Scott Adams Just tells 'em so well.

I've had this experience with Flora, but Scott Adams on The Dilbert Blog puts it wonderfully:


Last week, my in-laws were in town. While they were out visiting some other relatives, I took my turn watching their dog, Mollie. At this point, I should pause and mention that I haven’t had a dog since I was a kid. And in those days, in the country, when the dog felt nature’s call, we’d simply let the dog out, and it would use any part of our 2.5 acres as its toilet. Later, if you wanted to throw a ball around, you just kicked the (usually) frozen logettes to the side to clear a path. In those simple times, you weren’t playing a sport unless someone ended up covered in dog feces. It was just part of the game.

These days, things are quite different. Today, if you go to school covered in dog feces, there’s a stigma. And of course there’s the leash law. But nothing takes the joy out of a walk in the fresh air quite like being required to carry a plastic purse full of dog poop.

Back to my story, I took Mollie for a walk, thinking I understood how this process worked. The leash was no mystery. It had a cool spring action with a pistol grip. I liked that part. And I grabbed an official poop bag on the way out of the house. I was ready for anything.

Within a minute, Mollie laid down a steamer. I think she had been eating the cat food, because it wasn’t the firm little log I was expecting. But I soldiered on, turning the bag inside out like a glove, and grabbing the warm pile that melted in my hand. It wasn’t pleasant in the usual sense of the word, but I experienced some satisfaction in a job well done. I tied the bag into a tidy little package and intended to head home.

That’s when I noticed Mollie had just begun to poop. I don’t know if she was trying to spell “HELP” in case a rescue plane flew over, or what, but by now she was in full production. Step, squat, step, squat.
I looked at my tidy little bag, now sealed, and realized I was screwed. I knew the neighbors would be looking, or feared they might. I couldn’t leave this Katrina-sized disaster and get another bag lest someone think, incorrectly, that I had abandoned my doody. So I decided to see if I could untie the pooper bag and have another go at the new deposits. This plan did not work as smoothly as I had hoped.

Do you know what is NOT effective for picking up warm piles of poop? If you guessed “other warm piles of poop,” you might have been in this situation yourself. It was like trying to pick up mashed potatoes with a catcher’s mitt. And I was hurrying, so needless to say, back at the house I needed the Karen Silkwood treatment to feel clean again.

Later, when my in-laws returned, I told the story. Larry, a laid-back gentleman from Arkansas, turned to his wife Cheryl and drawled “Mollie double-bagged him.” Let me tell you, the only thing that could have made my experience worse was finding out my in-laws have a name for it.

Celia Celia by Adrian Mitchell

When I am sad and weary
When I think all hope has gone
When I walk along High Holborn
I think of you with nothing on

FROM A CULTURE OF VIOLENCE TO A CULTURE OF PEACE

FROM A CULTURE OF VIOLENCE TO A CULTURE OF PEACE
(The soft overcomes the hard; water quenches fire)

First of all I want to thank Sokka Gakkai International, Sokka Gakkai Malaysia and the Physicians for Peace and Social Stability for inviting me to share my thoughts with you on a matter of life and death for human civilization as we know it. Physicians for Peace and Social Responsibility are so called because their avowed aim is to promote well-being, not by means of the knife, but to stimulate the power of self-healing inherent in all mankind.

Two parables should help to focus our minds on the psychological parameters of the issue which now confronts us.

Akbar, undoubtedly the greatest Emperor India ever had ruled India from 1556 to 1605. Although illiterate himself he was a great humanist. He had six prime ministers, each representing the interests of his particular community. The Hindu was Birbal. “Birbal,” asked Akbar “ Why are there so many cows and goats in my kingdom and so few tigers?” Birbal took Akbar to the zoo where he had packed one cage with a herd of hungry cattle and another with a dozen ravenous tigers. Into the cattle pen he tossed in a bundle of hay. Each animal took a mouthful and withdrew to make way for the others behind. Into the other he threw in a dead buffalo. All the tigers immediately converged to start a fight to the finish, because each one wanted to eat the entire carcass dead buffalo all by itself. The survivors could not have had many teeth left intact to enjoy the meal. Thus violence is self-defeating.

