Some jokes from my childhood

KL fountain which is no more

Oh dear

Teacher: Nobody has seen flying saucers for sure.

Student: I have.

T: Where?

S: At home, when my parents fight.

A future engineer

It's a custom that one must not sweep the house on New Year's Day because that would be "sweeping the wealth out".

Girl is about to sweep the dirt out.

Parent: No no, don't do that, you will be sweeping the wealth out.

Girl: (After a moment's reflection) In that case can I sweep some dirt in?

Both salty

Teacher: Class, how are salted duck eggs made?

Student: "Waxed" ducks lay them.

Cured would be a better translation but they certainly do feel waxy because of the fat. Lap Ngap (Cantonese rendition) in dishes is a New Year delicacy. 

Malayan Moon, or the convoluted history of the Malayan anthem

One incident I remember from my childhood is playing one of the 78 RPM records from the haul I mentioned previously. The song was Malayan Moon, but I was surprised when the recognisable melody of the Malayan anthem emerged. I think my father explained that it was a romantic song before it was adopted as an anthem.

Years later, thanks to the Internet, I have the whole story. Briefly, the tune was a love song popular in the Seychelles over a century ago, and allegedly composed by a Frenchman. It spread to South East Asia and was adopted as the state anthem of Perak (one of the 11 states forming the federation of Malaya). When Malaya became independent an anthem had to be found. After some unsuccessful submissions, the Perak state anthem was adopted.

The record I heard was probably this, recorded in 1952, and here's the Australian connection: The Sydney band was Paul Lombard and His Orchestra. The singers Joan Wilton and Geoff Brooke sang in English and Malay respectively. The song's style was said to sound Malayan, and the diction of the non-Malay singer was said to be correct, although Malay phonetics are not hard to master. If I had known the record would be so rare... but who can predict the future?

The first line of the anthem goes Negara-ku (My country). Of course being rascal kids, we mangled the words to be a bit rude.

Blur

Another one of those slang words we used came back to me today. This is not to be confused with bleugh, a tone of disgust. Blur conveys tiredness, confusion, being out of it, that sort of thing. Examples:

We arrive by overnight bus from Penang. We so blur!

Aiyah, after 2 hour exam I totally blur.

Why you so blur?

So picturesque, if blurry, hahaha. Memory prompted by this blug, er, blog article.

School days supplies

Draughts boards were not standard supplies

A chat with a friend brought back memories of the supplies I used in my school days.

Paper

Malaysia probably switched to the ISO paper sizes following the lead of the UK. The Internet tells me that foolscap persisted into the 1980s. Certainly some of the old papers I have are this size.

Writing implements

Fountain pens and wooden pencils were the main implements when I started school. Parker and Schaffer were competitor brands at the high end. Parker also made Quink. The Chinese came in with their Hero pens and inks priced much cheaper. Dropping a pen on its nib almost certainly ruined it.

Ballpoint pens existed but throwaway pens were too expensive for common use until mass manufacturing made them affordable in the 1960-70s in Malaysia. However the skinflints among us practised ball point pen transplants. This was something you did when the roller stopped working, possibly because you dropped the pen point down. In this procedure, you didn't throw away the pen but transplanted the ink tube onto a working nib, probably one which had used up all the ink in its tube. You had to be careful not to introduce an air bubble into the tube. You did this by blowing lightly on the other end to make a gob of ink ooze out and then you filled the nib with this before pushing the tube in. Naturally you needed waste paper to wipe any ink detritus.

For a while the nibs were all metal but eventually they became plastic except for the roller. I remember because we used to reuse the nibs (and the crystal housings) as electrical probes.

Besides wooden pencils, mechanical pencils existed but were too expensive for poor students. When one got to high school, those made by Faber-Castell or Staedler were within reach, but the leads were still expensive. The leads were the same size as the ones in wooden pencils so sometimes one opened up a short pencil to repurpose its lead in the mechanical pencil. Oh, and the lead sharpener was in the plunger button.

Japanese manufacturers such as Pilot and Pentel entered the market with thin leads which obviated the need for sharpening and the resulting graphite dust. 0.5 mm and 0.7 mm were a couple of standard sizes for the pencils and leads. They were quite popular and were a bit of a status symbol among schoolkids in the 1980s; I remember my nieces pestering me to buy a couple for them. Eventually single-use mechanical pencils entered the market.

