Darwin is One Year Old

"Today is my 111th birthday. 111 years is far too short a time to live among such excellent and admirable Hobbits. I don't know half of you half as well as I should like. And I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."

The Fellowship of the Ring (1954) by J.R.R. Tolkien

On the 6th of September 2014, Baby Darwin evolved out of infancy into toddlerhood and came to the realisation that people will celebrate the fact the planet he was riding on managed to go around its sun for the 4.54 billionth time and give him free stuff for it. Darwin's mom had organised a joint birthday bash with his milk brother, Keve (which I understand is pronounced like how Ukrainians pronounce Київ, rhyming with "Eve"). Their milk kinship arose from my wife donating gallons of her breast milk to the care and feeding of Keve every time our freezer run out of space for my cocktail ice, because priorities.

Because Keve's actual birth date is on the 8th of September, they split the difference and threw the party on the 7th and everyone for whom the idea of parties with booze, drugs and loud music is a fading distant memory (i.e. parents) were invited. Even Darwin's maternal grandparents and his aunt's entire family flew over to celebrate.

It was Darwin's first party and quite a lot happened, and... you know what? I'll just let the kid tell you about it himself in the picture captions.

Yo, 'sup? Now that my aging, prime-passing, wordy nerd dad is out of the way allow me to intro myself. I am Darwin - yeah, like that place in Australia - but you can call me The Winster or D-boy, like me mates at the daycare do. And I got like everything, man. You can see me chillin' in the picture up top on my brand new 2014 Kiddieland roadster. Check out its hot vroom-vroom flame decals. It is off-da-hook!

I even got me own pool and all the balls I can ever want. I have like ALL THE BALLS, brah.

But it all means shizznit if I ain't got that special someone to share it with, y'know what I'm sayin'? It's like feeling all lonely in a room full of peeps at me own 1st birthday party. Hey, that's deep stuff. Gimme a sec while I tweet it to my followers, mkay?

And then I saw her standing there across the room. And I thought to myself, "Va-va-voom! Who is that gorgeous little lady right there!?" So I got me old man to carry me over to her double-quick. My mom told me that her name is Charlie. Short for Charlotte.

So I went up to Charlie and gave her one of my smooth lines, "Excuse me, are you candy? Because you are making me drool and it ain't 'cause I'm teething."
I waited for a response but she just gave me this gaga gorgeous icy look so I introduced meself, holding my hand out for a dance all gent-like. "The name's Darwin, but you can call me..."
And here's the part where she turned and walked away, saying, "Sorry sugar, I am allergic to baldness."

But The Winster ain't no quitter, ya dig? So I took to the dance floor to show her my moves. If there is one thing I can do, it's working it. Of course, I boogied to my jam, The Bieb's Boyfriend, because I am a baby and I got phooey taste in music.

My hot dancing soon drew the attention of the other chicks in the house. This one lady was all like, "Your moves so hot, Darwin baby! Have all of my balloons!"

"Thanks but no thanks, sweet cheeks," I brushed all of them off. They were like, "Have a heart, lover boy!" and was like, "I ain't got no heart to give 'cause Charlie's got it."

'Sides, I only date gals my age. These girls are totally too old for me and I ain't no cougar-hunter, y'know what I'm sayin'? "Excusez-moi," I bid them and left the scene. I got some major sorrows to drown.

So, there I was trying to drown my sorrows in the pool 'cause my heart's fillin' the diaper, if you catch my drift. I am one year old and still single! Can you believe it, brah? I thought I got everything but I ain't got game. Ain't got hair neither. I just want to splashy-splash into the cold, deep water and end it but my mama's all like nuh-uh.
"You go back in there and blow your candle on your birthday cake, young man." she said. "Then, it's off to bed for you!"

Anyway, I didn't even get to blow the candle out on my own birthday cake because I still haven't learn how to do that without spraying me sa-li-va. Mama and Keve's mama blew it out for us. Keve there in the picture called dibs on the candle and I let him, because he is my milk brah. And like they always say - milk is thicker than water, amirite? Bros before hoes! Blue bibs before pink cribs!

And thus concludes Darwin's saga of love found, lost and clean forgotten by his next bottle feed.

I would like to thank everyone for coming and showering Darwin with more toys than he knows what to do with (though admittedly, he doesn't even know what to do with his two hands on most days). He had so much fun and excitement that he pretty much brought the party back home and terrorised his poor father and mother all night long. At one point, I was forced to stopper his caterwauling by streaming an episode of the 1994 The Tick animated series on YouTube for him (I am not even joking).

