Rants & Raves of Jasmine’s Fiction

This is a common sight about town:  A person plugged into a portable music device.  Welcome to the world of MP3s.  One of the most common varieties found on the streets and in various forms of private and public transportation is the Apple iPod. 

You can normally tell those users apart from the generics:  the rectangular bulge in their pants.  The telltale ‘please mug me’ white wire leading to white earphones.  Also, iPod users tend to be a pretentious lot because they have a tendency to keep taking it out every 2 minutes to fiddle with the dials!

In light of this popularity rise (42 MILLION sold to date worldwide) – merchandising companies have created every possible accessory to increase the iPod users’ ‘mug me appeal’.  From bags to bling and from docking stations to speakers, it has now become a part of our culture.  Blame it on the 21^st Century; blame it on increased spending power.  Even Levi Strauss the denim giant has jumped onto the bandwagon.

The Levi’s RedWire DLX comes with a built-in docking cradle, retractable headphones and a joystick in the coin pocket!  Somehow the line “is that an iPod in your pocket or are you just happy to see me” doesn’t quite ring right.

In the meantime, I’ll listen to my music the old fashioned CD way while you get bashed over the head for your iPod AND your jeans.

Note: Jasmine does not own an iPod nor a pair of Levi’s.  This rant might be because she’s jealous that she doesn’t; or that she’s not stupid enough to pay US$400 and US$200 respectively to be ‘hip’.

Several of my mates recently hopped on the blogging bandwagon and for some unknown reason, they’ve been posting some pretty depressing albeit very insightful and enlightening but still some pretty downer type blogs. Boys!  Why the negativity?

Hell Is Other People, The Futility Of Hope, I Hate My Boss, Don’t Bother Me, Table Manners (or lack thereof) – just to cite some blog titles.  I know just for posting this I’m going to get lambasted by them via comments and feedbacks but gentlemen, seriously, is standing alone really THAT important to y’all?

What happened to “No Man Is An Island” and “United We Stand” and even “Don’t Worry Be Happy”? Maybe my anti-depressant drugs are of the industrial strength variety, or maybe I like being part of the generic hoi-polloi.  Sigh.  Carpe Diem, you only live once.  Why fight the system.  La Vie En Rose.

That aside, keep up the good blogging work mateys!  Luv you bubs ta bits I do!

You just gotta LOVE what the Malaysian press is printing nowadays… This came out on page 13 in the News Straits Times on the 10^th of August 2006. Laugh people.  That’s all we can do about it.

Even The Banned List’s Been Banned Now

A FEW weeks ago, the authorities came out with a pamphlet that listed the books that are banned from sale and circulation in Malaysia. There was some public outcry. To address this, the pamphlet has been slapped with a ban.

"The reason is quite obvious," said Freedom From Speech chairperson Salmon- berry Chen. "We fear that exposure to the very titles of these books will cause too much discussion. This should be the end of the matter."

The 49-page booklet was seen in a few shops of dubious prestige last week. But checks by this worthy organ confirm that they have been withdrawn from circulation.

The ban on those books and the reasons for them were initially controversial. One of them featured a cat named Garfield, considered offensive for "glorifying orange felines that were not indigenous to this country". Another featured a dog named Snoopy, and was withdrawn for "seemingly conferring the powers of speech to an animal, therefore going against the laws of nature". Now, even the titles of both these books can no longer be printed.

The question remains: If we don’t know what is banned, how can we take action against those who continue to sell and circulate those dangerous books? Chen dismissed this concern with a guffaw.

"The authorities have been instructed in a special way. Do not worry. Those of us in power have a different way of speaking, anyway."

Singapore

recently launched a campaign to curb rampant sex habits of Malay teenagers after looking at this ‘very worrying’ data:-

1)  About a third of all teenage abortions in 2004 occur in the Malay community

2)  Half of all teenagers infected with STDs are Malay

3)  More than half of the 417 teen who gave birth in 2004 were Malay

So with this in mind, the government is feeding ethnic Malay teenagers the message that “it’s sexier to say NO” in the hopes that they will abstain from sex.  Yeah right.  While I’m not Malay and certainly not Singaporean, I find this campaign to be somewhat, ambiguous.  And relatively offensive.

Seriously.  Which direction are they going?  They come up with lines like “This shows that our community has matured and is now ready to discuss this issue in the open and do something about it collectively.”  Uhm, ok.  Nothing in it about condoms and safe sex.  This reads like the Christian campaigns in the

USA

.  Abstinence supporters are up-front about their crusade being “MORALLY BASED”.  It’s for your own good goes the tagline.

C’mon, teens will be teens and if the government thinks that they can stop these kids from bumping hips just by informing them to feel ‘morally decent’ they’ve got another thing coming.  Teenagers don’t listen to their parents, so listening to the government is oh-so-likely-to-happen.  The more they make it a taboo subject, the more kids want to find out and experience it.  Surely it is a better idea to give these already sexually active young people information on how to protect themselves from the itchy nasties and how not to get knocked up!

Then there’s the other direction this could go.  This is the one I find odious.  It involves preaching directly to the Malay community about abstinence (with the S’porean birth rates declining), stigmatizing innocent kids born to unwed moms (rather than treating all kids equally) and placing the blame of teenage abortion squarely on the shoulders of a MINORITY group (14%, hello?) over ALL the population.  Look at the data above!  Two thirds of teenage abortions are from other ethnic groups and the other half with itchy nasties are NOT Malay! 

They want the Malay kids to say “NO” now but to wait till they’re ‘older’ and ‘married’ to then go for it like rabbits to impede the population decline but I feel by then they will be so terrified and uneducated about sex that they will have “NO” idea what to do and how to do it!

But what do the Singaporean ethnic Malay teens think about this?  In a random street interview, views ranged from the thoughts that it’s great that the government is taking such an interest in their morality to the fact that government is a legitimised dictatorship and that they would rather have their sensitive areas infected with several nasty things than to listen to the authorities.  Then cometh the teeth gnasher!  Some kids thought that the government should make it a point to impose a modest dress code because boys will be tempted to have teenage sex if girls dress scantily. 

I shall refrain from making any comments on that last thought lest I digress too far from my original topic.  All comments and brickbats are welcome though.