “Normal people over-react. But not smart people like us. We know germs cannot jump huge distances from a distant food market to our one here.”

                The next day I picked up the newspaper and discovered that germs had jumped from a distant food market to ours.

                I stuck the kids in the shower and washed them till they squeaked.

                Yet this whole bird flu thing bothers me. I find it really difficult to cower at the sight of chicken fillets, although I’ve seen crowds fleeing in terror from the sight of a dearly departed hen.

To me, dead chickens are the stuff of comedians’ valises. I have been known to carry around a rubber chicken myself, and many professional journalists consider it a standard item in their toolkit. How did they become the biggest threat to human life? It can only be clear proof of the existence of the Great Big Sense of Irony in the sky. The same could be said for HIV-AIDS and SARS.

I reckon the only possible explanation is that there must have been some big debate in the Plagues Department of heaven, some time in the 1980s.

                Angel One: I miss the old days, when we would regularly destroy the whole world with massive plagues.

Angel Two: There’s nothing to stop us doing some more. This is the age of irony. Let’s do some ironic plagues.

               Angel One: Great idea—let’s take something that everybody likes, and make it lethal.

                Angel Two: Blue skies? Hello Kitty? How about chocolate?

Angel One: Nah. Everybody already knows sunshine gives you skin cancer and candy is bad for you. How about sex? We could make sex lethal.

                And so HIV-AIDS was created. A few years later, the angels met to see how things had panned out on Earth.

                Angel One: That ironic plague certainly shook things up. Time for another. How about finding some really boring domestic animal and making it lethal?

                Angel Two: You mean like horses or dogs or something?

                Angel One: How about kittens?

                And so SARS was created, along with a rumour that it was carried by felines: thousands of kittens were abandoned across Asia.

                A few years later, the angels met again.

               Angel One: I’ve got an idea for the ultimate ironic plague. We’re going to take the least scary items in the world and make people petrified of them: chicken nuggets.

               And so was created bird flu.  At regular intervals, bird flu panic sweeps through Asia and chicken fast food shops lock their doors.

                Now according to my reading, plagues normally come in sets of ten, so there should be seven more. What’s next? I have no idea, but I’m kind of amused by the image of people backing away in horror whenever they see the Hello Kitty logo.

               Oh.
               You already do?

Facebook changes the way people relate

Poke me and I will friend you, he said

By Nury Vittachi

*

Millions of computer-users around the planet are now communicating with each other through Facebook, which is a sort of on-screen school year book with a page for every person on earth.

That’s fine. But what is not fine is that its bizarre language and conventions are starting to creep into real life. “I poked you. Will you friend me?” someone said to me the other day.

                This is worrying. Here’s how relationships in the future will develop as Facebook becomes increasingly influential.

                Boy meets girl. Boy pokes girl.“Ow! What did you do that for?” she complains.

                “It is how relationships start according to Facebook,” says the boy, whose name is Peter Lee. “Now you have to poke me back.”

                “What if I don’t want to?” says the girl, whose name is Meena Das.

                “If you do, you are allowed to look at my profile,” he replies.

                Curious, she stabs her finger into his shoulder. He immediately turns to stand at a right angle to her so she can see the side of his face. “You can now look at my profile.”

                “You’re weird.”

                “No. Poking is the first stage of a relationship. Studying a person’s profile is the second.”

                “And the third?”

                He pulls out two large pieces of blank white card from an art portfolio bag. “Stage three is to write on each other’s walls.”

                “Do we write poetry? Or do some sort of art?”

                Peter shakes his head. “Nah. We just write inane phrases or we forward ancient jokes.”

She watches to see if he writes anything clever or witty, but he just writes words she doesn’t understand: “Whassup? LOL.” 

               Then he walks purposefully across the road. She follows. They enter the offices of an outdoor advertising company. He leases electronic billboards on top of a building for them both.

“What are we doing this for?”

                “Stage four. Facebook requires us to have a public answer at all times for a question which is asked automatically: ‘What are you doing right now?’ The answer must be in the third person.” He types sentences which appear on the billboard above them: “Peter Lee is typing this sentence. Peter Lee feels the need to go to the toilet. Peter Lee is in the toilet.”

He goes to the toilet.

Two minutes later, he emerges to find that the girl is adjusting her make-up. He starts tapping on the keyboard that operates her electronic billboard. “Meena Das has updated her profile,” he writes.

Meena is impatient. “Can’t we do normal boy-girl stuff, like go on dates and stuff? You give me your phone number and I’ll give you mine.”

Peter shakes his head. “No. Guidelines recommend we don’t exchange personal details. It is not good to get too close to other users you meet through the Facebook friend system. Goodbye.”

She notices that he is walking away with his finger in front of him. “What are you doing?”

               “I am going to go and poke all your friends.”

                She’s outraged. “You can’t do that. They’re my friends.”

“Yes, I can. Now I’m in your network, your friends are my friends too.”

Meena stamps her foot. “Loads of shallow acquaintanceships and inane games, but no real relationships or commitment. This Facebook thing was started by boys, wasn’t it?” she says.

“Yes,” says Peter. “How did you guess?”

Feeding experiments to try on your kids

The Air Baby and other mysteries of dieting

By Nury Vittachi

*

Now here’s one of the great mysteries of modern life. All the westerners in my office keep in shape by cutting noodles and rice from their diets. All the Asians in my office keep in shape by doing exactly the opposite: eating nothing but noodles and rice. How come?

This observation proves one fact conclusively: I spend too much time watching other people in my office eating. It’s the curse of being on a diet.

Here’s another mystery. If you skip 10 desserts over 10 days, you lose one pound. But if you eat one dessert on the 11^th day, you immediately gain one pound. How does that work?

My wife has a penchant for molten chocolate cake, but no longer eats it. She just applies it to her hips.

If you are interested in nutrition, as I am, the most important thing, of course, is to have children. This is because you can use them for weird and bizarre experiments, a process known as “parenting”.

But at first, I couldn’t try out any feeding experiments on my youngest child, who turned out to be an Air Baby. Air Babies refuse to eat normally but extract nutrients from thin air, just like those hydroponic plants you get on tree branches in Sri Lanka. If we ever tried to get her to eat something, she would holler, aggrieved, “But I ate something last month.”

                We took her to a doctor.

               He said that there was a test to see if small children were thriving. He shook her chubby cheeks. “She’s fine,” he said. “At this age, they have an instinctual knowledge of what their bodies need—and it’s more trustworthy than what adults think they need.”

                So we stopped trying to make her eat normal meals and just put food on the table to see what she chose to eat.

              The first day, she ate only plain rice—three bowls of it—but no meat or vegetables. The second day she ate no rice or vegetables—but a whole steak, chopped into tiny bits.

                The third day she ate no rice or meat but no less than four large bowls of dau miu – a Chinese vegetable that’s a bit like spinach.

