Random Thoughts: Three Days To Go

Book of the Week: I ain’t really reading – most of the books are in boxes now and the Pending Shelf is empty!

Earthquake in Padang today. Ah Giek called Dad to say people in buildings downtown KL had felt the tremors. Dad got me on Skype to ask me about it. Of course I hadn’t felt anything. Immediately checked it out on BBC and in turn got Dad freaked out – kid sister is on assignment in Singapore just now and apparently the earthquake had caused a few skyscrapers in the CBD there to sway. So of course he was worried. It’s all right, don’t bother asking about me, I’m only on the 10th floor of an apartment block!

Letter came today from the university – graduation’s in June, mind you mortgage the house now or you won’t see the back of your scroll! Write Stuff people sound like they’re getting kinda worried as well. They probably think I have no intention of returning the trophy now that I’m back in Malaysia.

Lunar eclipse on Sunday. Saw bugger all. Always seem to be on wrong side of world at right time. Judging from comments on BBC, it was pretty damn clear over the UK.

Can’t wait to see Mukhsin. Opens this Thursday and it looks good. Very Malaysian. Might even take Gareth to see it. Special Mention at the 2007 Berlinale. That should impress him.

Got a fair amount of stuff done today. After numerous phone calls this week (will see the total cost of damage when this month’s bill comes) to Emirates, I finally heard a human voice and managed to sort out my frequent flyer miles. I’m still a long way off from qualifying for a free flight or upgrading to business class but hey! At least now I can fly for free within the Middle East or from Peru to Central America on United, go on a day safari or stay at a Marriott (Cairo, Maida Vale or Frankfurt).

After lunch, I cleaned the flat, mopped the floor and scrubbed both bathrooms (the amount of dirt we’ve let accumulate is really appalling!) in preparation for Gareth’s arrival on Friday. Man, I’m a slob. It’s probably the most exercise I’ve done in ages and I’m absolutely knackered. Bathrooms aren’t as pristine as I’d like them to be, but at least now I know we won’t find the cure for a headache on the grouting. Can’t wait to see Miks’ eyes pop out when he gets home from work today! Especially as my housekeeping skills could be considered the bat signal for Kim and Aggie.

I really should do more packing if I want to alleviate these panic attacks. I’m so sick of seeing my books lying about like shattered glass, but at the same time I get exhausted after doing just two boxes. At this rate I’m never going to sort everything out in time for the big move to Scotland. It’ll be really amazing if they do get sorted in time. I also think I’m going to do something that I’ve never done with any of my books before: I might actually give a few of them away. There are a few titles I think Sue Anne might find interesting. The kid doesn’t appear to read enough anyway. Or at least, I haven’t really seen her with anything that has impressed me.

Thumbed through the NZ guidebooks again and beginning to wonder if Maori and Malay (the languages) belong to the same language family, or have the same proto-language stem. “Death” is mate in Maori; mati in Malay. “Fish” is ika in Maori; ikan in Malay. “Cloud” is ao in Maori; awan in Malay. “Land” or “country” is whenua in Maori; the world – lots of land! – is benua in Malay. “Water” is wai in Maori; air in Malay. I bet if I could speak Iban or Dayak I would find this exercise even more interesting. I don’t have a background in linguistics, but I love comparing and contrasting different words and/in different languages.

Phek Kin and I are in touch again. She rang me yesterday – asked if I wanted to come over for dinner and sleep over – but because the mobile has been on the blink for the last one week (I can’t even switch the damn thing on now – stupid battery!), I had no idea she called. She suggested that I give Coconut to the National Science Centre if I can’t find him a home. That’s not a bad idea… except that I don’t know a) if they have labs there and if their rabbit and guinea pig enclosure supplies them their test subjects (EEK!); b ) if the rabbits and guinea pigs are kept separately; c) even if they weren’t, if I’d want Coconut to be subjected to a lifetime of being prodded and squeezed by tots who wouldn’t know the first thing about handling guinea pigs; d) what the living conditions are like for the animals there. It’s a government facility. Not any government facility, but a Malaysian government facility. Would you trust them?

Factoids of the Week:
The Taupo volcanic zone on the North Island of New Zealand has the two most productive caldera (or crater) volcanoes in the world (Taupo and Tarawera). For the geologically disinclined, a caldera volcano occurs when a volcanic eruption is so immense that the ground surface collapses into the hole left behind.

This next factoid is from the BBC – gotta love them. Characters in Shaun the Sheep move 25 times per second, which means animators have to reset scenes 1,500 times for just one minute of footage. They capture an average of seven seconds of footage a day. And that’s considered breakneck speed, compared to Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of The Were-Rabbit (three seconds of footage a day) and Chicken Run (two seconds was considered a good day’s work).

OK, I did my homework. Maori and Malay belong to the Austronesian language family, which encompasses 1,246 languages and 311,740,132 speakers across 38 countries. In comparison, the Indo-European language family has only 430 languages but has the largest number of speakers: 2,562,896,428 in 59 countries. The largest of the language families is the Niger-Congo, which has 1,514 languages and 358,091,103 speakers in 40 countries.