Entries Tagged 'Rantings' ↓

You know, I’ve never been as sick of the Olympics as I have been in recent days. I don’t mean that I’m sick of it. I love the Olympics and everything it stands for. I always see it as a triumph of the human spirit where upsets happen all the time in any sporting discipline irrespective of country might and money.

I love the idea behind the Olympics, where athletes from all over the world come to compete and (traditionally) all wars are halted to foster the spirit of friendly rivalty.

I don’t know what it is about China hosting the 2008 Olympic Games thats gotten the world’s pants in a twist. Every other day, I’m reading complaints about Chinese gymnasts being underaged, or that the opening ceremony was not as spectactular as it was, or that China has spent too much money building the water cube where the water sports are held… and China did this and China did not do that … and the list goes on. I find Yahoo Sports a big culprit in encouraging derogatory comments about the host country - first by tweaking the medal tally and in their truly skewed reporting. They should give fair coverage to the sports not make comments about how much the water cube costs and why the Chinese could not build a wall around the showers.

In my view, China is doing as decent a job of hosting the world’s biggest games as Athens or Sydney. We don’t hear complaints about how much Athens or Sydney spent. In fact, cities have gone bankrupt by hosting the Olympic Games. I’m sure Barcelona has a tale to tell. Will we be hearing about how much London will spend to host the 2012 Games? Will we still be hearing about Chinese gymnasts then or will we have some England bashing? I seriously doubt the latter.

Why am I not hearing that the 52kg Thai girl who lifted a record 126kg in the weightlifting championships is not legit? She is tiny and her lifting technique was effortless. She deserves her Gold medal as do the Chinese gymnasts who displayed a good performance. Performing before a home crowd always brings out the best in any athelete - ask our Jaguh Kampungs and they can tell you that. The USA swept the medals at the Los Angeles and Atlanta Olympics - we didn’t hear them complain then.

I’m not defending China in any other aspect other than their performance in hosting the Games. I’m just saying that it is the Olympics and if you win, kudos to you. If you lose out, you had a bad day, better luck next time, try again in 4 years. Phelps is dominating the swimming events and I’m sure the Americans are proud of him. They have every right to be, the same way the Australians adored Ian Thorpe when he was King of the Pool in Sydney. We don’t hear of allegations that Phelps must be on steriods to be the size he is and have the power he has or that the Americans must have pumped him up with something illegal that escapes detection.

So, I think what the world needs to do is take a step back and remember that we are all different. Asians have a smaller built and face it, look younger than our Caucasian counterparts. Different sporting disciplines result in people having different body physiques and different races capitalise on that. Look at track events. Blacks and Africans dominate mainly due to their size and physique. Swimmers need height as well as arms and caucasians have the upper hand. In the gymnasium and in diving a smaller size means less weight and more agility and Asians face it, fall in this category. In fact, I remember watching the Romanian team once who used to dominate the gymnastics events and they were really tiny too. So, if you can’t get that sort of physique it might be time to blame your ancestry not others.

I’ve had my say. Comments are closed. I dont’ want to have to deal with people telling me about why China is not being fair to their people and spending too much money instead of feeding the poor, because this is NOT what it is about.

I cannot tahan when I saw this on Yahoo sports:-

As of today, 11.20am 13 August 2008 this is the medal tally at the Beijing Olympics. The top 5 countries.

And America, YOU ARE NOT NUMBER ONE on the medal table! No matter how you twist it, you are still No. 2. And South Korea’s breathing down your neck. Don’t fancy being an Asian sandwich eh?

Medal tallies are traditionally placed in order of GOLD MEDALS won not number of medals won. If that’s the case, a country that wins 100 bronze medals can easily top the table without ever winning gold. That, my dear USA is the measure of a medal tally, not the number of medals.

I know Yahoo is American owned and so is Chevrolet but this just makes you look really silly. This and all that hoo-ha about Chinese gymnasts being underaged and Spanish basketball players taking slitty eyed pictures. Its childish and unsporting of Olympiads.

Feeling the heat eh? Looking over your shoulder at China eh?

Well, I’m rooting for China and I hope they top the medal table.  So there!

Malaysia turns 51 at the end of this month of August in one of the quietest Merdeka or National day celebrations I’ve seen so far. Just 5 days before Merdeka Day is the Permatang Pauh by-election which promises to be something of a thriller.

That is not the irony however.