My second story concerns a millionaire named McArthur (not General Douglas McArthur- our man was a wealthy farmer) who decided in 1938 that the USA was inevitably going to be sucked into Europe’s war with Germany. So he moved, far from the madding crowd, to a small island in the Pacific. It was Guadalcanal which just five years later became the most bitter battle-ground in the Pacific theatre. So we cannot opt out of trouble by running away from it, since there is no guarantee of safety in the face of global crises today.

Violence in any shape or form brings immediate suffering for its victims.
It becomes suffering for its perpetrators in the medium and long term because it never even succeeds partially in achieving its original purpose. Take Vietnam in the face of the French and the Americans who came after them, Cambodia under Pol Pot, and Iraq at the receiving end of the political ambitions of Bush and Blair – all glaring examples of this fundamental truth.

To understand why in spite of this lessons the power-brokers repeatedly make the same mistake we have to start at the beginning. The film “South Pacific” is a musical set against a back-drop of island paradises. Even Pulau Tioman figured there as the mythical Bali Hai. But out of character with all the other songs is this one which carries a powerful message as to where the seeds of the culture of violence are sown and then germinate. Let me sing it to you now:-

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!

This is the kind of cultural programming which was institutionalized by Stalin, Hitler and Tojo.

By way of sharp contrast let’s take the Victoria Institution in our time. There was no racism there. In our school song we acknowledged our debt by praising the multi-racial fathers of our school. Down to this day I don’t look at Dato Kamarul and think he is a Malay. I don’t look at Dato McCoy and think here is a Eurasian of Scottish ancestry. We were taught that our school mates are just other human beings like us, each worthy of the dignity of any other human being. Humanitarian values comes from a humanitarian education. We here in Malaysia urgently need to determine whether it is not going to be too heavy a price to pay for breeding a single spectrum mono-cultural national identity. To preserve social stability we must learn to value diversity.

And we must emphasize that truth and justice are universal values.
The engine riding on hate and fear is propelled by POWER and GREED.
In the 19th Century the fashionable definition of power was the capacity to bend another to one’s will. Today it is the capacity to direct how a nation’s resources shall be distributed. Economic duress is the constant companion of military might and that is what the global culture of violence has become. The worrying part of all this is that the ordinary individual seems totally impotent not just to prevent nation-states from going nuclear but to bring any meaningful pressure to bear on Governments to ensure that a nation’s wealth is distributed in a just and equitable way.

Our concern here today is to discover whether there is any way in which this trend can be reversed. Can a culture of violence be transformed into a culture of peace? At first sight this question looks like an invitation to participate in an exercise of futility. And indeed so it would be, if you thought you could wave a magic wand and immediately effect the desired transformation. Don’t ever say, 'I am only one sorry lonely man'. Instead ask 'What can I do to change things?'

Remember that constant dripping wears away the hardest stone.
Constancy is a close cousin of other virtues- courage, confidence, and conviction. Let’s take some examples close to home.

Chee Kim Tong was a humble bus conductor in the Trengannu Bus Company then owned by Lim Eng, Dato Lim Ah Lek’s father.
Those days it was the done thing if you knocked someone down on the East coast roads not to stop but to scoot to the next police station and come back with an escort. When a bus knocked down someone outside Kemaman, the driver and all the passengers bolted off leaving Chee Kim Tong to face a mob of parang wielding villagers. He disarmed everyone of them without any weapons except his martial arts skills, which can be traced back to my eternal hero, an itinerant Buddhist Indian monk – Daruma- who created the art of ShaoLin, the proto-type of every other form of Asian martial art whose core message was that it was a discipline for the purification of the human mind and not a tool for bullying others.

Statistically the Control freaks in whom power and material wealth are concentrated only form about 0.1 % of the countries they lord over. How such a small minority manages to hold sway over the multitude is one of the great paradoxes of human history. But mercifully history is replete with individuals who have wrought great cultural changes armed only with the force of their personalities and the justice of their cause.
Buddha was not born in Britain, Jesus was not a Japanese,and Muhammad was not a Malaysian Bumiputra.

This is a very important observation because these prophets are revered not only in the country of their birth but all the world over.
However potent their personalities and however meritorious the justice of their cause they would not have acquired their universal validity if the means were not at hand to spread the message.
We have today the Internet which spreads information at the speed of light. With such an ally our capacity for reform is limitless.

