Of punctuation and time capsules

This...is funny, in a way. Or maybe not so funny. You be the judge.

I was reading this article when I saw this sentence placed prominently on the page (just scroll through the page and you will spot the sentence)

"This extraordinary finding is like Pompeii, according to Dr. Hermann Pfefferkorn, a time capsule."

This sentence is actually saying that the dear Dr. Pfefferkorn is a time capsule. *gasp*

The actual sentence in the article reads:
This extraordinary finding "is like Pompeii", according to University of Pennsylvania paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn, who characterized it as "a time capsule."

To mean the same thing as in the article, the blown-up sentence should be:
"This extraordinary finding is like Pompeii," according to Dr. Hermann Pfefferkorn, "a time capsule."

I think that is already correct (or at least the meaning would not be distorted), but it would be even better as:
"This extraordinary finding is like Pompeii," according to Dr. Hermann Pfefferkorn. "A time capsule."

Because we seldom have two dialogue phrases "wrapping" the speaker's name in a sentence. It kinda looks untidy to me. But then it would mean that the Dr. actually said those words, which doesn't seem to be the case. So the solution would be to use the same quote marks as in the article itself:
This extraordinary finding "is like Pompeii", according to Dr. Hermann Pfefferkorn. "A time capsule".

But in this case "a time capsule" seems to be floating. (but anything is better than calling someone a time capsule, I think :P )

So many different ways of putting the punctuation marks, and even if the basic meaning is there, the nuances change. NOW do you see the importance of punctuation? Calling a Dr. a time capsule, indeed!

Gifts from the bank

This is the last post of the "packing" series. (click on the label below for the earlier posts)

When I was in France, I used the bank Crédit Agricole. It wasn't really a choice of mine...we were brought to that bank to open our accounts when we first arrived in France. And I just continued using it...even after I moved to Lyon and had to change to another caisse régionale (regional branch; somehow the same banks in different regions are somewhat independent from each other -_- )

Each time I opened an account, I received a card holder.

left: from Angoulême, in the Charente-Périgord region
right: from Lyon, in the Centre-Est region

I never used either of them...since I keep my cards in my wallet and it would be a bother to carry around another card case. But I kept them in a drawer "just in case" (that's the pack rat's motto, in case you don't know :P ) they would come in useful someday...

As of the other items I posted about, I decided not to bring them back to Malaysia. And now I'm kinda regretting my decision...the would be useful for stuffing some name cards right now...

Oh well. I can't get them back anyway.

(Psst...what's more the black one was of a velvety texture...and I love velvety textures. lol)

The hasty bus driver

This morning while driving to work, I had an encounter with a bas kilang (a bus sending workers to their factory).

As usual, there was quite a jam at the traffic light out of Relau...and I stopped before a junction (where there was no traffic light). The car in front of me was right after the junction. The bus was behind me, and honked. (there was no yellow box at that particular junction) I didn't bother moving forward...what's the use? It wasn't like I could move more than two car lengths forward...and if I did that I would be blocking the junction (though, it wouldn't have changed anything much because in the lane next to mine, there was a public bus already blocking the junction).

So maybe the bus behind me didn't like me leaving so much space in front of me. Maybe it's one of the driver's pet peeves, I don't know. Anyway, it honked at me again...and I think I ignored it again, until the car in front of me started moving.

Then when we were moving, I slowed down once because the car beside me looked like it wanted to cut in in front of me. Which was not the case, so I ended up with quite a distance between myself and the car in front of me. The bus (still behind me) flashed its headlights at me. And later (I've forgotten why exactly...I think I was just a little slow in starting to move) it did it again. -_-

Hey mister...what's the rush?

And this was when we were still far away from the traffic light...it wasn't as if we could go through; even if I had stuck to 1cm behind the car in front of me, we still would have had to stop again when the traffic light turned red!

Later when we were almost at the traffic light, the bus cut to the left lane to get through more quickly.

Then on another road I ended up behind the same bus. So I could see its preoccupation with rushing to its destination...

It was first in the fast lane, then it switched to the slow lane when the line at the fast lane was longer. That was when I ended up behind it...and took a photo of its back. (I usually take the slow lane because, 1) I don't want to block the "rushing" cars, and 2) I won't have to change lanes later) Then it cut back into the fast lane when it could. But all in all, it still reached its destination only maybe a minute before I did...it was sending people to my company.


Yeah, it was raining (drizzling, actually)...which was probably why the jam was a little worse than usual. But there has been worse... ;)

The bear that didn't make it

December 2007.

My birthday was always during the Christmas holidays, so I usually didn't see any of my French friends then. But that year, before the holidays Aurélia came to find me and handed me a wrapped gift. "I wanted to give this to you before the holidays," she said. (or something to that effect)

In it was a key-chain, a Winnie the Pooh key-chain. (My friends all knew that I liked Winnie the Pooh, because my pencil-case had Winnie the Pooh on it.) There was a button on the back of its head, which when pressed would make the bear light up blinking for a while.

I used that key-chain for some time...making it all bruised (since it kept coming into contact with my keys...) Then one day the hook (you'll see what I mean) broke and I was left with a Winnie the Pooh that couldn't hang anywhere any more.

