The good people at KLue magazine have been very nice to me lately.
Not only have they been slacking off and secretly reading kennysia.com during office hours (yeah… work), they described me as a “valued peer of KL‘s growing community of young, creative and involved individuals”.
Eh? KL? Since when I became a Kuala Lampian? I Kuching boy leh!
Those of you living in KL should really go out there and grab an issue. It’s always filled with tons of useful info on things to do/eat/watch around KL, most of which even this “valued peer of KL’s growing community” is not aware of.
Anyway, this is my contribution to the December 2005 edition of KLue Magazine.
I didn’t write the following piece, but it’s too cute to not post it up.
Cannot Take Photos Inside MRT Stations
You know, as much as I like Singapore and its people, there are things about the city state that I find annoying. Like how anal some MRT officials are.
See, I’ve been travelling a lot lately, and when I travel, I take a lot of photos.
I don’t usually get into trouble for doing that. While I tend to push my limits a little, I do have my own set of principles when it comes to photography. If people were to get upset at me if I took photos of them without permission, I can understand. What I don’t understand is why people would get upset at me for taking photos of something as innocuous as an empty MRT station.
What happened was this.
It was early Sunday morning. I was just about to get back to my hotel after pretty much partying my whole Saturday night away, which included hanging out with the former Miss Malaysia and having cold milk poured onto me by the Incredible Hulk.
The City Hall MRT station at 6am in the morning was hauntingly quiet, a huge contrast to the way it was during peak hours.
I found the scene strangely beautiful, so I primed my camera and took two shots at the almost empty MRT station.
Just as I finished my second shot, a middle-aged SMRT officer sauntered out from his booth with a pissed-off look on his face and slowly walked towards me, cowboy style.
SMRTO: What are you doing?
Kenny: Taking photos?
SMRTO: Why are you taking photos here?
Kenny: For artistic reasons.
SMRTO: You cannot take pictures in here!
Kenny: Oh ok. Sorry I didn’t realise that.
SMRTO: You have to delete the photos.
Kenny: Err… no, I’m not deleting my photos.
SMRTO: No… you have to delete them or I will have to take action.
Kenny: Well, there’s no signage around the place saying I cannot take photos in here, so I’m not deleting them. And it’s just two photos anyway.
SMRTO: We don’t put it on the signage, but it is against the regulation to take photos in here.
Kenny: Alright then, may I see the regulation?
SMRTO: Do you want me to call the police?
Kenny: No, I’m asking you to show me the regulation saying I can’t take photos in here.
SMRTO: We don’t have the regulation book in here. Our regulations you can find on our website.
Kenny: Don’t you have a hard copy of it?
SMRTO: No, there’s so many of them so we cannot list out every single thing in our book.
Kenny: Do you have Internet access?
SMRTO: No, sorry you cannot go into our booth!
Kenny: Then I’m keeping my photos.
SMRTO: If you want to do that, I have no choice but to call the police now.
With that, the SMRT Officer pulled out this big ass walkie talkie from his belt and paged someone, presumably not the police but his tai kor. As he stood aside, hundreds of thoughts went through my head simulteanously.
Kenny Kenny Kenny, what have you done? All these trouble just for those two pathetic photos? What if the police came for you? What if you went to jail for this? What if they locked you away with all hardcore rape criminals? What if those criminals got desperate and decided to poke your backside deep deep?
Your bright future ahead of you, gone, just like that.
Imagine if I went to jail. I’m gonna sit beside my cellmate and asked him “Hey buddy, what are you here for?”
“I killed me wife” he’d reply with a grunt. “And what are you here for?”
What am I gonna say?
“Oh uhh… I took some photos at the MRT station?”
Anyway, a few moments later the officer got off his walkie talkie. His superior (or the phantom “police force” or whoever it was that he’s paging) obviously thought he’s damn bo liao to bring this up and basically told him to sod off and play with his Barbie, because when he came back the horns had disappeared from his head and his voice had turned helluva lot softer.
SMRTO: I still advise you not to take any photos inside the MRT station.
Kenny: Look, you still haven’t answered my question. And all I’m asking for is a question. Not a threat, not a challenge, but a question. “May I see the regulation saying I cannot take photos in the MRT station?”
SMRTO: No… that’s why I said our regulation is on the website.
Kenny: I don’t have Internet access right now. And you have no hardcopy of the regulations, you cannot show me the regulations on screen. In other words, if myself or anyone else want to take photos in the MRT station you can do nothing about it because you cannot show them that it’s against the regulations.
SMRTO: That’s why I told you. The regulation is like whatever law in the country, there’s so many law, you don’t expect the government to put up everything you know?
Kenny: In other words, I assume the regulation do not exist and I get to keep whatever photos that I took.
SMRTO: Can you just show it to me? Fine, let’s say I find that it’s nothing then OK.
Kenny: Alright I’ll show you the photos but I refuse to delete it unless you show me the regulation.
Listen to part of the conversation (WMA, 1m56s, 297KB)
So I showed him the two bloody photos I took that started this whole brouhaha. Only then did I convince him that I’m no terrorist and I don’t plan to use the photos to plan where to hide my bombs.