                We suddenly realized that she was in fact eating a healthy balanced diet, although stretched over a week instead of half an hour like the rest of us.

                This discovery led to me getting a reputation as The God of Parenting. This is how it happened. One Saturday, we invited three other families over for dinner. In the run-up to this, the Air Baby had lived on Ribena fumes on Wednesday, desserts on Thursday, and air on Friday.

As luck would have it, on the day we had guests, she was having a Vegetables Day.

The other parents watched astonished as this tiny child ignored the French fries on the table and just ate vast amounts of greens.

                “Wow! How did you train her to do that?” they asked, their eyes as green as the spinach.

                “Skilled parenting,” I lied.

                In the meantime, I have decided that the best diet advice ever comes from Miss Piggy of Sesame Street fame, who said: “Never eat anything at one sitting that you cannot lift.”

                I am heading to the gym to practice bench-pressing three-kilogram cheesecakes.

We just don't have the mindset

The rock festival tries to come to Asia

By Nury Vittachi

*

Consider the following offer. How would you like to pay a small fortune to sit in a muddy field for two days in damp weather, surrounded by intoxicated strangers, and deafened by a constant barrage of ear-splitting noise?

“Yes, yes, yes!” I hear you say. “Lead me thither.” Congratulations. You are a member of a select group of people known as “rock festival fans”, or, to use the scientific term, dangerously deranged masochists.

Many people just like you will shortly gather at the world’s most famous open-air music party, which starts this Friday at Glastonbury in Britain.
          I mentioned this at a lunch and was amazed when someone said Asia now has identical rock festivals.

Impossible! Abandoning all your inhibitions and rolling around naked in the mud, stoned out of your head—I know full well that that sort of behaviour is de rigueur for westerners from the Queen Mother to the Pope, but I couldn’t see Asians going for it.

So I tracked down people who had actually attended these so-called Asian rock festivals.

First, there’s the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan, which is supposedly an Asian copy of Glastonbury. Hah! In fact, it’s the opposite. Instead of reacting to songs with screaming and violent convulsions (“dancing”), people listen quietly and clap. There are no queues outside the beer tent—but massive ones to drop litter in the correct recycling bins. There’s a spa available in case anyone gets a tiny speck of dirt on them. If any member of the audience accidentally shows an emotion, he has to apologize and commit ritual suicide on stage with a hara-kiri sword.

Then there’s the Beijing Midi, the biggest rock festival in China. You know what decibel levels the bands at Midi reached this year? Zero. Just as organizers were starting to promote it, the authorities cancelled it, terrified that some rock star might publically say or think the word “Tibet”, and thus cause the total collapse of civilization as they know it.

The other music festivals in Asia are either tiny (a sprinkling of obscure bands in a park), or glossy commercial events for yuppies, too embarrassingly twee for true rock fans to be seen dead at.

No, the key element that defines a rock festival is the hippie mindset.

This year, for example, Glastonbury festival-goers have been told that they can only use tent pegs made of potato (this is not a joke), because metal tent pegs upset the cows who use the field the rest of the year. Festival goers won’t mind this. In 2005, the festival was cancelled completely, because the cows weren’t in the mood to vacate the premises (also not a joke).

I was about to conclude that Asia was rock-festival-free when someone told me about Bogra, an Islamic religious festival held in a town in the remote north of Bangladesh. It didn’t sound hopeful—till I heard the details.

Young people of both sexes camp in tents near the venue. They eat chicken curry and rice. They smoke cannabis to help them get into ecstatic states. (BBC journalist Alastair Lawson was told by a pilgrim: “Smoking cannabis is not wrong if it helps you to contemplate God.”)

Everybody stays up all night singing and dancing, and occasionally someone gets a bit overexcited and falls into the curry.

Now that’s a rock festival.

Judges need their beauty sleep

Kindly prove to the court you are alive, your honour

By Nury Vittachi

*

A dramatic controversy is raging in the corridors of international justice. We all know judge and jury have to be present at trials. But do they have to be paying attention? Do they have to be awake? And—here’s the cruncher—do they have to be alive?

These are important issues, particularly since many judges are, to use the recognized medical term, “drooling old codgers”.

                I was alerted to this topic by reader Harsha Wikramasinghe, who told me about a trial which has just been cancelled in Australia.  When the hearing started, court officials were delighted that jury members were taking copious notes. But then they noticed they were writing vertically. It turned out they’d lost interest in the case and had been doing Sudoku. The trial was abandoned.

                However, in a similar case in the same country, a different conclusion was reached. A Judge named Dodd fell asleep during the arguments, but woke up in time to sentence the men in the dock to prison sentences. The case continued, but the men afterwards complained that it was not their fault that their fates bored the judge.

                Senior judges considered the issues and concluded that the law required judges to be physically present—but they didn’t have to be mentally there. Legal expert Robert Moles summed up the finding as good news for judges: “They are entitled to some quality sleep time.”

                Some lawyers sneakily interrupt judges’ beauty sleep. In Ontario, Canada, Judge Ayres Cuoto fell asleep during a 2001 trial. Lawyer Kim Schofield found a copy of The Criminal Code, a 2,136-page hardback, and dropped it onto the desk. “His honour was visibly stirred from his slumber,” she said afterwards.

                In Asia, courts are sleepy places with occasionally bursts of drama for which we wake each other.  For example, there’s one case in my diaries which really should appear in any listing of the world’s most important criminal cases. A furious man stormed into a Sri Lanka court room holding a bag of excrement. He flung it at the judge. But he aimed too high. The substance hit the ceiling fan. You can imagine the mess. This defendant illustrated the truth in a widely used adage (“the s*** hit the fan”) that had surely never before been scientifically tested.

               But what about death? Having been a court reporter, I can testify many judges sit with their eyes closed, unbreathing, for hours on end. It is impossible to tell whether they are awake, asleep or deceased. I remember shaking hands with one judge and I’m sure I could feel rigor mortis in his arm.

               Although the Australian finding says judges are only required to be physically present, consider the incident that took place in the US city of Denver in July last year. Judge Frank G. Henderson died right there on his bench in the middle of a hearing. The case was halted. (I wonder how people left the room, since no one is allowed to stand up and leave before the judge does? Is everyone still there?)

                If they had followed the findings in the Australian case, lawyers could have just pointed out that Judge Henderson was still physically present, and carried on regardless. They would probably have enjoyed having fewer interruptions from the bench.

And the jury, of course, could have finished their Sudokus.

The Discovery of America

How settlers met the Redneck tribes

By Nury Vittachi

*

Today, boys and girls, we are going to study an important part of world history: the discovery of America.