Do visit the website www.writespirit.net/authors and you will find a host of great leaders there to inspire you. One caught my eye. She was called Peace Pilgrim – a woman who just walked across America spreading her simple message and thereby accelerated the end of the Vietnam war.

Have you noticed that when a tree of a particular species flowers, all the other trees of that species world-wide follow suit. Civilisations also share that characteristic. Akbar’s reign was contemporaneous with the Renaissance in Europe, and the Ming Dynasty in China. These kingdoms were far apart and yet they reached their zenith in terms of artistic and cultural achievement together. I am optimistic that we are on the verge of a new Rennaisance. Despite the apparent might of greedy power-brokers and war mongers we have more than an even chance to transform the culture of violence to a culture of peace. We need to empower ourselves by making common cause with others who share our aspirations. We need to discard our fears. We must become living proof of our capacity for compassion. As we gain momentum we will surely become a global force that cannot be ignored.

The transformation we so earnestly desire must take place because however hard-hearted a person is, there is nothing so troublesome as a guilty conscience. Cyberspace is a huge mirror from which power crazy persons cannot escape looking at themselves. The weapons of war have changed over time in the pursuit of the capacity to out-reach one’s enemies in terms of speed and range.The tragedy of nuclear weapons is that this differential has been bridged between its opponents. Even a pre-emptive strike will be followed by mutually assured destruction.
Fortunately the art of war must always remain the same because of the limitations of the human beings who want to wage it. And they are the ones we must redeem by getting them involved in our commitment to a culture of peace.

Let us rise to our ultimate challenge which is to get everyone to share our belief that service to humanity is the best work of life.


Dato Mahadev Shankar
Shah Alam.
2nd September 2007

Pure Genius - Camel

CAMEL lyrics

The Glue That Binds Us

This is an article written by my father about the race riots which took place in 1969 in Malaysia.

---

May 13th 1969 is nearly four score and ten years behind us.
What day of the week was it? Alas I cannot now remember!
Perhaps it was a Friday. Friday the 13th has always had such an ominous ring to it.

It was certainly before Mahathir set our clocks back half an hour and thus took centre stage in our psyche. Of that I am sure.
As sure as I am that in 1969 with Bapa Merdeka, Tunku Abdul Rahman before he was deposed, we rose at sunrise and retired at sundown. Friday the 13th 1969 marked a turning point in the history of our nation.

I had finished with the Fitzpatrick case at Court Hill, and made an uneventful return home a little earlier than I should. My wife and children were out somewhere in town and got back just before sunset. By twilight time all hell had broken loose.
The shouting of a mob in full flow, seemed to be coming from the junction of Princess Road (now Jalan Raja Muda) and Circular Road (later Jalan Pekeliling and now Jalan Tun Abdul Razak) which was less than half a mile from our house on the corner of Jalan Gurney Dua and Satu. We were well within ear-shot of the commotion.

I was then out on our badminton court with my wife and children when I saw young Malay, face ravaged with shock as he ran past us, intermittently stopping to catch his breath and then run on.The panic he radiated was very contagious.

A few moments later my neighbour, Tuan Haji Ahmad shouted from across the road that a riot was in progress at the Princess Road junction and that we should immediately get back indoors.
Soon afterwards as the darkness set in, we saw red tongues of flame crowned with black smoke go up from the direction of Dato Kramat. From town there was a red glow in the sky of fires burning. The acrid smell of smoke was coming from everywhere . More to the point the very air around us seemed to be shivering with terror.

Fearing the worst we locked ourselves in and huddled around the TV set. Then I heard this high pitched wail. It was a female voice in distress –“Tolong, buka pintu, tolong. buka pintu!” [Help, open the door] A diminutive woman, with a babe in arms was desperately yelling for shelter, obviously not having had much luck with the houses nearer the Gurney Road junction.
Without a second thought, I ran out unlocked the gate and let her in. She was wide eyed with terror and the baby was bawling away.

The sheer relief seemed to have silenced her and she was not registering my questions. And she was not talking.
Once inside, she slunk into a corner in our dining room and just sat there huddled with her baby and not looking at us but facing the wall. It was now evident that she was Chinese, spoke no English, and was quite unwilling to engage in any conversation except to plead in bazaar Malay that she would give us no trouble and that she would leave the next day.

