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Tuesday, February 16, 2016

A challenging year ahead


AS the Fire Monkey swings in to take its place, many have predicted this year as a challenging one. So, what’s in store for everyone in this particular year?

Many came to me for advice on how to deal with this challenging period. Frankly speaking, I am not a feng shui master or an astrologist who can somehow predict the future. Neither do I know how to read a crystal ball and tell you what lies ahead. Having been through a few round of recessions and bad times during my early days, I can, however, only share my own experiences and observations.

As shared in my last article “Lessons from my father”, I have learnt how to live frugally since young from my late parents. I recalled starting up my own architectural firm at the worst possible time. The year was 1964, and it was during the time of the Malaysia-Indonesia confrontation. The country was experiencing an economic recession and it is not hard to imagine how tough it was to make a living. I basically lived on “char kuey teow” as my lunch for two years! Being frugal and practising delayed gratification somehow helped me sail through that rough period.

While it is wise to spend prudently, it is even wiser not to be in debt during times of uncertainty. I read an article which highlighted that Malaysian household debt as of August 2015 was 88.1% of gross domestic product against only 60.4% in 2008. The figure was among the highest in the region. It is rather alarming considering most young people tend to be indebted with at least a car and a huge outstanding of credit card and personal loan repayment.

It is important not to put ourselves in a vulnerable financial situation, in order to face the challenges ahead. Most items purchased with the use of personal loan, credit card and hire-purchase are likely to depreciate over time. As a result, if repayments are not made on time or at all, these items with depreciated value becomes a loss. Such loans are then dubbed as “bad debt”. A “good debt” is one that brings returns. It is time to re-look into our debt categories and reallocate our resources appropriately.

Conserving funds, while important, is not enough to withstand the inflation impact. It is therefore crucial to invest to fight inflation especially monetary inflation (money printing) which is a real problem in today’s world economy and is currently also causing asset inflation to continue. It is difficult to know the best form of investment during uncertain environment. However, I believe each of us has areas of expertise, and we should focus on those areas.

If you are planning to own a property, a good inflation-hedging tool, do creative searching for your dream home.

Muhamad Azree Abdul Rahim, a 26-year-old Malaysian, solved his problem of owning a property by thinking-out-of-the-box. He turned a used shipping container into his home by taking a RM75,000 loan and buying a plot of 2,400 sq ft land some 25km from Shah Alam. He was able to build a decent, fully-functional home with a garden next to it. His unconventional way of building his own house without being manacled to a 30-year housing loan is something that we should learn.

While everyone would love to stay near to the city centre and preferably, own a big comfortable home, we need to be realistic in order not to be financially overstretched. Start with a smaller home, and buy a home that you can afford, not what you like. It is absolutely fine if you chose a house next to the last MRT station, far away from KL city centre, as long as you find it easy to commute. No point being near the city yet having to endure the daily routine of traffic madness and at the same time, forking out a large sum beyond your means.

In the 1986 recession (the worst recession that I could remember), I had a team of 20 sales team members. Instead of waiting for customers to drop by our office, we went door-to-door and street-to-street to look for customers. Imagine swimming against the current, you may feel very tired and exhausted, but at least you are few steps nearer to your destination and you become a much stronger person. Hence, building resilience and perseverance in weathering the storm during challenging times is just as important.

Back to the year of the Fire Monkey, I realised that there are similar characteristics that we can learn from those who are born in the year of the Monkey. According to Chinese zodiac analysis, monkey is the mnemonic symbol associated with intelligence, creativity, perseverance and flexibility. Perhaps, take the cue from the monkey and brave through this challenging year by applying some of its traits.

Land & Property Food for Thought Alan Tong

Datuk Alan Tong has over 50 years of experience in property development. He was the World President of FIABCI International for 2005/2006 and awarded the Property Man of the Year 2010 at FIABCI Malaysia Property Award. He is also the group chairman of Bukit Kiara Properties. For feedback, please email feedback@fiabci-asiapacific.com.

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Saturday, February 13, 2016

Einstein's gravitational waves took 100 years to prove it right


Big discovery: When two black holes collided some 1.3 billion years ago, the joining of those two great masses sent forth a wobble that hurtled through space and reached Earth on Sept 14, 2015, when it was picked up by sophisticated instruments - Reuters

 
From Aristotle to Einstein, the world's greatest minds have long theorized about gravity. Here are the highlights, and where the study of gravity is headed next. (Gillian Brockell,Joel Achenbach/TWP)

The “chirp” is bright and bird-like, its pitch rising at the end as though it’s asking a question. To an untrained ear, it resembles a sound effect from a video game more than the faint, billion-year-old echo of the collision of two black holes.