                The first settlers from the civilized world, by which I mean Asia, of course, travelled to the Americas by ship, discovering it more than 150 years ago. They landed initially in what is now called North America in the mid-1800s. Here’s a poem to help you remember this: “In eighteen hundred and forty-two, Third Uncle sailed the ocean blue.”

                  Now when the Asian settlers landed, they discovered there were already people living there—a group of people known as the Rednecks.

                Although the Rednecks were simple, primitive people, they had spread over many parts of the country. They had curious habits. Female Rednecks had white faces on which they put face paint made for them by a man named Max Factor. Richer ones wore animal skins as a sign of wealth.

Males Rednecks had no face paint but gathered every night for the ritual drinking of a foul-tasting firewater called Budweiser that send them into ecstatic states during which they saw visions and fell over.

                It was observed that Rednecks greeted each other by raising their right hands and saying: “Whassup?” They had a deep spiritual connection with the land, which they referred to as “Real Estate”. They divided it into small sections which they sold them to each other for empty promises known as “mortgages”.

               The Asian settlers were intrigued by the fact that the land had great potential which was unlikely ever to be realized, since the inhabitants’ main hobby was collecting firearms and shooting each other. Occasionally, one of the Rednecks would suggest abandoning this practice, but the others would simply blast him full of holes.

                Furthermore, Rednecks spent millions building university libraries but never entered them, preferring to spend their study hours bowling.

               Not wanting to upset the natives, the Asian settlers started off in the railroad and mining businesses and then crept up the social ladder. The settlers’ children enrolled in Redneck universities, took over the libraries, and rose to dominate math, science, computing, medicine and so on. They became surgeons, financial controllers, systems analysts and programmers.

                Since many Asian settlers were math geeks, it was easy for them to go to Redneck casinos and wipe out the locals at blackjack and other card games.

Non-academic settlers discovered that the primitive peoples in North America had been subsisting since time immemorial only on inedible British-style food-like substances, such as “baked shoe leather” and “hot water bottle au gratin”.

So they introduced them to food which actually tasted of something. Rednecks were of course immediately enchanted with the stuff, and hundreds of thousands of outlets selling everything from curries to char siu opened up all over the New World.

These days, the Asians who discovered America live in peace with the remaining indigenous peoples there. Asians run the place, of course, but are wise enough to let the other tribes think that they are in charge.

The locals have not yet noticed that Asians have the best jobs earning the highest salaries in the key sectors, and label them as “inscrutable”, meaning “smarter than us”.

But today, it is considered politically incorrect for Asians in America to refer to the indigenous people of the country as Rednecks. They are now known as “staff”.

Running for your life

Jogging through the valley of the shadow of death

By Nury Vittachi
*

The world’s most invigorating exercise is jogging, but only in Asia. Going for a run anywhere else is pathetically dull: you pad along purpose-built waterside tracks with other yuppies like a herd of iPod-wearing sheep. I recently went jogging in Perth, Australia, and learned I could sleep at 10 kilometres an hour.

                But joggers in Asia never have a dull moment. You have to leap over massive holes. You have to maneuver around wild dogs. You have to sneak past wild people. And of course you have to negotiate normal Asian pavement traffic: pedestrians, scooters and 10-ton articulated trucks.

                My most memorable jogging experience was on a road near my home. This road was dug up so regularly that residents proposed changing the name from Victoria Road to Victoria Trench.

                That night, I took my youngest child with me. She sat in her stroller while I pounded the pavements, pushing from behind and feeling like SuperDad. She was so excited at the thought of an outing with me that she immediately fell asleep.

                Reaching the road, I was horrified to find workmen had dug up both pavements. They had also turned off the lampposts. And they had installed a contra-flow system, which is when temporary traffic lights force cars to take turns using a single lane.

                Contra-flow systems bring out the worst in drivers. Normally, when a traffic light turns red, a few drivers think: “I’ll speed through it as it’s only been red for a second or so.” But when a contra-flow system traffic light turns red, all drivers think: “I’ll speed through it as it’s only been red for a few minutes or so, probably.”

                The only way for us to continue on would have been a suicidal sprint down the middle of the road in pitch darkness with crazed drivers running red lights in both directions.

                So I was about to turn back when the man operating the temporary lights asked a favour of me. The walkie-talkies were broken, he said. Would I mind delivering a spare handset to the traffic light guy at the other end?

                Seeing that he had the ability to turn the lights to “stop” and ensure our safety, I agreed to make the delivery. He clicked a switch, the lights turned red, and I jogged off down the middle of the dark road, holding the equipment in one hand, and pushing the baby-stroller with the other. I felt even more like SuperDad. Here I was exercising, AND taking the baby out, AND doing my bit to keep the city’s arteries moving.

                But we were less than halfway down the road when I heard an ominous click. The idiot had turned the traffic lights green!

                Vast numbers of roaring vehicles charged through the darkness, heading straight for us. The pavements were fenced off. Suddenly I knew what a skittle in a bowling alley felt like.

                There was only one thing to do. Pray. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”

                The next couple of minutes were a blur as we dodged trucks, cars and buses and raced to safety. Miraculously, we survived.

                I delivered the equipment and got my breath back. The excitement had woken the baby up. “Again! Again!” she said.

                Next day I joined a gym.

Car park nazis I have known

Motorists are at war, you know
By Nury Vittachi

*

My wife got a parking fine the other day. Yet she had parked within the white lines, heaped money into the meter, and returned well before expiry time. What was the deal?

It turned out that parking spaces on that street had been designated as “vans and trucks only” and those on the next street “cars only”. However, the owners of the parking spaces had made sure there was no visible information about this.

For years there have been running battles between people with cars and people with parking spaces. I stopped at one parking garage recently which displayed a big sign at the entrance: “ONLY $6.” I nipped in and stayed just a few minutes. On the way out, officials demanded $24.

“But the sign said six dollars,” I complained.

“Six dollars for 15 minutes,” the official said. “Minimum stay one hour.”

A week later, officials put up a large disclaimer on the car park wall: “The owners of this car park take no liability whatsoever for any theft or damage or any other occurrence concerning your car, whether caused by directly or indirectly by us.”

If you think about it, this disclaimer actually gives car park staff full permission to break into your car, steal your stereo, and leave notes sneering at your taste in music. Knowing the officials who work there, it’s probably only a matter of time before they do. (I just hope they take my wife’s Carly Simon CDs.)

I saw one disclaimer that was even worse. In the car park at Mughal Gardens, Srinigar, India, there’s an extra line: “No Responsibility for Explosions.” So they can blow up your car if they feel like.

The following week, officials at my local car park added three new layers of control. A computer records the time you enter. An automatic camera takes a time-stamped picture of your car on the way in. And a little man in a uniform writes down your number plate and arrival time in a log book.

After lunch one day, I went to pick up my car and discovered, to my horror, that I had lost my entry ticket.

