Chatter Of The Squirrel

Gotta get a bike, Gotta paint it red

Something in Dracula from Houston must have been subliminal… Cos I went and bought this, which I had been eyeing for a while. Managed to bargain the price down to a cool RM650. Bought it off a Malay bike enthusiast who’s moving up to an RM3900 bike frame.

It’s a full suspension mountain bike frame. A Haro Extreme EX2. Why a full-sus bike? A less bumpy ride. And from the looks of the reviews I’m reading, it sounds as tough as a VW bug. Or maybe it’s just out of some deep-seated paternal instinct to protect my boys…

Well, what follows now is to transplant the rest of my bike componentry from my 2yr old Scott Voltage YZ4 over to this new old bike.

Bought my Scott at a good discount 2yrs back, for commuting, and to push up Bt Kiara (my skill level is far from able to ride most of those trails). And since then, I have upgraded every component on the bike. The Scott is still a beautiful bike frame with one little minor flaw…

It’s missing two eyelets for bolting on a disc brake for the rear wheel. Found that out when I bought a pair of mechanical disc brakes last week. Thus, it gave me the extra impetus to buy this Haro frame. (Although this MOAB looks so much prettier….)

And next, I’ll have to source a pair of wheel hubs too. The nearest bike shop is trying to scalp me for RM380 a pair. Am trying to find one at a quarter of that price….

And on some more serious news… Alan Greenspan retires from the US Federal Reserves at 80, and gold popped up to USD570 per troy ounce, an all new high in decades.

Perhaps Love

Once in a long while, a story comes along and speaks accurately of my own personal sentiments regarding love.

To borrow the words of a great philosopher, my sentiment is reflected as such, “Love : a grave mental illness.” Plato.

This appears to be the theme in Perhaps Love. Not that I disapprove… It’s good to see a theme more grown up than the usual Cinderella and Snow White stories.

But I still found the story horribly boring. It tries to do a Moulin Rouge thing, with circus performers, tango music, a tragic actress in a love triangle, and Jacky Cheung singing the bulk of the songs.

What were they thinking? Seriously! A chinese Moulin Rouge is like… a Bollywood Superman. (For a good laugh, please click on the preceeding two links, you won’t be disappointed.)

I don’t know music, but I know what I like. And I liked Ewan McGregor’s singing way more than a guy who made his career and created his legend from his vocals.

I don’t know music, but maybe it’s something to do with the rhythm and cadence of tango music that makes it completely unsuited to mandarin lyrics. None of the songs were even halfway memorable. You know who wrote better lyrics? ?? wrote more memorable songs than this. But that’s just me.

The story revolves around three apexes of a love triangle. A mental case director, a mental case actor, and a mental case actress. I can’t see how there’s any love between the characters. The director wanted a sex-buddy for his long overseas filming jobs, and got comfortable with the girl. The girl wanted a break into acting, and take grotesque pleasure in mindf***ing the actor. And the actor is just a sad case of neurotic longing.

Perhaps love has missed the point completely. And the gratuitious song and dance sequences was how Moulin Rouge would be, if it sucked and used an amateur dance troupe. The cinematography was far from inspired. Watching the dance was like looking at spilt ice-cream on the floor: something that could have been very nice if a fool hadn’t dropped it but is now just a disgusting mess on the floor that you wish you didn’t have to clean up.

Plotwise, the love story climaxed early (at the same time as Takeshi’s character), with half an hour to go. Which gave me some hope that the story will take a more guts-ey tragic turn: someone will die, either from tuberculosis (like Nicole), or someone’s fit of jealousy (a good stabbing), or an unfortunate stage accident (like an ancient TV series I watched a long time ago, ??). The movie needed to end on an R+J tragedy or similar to have a glimmer of redemption.

The plot tried to go in just such a direction. Yet even while I was watching the clumsy fore-play, I realised that the director was going to pull out early and leave his audience unsatisfied. Wuss.

But watching the movie was not a complete loss. I made a surprising discovery about the actress, Zhou Xun. She’s the blind girl in The Emperor and the Assassin.

Watched Emperor & Assassin many years ago in the cinema. And there was one scene that captivated me: where the assassin was sent to exterminate the family of a renowned sword-smith. After the massacre, the assassin found the blind daughter of the smith, who had been listening helplessly as her parents and brothers were slaughtered. The way she gazed sightlessly into the assassin’s eyes…. Those were the most hauntingly soulful eyes I’ve ever seen.

I bought the VCD after that just to see those eyes again.