But to the trained ear of experimental physicist, it is the opening note of a cosmic symphony. On Thursday, for the first time in history, scientists announced that they are able to hear the ripples in the space-time continuum that are produced by cosmic events — called gravitational waves. The discovery opens up a new field of scientific research, one in which physicists listen for the secrets of the universe rather than looking for them.

[Everything you need to know about gravitation waves (in gifs)]

“Until this moment, we had our eyes on the sky and we couldn’t hear the music,” said Columbia University astrophysicist Szabolcs Márka, a member of the discovery team, according to the Associated Press. “The skies will never be the same.”

Scientists from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) announced on Feb. 11 that they have detected gravitational waves, ushering in a new era in the way humans can observe the universe. (Reuters)

Thursday’s moment of revelation has its roots a century earlier, in 1916, when Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves as part of his ground-breaking theory of general relativity. The intervening years included brush-offs and boondoggles, false hope, reversals of opinion, an unlikely decision to take a $272 million risk, and a flash of serendipity that seemed too miraculous to be real — but wasn’t.

Here’s how it all happened.

[LIGO’s success was built on many failures]

In 1915, Einstein gave a series of lectures on his General Theory of Relativity, asserting that space and time form a continuum that gets distorted by anything with mass. The effect of that warping is gravity — the force that compels everything, from light to planets to apples dropping from a tree, to follow a curved path through space.

Gravitational waves, which he proposed the following year, are something of a corollary to that theory. If spacetime is the fabric of the cosmos, then huge events in the cosmos — like a pair of black holes banging into each other — must send ripples through it, the way the fabric of a trampoline would vibrate if you bounced two bowling balls onto it. Those ripples are gravitational waves, and they’re all around us, causing time and space to minutely squeeze and expand without us ever noticing. They’re so weak as to be almost undetectable, and yet, according to Einstein’s math at least, they must be there.

But like the entire theory of general relativity, gravitational waves were just a thought experiment, just equations on paper, still unproven by real-world events. And both were controversial. Some people believe that the initial skepticism about Einstein’s theory, plus blatant anti-Semitism — some prominent German physicists called it “world-bluffing Jewish physics,” according to Discover Magazine — explain why he never got the Nobel Prize for it. (He was eventually awarded the  the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect.)

 
A century after Einstein hypothesized that gravitational waves may exist, scientists who have been trying to track such waves are gearing up for a news conference. (Reuters)

So scientists came up with a series of tests of general relativity. The biggest took place in 1919, when British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington took advantage of a solar eclipse to see if light from stars bent as it made its way around the sun (as Einstein said it should). It did, surprising Einstein not in the slightest.

According to Cosmos, when he was asked what he would have done if the measurements had discredited his theory, the famous physicist replied: “In that case, I would have to feel sorry for God, because the theory is correct.”

[Inside LIGO: Physicists detect gravitational waves]

One by one, successive experiments proved other aspects of general relativity to be true, until all but one were validated. No one, not even Einstein, could find evidence of gravitational waves. Eddington, who so enthusiastically demonstrated Einstein’s theory of relativity, declared that gravitational waves were a mathematical phantom, rather than a physical phenomenon. The only attribute the waves seemed to have, he snidely remarked, was the ability to travel “at the speed of thought.” In the end, Einstein himself had doubts. Twice he reversed himself and declared that gravitational waves were nonexistent, before turning another about-face and concluding that they were real.


A small statue of Albert Einstein is seen at the Einstein Archives of Hebrew University in Jerusalem on Feb. 11, 2016, during presentation of the original 100-year-old documents of Einstein’s prediction of the existence of gravitational waves.(Abir Sultan/EPA)

Time passed. A global depression happened, followed by a global war. A reeling and then resurgent world turned its scientific eye toward other prizes: bombs, rockets, a polio vaccine. Then, in the 1960s, an engineering professor at the University of Maryland decided he would try his hand at capturing the waves that had so eluded the man who first conceived of them.