The car park official was thrilled. “You lost ticket, you pay 24 hours’ parking fee,” he grinned.

I explained that I had only been there an hour.

“You got no proof,” he said.

“True,” I said. “But you do. You have a computer record. AND you have a photo record. AND you have a Logbook Kept by a Little Man in a Uniform record.”

He looked horrified. It was true. There was now a mountain of evidence protecting the driver.

He went into a huddle with other officials. They eventually decided that instead of asking for the cost of 24 hours’ parking, they would demand the same money but call it a “Lost Ticket Handling Charge”.

So I had to pay it. But it was almost worth it just to have tormented them for a few minutes.

I heard of a case in London recently in which a driver returned to his parked car to find that officials had painted a white “Disabled Parking Only” box on the ground around the vehicle, and then attached a parking fine to his windscreen.

Which is why I now carry grey paint in the boot of my car.

This is war, you know. 

There's rain, and there's rain in Asia

Asia is the only place where you actually get weather

By Nury Vittachi
*

“Don’t go out,” she warned. “It’s raining.” I was standing in the doorway of a house in London, about to step outside.

I turned and shook my head. “This,” I said, gesturing outside, “is not rain.”

Honestly: Europeans are SO delicate! In that region, they define as “a rainy day” what we in Asia would call “mild humidity”. What they define as “a major rainstorm” is an almost imperceptible mist of water vapour, a bit like the weather angel is sitting on the edge of her cloud squirting an Evian atomizer.

Yet the slightest dampness causes Europeans to barricade themselves in their houses and phone flood control. If a drop of water hits the head of a European woman, she is taken to hospital to have it extracted. In England, the law requires that everyone carries an umbrella with them at all times, even while swimming. In cartoons, British monarchs may wear crowns and ermine robes, but the Queen’s actual ceremonial outfit is a headscarf, raincoat and rubber boots.

Yet the weather in Europe is so mild that we in Asia wouldn’t even count it as weather. It’s just sort of nothing.

Europeans: Want to see what real rain is like? Come to Asia.

They think the UK is a rainy place, but the average rainfall there is a mere 60 millimetres a month. Compare that to the last big rainfall in Mumbai, which was 1,000 millimetres in a single day.

On a rainy weekend in Hong Kong earlier this month, fish could be seen swimming down a high street. You know that scene in The Little Mermaid where Ariel sits in her den at the bottom of the sea and wonders what life is like on land? Well, the silly girl could just get off her scaly butt and swim to Asia and wait for a decent rainstorm. She could easily swim down the main road, get some sightseeing done, do a bit of shopping, and she wouldn’t even have to get her tail dry.

When I was a young reporter I recall writing a story about a truck in Bangladesh which was in collision with a large fish. The truck was wrecked and the fish was not too happy either. This rarely happens in Pall Mall.

I also recall writing about a woman in India where the rain turned into a flood, as it often does, so she climbed into a tree to finish what she was doing—having a baby. Now that is what I call “natural birth”.

In Europe, after what passes for a rainstorm, pedestrians have to negotiate a slight dampness on the pavements. After a rainstorm in Asia, we have to get on to Google Earth and redraw the borders on our maps.

Personally, I love weather, especially the big stuff. I feel compelled to go outdoors whenever a typhoon or rainstorm hits town. My doctor says this is because I suffer from a rare medical condition known as “idiocy”.

I once went out during a major typhoon near my home with a visitor from Europe. At first, he was scathing about how undramatic it was. Then we walked around a corner and were instantly hit by a body of water approximately the size and shape of an Olympic swimming pool.

               Now that’s rain.

We all work in sick buildings

Ice, fire and other hazards of modern office life

By Nury Vittachi

*

Like many readers, I work in an office complex. This cluster of buildings is designed to serve 12,000 people. But I’m writing this all alone.

It’s a public holiday and everyone else is off work. But not me. No sir: how could the world cope without essential services such as medical care, air traffic control, law enforcement, and the provision of newspaper columns? (Don’t answer that.)

To save money on this low-traffic day, the building managers have taped a sign to the elevator: “Please consider using the stairs. You can Save Energy and Get Exercise.” Just in case I am not deeply moved by their rare use of the word “please”, they have thoughtfully turned the lift off to help me with my decision.

After puffing up the stairs to my office, I discover the air -conditioning has also been turned off and the room resembles the core of the sun, only 432 degrees hotter.

Actually, I don’t mind this. As a Sri Lankan, I am only happy when I am too hot.

I slave away on the paragraphs above until noon, and then go foraging for food.

Uh-oh. I quickly discover that every restaurant is closed. This is bad news. It means I have to get lunch from a convenience store. Convenience stores, for readers fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with them, are brightly lit hellholes selling food-like items at exorbitant prices to desperate, unwary people.

Unwisely, I purchase a food-like item and find there is no cooking time printed on it. Instead, it says: “Place in store microwave and press button eight.” This is because anyone idiotic enough to eat convenience store food is assumed, correctly, to lack the brainpower to be able to understand complex concepts such as the fact that “two minutes” means two of those minute things.

After two minutes, the oven beeps. I open the door and note that a blob of radioactive orange sauce has bubbled out from the container. I grab a tissue to try to mop it up.

This is a mistake because the orange liquid is 4,000 degrees Celcius. I end up screaming and leaping around the store with my fingers in my mouth, mumbling, “It’s all right, it’s all right,” a phrase which embarrassed, well-brought-up middle-class people say when they are not all right.

Shop staff, experienced at dealing with emergencies involving hazardous chemicals, wave me aside and don nuclear radiation suits to deal with the spill.

The leaky microwaved lunch box is placed in a plastic bag and handed to me. I take it back to my office/ sauna, where it raises the temperature from that of the sun to that of an exploding supernova. My plywood desk goes soft and all liquids, including my tears, evaporate instantly.

I strip to my boxer shorts to avoid heatstroke. At this point, the patrolling security guard peers through my office window and nods his head knowingly.

Why do I put up with these working conditions? I’ll tell you. Like virtually all other offices in big cities in Asia, my air-conditioning system has only two settings: “off” and “flash freeze”. I spend most of the week in freezing, sub-arctic conditions, rather like one of those cavemen they find in glaciers.

I have to work holidays and weekends to thaw out.

Products of the supreme leader factory

In Asia, anyone can be leader, especially mannequins

By Nury Vittachi
*

I was standing by a news-stand which sells a range of Asian papers when I noticed almost all of them had glowing articles about Obama Bin Laden, who is now applying for the job of US president. Cheeky man!

The odd thing was that there were positive articles about this even in militant newspapers with a policy of never printing the word “America” without the prefix “evil aggressor”. They do this so religiously that their younger readers think the phrase is part of the country’s name, as in: “The nations of the world include Great Britain, the Virgin Islands and the United Evil Aggressors of America.”