I’ve tried to look for a still of that scene from the movie, but can’t seem to find it. Will make a still myself later.

Dracula from Houston

Sometimes it feels amazing when you find a piece of music that speaks to you on a personal level.

I’ve been playing Butthole Surfers’ Dracula from Houston on a loop the entire time I’m blogging…

Well, I’ve already got my blue bike. But I’ll probably wait on that doctor’s appointment.

Pekan Baru

My company has a client who has a couple of oil palm plantations in Sumatra, probably totalling 3 Singapores in size… They’ve an oil mill near Pekan Baru using our satellite broadband services. The system went down, and our contractor wasn’t willing to commit personnel to service it. So it suddenly fell to me to fly there and get the thing working again.

Not too enthused about it. Cos when I go somewhere by car, I get to make mileage claims. And with the way my car sips petrol, I make a tidy little profit. But out in a boring little town in Sumatra, I don’t get anything. And there’s only 3 flights a week, I go on Tuesday, and I have to hang around there till Friday…

But it’s work, so what choice have I got?

Gawd-awful early morning flight. No choice but to take a cab. Talked about Malaysia’s economic disasters, past & future, the whole trip. The plane ride took off at 7.40 and I arrived at 7.20.

Luckily, the contact here met me at the airport. He slipped the customs people money to get me through without hassle. Who knows what’s the going rate to smuggle in satellite transmitter parts etc… And if I let them know I’m just here to service an installation, they’ld insist on seeing my work permit/visa or something… But a couple of greens/blues/oranges/whatever greased the process far easier.

Hopped onto a car and driven almost 2hrs out of the town… Suffered a couple of minor head trauma on the way in, cos I kept dozing off in the car. But the driver was quite insistent that I see as much of his home as possible, and kept swerving the car sharply to smack my head against the seatbelt pulley. With each successive concussion, I lost more and more mental function, that it didn’t even occur to me to just put the seat down and lie back until more than an hour into the journey.

They drive like maniacs here. The use of the car horn is a language all on its own. It can say a variety of things like, “Coming through!” “I’ll bloody run you over if you don’t get your crappy bike off the road!” “Don’t you even dare think of cutting out into my lane cos I’m not slowing down for you, we’ll die together if we have to.”

It’s better to just sleep through the nightmare and put my fate in the hands of God.

It took me all of two hours to get the thing working. After that, it’s just a sad long wait till Friday.

I’m housed in some decent quarters at the mill. Room furnished with airconditioning, water heater, good spring bed, 24/7 maid service, food, gym. There’s even pornographic art in my room. A kind of a spooky drawing of a topless kampung girl that reminds me a bit of Nang Nak. Small wonder that the previous occupant of the room took down the painting and put it face towards the wall.

I came prepared with appropriate ‘desert island literature’. Some quasi-science/philosophy/art reading material that I prepared years ago. The kind of book that’ll give you 6-12mths of reading in case you’re stranded alone in a desert island… Gawd, it was boring!! I read a review of Godel, Escher, Bach in an issue of The New Scientist. I guess I’ll eventually power through it somehow. For the same reason why people read A Brief History of Time.

The sex book I bought was much better reading. A lot of fascinating anecdotes on sexual cannibalism, stag horns, peacock sex, huge penises, etc. Oh, Stephen Jay Gould is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist. It only *seems* that biologists think about sex all the time. But really, Gould writes very good stuff. He even wrote an essay on Lee Kuan Yew’s eugenic government policies.

But the book I really wanted to read was Dan Simmons’ Olympos. But I only have about 5-6 hrs of charge on my PDA, and there was no way to recharge it. Be assured that I’ll be ranting about this book in a later blog…

Back to my living arrangements… The main door gave me a small reason for concern… There’s a huge lead pipe for barricading the door with. What’s up with that?

Is there some danger of the peasants revolting against the bourgeois? (Isn’t it ever so cool to be able to put in a word of French to class up your vocabulary?)

Well, it appears that there had been some small trouble before.

The roads radiating from the main town are speckled with random small villages. Some village thugs have a habit of stopping the oil palm trucks and collect a ‘toll’ of a couple of fruits. They do this enough, and get a small truck load, and then come to the oil mill to try to sell the ill-gotten goods back to the people they stole it from.

The barricade, and the two guard-posts on the way to the quarters are necessary measures after an incident.

It’s a sad, but not altogether surprising, state of affairs. What do the locals here have going for them? They’ve got a bit of land, and the short-sighted sale of which is only a one time source of income. The only industry around is logging, saw-mills, palm plantations and the palm oil mill.