The engineer, Joe Weber, set up two aluminum cylinders in vacuums in labs in Maryland and Chicago. The tiny ripples of gravitational waves would cause the bars to ring like a bell, he reasoned, and if both bars rang at once, then he must have found something.

Weber declared his first discovery in 1969, according to the New Yorker. The news was met with celebration, then skepticism, as other laboratories around the country failed to replicate his experiment. Weber never gave up on his project, continuing to claim new detections until he died in 2000. But others did. It didn’t help that gravitational waves supposedly detected by a South Pole telescope in 2014 turned out to be  merely a product of cosmic dust.

People were inclined to believe, physicist Rainer Weiss told the New Yorker, that gravitational-wave hunters were “all liars and not careful, and God knows what.”

[A brief history of gravity, gravitational waves and LIGO

Weiss would prove them wrong. Now 83, he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when Weber first started publishing his purported discoveries.

“I couldn’t for the life of me understand the thing he was doing,” he said in a Q&A for the university website. “That was my quandary at the time, and that’s when the invention was made.”

Weiss tried to think of the simplest way to explain to his students how gravitational waves might be detected, and came up with this: Build an immense, L-shaped tunnel with each leg an equal length and a mirror at the far ends, then install two lasers in the crook of the L. The beams of light should travel down the tunnels, bounce off the mirrors, and return to their origin at the same time. But if a gravitational wave was passing through, spacetime would be slightly distorted, and one light beam would arrive before the other. If you then measure that discrepancy, you can figure out the shape of the wave, then play it back as audio. Suddenly, you’re listening to a recording of the universe.

That idea would eventually become the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the pair of colossal facilities in Washington and Louisiana where the discovery announced Thursday was made.


But not without overcoming quite a few obstacles.

For one thing, even though gravitational waves are all around us, only the most profound events in the universe produce ripples dramatic enough to be measurable on Earth — and even those are very, very faint. For another, an instrument of the size and strength that Weiss desired would require a host of innovations that hadn’t even been created yet: state-of-the-art mirrors, advanced lasers, supremely powerful vacuums, a way to isolate the instruments from even the faintest outside interference that was better than anything that had existed before. The L tunnel would also have to be long — we’re talking miles here — in order for the misalignment of the light beams to be detectable. Building this instrument was not going to be easy, and it was not going to be cheap.

And there would need to be two of them. The principles of good scientific inquiry, which requires that results be duplicated, demanded it.

It took a few decades and a number of proposals, but in 1990 the National Science Foundation finally bit. Weiss and his colleagues could have $272 million for their research.

“It should never have been built,” Rich Isaacson, a program officer at the National Science Foundation at the time, told the New Yorker. “There was every reason to imagine [LIGO] was going to fail,” he also said.

But it didn’t. Twenty-one years and several upgrades after ground was broken on the first LIGO lab, the instruments finally found something on Sept. 14, 2015.

Like most scientific discoveries, this one started not with a “Eureka,” but a “Huh, that’s weird.”

That’s what Marco Drago, a soft-spoken post-doc sitting at a desk in Hanover, Germany, thought when he saw an email pop up in his inbox. It was from a computer program that sorts through data from LIGO to detect evidence of gravitational waves. Drago gets those messages almost daily, he told Science Magazine — anytime the program picks up an interesting-seeming signal.

This was a big one. Almost too big, considering that Sept. 14 was the very first day of official observations for the newly revamped LIGO instruments. Drago could only assume that the pronounced blip in his data was a “blind injection,” an artificial signal introduced to the system to keep researchers on their toes, make sure that they’re able to treat an apparently exciting development with the appropriate amount of scrutiny.

But the injection system wasn’t supposed to be running yet, since research had just started. After about an hour of seeking some other explanation, Drago sent an email to the whole LIGO collaboration, he told Science: Was there an injection today? No, said an email sent that afternoon. Something else must have caused it.

But no one had an explanation for the signal. Unless, of course, it was what they were looking for all along.
 
An aerial photo shows Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Hanford laboratory detector site near Hanford, Washington in this undated photo released by Caltech/MIT/LIGO Laboratory on Feb. 8, 2016. (Caltech/MIT/LIGO Laboratory/Handout via Reuters)

Chad Hanna, an assistant professor of physics at Pennsylvania State University who was also part of the LIGO team, blanched as he read the successive emails about the weird signal. He and his colleagues had joked about their instruments detecting something on Day One, he wrote for  the Conversation, but no one imagined that it could really happen.