I still kept it (it first sat on my table because I didn't know what to do with it, then became an ornament on my bookshelf, I think). I think I would have kept it forever if I didn't have to move out, back to Malaysia. But finally I decided that it couldn't come back with me...

bruised and battered :(

the button

Goodbye Winnie the Pooh. I miss you.

Thank you again, Aurélia.

Penang skyline

At the end of last year, a friend came to Penang. We went around Penang together (not a full-blown sightseeing tour, just going around to a few places). One of the places we went to was Kek Lok Si Temple, and we went up to the top of the pagoda. From there, I took several photos to make a panoramic view...and here it is!

(click for a larger version, and for full-size, right-click and select "view image")

You should be able to spot Komtar. ;)

I'm missing the logic here...

There's an ongoing bit of "sensational" news about a KFC employee beating up a customer.

The facts, as I have heard them, are that the KFC outlet ran out of chicken for its customers (who had already bought coupons, which were about to expire), and one customer complained and wanted to see the manager. Somehow all this ended with an employee hitting the customer.

What happened in between, we don't really know...

But what strikes me about all this is that a lot of people are talking about boycotting KFC. This seems to me, rather irrelevant to the issue at hand.

One person beats up another. The first person happens to be in the service industry, so his employer sacks him. Why should the employer be blamed for what the employee did? You try to employ good workers, but you don't know what they will do when they are provoked.

Okay, so maybe the employer should pay damages, medical fees, etc. (which would probably be deducted from the salary of the employee) But this talk about boycotting a whole company for something its employee did sounds ridiculous to me. What's the reasoning behind it? Maybe someone can enlighten me... (if we boycott the company for defending the employee's actions, I'd understand...)

Well, for now KFC is is investigating the issue...most probably to cater to the public eye, to salvage its reputation. I don't blame them...I guess they have no other choice.

The post that was a year in the making

I think I mentioned before that my company gives us lunchtime coupons.

You see, they give us a booklet every month and we tear the coupons off each day. The booklet has a hardcover back...and that is where this story begins.

I started noticing that the back covers of the booklets had words on them...and they seemed to be from a Penang Hokkien dictionary. The ones from different months seemed to be from different parts of the book cover. The first few months I hadn't discarded any of the covers from the booklets, and after noticing this, I started stashing them away...waiting until I had enough of the different parts to make sense of the whole thing (sort of like a jigsaw puzzle).

Starting last month (I think), the back cover of our coupon booklets changed. It was no longer from this book. So I thought, it was time to start assembling what I had.

But procrastination being what it is...I still hadn't gotten around to it up till last week.

Then, earlier this week, I found a treasure trove.


Colours! Lots of colours!!

Okay, that's not the main point. And maybe it's not exactly treasure, but that meant there were probably a few more pieces to my jigsaw to be found. (these are a colleague's leftover coupons, FIVE YEARS' worth, together with their cardboard backs (though maybe some have been thrown away). And yeah, we have leftover coupons because every month we have numbers 1 to 31 of a certain colour, and we don't get to use them during weekends and public holidays. I don't know how he accumulated so much, because I use mine as scrap paper (which is what he says he does too) and I don't have more than a month's worth left. Okay, end of digression now.)

So today I finally got to work. I dug into the treasure and uncovered a few extra pieces...not exactly groundbreaking but it did add to the puzzle.

And the end result from all the different puzzle pieces (with lots still missing, actually) is....

front cover

back cover

That little piece on the bottom right is a completely loose piece, but I guess it has to go there. :P

I ran a search with the only person's name I had (Mr. Luc de Gijzel), and I found this article in The Star from three years ago.

And here is a bookstore's (or just a publisher?) website where there is a picture of the book cover.

So I guess the text I found is the back cover of the book...it's the same text found on the website. The cover that found its way to our coupon booklet was probably discarded because "wishing" was spelled incorrectly...as "whishing". Can't have that on a dictionary, can you?

Besides (partially) completing my puzzle, I found some other interesting stuff in the "treasure box". There were two other types of recycled paper used for our coupon booklets. (not counting those with abstract patterns like the one you see in the box in the first photo) These are from way back when I hadn't even heard of the company (haha)...from 2009.

One is a certificate.

"has par..."

I guess that is meant to be "has participated". And there's even the red seal...not embossed, unfortunately. :P

The other seems to be a medical practitioner's patient card or something. It looks like it's meant to be folded...


On the other side of one of the pieces (the one on the left), there are rows that look like they could belong the the table on the top (the inversed one with "TIME" and "DATE" on it) I wonder from how long ago this was...

Oh, and it has been just a little over a year that I started working in this company...hence the title. :P

Fancy some sky juice?

I heard a piece of news on the radio this morning mentioning that someone was selling "sky juice" for a really high price. (the same piece of news can be found in The Star; I think that radio station gets its news from The Star)

That struck me as strange, because I remember an anecdote that my mother told us when we were small: Never order sky juice in a cafe/restaurant, because once her friend did that (meaning to ask for plain water) and was brought a really expensive drink!