Here are some of the other pictures from the birthday celebration:

Darwin running to greet a fashionably late Keve by slapping him in the boobs.

Milk bros fo life!

Darwin and Keve's Olaf-themed birthday cake.

A pair of sisters giving an impromptu performance of Frozen's Let It Go.

Darwin, seemingly already gotten over Charlie. The blue 2-year-old in blue shirt reaching for the plastic cake knife is Darwin's cousin from Penang.

Father of one,
k0k s3n w4i

I Am Twenty-Eight

"Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest."

Larry Lorenzoni

My birthday visited me last month and since I have tweaked my social media accounts to not alert my acquaintances to its passing, I received only birthday wishes from the usual suspects. My mom and dad did, and so did my sister. As with all previous years, I got a birthday greeting on Facebook from that one guy with whom I went to high school who was born on the same day I was. The nursing matron who oversees the department I work in wished me as well, no doubt after recently handling my work documents but thankfully, she did not pass the word. Like some mountain-dwelling misanthrope, I purposefully kept my birth date a loosely guarded secret just to see who doesn't care enough to remember, so I can in turn forget their birthdays in a passive-aggressive fashion. Take that, friends-I-don't-have!

My wife reminded me of it weeks before le quatorze juillet (my birth date) came up, repeatedly asking me what I want for my birthday. Then, in spite of the (variable and confusing) answers I gave her, she got me a bottle of Ralph Lauren's Polo Blue Eau de toilette because my last bottle of BO concealer ran out two years ago. I take it that she thinks I stink but she's still married to me, so I guess it's true love after all.

She wrapped it so I can unwrap it in a few hours time at dinner.

Eau de toilette literally means "toilet water".

Now I shall smell like a polo player.

This prompted me to look up the difference between eau de toilette, eau de parfum and eau de cologne and apparently, they are just different gradings for a scent's concentration. Eau de parfum contains about 10-20% aromatic compounds, eau de toilette has 5-15%, while colognes are usually citrus extracts with 2-6% strength. There are significant overlaps in the number ranges because the French just don't give a fuck like that. Anyway, the different grades dictates whether you can spray a fragrance on yourself liberally or simply dab your pulse points with a drop or two. Judging from how some people's application of their fragrances can make my eyes water from 6 feet away, I suspect that very few people are aware of this fact. They won't notice that their scent is overpowering of course because of olfactory habituation (the why-is-this-pile-of-poop-smelling-less-offensive-the-longer-I-stand-beside-it? phenomenon). Maybe I can share what I learned about perfume strengths with them and lose even more friends.

And what did I get for myself?

Well, since I asked, I'll tell me. I bought a new smartphone to replace my stupidphone. It's a Samsung Galaxy S5 - an Android - because I am an atheist and I want no part in the Apple religion. I also bought myself a few video games from Steam (Penny Arcade's On The Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness 3 and 4, and Might & Magic Heroes VI) and made myself a birthday drink for good measure.

It was a piña colada, of course.

Add cat to taste.

And because birthdays are just thinly veiled excuses to stuff our faces and then vowing (and failing) to eat less for a whole week after that, we went to Sharing Planet, a nearby restaurant that serves food portions meant to be shared by two or three average-sized Malaysians. Cheryl and I ordered two whole portions and ate till we hate ourselves.

Quesa-nacho grande. La tentación del diablo!

Mixed grill, with the addition of a slab of rump beef.

Now I'm twenty-eight. I'm at that age when I need to mentally calculate how old I actually am if people catches me unaware with a sudden question. I guess the older you get, the less significant each year becomes, eh?



Thirty ahoy,
k0k s3n w4i

Teach the Controversy, Teach the Katu's Origin of Mankind Story

"We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation."

Lily Tomlin

I was honeymooning in Laos with the Crazy Cat Lady™ earlier this year in February and on the 11th, while exploring the city of Luang Prabang, we came across the TAEC (Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre) which is an independent non-profit museum that aims to collect, preserve, and interpret the traditional arts and lifestyles of the country’s many and diverse ethnic groups. Even if you are not into tribal culturalism, the air-conditioning here is a welcome respite from the dusty Laotian dry season heat. Or monsoon rains, depending on when you're in the country.

The most interesting exhibit there was a pair of black wood carvings of a dog and an alleged woman which summarily represented the origins of the Katu people. It was said that long ago, a great flood covered the world which killed everything except a woman named Anoi Amek and a dog called Apuu Paner. The dog wished to marry the woman but she - quite understandably - refused the amorous pup. She said that she would only marry the dog if he fetched fire from the top of some mountain and in the first two attempts, the dog failed as the fire he carried was extinguished by the rivers and streams he crossed in his return. At the third attempt, he captured the fire in a gourd tied around his neck and with that prize, won Anoi Amek's hand in marriage. They somehow managed to produce human children who later intermarried, giving rise to the Katu people.