“My reaction was, ‘Wow!’” LIGO executive director David Reitze said Thursday, as he recalled seeing the data for the first time. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Yet, as the weeks wore on and after an exhaustive battery of tests — including an investigation to make sure that the signal wasn’t the product of some ill-conceived prank or hoax — all the other possible sources of the signal were rejected. Only one remained: Long ago and far from Earth, a pair of black holes began spiraling around one another, getting closer and closer, moving faster and faster, whirling the spacetime around them, until, suddenly, they collided. A billion years later, a ripple from that dramatic collision passed through the two LIGO facilities, first in Louisiana, then, after 7 milliseconds, in Washington.

The realization of what they’d found hit the LIGO collaborators differently. For some, it was a vindication — for themselves as well as the men who inspired them: “Einstein would be beaming,” Kip Thorne, a Cal-Tech astrophysicist and co-founder of the project with Weiss, said at the news conference Thursday.

After the briefing, he also credited Weber, the UMD professor: “It does validate Weber in a way that’s significant. He was the only person in that era who thought that this could be possible.”


Thorne told Scientific American that he’s feeling a sense of “profound satisfaction” about the discovery. “I knew today would come and it finally did,” he said.

For Weiss, who had invested half his life in the search for gravitational waves, there’s just an overpowering sense of relief.

“There’s a monkey that’s been sitting on my shoulder for 40 years, and he’s been nattering in my ear and saying, ‘Ehhh, how do you know this is really going to work? You’ve gotten a whole bunch of people involved. Suppose it never works right?'” he told MIT. “And suddenly, he’s jumped off.”

But the mood Thursday was mostly one of awe, and joy, and excitement to see what comes next.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and celebrity astrophysicist, joined a gathering of Columbia University scientists who had been involved in the LIGO project. They cheered as they watched the Washington, D.C., news conference where Reitze announced the find.


“One hundred years feels like a lifetime, but over the course of scientific exploration it’s not that long,” Tyson told Scientific American  about the long search for gravitational waves. “I lay awake at night wondering what brilliant thoughts people have today that will take 100 years to reveal themselves.”

Fascinating photos of our solar system and beyond

View Photos
New discoveries about Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and the latest images of Pluto.


New discoveries about Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and the latest images of Pluto.

The collision of two black holes holes - a tremendously powerful event detected for the first time ever by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is seen in this still image from a computer simulation released on Feb. 11. Scientists have for the first time detected gravitational waves, ripples in space and time hypothesized by Albert Einstein a century ago, in a landmark discovery that opens a new window for studying the cosmos. Caltech/MIT/LIGO Laboratory/Reuters

Sources:

Friday, February 12, 2016

Google car could be its own driver?

Autopilot: Google's new self-driving car during a demonstration at the Google campus in Mountain View, California - AP



SAN FRANCISCO: The US agency in charge of highway safety thinks that the autonomous car built by Google-parent Alphabet could qualify as being its own driver.

In a written response to a query from the Silicon Valley-based technology firm, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that since the self-driving cars lacks steering wheels or other controls for humans, it is “more reasonable to identify the driver as whatever (as opposed to whoever) is doing the driving.”

Google reveals self-driving car slip-ups

While the administration’s response didn’t change rules of the road, it is seen as a green light of sorts for getting autonomous vehicles to market.

“Our interpretation that the self-driving computer system of a car could, in fact, be a driver is significant,” US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a written statement release on Wednesday.

“But, the burden remains on self-driving car manufacturers to prove that their vehicles meet rigorous federal safety standards.”

Foxx added that the NHTSA is “taking great care to embrace innovations that can boost safety and improve efficiency on our roadways.”

Alphabet said that it is considering the letter and had no further comment.

The feedback, however, promises to be encouraging given the time and resources that Alphabet has poured into developing self-driving cars.

A potential bump in the road popped up in December, when California motor vehicle department officials proposed self-driving car regulations that included mandating that a person could take the wheel if needed.

Google’s self-driving cars to compete with Uber: report

A draft set of rules released by the California Department of Motor Vehicles for a public comment phase do not allow for legal operation of an autonomous car being tested by Google because it lacks a steering wheel or foot pedal controls.

“We’re gravely disappointed that California is already writing a ceiling on the potential for fully self-driving cars to help all of us who live here,” Google told AFP at the time.