Geometry set

Secondary schoolkids were expected to have a geometry set for general measurement, e.g. reading maps in geography. Some geometry problems were solved by construction. The contents of the box were: a 45-45-90 set square, a 30-60-90 set square, a 180° protractor, a 15 cm ruler (wooden then clear plastic later), a compass (used for drawing circles and arcs), dividers (used for transferring measurements of distances), pencil, sharpener and eraser. The link mentions a stencil, but I don't remember that; maybe it was omitted in Malaysia. The divider was the most useless of the instruments. We just used it to poke holes in our wooden desks.

My friend mentioned that the keen students stuck a timetable of classes on the inside of the metal box. Most classes tended to stay in the same classroom throughout the year, and the teachers moved between classrooms.

Calculators

A step up from doing arithmetic (especially multiplication and division) by longhand were log tables, which were taught in secondary school. They also taught us to use trigonometric tables. I remember owning a 4-figure book of log tables. I wish I had hung onto that, it would be a museum piece now.

My father who was into gadgets, had an addiator, made in the US I think. I quickly realised that combining this with a log book would allow me to multiply and divide. I couldn't convince anybody that it was practical. Too much trouble, said one person.

My brother had a slide rule and passed that on to me when I was in high school. Again I only managed to convince people I was nerdy when I said I could multiply and divide using that. Again I wish I had hung onto that slide rule.

Around the time I entered university, scientific calculators became affordable although still pricey enough that some people bought them in Singapore when holidaying or got a helpful person to, to save on import duty. Casio made the most popular models in my milieu. Some students could afford Texas Instrument or Hewlett Packard calculators. I wanted and saved up to buy a HP-25 programmable scientific calculator in Singapore and wasted spent many hours writing programs to implement formulae that I would never actually need. I still prefer RPN to Algebraic. Now my smartphone and desktop have a wonderful free HP-42 emulator. There was some question about whether programmables would be allowed in engineering exams but the faculty decided that the questions would be set such that having programs on hand conferred no advantage.

Today

And now?

Paper is now bought by the ream to be printed in laser or inkjet printers, something undreamt of in the days of mimeographs, waxed stencil paper, correction fluid (nail polish was an acceptable substitute), and oily, messy inks. But even this is diminishing as electronic copy displaces paper copy.

I have more ball point pens and pencils than I can use in my lifetime, I find them dropped on the street or otherwise discarded, or given away for free in seminars.

Measuring tapes are more useful to me than rulers and protractors.

Everybody has a smart phone now which can do far more than calculate. On the other hand, it's usually when I do hobbies that I need to calculate.

A silly telephone joke

I remember this joke told to me when I was a kid by my brother-in-law. It helps, but isn't essential, to know that the surname 葉 (or simplified 叶), is Yap in Hakka and Hokkien, Yip in Cantonese (and Ye in Mandarin).

A: Hello, is that Yip?
B: Yup!
A: Yap?
B: Yip!
A: Sorry?
B: Y.I.P!
A: I don't know why you pee.

 

I would like to call a wrong number, please

 

4 versions of When Will You Return?

When the opening song came up in Crazy Rich Asians, I was overwhelmed by nostalgia. It was When Will You Return? (何日君再来) a song introduced by Chinese singer Zhou Xuan in a 1937 film. She was Shanghai based, an immensely popular singer and actress, perhaps the most of that era, and her songs were well known throughout Asia. When I was a kid this song was often heard and my father had an album of her songs. Her early death at 39 in 1957 may have inspired another wave of fandom when I was growing up.

The opening lines translate as:

Lovely flowers don't bloom often
Beautiful scenes aren't always there
Worries dissolve smiles
Memories of love bring back tears
After you leave tonight
When will you come back?

Zhou Xuan's version is in tango rhythm, the martial pace suggesting the dark days of the Japanese occupation of China. One imagines the singer addressing a lover who must leave imminently. The question may be rhetorical. After the PRC was established the song was censored for being too decadent.

Four decades later, Teresa Teng, a Taiwanese singer hugely popular throughout Asia, sang this version. She too had a troubled love life and died early at 40, which makes her interpretation poignant.

Lisa Ono, a Japanese singer who spent her childhood in Brazil, did a bossa nova flavoured cover in 2010 on an album featuring songs of Asia. Her throaty rendition conjures up a band performing in a cozy jazz venue.

Finally, for the Crazy Rich Asians soundtrack, Jasmine Chen has brought the song back to Shanghai, which is decadent again, in an ebullient jazz flavoured cover. The title has been changed to Waiting For Your Return, suggesting anticipation rather than resignation. It abounds in optimism and energy, matching the groundbreaking film.

The film it first appeared in, Three Stars by the Moon, was one of the last silent Chinese films, and the song track provided by a synchronised gramophone which is odd as that version is over 5 minutes. 78 RPM records held just over 3 minutes per side, which explains the normal length of a pop song. Perhaps in the middle the operator restarted the side from the beginning. There are spoken lines, by a male voice, proposing toasts to the singer. In later versions the singer speaks lines urging the lover to drink up.