Why do people on this side of the planet like Mr Obama? Well, the obvious reason is that he’s Asian. Now I know that technically he’s not, but spiritually he is. He has an Asian name, he has black hair, he has dark brown eyes, and—this is the clincher—he likes to eat chilli so hot it has to be served in lead-lined bowls by aides in radiation suits.

According to the infallible Asian science of feng shui, Mr Obama is guaranteed to win the US election. (The hair parting of his rival John McCain points southwest, poor fella.)

His presence in the world’s top job will go a small way towards making America marginally cool, after a long history of being uncool. You see, only the funkiest, most sophisticated places in the world can elect folk destined by the gods to be spat upon (minorities, women, foreigners, tourists).

This region is totally cool. The first place in the world to elect a female prime minister was Asia (Sri Lanka in 1960). Even Muslim Bangladesh followed with several female premiers, as have other Asian nations.

In Asia, we even find a rare example of one race being peacefully governed by a tiny group from another race: Hong Kong from 1841 to 1997. (Try to imagine a small group of Frenchmen taking over Britain. There would be riots within the hour.)

India elects any one who asks nicely. Winners include women (such as Indira Gandhi), Sikhs (Manmohan Singh), bearded men (Inder Kumar Gujral), clean shaven ones (Atal Bihari Vajpayee) and even a female European tourist: Sonia Gandhi. It’s not just civic leaders either. Last week, an Indian business school elected a monkey statue as president.

Asia has variety. North Korea once elected a rotting corpse for Supreme Leader and currently has a leader with all the appeal of a rotting corpse.

In fact, I think there’s only one major country in Asia which remains totally predictable in the election stakes. Clearly there is a secret rule which says the leader of China MUST be male, stocky, boring, elderly, bespectacled, and have the charisma of a lettuce.

In fact, most of China’s top people are so alike that I suspect they are churned out in large numbers from a mannequin factory in Beijing called Elderly Leader Factory Number One.

For China to change, it would have to elect—oops, sorry, no democracy—it would have to assign the job of premier to someone who is the categorical opposite of the standard leader. They would need a person who is not bespectacled, not dark-haired, not Chinese, not stocky and not male.

I hear Hillary Clinton is looking for work.

Bureaucratic nightmares round-up

Airport officials recapture the red tape top spot
By Nury Vittachi

*

Here at the records office of the Ministry of Unreasonable Officials we are happy to announce that employees in the airport sector have once again grabbed the coveted top spot.   

This follows a period when civil servants threatened to take over as dumbest breed of red tape dispensers, thanks to officials from India and Malaysia who declared living people dead and refused to revise their paperwork despite having the “corpses” standing in from of them asking politely for their status as deceased persons to be reviewed.

The airline sector’s winning team earlier this month prevented a man from boarding a plane at Heathrow airport in London because he was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a man with a gun. Brad Jayakody’s garment had an image from the action film Transformers. Well done, Heathrow officials: that was an impressive entry.

In runner-up position came an Indian airport official. He confiscated a mango from a passenger “for security reasons” before allowing him to board a domestic flight in that country. The passenger told me: “Maybe they thought I would hijack the plane by threatening to squish it on the pilot’s nice uniform?”

Numerous people shared stories of airport security officials swooping on women for the crime of wearing underwired bras. Just a little note to guards: if a woman needs tempered steel to reinforce the underside of her brassiere, there is unlikely to be much room in the garment for extraneous objects.

And in the United States, airport officials prevented a person boarding an aircraft with a MacBook Air, the new super-thin computer from Apple. They didn’t believe such a slim object could be a real computer. 

                An emailer who signs himself “Frequent Traveler” asked a question: “Many airports now have No Joking signs at security areas, and there have been several cases of quick-witted wags who have been arrested and even jailed for telling jokes. How do they square this with their constitutions, which guarantee free speech? And why haven’t you been arrested?”

The only answer to your first question, Frequent Traveller, is a hollow laugh.

As for the second, I pretend to be deaf and dumb.

As well as the No Joking Zones at airports, there are secret No Joking Zones at newspapers and other media offices all over Asia. Think about it. While this newspaper fearlessly prints these attempts at humour, do its rivals regularly print anything remotely funny? No? There you go.

Now I wouldn’t want airport officials to think that I am calling them dense, humourless ill-informed automatons, just because I am.

No. I fully accept the fact that airline passengers can be even dumber.

The Asian press reported last week that a record number of female pilots are well on their way to taking the controls of aircraft at major airlines in the region.

This is great news, but I know Asian businessmen will be at least as sexist as their western counterparts. I will never forget a story I head of a European pilot named Helga who overheard a male passenger commenting as she entered the cockpit.

“Is that a woman I see going in there?” he asked.

The flight attendant nodded.

The man added: “Well, I suppose it’s all right, as long as they don’t let her touch anything.”

Worst Chinese songs ever

The sad song of the single eyelid girl
By Nury Vittachi

*

The search is over. The world can take a deep breath. Readers have spoken, and the mission to find the most, er, memorable East Asian pop song lyric ever has come up with a winner. 

                Let’s go in reverse order. In third place comes Hong Kong’s Aaron Kwok with this baffling line: “A crowded car is like the noise of bees who is specially recalling my face with nostalgia.” Thanks, Aaron; keep taking the tablets.

In second place is Taiwan’s Richie Jen with this great passage:  “Lonely boy’s flyswatter: Swat-swat left, swat-swat right. How come I have no one to love me? No one shows interest. How boring.” You said it, my man.
                But the first place winner in this category has to be—big round of applause—Single-Eyelid Girl by the China Dolls, a group from Thailand.

                This unforgettable song is about a girl who falls in love with a boy, but then discovers that he only likes double-eyelid girls, while she is a single-eyelid girl: “The boy at the table opposite us is here again today; look at his eyes, what amazing confidence. But I've heard that he only likes double-eyelid girls! With my single eyelid, I have no choice.”

                For some reason, the song conjures up a vision of a Cyclops-like girl sitting in a restaurant with one huge eye in the middle of her forehead. I’ve never actually seen the lead singer of the China Dolls, so perhaps that is what she looks like.

                Meanwhile, listeners of the Phil Whelan show on Hong Kong’s Radio Three wanted to add the Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Weeps to our list of bad lyrics. George Harrison, desperately looking for a rhyme for “sleeping”, sings: “I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping”.

An even more embarrassingly desperate rhyme was spotted by reader Dave MacDonald in Led Zeppelin's Dancing Days: “I told your mamma I'd get you home/ but I didn't tell her I had no car/ I saw a lion, he was standing alone with a tadpole in a jar.”

Raiya Kishwar Ashraf from Bangladesh added a song from her country which clearly has lyrics designed to shock listeners: “My shirt button is open: Oh brother. My shirt button is open!” Which just goes to show that different things shock different people.