The thing is, sky juice is actually a really special drink. (wanna try making it? :P )

I don't get how "sky juice" came to be used in the news to mean plain water, especially if the Bahamas version has been around for so long! Maybe it just died out here in Malaysia...

A makeshift board

Check this out:


Do you recognise it?

If you don't, this might help:


If you still don't recognise it, then you will never figure it out :P

It's a Chinese chess board. During my first year in INSA, I had to go for English classes. We needed to do a short talk on a topic of our choice...and I somehow thought of this. But I didn't have the chessboard with me...so I took a friend's cereal box and cut it up to make the board (that friend eats a lot of cereal...it was a jumbo-sized box!)

You might notice that there are tiny letters written in pencil on each of the chess pieces. They are the letters used for move notations...I didn't even know about them before doing my research for the talk. (I only know how to play...and not very well. My English chess is a little better...and I knew the notations for those too! I mean even before doing this talk :P ) So I needed to have them written down so that I wouldn't forget.

I kept this board for five years, thinking that it would serve again if I had to do another talk. (and also, if a friend suddenly expressed a desire to learn Chinese chess) But I never used it again, and I decided that it had to go when I was packing to come back for good. It hurt to throw it away. :(

Anyway, for those who like the black side better, here's your team! (though it's the blue side, now :P )

Vive la 49ème promo!

Um...remember the posts I wrote about stuff I threw away before coming back from France? (if you don't, click on the label at the bottom) After a little break, here's another one.

Poly de parrainage, 49ème promo de l'INSA de Lyon!

This is...the little booklet (well, not so little, actually...it's A4-sized :P ) that we received during our integration. We had a week-long integration, filled with different activities...but I can't remember much of it now. (oops...)

The main thing I remember was that we had "families"; seniors (who wanted to take part in the integration) would form families. Each family has a name, and the integration committee (well, a group of students) would take the list of new students and put them into different families. (am I being clear? Sorry if I'm not)

Anyway, in my year, the ASINSA (Asian department) foreign students didn't have any family (they left us out! *sniff* ) So when we went for the integration activities, all the seniors pointed us to THE family that was formed by senior ASINSA students. So that family ended up being very big! :P

As for the activities, we would go all over campus (and believe me, the campus is huge!) and here and there we would face off with another family in some kind of game. For some reason, every time we met another family we had to try to yell louder than the other family. (Intimidation? Domination? I don't know...lol)

So with all the "homeless" (or "family-less") students in our family, it certainly helped us win a lot of yelling matches :P Not that there was any prize.

Oh, and our family was called the Mickeys! Yeah, like Mickey Mouse. And we had a really lame slogan - which I didn't understand at that time but understood later when I saw it written down - it was "Pourquoi Mickey Mouse? Parce que Mario Bros!"

Literally, it is "Why Mickey Mouse? Because Mario Bros!"

The thing is, the slogan could be written "Pourquoi Mickey mousse? Parce que Mario brosse!", which is read the exact same way, using the French pronunciation of English words. Yeah, unfortunately. *sigh* And "mousse" is to lather (like the mousse when you shampoo your hair, except that it's a verb here), and "brosse" is to brush. So, uh...this is a pun. I guess. Except that it's really lame because it hinges on wrong pronunciation. *sigh*

All right, back to the booklet...in it, they there was all sorts of information, about our dorms, about the restaurants on campus (there were four!), ...and I can't remember what else. :P All presented in that comical manner you see on the cover...

I kept this for five years, and I was rather sad to leave it behind... But I hadn't touched it in the last three or four years I was there, so I guess it would similarly collect dust in Malaysia. So off to the recycle bin it went. (and let's hope it has been reborn into a better life...)

So now I shall have to be content with my yearbook (or should I say graduation book?)...which I shall probably (certainly!) keep for a much longer time. (which just means it will collect dust for a much longer time, I guess)

A little bit of history

Without an exam at the end, thankfully! ;)

On Pangkor island there are two historical sites (unless if I've missed some :P ) - a Dutch fort and a historical rock (batu bersurat).

arriving at the Dutch fort

a cannon

the...garden?

the fort

in the fort

storage or rubbish bin?

steps going down...to the "garden"

Then we went to see the batu bersurat, which is just a little further down the road from the Dutch fort.

the batu bersurat looks blank almost all over...

the inscriptions
(click on the photo to view a larger version...and to view in full size, right-click and click on "view image")

We didn't even know that these were the inscriptions, at first...then an online search got me this information:

Carved on this particular huge boulder are sketches of a tiger carrying a child, two round-shaped leaves along with the letters,'If Carlo 1743' and 'VOC,' an acronym for the Dutch East India Company.

The sketches were believed to be the work of grieving soldiers in memory of a Dutch dignitary's son who went missing whilst playing near the stone in 1743, during the reign of Sultan Muzaffar Syah III (1728-1756). One version of the tale was that some of the Malays and Bugis, who disliked the Dutch for ill treating the locals, kidnapped and killed the boy.

Another version claimed that a tiger ate the boy.

I guess we'll never know which version is true, huh?

That's all for this trip. If you want to see all the posts, click on the Lumut-Pangkor label below!