Vittachi

The only truly timeless blog on the planet

World’s earliest blogger had his work cut out for him

By Nury Vittachi

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The world’s first blogger has been found. It’s an Indian nerd. (What a surprise.) Stand up and take a bow, Ashoka Piyadassi of northeastern India. Yay!

Well, actually, he can’t stand up and take a bow because he’s dead. Ashoka started (and finished) writing his blog a long time before any other rival claimants to the title: 2000 years earlier, to be precise.

Now I know what you are thinking. How could this guy have written a blog so long ago, two millennia before the invention of the key elements of on-line diary-writing, which are, of course, abject self-centredness and atrocious spelling?

Well, historians now believe that self-centredness is actually a lot older than most people think. It was invented by a woman named Eve, who looked at a fruit tree and thought: “Rules, schmools, I need a low-cal snack that won’t go to my hips.”

And bad spelling? William Shakespeare, often described as the world’s greatest author, frequently misspelled his own name, sometimes writing it “Francis Bacon”.

For Ashoka, 2000 years ago, the big challenge was equipment. Wi-fi was in short supply, so his blog posts were literally posts. He chiseled them into rock pillars and delivered them by hand to vast numbers of places all over the Known World.

Now you may well be thinking: how come I never heard of this guy? Few people have. I reckon it’s because historians have listed his inscribed pillars in their dusty tomes as The Edicts of Ashoka.

               But I’ve read the things. They are no more edicts than my laundry lists are (and I write great laundry lists). No, Ashoka’s posts are a self-serving list of personal achievements (“I dug some wells”) interspersed with idle thoughts on how to fix the world’s problems (“let us all be vegetarians”). His posts run on a casually egomaniac assumption that the rest of humanity will benefit from access to his unedited thoughts: the unmistakable stamp of the blogger.

Of course, Ashoka lived in a different era so his interests differ from ours. In one posting, he tells us his household has gone vegetarian “except for one deer and two peacocks every day”. In my house we barely get through a deer and two peacocks a week, unless we’re really hungry.

Today, there are 120 million blogs. Fears have been expressed that they may sound the death-knell of newspapers. But then every invention, including radio, television, the hula hoop, peanut butter, the deodorizing insole and the padded brassiere have been credited with sounding the death-knell of newspapers.

We’re still here. Some Asian newspapers, such as the rivals of the ones I write for, can be pathetically dull, but even they are interesting compared to what you read in today’s blogs.

Possibly the dullest blog ever can be found at wiblog.com. One entry, entitled “Standing in the Middle of the Room”, reads as follows: “I was standing at a central point in the room. The walls were all at approximately the same distance from me. I continued to stand there for a few moments.” 

Be still, my heart. Thrilling stuff.

One guy in my office tells me that there are some bloggers who are not rampant egomaniacs.  I’m impartial enough to be willing to record his point of view.

But I should also point out that he also believes in the tooth fairy.

Exploding animals and other friends

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The Malaysian ant teaches us all how to go out with a bang

By Nury Vittachi

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There are people who think the total destruction of human civilization through global warming might actually be a bad thing.

               But there you go. People can be weird.

Yet everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, even if they are wrong.

But I was intrigued to hear one theory about human self-destruction that leads us to one of the world’s most curious creatures: the Malaysian ant, known to scientists as camponotus saundersi.

Most creatures have some sort of self-defense mechanism. Attack a snake and it will spit poison at you; scare a squid and it will squirt ink at you; criticize certain Singaporeans and they will shoot out a stream of lawyers at you.

                If you attack this Malaysian ant, it explodes. This is how it works. Big bug attacks ant.  Ant runs away. Bug pursues ant. Ant stops and turns. Bug approaches, taking out knife, fork and ketchup sachet. Ant explodes, looking smug and killing larger bug.

                As defense techniques go, the Malaysian ant’s system works well. There’s only one drawback, which smart readers may already have spotted: the triumphant winner ends up spread in tiny pieces over the forest floor.

