Raising Rockstar

Haven’t done one-a these in awhile..

#92

So the wabbitdog likes to do things like dig in the plant pots to get HN’s attention, and like with any of the other kid messes, we always try to clean the worst of it up before Kings gets home… One evening I enter the living room to find HN imposing a back-to-hutch timeout on a non-plussed rabbit-with-satisfied-expression.

HN: When I get married, I’m going to make sure it’s to someone who’s fine with my animal messes <looks at me reproachfully> 

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“There is no threshold, that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become truly alive…”  – Sir Anthony Hopkins as genius “puppeteer” programmer Robert Ford in Westworld

“Awake, wood inanimate, now you’ve got a soul!” – guess where this one comes from 😉

Italian novelist Carlo (Collodi) Lorenzini was a volunteer in the Tuscan army before becoming disenchanted with politics, thereby turning to children’s literature (wait, what?)

“…every man, whether he is born rich or poor, is obliged to do something in this world….”  

“Never trust anyone who promises to make you rich in a day, they are generally crazy swindlers.” 

If you don’t recognise the quotes above, it’s not your fault. Disney tortures nearly everything to death in the name of children’s entertainment (and yet…. can’t live with em, can’t live without them…. Disney. Not… children.) Let’s try another:

‘When the dead person cries, it is a sign that he is on the road to get well,’ said the Crow solemnly. ‘I grieve to contradict my illustrious friend and colleague,’ added the Owl, ‘but for me, when the dead person cries, it is a sign that he is sorry to die.” 

Still no clue? Not surprising, but you’ll definitely recognise it after this next excerpt:

“’Are you not afraid of death?’

‘I am not in the least afraid!… I would rather die than drink that bitter medicine.’

At that moment the door of the room flew open, and four rabbits as black as ink entered carrying on their shoulders a little bier.

‘What do you want with me?’ cried Pinocchio, sitting up in bed in a great fright.

‘We are come to take you,’ said the biggest rabbit.

‘To take me?… But I am not yet dead!…’

“….but you have only a few minutes to live, as you have refused the medicine that would have cured you…”

‘Oh, Fairy, Fairy!’ the puppet then began to scream, ‘give me the tumbler at once… be quick, for I will not die–no…..”

Am I the only one who thinks this is just hilarious – Pinocchio makes it his life’s goal to be a Real Live Boy. Then he gets sick just like any real boy would. Then like so many other real children out there he refuses to take his bitter-tasting medicine and learns that to be alive is to also feel pain, face sickness and death and well, do stuff you don’t always enjoy but is good for you in the long run (like, when did we get to thinking anything we want, covet, comes without a price or consequence?) It’s like Newtons’ Law Of No Free Lunch For Everything In Life right… 

(pics from Greg Hildebrandt art on Pinterest and ebay)

Oh, and I especially liked when the Four Rabbits of Death (what?) come to collect Pinocchio and talking to them so frightens him that he begs to take his bitter medicine. (Seriously, dis is good stuff. WHY would the Disney Powers That Be ever see fit to edit out the Four Rabbits. Like, do they have names like Pestilence, Famine, War etc? Well in Pinocchio they have jobs as undertakers (again – what?) but anyways) – Lemme try that with our own wabbit (whom, disappointingly, HN has named Tarrant (Hightop)) –

Study hard, kids. (Take my word for it, dis issa rabbit)

“B+ Again??  Incredulous

(On an aside, this also why I insist the kids spend some time cleaning up after their pets (though it drives me batsh*t to sometimes have to clean up after them cleaning up after their pets) – to have live pets rather than soft toys is to risk that they can die; to get to feed the pets all kinds of different fruits and veggies, discover the foods they madly love, is to also deal with animal poop; without having to do real work, there is no incentive to find ways to lighten the load.

The joy of a pet loving you is that it’s a relationship you have to nurture, like any other real life relationship (except animal relationships tend to be without a “manipulativeness” that practically always comes with being human – humans often overthink, and sometimes it’s just nice to have a few simplistic relationships as well) – and to do that is to take time to understand the pet… Which is about when HN learned to not insist her rabbit go out when he doesn’t feel like it (usually when he can smell rain in the air, but sometimes Just Because). It’s really not always easy to stick to things, but to “cheat”, to break these rules, is ultimately to get something less out of the relationship..

Anyway, back to Pinocchio.

“Believe it or not, my introduction to scary literature was Pinocchio. My mother read it to me every day before nap time when I was 3 or 4. The original is terrifying.” – R.L. Stine, author of Goosebumps

In the 1880s, Adventures of Pinocchio had a storyline meant as a metaphor on the human condition, and the work still holds the record for Most Translated Non-Religious Book (second only to the Holy Bible), that runs roughly like this:

Celebrated Master Carpenter discovers Block of Talking Pinewood. Freaked out by Talking Block (everyone knows blocks of wood should just shut up and be carved into whatever suits our purposes), he dumps “Problem Block” with Down-On-His-Luck Puppeteer.

Thus begins the journey of self discovery for Pinocchio and his adoptive dad Geppetto – one filled with irony as the puppet pulls the strings, fraught with an exquisite pain of the sort only a parent might know, as penniless craftsman sacrifices repeatedly to provide for his unexpected dependant who grows ever more stubborn and selfish even as he grows more “human” (pics from spiderwebart.com and Pinterest):

‘The Marionette, as soon as his hunger was appeased, started to grumble and cry that he wanted a new pair of feet.

But Mastro Geppetto, in order to punish him for his mischief, let him alone the whole morning. After dinner he said to him:

“Why should I make your feet over again? To see you run away from home once more?”…..

“I promise to go to school every day, to study, and to succeed–“

“Boys always sing that song when they want their own will.”

“But I am not like other boys!…..

Geppetto, though trying to look very stern, felt his eyes fill with tears and his heart soften when he saw Pinocchio so unhappy. He said no more, but taking his tools and two pieces of wood, he set to work diligently.

“To show you how grateful I am to you, Father, I’ll go to school now. But to go to school I need a suit of clothes.”

Geppetto did not have a penny in his pocket (but managed to fashion a satisfactory outfit for the puppet)…

“…in order to go to school, I still need something very important… An A-B-C book.”

“And the money?” …When poverty shows itself, even mischievous boys understand what it means.

“What does it matter, after all?” cried Geppetto all at once, as he jumped up from his chair…..

After a while he returned. In his hands he had the A-B-C book for his son, but the old coat was gone... and the day was cold.

“Where’s your coat, Father?”

“I have sold it.”

“Why did you sell your coat?”

“It was too warm.“‘

In the original, Pinocchio eventually dies by hanging, for his many crimes and transgressions. That includes killing Jiminy Cricket with a hammer (OMG!!) And then publishers thought that was “too scary” for little children (no!) and author Collodi was asked to add about 20 chapters of the Fairy With The Turquoise Hair.

pic from wikipedia (but you can also search Collodi on kids.net.au)

This “fairy” grants lonely Geppetto’s wish to bring his puppet to life, and appears at critical moments in Pinocchio’s transgressions, admonishing him and eventually keeping him from bad or risky behaviour. But along the way are many misguided attempts on both sides, including the fairy in some versions saying “study hard, you are almost ready to become real,” and even with blue hair and magic, learning to be good, understanding the consequences of being bad, takes time. 

Just as Pinocchio has been “almost good enough” to get to be real, he runs away to Toy Island and he and his bad friends get turned into donkeys by some kind of child (or donkey) traffickers (CAVEAT – there are several comments on the Transformationi Videos Youtube channel that say this is like the scariest scene in a little kiddie movie ever haha)

 OK – caveat for the rest of this post because of the TV series described bel0w, which carries a strong MA (Mature Audience) rating…

Imagine an amusement park in which for USD 40,000 a day you get to live with no rules, be as cruel and selfish to your fellow man, woman or child, as your hidden heart desires.

In this high-end cowboys-and-indians theme park filled with life-like androids indistinguishable from humans, sits layer upon layer of role-playing story loop. None of the androids can hurt a paying customer, but you, the customer, get to hurt all the inhabitants of this world with no apparent consequences. You get to play Mass Murderer, or Town Hero, as you wish. “Everyone” ultimately chooses Black Hat over White, it’s the most exciting game (that turns out to be not really). The clip below is for general audiences, but I did not let the kids watch the actual series, not because of the themes, but because of the visuals:

Now, storylines of malfunctioning robots wreaking havoc AND/OR becoming more human than the humans, are not new. Who they are, what they look like however, is. The choices casting directors and writers make when they create characters, pick the right faces for, is telling, re how our world is changing. 

Decades ago, “malfunctioning killer robots” looked like this (pics from vox.com and hollywoodreporter.com):

The latest AI going rogue (and yes killing people) however, ie what-writers-decided-would-have-a-greater-effect-on-audiences today, looks predominantly like this (pics from Hollywood Reporter and Hello Giggles):

(Also to be contrasted with the female androids in various versions of Stepford Wives (I only watched the not-at-all-meant-to-be-funny 1975 version, not the Nicole Kidman newer version) where husbands decide to replace their real wives with beautiful and compliant robots who never get angry, always dress nice and cook and clean – obviously NOT AI or any ‘I‘ :D):

Also, apparently they can do all that in high heels. Obviously robots 😀 pic from BBC

Someone made a tv series titled Stepford Children too, in which kids “always do their homework” (pic from Wikipedia) 😀

I tried to be fair and put up a Stepford Husbands pic but Googling SH gets you the men who turn everyone else into robots (oops) so instead, how bout Hairy-chested Helicopter Pilot From Inside Out (gif from weheartit.com):

Anyway back to Westworld. I got the pic of Evan Rachel Wood in character (blue dress several pics up) from hellogiggles.com, but I have no idea why they call their website that, her interview is erm, not at all “giggly.” She is quoted:

“The greatest lesson I have learned is that there is always more to learn.” 

“Don’t pretend to know things you don’t – just ask. If people give you sh*t, it says more about them than you. You have nothing to prove.”

…at which point I should probably put up a pic of her when she’s not in character as Babyfaced Android Built To Be Abused By Park Guests, Who Eventually (Maybe) Becomes Sentient in Westworld:

(Y-eah a bit like Captain Marvel’s latest look in Endgame) pic frm hellogiggles.com

In real life, Wood has a black belt in taekwondo 🙂 She’s also testified at the United States House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations as an abuse survivor and is a single mom of a young boy. (In Westworld she put on such a powerful performance as an android “victim” built for mistreatment that I went to search for where the acting chops could’ve come from…)

SPOILER ALERT

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A further elaboration on the are-they-aren’t-they “sentience” of the robot inhabitants of Westworld – the series teases you not a few times into thinking the “geniuses” of engineering and business acumen have succeeded in creating life – true AI that eventually rebels at their mistreatment – while milking a cash cow of a lucrative business idea for adult entertainment… but then you catch ever more glimpses of saboteurs at work – they actively alter the code that dictates each host/android’s ability to rebel, “improvisation” of speech and facial ticks being also programmable conditions in their personality – like, how sarcastic a robot is can be marked on a scale of 1 to 18.

One host appears to go completely rogue, enlisting other hosts in a jailbreak, killing many employees in the labs in the process…… only to be told she was coded to do so. Then right when you think there is no such thing as free will, on the subway ride into the outside world she changes her mind and turns right back into the park she has just escaped, to look for the child host who once played the part of her daughter, back when a VIP customer requested the experience of murdering a mother-and-daughter (Yeah. Gruesome entertainment that shines a spotlight on the desensitising effect of screen/ entertainment violence (you can tell I’m still mad at Deadpool producers, right? Such brilliant wit and humour. Such unneccessary gore and sex)).