California rules-of-the-road for self-driving cars have the potential to set precedent, and the proposed regulations are seen as sure to slow down the speed with which the technology goes mainstream.

The proposed California regulations call for a licensed driver to be in a self-driving car and able to take control in the event of a technology failure or other emergency.

US pledges $4b to speed self-driving cars

Google has been testing self-driving cars on California roads for a while, and an array of automobile makers including Audi, Ford, Mercedes, Lexus, Tesla and BMW are working on building self-driving capabilities into vehicles.

The US administration pledged in January to help clear the way for autonomous vehicles with an investment of $4 billion to fund research and testing projects.- AFP

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Developers of toppled Taiwan building detained

Executives face charges over professional negligence resulting in death




Questions are being asked about the building’s construction (Picture: AP)

Three Taiwanese construction company executives have been detained on charges of professional negligence resulting in death following the collapse of an apartment building in an earthquake, killing dozens.

The district prosecutor's office in the city of Tainan said Wednesday that Lin Ming-hui and architects Chang Kui-an and Cheng Chin-kui were suspected of having overseen shoddy construction of the 17-story Weiguan Golden Dragon building, which crashed onto its side during the earthquake Saturday.

It said the three were detained to prevent collusion or other acts that could disrupt the investigation. Among the accusations was that only half as many fasteners had been used in the supporting columns as required.

The death toll in the 6.4-magnitude quake stood at 44 on Wednesday, with all but two of the deaths coming in the building collapse. About 100 people are believed to still be trapped in the debris.

The broadcaster FTV and other Taiwanese media said Lin had changed his name after a previous bankruptcy and had run multiple property development companies in Tainan in an apparent attempt to avoid creditors and bilked clients.

Although the shallow quake was potentially devastating, few buildings were damaged as a result of strict construction standards in force in Taiwan, an island frequently struck by quakes. The Weiguan Golden Dragon building, built in 1989, was the only major structure to collapse in the temblor.

Most of the 320 people who were rescued from the disaster were saved in the hours immediately after the quake, in which the building's foundation and lower floors gave way before it toppled onto its side.

Earthquakes rattle Taiwan frequently. Most are minor and cause little or no damage, but a magnitude-7.6 quake in central Taiwan in 1999 killed more than 2,300 people. More stringent building standards were introduced following that disaster and appear to have been tightly enforced.

The quake struck during the most important family holiday in the Chinese calendar - the Lunar New Year. Celebrations of the holiday in Taiwan have been subdued. - AP

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Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Start work on Friday for better luck? Sink or swing with the Monkey: Pay peanuts, get monkeys!

THE fifth day of the Chinese New Year, which falls on Friday, is the best day to start work in the Year of the Fire Monkey, China Press reported.

The best time to report to work on that day is from 5am to 11am and from 1pm to 3pm, according to Feng shui Master Wei Xuan.

However, Wei Xuan said it was not a good date to start work for those born in the Year of the Horse.

He said other good dates to start work are on Feb 15, 16, 19, 22, 24 and 27.

According to Chinese belief, a person will have a prosperous year if he or she starts work on an auspicious date and time at the beginning of the lunar calendar.

Wei Xuan also advised the employees to be dressed decently and not to be late on the first day to work as it will affect their luck.

Bosses and their employees should also give angpows to each other on the auspicious day, he said.



Sink or swing with the monkey


There’s a lot to learn about this simian which can be lovable and loathable in equal parts.

WELCOME to the third day of the Year of the Monkey!

I must say it’s a great relief to say goodbye to a wild and woolly Year of the Yang during which we witnessed much sheep-like behaviour and had quite a lot of nasty things rammed down our throats.

A year ago in this column, I shared that yang is Mandarin for a horned ruminant mammal which can mean either sheep (mianyang) or goat (shanyang).

I argued the case for celebrating the Year of the Goat as the animal has more attractive and positive traits than the sheep.

Sheep have been documented as dependent, nervous creatures that require close supervision and are known for being mindless followers.

Goats, however, are a lot smarter, independent, nimble-footed and full of fearless curiosity.

Well, as it turned out that while some Malaysians tried to be goat-like, there were more who were sheep-like and got spooked by scare-mongers who, as usual, used the race and religion cards, and the sheepish ones ended up bunching together even more tightly in fear and suspicion.