I think that there should be some deleted scenes here preceding the birth of their children but never mind that now.

You can see the fire gourd hanging from the neck of Apuu Paner.

Of course, aside from the impossibility of a global flood, fire surviving in a watertight gourd, a dog which can understand the concept of matrimony, and fertile human children resulting from the union between a Homo sapiens and a Canis lupus familiaris, this myth is no more fantastic than how some Middle Eastern desert people believed that a deity created the first man from dirt and the first woman from his rib, and then commanded them to never eat fruits from a particular tree. A talking snake supposedly tricked them later into disobeying, resulting in their creator cursing them and banishing them from paradise, after which they managed to populate the entire Earth with their incestuous descendants.

If creationists argue that we must teach creationism or intelligent design in schools as a competing theory to evolution, then we must teach the controversy in churches regarding the origins of mankind! It's only fair.



Advocate for the diversity of bullshit,
k0k s3n w4i

Cold, Hard Cash

"A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don't need it."

Bob Hope

I think most households would have some sort of receptacle for the loose change that we unwittingly generate in our day to day transactions. In my household, it takes the form of a plastic tub which Cheryl bought for me when she got tired of me secreting coins everywhere like an incontinent piggy bank every time I come home – and now that we have an infant at home whose main mode of interaction with the world around him is gustatory, it had literally became a matter of life and death.

A couple of weeks ago, the tub began overflowing and I decided to take the lot to a bank and convert them into a form that would fit into my wallet more readily. Counting the coins proved to be a much more challenging task that I anticipated because they were in a mix of the old 2^nd series coins and the newly minted 3^rd series pieces. The new 50 cents are about the same size as the old 20 cents and are only ever so slightly bigger than the new 20 cents. Complicating it further is the fact that both the new 50 cent and 20 cent coins are gold in colour (the former being nickel-brass clad copper and the latter are made from nickel brass) so I had to look at each gold piece carefully to confidently differentiate them. The new 5 cent coins are also bigger than their 2^nd series predecessors and are actually closer in size to the 10 cent coins (old and new) so there’s that as well. But counted the lot I did and after counting the stacks I've built from them, I found that they totalled a sum a little more than RM170. After that, I plowed the stacks into a plastic bag and then nested that into a second plastic bag before bringing it with me to the bank.

Hardly anything that glitters is gold.

The first bank I brought my swag to told me that their coin-counting machine was out of order and that no, they cannot just take my word for it regardless of how upstanding a citizen I am or how many old ladies I have helped across busy streets.

That could not be helped so I took my heavy bag of loot to a nearby second bank. The receptionist who handed me my number told me that I need not bother as their bank does not offer the service of transmuting metal into paper for its customers. I ignored her because by this point, I was already sufficiently annoyed that my hearing had begun failing me.

When my number came up, I walked to the counter and plopped my baggie of cold hard cash right under the nose of the teller. He looked like he was going to repeat what the receptionist told me but I cut him off at "Sir" because I am not in the habit of letting people tell me the same things twice as if I am a particularly stupid dog.

"I would like to pay my credit card bill with these coins," I said, handing him a payment slip with my credit card number on it. He looked at me hard for a second. I smiled in reply.

He excused himself from the counter, presumably to get ahold of someone belonging to a higher pay grade than he is, and returned with a lady who asked me how she could help me. I repeated my request.

"I'm sorry, sir," she began. "Usually, we would tell our customers to sort their coins into their separate denominations before accepting them. You see, our machine..."

"So, is there an official company policy saying that you cannot accept my coins if I haven’t sorted them?" I interjected because I wasn’t in the mood to give any fuck. I was not going to go through the tedious process of counting the bloody coins again.

"No, it’s just that…" she faltered. "If you don’t want to sort them, then you have to leave your coins with us for a couple of days for us to sort them for you before processing your credit card payment."

"Excellent!" I said with a huge grin on my face. "Let’s do precisely that!"

She was taken back because she didn’t think that I would agree to that. After another awkward moment, she excused herself, saying she would be right back.

About a minute later, a middle-aged gentleman came to the counter instead and asked me, quite unironically, how he could be of service. The lady who talked to me must have given up.

We had a repeat of the previous conversation I had with the woman, including him telling me that they "usually" have their customers sort their coins first and I demanding to read their SOP guidelines.

