Tripleone

Love

I am not Christian. I am Muslim. However, i think there is universal value in this quote from the Bible :
"Love is long-suffering and kind. Love is not jealous, it does not brag, does not get puffed up, does not behave indecently, does not look for its own interests, does not become provoked. It does not keep account of the injury. It does not rejoice over unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."

Happy Early Valentines Day to all my friends and loved ones.

Hey Pig, Yeah You

I got stopped on Saturday night, in a roadblock on the way back from sending some friends home. Standard roadblock, road dividers, cops, and more cops with flags and clipboards, and not to mention that small thump of anxiety as you race through possible reasons why they would stop you and throw your ass in jail. Did I clean out the dead prostitute in the boot? Do I have a joint butt stuck to the side of my neck?  Am i wearing a black metal shirt? Do i even have all my clothes on?

So it turns out i was speeding. 133, and the limit was 80.

80? On a highway? That is dangerously slow, but thats a whole other issue altogether.

I was plain hoping me and my band manager Nad look like real goodie malay kids. But obviously not. The cop cut to the chase and smiled as he told me that I would have to pay a looooot of money for the fine. And they are really good at this. Sentences that don't really finish in terms of intonation.

Ah, ini kena saman ni. Kena masuk mahkamah...

And he actually SPEAKS the dot dot dot at the end. A vague tapi hovers in the air as he smiles. I wish they would just cut to the chase, something around the lines of

Good evening. I am a cop, I am underpaid. You can either pay the government tons of money for rushing safely home, so that they can budget another supermulticybercorridor, or you can pay me some over the window money so i can buy my kids some decent textbooks.

So i imagine he says that, and wave 30 bucks in his face. He takes it and actually has the balls to ask me if i have enough to 'belanja' myself. Nice, Mr. Policeman.

So if anybody has the semangat to report this cop for corruption, i have drawn my own photofit :

A Blast from My Past

Sometimes the things you put away come back to haunt you. Okay, haunt is too negative a word. But sometimes, when you least expect it, memories come back. You take it off the shelf, look at it, smile, and then put it back again. Never any hard feelings.

One of my ex-girlfriends from a time long past came in contact with me, and it was strange, to say the least. It has been roughly eight years since we heard and seen each other, and now we are halfway across the world, as friends. Spain and Malaysia. But, the moment of ultimate strangeness is when you see each other's pictures and you get a strange feeling of deja vu. She looks different, yet the same.

So Miss Maria, like I told you at the end of everything, take care of yourself and you will find what it is you are looking for. And i am sure you are pretty close.

"Women need rules of engagement. We have to learn to fight fair and we have to learn how to end fights. Men compete like crazy. In the end there's a winner and a loser and then everybody has a beer and they're friends. Women need to learn this."

Hmmm. i agree and disagree. there is never a winner or a loser.

Meowness.

From my CD Rack

Tegan & Sara - So Jealous

I just love it when artists fuse pop sensability with something that can only be described as...more. And thats exactly what these lesbian twins managed to do. What? Hey! Why is it that everybody I say that to are like "WTF? They're lesbian and incestious?" Come on, you wouldn't say that about hetero-twins of opposite sex, would you? 

Well this album can only be described as sweet. Great for sunday drives and great for lazing with a girl on your lap. Their voices are as one of my malay friends described, manja, so sweet you would excuse the heavy use of chorus effects and double-recording. The instrumentals are minimal, such that when the occasional keyboard or distorted guitar kicks in, you REALLY savor it.

For the musically aware, this is their sophomore effort, being backed up by two members of the New Pornographers.

The songwriting comes across as brutally honest, and this is much much more edible than the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to me. It is very much 80's pop-punk rehashed. Very catchy at times.

For a guaranteed good listen, check out I know, I know, I know,  Fix You Up and Downtown. And then when you like it, go out and buy the album like a decent person. Ahem.

Snag this up if you like Sleater-Kinney or Indigo Girls.