Reader Ricardo Cabeza scolded us for missing Neil Diamond's Play Me, for the line: “Songs you sang to me, sounds you brang to me.”

We earlier mentioned an Indian song which went, “Light your ciggie from my liver, oh lover”. Reader Claudia Cucker says it may not be as absurd as it sounds: “The liver is the organ in your body that gives off the most heat.” Thanks, Claudia. Next time I want to flambé my dessert, you can come round and ignite it with your internal organs.

                Several readers wanted to give a Most Baffling Love Song award to Manfred Man for his song about a guy who meets a girl who says: “Doo wah diddy diddy dum diddy doo.” He replies with the same phrase, and they decide to get married so they can spend every day chanting “Doo wah diddy diddy dum diddy doo”. The only possible response to this lyric is: What were they on when they wrote this, and where can I get some?

Marketing to the terminally stupid 2

How to sell locust beans and seaweed to kids
By Nury Vittachi

*
My wife bought a box of “Fruit By The Foot” strawberry snacks. From the package, one might assume it would contain foot-long (30 cm) snacks made of strawberries.
               Wrong. It turned out to contains strips of dyed sugar. Nothing remotely strawberryish was listed on the list of ingredients. However, it did contain locust beans and seaweed.

                I imagine that the manufacturer, Betty Crocker, must have come up with the product and then test-marketed it: “Hey, kids, wanna try a yummy locust bean and seaweed snack?”

                Getting the thumbs down, they used classic business strategy known as Call It Something Else and came up with “strawberry”.

                I asked a nutritionist friend how food companies could get away with this sort of thing. She pointed out that Betty Crocker was American and thus more heavily regulated than Asian food firms.

                Until now. This year, most Asian states are making laws about what labels can and cannot say.

                Not before time. Some Asian products have labels which are just plain baffling, as my diaries show:

               Seen on a Japanese carton of diary products: “Boy cow milk.”

               Seen on a pack of Chinese aubergines: “Violent Eggplants”.

               Seen on a Hong Kong pack of chilled chicken: “Four-Legged Chicken.”

               Law drafters in Asia are focusing on packaging that makes specific health claims.

   One package of Japanese coffee has this on the label: “Black coffee has great features which other coffees have never had: Non-sugar.”

                A bottle of health tonic from mainland China has this claim: “Known to cure itching, colds, stomachs, brains, and other diseases.”

                From India, a reader showed me a packet of Holy Miracle Cow Dung. Which just goes to show that food company claims are sometimes quite literally a load of bull.

                While researching this topic, I noticed that many food makers use the classic business technique known as Marketing to the Terminally Stupid.

                For example, most chocolate products boast about how much cocoa they have. But Nutella, a chocolate hazelnut spread, has a big tick on the label next to the words “Only 7.6 per cent cocoa.”

                Buy a can of Coke and you find the calorie count per serving in a neat little table on the side. But only when you read the small print do you see that each can is said to contain “1.88 servings”. This would make sense if the average customer bought a can, poured out just under half of it into his glass, and then poured the rest of the can into a separate glass for someone else, and then rushed back to the shop to get another can to fill up the second glass.

                Dear Coca-Cola Company, I don’t do this. Does that make me weird?

                (Don’t answer that.)

                The nutritionist told me candy bars were always made with an odd number of chunks, to prevent parents sharing one between two kids. I checked in my local shop. It was true: every chocolate bar had five chunks.

                Anyway, among the new food labeling laws in Asia are one which requires all perishable items (with the exception of members of the Chinese politburo) to be clearly stamped with a “Sell By” date.

                Some have already started. However, I’m not sure that Asian food manufacturers really “get it”. On my shelf I have a bottle of Chinese medicine which says:

               “Expiration Date: 2 years.”

                Er, from when?

Newspapers are actually growing

By Nury Vittachi

Newspapers are thriving, but don’t tell anyone

*

As I peruse yet another magazine article celebrating the arrival of the digital age and mourning the loss of the old-fashioned print media, an important thought strikes me: I wonder what’s for dinner?

Reading such articles make my mind wander to more earth-shaking subjects such as my dinner for several reasons. First, because they are so many of them; second, because they are all wrong; and third, because I am on a diet (I have to get in shape for an appointment with my tailor).

You wouldn’t believe how widespread the digital fallacy is. When I tell people I write for newspapers, they shake their heads and talk sadly of “sunset industries”. Journalism.org says printed publications “are increasingly seen as anachronisms in this new media landscape”. Professors talk about the “terminal decline” of the traditional newspaper.

Anyway, I shall tell you a secret that is STRICTLY LIMITED to you, me, and other few hundred thousand people who read this column.

None of it is true. Newspaper circulations are up. Readership is up. Advertising is up. Revenue is up. The top Asian papers have been growing steadily for years and are hitting new records every year, including this one.

But this is hush-hush. We are not telling the Big Name International News Commentators about this. Why?

Because they think the world consists of three places (North America, Western Europe and Australia) and it suits us to let them continue to think this. In those three places, newspapers have fallen out of fashion.

But in Asia, the opposite is true. Almost all the world’s top papers are now in Asia (74 out of the top 100) and are growing. More papers are sold every day in tiny Japan than in the whole of the United States. Ninety-nine million papers are day are printed in India, and 107 million in China, both record highs.

Asians spend an unusually long time with their papers. The typical Chinese reader spends an average 48 minutes with each one, surveys show. Given that many readers spend just a few minutes glancing at the headlines while commuting, this means the others spend 20 hours with each paper, which would necessitate eating, bathing, and going to bed with them (I'm really touched by this. I didn’t know they cared).

                Why haven’t Asians abandoned newspapers for computers?

                Well, you can’t wrap your rice and curry lunch in a laptop, for a start. Well, actually, you probably could, but it would be pretty messy.

                Second, you can’t hang your computer on a nail in the toilet to wipe your bum with. Well, again, I suppose you could if you were desperate and insane.

                And third, the single most important thing a newspaper provides doesn’t work on a computer screen. I’m talking about those long, happy hours scribbling in the margins of a scrunched-up paper doing the crossword or Sudoku.

                Experienced newspapermen like me have no pretensions about what is really important to readers. If we misspell the President’s name or print “billion” instead of “million”, nobody notices.

But if we print the wrong crossword grid, thousands of people riot outside our offices, and the production editor has to commit ritual suicide in the nearest public stadium.

Okay, that’s the end of this column and you can now hang me in the toilet.

Reasons to build a spare city

What to do if you have way too much money
By Nury Vittachi

*

Every now and then, top government officials look at their coffers, and say out loud: “Wow. We have way too much money. How can we blow the lot?”

From me comes the obvious answer, which is: Hey. Why ask me? I’m a newspaper columnist.

