A Chinese name joke

Eating in class will go on your report book!

When the Internet was younger, my niece used to print out jokes from there and paste them into a scrap book. This was one that I liked:

Teacher pointing at boy at other end of classroom: You there, are you chewing gum?

Boy: No sir, I'm Chan Weng Keong.

These days of course there's no need to print anything, jokes are just a search away.

In case you haven't got it yet, Chew Eng Gam is a plausible Chinese name.

My dad's shoe joke

My shoes are killing me

Sneezy woman enters shoe store.

"I would like … atchoo!"

"Madam, our shoes are sold in pairs."  

Kopi-o lesen

It's ok, I have a license to monkey around

Today while watching an inept driver an insult we used in Malaysia came back to me: kopi-o lesen which means black coffee license. It referred to the practice of bad drivers bribing the road test examiner, and by extension, the licenses thus obtained.

It seems that a few years back Malaysia implemented automation to remove the examiners from sitting beside the drivers under test to put the kibosh on the practice. So hopefully kopi-o lesen will only be a memory for oldies like me. Anyway good to know that my long term memory is still working. 😉

Remember the CD longbox?

HiFi rack from that time, not mine

Today as I was scanning tourist pamphlets to reduce my collection of paper, it came back to me that I used to make postcards. Well, not from scratch, I'm terrible at art. I used to cut up CD longboxes and use the panels as postcards because they were so pretty and it was a waste to throw out that cardboard. Some of my postcard recipients were bemused.

I've always thought that the format was created for two reasons, to reuse the LP bins, and to make the CDs harder to shoplift. But eventually just displaying jewel cases became the norm, and electronic tags and such were used to reduce shoplifting.

Of course the LP and CD shop has declined in market share now that everything's gone online. Some people still like to have physical artefacts and the vinyl revival is due to that, though it seems a large fraction of buyers never actually play their LPs.

Here's an US-centric long article on the rise and fall of the longbox. I remember one of defunct retailers mentioned in it, Tower Records.

Malaysian Princess of the Night

Looking at photos I scanned from 50 year-old film roll I found some of a pot plant blooming. It came back to me. We had a night-blooming cereus, also known as Princess of the Night and other names, at home which did nothing most of the time. But once on a rare occasion it would burst into bloom. I think in all my childhood years this only happened twice. This would be cause for wonder and picture taking. The blooms would last only one night. Here are the three photos I took, perhaps in 1973.

Filter coffee, Indian style

Last Friday I had breakfast at Komala Vilas, a southern Indian cusine eatery that gets high marks, which I had patronised on a previous stopover in Singapore. I had a couple of vadai, which are doughnuts made from legumes. Crisp on the outside, white and fluffy on the inside. I'm still dreaming of them. If one wants tasty nourishing vegetarian food, Indian recipies are a must.

Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

But back to the coffee. When I asked the waiter what they offered, they named filter coffee. When it arrived I realised I had the wrong mental image. Not paper filtered coffee but Indian filter coffee which contains sweetened milk. Took me back to the kopitiam (coffee shop) of my Malaysian years. And the teh tarik (aerated tea) of roadside vendors.

Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

BTW, by default kopitiams serve coffee with sweetened milk. To omit that you have to add the suffix -oh.

Lecturer joke

Next week I have a surprise...

Here's an old joke (obviously pre-Internet) my late brother, who was a lecturer, was fond of:

A lecturer comes in one day with a cassette player. "I have prerecorded lectures for you and the AV assistant will cue them up so for the rest of the semester I don't need to come to the lecture theatre." He presses play and leaves.

Next week, he's curious about how his students are adapting to the arrangement, so at 15 minutes past the hour he peeks into the theatre. There on the lectern is his player, and on the student benches are their cassette recorders, capturing his lecture.