Welcome to Anus Collections

You see, me and my buddies Vira and Jake really are infantile juvenile twats. And we love it. Take for instance the picture of Vira's nose being prodded using the photography method of manual superimposing where i match my hand up to his nose, snap and then look at the pic on my phone and snigger snigger.

But the thing is, we further enjoy laughing at people even more infantile juvenile than us. Such as the person who bothered to create the following piece of vandal art.

Yup. Anus collections. Wanna shop? Some genius really bothered to prop himself up high enough to neatly place white tape over the ha of Anusha Collections to make Anus Collections. Nice. Well, the shop doesn't bother to ask you to use the back door.

The Singapore Connection

What do you get when you put two artists, one fasting and one with a severe lack of sleep into a car travelling at 180km/h southbound from KL - The StudioVoxel Singapore Connection.

I haven't been writing on here a while. Actually I never do. So I'll start with this which happened two weeks ago.

We had been doing a children's book for the Singapore Pharmaceutical Society. A book invented with the sole purpose of propagating to our (well, Singapore's actually) new generation, the fact the western medicine's good. Real good. That was completely against my principles to begin with. I had dated a girl who taught me better, more natural ways of taking care of myself as opposed to using colorful tablets and pills whose names end with -ton -tal -sol and so on. But I did it anyway. My company needed the money.

So at the eleventh hour, the time when we needed to hand the goods to fed-ex to take to Singapore for printing, shit hits the fan bounces off the floor and smacks us all right in the face. Cd-burners stopped working, networks went down in the studio, the f**kin works. Even fed-ex dude was rude to employees at our sister company Energy Day Spa where the work was to be sent out, and he left.

So I took over. I fed-exed it, me and my Art Director Amir Shah, to Singapore ourselves. I had two and a half hours to get there and a Toyota RAV-4. So we maxed it out. The poor thing couldnt go any faster, but we did it. We got from KL to Singapore in less than  2 and a half hours.

So sorry God, I didn't fast that day. Sorry but I really needed that coffee, and I needed to smoke that cigarette. I was stressed. It was PURELY for practical reasons. I mean, smoking a cigarette in a car going at 180 is like smoking while sky diving. I was so tired at times I hallucinated that fed-ex dude appeared in front of us, and we happily smacked right into him while screaming to Muse's Origin of Symmetry.

Well at least I enjoyed two hours in Singapore. I got to see our well-developed neighbor and childhood home in all its glory. Didn't get to pick up those behavorial manuals they've been making - how to be romantic, how to be courteous - I would have given one to fed-ex dude. But I got Mos Burger, and I even got one for that girl who taught me against pharmaceuticals - so I hope I made up for it.

This PIC of a Masaratti (sp?) is dedicated to my good friend and brother Josh who likes shiny metal stuff on wheels. Nice lights, huh, Josh? But it kinda makes the car look :( sad....

Why Tripleone?

Tripleone.....tripleone. The numbers 1-1-1 now mean a lot to me, and it's meant a lot to many people around the world for a long time now, as I have read. I recently discovered a coincedence that I may  well be destroying by mere discussion. Here. Openly - on the internet. Jinx it perhaps.

I have a penchant for attracting strange coincedences. All my life. Often, when i mentally hum a song; a random song, at a random time and at some random place...and just as I deliver the first few lines of the song in my head, the person next to me starts singing it too. I sit on my balcony contemplating some complex situation and as I sigh "Give me a sign, dammit...", four MIG-29 fighter jets sonic boom themselves right over my house. Kencing my pants, i almost did.

So that's among a whole range of coincedences that I've experienced for 'quite some time now' though I know quite a lot of people do experience stuff like this. But the recent one, has increased in frequency, and has sent shivers down my own spine as well as others close to me who have seen it with their own eyes.

It all started with a clock. My car clock.

You see, i've always had a weakness with personal organisation. Achilles heel. Though that's being sorted by an arsenal of those self-help books with names that have words like "10 days", "Chicken Soup" and "How to".  I hardly look at my clock. My brain's not interested, it wants to carry on doing the fun thing we're doing right now, yippe yay! I hardly ever did look at my clock, my watch.  So it was strange that slowly and increasingly, i began noticing that the numbers "1:11" and "11:11" began taking the lead role on my clockie in the car. I started, by complete chance, noticing these sequences up to two times in the four times they happen in 24 hours. But that wasn't enough to alarm me. (Haha gettit! Alarm! Gettit?! Clock! *cough* Well....)