               But some bright spark in the civil service always comes up with the sort of proposal they like: “Let’s offer to host an unimaginably large and expensive event so that we can build an entire city with loads of costly infrastructure and stuff, and then overspend disastrously on every item.”

Now if my wife made a suggestion like that (and she does, at regular intervals), I would uncategorically reject it in the strongest possible terms, using words such as: “Yes, dear, maybe later.”

But governments are different. They adore such suggestions. Officials immediately promote whoever suggested it to Minister of Finance and Junkets and start throwing truckloads of taxpayers’ money into the hands of their friends in business, temporarily interrupting their normal activity, which is throwing truckloads of taxpayers’ money into the hands of their friends in business.

For decades, the Olympic Games were considered the best way of losing huge sums of money fast, but they didn’t happen often enough. They were “quadrennial”, which means “every four years” and should not be confused with the word “bicentennial” which means “sexually ambiguous”.

So governments introduced the World Expo, a second excuse to build unnecessary cities. These were originally every fourth year, or “quadraphonic”, but are now “bisexual”, which means “every two-to-six years”.

World Expos come in two sizes. The big ones, such as Shanghai 2010, are advertized so heavily you get sick of them. Already, all large outdoor surfaces, including the dark side of the moon and John McCain’s forehead, have been reserved for promoting this event.

Then there are tiny ones, which you hear nothing about. One of these starts this coming weekend in Zaragoza, Spain. (I hadn’t heard of it either.)

Although the main purpose of World Expos are to waste taxpayers’ money on things that disappear without trace, organizers occasionally accidentally achieve something.

This was the case in Paris in 1889. Instead of World Expo, the uppity French insisted on calling it Expo Universelle (perhaps so they could waste extra money on intergalactic landing strips). One of the useless things they built for that show is still there, 120 years later, although they still haven’t thought of a use for it. Yes, it was the Eiffel Tower, now said to be the most recognizable building on Earth after the lifeguards’ changing room from Baywatch.

Occasionally, World Expos act as proof that the universe is governed by a huge, all-powerful Sense of Irony. In 1984, “Water as a Source of Life” was the theme of the World Expo in New Orleans, a city later destroyed by floods.

The World Expo that starts this weekend in Zaragoza is also on a watery theme: the coming water shortages predicted for this planet.

I tried to explain the water threat to my friends (idle Asian yuppies, like attracts like), but they couldn’t get worked up about it. “I don’t see what the problem is,” said one. “I’ll just drink Coke instead.”

               No doubt the Zaragozans (don’t they sound like an alien race?) have rejected this cheap and easy solution.

It doesn’t waste enough money.

Exploding animals and other friends

.

The Malaysian ant teaches us all how to go out with a bang

By Nury Vittachi

*

There are people who think the total destruction of human civilization through global warming might actually be a bad thing.

               But there you go. People can be weird.

Yet everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, even if they are wrong.

But I was intrigued to hear one theory about human self-destruction that leads us to one of the world’s most curious creatures: the Malaysian ant, known to scientists as camponotus saundersi.

Most creatures have some sort of self-defense mechanism. Attack a snake and it will spit poison at you; scare a squid and it will squirt ink at you; criticize certain Singaporeans and they will shoot out a stream of lawyers at you.

                If you attack this Malaysian ant, it explodes. This is how it works. Big bug attacks ant.  Ant runs away. Bug pursues ant. Ant stops and turns. Bug approaches, taking out knife, fork and ketchup sachet. Ant explodes, looking smug and killing larger bug.

                As defense techniques go, the Malaysian ant’s system works well. There’s only one drawback, which smart readers may already have spotted: the triumphant winner ends up spread in tiny pieces over the forest floor.

                There are several examples of exploding animals in nature—such as whales, cows and King William I of England—but these all die before exploding. It is only the Malaysian ant which is one moment swaggering along the road thinking, “I am the master of the universe and I can prove it any time I want to” and is the next moment 2,000 bits of organic dust, each of which is thinking: “Oh bother. Bang goes that nice evening I was planning hanging out with the queen.”

Scientists think the Malaysian ant is making an unconscious decision to sacrifice its life for the colony. And some believe that human beings are making the same unconscious decision to wipe themselves off the Earth for the sake of the planet. 

                If humanity does destroy itself, the globe will almost definitely be taken over by ants, which already make up some 20 per cent of the world’s biomass.

                One just hopes they won’t all be Malaysian ants. Can you imagine what would happen if an alien lands and looks at them the wrong way? They could get very upset and—bang—there goes the planet.

                Incidentally, there was plague of exploding toads in Germany recently, a reader tells me. Scientists discovered that a generation of toads had got into the habit of misjudging the amount of air they should take in to puff themselves up, and ended up accidentally blowing themselves to pieces. This is perhaps the ultimate example of how a small mistake can spoil your whole day.

                The discovery that creatures can puff themselves up so much that they explode has interesting implications. I hope it applies to humans, too. Think about the leader of North Korea, whose birth allegedly caused the stars to bow down.

                Kim Jong Il: As Supreme Leader of the richest, most developed, most advanced civilization in the universe, I would just like to say—

                [A loud explosion shakes the hall.]

                First audience member: Where’d he go?

                Second audience member: I don’t know. Why is there steaming blubber draped on your shoulder?

                 First audience member: No idea. I don’t remember putting it on this morning.

Males and females not the same, boffins discover

It’s curtains for men, as scientists map the female DNA

By Nury Vittachi

*

Scientists in Holland last week announced that they had for the first time mapped the complete DNA of a woman. The DNA of the human male was mapped in 2001, and boffins have also done a number of lesser beasts, such as the dog, the bear, the E. Coli bacterium, the fruit fly, the mouse, and finally, last and definitely least, the human female.

Humanity will at last be able to conclusively identify genetic differences between men and women, a spokesman said.

                As usual, scientists have taken years to discover what the rest of us already know.

               For example, I know from personal experience that men are genetically programmed to have no opinions whatsoever about the colour of curtains. I have spent years strenuously attempting to have an opinion on the subject, but it is simply not possible.

Unfortunately, women are genetically programmed to not notice that men have no opinion on this topic, and will ask their partners for one repeatedly throughout their lifetimes.

When I am on my deathbed, my wife will ask: “So: what colour curtains do you want at the crematorium?”

And my last words will be, “Er. Ah. Um. I don’t know. Uh, white?”

“White? Are you crazy? What about all the soot?”

Here’s another example of gender-specific programming. If a man puts something down and then cannot find it, he is genetically programmed not to look for it but to ask the nearest woman where it is. She will then find that it is exactly where he left it and she will hand it to him. It’s a kind of comforting ritual.

There are genetic differences in shopping, reader Sara Wan said. Men buy things according to how many unnecessary functions they have, which is why the world now has Internet-connected refrigerators and Bluetooth-enabled rice-cookers. “If we could calculate just how much money is wasted by men buying gadgets with functions they never use, we’d probably have enough to solve all the world’s problems,” she said.  Good idea, Sara. I’ll see if I can find a gadget with that function for you.

