Sunday, November 14, 2004

I was Googling myself out of boredom....it's interesting how much random stuff comes out that you don't even remember. Top of the list was from, of all things, BBC's website (5th from the top)! When Anwar was released, BBC put up a section where we could put comments about what we thought of the whole thing, and I chucked in some random ranting, and surprise surprise they actually put it up. I didn't even realise until when I met Julian Lee when I was still in KL, and he mentioned that he saw my comment on the Beeb. For those of you too lazy to click on links:

This whole charade is but yet another chapter in the whole shadow-play that is Malaysian politics. Contrary to all the odes to the apparent new-found freedom of the judiciary, Anwar was released simply because he is no longer a immediate threat to the government, and denying him medical treatment will make the Malaysian government an international pariah. As far as I'm concerned, this is just a ploy by the powers-that-be to gain political brownie points both locally and abroad. If Anwar is still a viable threat to the establishment, the yes-men in the judiciary wouldn't have been told to dismiss his conviction, period. As it is, Anwar cannot take part in politics for five years thanks to the law which states that anyone imprisoned for more than 12 months is disqualified. What a cynical yet brilliant masterstroke by the government.Lee Khee Gan, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The next thing on the search result is something I barely even recall, on a website called TalkOrigins.org. When I was in Methodist College, at one point I got into a heated debate about evolution with this fundamentalist Christian idiot whom I shall not even dignify to name (let's just say he had an obsession with exploring his nasal cavity as well, for all you ex-MCers) . TalkOrigins is a website which is dedicated to discussions on evolution, and I posted a questions for fortify my armoury of arguments. It must have been very regularly accessed since it was second on the list.

Then, there are a couple of sites from the UCL chamber music society, with programmes of my past recitals given in college. I remember being very surprised when a new acquaintance seemed to possess a priori knowledge that I was a guitarist, before he mentioned that he Googled my name (yay!).

And then.... an article in the Star of my concert last month! I should point out here that I am unimpressed with the standard of writing in Malaysian newspapers, but when it's an article about yourself (OK, just a paragraph to be fair...), you usually don't care how lame it is. And I look rather scruffy in the picture in the article as well...time to get a new suit!

There is a link where my name turns up rather perfunctorily in a list of summer students in the STScI webpage, but apart from that the rest of the links are to the letters section of Malaysiakini, usually extremely vitriolic and critical ones. How nice to know that it will be sitting in Google pretty much indefinitely should any government official be perceptive enough to do a quick search. I just hope that would not be requiring government assistance anytime soon, or failing that, to saturate the Google results by many more news articles of a more positive nature!

Oh....I will finally be going to Madrid next weekend! Will have to skip class on Friday though (boo hoo!) since we got a cheap flight on Friday morning, but it'll rock!