Vittachi

C'mon baby light my fire

They got what they prayed for, plus a lawsuit

By Nury Vittachi
*

All over the world, highly trained newspaper columnists (“good-for-nothings”) spend long hours every day doing research, which is a combination of finely-honed skills: reading, making phone calls, staring into space, and drinking themselves into a stupor. They seek interesting, original “source material”, which is journalistic jargon for “something I can copy out so I can go home”.

But not this column. With its huge network of well-connected readers, this is a partnership, with each side having its own clearly defined function. You do the work. I get the money.

        Religious devotees were outraged when a businessman opened a bar right opposite their temple in a small town in India, I heard from reader Pola Singh.

           They were horrified at the idea of people gathering to drink and eat and sing and fall over in a place just a few meters away from a site where people did sacred, religious things, such as gathering to eat and drink and sing and fall over.

           So temple monks led the congregation in a campaign against it. They prayed. They beseeched their idols. They burned vast amounts of incense.

           Had the gods heard them? Apparently not. The grim day came when the bar was complete and almost ready to open for business.

That night, there was a huge storm. There was a bright flash. Lightning struck the bar and burned it to the ground.

           The following day, temple devotees, strolling to worship opposite a pile of ashes, were naturally rather smug. Until the bar owner filed a lawsuit suing the temple and the congregation for being “directly or indirectly responsible” for the destruction of his property.

           Temple leaders quickly denied that any of their actions had any connection whatsoever to the sudden and dramatic demise of the building opposite.

The argument ended up in court. The judge examining the case said: “I don’t know how I' m going to decide this case. But it appears from the paperwork, we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer, and we have an entire temple and its devotees who don't.”

           This story teaches us an important principle to live by. Be careful of what you wish for, as its previous owner may have a lawyer.

           A reader told me about one man who recently did receive what he wished for. A night-shift taxi driver named Shen was sitting in his car in Huainan, China, praying for a passenger at three o’clock in the morning.

           One appeared. “He had a lot of home appliances, so I helped him put all of his things into the cab,” Mr Shen later told the Xin’an Evening Post. “I noticed he had a fish without a tail, and I thought how much it looked like the fish in my freezer at home. But then I laughed at myself for even having the thought.” There are probably thousands of people who go out for a walk with a fish at 3 am in Huainan city.

           The taxi driver later returned home to find a burglar had broken into his house and helped himself to all the home appliances, plus the tail-less fish he’d saved for dinner. The well-organized villain had everything but a getaway car, which Mr Shen had thoughtfully provided.

           This leads us to a fascinating conclusion: I can now go home. 

Of dead chickens and strange diseases

The ten plagues of the age of irony are upon us

By Nury Vittachi

*

I was walking through a wet market with my children when we noticed something odd. One whole row of stalls had no customers except us. Even the stallholders seemed to have disappeared. It was the poultry section.

                Then I realized why. “It’s empty because bird flu germs were found at a market on the other side of town,” I told the kids. “Bird flu is a killer disease people catch from uncooked chickens.”

                “Will we die, daddy?”

                “No, dear,” I said, laughing. “Normal people over-react. But not smart people like us. We know germs cannot jump huge distances from a distant food market to our one here.”

                The next day I picked up the newspaper and discovered that germs had jumped from a distant food market to ours.

                I stuck the kids in the shower and washed them till they squeaked.

                Yet this whole bird flu thing bothers me. I find it really difficult to cower at the sight of chicken fillets, although I’ve seen crowds fleeing in terror from the sight of a dearly departed hen.

To me, dead chickens are the stuff of comedians’ valises. I have been known to carry around a rubber chicken myself, and many professional journalists consider it a standard item in their toolkit. How did they become the biggest threat to human life? It can only be clear proof of the existence of the Great Big Sense of Irony in the sky. The same could be said for HIV-AIDS and SARS.

I reckon the only possible explanation is that there must have been some big debate in the Plagues Department of heaven, some time in the 1980s.

