Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Schadenfreude and other thoughts

    We often say that in Malaysia, things usually almost work. Yesterday was no exception.  We came home yesterday from an evening out all ready to watch England-Portugal on either ESPN or Star Sports, but they weren’t showing it.  Instead, we could watch old World Cup matches that we had already seen.  So that was annoying.  But we were happy to wake up this morning and see that France had beaten Brazil.  I (TP) haven’t felt this good about a non-US World Cup match since mid-July 1998.

    We’ve been seeing ads for a special Nusantara Crafts Festival being held here this weekend, so today we went and found it.  (Nusantara is the Malay/Indonesian word for Malaysia and Indonesia; it corresponds roughly to “archipelago,” but it only refers to this one.)  It was fun to walk around and see all sorts of arts and handicrafts and textiles and stuff.  We saw lots of batik, pearls, and silverwork.  We also enjoyed ourselves watching two Malay girls playing with a kitten.  It was cute.

    Over lemon chicken and hot-and-sour soup last night, JM and I were discussing movies.  We had planned to see a movie last night, but we couldn’t find a single thing worth seeing.  This is pretty amazing–in Malaysia, movies only cost about $2.50 a person, so we’ll see almost anything.  The problem is that all movies these days are bad remakes of old movies or TV shows.  For example, Superman.  We were thinking, can anyone think of a single movie remake that is as good as the original?  We cannot.  We did think of some that are not bad movies (Ocean’s Eleven, the Italian Job), but neither of these are  even close to the originals, which were fantastic movies.  It can be argued that Charlie’s Angels is better than the TV series, but that’s because the series, in reality, was pretty awful.  Can anyone think of a remake that’s good?  If not, why doesn’t Hollywood stop making them?

    On a personal note, a member of my weekly poker game has won a seat in the World Series of Poker.  I like to think that I taught Matt everything he knows about poker: how to take money off of a crappy player, how to read a bluff, how to identify a tilt, and why you should let your opponents be the one who drinks 10 beers at the table.  Best of luck to him.

  • Time, Food, Language

    The worst thing about flying across the world is how much your body fights it.  The other night we slept from 7 until 7, which was great.  Last night we slept from 9 until 4:15 AM, by which time we were fully awake.  So we flipped on the TV and caught the end of the Italy-Ukraine game, and then tried to go back to sleep; didn’t work.  The other problem here is that it really doesn’t get light out until 7:30 AM, which just messes with you.  So we’ve been up already for about six hours, and it’s not even lunch time yet.  We’ll have to really try hard to stay up late enough tonight…we have a date to watch the England-Portugal match at 9:00 this evening.

    Food here is still good.  We went to our favorite bread place last night and had idli (sourdough steamed rice buns), masala dosai (fried bread wrapped around potato curry), paper dosai (fried bread just served with curry, and roti telur (pulled flaky wheat bread with egg).  Yum.  We’ve been having long discussions this morning about where to go for dinner tonight: it’s a fight between our favorite Chinese fast food and our favorite Chinese hawker stalls.

    Last night we had a fun cab ride with a Malay guy who lamented how the Chinese and Indians never want to speak Malay.  We had forgotten the delicate dance of languages here.  Most everyone speaks some sort of Malay and English, but Malay people love it if you try to speak Malay.  Chinese and Indian Malaysians prefer English to Malay, and you can look like a fool if you try to speak Malay to them–they probably can respond, but they’d prefer not to.  Of course, if we spoke Cantonese/Hokkien or Tamil we’d do better, but we definitely cannot.  Just another part of the constant barrage of race, ethnicity, religion, and "multiculturalism" that is part of every aspect of life here in Malaysia.