One of the most brilliant hosts, in between being programmed and re-programmed and therefore half the time not remembering he isn’t human, creates a “maze”, metaphorically like a child’s educational toy “worthy” hosts are meant to solve, but really a journey of empathy based on life’s trials and tribulations, set around the park whereby their artificial minds ultimately achieve sentience if/when they manage to complete it.

In some of the Westworld clips compiled below, major characters with fulfilling work and/or personal relationships appear to kill each other and/or themselves and if you followed the series, you would be absolutely horrified/rivetted/ horrified/rivetted …..it’s only later that you’ll learn practically everyone killing each other and themselves are androids who can be brought back to life, their memories wiped clean or inserted into other bodies. Most of the time, they don’t know it either.

https://youtu.be/JIChFmFzhR0

The point is this: When you thought they were real, was it not horrifying….. and then horribly desensitising? Then when you realised they were not real, were you able to turn off how you felt or reacted to watching it just like that <snaps> Your own reactions to this powerful drama should tell you whether such concepts for entertainment should be produced for real. 

Sir Anthony Hopkins plays a master genius programmer and designer who decides to end his own life not with the whimper of being ousted from the Board of Directors due to corporate intrigue, but the bang of being assassinated by one of his greatest robot creations. (Unfortunately, he decides to take most of the Board with him.)

“These violent delights have violent ends…..” – originally from Romeo & Juliet

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END SPOILER

Sir Hopkins, aged 81, has joyously described how he doesn’t understand technology but that he wants to “move out of (his) comfort zone or (he) may as well die”. Thus he gleefully merges his considerable acting skill first with the latest developments in CGI (Transformers), and now the layer upon layer of artificial personality and the constant question of what humans really might be able to create, and what is truly beyond us. (And by “really might be able to create” I don’t mean simply the ability to do so, but the cost attached..  Y’know, as in there are so many things we already wish we could “un-create”.)

At some point in the series you realise there is no such thing. Lack of consequence. 

Supposedly, as long as you can afford the hefty price tag, you are free to perform unnameable acts of violence and cruelty towards “people” who are literally programmed to not be able to defend themselves. They are also coded to believe that the pain, fear, and anything else you choose to inflict on them, is real. It’s their realistic suffering that makes your role-playing game vacation come to life.

An army of programmers divided into several corporate teams cross-checking each other, debating the extent to which the artificial intelligence before them are keeping to their storylines/ “loops,” whether their diversions are “malfunctions” or acceptable variations their programming has allowed in order to make them more “human,” ensures the hosts’ are “convincing”. (I think they could’ve added a bit more detail to the discussions between the mainstream programmers and the quality assurance programmers who cross-check the conditions written for each “host” android and the choices said “host” then makes as their story loops unfold with the paying customers, within those constraints. It is a very interesting trade-off – the more autonomy and “freedom” the android is allowed in making decisions, the more life-like they seem to park guests…… and the more risk that the AI’s consciousness evolves in ways their corporate “masters” can no longer control.)

This raises all kinds of moral arguments and divides the board of directors and majority shareholders (some of whom would rather not “give (a) life (of suffering)” to AI, believing old fashioned bots to be more than adequate for the park, in the name of not creating every damned thing “just because we can”. The existence of and blurring between good and selfish intentions gives rise to corporate intrigue – and then they start reprogramming the robots… The robots also reprogram each other. (If ever there was a verdant playground for scriptwriters, this is SO it. Maybe hissa robot. Maybe shissa robot. Maybe POTUS Donald Trump issa robot…)

Some park hosts learn to hide precious memories and encounters from their programmer keepers, so as not to risk having them deleted, thereby making the cross-checks against malfunction meaningless but for a false sense of security. Some of the most mistreated hosts form alliances. The host searching for her repurposed host “daughter” is theorised to have “awakened” within her conditional programming that allowed improvisation of narrative, because the trauma of having her “daughter” killed in front of her sets off a condition in her permanent coding that eventually causes her to keep recalling her “past life” as an ordinary homesteader mom. Is that true AI consciousness? We are yet to find out…

At some point along the way, you, the vacationing customer, lose your humanity and meaning for your existence. Whether or not robots are “real,” the point is we are, and somewhere at the back of all the made-for-screen-entertainment theatrical violence, intrigue and sheer decadence of the entire park project is the overriding message:

We were not meant to live without boundaries and rules. This is a theme that gets revisited over and over by writers through the decades (though not always with malfunctioning robots) – one lo-tech version is Lord of the Flies.
We cannot do cruel or decadent things with impunity, without consequence, for our own sanity and wellbeing. 

It was TS Eliot who said “love between human beings” was only explained and made reasonable “by the Higher Love, else is it a mere coupling of animals”. You lose your humanity when you stop behaving like a human being.

ps: (On an aside, TS Eliot created some powerful literature while struggling in his search for meaning of life and love, writing some graphic poems about horrible encounters of the flesh, sterile and empty spiritual practices…… before he became a Christian. Whereupon I observed somewhere in my A Levels essays (before I became Christian) that he arguably stopped producing anything “good” (ie angsty and tragic) thereafter – if you look at what he wrote in his deepest darkest despair (Hollow Men) vs what he wrote after he accepted Christ – some happy stuff about Cats having 3 Secret Names (FINE so it’s in the Cats musical and personally I would much prefer to feel strongly about cats’ names than that the world has no hope, but…. Anguished It Iz Not. I mean, I’m happy for Eliot, he found faith, but like Bon Jovi once said, “Like the Roses Need the Raaaaaiiin…. Poets Need Da Pain…. 😀 ) 

Blog been getting way too serious lately… Let’s lighten it up, shall we?

“Robots are causing all the Robot Crime in Robot Chicago…” 

Ronnie Chieng, Johore (Malaysia) born, Singapore and Aussie-educated standup comedian, recently went on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show with a case for an Asian President in the White House, how every Asian-American child “no longer has to aspire just to be a neuro-surgeon.”

We first came across Chieng when he played the status-chasing cousin/ Poser Dad coaching his 3 sons to freeze at “optimal angles” for photo ops and dictating his wife’s dress labels (Bottega Veneta, anyone?) in Crazy Rich Asians…

Dis is him (pic from news.com.au)

… though Chieng has a day job as a senior media correspondent on The Daily Show, and recently he interviewed Democratic Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang about his 2020 run (I’ll add that I think many candidates get in the race to make themselves heard, bring up  issues they care about in the debates, not just say, bid for nuclear launch codes):

Gotta be a little impressed Yang managed to keep a straight face what with Chieng just… bloviating everywhere, Robert Greenstein, Founder/ President of the Center On Budget Planning & Priorities, a Washington D.C. think tank focussing on fiscal policy that affects moderate and low income households, kinda lets a few smiles escape when declaring I Am Not A Robot…. But I Could Be… Y’know, in case you thought this blog segment was all about Big Birthday Parties With Ulterior Motives Serious World Domination.

Greenstein nonetheless affirms Yang’s plan for Universal Basic Income – putting USD 1000 a month into the pocket of every American citizen – as a beautiful way to allocate funds, with a big qualification that it costs so much the US Govt would never be able to afford it. (How to pay for it is addressed in the clip further down)

(On an aside, Yang is a father of two boys, the elder of whom he mentions openly in interviews is autistic, and in his elaboration below about Universal Basic Income, he highlights how his wife stays home to care for the kids and among others UBI “pays”/ incentivises vocations or jobs that are difficult but not acknowledged as actual “jobs,” like that of the Stay At Home Mum/ Dad who can’t make a 9-to-5 (but can start an online business/ take some refresher courses etc). Also that the majority of Americans who receive UBI aren’t going to quit their day jobs, but need a little extra help paying off student debt, paying for kids’ education…

As for the Who’s Going To Pay For It, I also view it as a play on time. An investment expense today that goes towards retraining to keep from existing skills becoming obsolete, ultimately funded/ repaid in the form of a better skilled, better educated, debt-free workforce, paying back the government in future taxes on higher earnings. Someday those Jobs and Employment economic numbers gonna show real results. (Not say, Issa Election Year We Need Fewer Poor People Let’s Adjust The Poverty Line/ Minimum Wage etc Calculation So We Call Fewer People “Poor’. (Even if they’re making exactly the same amount they did before we changed the definition of “poor” or “unemployed”..))

More cashflow, higher spending power, a cash injection, to be spent on more taxi rides, eating out, shopping, various other consumer “luxuries”… Yang highlights job creation et al… and a 10% value-added tax (not unlike Singapore’s GST) and forgoing of Welfare Benefits to pay for it (not to mention shifting some of the tax onto companies like Amazon.):

While this post was more about Asians killing it at Standup (before I got a little carried away), the diverse candidates and plans that American presidential candidates will discuss in upcoming debates are a real wealth of entertainment and education – not just because of the many ideas they are floating in order to solve America’s (and to some extent the world’s) problems, but because of who they are. Incredibly diverse. Talk shows are gonna get so much more exciting than the Kardashians.

Oh wait, you also need to see who some of the other Asians in Standup (besides Ronnie Chieng) are… Like Dr Jason Leung (hang in there for the “Everyone fears Chinese bit..”)-

(Forgive him, he went to medical school. Yes he is a real doctor.)

AND I saved the most interesting and thought provoking for last – Joe Wong, who performs regularly for audiences in both China and the US, and tries to make it all a little bit better with a laugh (this one didn’t go to med school. He just has a PhD in Biochemistry):

The world truly is changing – and it’s not all bad.

ps: Want more Ronnie Chieng? He’s also known for hammering Fox News for the so-horrendous-it’s-almost-funny-but-only-Asians-get-to-maybe-laugh-in-the-same-way-only-black-people-get-to-laugh-at-racist-black-jokes (and sorry white people looks like you don’t get to laugh at anything) car crash of stereotypes that the current mayor of New York then came right out and condemned. Here’s Chieng’s clip which includes respectful interviews of Chinese Americans at the end – sorry ’bout the language (BIG CAVEAT); and I almost liked when the Fox guy tortured Asian martial arts categorisations completely to death, BUT I did not like when he put very old people on camera who obviously had no idea what was going on – nothing justifies that disrespect.

(And I say this as someone who speaks nothing else nearly as well as English – either I’m super blur, or I really haven’t encountered a native speaker of any Asian language who behaves like I’m stupid just because I don’t speak their language well (not counting those who might think Imma plebe – ay, I got an A on that Sun Tzu elective I took in Uni okayyy – wait for it – which I wrote in English <sheepish>) OK anyway):

For the younger folk who might miss the Alfred E. Neuman For President reference by the Cantonese-speaking interviewee who didn’t want to choose between the two candidates in the last presidential election:

This is Alfred E. Neuman (pic from Comic Vine)

For real though, Fox Guy Trolling Chinatown probably made more American Chinese raise their kids to run for POTUS someday… I’m just sayin’..

Ok, you win. You get what you want. I lose, I fold.

The next two words are a game changer. What are they?