                There are several examples of exploding animals in nature—such as whales, cows and King William I of England—but these all die before exploding. It is only the Malaysian ant which is one moment swaggering along the road thinking, “I am the master of the universe and I can prove it any time I want to” and is the next moment 2,000 bits of organic dust, each of which is thinking: “Oh bother. Bang goes that nice evening I was planning hanging out with the queen.”

Scientists think the Malaysian ant is making an unconscious decision to sacrifice its life for the colony. And some believe that human beings are making the same unconscious decision to wipe themselves off the Earth for the sake of the planet. 

                If humanity does destroy itself, the globe will almost definitely be taken over by ants, which already make up some 20 per cent of the world’s biomass.

                One just hopes they won’t all be Malaysian ants. Can you imagine what would happen if an alien lands and looks at them the wrong way? They could get very upset and—bang—there goes the planet.

                Incidentally, there was plague of exploding toads in Germany recently, a reader tells me. Scientists discovered that a generation of toads had got into the habit of misjudging the amount of air they should take in to puff themselves up, and ended up accidentally blowing themselves to pieces. This is perhaps the ultimate example of how a small mistake can spoil your whole day.

                The discovery that creatures can puff themselves up so much that they explode has interesting implications. I hope it applies to humans, too. Think about the leader of North Korea, whose birth allegedly caused the stars to bow down.

                Kim Jong Il: As Supreme Leader of the richest, most developed, most advanced civilization in the universe, I would just like to say—

                [A loud explosion shakes the hall.]

                First audience member: Where’d he go?

                Second audience member: I don’t know. Why is there steaming blubber draped on your shoulder?

                 First audience member: No idea. I don’t remember putting it on this morning.

Whale found in middle of desert

Have a whale of a time with a minkemoo steak
By Nury Vittachi
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Japanese scientists have been trying to cross a cow and whale. The news was revealed just before the international meeting of whaling experts which starts this week in Chile.
     The Japanese have not said what the new creature might be called. A wow? A cale? Since they were injecting minke whale sperm into cow eggs, they could call it a minkemoo. This has the virtue of being cute, and as you know, extreme cuteness is the most respected national characteristic in Japan, closely followed by the military ability to conquer neighbouring countries.
     If they succeed, the implications are huge. Can you imagine the advantages of having a cross-bred cow-cum-whale?
     1. Healthy fresh milk soon to be available underwater for lost scuba divers.
     2. T-bone steak now eight metres long.
     3. Milkmaid uniform to be replaced by bikinis to facilitate 40,000-litre-a-day liquid output.
     4. Butter from now on to have interesting plankton taste.
     5. Within a year, all bull fighters will have been crushed to death.
     The news about the whale-cow experiments was released reluctantly. Japanese fishermen have been getting around a ban on whaling by explaining that they killed 7,000 whales for “important scientific research” (read “snacks”). The international community demanded to see the paperwork – and were given records of bizarre experiments such as cow-whale breeding.
     Scientists are meeting to decide what to do about whales, which, like Asian countries with military leaders and young girls surnamed Spears, are extraordinarily difficult to manage.
     There have been breakthroughs. Scientists now know why whales occasionally explode. It’s all to do with intestinal gas. Humans look the other way and clench their stomach muscles: end of problem. Whales detonate themselves over a large radius.
     You may remember the famous 2004 case when a 50-ton whale being transported by truck through a Taiwanese city suddenly exploded, spattering whale innards over the city. The BBC quoted a bystander saying: "What a stinking mess. This blood and other stuff that blew out on the road is disgusting, and the smell is really awful." No, wait, that was a comment on a meeting of the Taiwanese parliament.
     There was a case in British Columbia, Canada, where a whale exploded with such violence that nearby vegetation “looked like Christmas trees”, a description no doubt given by someone who celebrates December 25th by adorning conifers with chunks of bloody cetacean blubber.
     Scientists may also discuss creatures unknown to science which have been found living on the bones of dead whales off the coast of California. They said the tiny animals were “slimy and worm-like but with no guts and no mouths”. The description convinces me that several of these edited newspapers for which I worked in the 1990s.
      Meanwhile, the body of a whale has been found in the middle of the Egyptian desert (see pic at the top). The bones were 40 million years old, so scientists are not sure what they can learn from them.
     Well, for a start, I’ll bet you anything it’s a male whale. Only a male could be so far off course and refuse to ask directions. You can just see it flopping through the desert, saying to itself: “Wow, this sandbank is long, but I’m sure if I just keep going I’ll soon know where I am.”
     Now if it had been a minkemoo, at least it would have been carrying something to drink.