When I flew back to Kuching that night, the first thing I did was logged on to the SMRT website to check if their mysterious anti-photography regulation exists. Even up till this day, I find nothing of that sort.
Thinking back, it’s kinda stupid to argue with the authority over two useless photos. But hey, I don’t like to be told what I cannot do and I guess the deadly combination of alcohol and fatigue has made me bolder that morning.
Somehow, I’m just glad I wasn’t sent to jail for taking photos. Would be interesting though. I wonder if Singaporean police also make detainees do naked ear squats like in Malaysia?
Behind The Scenes At the mrbrown show Podcasts
Download: the mrbrown show Podcast: “Causeway to Kuching” (MP3, 7.2MB, 20m48s)
Topics: Zouk, Kuching clubbing scene, tetno music, origin of Kuching’s name, “what do you call KL-ians?”, tallest building in Kuching, “how do you guys know about Kuching?”, Singapore children now getting taller, Azahari the bomb expert, Miyagi’s army stories from Australia, someone shat on the road, Kuching Kangaroo, Zouk’s water tap.
Subscribe: the mrbrownshow XML feed
Video: Behind The Scenes at “the mrbrown show”
- Full Version Very Clear One (MOV, 82.7MB, 6m10s)
- Pirated Version Not-So-Clear One (WMV, 16.5MB, 6m10s)
- Watch on Google Video
Podcasting is set to revolutionise FM radio the same way MP3 technology revolutionised the music industry. Ever since I acquired the iPod nano, I find myself literally hooked on podcasts and have more or less stopped listening to local radio stations altogether.
I always wonder what goes on behind the scenes at the mrbrown show podcasts. On my last trip to Singapore I was lucky enough to not just appear on the show, but to have the man himself explain to me what went on behind recording and publishing your very own internet radio show.
Equipment-wise, the bare minimum you require is a microphone connected to your computer. But Mr Brown is a bit gung-ho about sound quality, so he made some significant investments acquiring two ice cream cone-like microphones (with stands), a DJ-like set of headphones, a flynet-like pop-guard and a mixer deck that looks like it’s gonna explode if I chin chai press any button on it.
Writeboard – the online collaborative software used to prepare for the mrbrown show podcasts.
Surprisingly, very little work went on behind preparing for the show. Comedy skits like the Zhng My Car series require a bit more work though. For Zhng My Car, Brown and Miyagi would collaborate over Writeboard, where the gist of the script took shape and they can review it individually at work or at home without meeting up face-to-face.
In most cases, Brown and Miyagi simply get together and brainstorm for a few topics an hour before actual recording. Brainstorming was full of laughter and stupid jokes with those two around (check out the video link at the end of this entry). Almost all their shows were done in one take with very little editing effort going into post-production.
For sound-recording and post-editing, Brown uses Apple Garageband on his iMac G4. Any other sound recording software should work just as fine though.
I was nervous as hell throughout the recording, fumbling my lines in more ways than one. Brown was reassuring to me, “Don’t worryyy! If you mess up we will help you out one!”
To him, doing an internet radio show is almost his second nature. In fact, as you will see in the video later, the only time he fumbled was when he did the intro and outro of the show.
After recording, all that’s left to be done is save the MP3 file, upload it, then publish it on the World Wide Web.
Podcasting is not my niche, but I sure had lots of fun recording the mrbrown show (perhaps more fun than the audience who listened to the podcasts). I totally enjoyed myself and I’m sure they did too.
Thanks again, Brown and Miyagi, for inviting me onto the show!
Download: the mrbrown show Podcast: “Causeway to Kuching” (MP3, 7.2MB, 20m48s)
Fight Club At Orchard Underpass
It was by all signs an ordinary Saturday night at the Orchard Road underpass.
Throngs of everyday people were minding their own business walking through the underground walkway situated between Wisma Atria and CK Tang’s. On the walls, the rolling posters burr noisily when they change. A middle-aged busker on keyboards, a seemingly permanent fixture of the Orchard Road underpass, was singing Christmas Carol’s in his signature monotonous tone.
I missed what exactly happened, but it was the resulting commotion caught my attention.
“Call the police! CALL THE POLICE! CALL!!!” yelled the man on the left.
I stopped my footsteps immediately. My face turned ghost white.
What did I do wrong? Was it the pirated DVDs I brought in from Johor? Could it be the packet of chewing gums I had in my pocket? Maybe he reads my blog and didn’t like me putting up pictures of durian terrorists shouting God’s name in vain.
I looked over to his direction.
The man was yelling at this blind visually-impaired woman (must be politically-correct in my blog nowsaday, y’know? Don’t want some visually-impaired people to “read” my blog and think that I have something against blind people. I believe it was a great poet from ancient China who once said ‘With great power comes great responsibility’. Or was that a quote from Spiderman 1?)
The woman must be peeing in her pants because the man was shouting at a volume 100 decibels above the human hearing threshold, and this was in an underpass so you can imagine how loud he was. All this while she was mumbling nervously and pointing her walking stick towards the man’s face, though I doubt it’s gonna help much since, like, she cannot see?
