Chatter Of The Squirrel

The Colour of Sin is a Crispy Brown

My phone camera is pretty crappy, so it might not be possible for you to recognise this blur of brown on the plate.

This, dear friends, is the picture of SIN!

Take the foot of a pig. Steam it until the meat is soft and tender. Then deep-fry lightly just till the skin is crispy.

There’s a lot more to the recipe than this, but this is as much as I can figure out.

Steaming cooks and softens the meat without leaching out the flavour and juices in the meat, like what happens if you stew the meat.

Deep-frying alone will harden and dry the meat, and often dissolve away much of the fat in the meat.

But a combination of the two creates a miraculous dish of soft tender meat with juicy fat and crispy skin. It’s like an orgy in your mouth.

And it only costs less than a dinner for one at TGIF. Not to mention that the restaurant also has crabs at RM13 /kg.

Business is mad, there’s a specialised cook for this dish. And probably a whole production line for sorting, gutting, cleaning, and cooking crabs. The restaurant spans across 3-4 ground floor shop-lots.

You can find this restaurant at these approximate co-ordinates: N2 deg 18.320′ E111deg 50.875′. You may GoogleEarth it, or head there with a GPS.

Mere walking distance from my parents’ house in Sibu.

With this promise of a taste orgasm, maybe now I can convince some friends to come visit me in Sibu some time…

OOTS #285 & Langkawi

In the latest OOTS, Haley’s line is:

“You can’t understand me, so let me just say that you’re a frigid bitch and your thighs look fat in that armor.”

Taken me some time to get around to it, cos I just got back from Langkawi.

Will write about that trip, but I have to pack for Sibu tomorrow.

Will explain why I’m going to Sibu, or even where Sibu is, but I also have an assignment that I need to submit before Saturday, and I won’t have the internet connection to do that in Sibu.

And I’m also sun-burnt from the hot tropical sun of Langkawi.

And my colleagues were so kind as to arrange a full day for me tomorrow…

Which I’ll have to somehow manage despite being crippled cos a Honda Prelude rear-ended me yesterday, just before my flight to Langkawi.

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!

But at least I have a new toy to play with to keep me balanced.

Finally got hold of a GPS! Extremely good 2nd-hand condition, at half the price.

It’ll be cool to use it in Hanoi.

Will review my gizmo some time. And explain Hanoi another time too.

Speaking of reviews… am also asked to ‘audition’ for a game review magazine. Gonna try to come up with a decent game to review. But have been playing so few games lately. Probably did less than 5 games in years.

Pulau Langkawi

Finally, a job assignment that brings me somewhere decent!

A satellite installation at an island in Langkawi had failed for a couple of months already, and our usual contractors are too overbooked to service us, again. So it fell to me to head out there to fix it.

It’s a tropical island with good beaches. So, I have no complaints.

But before I head to the airport, I had to go pick up some invoices from the office. Somehow, it didn’t occur to my manager to hand them to me before I left the office the day before… So, on the way to the office, I got rear-ended by a Honda Prelude.

That damnable man was practically sleeping at the bloody wheel, cos he hit me with enough force to bump me a few feet forward into the back of a Kembara. It was morning rush hour traffic so he couldn’t have been going too quickly, yet the impact wedged shut my boot, and crumpled up my bonnet.

Well, his radiator sprung a leak and his front took more damage than me, so that gave me some malicious comfort. The Prelude is not the most common car in KL, so parts will really cost him.

But my car was still driveable, but not safely so, as the buckled bonnet won’t lock right and might pop up on the highway. This couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Just before I need to get to KLIA, and back on Thursday, and there again on Friday, and back again on Sunday. That’s a few hundred ringgit damage in cab fares…

Well, enough whining…

So I got to Langkawi, met the representative from our client at the jetty. And we took a 20min boat ride to Tuba Island, an idyllic place with a population of a few thousands. We were headed to the primary school there, which was the benefeciary of this company’s community outreach, thus explaining why such a kampung school can have IT equipment and a satellite broadband subscription.

The school happened to be having a sports day. It’s rather amusing to see their house names are Satria, Waja, Wira & Iswara. But this is Mahathir’s home after all.

Managed to get the work done in an afternoon, which gave me almost 24hrs of time to kill. That’s where I made the mistake of asking the cabbie to take me to a cheap and clean place. If I had realised that my accomodations would be charged directly to the client, I would have gone somewhere closer to a beach…

If I boozed, I might have had a great time with all the duty-free beer. But as it were, my only entertainment was munching pasar malam food and watching Robin Williams on TV.

Next day, I rented a bike from a nearby shop and went cycling. It was the crappiest bike I’ve every ridden. Ever. I estimated that I could make my way from one end of the island to the other in 1-1.5 hrs. That’s where the nice beaches are, the west side.

Took me 2.5hrs to make the journey. Crappy equipment can really suck the fun out of your favourite activities. Like reading a bad book. Although I did make a few random stops and found some of the polluted fishing areas carefully kept hidden from tourists.

At the beach, I was only rewarded with the sight of one chick in bikinis. Only one. It wasn’t yellow, but it was polka-dot.

Only had half an hour to swim before I had to take a cab to return the bike and get to the airport.

The cabbie is ex-army. We talked about scandals in the Malaysian military. About our Spitfires that we purchased from the British, and left to rust in Arizona before fencing them off again to some other suckers.

Managed to get back home in one piece.

Then unpacked.

And packed again for Sibu.

OOTS #284

Finally, a good cryptogram after so many weeks.

And I must apologise for taking so long to get around to this. It appears that quite a number of Googlers have been here to look for the latest solution and not finding it.

“Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.”

So let me introduce all OOTS fans to THIS.

Or… if you can’t be bothered, here’s the fish.

Panel 3:
What?

Panel 5:
No, wait, that verdict doesn’t make sense. Laws don’t work that way.

Panel 6:
I’ve seen enough of my thieves’ guild friends sent to prison to know that this should have been a conviction.

Panel 9:
But.. but it doesn’t make any sense!

Panel 10:
No! I’m not OK, this whole trial made NO SENSE!

Panel 11:
We WERE guilty! It shold have been a guilty verdict! I can understand if they wanted to reduce the sentence due to the circumstances, but it should have still been a guilty verdict.

Panel 12:
Oh, never mind, I don’t know why I’m bothering.

Panel 13:
Wait–Elan, what did you just say?

Panel 14:
Oh my gods, Elan! That’s it! Elan, you’re a genius!

Venusian Sixth Sense…

So… I took a weekend off my gaming, and took a whole day to clean up my apartment. Had been servicing my bikes in the living room, so the floor was quite greasey. And my quarterly mopping was long overdue.

So I took a day to hose down the floors and scrub it till I nearly slipped my disc.

Anyway, the first friend that dropped by saw the cleaning, became immediately suspicious, and asked me who I’m cleaning for?

The next friend that found out that I had been cleaning, also became suspicious, and wondered who’s coming to visit.

It seems that the only reason a bachelor will clean, is when he’s going to bring a girl he wants to impress.

And when a guy cleans too regularly, he must be gay.

I once had a profound respect for women’s intuition. But after some scientific observation, I think it’s just a roll of dice on the craps table. If they jump to enough random conclusions as frequently as they buy shoes, occasionally they will make a connection that might strike one as intuitive.