True tale of the DVD designed for Martians

Earth scientists greet the people of Mars

By Nury Vittachi

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Scientists are sending a DVD to Mars. It is due to arrive on the surface of the Red Planet on May 25^th, which is next Sunday.

Now hang on a minute, I hear you ask.  What if Martians don’t have a DVD player?  What if they are still using video tapes? What if they haven’t progressed past Super 8 movie reels?

Well, scientists have taken that into account. The DVD is made of tough stuff that will make it playable for at least 500 years, which they reckon should be enough time even for the most primitive form of life, such as a single-cell bacterium or an American Idol judge, to build a DVD player.

Now I know you think I am making this up, but I’m not. They really have sent a DVD 680 million kilometres to Mars. Scientists spent months making the disk, which opens with a greeting to Martians.  “Let me introduce myself to you,” it says. “I am Peter Smith, the Principal Investigator of the Phoenix mission funded by NASA. My father, Hugh Smith, was born in 1902, an era when there was no radio or recorded music or television. “

I’m not exactly sure why it starts with this statement, but I suspect Mr Smith believes the sympathetic Martians will immediately use some form of Intergalactic Paypal to help with his funding challenges.

Mr. Smith then admits that Martians might not be able to understand the disk. “We will have no common language,” he says, in the language that they cannot understand. This reminds me of the safety card you get on airlines which says, “If you cannot read this, notify the flight attendant.”

Also on the disk is the radio version of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds, a story in which Martians try to take over the planet Earth, but are defeated. I can only deduce that this has been cleverly included to stop them trying to do the same thing again. “Curses!” the Martians will say. “Apparently we tried to invade them before but we failed.”

There are also messages from dead humans. There is an interview with my old friend the late Arthur C. Clarke, filmed at his home in Sri Lanka. And there’s a message from the late science writer Carl Sagan. He recorded it at his New York house, a beautiful home in Ithaca, New York, famed for its 200-foot (60 metre) waterfall. Mr Sagan greets the Martians and says:  “Maybe you can hear in the background, a 200-foot tall waterfall, which is probably, I would guess, a rarity on Mars.”

Mr Sagan is on pretty safe ground making such a claim, as there is no water on Mars. One wonders what was going through his mind when he chose to make this statement. “If people on earth are green with jealousy about my 200-foot waterfall, what about those poor schmucks on Mars, who don’t even have running water?!”

The latest space probes have reported that Mars is basically a large, icy plain, with virtually no signs of intelligent life.  No, wait, that’s Canada.

But Mars sounds pretty much the same as Canada, only with better nightlife.

Anyway, the DVD will arrive on the Red Planet at the weekend.

I suspect pirate copies will be on sale in most Asian cities by Friday night.

This will give a lift to your day

Elevators beyond Faith
By Nury Vittachi

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Imagine an elevator that never actually stops moving. It zooms up the east side of the building, disappears into the attic and then reappears, zooming down the west side. It goes round and round, endlessly, night and day. It has no doors. The only way to use it is to throw yourself in as it passes your floor, and leap out when it reaches the floor you want to get to.

Sounds like a nightmare? It was for reader Faith Ratnayake.

A lift exactly like that, called a paternoster, was the only elevator at a skyscraper in the UK’s Sheffield University at which she worked in 1962.