                A reader who did not want her name used said: “I am a married woman. My husband has several functions he does not use.”

Moving right along, a gentleman named Dan said he had seen statistics which said that married men live longer than single men.  This could be true. Or maybe it just feels like it.

Men and women also have very different body-clocks. This can easily be proved by observation of The Midnight Conversation, which I’m sure all couples have.

Him: Zzzz.

Her: Do you think we have enough quality time, I mean, as a couple?

Him: Zzzz.

Her: I mean, when was the last time we really talked?

Him: Zzzz.

Her: We don’t talk enough.

Him: You do.

Her: What did you say?

Him: Nothing. Zzzz.

Anyway, I guess these scientists in Holland may come up with some useful information that guys can use. You know what they say. There are two periods when men don’t understand women: before marriage and after marriage.

I shall leave the last word to a female reader. “Imagine a world with no men. No crime and lots of fat, happy women.”

Readers' answers to the swimsuit problem

The naked truth about those original Olympic athletes

By Nury Vittachi

*

Japanese swimmers are secretly wearing Speedos to beat their best times by almost a second, the Asia business correspondent for The Times of London reported.

                Athletes fear that swimming costumes made by Asian firms such as Mizuni and Asics slow them down. This follows reports that swimmers wearing UK-made Speedos have an unfair advantage. Asian swimmers are hoping for technological breakthroughs by top Japanese swimwear firms such as Descente (which strikes me as a terrible name for a company which makes garments which wearers desperately hope will stay up).

               Don’t worry, lads. Readers of this column have come to your rescue. Vince A, writing from the Philippines, said: “Those of us in technologically backward countries have no chance to compete. I vote that all swimming henceforth be sans any swimwear to even things out.”

               Other readers supported this idea, and pointed out that it would boost television viewership and be more true to the original Olympics games, at which participants were naked.

Vince: your idea is perfect in every way, except for the fact that it just won’t work. Most television channels would simply refuse to show the Olympics if athletes appeared as nature intended.

It’s a strange thing. The human being is the only creature to think its own body is weird and disgusting. It is the only animal which will arrest itself for seeing itself naked. This is somehow taken as a sign of our sophistication as a species. Whoever it was among our forefathers who decided that what humans look like naked was some kind of secret clearly did not realize that anyone could blow it by simply undressing. As far as I know, seeing yourself naked in the privacy of your home is not yet illegal anywhere, except perhaps in more conservative parts of Singapore.

                On the subject of nudity, reader John Wilson received a letter while preparing for a stay at the Hong Kong Eye Hospital. “You may consider to bring your own clothes,” the letter advised. Perhaps patients, expecting the hospital to supply everything, have been turning up naked. “I’ll follow the advice,” he said.

                 I also heard from a historian who said that the Olympics were not originally naked, as widely believed. What actually happened was this. A runner called Orsippus of Megara, sprinting along at the Olympics in 720 B.C., lost his shorts in the middle of his race. This must have been horribly embarrassing for his clothing sponsor, which was probably some early Greek sportswear firm with a name such as Reebokos, Nikos, Pumos or Adidos.

                Orsippus stepped out of his shorts, kept on running—and won the race. From then on, everyone followed his example of competing naked.

              It’s also not true that women were not allowed to watch the original Olympics. The rules said that any married women found in the audience would be thrown off a cliff, but single girls were allowed to watch. Perhaps the organizers thought young women would find it educational.

                Anyway, this little history lessons leads us to a clear answer to the swimwear conundrum.

Swimmers who don’t have Speedos and have to wear slow, draggy swimming costumes, can take inspiration from Orsippus of Megara and “accidentally” lose their trunks after starting the race.

And since Japanese swimwear already has the word “Descente” printed on them, it will all seem rather apt.

*

Whale found in middle of desert

Have a whale of a time with a minkemoo steak
By Nury Vittachi
*
Japanese scientists have been trying to cross a cow and whale. The news was revealed just before the international meeting of whaling experts which starts this week in Chile.
     The Japanese have not said what the new creature might be called. A wow? A cale? Since they were injecting minke whale sperm into cow eggs, they could call it a minkemoo. This has the virtue of being cute, and as you know, extreme cuteness is the most respected national characteristic in Japan, closely followed by the military ability to conquer neighbouring countries.
     If they succeed, the implications are huge. Can you imagine the advantages of having a cross-bred cow-cum-whale?
     1. Healthy fresh milk soon to be available underwater for lost scuba divers.
     2. T-bone steak now eight metres long.
     3. Milkmaid uniform to be replaced by bikinis to facilitate 40,000-litre-a-day liquid output.
     4. Butter from now on to have interesting plankton taste.
     5. Within a year, all bull fighters will have been crushed to death.
     The news about the whale-cow experiments was released reluctantly. Japanese fishermen have been getting around a ban on whaling by explaining that they killed 7,000 whales for “important scientific research” (read “snacks”). The international community demanded to see the paperwork – and were given records of bizarre experiments such as cow-whale breeding.
     Scientists are meeting to decide what to do about whales, which, like Asian countries with military leaders and young girls surnamed Spears, are extraordinarily difficult to manage.
     There have been breakthroughs. Scientists now know why whales occasionally explode. It’s all to do with intestinal gas. Humans look the other way and clench their stomach muscles: end of problem. Whales detonate themselves over a large radius.
     You may remember the famous 2004 case when a 50-ton whale being transported by truck through a Taiwanese city suddenly exploded, spattering whale innards over the city. The BBC quoted a bystander saying: "What a stinking mess. This blood and other stuff that blew out on the road is disgusting, and the smell is really awful." No, wait, that was a comment on a meeting of the Taiwanese parliament.
     There was a case in British Columbia, Canada, where a whale exploded with such violence that nearby vegetation “looked like Christmas trees”, a description no doubt given by someone who celebrates December 25th by adorning conifers with chunks of bloody cetacean blubber.
     Scientists may also discuss creatures unknown to science which have been found living on the bones of dead whales off the coast of California. They said the tiny animals were “slimy and worm-like but with no guts and no mouths”. The description convinces me that several of these edited newspapers for which I worked in the 1990s.
      Meanwhile, the body of a whale has been found in the middle of the Egyptian desert (see pic at the top). The bones were 40 million years old, so scientists are not sure what they can learn from them.
     Well, for a start, I’ll bet you anything it’s a male whale. Only a male could be so far off course and refuse to ask directions. You can just see it flopping through the desert, saying to itself: “Wow, this sandbank is long, but I’m sure if I just keep going I’ll soon know where I am.”
     Now if it had been a minkemoo, at least it would have been carrying something to drink.