On this evening’s news, it was reported that tourists enjoy coming to Malaysia because of the multi-racial multi-cultural country that is Malaysia. Everyone lives in harmony. Just imagine the scene in a Merdeka Day advertisement that is unfortunately only the stuff of tv,

If that is what the tourists find attractive about our country, why aren’t we proud of it? Why is racism rearing its ugly head everyday? Why are we not tolerant towards other races and religions anymore? Why is there continued favoritism and/or protests towards selected races for admissions into universities and higher institutes of learning?

Honestly, I’m puzzled. In our parents’ generation, all races were relatively friendly towards each other. In my generation, we still had friends from all races although it wasn’t as prevalent.

In this generation, we all seem to be living in our own compartmentalized worlds; not interacting, not tolerating.

51 years isn’t all that long and it did not take long for the multi-cultural, multi-racial country that is Malaysia to break down.

Sad isn’t it?

Happy 08-08-08 everyone!

This date comes around but once a century so isn’t it pretty awesome that we are seeing it in our lifetime? Little things to be happy about…

… because I was pissed off this morning at the fact that I might have to miss the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics tonight!

Life’s simple when you have Astro. But for someone like me who does not believe in paying for satellite tv when I barely watch terrestrial tv, I am at the mercy of the terrestrial tv stations as to the shows they want to show, and the coverage of the Olympic Games.

I had been looking forward to tonight, to see the Opening Ceremony of the first Olympic Games ever to be held in Asia. (Edit: I’m stupid. I forgot about the Seoul Games) If I know China, we can expect a lot of pomp and ceremony and lots and lots of color - red and gold I bet.

So, imagine my horror when I checked the online TV stations (I always start with NTV7, 8TV then TV3) and found that NONE OF THEM ARE SHOWING THE OPENING CEREMONY OF THE OLYMPIC GAMES!! Panicking, I ran and checked RTM and *gasp* nothing!!!

Calming down a little, I pulled myself together and decided to check the newspapers (online of course) and finally, I had a leeetle bit of good news on The Star:-

Whew! Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games at 8.30pm on RTM1! It is my personal policy never to watch RTM1 - see the programme line up and you’ll know why. But I will make an exception for something as momentous as this… unless by some fluke it appears on the private tv stations later tonight.

I just hope that there will be no unnecessary chatter over the international commentators tonight. I remember one year when our local commentators introduced all the wrong countries during the march past, having to hastily correct himself when he finally saw the sign boards carried. Our local commentators are embarrassing, and ill-informed and they think that incessent chattering makes up for lack of information and inaccurate reporting. But I guess its too much to hope for them to leave the international commentators alone.

Unfortunately, as I’m kiamsiap I will have to live with it. Maybe I’ll just turn down the volume and enjoy the pagentry of the Opening Ceremony. I’m sure it will be exciting!

Have a happy 08-08-08 and enjoy the Opening Ceremony tonight!

I had been resisting the Wordpress 2.6 upgrade for a while. Part of the reason is because I did not like the Wordpress 2.5 dashboard.

I know of people who like it, but I personally do not and I found that if you have a large blog with a lot of posts or a slow internet connection, it is considerably slow in loading. So, I resisted for a long time…

Until I had to install a new funky plugin and it wouldn’t work because I wasn’t on the latest version of Wordpress! Can you say discrimination?!

So, I took the plunge on my food blog and the upgrade went well… until I saw my Categories were all gone!!! They were still there except I couldn’t see them. There are numerous tips online involving SQLs and databases that made my head spin and which I could not comprehend, so I deleted all the categories and started all over again! Lucky I’d been a little lax so I only had about 100+ posts to update. But still… so if you have a food blog and see me pinging your site, this is the reason for it!

So, when it came to my beauty blog, I was hesitant. I had just celebrated writing 500 posts on it. Imagine if all the categories disappear?! I’d go a little nuts! Well, maybe not a little, a LOT nuts! So, I taught myself how to export the SQL database and other whatchamacallits, went into Fantastico, crossed my fingers, closed my eyes and hit the upgrade button.

Thankfully, it was fine! The upgrade to 2.6 was painless! YES!

Now, I need to upgrade this site. My gut feeling tells me, its going to give me the same headache as that I experienced with the food site - dare I try it? I don’t know. Do I want to spend a few hours of my life updating all my categories?! have nearly 400 posts! *whimper*

How?!