“What glorious fun!” said the wicked sprite, for he had created a mirror that failed to reflect the good and beautiful in people, that magnified only the ugly… Yet if a good thought passed through a man’s mind, still it appeared as a grin…

The Devil’s Mirror (pic from fairytale.fandom.com)

When the sprites had had their fun on Earth they decided to cause trouble in Heaven, to use the Devil’s Mirror and make the angels see as they did. But the closer the mirror got to Heaven, the more it grinned. Higher still, and higher, grinning ever wider, until it shattered into thousands of shards and fell back to Earth, there to be lodged in people’s hearts and eyes… 

– adaptation of The Snow Queen, Hans Christian Andersen  

Did you like the story of Kai and Gerda in the Snow Queen – Kai, with shards of Devil’s Mirror lodged in his eye and heart, who can no longer see the good in things. Gerda, who befriends the river, the birds, the flowers, each helping her just the little they can, toward her goal?

pic from dara3299.blogspot.com

Author Hans Christian Andersen created many fairytales – Snow Queen, Emperor’s New Clothes, The Tinder Box, Princess and the Pea….. How many can you name – 5? 10? 50? He wrote 3,381. For which we can only name a handful. He was also mocked for wanting to be a writer, likely dyslexic, and abused in childhood. He had a penchant for falling for unattainable women, thus taking a vow of celibacy and sparking all kinds speculations as people pored over his writings that became his outlet. He created all these enduring stories and is mostly hailed as a Danish national hero.

Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert failed often, receiving rejection after rejection for 6 years straight, before the success of EPL. Then on the (arguably inevitable) failure of whatever she wrote immediately following EPL she said, “I had to make sure my creativity survived its own success… I found it by how it had once survived its failure. You have to find your way home again… Your home is whatever you love in this world more than yourself. …It’s what you can dedicate your energies to regardless of whether you fail or succeed. …Whereby the ultimate results become inconsequential…” (THANK you, Cathay Pacific and Dragonair, for having all those TED talks in your inflight entertainment!!)

If you can only see the win, if your yardstick of measurement is only a string of As on your report card, your actual learning journey is that much weaker. (Not… that “only As” can ever be construed as a bad thing, but I think that “- and what else?” could go with. Like… Fish and chips. Burger and fries. Steak and fries. Grilled salmon and fries. Sushi and fries. (I eat them sparingly, but darn do I love my fries – everything tastes better with fries))

Ok but seriously. Years ago I met an intern who had always been a good student, she had a strong second-upper Law degree from the UK… then she said very honestly that coming out to work she had no idea how to translate that into doing well at a job/ career and it was terrifying. I know how she feels, I once had no idea what I was going to do with an Accounting degree**, possibly from initial lack of imagination though –

Take these two nerds. (pic from businesswire.com)

Economists Levitt and Dubner made “Freakonomics” a real thing. After these guys, people said things like “If Indiana Jones were an Economist“.  S-o let’s try that again –

A tad much? Nahhhhhhh.

<ends aside, begins another>

In some of the more rural areas of my childhood, every now and again the monkey population would swell, and the animals would start coming out of the jungles to steal food, attack humans especially little kids with snacks… The villagers fix monkey problems with a narrow-necked heavy glass jar and a handful of nuts.

The monkeys close their fist on the nuts at the bottom of the jar and in so doing can no longer remove their fist. Escape is hampered by the heavy glass jar around the monkey’s fist, it’s what makes him easy to catch. At any time if Alpha Monkey had simply let go, he could have removed his hand from the jar. The more aggressive the Alpha, the less likely he is to yield in time to escape. 

“Ok, you win. You get what you want. I lose, I fold. So what.“

Aggression and ego have more than a healthy correlation to insecurity and envy. Take this guy –

Mark Strong’s Dr Sivana in Shazam! (pic from tvandmovienews.com)

SPOILER ALERT…

Shazam The Movie’s latest super villain is, as the story goes, born after Dr Sivana, as a tween boy, cannot live up to his father’s expectations and remains resentfully in his older brother’s shadow. When vying for the role of the wizard Shazam’s Champion, the demons of the 7 Deadly Sins tempt him with power enough to finally impress his dad. When he easily succumbs, the wizard dismisses him as unworthy of inheriting his magic (not that there ever turns out to be someone truly worthy). What Sivana hears ONLY, is “You will never be good enough.”

And then he starts on this whole self-important, self-pitying rant re Does Age-old Wizard Know what it’s like to be a child and have this said to him???

Thus is a super villain born – Sivana makes it his life’s goal to find the portal and seize the Evil Eye so he can finally impress Dad and throw older brother out the window, right before feeding Dad to a demon. Sure. We’ve all been there. <shrugs> (NO, ok… NO WE HAVEN’T. Someone gonna say the Crazy Blogging Lady is at it again – lemme put the proverbial Not A Toy, Do Not Eat disclaimers on all kinds of very obviously non-edible not-meant-to-be-played-with things) There is however a real reason the demons say they’ve found their champion in Sivana, why they keep pursuing him – so many mortals tested over the years in the wizard’s search, but it is Sivana’s particular weakness they like best. Ever thought of that? Oh, and if you have a weakness people love to exploit, that is a helluva motivation to um, not have that weakness anymore 😀

Wizard on the other hand never finds the “perfect pure-hearted mortal”and settles on –

This Dude. 14yr old Billy who morphs into Big Guy With Cartoony Face (pic from tvandmovies.com)

Anyone get the irony? Sivana grows up “privileged and accomplished” – his father owns some large company with swanky offices and Sivana himself achieves enough to attach the prefix “Dr” to his name. His father, despite the scorn he receives (some of which seemingly Dad’s misguided attempt to get his “whine-y” son to stop well, whining), is still supportive enough to fund the research that goes towards finding the wizard’s cave (regardless he obviously doesn’t think very much of it). Yet Sivana can see only his father’s lack of approval and preference for his older brother, and his brother’s disrespect towards him.

Billy Batson, “Chosen One,” is by contrast an orphan bouncing from one foster home to another, as he searches for his birth mother because of what he believes to be a terrible mistake, that they simply got separated one day at an amusement park when he was 3 years old. When the wizard abducts chooses him, he says “I’m not sure anyone (pure of heart) exists.” Also, he doesn’t want to talk to strangers offering him “super powers” (kids! take note! 😀 ) Remember Sivana has this whole rant about how he made it his life’s goal (paid for by Dad – and then he says Dad Not Respectin’  him?! Like, no kidding.) after some… stranger tells him he is “unworthy.”

OK, how do I put this? In the fashion of Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga*, DIS… IS… AN EXCUSE. He wants to be this way. Evil villain, for the power. And then the dad, the wizard, the bro, the childhood, the french fries, the magic 8 ball are all excuses (*Kishimi and Koga, Japanese Philosopher who also specialises in Classic Western Philosophy, and award winning professional development writer respectively, wrote The Courage To Be Disliked, based on Freud rival Alfred Adler’s work.) Broadly, that we are not determined by our experiences but the meaning we give them, how we see them. And that these are largely choices we make (Here‘s a summary). Broadly, places the age point at 10 years. Around 10yrs old is when we can start to actively choose who we want to be.

When 14yr old Billy finally finds his birth mother, she tells him she was 17, and chose to abandon him with police authorities in the park because she had no idea how to give him a better life. Billy experiences what must be a most wrenching let-down for anyone, let alone a 14yr old orphan who made reuniting with his mother practically his only goal in life – only to learn she deliberately abandoned him and does not want a relationship. 

Instead of turning to a lifetime of super villain-ry fuelled by Shazam! powers though, Billy wishes her well, hands her the dinky little toy compass keyring he’s been holding on to his entire childhood – the last thing she had given him 11 years ago (she doesn’t remember it btw) – then he lets go – and returns to his real family, with a “real” mum and dad, also former foster children at least one of whom also did a lot of running away from foster homes.  

So yeah there’s a wizard and some magic spells. What. Ever. The “perfect human” may not exist, but tell me that ole’ wizard didn’t know a thing or two when he picked Billy over Sivana to morph into an action figure superhero.

Our society at large prizes winning. Adulation to the victors, correspondingly communicating the extent to which everything else matters less. We remember the name Neil Armstrong…. n-ot so much the army of engineers, health professionals and what-not who also had a hand in putting him up there.

Now, let’s imagine if families, workplaces, teams, were made up ONLY of people who always had to come in first, who always had to have their way. Like, if everyone just wants to be the first letter of the alphabet then we would just have no words 😀 Yet it is the humble, those who do not need to prove something, even to themselves, who hold families, societies, teams together.

**Have assignment, will brb…

————————————-

Dedicated to anyone who thinks their job sucks (and don’t many of us have one-a those days)…

“Hey, my name is Jim, where did I go wrong

My life’s a bargain basement, all the good sh*t’s gone…

…Hey, man I’m alive I’m takin’ each day and night at a time

I’m feelin’ like a Monday but someday I’ll be Saturday night”

– Jon Bon Jovi (Rocker, tattoos and the occasional dubious lyrics (caveat!) aside, Bon Jovi remains proudly and happily married to high school sweetheart Dorothea Hurley, describing a successful marriage as “hard in any (line of) work, in any world.”) 

In The Difference That Makes The Difference, a chapter of Thrive, author Jeremy Han describes how his most inspiring “student” at one of his workshops was the waitress serving the food during the 3-day workshop. Han writes, “…at the end of the third day, she approached me and said, ‘Sir, I am just a waitress… but whenever I was not serving, I paid close attention… I won’t remain a waitress all my life…” 

Would you see yourself as the “poor” person who couldn’t afford to be in some swanky inspirational workshop, or would you see that as an opportunity to be a fly on the wall at a hot full-house event some paying customers cannot get into? AND you’re getting paid to be there.

Hold that thought…. 

This exchange from the Steve Jobs movie gets picked up pretty often, in part because of the indignation of Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, whom many have said is the “real” genius. Simple, right? Jobs stole Woz’ credit and limelight? Woz, his loyal old friend, tries to stand by him? Hang on (if this is accurate – and the real Steve Wozniak is on record as saying Seth Rogen’s portrayal of him in the movie is spot on – then whoever wrote the scene is brilliant) – see if you notice anything else interesting:

Woz: You can’t write code. You’re not an engineer. You’re not a designer… so how come 10 times in a day I read “Steve Jobs is a genius.” What do you do?

Jobs: I play the orchestra. And you’re a good musician…. you’re the best in your row.

(Now clock (sorry :D) the…. thing on Woz’s wrist that he’s raving about as The Next Big Thing. Would you as a potential watch buyer see that “Next Big Thing” through Woz’ eyes, or through Jobs’?)

Now a less-quoted excerpt:

Jobs: …(Woz), you get a Free Pass for life…

Woz: I get a “Free Pass for life.” From you. …You give out the passes. You. Give ’em to me. 

An orchestra requires many different parts, therefore many different skills – which implies many different personalities. You need Wozes and Jobses on a strong team, in a strong society – each can see and create what the other could never. But the Wozes often feel (and fairly likely really are) shortchanged. The Jobses get more than a little encouragement to nurture the @sshole-ic part of their personalities because our reward system is perpetually flawed. Thing is, we all have a capacity to be selfish @ssholes, albeit our erm, “price point” differs – as Adam Grant put it, most people are “matchers”, a favour for a favour. But the price of letting just one “taker” in is that the givers burn out and suddenly everyone becomes wayyyy more selfish than before..

(Off on a tangent because Apple and Different Ways Of Seeing Things: Various news outlets have been on about President Trump’s latest “mistake” in calling current Apple CEO Tim Cook “Tim Apple”. May I just say – ALL that energy to dig up and respond to whether it was a “mistake,” whether there was a 0.2 second pause and whether POTUS was just “saving time” in the course of speaking, etc etc etc Apple CEO Tim Cook had the best reaction – he then happily changed his official Twitter to “Tim Apple.”) 