The translated lyrics (scroll to bottom) illustrate how compact Chinese sentences are, and Chinese poetry more so, the reason being that Chinese usually elides pronouns and articles. The key line is 10 syllables:

今宵离别后，何日君再来?

Grammatical translation:

After you leave tonight, when will you come back?

Literal translation:

This night parting after, what day gentleman again come?

君 translates to gentleman but is a polite you.

Positive ground car

Both vehicles are grounded that's for sure

My dad once had a car with positive ground. If I recall correctly it was a British car, the Mayflower. Like most British cars of that era, it had positive ground, meaning that the positive terminal of the battery was connected to the chassis. New cars, in particular the Japanese cars popular in Malaysia, had by then negative ground. The first time this caused an issue was when my dad decided to have a radio/cassette player installed. The preponderance of negative ground meant that radios were designed for that. The man who fitted the radio had to improvise a wooden panel to mount the radio on so that its case could be insulated from the car chassis. As you can imagine, I thought this a little unsatisfactory as it meant that the radio case was "live" and could cause shorts of the car battery to the chassis.

Later, at my behest, my dad got a car mechanic to reverse the polarity of the car's electrics. I think even the generator connection didn't need to be reversed as the excitation coil was reversed too, but I'm not certain (that era of cars did not have an alternator). Remember, the radio was probably the only electronic device in a car in those days.

All cars nowadays have negative ground, and the dual standards are a footnote in history. I read arguments for one or the other based on galvanic corrosion or something like that but I'm not convinced. The car is a floating electrical system anyway.

PS: There was another divide, the 6V and 12V battery cars. The only 6V car I knew of at the time was the Volkswagen. Again most cars standardised on 12V after that.

IBM 1130 FORTRAN with localised subroutines in Malay

In 1967, University Malaya acquired an IBM 1130. It may have been the first general mainframe in the country. An academic friend of the family invited me, a schoolboy at the time, to join an introductory course in FORTRAN, intended for other academics, officials and industry to learn about programming and how computing would change the country. It certainly changed my life as it was the start of my interest in computer science.

I could go on about the incredible increase in computing power, about how a Raspberry Pi is a more powerful computer than the 1130 ever was, but this blog isn't about that well-trodden ground. Neither is it about 1130 lore, there are sites for that, like this one.

Rather it's about one aspect of our course which has always intrigued me, and I may never know the answer to. As FORTRAN programmers know, formatted I/O is one of the more difficult areas of the language, and remember the strings were Hollerith constants, the CHARACTER type didn't arrive until FORTRAN 77. So the course presenters gave us a couple of free format input and output subroutines: CALL BACHA() and CALL TULIS(). BACHA and TULIS are read and write respectively in Malay.

If I recall correctly, not only did these routines take both INTEGER and REAL arguments, but were variadic. Probably impossible to provide with a subroutine written in FORTRAN. Now we can think of myriad ways of implementing this in modern languages. But the IBM 1130 had comparatively little memory, measured in thousands of words. My guess is that IBM technical support provided these routines, in assembler, localised for Malaysia. But I may never know.

Fumble!

While playing snooker the other night and missing some shots, this expletive from my university days came back to me.

It's easiest to explain by example so here are some:

After the exam:

A: What value for the inductance did you get for question 6?
B: 16.2 millihenry.
C: 16.2.
A: Aiyah! Fumble!

Missing the bus:

We stopped to chat and missed the last shuttle bus to the residential college and had to walk. Fumble!

Why so shy?

Why you didn't ask her out when you had a moment alone with her? Fumble, man!

Obviously it can be applied to situations where another expletive starting with fu might be used, but it also carries the implication that you are the author of your own misfortune, rather than blaming it on the universe.

Making our own stylophone

After I saw a design for a DIY stylophone in an electronics magazine, a friend and I made our own. As I recall the original design called for a unijunction transistor for the relaxation oscillator. The UJT oscillator was to get a very short discharge time so that the period would be proportional to the charge time, and therefore controlled by a resistor in an RC circuit. The contact pads which were the "keys" were taps into a resistor chain.

UJTs were expensive so I devised a replacement using a pair of BJTs (conventional transistors). The oscillator was followed by a binary divider to square up the waveform. We made several of these instruments and sold some to friends.

The kid in the first photo is probably my niece. My brother-in-law is at the edge of the picture. In the second photo you see a bit more of the top of the stylophone. The person was a schoolmate whose name is lost to me now.