                Angel One: I miss the old days, when we would regularly destroy the whole world with massive plagues.

Angel Two: There’s nothing to stop us doing some more. This is the age of irony. Let’s do some ironic plagues.

               Angel One: Great idea—let’s take something that everybody likes, and make it lethal.

                Angel Two: Blue skies? Hello Kitty? How about chocolate?

Angel One: Nah. Everybody already knows sunshine gives you skin cancer and candy is bad for you. How about sex? We could make sex lethal.

                And so HIV-AIDS was created. A few years later, the angels met to see how things had panned out on Earth.

                Angel One: That ironic plague certainly shook things up. Time for another. How about finding some really boring domestic animal and making it lethal?

                Angel Two: You mean like horses or dogs or something?

                Angel One: How about kittens?

                And so SARS was created, along with a rumour that it was carried by felines: thousands of kittens were abandoned across Asia.

                A few years later, the angels met again.

               Angel One: I’ve got an idea for the ultimate ironic plague. We’re going to take the least scary items in the world and make people petrified of them: chicken nuggets.

               And so was created bird flu.  At regular intervals, bird flu panic sweeps through Asia and chicken fast food shops lock their doors.

                Now according to my reading, plagues normally come in sets of ten, so there should be seven more. What’s next? I have no idea, but I’m kind of amused by the image of people backing away in horror whenever they see the Hello Kitty logo.

               Oh.
               You already do?

We just don't have the mindset

The rock festival tries to come to Asia

By Nury Vittachi

*

Consider the following offer. How would you like to pay a small fortune to sit in a muddy field for two days in damp weather, surrounded by intoxicated strangers, and deafened by a constant barrage of ear-splitting noise?

“Yes, yes, yes!” I hear you say. “Lead me thither.” Congratulations. You are a member of a select group of people known as “rock festival fans”, or, to use the scientific term, dangerously deranged masochists.

Many people just like you will shortly gather at the world’s most famous open-air music party, which starts this Friday at Glastonbury in Britain.
          I mentioned this at a lunch and was amazed when someone said Asia now has identical rock festivals.

Impossible! Abandoning all your inhibitions and rolling around naked in the mud, stoned out of your head—I know full well that that sort of behaviour is de rigueur for westerners from the Queen Mother to the Pope, but I couldn’t see Asians going for it.

So I tracked down people who had actually attended these so-called Asian rock festivals.

First, there’s the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan, which is supposedly an Asian copy of Glastonbury. Hah! In fact, it’s the opposite. Instead of reacting to songs with screaming and violent convulsions (“dancing”), people listen quietly and clap. There are no queues outside the beer tent—but massive ones to drop litter in the correct recycling bins. There’s a spa available in case anyone gets a tiny speck of dirt on them. If any member of the audience accidentally shows an emotion, he has to apologize and commit ritual suicide on stage with a hara-kiri sword.

Then there’s the Beijing Midi, the biggest rock festival in China. You know what decibel levels the bands at Midi reached this year? Zero. Just as organizers were starting to promote it, the authorities cancelled it, terrified that some rock star might publically say or think the word “Tibet”, and thus cause the total collapse of civilization as they know it.

The other music festivals in Asia are either tiny (a sprinkling of obscure bands in a park), or glossy commercial events for yuppies, too embarrassingly twee for true rock fans to be seen dead at.

No, the key element that defines a rock festival is the hippie mindset.

This year, for example, Glastonbury festival-goers have been told that they can only use tent pegs made of potato (this is not a joke), because metal tent pegs upset the cows who use the field the rest of the year. Festival goers won’t mind this. In 2005, the festival was cancelled completely, because the cows weren’t in the mood to vacate the premises (also not a joke).

I was about to conclude that Asia was rock-festival-free when someone told me about Bogra, an Islamic religious festival held in a town in the remote north of Bangladesh. It didn’t sound hopeful—till I heard the details.

Young people of both sexes camp in tents near the venue. They eat chicken curry and rice. They smoke cannabis to help them get into ecstatic states. (BBC journalist Alastair Lawson was told by a pilgrim: “Smoking cannabis is not wrong if it helps you to contemplate God.”)

