ten ₱esos

Do not watch the movie Seven Pounds unless you want to be bored to death as if the movie were seven hours long. It’s a strange, slow-moving, uninvolving movie that no one but the financiers would watch if it didn’t star Will Smith. The movie lacks ingredients that make for a popular American film:  running gun battle, boat chase, car chase, spaceship chase, extraterrestrial persons, cute robots, menacing robots, exploding cars, torture scenes, prurient nudity, dinosaurs, ‘local color’ such as a traditional wedding, funeral, dancing, music, festival, fair, landmark, national park, national monument, …

A newly-built Saturn dealership on Highway 98 in Panama City did not open in “Fall 2008,” and it never will.  G.M. is killing Saturn — “a different kind of car company, a different kind of car.” It will follow Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Geo,  Plymouth, Eagle, AMC and other brands to the junkyard of history.

Penske Automotive Group announced today that it has ceased discussion with General Motors to buy the Saturn brand. »→

I’ve returned to U.S.A.. Here, when I flip a light switch, a lamp lights immediately, not eleven seconds later, as in Malaysia. Here I can enjoy a hot or warm shower. Here toilets actually flush away waste, and they refill within two minutes, rather than nineteen minutes in Malaysia. Here I can understand English spoken in shops and restaurants and in Holy Mass. Here people don’t drive the wrong way in traffic lanes, against oncoming traffic without lights lit. Here people drive with deference and courtesy and sanity — so far. †

After advertising on www.Mudah.My, I sold my 2007 Modenas Kriss 100.  No more head-on accidents and somersaulting over handlebars for me …

my ordinary costs of living on Penang Island, Malaysia in July 2009

~ at 3.5 ringgit per U.S. dollar ~

my half of apartment rental in The OceanView: RM 425  or $121.43

my half of  electricity bill: RM 43  or $12.29

food & bottled water; dining-out & groceries: RM 508.35  or $145.24 or $4.69 daily »→

We’ve had some rain here lately – days and nights. It certainly cools the ambient air. It also chills the water in the OceanView swimming pool and the rooftop water tanks. So my showers are as cool as they’ve ever been. I haven’t had a hot shower since I was in a hotel room in Kuala Lumpur on May 6. The upside is that I’m not spending money to heat shower water or to chill air in this apartment. Dominic operates an air conditioner in his bedroom every night, but I usuallly use a ceiling fan. I think that I’ve used the air conditioner in my bedroom twelve nights in four months.  †

Tonight I watched a nonstop Formula One race, televised from the Hungaroring Circuit in Hungary. The race had NO yellow-flag caution periods which the IndyCar Series dearly loves.

IndyCar fans often have to endure 12 minutes of no racing during a race. The laps spent trolling around behind a Honda Accord pace car are counted as race laps, although no one is racing. The fans in the stands are bored and viewers at home are exposed to insipid ads which they’ve seen and heard several times already. If IndyCar Series executive officers care about the quality of their on-track ‘product,’ they would do well to watch Formula One — and other — races which don’t have needless, unnecessarily-long caution periods for such excuses as the removal of a stopped car which is nowhere near the racing surface and thus endangers no one.

all my ordinary costs of living on Pulau Penang, Malaysia in June 2009

~ at 3.47 Malaysian Ringgit per U.S. Dollar ~

food & water; groceries & dining out: RM 391 — or $112.91 — or $3.76 per day

apartment rent: RM 425 — or $122.48 — or $4.08 per day

electricity: RM 62.50  — or $18.01 — or 60 cents per day

gasoline/petrol: RM 28.40  — or $8.18 »→

Today I slept late after watching the first several hours of the 24 Hueres du Mans on Eurosport TV last night and this morning. I went out walking and jogging briefly, bought a loaf of bread, returned home then resumed watching the 24 Hours until its conclusion. Then I swam in a pool at The OceanView. Now I’m on the internet for a few minutes, but I’m hungry.

The 3000 megabits/second (3 gigabits/second) broadband internet access in Malaysia is painfully slow when accessing websites outside Malaysia and neighboring Singapore. Data transfer across oceans and seas via cables is slow. Accessing U.S. websites from the U.S. with a broadband is so much faster than trying to reach the U.S. from here. And this is the fastest service that is offered by TM Net. I shudder to think how slow the cheaper services from TM Net –and the cellular phone companies– are. This is slow enough.

Household water in Malaysia is so cheap –even free from rivers for Malaysians in the boondocks– that some residents spray water on their homes’ roofs via hoses and lawn sprinklers to alleviate heat in the summer.

Internet Explorer 5 and 6 are old, defective browsers that no one should be using since the advent of Exploiter 7 and 8. Browse the internet more securely and see websites as they were designed by using Firefox, Safari, Camino, Google Chrome, Flock, Opera, OmniWeb, or IE 8.  By the way, the new Firefox 3.5 is two times faster than 3.0.

Last night I saw, from the den, a cockroach calmly crawling across the kitchen floor. I thought, ‘What audacity! The apartment’s not dark and silent. I haven’t gone to bed yet.’ I walked to the kitchen, picked up my spray bottle of chlorine bleach, used for sanitizing and cleaning and insect ‘control.’ I set the nozzle to ‘STREAM’ then aimed at the intruder which didn’t seem to notice that I was standing behind it. I shot. »→

I had decided not to spend time and money to travel south to Sepang to watch Formula BMW Asia, GP2 Asia and Formula One races because I’d read daily of rain forecast for each afternoon and evening this weekend. On Penang we’ve had rain most evenings. If I’d gone down to Sepang on Sunday, I could’ve seen an interesting GP2 race in the afternoon, but I don’t know who any of the drivers are and thus don’t care who takes which position on track nor who wins. I know who the drivers in F1 are, but I thought that the race which was slated to start at 5 p.m., would likely be rained-out. And it was. »→

From my bedroom windows and from the balcony bordering the den I can watch a dozen tiny, brown birds bathing at the edge of  the kids’ wading pool below then shaking themselves dry and preening in the three small pine trees which are very close to the apartment. The palm trees of various species, with fronds waving in the wind, aren’t suitable perches for the birds. They favor the textured, skinny, horizontal branches of the young pines which aren’t moved much by breezes. »→

I just watched a Formula One race on television – the season-opener in Melbourne, Australia. The race began at 5 p.m. there  – 2.p.m. here in Malaysia. Racers of Brawn GP, formerly Honda F1, Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello had qualified Saturday to start in positions one and two! An auspicious start for Brawn GP, which as Honda F1 had been languishing for years. »→

The parish will have a blood-donation day on April 5. Until then, I’m an involuntary donor. Mosquitos love me. The ankle-biters visit me each week. They like my neck, hands, ankles and feet, perhaps because they don’t have much hair for the skeeters to avoid. I think that they get me when I sleep. We leave windows and balcony door open day and night for airflow through the apartment, and Asia doesn’t have window screens, so the bugs are free to come in. Oh, well. Small nuisance.

Well, mail doesn’t take too long to arrive here (unlike the Philippines). A friend sent mail from Baguio City on Monday, March 16, and it arrived here on Saturday, March 21. My brother mailed a small parcel from Tampa on Friday, March 13, it arrived in Malaysia on March 19, then I received it here on March 23. I sent postcards in February from Kuala Lumpur to U.S. and Germany, and transit times weren’t long, so I was glad.