Jay Leno playing himself on fictional-yet-carefully-researched-and-highly-acclaimed The West Wing puts it most eloquently to fictional press secretary C.J. Cregg, “You know what would be great? If you could get (POTUS) to ride his bike into a tree again.” Because y’know, “that’s my bread and butter” (as a talk show host)….) Wait wait wait can I just say how much I love standup and SNL and Fallon and Wayne Brady and – OK end of rave.

AND THEN LIFE WENT ON 😀

Lesser known fact: Jobs denied paternity of daughter Lisa for several years, even after a DNA test established him as her biological father. His argument for doing so appears relatively sound logically, as backed by statistics and probabilities about the chances these tests can be wrong.

In other words, it illustrates the extent to which Jobs Senior did not see Lisa as a 5 year old child (he finally acknowledged paternity when she was about 9. That is a substantial part of her entire primary school lifetime – Rockstar not that long ago turned 11, and HN is not yet 7.)  

Lisa Jobs is classified as gifted, she attended Harvard, and this past September published Small Fry, a memoir of her childhood which includes emotional abuse, and which The New York Times is quoted, “In the fallen world of kiss-and-tell celebrity memoirs (a.k.a. reality tv and tell-all books), this may be the most beautiful, literary and devastating one ever written.“

I wonder how many people only saw that she was “gifted,” the daughter of a famous rich guy going to Harvard, wanting what she had, without seeing what she did not have, that many more kids her age did – a loving father. Because no one ever has everything. And we do ourselves a disservice chasing after the bits we can’t have, if it affects our ability to see what we do.

NOW back to that thought you were “holding” :D… That wonderfully fascinating world of “pricing,” mis-pricing, and opportunities and costs and the fact that what all of us see is coloured in some way or the other. Sometimes that’s bad. Sometimes however, that can give you strength like no other. (And well we could all use a bit more of it in our parenting).

One of my all-time favourite egs is the 1998 Italian movie Life is Beautiful, based on real-life Auschwitz survivor Rubino Romeo Salmoni. (Caveat, despite winning some 40 awards, 3 of ’em Oscars*, the movie still received criticism for incorporating humour in a Holocaust story.)

In the movie, fictional father and son Guido and Giosue are Jewish Italians who have been taken to an internment camp. To shield his son from the true horrors of the camp, Guido uses his substantial imagination (and gumption) to create a role-playing game:

What did you take away from that scene, that true heroes can often be skinny nerds with wonderful senses of humour? That real “strength” has less correlation to big muscles than we expected? How about the powerful influence how you see things as a parent and communicate them to your child will have on your child, who will grow up to be husband/wife, friend, parent, boss, team mate with their own powerful parts to play in our society. <STRESS><PRESSURE>

Let’s All Get Puppies! (Yo SPCA, y’all doing those pet keeping courses now right, can kids come? 🙂 )

*Life is Beautiful’s 3 Oscars… Roberto Benigni wins the much-coveted Best Actor role, beating out even Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan that year. So Benigni goes up there, and delivers just the best quip ever: “This is a terrible mistake. I used up all my English for the other awards.” 

Like, OMG – Coveted Best Actor, not won by a non-English language movie actor/actress since Sophia Loren 40 years prior.  

Y’know, I mentioned before that I’d been in some nasty mergers, that “bad” things “always” happen to “good” people in those mergers….. Quote marks relevant.

Every time you think someone is being deliberately awful to you, think also that this requires at least a teeny bit of effort and awareness. Which… You are happily wasting by not giving a sh*t about WHEEEEEEEEEEEE! (Umm, you’re using your own effort and awareness for something more productive like acquiring a new skill, right?)

Mergers are also an experience. They may take your portfolio for now, you may even lose your job in the short run, but no one can take away skills and ability you have gained – and better gained because of the added motivation your current situation gives you. That knowledge is yours to keep and put towards serving everyone else in your future who treats you better. (Sorry, I should’ve said, several posts ago, instead of leaving it at “that always happens to good people who don’t want to play dirty.” Yes it looks like you’re always at a disadvantage, but know what? You’re not really, you’re getting better at other things, acquiring new skills, while they’re expending their energy giving you a hard time and looking for a reaction…)

Umm… sorry to all the perfectly sensible (and may I add oh-so-witty) Bens we know, for the unfortunate title of the movie…

“Hi, I’m Ben. I’m an addict…” 

Ben is 19. He’s come home for Christmas, and the people who love him are terrified. He’s done this too many times before – promised he was clean, given loved ones false hope, gotten his girlfriends hooked, broken into his own home looking for things to steal so he can pay for his next high.

“I’m not worth it, Mom. …If you really knew me, you’d be done with me…”

Julia Roberts, who is so believable in the Mom-In-Difficult-Parenting-Situation Roles (anyone noticed the Pretty Woman jewelry box scene Easter Egg in Wonder?) you kinda don’t think she’s even acting anymore, portrays all the mixed emotions so powerfully that every mum can see themselves in her – the terror, the joy, the hope, the denial, the excuses when your kid does something stupid/ wrong, the refusal (and inability) to ever give up on them, the anger at everyone else for doubting… Don’t we all struggle perpetually to parent our kids? (AND I wouldn’t mind looking like Julia Roberts when I’m 50 😀 )  And so Holly Burns orders the organic cranberries because she wants to prepare the perfect meal, what with her son home from rehab. Everyone needs to fasten their seatbelts. The younger kids can get 15 more minutes of screen time.

Roberts of course took a break from acting when she had twins Phinnaeus and Hazel, now 14. She also has 11 year old Henry Daniel. And she relentlessly worked at convincing young upcoming actor Lucas Hedges and his writer-director father Peter Hedges to work together on the movie. In interviews, she will describe having the younger Hedges over for Thanksgiving and other big family events, to be around her own kids while they prepared to create Ben is Back together.

Ben Is Back is a drama meant to draw attention to the opioid epidemic, the terribly eye-opening horror story of the kind that can theoretically happen to “any” family. It is written with the voice of experience – Peter Hedges’ mother was an alcoholic who left the family and her son while he was still young… Grandma Hedges would return 15 years later, and spend the next ~25 years trying to save other addicts, herself never being completely free of her own demons.

Having also lost friends to drug addiction, Peter Hedges then wrote this story, which I view a clarion voice of caution, at the terrible toll addiction takes, the insidious way it finds its way in.

Betcha watch it anyway, but well, SPOILER ALERT…

This movie is rated R for language and drug use, and Common Sense Media unofficially places a 15+ age rating on it; personally I think it illustrates so powerfully the far-reaching consequences of substance abuse, the easy and unassuming way young people get caught unaware and sucked into those circumstances, down a path from which there is almost no chance of return, that anyone watching it cannot possibly think even an experimental high is anything but a stupid idea. 

Because Ben, back this Christmas Eve, can never truly be back.

Ben has so eroded everyone’s trust in him that he can’t be left alone for even a second. Big, strapping, athletic, charming Ben who writes funny songs without reservation on the fly. At 19 years old, he can’t ever close the door to his room when he comes home.

“Just tell me son, where you want me to bury you…. “

His mother stays in the bathroom with him when he pees. She searches him before he closes the changing room door to try on the shirts she’s picked out, then frantically bangs on it when she thinks she hasn’t searched him thoroughly enough.

Oh, so you thought coming of age to say, smoke, drink or drive legally meant you were also “grown up enough” to use? Go read what I wrote above. I know someone (no longer in HK) whose parents used. And their grownup children, now with children of their own (which was how we met), told me “An addict will say anything to get their next hit.” (Well, don’t get me started about the people who aren’t addicts who will also say “anything” :D)

People in the department store watch as Ben finally opens the changing room door his mother is banging ceaselessly on, hands over the little packet of powder. But, but he had confiscated it from this girl at his last AA meeting – that’s why he had it with him! He was SAVING her! 

“….My sponsor, he said, ‘Feeling really good about yourself are you, Ben? If you were honest, you would look in the mirror and say I Am A Great Big Phoney. …Because Ben, you are an addict. You are the last person who should believe his own bullsh*t…”

When I was young, I happened to come across an article written by a recovering young addict with a long history of substance abuse. She said that if you had never had a cigarette, you could never understand the terrible pull of an addiction. You will do anything, rationalise anything, just to feed that urge. Her words, the thought of never being able to feel as good again as if I had never tried it, frightened me deeply. It is the recovering addicts who deliver the most powerful lesson – I am yet to come across a recovering addict in an interview who does not regret ever starting.

I have also never come across anyone who did anything resulting in say, getting hooked or being in some accident, and then said “I knew I was going to end up hooked/ in that accident from doing (that stupid thing)!” Everyone always thinks that wasn’t going to happen to them and that’s why they did it. (…AND THEN THEY WERE WRONG 😀 ) The movie shows you as much – just when Ben’s feeling good about himself, having recovered the family’s stolen dog and thereby also “saved” his siblings’ and family’s Christmas, gotten away from his drug dealer friends, managed to settle his debts with them…… that’s when he thinks It Can’t Hurt.  One of the things Peter Hedges talks about in interviews is the number of former addicts who backslide right when they think they’re now in a good place.

This is not a movie that teaches kids how to take drugs, and nowhere is there one of those rather irresponsible night clubbing scenes that shows people having just the best time with the lights and the music and the supposedly heightened fun experience. This movie shows unreservedly what happens long after that first high. It shows how no matter how hard Ben tries, no matter how many people who love him try to pull him out of it, he cannot escape. An hour of “fun” which you can barely remember anyway, a lifetime of suffering which you can.

“I TOLD you not to believe me (Mom), and you didn’t listen…” 

Ben was not saving her. That girl in the meeting who just wanted to get high one last time. An hour after he got home, he got the packet out of the stash he keeps hidden above his younger siblings’ bedroom. He has 3 younger siblings who adore him, the eldest of whom is beautiful, bright, capable, has a powerful singing voice – and knows never to trust him.

Ben gets a former girlfriend hooked, by convincing her “getting high feels so good.” Maggie dies of overdose. Just like Ben would’ve if Ponce, the family’s adopted rescue mutt, hadn’t kept licking his face to keep him awake.

You will watch Ben’s mother face Maggie’s mother in church. You will watch Maggie’s father living alone in low-cost subsidised housing, smash the family car window trying to get at Ben, when he recognises their car outside. You will watch Maggie’s mother lend Ben’s mother her car after Ben drives off leaving her stranded, also teaching Ben’s mother how to administer the treatments needed to revive him when she eventually does find him. 

Ben’s mother blames his doctor. She thinks it was too many painkillers after that snowboarding accident, when Ben was 14. The doctor doesn’t even remember Ben, let alone remember prescribing “too many”.

Ponce is gone. Coming back from Christmas Eve service, Ben’s family finds their home burgled, their beloved rescue mutt missing. His “friends” know he’s home. They won’t let him stay clean.

“You don’t understand, Mom. There are so many, many people it could be…”

“Then we’ll just have to take it one @sshole at a time..”  

“(warmly, kindly) Ben! It’s about time!” It’s a warm, inviting doorstep, cheerily decorated for the holiday season.

Ben shies away. “I just want to know if you have my dog…”

Back in the car, Ben’s mother is relentless. She knows that face. She’s seen the man with the kind face often… somewhere. And so Ben finally tells her that’s Mr Richmond who used to teach History.

