Their Amazing Journeys

For all of you basketball junkies out there who have not yet noticed, NBA.com is currently running a section under the name of My Amazing Journey that brings together 30 current players to reflect on their life journeys before making it to the NBA as part of the league's countdown for the new season’s tip-off. Presently at mid-way through the list of the chosen players, already big names like Steve Nash, Yao Ming and Dwayne Wade had joined in to share their life-changing experience and the highs and lows they have gone through to fulfill their dreams of playing their beloved game at this highest level. Questions like ‘To what lengths would you go to for a chance to play basketball, even if it were just a shoot around’ and ‘What is your favourite childhood basketball memory’ will never fail to catch the readers, certainly not if you are a basketball or for this matter a sports fan. Add a winner-in-build-up’s mentality and attributes to that, there you get a perfect, impeccable match-up of a reader and a piece to read. You might not quite get the idea just yet, so my suggestion would be just have a go at the above link, randomly select a player or two of your choice for their stories and enjoy.

Get A Life NameWee!

This chap has certainly gone too far!

Freedom of speech never means you can simply insult other people’s race and religion. Surely there is a much better way to air out dissatisfaction. The fact that he posted this video while we are on the verge of celebrating our 50th year of nationhood really boils me.

Please, leave your comment on the video people if you really love our country, our religion. The bitter history of May 13 will definitely be repeated if we let things like this to go on.

To NameWee: Go get a life!

Plagiarising Samy

This is way too much.

We cast our votes, put our trust in them, and this is what they did to us. Just when we thought things would not go any worse, it does.

I do not know you guys, but only recently did I discover this daunting truth. Well, remember that I blogged about Samy Vellu’s tribute poem to Pak Lah in conjunction with the latter’s marriage sometime ago? The thing is that poem is a sheer work of plagiarism, full stop. Terrible, right? This was first revealed by Malaysiakini, from a letter sent by a reader which can be viewed here. I might be late in getting to know this, but hey, they always say that it is better late than never, and I guess to be an ignorant is as bad as not knowing it at all.

I remember as an 18-year-old learning how bad a crime plagiarism is in writing, and that we are so inclined to plagiarise sans proper guidance and knowledge. Nevertheless after awhile, once we get used to it, avoiding plagiarism comes naturally and in fact coming out with our own sentences word by word and not merely sticking with another person’s entire work is not that hard. This makes me wonder why in the first place our Samy Vellu did such a stupefyingly silly, shameful act. At the very least, he could always change the words from the original piece a little bit, and that is not difficult, is it?

Anyway, joke has it that at least he knows how to use a couple of functions on a PC; copy and paste. Come to think about it, I reckon it is not too much to wonder if all those paperwork on new highway plan or toll hike and all were also plagiarised, who knows?

Your New Source of Independent News

Are you looking for a neutral kind of arguments for the hotly-debated issues in the motherland, and found that those given by mainstream media are either limited or one-sided? Keen to listen to public reviews and open debates on those issues or any other daily occurrence in Malaysia? Or simply looking for a fresh reading material? Then MalaysiaToday is definitely your answer.

Some of you might already be familiar with this site, but for me it is kind of new. I found this site by accident while browsing through the net in search of some additional information on some public-eyed issue in the home country recently when I stumbled upon this blog, and have put it on my list of daily readings ever since. Dubbed as ‘your source of independent news’, at first I found it rather interesting that this site is single-handedly managed by a chap by the name of Raja Petra Kamaruddin. Much later I found out that he has some assistants helping him out. Other details of Raja Petra are still somewhat vague for me, but I learnt that he was once detained under ISA, while some of his previous works are quite prominent albeit a little confusing. Also, the fact that caught me by surprise is that Raja Petra is an old boy of my alma mater, MCKK though he went to Victoria Institution later in his secondary academic stage.

MalaysiaToday is not all about him though; in fact one part of the site deals with the collection of materials from around the blogosphere, where anyone’s article can be there. Now, this is why I told you this is an excellent, if not perfect place to seek for unbiased disputes on national issues. From Raja Petra’s writing, I can also tell that he is not a one-sided observer; most of the time he makes his stand on a certain point clear and the rest, it is up to the readers to judge. The appealing part is always at the end of each article, where the public is given a chance to throw in their opinions, which most of time concludes with raging, albeit controlled disagreements between the commenter. Apart from that, this site also consists of public columns by four independent writers, whose names are anonymous to many but in fact are big names in writing fields, including Raja Petra himself. Two out of four columns are written in Malay language for the record. On a more personal note, I found Hishamuddin Rais’ column on this site as a pleasant replacement to the one he also has in the Off the Edge magazine, which was made as my monthly reading back then in Malaysia. The only difference is that, he writes in English in that magazine.

So brush off the thought of sticking merely to the mainstream media, and instead get yourself updated with current news from the motherland from MalaysiaToday as well from now on. Just click on the image above, and immediately you will be brought to the new realm of independent news.