“Too scared to embark, I walked up and down umpteen floors every day,” she said. “After 46 years of sleepless nights, I appeal to your investigative brain to relieve my addled one: what happens when they reach the top and bottom? Do they turn tail and return upside down? Or cross over to the other side, like politicians?”

Faith, of Sri Lanka, had another reason not to use them—she wore skirts rather than trousers, so going accidentally over the top and descending upside down would have been indecent.

Well, Faith, your wish is our command. I’ve long had a death wish, so I was happy to visit that building, disobey the warning signs, and stay in the nonstop elevator as it disappeared up into the attic. (I took a lady friend for company, in case we got stuck).

It got very dark and noisy, but it didn’t turn upside down. After a while, it zoomed sideways. Then it started to head downwards.  We promptly stood on our hands to mislead observers into thinking it had turned over at the top.

Later, locals told us of rumours that people with nowhere else to go sometimes had sex in the brief period in which it disappears into the mechanical bit at the top before reemerging.

Well, I can confirm that this is impossible. There is simply not enough time for serious naughtiness to be committed by any normal person, with the possible exception of experts such as Bill Clinton.

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SURREALITY DEPARTMENT: I’ve always had a problem with the word “surreal” which means “unreal in a strange, dreamlike way”. I’m not sure if it is just me, but life seems to me to be almost entirely surreal. Which makes reality unreal. Perhaps it’s Asia. Or maybe I just need to get out less. Anyway, from the “reality is surreal” department, I received an announcement telling me that “The Hong Kong China Food Oil Ticket Research Club” has just been disbanded. What a shame. Now the millions of people interested in researching Hong Kong China food oil tickets, and may even know what that phrase actually means, no longer have a place to do whatever they do.
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SILLY SIGNS DEPARTMENT: Vast numbers of readers have been sending me signs, instructions and observations, so here are the three best:

Seen on a street in Kyushi, Japan: “Stop. Drive sideways.” Sounds like Faith’s elevator.

Seen on the front of a jewellery shop in India: “We shoot earholes.”

Seen in an ad for a hotel in Spain, sent in by reader Yammie Ting: “The provision of a large French widow in every room adds to the visitor’s comfort.” 

Now there’s an offer you don’t get in every hotel.

Competitive Eating is the happening thing

Major League Eating proves that sports is bad for you

By Nury Vittachi

Welcome to The Myth-Exploders Report. In each assignment, we take a widely held topical belief and examine it to see if it is true or false. We do this without any form of prejudice or bias, except for the fact that we really, really hope it is false, otherwise, let’s face it, we are well and truly stuffed.

           Thanks to the Olympics, sport is top of the news agenda, so today’s statement is: Sport is good for the health. True or false?

           First, let’s define our terms. Sport is defined as a competitive physical activity overseen by a governing body consisting of men with clipboards wearing embarrassing coloured jackets. 

Health is defined as (a) the opposite of being dead or (b) the opposite of being a member of the Rolling Stones.

        We will focus on the most important sports event of this season, which is—the Beijing Olympics notwithstanding—the 2008 Competitive Eating Championships, some of which were held last week, and the rest of which run from May through July.

There are more than 100 competitive eating events worldwide every year, involving ramen noodles, burgers, burritos, corn, pizzas and deep-fried asparagus stalks. They are all overseen (I’m not making this up) by the International Federation of Competitive Eating. Although it has supporters worldwide, the United States provides the bulk of the members (no pun intended).

This is because probably overeating has been a legal requirement in that country ever since former President Bill Clinton signed “Bill’s Law” (“Just eat it”) into the statute book.

Competitive eating has become an East-versus-West thing.  Asians were disappointed when Juliet Lee, 43, originally from Nanjing, took second place to Chicago’s Patrick Bertoletti, 22, in the oyster-inhaling round on April 13. But Asia is seeking revenge on July 4, when Japan’s legendary Takeru Kobayashi challenges America’s Joey Chestnut to wolf hot dogs in New York.