I remember using my knowledge of the equal tempered scale with its twelfth root of 2 ratio between adjacent semitones to work out the resistor values needed in the chain.

This was probably the first model with a wooden box (cigar or chocolate box). Later versions used a long cigarette pack gift box. Getting hold of suitably sized boxes limited our production capacity.

Introduction to music and scanning 126 negatives

Musician at wedding dinner
The restaurant is Mak Yee
the site of which has
been sold off decades ago

I owned an Instamatic camera, probably my second camera, between my first 120 roll film camera and using a 35mm camera. I seem to remember that my father bought it for me after some pestering from a store in Singapore called CCC Junk Store, which sold goods disposed of by returning expatriates. My father would religiously visit this shop for bargains whenever we visited Singapore. The biggest haul was several crates of 78 rpm records. Most records were classical music. As you can imagine, a long work would be split across many records and this is where the autochanger came in. Of course there were series with missing records and duplicates. All the more fun. The family listened to them for years. It was the basis of my musical education. I remember reading a label and asking my brother What's a Beet-ho-ven? Then: What's a composer? It was only when I was older that I understood that music had composers.

A baptism ceremony
Colours were terribly faded,
it's been 50 years, after all

Anyway I was not looking forward to scanning these negatives as my flatbed scanner software has no setting for 126 film. Also unlike 35 mm strips, which has unexposed film between frames, 126 strips had not just pre-exposed numbers (normal for other formats) and but also pre-exposed frame lines, probably to assist the printing process. The camera could advance accurately between frames because there was only one registration hole per frame for the sensing pin to fall into. Which meant that the frame detection feature of the software wouldn't work. But it turned out to be easy. Following a tip on a forum, I scanned in the whole strip in one go, resulting in 200MB image files, then cut out the various frames with GIMP.

Hailstorm

I looked at a photo taken in the early 1970s and thought: what am I looking at?

Then I remembered that it was a hailstorm, a rare event in the tropics. There were pictures taken of the lawn, looking like some magic eye puzzle, a waste of film. In this photo you can just make them out on the concrete. I know now that what the eyes see and what the camera records are different things. The eye focuses on what the brain tells it to while the camera is indiscriminate. That is to say, I should have taken a closer shot of a hailstone, even if I didn't have a macro lens at the time.

Yay! Flood!

Malaysia being a tropical country, at times torrential rain would overwhelm the capacity of the drains and the result would be flooding of the roads. Our house was on a slope so it didn't get flooded, but from the window I had a good view of the waterlogged neighbourhood.

I used to enjoy the spectacle of the traffic jam on the main highway in the distance. Maybe it was a bit of schadenfreude, but I think the excitement came from the wind and, some people claim, the ions in the air during a thunderstorm. I like breezes and open air; my idea of ennui is a stultifying warm confined space. I really miss a good thunderstorm these days.

Timber!

The lot next door to our house was vacant land, well vacant in the sense that it was not built up but had trees and weeds. (And rubbish we thoughtlessly tossed there.) One day, I think a few days after heavy rain, one of the trees toppled onto our side of the fence. Nobody was hurt, and the only property damage was to the boundary fence and a bit to the zinc shelter over one of the car spaces. Naturally we were a bit inconvenienced for a while by the blockage.

This photo was taken from the inside of the undercover car space. I think the car is a Vauxhall. Those were the days of trade protection so British cars accounted for most of the sales. Japanese cars had not yet burst onto the world stage, American cars were expensive and a few daring people owned European cars like the Beetle. And the rich had Mercedes of course.

Anyway all this drama was heady to me as a kid that I used up almost a whole roll of 120 film.

Our first TV

Television came to Malaysia in 1963 but my family did not get one right away as they were expensive. I remember asking a neighbour if I could watch an episode of Batman. He allowed me but sent his son to his room to study. It was a bit awkward so I never asked again. So I pestered my dad to buy a TV. Eventually he got this Hitachi at a good price from a dealer acquaintance of his. It served us well for many years.

The screen shows the final credits of a show made in Pinewood Studios which might have been The Saint, or less likely, The Champions.

Before Instagram

Before Instagram, photos taken on 120 roll film were naturally square. There were 12 exposures in a roll. The film had no sprocket holes, the frame number printed on the backing paper could be seen in a small red window. No shutter interlock; one had to learn the discipline of winding on after every shot to avoid double exposure.

This is one of the earliest photos I took, of my primary school class with our teacher. You will notice that most of the pupils were girls. I went to a Chinese girls school which actually meant that it was predominantly girls, with about 20% boys. My older siblings wanted me to learn Chinese, at least in the primary stage (years 1-6).

