Happy Birthday Bom!

Temperature: 28 c

Weather: Fair

Today (23-9-2007) is a big day for my good friend Bom, it’s his birthday! I am not sure whether I will be meeting him later today, so I will record my wishes to him here:-

祝你所有愿望都实现，婚姻美满，身体健康，工作无压力，事事顺利！

The reason I am not sure whether I will be meeting him today despite today is his big day is because we had earlier celebrated his birthday on Friday night in a Sichuan 四川 restaurant.

Lately, Bom had fallen in love with Sichuan food; he enjoys the sensation of his lips and tongue being numbed by the spices. The key feature of Sichuan food is not about its spiciness (though some dishes are really hot), it’s its numbness 麻. Take 水煮鱼 (water-cooked-fish) for example, (oh by the way, don’t get misled by the words “water-cooked”, there is no water in it, it’s all oil, and the fish is soaked in hot-boiling oil), the fish is not hot at all, so you might think: “Oh the Sichuanese says this is hot?? Hahah! We Malaysian can take this on anytime!”, but after you have eaten few more pieces of the fish, your lips and tongue will feel a weird sensation, i.e. you can’t feel your lips and tongue anymore because they are completely numbed and all your subsequent dishes become tasteless.


Bom’s birthday celebration was not graced only by Sichuan food, there was a Malaysian thing too: a Secret Recipe Cheese Cake! Yes, the Secret Recipe we have back home. In Malaysia, Secret Recipe is a big thing; here it has yet to gain its popularity. Secret Recipe is known as 食之秘 in China. Shanghai only has 4 Secret Recipes currently (3 of them housed in Carrefour premises). The Secret Recipe Cheese Cake we brought it for Bom has a story to tell.

When Bom’s girlfriend, Stella, came to Shanghai last month, her main job was to seek out the best Secret Recipe outlets and buy cheese cake for her boyfriend because Bom is a big fan of cheese cake. She wanted to give him surprise (oh how sweet) so all her research on Shanghai Secret Recipe was done quietly outside the purview of Bom. However, she didn’t finish her research and book the cheese cake before she left Shanghai. So she needed external help, and Engtee (another jobless housewife) came in handy.

With careful coordination, communication and cooperation between Stella and Engtee through sms and MSN, the cheese cake was finally booked and later purchased. Bom, if you are reading this, the cheese cake 可说是有血有泪! You’d better tell Stella how much you enjoyed the cake!


I was actually going to write something about the explosive Lingam Tape that everyone in Malaysia is talking about now (Eric, thanks for alerting me). But I took my mother’s advice not looking back.

It is really heart breaking to know that our judiciary had rotten to that stage. It was merely rumour that the senior judicial officers in Malaysia are fixed and arranged by an invisible hand. Now it is virtually confirmed. In other more developed country, heads must roll. However, in Malaysia, these culprits are blessed with very tolerant rakyat. The people will make hooh hah now. It will be a hot topic in the coffee shop. The Bar Council might do something. But in the end, life goes on and before you know it, this explosive issue will be swept into the carpet and the police investigation file will be stamped with “No Further Action (NFA)”. Our AG even had the brain to say that he saw no criminal offence in that tape. Our beloved PM said that there is no need for Royal Commission. Ok ok, even a first year law student will tell you this is something that warrants thorough and serious investigation because it concerns one of the 3 pillars of government! But of course, that’s just the opinion of a first year law student. How can our PM and AG be wrong? They are, after all, much more wiser and experienced than a first year law student, aren’t they?

Now, every lawyer when appears before judges will inevitably have this thought in their mind: Yang Arif, are you sitting there because you licked the right boots?