Everybody stays up all night singing and dancing, and occasionally someone gets a bit overexcited and falls into the curry.

Now that’s a rock festival.

There's rain, and there's rain in Asia

Asia is the only place where you actually get weather

By Nury Vittachi
*

“Don’t go out,” she warned. “It’s raining.” I was standing in the doorway of a house in London, about to step outside.

I turned and shook my head. “This,” I said, gesturing outside, “is not rain.”

Honestly: Europeans are SO delicate! In that region, they define as “a rainy day” what we in Asia would call “mild humidity”. What they define as “a major rainstorm” is an almost imperceptible mist of water vapour, a bit like the weather angel is sitting on the edge of her cloud squirting an Evian atomizer.

Yet the slightest dampness causes Europeans to barricade themselves in their houses and phone flood control. If a drop of water hits the head of a European woman, she is taken to hospital to have it extracted. In England, the law requires that everyone carries an umbrella with them at all times, even while swimming. In cartoons, British monarchs may wear crowns and ermine robes, but the Queen’s actual ceremonial outfit is a headscarf, raincoat and rubber boots.

Yet the weather in Europe is so mild that we in Asia wouldn’t even count it as weather. It’s just sort of nothing.

Europeans: Want to see what real rain is like? Come to Asia.

They think the UK is a rainy place, but the average rainfall there is a mere 60 millimetres a month. Compare that to the last big rainfall in Mumbai, which was 1,000 millimetres in a single day.

On a rainy weekend in Hong Kong earlier this month, fish could be seen swimming down a high street. You know that scene in The Little Mermaid where Ariel sits in her den at the bottom of the sea and wonders what life is like on land? Well, the silly girl could just get off her scaly butt and swim to Asia and wait for a decent rainstorm. She could easily swim down the main road, get some sightseeing done, do a bit of shopping, and she wouldn’t even have to get her tail dry.

When I was a young reporter I recall writing a story about a truck in Bangladesh which was in collision with a large fish. The truck was wrecked and the fish was not too happy either. This rarely happens in Pall Mall.

I also recall writing about a woman in India where the rain turned into a flood, as it often does, so she climbed into a tree to finish what she was doing—having a baby. Now that is what I call “natural birth”.

In Europe, after what passes for a rainstorm, pedestrians have to negotiate a slight dampness on the pavements. After a rainstorm in Asia, we have to get on to Google Earth and redraw the borders on our maps.

Personally, I love weather, especially the big stuff. I feel compelled to go outdoors whenever a typhoon or rainstorm hits town. My doctor says this is because I suffer from a rare medical condition known as “idiocy”.

I once went out during a major typhoon near my home with a visitor from Europe. At first, he was scathing about how undramatic it was. Then we walked around a corner and were instantly hit by a body of water approximately the size and shape of an Olympic swimming pool.

               Now that’s rain.

Products of the supreme leader factory

In Asia, anyone can be leader, especially mannequins

By Nury Vittachi
*

I was standing by a news-stand which sells a range of Asian papers when I noticed almost all of them had glowing articles about Obama Bin Laden, who is now applying for the job of US president. Cheeky man!

The odd thing was that there were positive articles about this even in militant newspapers with a policy of never printing the word “America” without the prefix “evil aggressor”. They do this so religiously that their younger readers think the phrase is part of the country’s name, as in: “The nations of the world include Great Britain, the Virgin Islands and the United Evil Aggressors of America.”

Why do people on this side of the planet like Mr Obama? Well, the obvious reason is that he’s Asian. Now I know that technically he’s not, but spiritually he is. He has an Asian name, he has black hair, he has dark brown eyes, and—this is the clincher—he likes to eat chilli so hot it has to be served in lead-lined bowls by aides in radiation suits.

According to the infallible Asian science of feng shui, Mr Obama is guaranteed to win the US election. (The hair parting of his rival John McCain points southwest, poor fella.)

