Stripping when you are gone...

No, it's not something that I did when my fiance went back hometown for a couple days or something. It's just something I found on the Yahoo! news.

So I was doing my usual work, when I came across a funny name for a place in China -> Donghai. I was amused at how vulgar it sounded in Cantonese, but it was really Mandarin, pronounced doong-high, meaning "eastern ocean". So I googled up "donghai china", and found the following article on the top of the search result:

Wed Aug 23, 11:09 AM ET
Police crack down on striptease funerals...
BEIJING (Reuters) - Striptease send-offs at funerals may become a thing of the past in east China after five people were arrested for organizing the intimate farewells, state media reported on Wednesday.

Police swooped last week after two groups of strippers gave "obscene performances" at a farmer's funeral in Donghai County, Jiangsu province, Xinhua news agency said.

The disrobing served a higher purpose, the report noted.

"Striptease used to be a common practice at funerals in Donghai's rural areas to allure viewers," it said. "Local villagers believe that the more people who attend the funeral, the more the dead person is honored."

Wealthy families often employed two troupes of performers to attract a crowd. Two hundred showed up at last week's funeral.

Five strippers were detained and local officials "issued notices concerning funeral management," Xinhua said.

Now village officials must submit plans for funerals within 12 hours after a villager dies. And residents can report "funeral misdeeds" on a hotline, the report said.

Read original article at Yahoo! news


So now Donghai is not only that a name for a county in China and the name for a strait between the Pacific Ocean and China, it's a place where you have strippers at funerals. I don't know how long this has been going on, but this act has made this village now synonymous with strippers in the eyes of the world.

Now, being a chinese myself, I could understand the drawing-big-crowd-at-funeral part. In fact, we had marching bands and mini parades strolling the main streets led by the hearse and a Taoist priest. But isn't this a going a tad bit too much? So for all those of you who still think the East is still exotic, virgin, and unattached from modern civilisation and culture - think again.

I'm busy now, but I have a lot to say about this, so I'll be back to update this entry.

Oh by the way, I did get back on track finding its location and here it is...

Do the Programming...

I didn't start out being a geek, to be honest. In fact computing is one of the four things I hated in my life, the others are politics, accounting, and asparagus. I was turned in a geek under circumstances.

As some of you guys know, I used to be a CAD draughtsman for Best Wide Matrix . Up till this day, I still don't know why they did not come up with their own website yet. My first attempt at programming was scripting a LISP AI for my AutoCAD work. Working with AIs are cool in cadding cos it eases my work and speeds up my productivity.

So I studied IT and Computing with APIIT, to broaden my range of skills and in hopes to better my LISP scripting. Of course, I found out later thatn they didn't really teach LISP in IT classes but I was hooked with programming.

Read another blog, the other day, and from there it finally hit me in the head, and brought to the surface the real reason why I liked programming, which has been eluding me for a long time. I love writing, learning new languages, and I love puzzles & problem solving. And programming fits perfectly all 3 of them. There are so many languages in programming, from the lowest level right up to the top. My expertise of course is mainly in web-application programming. So now i finally understand why I never tire of it.

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In truth. I had the first taste of programming way back when I was a kid doing Basic Programming. But our family was too poor to own a computer and my enthusiasm just died off. Wonder what would have happened if things happened otherwise...?

Gramaphone me...

We got an old gramaphone in my hometown home. It's actually an electric phonograph, with two 2-feet tall speakers, standard turntable with ceramic stylus, and an amplifier-cum-radio tuner. Can't remember if it was a 75rpm or a 45rpm. Easily 30 years old. Really an antique worth keeping in my opinion, but Papa wants to throw it away.

You see, we have finally sold our old house and have been moving stuff out of the house to the new one, and also been deciding which stuff are worth keeping and which are the ones that we REALLY need to get rid of. Our family (except Mama) are a bunch of pack rats, what others see as junk we see as treasure. I'll talk about this in another topic...

So Papa wants to get rid of it, he thinks that thing really takes up a lot of space, and it's old and unusable. So don't think all our old folks are attached to inventions and products created from their era. Papa is a real Audio-Visual fanatic, and ever since the inventions of CDs, DVDs, and really cool Kenwood sound systems came about, he never looked back.

I have lots of memories with that machine, which was given to us by Uncle Victor - Papa's cousin. When I was small, Mama used to play it everyday while she does housework. I think that's mostly where my passion for oldies came from. We even also have a few Christmas, and nursery rhyme records. Songs for all occasions for the entire year. Sometimes, we would just turn on the radio. Lots of Bee Gees and Samuel Hui records there too, and I was a big fan. And Papa wants to chuck it out.

It's not old, it's just seasoned. (hmm... i think i will used that phrase once I am of age) And it's not unusable, it's just that the stylus/needle is spoilt, and they don't know where to get a replacement for it. Can't blame them, in our current age of high-tech stuff, things like gramaphone ceramic/crystal styli is just not something you can get at a local mall. So I told them to NOT throw it away, I'll take it, move them over here to my place.

Actually, there are still shops lying around still selling gramaphone records and phonographs. All second-hand items of course. The one in Ipoh is closed already, but there's one over here in Sea Park. I frequent that shop occasionally just to look at the old records. So today I asked the shopkeeper, if he has styli for sale. Here's the funny story: he was looking at me in an awkward way, as if to say "what's a young man, dressed smartly in slacks and shirt wanna get a styli for? Is it for his grandma? Does he even know how to use it??". So the grizzled old man was babbling away at me --> "Which type you want? The Kawai type? Toshiba? National? Each of them are different you know....blablabla.." So i said, I wanted the really early types, the "flip-overs", with just a standard ceramic needle will do. Stopped his long-speech halfway, looking bit embarassed, he took me to the glass shelves. I had a look, and after talking to him further, it seems that the type I wanted may be REALLY obsolete. However, he can do mods. So I'm going back home next week, and return with one of the needles to show him, and see if he can do anything.