Our attention soon shifted from her to the TV set. A very distraught Tunku Abdul Rahman [the then Prime Minister], came on to tell us that a curfew had to be declared because racial riots between the Malays and the Chinese, caused by the over-exuberance of some elements celebrating their election victories, gave brief details of irresponsible provocations, skirmishes, and fatalities. He stressed the need for calm whilst the security services restored law and order. Well do I remember his parting words to us that night,“Marilah kita hidup atau mati sekarang.” [We must love each other or die]

As my attention once again shifted to the tiny woman and her tinier baby, let me confess to my shame, that the thought crossed my mind that living in a predominantly Malay area, I had now put my whole family in peril by harbouring this Chinese woman. It was manifestly evident from the TV broadcasts that her race had become the target of blind racial hatred.

It was an ignoble thought I immediately suppressed as unworthy of any human being. She too had been watching the TV and perhaps even more intently was watching me, and must have seen the dark clouds as they gathered around my visage.
None of us were in the mood to eat anything anyway.
We all just sat and waited and waited and waited not knowing quite what to expect.

Hours later there was a loud banging at our gate accompanied by a male voice shouting. I realised then my moment of truth had finally arrived. I asked my cook Muthu, a true hero, if ever there was one to accompany me to the gate.

In that half-light I saw the most enormous Malay man I ever set my eyes on. With great trepidation I asked him what he wanted.
“You have got my wife and child in your house and I have come for them” he said in English.Still suspicious I asked him, “Before I say anything can you describe your wife.”
“Yes, yes I know you ask because I am a Malay. My wife is Chinese and she is very small and my baby is only a few months old. Can I now please come in.”

I immediately unlocked the gate. In he came and we witnessed the most touching family reunion. He thanked us profusely and without further ado they were on their way. In the excitement we did not ask his name or address. What next?

I saw where my duty lay and immediately called the Emergency telephone number to volunteer for relief duty. An armoured car appeared the next morning. I was taken to Federal House and assigned to assist the late Tun Khir Johari (as he subsequently became) and the late Tan Sri Manicavasagam. Our task initially was to transport and re-settle the refugees into the Merdeka Stadium and thence into the low cost municipal flats in Jalan Ipoh. We then tied-up with Dato Ruby Lee of the Red Cross to locate missing persons and supply emergency food rations to the displaced. Some semblance of law and order was restored and the town slowly came back to life.

If that baby who sheltered in our house that fateful night has survived life’s vicissitudes he would be 38 years old today.
All the ethnic races which compose our lucky nation were fully represented in our house that evening when the Almighty brought us together for a short while.

With our 50th Merdeka [independance] anniversary fast approaching, and our hopes for racial unity so much in the forefront our minds, may I leave it to my readers to ask themselves whether there is a pointer here for all of us.

Folded into our experience of the night of May 13th 1969 was there not the glue that binds all of us with the message that we must love each other or die?

Dato Mahadev Shankar
Shah Alam.
13th May 2007

DM of the Rings

Have you ever wondered what would happen if a group of modern RPG players who had never heard of Lord of the Rings were to play it as an adventure?

Go here: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=612 to find out.

Crosby Stills and Nash

I love this song...it reminds me of my family far away

Look around me
I can see my life before me
Running rings around the way
It used to be
I am older now
I have more than what I wanted
But I wish that I had started
Long before I did
Chorus
And there's so much time to make up
Everywhere you turn
Time we have wasted on the way
So much water moving
Underneath the bridge
Let the water come and carry us away
Oh when you were young
Did you question all the answers
Did you envy all the dancers
Who had all the nerve
Look round you know
You must go for what you wanted
Look at all my friends who did and got what they deserved
Chorus
And there's so much time to make up
Everywhere you turn
Time we have wasted on the way
So much water moving
Underneath the bridge
Let the water come and carry us away
And there's so much love to make up
Everywhere you turn
Love we have wasted on the way
So much water moving
Underneath the bridge
Let the water come and carry us away
Let the water come and carry us away

Wide Night

Wide Night

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine
the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you and this

is what it is like, or what it is like in words.

--Carol Ann Duffy