(Doctor, teacher however, is not the point. The point is “there are so many, many people it could be…” It could be anyone. It could be anywhere. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And so there must not be a will. I feel many young people take things too far at least partly because they aren’t shown clearly enough where that path can lead.…

I grew up with Malaysia and Singapore carrying the death penalty for drug trafficking..  Interspersed with regular prime time family programs in Malaysia back in the day were the anti-drugs ads, and while I can only vaguely remember they had these tables of how many grams heroin vs cocaine etc etc, would get you which heavy penalties, one of the things burned into my memory was the footage they show of the shivering addicts going cold turkey in the rehab centres. Never the lights and the music and the smoke patterns, it was the shivering addicts… Kinda like the warnings and graphic pictures of throat and lung cancers that are legally required to be printed on cigarette packets today…

“There is no high anymore, I just don’t want to be sick…” 

Ben’s mother can hardly recognise his childhood friend Spencer, now weaselly and shaking, body racked with withdrawal. Eventually the only way to get anything out of him as to Ben’s whereabouts is to give him the packet she took from Ben in the changing room.

“Your mother and I were friends. I changed your diaper. This is so F*CK-ed.”

Aforementioned title issa nod to Rockstar and Friends’ current pun obsessions*… 

The movie Tag features 5 primary school friends who keep up a game of Tag for 23 years. Antics include crashing weddings and funerals, plenty of disguise… I would’ve written about it sooner, but well the full movie has some pretty dirty jokes (caveat!) so here are some cleaner clips:

And so by means creative, devious and often extreme, the 5 friends over the years block off a month a year, during which they enlist the help of spouses, get cleaning jobs in each others companies and just all around prank each other (if you’re wondering, the Over-The-Top Never-Been-Tagged player is – not the CEO – a personal trainer, who has a whole chain of gym outlets):

Now Get This – the movie is based on a real life story. Also, the part where someone gets “Tagged” during a funeral really happened. 

Here are the Fab 10 Real Life Taggers:

(One of ’em is wearing a priest’s collar, isn’t he?! <images of would-be Taggers chasing the priest about during sermons>)

Oh, the joys of play. Real play, that real kids did, where real friendships were formed, before everyone went and grew up too fast. In the movie, the CEO alludes in his Wall Street Journal interview to how the creativity in play continues to inspire him in his day job. In real life, lawyer Patrick Schultheis drafted the Tag Participation Agreement, a binding legal document in which rules like No Tag-Backs allowed, and that you are bound to answer honestly if asked if you’re “It,” are laid down.

I especially like the part in the legal document where the “parties” didn’t wish for said game “to degenerate into the bawdy spectacle of mayhem, disarray, terror, plague, pestilence and danger” – like, what were these guys doing before they put that down in writing?

It goes on for about 4 pages, in which the penalty for being “It” each year is to consolidate a USD 25 donation from each of the other participants and donate it to their school alumni association.

Anyway, back to the original bit about how far our childhood experiences can take us (there is after all so much talk about how kids can be “scarred” in childhood etc etc right? Well then the flip side is also true, and we can derive some real strength and inspiration from that time too, right? Such…. crushing responsibility :D, yet also opportunity…)

*”The Play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King…” was originally spoken by Hamlet, who suspects his uncle has murdered his father – he dithers for almost an entire Shakespearean play and then decides to hold a play (yes, a play within the play) depicting what he thinks really happened. Then he watches for any guilty reaction by the new King, his uncle. Obviously that bit has nothing to do with the title of this post –Pun-ny enough for you guys? Well thank YOU for having been so welcoming and accepting of Rockstar during all the changes and new groups he has come into. And for the pun inspiration, been hearin’ bout your punnin’ for months… 🙂

“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players…”

– As you like it, W. Shakespeare.

“…corruption flourishes not just because these …shell companies, offshore bank accounts, and dubious trusts are located in far-flung overseas territories …or rogue states, but because they are supported by apparently respectable firms at the heart of some of the world’s biggest and most advanced cities.”

– The Right Honourable Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister of the UK, and brother inlaw to Sarawak-born Clare Rewcastle-Brown, author of The Sarawak Report.

Personally, I prefer “playground”. All the world’s a playground. Some games are no fun. Or else nobody’s playing by the rules. Others……. well, you’re still playing 🙂

Sarawak is in East Malaysia, and while I have never been, I spent 8 formative kindy and primary school years in Sarawak’s closest neighbouring state of Sabah, before moving to Penang in West Malaysia (I was however born in Petaling Jaya, near the capital. In other words, I know I’m Malaysian, just not sure how to explain where from.)

pic from operationworld.org

While the largest indigenous group in neighbouring Sarawak is Iban, many of my former Sabahan classmates boasted at least some Kadazan blood. (Henry Golding, heir apparent and eligible bachelor on Crazy Rich Asians, is half Iban btw, even observing traditional rituals like the rite of passage into manhood known as bejalai).

CAVEAT: They slaughter a pig the traditional way in the video below, and while it’s blurred out with little blood you can hear the screams.

East Malaysia is about 51% Indigenous, 15% Malay, 14% Malaysian Chinese. Add to that I’m Straits Born Chinese, and 3 out of 4 of my English-educated/ Chinese-illiterate grandparents look it (my lone grandma of direct Chinese descent had fled Guangdong when her family lost their land*.)

Anyway my time in East Malaysia (Sabah) – weekend market drives on dirt roads passing indigenous women walking to market (slender necks, small and slight figures, effortlessly balancing huge baskets on their heads – it was where I first formed the impression a woman could be tough as nails, without ever showing or even thinking about it), visiting the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre in the family car which was by necessity a 4 wheel drive.

4WDs – Sabah is after all Chosen Venue of The Camel Trophy though no, I didn’t go to school by river 😀 (pic from borneo4x4adventures.blogspot.com which tellingly also bears the tagline “…from taking the road less travelled… or no road at all” 🙂 )

I have fond memories of primary school mates who were really good at digging up antlions (one of ’em has his own medical practice in the UK today – but what I always remember is Steady Supply Of Antlions :D) and thanks to them I had several large glass bowls of the things. We fed them huge red ants from the garden (occasionally the ants won).

-diagrams from oldblockwriter.blogspot.org and sacnaturecenter.net and there’s umm.. even some study on antlion hunting behaviour. Just happened to find it. I have absolutely no idea how us kids started doing this one day, suddenly kids started bringing antlions in from outside and then we would dump the pretty, colourful erasers (like the Hello Kitty or Smiggle nowadays) out of their plastic cases so we had something to put the things in.

Another tuition mate from that time is today a surgeon (of humans). I used to wish my parents were both veterinarians so I could help out in their clinic in Sandakan….. until I watched her mum cut a few large tumours out of one of my hamsters with a scissors and no anaesthesia (it was over 3 decades ago and they didn’t want to risk it. My hamster screamed and screamed until it couldn’t anymore, around the time she started stitching it back up. After a brief maggot scare it went back to running around my room in the night like nothing happened. But I couldn’t look at scissors the same way for awhile. Stupid hamster.)

Oh, what were we doing in Borneo (East Malaysia)? My dad’s field was botany, soil science. Periodically his work necessitated us living in the more agricultural areas of the country. I just rarely mention because he declined to comment early on – all living things evolve to suit their climate and since rubber, oil palm etc etc are well, rooted to the ground and on huge plantations, it’s not like they can walk indoors, dig burrows, or throw on a jacket. He used to trek for days through thick primary jungle after first travelling by helicopter or jeep, in order to reach plantations deep beyond various Malaysian/ Indonesian/ Philippino jungle so he could see how the plants grew in their natural environment. To him the climate conditions in HK produced something so different that I may as well have been asking him about aliens.

And with that background of what I remember of Borneo, The Sarawak Report is a blog that began out of a Sarawak-born Englishwoman’s love for the Malaysian rainforests, her writing meaning to draw attention to the great need for conservation and the environment….. which then greatly assisted the about-turn of how the funds of a naturally rich agricultural country were (mis)run. Now it’s a book as well: The Inside Story of the 1MDB Expose.

pic from sarawakreport.org

“Dedicated to my mother and father who spent their young adult lives serving in Borneo with integrity and commitment…”

“Without the support of so many Malaysians who encouraged me every inch of the way, I could never have begun to create an impact… This is their book as much as mine..”

– Rewcastle-Brown

“The Sarawak Report is a triumph… for the blogosphere.. despite the fact that it was written by a bona fide journalist with an extensive portfolio. …exposing the deforestation in Sarawak and the individuals who were lining their own pockets in the process of granting and receiving concessions… now a …tome of outstanding investigative journalism.

– Andrew Leci, unreservedmedia.com

The Malaysian Chamber of Commerce HK & Macau (whom I sometimes do paid publishing work for) invited her to speak at one of their regular Nasi Lemak talks here in HK, to a full-house audience.

Rewcastle-Brown, 58, started writing the book in 2010. The book after the blog details among others the harassment and legal action she faced in getting it published. Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown describes her efforts as, “At great personal cost, including risks to her safety…”

Then there was the giant mess of blog noise. (Read the whole thing before you freak out at part of what I type.) Part of the reason I deleted, rewrote, deleted, deleted, deleted, took so long, is because if you look at the detail in her book, you will get an idea of the extent to which stuff really flies everywhere – lotsa shots at different peoples and countries appearing and often incongruously.

Now, we are no strangers to misconception – the latest funny one is that I’m Kings’ second wife by which we have HN, and Rockstar is Kings’ child by his first wife. Sure I have been asked whether both kids are mine, but then various Asian wait staff abroad have been strangely peevy….. until I realised they probably thought something like I had stolen Kings from his first wife because Rockstar couldn’t possibly be mine… (they were actually much nicer when I jokingly said something about how no one ever believes Rockstar is also my kid).. So for the record we’ve only ever been married to each other, and both kids are ours. Also, I speak no Tagalog. If I did though, I’d be happy to respond 🙂

Anyway, all the noise out of Sarawak Report. Rewcastle-Brown documents it all. The book is after all freaking 500+ pages. But I pick some stuff and not others and people gonna jump up and down about what I did pick… or what I didn’t pick. So I didn’t pick. I just put down the first colourful eg of nonsense I came to:

Among others, there was a site that popped up purporting “to offer (so-called) Texan right-winger Americans relevant news” that then linked to a website by a known Texan Republican speechwriter and started talking about former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister of the ’90s Dato’ Seri Anwar Ibrahim (currently Prime-Minister-In-Waiting to the newly re-elected Prime Minister Dato’ Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad), petitioning against former Prime Minister Najib Razak a.k.a. Guy Taken Down By Sarawak Report And Being Tried For Massive Misappropriation of 1MDB Funds.

In other words, any real “Texan right-winger Americans” who found themselves reading it probably went through said intricacies of Malaysian politics and something about an “upper-crust Brit… making the welfare of every bee and bug in Sarawak (her business),” and be like:

(Read nothing more into Captain Sparrow than that I like Depp’s many varied and colourful movie characters – Willy Wonka, Mad Hatter..) – meme from jigidi.com

<clicks away>

Not too long after I first started to mummy-blog, I commented that it takes relatively a much larger amount of resources to maintain and police content consistently over time (I was talking about the difficulty blog directory sites have in perpetually keeping track of what they link to at the time), than say, to add another link on, yes – possibly anonymously – in the course of “regularly managing” the things.