I've got a tiger in my tank

One of the most successful marketing campaigns by Esso was the use of a tiger as a mascot and the line I've Got A Tiger In My Tank. This photo was taken at a school day where a budding comedian plays a boxer having a match with a roly-poly inflatable tiger.

Besides this toy, other merchandise included T-shirts. I have a picture of me wearing one. Also "tiger tails" which were attached to petrol tank caps to give the impression one had a captive tiger in the tank.

There were also bumper stickers to get free advertising. Some alteratists discarded the T and edited the E to an L to make the slogan I'VE GOT A GIRL IN MY TANK.

Not surprisingly, the match ended in a KO win by the tiger.

A pretty woman

This picture was taken at a Malaysian Agricultural Fair in the early or mid-1970s. She was a publicity rep for Esso as you can see from the sash.

In fact the fair exhibited more than just agricultural products. I remember that the Malaysian Consumer Association had its launch here. They had a display of counterfeit washing powders. FAB was a well-known brand then, and the counterfeit products sported names like F4B and FAR with similar graphic designs. These days counterfeits are more subtle.

The fair also exhibited industrial products. Here is a booth by an electronics factory showing a range of variable resistors and electrolytic capacitors. Many US and European electronics manufacturers set up factories and assembly plants in Malaysia due to the wage advantage. They all relocated to lower wage countries many years ago.

Home HiFi setup, mid 1960s

A picture of a "component" HiFi system which I enjoyed.

The record player is the auto-changer type. (I didn't realise before writing this post that it was invented in Hobart, Tasmania.) You put a stack of records on the spindle and upon reaching the end of one record, the eccentric motion of the stylus arm due to the shape of the groove near the centre would trigger the mechanism to drop the next record in the stack. It was most useful for 78 RPM records which only lasted 3-4 minutes. With the spread of Long Playing vinyl, the need for a stack was reduced. Ah, also the stylus was double headed, one for vinyl and the thicker one for 78s.

The ¼ inch tape recorder was a 7 inch Panasonic, which unfortunately couldn't play the older 10 inch reels recorded with an older Philips recorder and and even older British recorder. It however was transistorised (solid-state they called it) so didn't run warm. I recorded quite a bit of music to savour (er, also annoy my family) over and over again.

The radio-amplifier was the valve type, make possibly Philips or Grundig. At the top right corner of it you will see a small horizontal window. This opened onto an electron tube called a magic eye, for displaying the signal strength when tuning to a station. The fluorescent phenomenon was later used in calculator and clock displays, albeit with lower voltages.

Monkey business

This was probably taken in the Botanical Gardens in Penang. I sent this picture to friends, jokingly entitled Me Getting Pocket Money from Dad.

Those monkeys (probably macaques) could be audacious. My mother used to tell how when I just a small kid, I once had something, a sweet or a piece of fruit perhaps, snatched out my hands, leaving me to wail. I don't remember that episode, I was probably too young.

An adventure with my dad

A seemingly mundane photo of buildings and hills in the distance. But I believe these are the photos I took when my dad allowed me to accompany him on an outstation trip to Taiping, a small town about 250km from Kuala Lumpur to conduct some business, I think to do with a tin mine.

I looked up the train station on Street View. I think the station is still where it used to be, but modernised of course. It would be too much to expect the buildings (I'm guessing a school) to be standing after 50 years, but I can still see the hills in the distance.

We took the overnight train from Kuala Lumpur to Butterworth. Since this arrived at Butterworth early in the morning and Taiping being only 2/3rds of the way there, the train deposited us in Taiping sometime before sunrise. So we had to wait for daylight before proceeding to the town centre a few km away. I don't remember if we walked. Most likely we got a trishaw.

I think my dad is listening to the news on his pocket transistor radio.

I think I was quite adept at using my dad's 35mm camera by then, there is only one underexposed shot before the first good one. But it must have had a light meter, as dawn and indoor scenes are difficult to judge for exposure.

And I think these are the offices where I waited while he talked with the people he needed to.

Why do I remember all this after half a century? I remember being excited at being allowed to accompany my dad on an overnight trip with the frisson of arriving at an early hour. It was an adventure for me. I know some people have missed having a dad in their life. I didn't appreciate my dad enough when he was alive, but I'm not the only child who does this. I realise now that the most important thing was that he was there for me when I was growing up. He'd be surprised I remember all this. More important than toys or presents is doing things together with kids.

Another blog?

Well yes, the material doesn't fit into the existing blogs.

I've been scanning old photos and many of them bring back old memories of people and incidents. I've been bothering people with snippets by email and messaging and it's occurred to me that I should set them down in a blog. Hence this.