So, what now in the Year of the Monkey? What sort of traits does this simian have that can give us some pointers to go by?

But first, we should get some basics right. Just as we had to separate the goats from the sheep last year, I have learned there are 264 known species of monkeys, but the chimpanzee is not one of them. The chimp, like the orang utan and gorilla, is an ape. Monkeys are different from apes, the most obvious difference being apes don’t have tails. So, let’s not confuse monkeys with apes.

Primatologists will tell us that monkeys in the wild behave very much like humans. They are intelligent creatures with the capacity to learn, innovate and live in social structures.

According to monkeyworlds.com, “the hierarchy of the social structure is very detailed. It doesn’t matter if there are only a few members or hundreds of them. They all have their role within that group”.

Interestingly, like humans in political parties, the monkeys can form smaller groups (what we would call factions) within the larger group. What’s more, if the monkeys aren’t happy about their social status within that group, they can leave and create a brand new group.

The similarities don’t end there.

Male monkeys frequently challenge the leaders of the group. Experts say this is to give better opportunities for breeding: a strong alpha male will sire sturdy offspring which will ensure the survival of the species. That happens in monkey groups but sadly doesn’t seem to have the same effect in political parties.

The monkey society is also admirable in that they have a welfare state: they “help each other with finding food, caring for the young, and staying protected” to quote monkeyworlds.com.

But like humans, they can be stressed if they lack food and shelter, which can lead to conflicts. But when there is plenty of food and they don’t feel threatened, monkeys are more likely to live in harmony with each other. Co-existence 101!

Perhaps it is because they are so human-like that the monkey is an animal that evokes both admiration and scorn.

In most African and Asian folk tales, it outsmarts its cunning adversaries like the crocodile and the shark, but in some, the overconfident primate takes the fall.

In Chinese culture, the animal is immortalised as Sun Wukong or the Monkey King, and the main character in the classic novel, Journey to the West.

Sun Wukong is depicted as highly intelligent, mischievous and so bold as to rebel against the Jade Emperor that results in his imprisonment by Buddha for 500 years. He is finally freed to allow him to atone for his sins by accompanying and protecting the monk Xuanzang on his perilous pilgrimage to India to obtain sacred Buddhist sutras to bring back to China.

Then there are Japan’s Three Wise Monkeys. That’s how they are seen – wise – in Asia because their desire to see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil has roots in Confucianism which exhorts people to not look, listen or speak in a manner that is contrary to propriety.

But in Western societies, this behaviour has a negative connotation.

It’s associated with pretending to not see, hear or speak about the misconduct or impropriety of others. It’s similar to the idioms “turning a blind eye” and “looking the other way”.

I must say, I am pretty pleased with the Star Media Group’s clever take on the Three Wise Monkeys by turning a passive response to an active one.

The message urges Malaysians to see with clarity, hear with an open mind and speak with kindness.

These are actions we sorely need to connect with each other again. This is especially so in a year that has been predicted to be seriously difficult and challenging on many fronts.

After all, in simian terms, many people feel like they have already started the new year with a monkey (or two) on their back and wish the authorities will stop monkeying around with them.

And I would add, after months of witnessing a lot of monkey business, especially among politicians who seem to turn the state assemblies and Parliament into a monkey house, people would dearly like less monkey see, monkey do behaviour from both leaders and their supporters.

Of course, some people may see antics in the August House as more fun than a barrel of monkeys but I would prefer to throw a monkey’s wrench into that sort of nonsense.

Indeed, many of us keep hoping to return to a time when sanity, equilibrium, inclusiveness and trust and honour prevailed, but cynics will most likely reply, “I’ll be the monkey’s uncle!”

I have saved the last idiom which I think will resonate with a lot of my fellow citizens, which is a reminder to employers thinking of pay-cuts and hiring cheaper and that is “You pay peanuts, you get monkeys”.

But for this festive season, enjoy your peanuts because the huasheng (as it is called in Mandarin) is an auspicious food representing good health and long life, as well as wealth and good fortune.

That’s the Chinese for you. Gong Xi Fa Cai!

By June H.L. Wong, So aunty, so what?

Aunty was gobsmacked when the pig character Zhu Bajie went missing from the Monkey King 2 movie posters and billboards in Malaysia. If this animal is the cause of so much sensitivity, how in the world are we going to celebrate the Year of the Pig in 2019? Send feedback to aunty@thestar.com.my.


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