On A Little Street in Singapore …

I’m on my holidays in South-East Asia. First I went to Singapore for a few days. It’s one big shopping-mall-cum-outdoor-sauna. You need to be fit to traverse its malls, as they go on for miles, and many are underground. Fortunately, most shops have air-conditioning.

It’s very clean, orderly, and the natives are friendly. They also speak good English. If I had to have a base in the Orient, Singapore would be good.

It’s a small island, imports its water from Malaysia, and has no natural resources. It has therefore to work very hard at its finance and retail industries. Even the lift doors have ads on them.

The Long Bar at Raffles Hotel is worth a look, if you can find it. There’s Raffles Plaza and Raffles City, and Raffles Hospital as well. Raffles Hotel has let out ‘rooms’ to businesses. If you squint your eyes you can imagine the fine hotel it must have been. Now it’s hard to find the hotel amidst the concessions.

Then we went to Penang, which is a small island off the west coast of Malaysia. The standard of living is not as high here. It reminds me of how Spain might have been, before it got over-developed. They are building towers by the beach good-oh. Very warm, and very humid.

This is a Muslim country, which means there is a tension between the trend toward consumerism and self-expression, and the ethnic minorities, and the puritanism of Islam.

What is fascinating is that the Government has just barred the creation of an Islamic ’snoop squad’ or moral police. They wanted to spy on courting couples, and the like, I think. The Government realised quite rightly that it could easily get out of hand. Another scandal lately is the using of faeces to feed farmed freshwater fish, or ‘patin’. The national paper ‘The Star’ seems to carry a fair bit of critical news of the ‘we must improve our standards’ variety, which is encouraging. The fact remains that this is a two-tier society; the Malays, and the rest. The former get preferential treatment.

Eating out is often done in open-air cafes, with just a roof to keep off tropical rainfall, and overhead fans to ameliorate the heat . Reminds me a bit of rock festival catering. The food can be quite tasty. I have read one would be wise to avoid ice and salads. In Muslim countries toilet paper is not traditional; a hose is often provided in the lavatory instead, so if the cook doesn’t wash his hands thoroughly …!

Outside my window, they are tearing down a couple of hills for sand and gravel, I think. A great pity, as the local wildlife is quite charming. When they’re gone, you can’t just put them back again. I saw an iguana and a monkey climbing a tree in the back-garden. Very warm and humid here, so you need air-conditioning if you are European and need to think straight occasionally.

I don’t mind the heat _too_ much, but I resent having to wash two or three times day just to remain decent. It’s a chore, for an Irish farmboy.

I have also had to concoct an insect repellent, as I’m afraid of malaria and dengue fever. Some relatives of my travelling companions have caught the latter recently, so it’s no joke. Citronella (mixed with olive oil for spreading on the skin) is reputed to work. Also using unscented toiletries, wearing light-coloured clothes, and washing the latter with unscented soap powder. Here’s hoping!

Osama Bin Laden hacked my website!

The site is TigerTom Freeware. It runs a slightly outdated version of PHP-Nuke. It got hacked on 22nd December 2005, by some lads from Bahrain. They put up their own message on the front page; as most of it was in Arabic, I don’t know what it said. Possibly ‘Chelsea boys were here’.

I was glad they hadn’t truly wrecked it. Might have been because it was a freeware site, and had a great big picture of the pyramids of Giza on the front.

As I was on an antediluvian internet connection, I couldn’t upgrade it. So I stripped out everything except the download module. Remains to be seen if it remains unviolated.

I’d read PHP-Nuke is particularly vulnerable to hacks. They should just release a version with minimal functionality, and no possibility of third-party input, as default. This sort of bovver can waste months of someone’s work.

Where Are The Heroes Of Yesteryear?

Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, has been tossed overboard by his honourable colleagues.

I remember looking at pictures of politicans and sporting heroes from years gone by. I was struck by how few would be known today, even by name.

Just because eveyone tells you you’re important, doesn’t mean you are. I used to work at a market research company. One executive told me that if he contributed to the literature on pharmaceutical marketing, he could die happy.

We should all get out of the house and climb a mountain, occasionally. See things from the perspective of God. We are players on a stage, and the Gods are on the balcony. Sitting around whinging, focussing on minutae, will get us bottled off.

I think it was the noted English occultist, Amado Crowley, who said: "Man thinks he is a problem waiting to be solved. He doesn’t realise he was meant to be an answer".

Man is a key. Some people ‘fit’ their space in the continuum, and they are blessed and can bless. The rest of us pick at our psychological scabs, and exist in petty conflict with our brothers and sisters.