Oh yeah the money, the crazy shopping sprees. Imelda Marcos, then “First Lady of the Philippines,” once fled her country famously leaving behind 2,700 pairs of shoes at the presidential abode in Manila. When then-“First Lady of Malaysia”s home was raided, they found 567 Hermes, Prada and Chanel bags, 423 mostly-Rolexes, some USD 300 mio in jewels and cash. (I noted with absolute respect for Rewcastle-Brown that she had even pointed out that in adopting said title in Malaysia as the wife of the then-Prime Minister, Puan Mansur was effectively “ousting”  the wife of the King of Malaysia. It shows how much Rewcastle-Brown understands of the country.)

As for the crazy shopping sprees – we have 2 wrists, 2 shoulders, 2 arms, 2 feet, 365 days most years to use the stuff… WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND DOES THIS?

HOLD ON. One in five. That’s FOUR of you don’t get to go THAT’S MY BOSS!! Aren’t statistics fun? (Aforementioned study is covered by this article in The Telegraph btw)

Anyway, the excesses out of 1MDB are widely reported, lotsa star-studded names. Back in 2015 cleanmalaysia.com put the tally of the number of countries involved in the investigation at 6 – Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland, the US, the UK… now they think it’s just the tip of the iceberg, the Wall Street Journal recently published how China has now offered to assist.. No point me regurgitating.

In the beginning I was all Whoa, and that’s just the cash, wait ’til they get to the book keeping for their derivatives. On second thoughts though, I would flippantly say I’m not sure anyone bothered very much. They didn’t need to, they were super flush. A lot of the time derivatives are for achieving leverage – tapping increased returns by taking on increased risk… without coming up with the initial funding. This one looks more like one big fat orgy of a shopping spree.

This a pretty good description from an old article on WSJ:

“…the very nature of these synthetically created securities makes it difficult for those outside Wall Street to debate their merits. For some, the definition alone is enough to cause eyes to glaze over. Essentially, derivatives are risk-shifting agreements whose value depends on — is “derived” from — an underlying asset, financial instrument, or event…” 

(“Risk shifting”. That’s what they’re supposed to do. Depending on how they’re accounted for, they can also conceal. Pretty sure that used to happen, but the ISDA (International Swap Dealers Association – which is headquartered in NYC) has come quite some way, in regulating the disclosure of swapping. Without closely regulated disclosure requirements (when to recognise the risk on your books, whether you have swapped out or swapped in further risk), you can quite simply say, conceal a “buy” into a “sell” – buy the stock or bond, then buy huge credit default protection on the same name <shrugs> Effectively, you are not exposed to the risk of the bonds after all – unfortunately, you are exposed to the risk of whoever you’re buying protection on the bonds 😀 Now, maybe Management was fine with the initial risk, but is in fact not fine with that much exposure to your swap counterpart)

But since we’re on about derivatives:

“..Making matters more difficult, however, is the fact that the value of certain complex varieties, such as options, asset-backed securities, and credit-default swaps, depends on many inputs…”

(A.k.a. Garbage In Garbage Out)

“…The fear is not derivatives, but the misuse of derivatives via too much leverage.”

One example is the series of little options known collectively as the now-notorious Accumulator. Before the massive losses though, for 7 months I had a job in Pricing and Execution at a bank that did a lot of these. (It was my first pure execution job,  a big name house I found a job in after my original beloved employers had been gutted in an aggressive acquisition, the second of my former career. Both acquired institutions had had their own unique expertise and client base, making them desirable acquisition targets. And so they were savagely bought over. A lot of “bad” things happened to the “good” people. Lemme tell you – it always happens. Cockroaches have more finesse in filth. If you are innately uncomfortable playing dirty, you are always at a disadvantage. there is no shame in it, but you should be kinder on yourself and recognise it’s simply not your natural element 🙂 Not every bright, hungry person plays in the same playground. By a form of “natural selection” “good” people get killed off in “bad” organisations because the place is no longer a fit for them . Without the crash though, inertia has a stronger hold – while it’s scary, isn’t it also exciting, to be striking out for new waters?)…

Then came the ICBC IPO and at the time unprecedented deal volume, and I quit after the worst of it was over because I became very rundown (at almost 5ft 7inches, I weighed just below 45kg/100lbs). I declined to come back when I found I was unexpectedly pregnant (with Rockstar). Then I got myself hired (yes, pregnant) at a much more conservative house that didn’t do unfunded products (ie the kind that allows huge leverage.)

One day there was this rather sensationalised article of a woman who was devastated and planning to sue A Bank I Have Never Worked At, because she had apparently lost something like tens of millions of HKD in Accumulators. One of my RMs (Relationship Managers – they handle the clients and sell the products I source or put together – I’ve told them if I cannot make them understand a product in 5 mins, I need to find something else for them. Also, we like to start the pitch with the worst thing that can happen to the investor, because if they cannot accept that, we need to yes, find something else for them).. So anyway, my RM showed me the article and asked, “Did anyone notice her actual job (was something like handling a photocopy machine)? How did she even have that amount of capital to leverage up, and then lose?“

My then-RM had worked it out backwards that the lady had likely made really good money off it first. And then kept going back in. What special kind of hell is it, to know you had made enough for your retirement several times over…. only to lose it all and more. (That is so terrible. I’d rather just never have had it. Come to think of it, even when Kings and I were both in banking, we never made anywhere close to that kind of money haha)

Anyway, the not being able to stop in itself is not that unlike buying 2,700 pairs of shoes or 567 Hermes, Prada and Chanel bags (or eating or gaming excessively – remember the CNN article about the 32yr old man who died from heart failure aggravated by the fatigue of gaming for too long). And we as a people keep doing this to ourselves over and over – encouraging that kind of dysfunction at least tacitly.

What never seems to look cool is exercising restraint. The kinds of personalities who don’t buy in to that kind of behaviour are not traditionally encouraged. My bank employer that didn’t allow those massive leverages or the structures that encouraged them was not respected for it. It was very hard for the RMs to secure clients. Because the clients wanted to open accounts and do these things. (Oh, you thought only parents have a really hard time saying no to their kids? :D) And then the RMs in the big houses that do allow these things are under very heavy pressure to sell them, and risk losing clients to other RMs who are willing to do them, if they’re not. Everyone is under this intense, intense pressure to perform. That performance is measured by grades your bottom line. You perform by doing these things. You lose a lot of ability to perform if the house you are with doesn’t do them. Who collectively agreed that life selling investment products would be like that? 

What’s that they say about taking a calculated risk – a ship in the harbour is safe… but it’s not what ships are built for. Yet neither do they go out without checking the weather reports.

But if you grew up where you were going to sail….. if you had a unique understanding, garnered from work or personal experience, you might know something even the best researchers in the field who have never lived there or been in that industry or etc etc don’t. (I said. MIGHT.)

Taking a view works essentially the same way in both derivative and vanilla, you are meant to go in when it’s cheap – and by cheap I mean you take a view that the market has not already priced in. If everyone else agrees with you, the trade is already “expensive” (no matter how pretty it looks). Unless things get even better, you’re not going to make money out of it, you already paid for it. AND upfront to boot. People liked to go into Accumulators in bull markets – which means they were accumulating stock below current market, while current market price you dealt at galloped up, up, up, like a runaway horse. Sounds like a win? It’s too expensive a trade (because it’s a priced-in “sure-win”) without adding a Knock-out. Your awesome trade stops accumulating when the stock price reaches the KO level. At the height of it, those KOs were being reached every 20 mins or so. That’s when people kept going right back in to do the trade again. At current higher price. Oh yes, it’s higher. And again. Higher still. Higher, and higher. But all things that go up have to come off the high, at least correct a little. And many people got caught.

A derivative magnifies, reduces, diversifies off the original vanilla (and of course can also conceal*) – whether a particular kind of research in the industry was likely to be approved. Or even succeed. Buy the stock <shrugs> Borrow massively to buy the stock? You’d probably think twice. But do the derivative? Is not borrowing what, is “investing in a sophisticated derivative”? (Answer is Yes That IS Totally Still Borrowing, In That Case.)

Time is both our friend and our enemy… Time ages us, decays all things…. but in many ways time reveals truths and lessons… There’s at least a couple things health researchers learned from observing things like the health of the elderly in far-flung villages where the inhabitants eat certain staple foods in that region.

You might have a distant relative you’re going to visit this CNY. Maybe you go down this year, and he tells you people in the small town are almost sure that company-owned-by-that-other-publicly=traded=company’s plans to set up a new plant are going to come through. After all, they recently discovered the area was rich in a particular ore/ new health and beauty benefits from the indigenous plants that only grow in these climate conditions. Decades ago there were.. what, 6 known vitamins? How many are there today, 20? 30? In another few decades, what’s that number going to be? Thing is, pharmaceutical companies cannot manufacture the next big super vitamin if it hasn’t been discovered yet.

And with that, it’s gonna be a happy, happy Chinese New Year. May we seek new and ever more exciting opportunity together.

*My grandma from Guangdong (because I’ve been getting asked more frequently, recently) – She’s an amazing person, she came to Malaysia alone when she was about 16, dressed as a boy for safety, supporting herself as a seamstress. Then there were the effects of the second World War in Malaysia, the Japanese Occupation. When things eventually settled, her only son travelled abroad, where he married a German woman – 6ft tall, blonde. My cousins are all over 6ft. They remained in touch and visited – when my uncle fell terminally ill, my grandma upped and moved to the little German town to help care for the family until he passed away.

I mention, because I’ve often gone over what I knew of her growing up – she had been the youngest daughter in a large, wealthy family with a farm. Her eldest brother and her father’s pet, the daughter of his old age, and therefore quite unburdened by familial obligations and responsibilities. She ran free, on unbound feet – something she would describe as a huge advantage – trying to ride on the cows. (Not horses. Cows.) She never said, re her father, all the years she sat for me, but the last thing she saw before fleeing her home forever was her eldest brother shot. I wonder often, what confluence of nature and nurture produced such resilience? I think, part of it we all have in us. We never know just how strong we can be until we are tested.

One of my half-German cousins – the closest thing I have to an older brother, I was otherwise a Lonely Only” surrounded by animals – served in the Iraq War (step-dad is British-born Chinese I believe, “a fair man,” my cousin once said. He signed up to serve in the Army voluntarily). He has childhood memories of our tiny, spunky, power-walking granny determinedly navigating grocery stores in the little German town they were in, “(when) money was tight, she always made sure she got the exact change,” while his mother worked and his father was very sick.

He still visits her memorial at the Penang Buddhist Association building, when he’s in this part of the world. She passed away peacefully in her sleep following about 6 months of illness, while I was at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and for the first time in my life I failed an exam. I had been preoccupied throughout that semester, I wrote to her by snail mail about 5 times a week. That was pretty much suicide, academically – entry requirements for Malaysians into the Accounting degree at NTU that year were a minimum of 3 Cambridge A-Level Distinctions. Failing a core paper – Management Accounting – and producing meh grades for the rest during the time cost me severely. MA had become one of my favourite subjects by the following semester at the re-exam, one of my strongest, but well, it’s the initial failing grade that they take… Which I well knew, when I worked hard on the re-test <shrugs>..)

Also, I missed putting this in the previous post:

Mystique, the shape-shifting mutant from the X-Men movies who is born blue and scaly (it’s. An. Anology. And a conveniently safe one, I might add) struggles to accept herself, and Magneto illustrates that energy she expends on hiding who she is is energy that she might need to someday save her life:

(Oh, so tha’ats why she’s always blue when she fights :D)

But seriously, knowingly maintaining a lie for a long time – one of those big ones, not the I’m Almost There Please Hold My Table ones, not liking yourself very much, costs you.