His presence in the world’s top job will go a small way towards making America marginally cool, after a long history of being uncool. You see, only the funkiest, most sophisticated places in the world can elect folk destined by the gods to be spat upon (minorities, women, foreigners, tourists).

This region is totally cool. The first place in the world to elect a female prime minister was Asia (Sri Lanka in 1960). Even Muslim Bangladesh followed with several female premiers, as have other Asian nations.

In Asia, we even find a rare example of one race being peacefully governed by a tiny group from another race: Hong Kong from 1841 to 1997. (Try to imagine a small group of Frenchmen taking over Britain. There would be riots within the hour.)

India elects any one who asks nicely. Winners include women (such as Indira Gandhi), Sikhs (Manmohan Singh), bearded men (Inder Kumar Gujral), clean shaven ones (Atal Bihari Vajpayee) and even a female European tourist: Sonia Gandhi. It’s not just civic leaders either. Last week, an Indian business school elected a monkey statue as president.

Asia has variety. North Korea once elected a rotting corpse for Supreme Leader and currently has a leader with all the appeal of a rotting corpse.

In fact, I think there’s only one major country in Asia which remains totally predictable in the election stakes. Clearly there is a secret rule which says the leader of China MUST be male, stocky, boring, elderly, bespectacled, and have the charisma of a lettuce.

In fact, most of China’s top people are so alike that I suspect they are churned out in large numbers from a mannequin factory in Beijing called Elderly Leader Factory Number One.

For China to change, it would have to elect—oops, sorry, no democracy—it would have to assign the job of premier to someone who is the categorical opposite of the standard leader. They would need a person who is not bespectacled, not dark-haired, not Chinese, not stocky and not male.

I hear Hillary Clinton is looking for work.

Reasons to build a spare city

What to do if you have way too much money
By Nury Vittachi

*

Every now and then, top government officials look at their coffers, and say out loud: “Wow. We have way too much money. How can we blow the lot?”

From me comes the obvious answer, which is: Hey. Why ask me? I’m a newspaper columnist.

               But some bright spark in the civil service always comes up with the sort of proposal they like: “Let’s offer to host an unimaginably large and expensive event so that we can build an entire city with loads of costly infrastructure and stuff, and then overspend disastrously on every item.”

Now if my wife made a suggestion like that (and she does, at regular intervals), I would uncategorically reject it in the strongest possible terms, using words such as: “Yes, dear, maybe later.”

But governments are different. They adore such suggestions. Officials immediately promote whoever suggested it to Minister of Finance and Junkets and start throwing truckloads of taxpayers’ money into the hands of their friends in business, temporarily interrupting their normal activity, which is throwing truckloads of taxpayers’ money into the hands of their friends in business.

For decades, the Olympic Games were considered the best way of losing huge sums of money fast, but they didn’t happen often enough. They were “quadrennial”, which means “every four years” and should not be confused with the word “bicentennial” which means “sexually ambiguous”.

So governments introduced the World Expo, a second excuse to build unnecessary cities. These were originally every fourth year, or “quadraphonic”, but are now “bisexual”, which means “every two-to-six years”.

World Expos come in two sizes. The big ones, such as Shanghai 2010, are advertized so heavily you get sick of them. Already, all large outdoor surfaces, including the dark side of the moon and John McCain’s forehead, have been reserved for promoting this event.

Then there are tiny ones, which you hear nothing about. One of these starts this coming weekend in Zaragoza, Spain. (I hadn’t heard of it either.)

Although the main purpose of World Expos are to waste taxpayers’ money on things that disappear without trace, organizers occasionally accidentally achieve something.

This was the case in Paris in 1889. Instead of World Expo, the uppity French insisted on calling it Expo Universelle (perhaps so they could waste extra money on intergalactic landing strips). One of the useless things they built for that show is still there, 120 years later, although they still haven’t thought of a use for it. Yes, it was the Eiffel Tower, now said to be the most recognizable building on Earth after the lifeguards’ changing room from Baywatch.

