Sunny Sunday Day in the Sun

"Weekends are a bit like rainbows; they look good from a distance but disappear when you get up close to them."

John Shirley

Guess where I snapped this picture from.

Just to prove to everyone that I do not actually melt in sunlight (or gourd forbids, sparkle), I crawled out of what Beve refers to as my "cave" today and drove to town to see what the real world has become in my absence from it. I'm a habitual mall rat so my destination was naturally a mall of some shape and description which could provide everything I need - and I have needs of lunch, a place to do spot of reading and possibly a movie, should the fancy take me. I'd call my friends and check if anyone's up for a bite and a matinée, but frankly, I was quite unwilling to put myself through the headache of doing that. It's quite telling really, how okay I feel about the idea of doing things on my lonesome. Many consider it quite unacceptable.

But enough of my many neuroses. I discovered that Hatten Square had opened its doors recently, in a manner of speaking,

Automatic parking systems are apparently quite the draw. The less we have to deal with stoopid hoomans the better, right?

I like the fact that the privilege to leave one's car somewhere for a few hours is still quite an affordable proposition in smallish town Malacca, but as Mandy Moore insisted quite ominously through my earphones; "All good things/Come to an end."

Personally, I know of a good, shaded parking space near the Dataran Pahlawan mall that is completely free-of-charge and is unoccupied about 90% of the time I look for it. Of course, I'm not going to divulge where it is - you can't blame me for not wanting to compete with more people than I necessarily have to.

Another chance discovery was this,

Good thing I was in a mall where pants are readily available - because I just came in the one I was wearing.

I wonder how many of my readers still remained from back when I wrote about the same book fair last year. Yeah, it's the travelling Times warehouse clearance sale and it's back! While I know that the titles they carry are unlikely to have improved over last year's selection, there's just something magical about seeing tens of thousands of dirt cheap paperbacks and hardbacks decked out so obscenely like so many street corner prostitutes in Calcutta's red light district (not that I know anything about that, ahem). You'll never know what gems you might dust off from the pile, just like how sometimes you might get a venereal disease free hooker. There are 3 for RM 30 deals, 3 for RM 20 and price-cuts for individual volumes up to 70%. There's also a blanket 30% off on all alleged bestsellers so you can probably get your Dan Browns, Cecilia Aherns, Mitch Alboms and Stupid Sparkly Vampire Novels cheaply here.

It started yesterday, I think, not that that's important - but if you want to put your hands on some discount lits, you might want to do so before the 20th of this month when the party stops. It is June now, isn't it? Sweet bejesus, these date things are such a pain the ass.

Weight Loss Surgery for Dummies; hey, this one actually looks like it might be in demand!

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Surviving Divorce; they need to write one on avoiding marriage in the first place, if you ask me.

There was a couple of titles I really, really wanted to get but even after having their prices taken down a peg, my wallet still neighed like a disapproving horse. One of them was Stephen Jay Gould's Full House: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin,

Yeah, it's still expensive even when it's going at almost half-price.

You might occasionally catch me using words like "punctuated equilibrium" and "spandrels" when I talk about evolution and if you don't already know this; the late great Stephen Jay Gould was the scientist who developed the the theory of punctuated equilibrium and introduced the architectural term "spandrel" into evolutionary biology to describe phenotypic evolutionary byproducts.

The other one which caught my attention was The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans,

If you recall, I have quite an interest in human evolution and evolutionary anthropology too.

Argh, it's such a dilemma. I'm still fattening the piggy for Gluckman, Beedle and Hanson's Principles of Evolutionary Medicine which I'm planning to order through Amazon.com (via Kinokuniya) next - I've had my eyes on it for the longest time, mind you - and yet there I was, debating whether or not to put the porker to the slaughter for that two books. Sigh, the Puppini Sisters know just how I feel - that's why I keep them on my MP3 player, you know, for moments I have to physically drag myself away from things I really want to buy; "Looked for my limousine, once more it's not there/I can't believe I'm not a millionaire."

What, your life don't have a soundtrack? What sort of half-assed effort at living are you trying here?

Anyhow, you didn't think I would actually leave the book sale empty-handed, did you?

That's like 10 bucks apiece.

The apparently untitled book by Valerio Massimo Manfredi is actually called Tyrant. I don't have much expectations for it, though. Aside from his phenomenal semi-fictionalised Alexander trilogy, none of his other works really stand out on the bookshelf.

The one which I really wanted to buy was Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. I have quite an active obsession with the modern commercialised food culture. I watched every documentary there is about the subject from Spurlock's Super Size Me to the recent 2008 Academy nominated, Food, Inc. I even saw Unser täglich Brot (Our Daily Bread), that German one which has no voice-over whatsoever and is basically just a series of impassive, unnarrated agricultural and food processing footages. I invite anyone who likes to eat anything to check any of these excellent films out. You might never eat the same again.

Speaking of food, here's where I lunched,

Wong Kok Char Chan Teng, I believe it's called.

It's one of those Hong Kong-styled restaurants which kept mushrooming all over the place like the undead in a zombie apocalypse - and like zombies, most of them are quite rotten. I keep wondering why Kim Gary is so tardy in making their move on the Malaccan F&B market when there's an obvious niche to be filled here which is currently being occupied unsatisfactorily by these incompetent, copycat, me-too outlets.

The honeydew plus mango plus frogspawn dessert thing I had.

Crispy noodle with prawns and mixed mushroom cream sauce.

It was decent enough a dish and the peppery mushroom cream sauce was quite a treat. My only misgiving about this is the three orange crustaceans floating in it like a trio of bloated corpses. As a rule, I don't customarily eat animals which do not live on land - and if anything has a shell on it (e.g. crabs, tortoises, bombs), the odds are good that I wouldn't like it. If I have Phoebs around, I usually just give her all of these weird beasties that sometimes come with the real food I order. And how does one peel a prawn anyway?

Not wanting to waste them, I simply popped the prawns into my gob (shell and all), chewed and swallowed while my brain went "WHAT THE FUCK, WHAT THE FUCK, WHAT THE FUCK!" the whole time. Even the thought of it sends shivers down my spine now, ugh.

This has been yet another utterly pointless post by me. Thank you for wasting your time here. 'Preciated.



A waste of space just like everyone else,
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