You need energy to get better at stuff, and you don’t get to have your cake and eat it, you don’t get to spend that same energy on both things, at the same time…

We’ve been in the Lake Tahoe area this Christmas and beyond; so many inspirations, even more that were half written and I never had my laptop for quite long enough to complete and post…

This my favourite picture of the trip

You see, I took the same picture 7, 8 years ago:

Tiny Rockstar is not yet 3 in this photo; we went into the restaurant (which had too long a queue for us to actually eat there this time) to show them the two pics

…right after…

…this. Squaw Valley Kids have a full snow school program, Squaw Valley/ Alpine Meadows does the grownups

You might be inclined to think I’m good at snowboarding. I’m not, I’m quite bad. I saw snow for the first time in my mid-30s. I’m picking up snow sports in my 40s. In contrast, I grew up with taekwondo (and water – I learned to swim naturally when I learned to walk, without formal coaching and spending many hours playing in large and deep pools – it was years before it occurred to me the “stroke” I used, to be able to swim laps relatively indefinitely without getting tired is um, not a “real” swimming stroke haha but as an older child with no competitions or evaluations looming it was not too difficult to “convert” to a “real” stroke… I think the free time little kids increasingly used to have – to move, run, play naturally, is becoming more and more severely underrated – because I still believe you need to get to know your own body well enough, your brain needs time to learn how to move your body naturally, before you can truly get the most out of working with a professional coach.)

Your weight distribution in taekwondo is completely different from that of controlling a snowboard. (So said my board coach who did both). Therefore it takes a huge amount of my energy just to not fall hard, because the moment the board moves on the snow surface, my reflexes do all the opposite things it’s supposed to, naturally. In other words, I signed up knowing I’d be at the bottom of any snow sport class I took. I think it’s good for everyone to experience what that feels like – being “picked last” for a proverbial team. Success may build confidence, but it is failure that builds resilience. According to Carol Dweck in Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, one of NASA’s selection criteria is NOT someone who chalks up success after success. They pick people who have crawled back from devastating failures.

Then again given the choice, your average instructor would prefer not to have me so some might say I’m deliberately “torturing” an instructor <sheepish>. The grownup ski/board school then assigned me an instructor who otherwise runs a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) practice in the city – qualified to work with people who have PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) for eg – and comes out several days a week to coach for love of snow sports. In other words, I owe these people drinks. With loadsa alcohol. 😀

My other reason for doing this awful thing to myself is, old-dog-new-tricks – it must take decidedly wayyyyy more new neurons. I used to tell HN this story – An oyster in the vast ocean finds an irritation in its shell – inconsequential little chip of shell or rock, until it finds its way in, ugly and grating on the oyster’s delicate flesh. It does all manner of Oyster Contortions to rid itself of the Irritation, but then it throws its proverbial Oyster Hands up in the air, and tries Something Completely New. That’s when it makes a Pearl. (Like, IS THIS NOT INSPIRING?? But in true HN fashion, she deadpanned, “SO then people keep sticking things in oysters because they always want pearls” <eyeroll>.)

A-nyway, John Piper wrote Don’t Waste Your Cancer when he found he had cancer – if you don’t find a use for having to experience a terrible, terrifying, debilitating disease, you’re wasting it…

Growing up, the late Christopher Reeve was my hero. The superpower I most wanted to have as a child was the ability to fly.

He’s the only Superman I remember! – pic from theindianexpress.com

(I also “knew” I would never get to be a pilot because back before Lasik was invented I had pretty bad eyesight. In my mid-20s I then took considerably more time with a surgeon who preferred to do the procedure relatively much more slowly – because for all the vaunted medical qualifications and skill his reputation purported, he believed every patient’s recovery rate so unique as to insist on spending extra time watching the recovery on one eye, before then adjusting to suit the patient’s other eye. During the many more waiting room hours I chalked, I then remember a mum bringing in her ~12 year old son. They were trying to weigh the likely reduced chances of lasting perfect eyesight by having Lasik before the age of 18, against the increased risk of wearing glasses perpetually during full-contact Rugby which he trained extensively in.)

Anyway, back to Reeve. He became Superman for real after a horse riding accident severed his spinal cord, leaving him paralysed from the neck down. His accident was so bad his skull and spine were no longer connected. In Mindset, Carol Dweck describes how Reeve did the “impossible” – regained some movement where medical experts said he never would. He was about 43 years old when the accident happened. He took 5 long years, but when they looked at his brain, they realised he had eventually formed new connections. He regained some sensation in his body and could move his index finger enough to power a wheelchair.

I’m still on the fact he didn’t give up for 5 years. 5 years is almost HN’s entire life time. 5 years of being surrounded every day by the “fact” he would never regain movement. He considered ending his life. His wife said “You’re Still You”, and he never considered it again. I was still a student when Still Me, the book Reeve wrote following the accident, was published. It also covers his time making the Superman movies. It was so heart rending I was too terrified to read further. Reeve’s co-stars during his Superman movie run have said when he played the superhero, he wasn’t very nice. The same colleagues have said he was a much better person after the devastating accident.

I came to the Christian faith thanks to a former colleague, Janet, during the first (of eventually three) bank mergers during my former work life. Coming from a staunch Buddhist/Taoist background and decidedly “scared of Christians” as I was, still Janet walked the talk like no other I’d met, and it affected me profoundly. Janet had had a tumour at the base of her neck in her youth, and told me matter-of-factly and relatively cheerfully during all the merger noise that treatment of the tumour had likely left her permanently unable to have children. We parted ways, I began a new life in HK, and about a decade passed between when she told me that and when I heard from a mutual former colleague on the street that after being laid off she’d started up a business and found herself with a baby girl.

People who don’t believe in the power of prayer or of having a faith will say it’s all about a powerful human will. But then a faith, to begin with, is life and personality altering. You might argue that “maybe (I) don’t know enough Christians” 😀 but then I can also say that I neither know of nor can imagine someone who has the attitude of “God’ll forgive me for being this petty and I really am this petty” being blessed with “miracles” of the Janet sort. Janet may not have been an athlete, but during the most awful parts of the merger I still remember her reading a little New Testament early in the morning, checking her bright lipstick quickly and wishing everyone a bright “Good Morning!” with a smile. When many people were What’s The Point We’re All Gonna Die Be Bought Over Anyway.

What makes us insecure? Insecurity after all, is a terrible disease that makes otherwise “good” people do “terrible” out-of-character things. But that’s not the bit that makes it like –  but worse than – cancer. Because insecurity is something people can inflict on others (to get what they want.)

Do People Think Imma Bad Parent is arguably a terrible weakness practically “all” us parents have, however deep down. I could be a bad driver, bad snowboarder, bad eater, maybe even a bad worker. But <shudder> “Bad Mother“? “Bad Parent”?

You know the flip side, right? The flip side is how far you’d go just to be granted the Golden Apple that says “Good Mother” on it. Needing that approval from Purveyor Of Proverbial Golden Apples gives Said Purveyor a huge power over you, ever thought of that? I mean sure, if you like them apples <shrugs>. But how d’you know if you like ’em if you don’t really know what they cost?

I’ve said before that I’m (mildly!) obsessive compulsive – it manifests partly in prices, in costs. Hidden risks and costs. Because every decision you ever make bears reward, cost and risk, and there be no reward without risk… somewhere. As I’ll (eventually!) get back to when I finish the comments-on-financial-derivatives post, you can never remove a risk, only change its form.

The imperfectness of human decisions means our risk-reward evaluation system is perpetually flawed. That brings cost and opportunity. Like risk and reward, they go together. To someone who deals in the price of a reward, as denominated by a corresponding risk and probability of it occurring, this is an endless fascination – why a single case of Mad Cow out of 10 freaking billion cows on the planet can cause massive panic – the tanking of beef futures and soaring of fish prices – while we continue to do things like leave raw meat with far more common and equally deadly bacteria on kitchen counters in homes all over the planet.

The hidden cost of making a decision you know deep down shrinks your strength of character is for me a big one. (Oh, you thought it was because Imma Good Person (And I Think You’re Not As Gooda Person)? <HUGE SNORT> 😀 I always thought people who don’t challenge themselves to be the absolute best versions of themselves…. can’t ultimately like themselves very much. I mean, you think you do, and that’s why you act selfishly because you think it pays off… but in truth it hurts your belief in yourself without you realising. If you believe you need the crutch or your child needs the crutch, what happens when you don’t have it? The loss of potential, the waste from losing that little bit of ability or credibility because of the crutch kinda grates on my nerves. (And the real one is almost always gonna be in your head. It’s also the one you can fix. It’s your head!)

This the affirmation we all already know and just need to remind ourselves…What’s that slogan the SPCA coined – A Pet Is A Lifelong Commitment? I had a few friends who were so terrified of getting a dog… and I would be looking at them and thinking But You Would Make Such A Great Owner, How Could You Think You Might Not Be? HOW bad a parent, HOW careless about your child’s education or feeding and care of etc etc could you POSSIBLY be? The people who worry the most are ironically the ones who most likely are doing the best job. (The ones who REALLY are doing a bad job probably have no freaking idea or don’t give a rat’s @ss.) So what’s left? Being a good parent who instead sells themselves short and then ironically that’s what makes them less good at it because they allow themselves to be manipulated? Mind blown.

I had a PE teacher back in Junior College (so I was about 17yrs old) who just hated me once introduced the Fosbury Flop used in High Jump in a lesson. I don’t think any of us had ever done this thing:

Fosbury Flop diagram from carloselopez.com about Change Management – he says Dick Fosbury took 5 years to get good at it but it ultimately improved high jump records by a substantial 10 cm

You run at the bar and then instead of straddling it to jump over like any “normal” kids’ Jump Rope game, you go over the thing back first. That’s not the bit that stuck, what stuck was when she said she she could tell how we felt about ourselves, our “belief in ourselves” based on how we ran up to the bar. “Some of you were not going to make it before it was ever your turn at the bar. Why?” 

(In case you’re wondering, she pretty much hated me from an initial impression formed by my first attempt at the then-NAPFA – National Physical Fitness Assessment – of public Singapore school PE classes. You have to pass a battery of physical fitness tests that includes pull-ups, jumps, sit-ups (for the boys who are about to go to National Service it further determined whether you got slapped an extra few months in dreaded Basic Military Training, I think it was) that included a 2.4km run under a particular time limit… and I had NO IDEA “PE” was anything other than games and coordination, which led to her then-conclusion when I held the entire (Singaporean) class up during our first run up a hill, “Oh, you’re a Malaysian. NO WONDER.” 😀 (As in, because they most commonly had Malaysians joining their Singaporean public schools since the two countries are right next to each other, and then we often have problems with some NAPFA item or other because we were obviously not growing up with NAPFA-based PE lessons..) Sorry Malaysia, running for me is like pulling teeth. BUT we found redemption in Fosbury!)

That was also the year I asked myself what I liked most about the people I respected and wanted to be around. And what I didn’t, about others. Then I started practicing being who I wanted to be.

Have a wonderful 2019, dears.

“I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is

southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.” – Hamlet

Translation: a) I’m conveniently mad when I need an excuse for acting like a jerk.

b) Madness is a form of genius. Y’know, in case excuse (a) needs a little beefing up. (But really, blame the Cliff Notes.)