And another unusual industry I noticed on the way in… I saw a roadside shop selling gallon bottles of ‘bensin’. That’s benzene, isn’t it? And I thought, cool, why not? Even I have times when I felt that I could do with some mutagenic industrial solvent. Maybe there’s some local industry that uses the stuff, and there’s a market for gallon bottles of the stuff…

Then I saw more and more roadside stalls selling this. WTF? What’s the mystery market for benzene here? Do they huff the stuff to get high?!

Then I found out that ‘bensin’ is indon for gasoline. And ’solar’ is diesel. Ooookay… That makes more sense… They’ve got no petrol stations outside of the town centre. So, entrepreneurs will motor into town, buy up a couple of containers of the gasoline, and bring it back to his village and re-sell them at a mark-up.

The coolest thing though, is that nobody makes a fuss when you light up a fag at these petrol stations. Not many places around lets you satisfy your nicotine cravings while you’re filling up your vehicle.

Anyway, finally Thursday comes around, and I left the oil mill. Early morning flight on the Friday, so took a room in town. Got to see a bit of the town centre. Had 250,000 rupiah in my pocket, and nothing to spend it on.

But did manage to buy 48packets of IndoMie. They’re less than RM2.00 for 6pkts, where I have to pay RM3.30 for 5pkts in KL. And the Indonesian version tastes better than the Malaysian one. Well, at least I won’t go home empty handed.

While I’m talking about travelling… I’ll also mention a bit about how to get to and from KLIA.

Right after you exit the baggage claim, you can start making random eye contact with the crowd. I’m sure you’ll then be approached by no less than a dozen illegal cabbies who’ll charge you about RM70-80 for a ride into the city.

Or make a left, and follow the signs to the KLIA Express, where RM35 will take you into KL Sentral in 28minutes.

Or make right, and look for the KLIA Transit. It runs on the same tracks as the Express. But buy a tix to Putrajaya for RM6.20. Exit the platform at the correct stop. Buy another tix to KL Sentral for RM9.50, and go back down to the platform to catch the next train in 30min.

Thus, RM15.70 can get you into the city if you’re not in a hurry.

Pedalphilia

I’m not talking about The Woodsman. Although I’m talking about 5yr old and 10yr old boys, this has nothing to do with PEDOphilia.

Joined my first mountain bike hash today.

I’ve been ghosting the KLMBH group since I bought my Scott Voltage YZ4 two years ago. In the beginning, I had no means of getting myself and my bike to the bash sites. Only bought my trusty Daihatsu Charade last year.

The only off road trail that’s within manageable distance from my apartment is the Bt. Kiara trail, near Taman Tun. I’ve been there twice, just to push my bike up and down some of the trails. It’s a very technical trail, and the bulk of it is beyond my abilities. Do wish I can skill up and tackle it soon, before all of it is lost to rampant development. Properties in Bt Kiara are lava-hot.

After buying the car, I told myself that I will start joining a few bashes, especially if it promises to be scenic and non-technical. Somehow, didn’t get around to this for an entire year. Thought I’ll do something to kick my MTB-ing up a notch this year. Checked the MSN group last night, and whadaya know, there’s one today, and a whole bunch of newbies are gonna be showing too!

SET!

So I cleaned my bike. Got rid of the embarassing cob-webs. Wiped the chain and lubed it with fresh oil. And packed my bike off to Rawang. Found the hash spot after only one wrong turn.

104 riders this day. And met the near-legendary Pigpen Pat, who is responsible for the maintenance and creation of the bulk of the trails in Bt Kiara.

There’s a long trail, 22km and a short trail, 12km. I signed up for the long one. Pretty ambitious, but no pain, no gain.

Started off at 9.30. A hundred riders following the hares off the road and into the rubber plantation. We had to cross two streams early in the trail, which slowly strung out the riders.

I hung around the back of the group, and followed a couple of guys to look for alternative crossings before doubling back anyway. By then, most of the group are no longer in sight. I followed the trail of paper until I caught up with a small group. A dad with a bunch of boys with him.

By then, the trail has gotten steep. My front derailleur was giving me crap and the chain slipped off the cogs no less than 5 times. I was also running out of breath, and had to get off and push. I found myself barely keeping pace with a bunch of 10year olds!!