By then, a large crowd has already gathered around the two. Even the uncle playing on keyboard grew sick of the confrontation and said “Oi. You two want to fight go home and fight lah. Don’t come here and fight, make everybody unhappy.”
And with that, he nonchalantly sang Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, much to my amusement.
At one point, the woman kicked the man’s guitar till it fell on the ground. To his credit, the man didn’t do anything back against the woman. He just talked, thus proving correct the theory that all men are “No Action, Talk Only”.
Before I knew it, a plain-clothed detective showed up and separated the two.
With no free show left to watch, the crowd slowly dispersed. I too, quietly slipped a note into the busker’s donation box before disappearing together with the crowd. Don’t wanna get caught red-handed with chewing gums in my pocket, ya know?
Download Fight Club at Orchard Underpass Video. (MOV, 3.2MB, 14s)
Smell My Car Zhng
Download the mrbrown show Podcast (guest-starring Kenny Sia):
“Zhng My Car – Part 2” (MP3, 6.9MB, 19m48s)
I’m a big fan of the mrbrown show.
In case you’ve been living under the rock, Mr Brown is one of Singaporean blogosphere’s most influential persona. It was actually him who first introduced kennysia.com to the Singaporean audience after ‘brown-ing’ one of my earlier posts. The mrbrown show is of course, a highly entertaining internet audio show hosted by Mr Brown and Mr Miyagi.
One of their comedy skits titled “Zhng My Car” received over 40,000 downloads recently, officially making Brown and Miyagi the most boh-liao people coming out of Singapore since Jack Neo and Moses Lim.
So anyway, I touched down Singapore yesterday morning and Brown sent me a message telling me they’ll be recording the sequel to “Zhng My Car” that evening. I was excited of course. I didn’t want to miss the chance appearing on his show, so I pleaded with Brown to give me just a small two-liner cameo role in his skit.
But Brown Cow had better plans. And it wasn’t until I arrived at the “studio” at Miyagi’s pad that I realised he didn’t just want me to do CAMEO. He wanted me to GUEST STAR the entire Zhng My Car show instead! WAH LIEW!
I didn’t even know what to say! Brown and Miyagi are seasoned veterans of the show so they had little trouble getting into character quickly. Me? I sound worse than Michael Jackson on helium.
With only a few minutes to prepare, I was told the gist of the show, wrote down some key lines to say, and then improvise with the rest. In fact, everything you hear in that episode was done in one take. That’s why you can hear me stutter, speak too fast and majorly screw up my lines like only I can.
Recording the podcast was damn nervewrecking experience but it sure was helluva lot of fun. Watch out for me in the next episode of the mrbrown show, where we talked about my hometown Kuching.
Meanwhile if you haven’t yet already done so, download and listen to the original “Zhng My Car” episode. Then catch me joining Brown and Miyagi in the latest most newest episode of the mrbrown show – Download “Zhng My Car – PART TWO”
kennysia.com English – Benglish Translator
Want to assist your child’s learning with English lessons? Then using these great English lesson plans made for teachers can provide your children extra help. You can find great literature on how English books measure up and which ones meet state standards. The lesson plans will help you follow along with their English learning. Also check out these great resources for teaching your kids English and achieving good grades.
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I was happily writing my Ah Beng entry last Saturday when suddenly I sensed something was amiss.
Notice how on the Internet, we have these English – Spanish translators, English – Chinese translators, etc. Heck, we even have an English – Gangsta Talk translator. But has anyone ever noticed that we do not yet have an English – Benglish translator.
Think about it! We have literally tens and thousands of technology graduates in Malaysia and Singapore working their asses off each day for giant corporations like Motorola. And for what? Does it benefit our own people? NO.
On the other hand, we have all these Ah Bengs and Ah Lians on our streets. They rather drive their modified Kancils with boom-boom sound instead of surfing the Internet reading blogs. Why, my friend, its because they feel neglected! Neglected by society! Neglected by school! Neglected by all these proper English-speaking people! We only care for ourselves. But what about them?
GODDAMMIT WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE AH BENGS?!?!
The English we use on the Internet all so cheem-cheem one, how do you expect those Ah Bengs to understand? Can you imagine an Ah Beng surfing the Internet or not?
“EH! Wat all this lan jiao Googur chee bye Brogspot!? I DONCH KNOW ONE LEH!”
Poor Ah Bengs. 🙁 I’m sure they all feel very left out.
And that is why over the weekend, I flexed my programming muscles and came up with this English – Benglish Translator. Its just something I quickly put together in my spare time, and there’s only around 100 words in the dictionary right now, so its not gonna perfect. Any suggestions, let me know.
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Recommended readings:
– Project Petaling Street in Benglish
– Tomorrow.sg in Benglish
– XiaXue in Benglish
– Minishorts in Benglish
– Joel Tan in Benglish
– Mack Zul in Benglish
– Cowboy Caleb in Benglish
– Finicky Feline in Benglish
– Vincent Lau in Benglish
If you’ve found any funny Benglish-translated sites worth visiting, comment and share lah!