Occasionally, World Expos act as proof that the universe is governed by a huge, all-powerful Sense of Irony. In 1984, “Water as a Source of Life” was the theme of the World Expo in New Orleans, a city later destroyed by floods.

The World Expo that starts this weekend in Zaragoza is also on a watery theme: the coming water shortages predicted for this planet.

I tried to explain the water threat to my friends (idle Asian yuppies, like attracts like), but they couldn’t get worked up about it. “I don’t see what the problem is,” said one. “I’ll just drink Coke instead.”

               No doubt the Zaragozans (don’t they sound like an alien race?) have rejected this cheap and easy solution.

It doesn’t waste enough money.

Pasta starts to edge out rice

I’ll have the string with meatballs, please

By Nury Vittachi

*

You may have seen the recent news report that rice consumption in Asia has fallen sharply as people throughout the region turn to pasta. This worries me. I think pasta is weird, dangerous stuff.

                An Italian friend named Giovanni once tried to convert me by inviting me to a pasta buffet at a hotel coffee-shop. I told him that I’d had it at my office canteen but he sneered: “Asian noodles are nothing like real pasta.”

The first thing he showed me was farfalle. This consisted of small blobs of shaped pasta. Next he showed me conchiglie. This consisted of small blobs of shaped pasta. Next came penne (small blobs of shaped pasta). Then we had cavatelli (small blobs of shaped pasta).These were followed by rotini, orecchiette, fusilli and gemelli (all of which were small blobs of shaped pasta).

The weird thing was that he introduced each one to me as if it was dramatically different. At this stage, I began to back away from him and started eyeing the door.

I mean, what’s the deal with this? Can you imagine if we Asians did this with our food?

Hello, foreigner. Try this squarish chunk of chicken curry. Isn’t it yummy? Now try this—it’s a rectangular chunk of chicken curry. How different it tastes! Now have a bite of this: it is a trapezoid chunk of chicken curry. Completely different again, am I right?

I wanted to shake him and say: “Giovanni:  get a grip on yourself. These are all the same thing.”

But I didn’t. Europeans are dangerous, violent people. Look at all their wars.

A few days ago, I accidentally bought a packet of macaroni—a pasta shape I associate with small children. Well, would you believe it: my youngest child ate four bowls of it (plain, no sauce) and begged to have the same thing the following day. The ingredients and brand were exactly the same as the pasta my wife bought last week. The only difference was the shape.

To find an explanation, I consulted my mentor/ bartender. He said different pasta shapes tasted different because they retained different amounts of sauce. But that didn’t explain the reaction of my child, who eats her pasta sauce-free. He suggested that shapes had different associations.  Macaroni was kid’s food, fettuccine was wine bar food and spaghetti was canteen food.

But my belief that pasta was weird was reinforced when I got someone to translate pasta names for me. Fusilli means “guns”; oreccheitte means “children’s ears”; strozzapreti means “priest-stranglers”; ditalini means “children’s fingers”; vermicelli means “tiny worms”; spaghetti means “bits of string”; agnolotti means “the ears of lambs”; linguine means “the tongues of small ones” and so on. (You see why I think Europeans are violent?)

Anyway, I wouldn’t tell the Giovannis of this world, but it has just been proved that Asian noodles pre-date Italian pasta by thousands of years. Scientists recently found the world’s oldest bowl of noodles, right here in my office canteen. No, wait, I mean they found them in an archeological dig at Lajia on the Yellow River in China. Radiocarbon dating revealed that it had been cooked 4,000 years ago.

But amazingly, they exactly like the noodles cooked at my office canteen. The only difference is that it looked fresher.
            Now you know why I prefer rice.

The Speedos swimwear scandal

The world’s fastest swimming trunks hit troubled water

By Nury Vittachi

*

Japanese men are furious about a rule that prevents them from wearing Speedo swimming briefs. The government of their country has forbidden them to wear the things during the Beijing Olympic Games later this summer.

They have not banned them for the obvious reason that they make most men look like beach balls balancing on golf tees.