So anyways, I give a little 'wah...so strange wan' and carry on life as usual, until that day when it seemed like whatever force influences this kind of thing thought I couldn't get the hint enough. In the morning,  I headed off  and went to pick up Rauf, the animation staff writer from his place to go to work, so I park my wheels in the usual waiting spot at 10:00am. Yup, 10:00 am -  no chance of any clockplay here. So I began contemplating on how i had seen 1:11 twice the day before. As the plume of my cigarette smoke cleared in front of me, there it was - just beyond my windscreen. 

"Apartment for Rent. Call 01X-22111XX."   Just as i was thinking about it, about the numbers. Excuse my censorship. Kencing my pants, I might have.

So all the way up the hill to the studio I blabbered on to Rauf about the mysterious tripleones. I was just completely blown away.. So when we got to the office I headed off to my desk and pulled out my phone to return a kind "Go f**k yourself" to a client's "Be my eternal slave, you art slut." that i had recieved in the car.

Sending...sending...sending....

Message send failed. Hmmm, bad reception.

Sending....sending....sending.... ( X 3)

Message send failed (X 3)

Yucks. Must have no credit. Dial *122# to get credit report.

.....................  RM frickin 1.11

Kencing my pants? I should wear a diaper.

I flipped, i told the whole story to the GM and the team. She was flipped out too. But you know what they're thinking...coincedence, overanalysis. So we went on to talk about the new PDA she's got. So  I wanted to show her the awesome add-on software I had on mine.  Off to my desk. Get my PDA. Bring back my PDA. As i took it out in front of her and turned it on, the screensaver read the time. It was now 11:11AM in the morning.  I freaked out. That whole sequence -  sitting in the car thinking about the time coincedences the day before, then seeing them on a rent sign in front of me. Checking my phone credit, and now back to the time. It was completely bizarre.

So i checked the internet. Google search - "111 numbers"....."numerology 111"...."meaning of 111"..."Free teen slut movies"..... and i stumbled upon several sites that had gained my interest.

One was about how these numbers are connected to the universe  and oneself in some way  such that if one was to experience them frequently beyond coincedence, the focal  power of their mind was powerful enough to manifest thoughts into reality / or some shit. And it recommends you to think desirable thoughts at this time for them to actually happen. Yeah, hardcore. Cool. I will soon be able to make heads explode like in the video games. But this all really seemed like far-fretched trash coming out of the mouth of washed-up scientists on shrooms and other psychadelic drugs. So I googled on and on and on.

Then came another site. The discussion of angels. This numerogist-astrologist christian chick began a community of people whom all have experienced this phenomenon. Some of them sent their testimonials which arrived coincedently at 1:11 and so on. It was cool, a site filled with all these people who shared this experience. this lady has a few pages on her site which explained how this was the communication of angels to humans. That if the angels manifested themselves physically we would kencing our pants so hard, we'd keel over and die from dehydration. So it is their subtle message to tell you that you are going on the right path, and things are happening as they should. Furthermore, a lot of people began experiencing tripleone during a really difficult and changing time in their lives, and that the angel has been sent to protect them from all harm.

Wow. Even further-fetched huh? But personally i like this story a lot better. I need that little extra boost. Knowing that you are being protected and not as alone as you might think. So i guess maybe that's why I continue believing in this 'coincidence' whatever the explanation, to feel better. And maybe that matters. So just to make yourself feel better, the next time you see 111, just take comfort in thinking that someone is watching your back, or that you can blow up heads.

So you'd expect that over time maybe I would stop making such a subcounsciously strong effort to notice the numbers, but just as i had completed the paragraph above, I made a word count and this document adds up to....yup...you guessed it - 1110 words minus this sentence and the title, good night.