"Look, your colleague previously said that I can leave my coins for a day or two for your people to sort," I told him. "I agreed to it, so I consider the matter settled. Unless you are saying she lied to me?"

He stupidly repeated that line about how they "usually" have their customers do the sorting before bringing their coins to them. Since stupid is a game that two can play at, I stupidly repeated the prior agreement I had struck with the lady.

"Okay," he said resignedly and picked up my bag of change.

"Good man! There’s RM170 in the bag. I will check if the correct amount is banked into my credit card account," I said and shook his enervated hand.

Like I always say, why let customer service providers frustrate you when you can frustrate them instead?

P.S. According to Act 519 (Central Bank of Malaysia Act1958), in section 24 regarding legal tender, the bank has the right to refuse a payment in coins if the amount exceeds RM10. If they knew the law, they could have refused me on that ground alone. But they didn’t, so la dee da.

Unflappable,

k0k s3n w4i

The Second Hundred Days of Baby Darwin

"Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby - awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess."

Horseradish (2007) by Lemony Snicket

Consider this a sequel to my previous post, A Hundred Days of Baby Darwin. Yes, you blinked and missed it because my sole progeny have made it to 200 days old last month! He is now a harder, better, faster, stronger baby and is scientifically proven to be 200% better than his closest competitor.

Here are the snapshots (and two short video clips) of him from day 101 to 200.

Day 102 of life: S'up.

Day 107 of life: BLEURGH HEURGH BLAAARGH!

Day 112 of life: Darwin reclining on his fuzziest, warmest pillow.

Day 115 of life: Darwin at a local Toys "R" Us in his brand new perambulator being attacked by a T. rex that Cheryl wouldn't let me buy for him.

 Day 121 of life: Here's a video of Darwin's parents having a laugh at his expense.

Day 123 of life: This bean bag gets a footsie thumbs up from Darwin.

Day 123 of life: Cheryl introducing her Samsung Galaxy S III to Darwin.

Day 125 of life: Darwin celebrating his mama's birthday at Bla Bla Bla. That face needs no caption.

Day 128 of life: A HOT CHICK KISSED ME!!!

Day 135 of life: Darwin eating his first ever Lunar New Year red packet given to him by a bloke dressed like Cai Shen at the Summer Mall.

Day 136 of life: Sitting by a pretty fountain, watching the water dance.

Day 136 of life: Here I am playing Darwin's favourite game. He has the most adorable and infectious laugh.

Day 141 of life: 7.3 kilograms of cute.

Day 145 of life: Sitting in a baby chair for the very first time.

Day 148 of life: Future Coke addict. Like his mom.

Day 148 of life: I think babies just look around a room thinking "What does THAT, THAT and THAT tastes like?!" all the time.

Day 150 of life: "OH NOES HE'S GETTING AWAY!!!" Darwin playing with his cousin.

Day 152 of life: Darwin noticing that he has hands for the first time.

Day 167 of life: This is the face he made after his first ever taste of rice porridge.

Day 168 of life: At less than 6 months and 3 weeks after his first seating in a baby chair, Darwin perfected the Malaysian kopitiam slouch.

Day 168 of life: For his first holiday, Darwin spent a night at a boutique hotel in Penang called Noordin Mews. He was simply fascinated by the dancing dots cast by my laser pointer.

Day 170 of life: Darwin REALLY wanted our makizushi at Minoru.

Day 172 of life: Darwin frenching a Pringles can passionately.

Day 184 of life: WANT.

Day 190 of life: Darwin (sort of) sitting in the driver's seat of our car for the first time. The bib was purely a happy coincidence.

Day 190 of life: Yay, mommy bought a breadmaker! SOOO PSYCHED!

Day 196 of life: SOPHIE!

Day 196 of life: Darwin, seconds away from pulling a handful of fur from Mikey's face.

Day 197 of life: He went through a phase where he would stuff his mouth with a hanky and then wave his arms around like a drunken squid.

Day 198 of life: Darwin experiencing grass for the first time at the Borneo Highlands Resort's Kalimantan border viewpoint.

Day 199 of life: Darwin snarling and flashing his two lower incisors (they first appeared nearly 3 weeks ago).

Just like Darwin's last picture album (and in all the posts I write, really), there are secret captions written in all the photo's hover texts which can be summoned if you just let your mouse cursor linger over them for a sec. So scroll all the way up and start again. Chop chop!



RELATED POST:
A Hundred Days of Baby Darwin
The Third Hundred Days of Baby Darwin



Darwin's fat landlord,
k0k s3n w4i