They have banned them because they are not patriotic. Speedos are made in Australia. Japanese competitors must wear Japan-made swimming costumes.

The guys from Japan are furious. In the same way that most men believe red sports cars are speedier than those of other hues, they believe Speedos go faster than normal trunks.

The row started in February when the Speedos company released its latest pair of briefs. It looked exactly like any other pair. What made the difference was the blurb that came with it. This is the Speedo LRZ Racer, it said, “the world’s fastest swimming costume”. It was created “with the help of NASA”.

Well, on behalf of readers, a friend of mine examined them to see if there was obvious NASA input. There were no rockets, fuel cells, turbo-chargers or loose O-rings, designed to fall off in mid-flight. Then he noticed the price-tag: US$800. That was the only bit that reminded him of NASA. It is well known that you can sell anything to big US government organizations if you give it a grand enough name. To take an extreme example, bits of grime from your underpants, if labeled Malleable Organic Multi-Purpose Substance, can be sold to the Pentagon for thousands of dollars a gram.

Anyway, a couple of months later, sports reporters revealed that the winners of nearly all recent major swimming competitions had been won by swimmers wearing “the world’s fastest swimming costume”.

The international swimming community en masse immediately decided that the blurb was true, and a mahogany log wearing a pair of Speedos would move faster than a trained Olympic-grade swimmer in normal costume.

Several swim teams said the wearing of Speedos should be banned under anti-doping laws. The Olympic Games senior doping inspectors (“the dopes”) refused to countenance this claim, unless critics could show that the swimming trunks were being consumed in tablet form. (Actually, the Japanese wouldn’t put this past the Aussies.)

The argument took a new twist a few days ago when Yamamoto Corp, a Japanese rubber firm, announced that it had invented a suit that could swim faster than the Speedo.  It is now at the testing stage, which presumably means the Yamamoto pants are doing the butterfly stroke by themselves in a secret pool outside Tokyo somewhere.

Meanwhile, many respected observers (that’s a common journalistic phrase meaning “I”) believe the entire dispute is due to the well-known male psychological phenomenon known as “price-envy”. If it’s expensive and related to sports, men will rush out and buy it. I mean, think about it. Eight hundred US dollars for a pair of swimming trunks. It’s ludicrous. I mean, would you pay US$800 for a pair of sneakers?

                What? You just did?

                Huh. Well, my answer is this. Why not remove humans from the equation? The Speedos and the Yamamoto pants can challenge each other.

                 I reckon the Japanese pants will win the race, but the Speedos will win the drinking games afterwards.

Music plagiarism for amateurs

I did it my way, said the Indian composer

By Nury Vittachi

*

When I was a junior reporter, I worked for an editorial department head who used to copy my work and re-sell it to other newspapers.

                One day, I worked up my courage and fearlessly stormed into his room, on my knees. Holding my head high, I threw my accusations in his face: “Look, terribly sorry to bother you, but I think you may have, er, accidentally copied my stories every day for the past three weeks and sold them to other newspapers.”

               “I most certainly did not,” he replied, looking most affronted. “I re-wrote them. If I re-write a story, it legally becomes my work.”

                I apologized and stormed proudly out of the office, backwards, bowing.

                The next morning, I took my own latest article and compared it with one which appeared in a different newspaper under his name. Not a single word had been changed.

               So I charged into his room and once more violently tore a strip off him: “Look, I’m really, really sorry to bother you again, but I think you may have forgotten to re-write any of my words in this one.”

                He pointed to the top of the article. “I changed those two words,” he said, pointing to my name, which he had changed to his name.

                That incident taught me a very important lesson about ethics in Asian business.

There aren’t any.

One of my all-time favourite Asian TV news clips is a CNBC report last year on music plagiarism in Bollywood. The TV anchor interviewed musician Pritam Chakravaty, who is credited with composing many famous songs that most of us thought were written by other people. For example, he, er, “composed” My Way by Paul Anka, which appears under his name on one of his soundtracks.