It took the better part of half an hour before I left them behind! I’m not THAT out of shape, am I? I kept pushing forward, but never caught up with anyone else. Are even the newbies so far ahead of me already? Come on, there were waify (adjective used to describe Winona Ryder) Malay girls riding cheap and gawd-awful heavy steel LeRun bikes! Those monsters are a nightmare on the steep slopes.

A simple ride? That’s freaking false advertising! And all this while, I was still on the shared track for both the short and long routes. The trail hasn’t split off to sate the thirst of the sado-masochists yet.

There were a couple of downhills too. The trick is to relax and ride it out, picking you path carefully. Hard braking will just tip your centre of gravity forward, and you’ll endo.

It is exhilirating as hell. The adrenaline saturates your brain and you feel like you can almost see the Matrix. My thought process went, Ohshitohshitohshit ohshitohshitohshitohshit ohshitohshit ohshitHowinthegoodLord’ssweetnamedidIsurviveTHAT!!!

I can almost understand now why there’s a Kiara trail named, Boner. (This is a double entendre.)

But it gets trickier when the slope gets bumpier. If you hadn’t chosen your path properly, or not skilled enough to pick the right path, you’ll go don’tgointherutdon’tgointherut don’tgoindon’tgoin… HelloRut! GotothegrassGotothegrass and Wheeeee! and Ow!

The rider behind me saw me do a double headspin triple somersault. His words: “That was incredible!” I’m only sorry that I couldn’t have seen it myself. I landed on my back, which was cushioned by my CamelBak filled with 3Litres of fresh water. I walked away from that fall with no more than a pain in my right butt. No scrapes. No bleeding. No broken bones. It’s like a rite of passage, and it even felt great.

Lesson learnt: I forgot to raise my butt off the seat. If I had stood up a little, the bike wouldn’t have bounced so much and I should have been able to surf down the slope with more control of my speed. When you’re bouncing and your wheels air-borne, the brakes don’t do shit. There’s no traction. Braking in mid-air only locks the wheels, and that spells bad news when you hit the ground again. Either that, or get a full suspension bike.
After the fall, my rear derailleur started giving me trouble too. I couldn’t shift properly to the low gears, and the rest of the ride became quite a pain. When I bought those SRAM 4 with the shifters, I asked how good is it compared to more expensive ones. The salesguy said that it’s not good enough for serious enthusiasts. Seems like he’s right…

I kept pushing onwards, and still no sight of the women and children. I didn’t want to be last, even if this was my first hash. Although I can still spot the paper trails, I don’t relish the idea of being left behind. After pushing up a horrible slope that nobody could ride up, unless he’s Mickael Rasmussen… I finally came to the fork in the trail that distinguished the sado-masochists from the common man.

I’ve finally came 10km, and can either take a further 2km short route out, or another 12km long route. Wisely, I took the sane choice. The last 10km was hard enough for me. I had no intention of seeing the rest of what the hares had planned for us. I caught my breath for a bit and chatted with the hare.

I found out that the boy I had so much difficulty passing, was only 5 years old!!!! I was almost out-done by a kid 17% of my age!!!! I only passed him in the last kilometre!

The remaining 2km was uneventful. Finished the hash with just enough water to spare, and found myself being the first 15 finishers. I’m sure there were more scrubs than this…

Maybe everyone else went the long route? Or maybe the crowd got led down a false trail early on, and that’s how I bypassed them. I never caught up with them, cos they were behind me all the while!

Took some well deserved rest, and carbo-ed up with what the ice-cream man was selling. Hung around the finishing area to watch people finish and observe the post hash activities. Some brought portable showers to wash off. One Caucasian dude unabashedly took off his lycra pants in full view of everyone. No towel. No hiding behind a car door or anything. Down came the pants while I was on the phone calling my sister. I had front row seats to his creamy white and blistered cheeks.

Got to admire some of the hardware (double entendre not intended) the riders were packing. Marzochi Bomber front suspension that cost more than my entire bike. A Whyte PRST-4 that costs more than my car (just the bike frame, mind you). Even a LeRun, so at least I’m not the saddest case.

It’s a good day. Any day that you can walk away in one piece is a good day.

The damage:

-RM 5.80 for toll, and less than RM10 of gas to get to Rawang.

-RM 10 for joining the hash as a guest. The registration is so that they’ll come look for you if you don’t make it out.

-Lost the ear-piece of my fave specs after the crash

-One knocked up rear derailleur

-One crack in my bike helmet. That’s why “No helmet no ride” is a hard rule at the hash. I made it through the day with no loss of G.C.S. so I guess I got off pretty lucky there.

-One bruise in my right butt. But you don’t get a photo of that.