In the 1970s and 80s, a small US Army unit was mandated to develop soldiers’ telepathic abilities in order to carry out psychic warfare. Besides working out how to walk through walls, they trained in staring at goats to stop their hearts.

That Moment When Everyone Decides Not To Trust Everything They Read On The Internet* 😀 … pic from slashfilm.com

They’re he-eere… 

But they’re not the ghosts who live in tvs… (New word to scold my kids with: POL-ter-geist.) They’re evil robots humans built… Y’know, I always think an indication of how we feel about ourselves as a people is tellingly in how we quickly assume that any other evolved consciousness (like AI) is also going to turn evil, but anyways..

In 1965, British Mathematician Irving Good defined an “ultra-intelligent” machine, arguably what we might today call an AI (artificial intelligence), as “a machine that…. can design even better machines..” Make copies of itself that are evolved.

The Omega Team named their first AI Prometheus... Prometheus’ chosen first task and test was to build….. computer games. Like what you need to be Jimmy Fallon or Leno or Wayne Brady or some other super funny-on-the-fly guy, to design the next cult game requires an understanding of the human gamer’s nature – to hit that sweet spot between Challenging Enough and This Stupid Thing Is Too Hard <givesup>. A good computer game gets you hooked. Makes you spend money. Gets all your friends hooked so you can’t leave without “losing your friends”.

Max Tegmark of Life 3.0 writes – “The real threat is not malevolence, but competence.” When algorithms know ourselves better than we do, they can mine and crunch data to make all kinds of decisions – including creative ones. I don’t think tha-at, but what I do think is Those Are Some Awesome Tools To Have.

And my personal take on AI replacing Human? Never Fear. The most wonderful-terrible thing about being human is being crazy-passionate enough to….. a) cut off your ear during an argument.

That’s This Dude (pic from Van Gogh Museum)

…then sparking countless theories and debates about why the “creative genius” would cut his own ear off during a fight with a friend. Why he then sent the wrapped-up severed ear to an unknown woman, and who she might be. (I remember one of my old mum friends (Mum of Cherub, former budding English Prof from Yale who now lives half a world away) eyeing the Starry Night sticker on my then-laptop and saying something along the lines of Van Gogh Was Such A Troubled Man, Yet… His Art. And What Everyone Else Derives From It… Again – a completely unpredictable, often illogical trajectory by other human minds…

Van Gogh’s Starry Night (pic from profoundjourney.com)

b) absorb energy from people around you, then paint feverishly all through the night (don’t even get me started on all the other inventions in various other fields he is known for)

That’s this dude (Pic from leonardodavinci.net)

Can you possibly ever build all this in an AI? Is “creative genius” truly possible without certain human flaws, or quirks? And whether “quirks” can exist in the perfectly “normal” (what’s “normal” anyway? What everyone else who is not Hamlet sees? So if you had enough Hamlets to change that, the “normal” people would then be the mad ones?)

Popularity, normalcy, madness…. are all labels created by other humans. They require a human opinion (or well, an algorithm that takes these things into account – Monte Carlo Simulation, anyone?) The Monte Carlo is what they use to run “infinite” possibilities in an investment portfolio. That’s pretty cool, right? Now do that again. But on the Kardashians. 😀

One of my all-time favourite stories to tell the kids is of the Golden Apple of Discord (or Contention) – because one of the first ever great storytellers – Homer (NOT the yellow cartoon character but hey, now we know where Papa` Simpson got the name) – painted a picture of Greek gods…with very human failings. (Shakespeare is another master of the terrible-wonderful bitter-sweet all-too-often-all-bitter characteristics of human nature)…

Eris, Greek Goddess of Discord, is offended at not being invited to the wedding of Sea Nymph-Goddess Thetis and King Peleus. And so she throws the Apple of Discord in the midst of the three greatest goddesses – Hera wife of Zeus, Athena Goddess of Wisdom, and Aphrodite, Goddess of Love. These three great goddesses – far greater than Eris herself – allow themselves to be pitted against each other for the Apple, on which is written To The Fairest. In some incredible irony these 3 great goddesses depend on the opinion of Paris, at the time a lowly human shepherd, to break the 3-way tie. (Some versions have Zeus, King of gods, in an all-too-typical human male self-preservation response, wimping out on annoying two out of three very powerful females – he passes the buck to a hapless mortal haha)

Artist J.M.W. Turner’s impression of Eris choosing the Apple of Contention (pic from Wikipedia.com)

On a parenting aside I’ve also narrated to the kids, Paris is born prince of Troy. Because it is prophesied that he will cause Troy to burn, his parents abandon him on a hill somewhere and he is eventually adopted by a shepherd (where he then ends up awarding the Golden Apple to Aphrodite, and she, having obtained his vote by promising him the fairest woman in all the land, now needs to deliver. Fairest mortal woman turns out to be Queen Helen who is already married to King Menelaus.

This the thing – practically all the other mortal kings in that particular region wanted beautiful Helen for themselves, but in a huge feat of cooperation, had decided that the most beneficial union of lands would be that of Menelaus’ and Helen’s. So when Paris steals her with Aphrodite’s help, everyone gets super-pissed at Troy and so they go to war. In other words – wait for it – had Paris’ parents King Priam and Queen Hecuba been of stronger character – either making the decision (IF they really believed the prophecy that their son would cause the deaths of thousands of Trojan subjects) to a) euthanise baby Paris quickly and painlessly instead of leaving him to a much slower more painful end of starvation, exposure or being eaten by a bear or b) raising Paris right – to understand the need for cooperation to mutual benefit so he doesn’t selfishly steal Helen the Trojan War would be prevented. Maybe there was a reason those various were mortal kings – leaders – and not plebeians. Perhaps also why Dante reserves a special place in hell for the Indecisive, in his Divine Comedy. Because Indecision is also a choice.

(Hamlet, did you hear that?) Because, very obviously, you lose time by indecision. That is the cost that also needs to be factored in… (What do I want with the time saved? Simply to have it. Because if Newton weren’t vegging out under that tree he wouldn’t have seen the apple drop. 🙂

A most awesome depiction of the Trojan Horse off the Farnam Street blog – so apparently it’s now also used in investments and finance

Lemme just throw one more thing in about the Trojan War – it’s where the Trojan Horse type of computer virus gets its name – the Greeks leave this giant wooden horse on the beach saying it’s a gift of surrender. The Trojans pull the thing willingly through their own city gates, have a big party, and then in the night the Greek soldiers hidden inside the horse come out and slaughter all the drunk-on-partying Trojans. And so they named the computer program that pretends to be something it’s not, right until you click it and it sends porn to all your friends and bosses from your email account or some other idiot thing you would never have allowed it to do… (You… didn’t send porn to your boss’ account and pretend your home PC was mad, did you?)

A-nyway, Don’t Download Senselessly Off The Internet, Kids. Your Life Or At Least Your Laptop (Fine, Same Difference) Could End. This actually happened to my grandma back when I was crashing at her/my uncle’s place in Bishan, Singapore, around Uni Finals. First time she gets her Yahoo email over 2 decades ago (as in, they surely have better child-safeties nowadays!) she’s clicking excitedly on all the erm, pop-up ads and gets seriously spammed XXX Lesbian Porn and then I have the most awkward time imaginable coming up with an appropriate response to “Aileen, what is this?”

S-O Tangent went on a tangent and when everyone got back we decided to have a debate on reality. No actually, I meant reality TV.

Back To the Original Question: Without Googling, which d’you think is real, The Men Who Stare At Goats or the AI named Prometheus?  

Artificial Goat wins! pic from Boredpanda

Yeah yeah that’s not a goat, I believe Bored Panda says it’s a “rare white baby reindeer”. (Yay Christmas season!) Not-a-goat was so cute! And I figured well, Close Enough.

<pause> I’m just going to get hate email from the Goat People and Reindeer People now, aren’t I. Y’know, I once flippantly said cats and Poms have “awful personalities” and several weeks later….. no, I didn’t get hate messages, I got…… a casual invitation to an informal Pomeranian Lunch Club. Every month, some 15 – 20 Poms have lunch in someone’s apartment. HN, who was there when we got invited, really, really, really wanted to go. But it’s possible after that we will end up getting a Pom. Or three. W-aaait. That was the plan all along wasn’t it. Revenge of the Pom People. There be method to the madness, you’re one of us now!

And the correct term is protective. Pomeranians don’t have awful personalities, they are VERY PROTECTIVE OF THEIR OWNERS. There, now. Please don’t make us get three of these things? <pause> Pom Christmas Party just flashed through my mind.

OMG kawaii – pic frm warrenphotography.co.uk

OMG!!! (screen shot from Funny Dog Wearing Santa Claus Costume Youtube)

OMG!!! (pic from @jiffpom)

AND “as happens with the supremely attractive,” this one has an “empire.” pic frm fallinpets.com

(You guys know Boo rose to fame off his Facebook page created by owner Irene Ahn… who works at Facebook, right?)

Giving the Kardashians* a run for their fake-reality money (pic from e123.hk)

Cat people appear to be notably silent. And permanently disapproving. A thing about people and their pets comes to mind 🙂

Merry Christmas anyway, Cat People (pic screenshot off Pinterest)

<end of very long tangent on tangent>

Reality TV or really fake reality tv (think: Kardashians) is a real story. Just watch it not for the fake marriages, fake weddings, fake fights, fake eyelashes – watch it for why the creators and characters think that’s what viewers want. <boom!> Watch Disney Princesses for what they thought little girls and their parents used to like and relate to. (And then go watch what the latest Ralph Breaks The Internet tells you about what’s fashionable today. Disney’s making amends for the whole helpless-Princess-saved-by-strong-man-era)

Epiphany: There is no fake reality tv and everything is reality tv. 

Now back to goats: Who signed off on tax payers’ money to finance that small real US Army Unit decades ago? There were actually enough people who believe, misguidedly or not, in the paranormal and tried to weaponise it. (Wasn’t this roughly during the Mulder-and-Scully X-Files Era?)

X-files is the ’90s era tv drama series about agents investigating the paranormal – rather interestingly, this came out roughly following the REAL US Army efforts – pic from geek.com

Note also there were people erm, brave enough to dare stand before politicians, law makers and army generals with a proposal along the lines of “I Want Funding To Explore Developing Soldiers’ Psychic Abilities”:

Hypothetical 3 Star General: We will need to take that out of the Defense Budget for new Stealth Craft Detection Software. How will you be spending those tax payers’ dollars on this?

Brave Person: We will be buying some goats. And then our carefully vetted, hand-picked soldiers will be staring at them.

Oh, so you thought your presentation assignment sucked? (Fine, some of you want the Mad Genius assignment). Oh, and these guys actually succeeded in getting that funding!! What I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall during that particular preso…

Epilogue: There’s a part 2 someday… Here’s a teaser:

Did you know the money for this movie came from Malaysian strategic development company wholly owned by the Ministry of Finance (pic from bestbuy.com)

Out of which she received USD 8mio in jewellery (she promptly RETURNED) during her 1yr relationship with one of the perpetrators – pic from dymocks.com.au

(Leo diCaprio, Margot Robbie, Miranda Kerr etc etc etc were all cleared of wrong doing, but the USD 3.5bio from the former Malaysian State-Owned Funds is going to be One Serious Rabbithole.)

Let’s take a trip to Wonderland dears, hopefully soon 😉