Now, it’s good interviewing technique to start with easy questions before shifting to tough ones which force people to admit their crimes. So the smart TV interviewer innocently asked: “To what do you credit your great success?”

Mr Chakravarty, wriggling with guilt, replied: “Er. Well. Er. I don’t know. You see I have been very, er. I just concentrate on my work. It just happened!”

Having got an instant confession without any work at all, the interviewer turned to Anu Malik, an Indian composer who “composed” many famous Western tunes, including The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Phantom of the Opera and Listen to the Falling Rain.

The interviewer said: “These are extremely well-known tunes. Do you think people in India would not know?”

“It’s no big deal,” replied Malik. He thought it most unfair that he should be accused of copying music when all he had done was copy some music, as many plagiarists had done. “Why single me out?” he whined. “Why not all the other composers?”

                The TV interviewer turned to an intellectual property lawyer named Praveen Anand and asked him to identify the prime factors for determining whether a song had been copied. The lawyer replied: “Whether there has been copying.” He then expanded on this point. “At the root of copyright law, there is copying.”

                Anyway, I’d just like to tell readers that they are free to copy any columns of mine containing libel and slander. Just remember to take out my name and put in your own.

Do you take this tree...?

This husband really is rooted in firm foundations

By Nury Vittachi

*

Do you want a spouse who doesn’t answer back, keeps both feet on the ground and never, ever runs around? Why not marry a tree?

                That’s what the mother of a Hong Kong reader did. Shrynne (pronounced Shireen) wrote to add her family tale to our file of stories about Asian weddings at which the bride or groom marries a ghost, a painting, a statue, a dog, et cetera.

Her mother was told by a fortune teller that her second marriage would work, but not her first. Wanting to save heartache all round, her mother’s parents reacted by marrying her off to a tree. “It’s easy to get divorced from a tree,” they explained.

After the separation was completed (the tree did not contest it), they married her off to a human.

I imagine Shrynne’s mother must have found her second husband a bit more animated and talkative than her first. (Or maybe not, who knows? He was an Asian guy.)

“It worked so far,” said Shrynne. “My parents have now been married for 42 years.”

                The tree was not available for comment.

                She could also confirm our allegation that the choice of partner was sometimes the least important item in an Indian wedding. She told us about an Indian guy who learned from his bride that the wedding date he had chosen was the day she was due to do her final exams for her medical degree.

                “No problem,” he replied. He changed the date.

No, of course he didn’t. This is Asia. He kept the wedding date and looked for another girl.

I can’t help but wonder how a guy like that breaks the news to his fiancé. “You can’t do June 19^th? Dang. Know any other chicks with incredibly low standards?”

His bride must have passed some names to him, because he married her cousin. That’s lurrve, Asian-style.   

Meanwhile, foreign correspondent Dan Kubiske was intrigued to read our item on Intelligent Elevators. “The Bangladesh Interior Ministry is accepting offers in a tender for Intelligent Equipment,” he said. “My first reaction was to think they were looking for intelligence-gathering equipment such as secret cameras, listening devices and such-like. But then I thought maybe they were looking for equipment that’s intelligent because humans are not.”

On the same subject, Peter Emmett from the Philippines reckons that Intelligent Elevators are a good idea. “We’ll get used to it and one day wonder how we did without them,” he said. He pointed out that few people would have thought that giving away plastic Snoopys with McDonald’s happy meals would be a good idea, yet they’re wildly popular. Actually, Peter, I think it’s a perfect match. Tasteless plasticky things given away with tasteless plasticky things.

From a business-watcher, I got a letter about an intriguing note spotted in a list of official company announcements last week. Shortly to be struck off a company register is a business called: "Hong Kong Loving Wife No 1 International Electric Industrial Limited".

                That’s one of those names has to hide a story. Did Loving Wife Number One not appreciate having an international electric industrial company named after her? How come this guy has to number his loving wives, anyway? How many does he have?

                And why doesn’t the poor woman have a name, anyway? Is she a tree?