Yes, 2010 arrived with a bang, and for some of us, reality has started to kick in as the second week of the new year flashes by. To begin with, the bonus money has disappeared faster than it was banked in. For sure, it was spent on intriguing stuff, like a phone with ring tones of a possum chirping, goat belching, toad purging or 100 other calls of the wild... Any better ideas for blowing a hard-earned reward, do drop me a line.

Sounds pretty much like every other year, where after about 17 beers too many, you slip up, and blunders find their way to run smack into you. 

Most of us would have already broken well-meant resolutions, and if not, are this close to giving up. Which is a point Oscar Wilde summed up so well: “Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.”
More down-to-earth but less kind was a message from a weary soul… “New year’s resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.”

In response, we offered the wise words of FM Knowles, “He who breaks a resolution is a weakling; he who makes one is a fool.” The end result of all this wisdom is to make us feel as important as duck droppings.

Oh well…it’s the new year. So let bygones be bygones. We’ve started the year on a great note, with the market capitalisation of listed companies on the local bourse breaching the RM1 trillion mark last Tuesday.  

Also, the Companies Commission of Malaysia is hot on the trail of 20 private company directors who have been declared bankrupt but are still managing companies… hmm, interesting. Just love that “hot on the trail” part… so Starsky and Hutch. What was the other PI show? The Equaliser? Or was it The Tranquilliser?  

Change is welcome, especially since 2009 was… well, eventful. Two RMAF F5E jet engines have found their way to Uruguay, via the Middle East. Our national car company Proton Holdings has only managed to go half the distance, all the way to Iran. Maybe the culprits can write a tell-all book to inspire the national car boys.

Whoever did it should be hired by our Special Branch for counter-intelligence purposes. C’mon, smuggling two jet engines out of a restricted area is not a job for the Boy Scouts. It’s not like you can slip them into your Y-fronts and mosey out of the air base on your kap chai. Even better, according to the A-G, only lower-ranking personnel were involved. Wonder why such capable brains weren’t promoted earlier, unless of course,  their superiors are Mensa-level material.

Well, for whatever it’s worth, we hope for more intellectually interesting issues in 2010, say, a research and development attempt gone awry, creating a computer virus, or a Malaysian company being sued by, say, Apple or Microsoft for infringing intellectual property rights.

The scandal at Transmile now seems like a breath of fresh air, compared to the petty, low-level, Third World country-type issues we face today. Even the football betting scam seems more palatable somehow...

Anyway, here’s to an interesting year ahead, with lots of scandals and outrage to make Malaysians proud of our cunning and guile.



This article appeared in Capital page of The Edge Malaysia, Issue 788, Jan 11-17, 2010.