I asked a top sportsman (okay, a guy at the gym near the office) whether gorging could in any way be good for health. “That’s an interesting question,” he said, balancing a cup of coffee on a jutting chest muscle. “The discipline of sport is not about the curve of your gluteus maximus. It’s about the truly important things in life, such as money, fame, women, being able to wear really tight clothes, and the curve of your gluteus maximus.”

Competitive feeders get cash—US$350,000 a year in prize money. They get fame too. Sports channels broadcast shows called Major League Eating and Eats of Strength. A three-hour ESPN special called The US Open of Competitive Eating was sponsored by one of the world’s biggest names in medicine: Alka-Seltzer (I honestly am not making this up).

Our last hope of dissing this sport was the moral argument. In these days of rising food prices, is it right to eat 58 hot dogs in one quick slurp? My gym friend said: “If you knew what went into one of those things, you wouldn’t eat one, let alone 58.” A rigorous investigation (that is, a quick search via Google) revealed that hot dogs are made of indigestible parts of farm animals, such as the hoof, the collar, the bell and name tags saying “Daisy”. So that proves that doing sports is bad for you. Okay lads, back to the couch.
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Asia and Africa come together

Make way for co-rule by the She-Elephant

By Nury Vittachi

An alert reader wrote to me to tell me that tomorrow (April 19^th) is the birthday of King Mswati of Swaziland. I was stunned by this. I was so stunned that I ran around the office, informing my colleagues about this important news: “I have a reader, nyeh-nyeh na nyeh-nyeh.”

               After calming down and returning to my desk, I prepared to write back to My Reader thanking him for existing. But then I read the rest of his note. “One of the top news stories at the moment is Asia’s growing links with Africa. Well, Swaziland has exactly the same problems that most Asian countries face, but it has dealt with them in unusually creative ways,” he said. “Check it out.”

                I did. He was right.

               Both Asia and Africa are having to deal with the whole “Equal Opportunities for Women” thing. But in Swaziland, a decree has been passed that the land should forever be “co-ruled” by a ruler AND his mom. That’s a way cool idea. I mean, how can a guy focus on doing bad stuff like organizing invasions if his mama is sitting there barking, “Put that laser pointer away, you’ll have someone’s eye out.”

                In Swaziland, as a show of respect, the ruler’s mother must always be addressed as “The She-Elephant”. WARNING: Do NOT try this with the senior-most woman in your parliament, your corporation or (especially) your home.

                In both Asia and Africa, modern young women are demanding respect. So every August, King Mswati requires 20,000 of them to dance in skimpy costumes outside his house so that he can give them that respect. Is that not a creative response to feminism?

                Both Asia and Africa are sniffing around the whole democracy thing. But in Swaziland, they’ve introduced a system which is “democratic” in name but which simply omits the troublesome stuff about residents having a say in choosing their own leaders. A neat, easy solution.

                Both Asia and Africa are pussyfooting around the relationship between business and politics. Swaziland has dealt with this using a system classified by economists as kleptocractic, which literally means “rule by thieves”. The term signifies “a system in which people with wealth and people with political power work together to further enrich themselves at the expense of the poor”. The Asian elite I know would totally go for this.

Most Asians think their leaders are business-obsessed. But we’re nowhere compared to Swaziland. Their economy is based largely (and this is not a joke) on Coca-Cola. Forty per cent of GDP comes from the Coca-Cola Company and the King of Swaziland makes an annual pilgrimage to the headquarters of the soft drink firm in Atlanta, Georgia to pay obeisance to the CEO.

                Both Asia and Africa live in fear of pandemics. To stop the spread of HIV/AIDS, King Mswati made a rule that it was illegal to have sex with women under 18. Two months later, he broke the law himself by marrying a 17-year-old (his ninth wife). But to be fair to him, the King admitted guilt and fined himself a cow as punishment.

King Mswati announced that all young unmarried women had to wear Scarves of Chastity for four years.  The programme was eventually abandoned as a failure, perhaps because the Scarves of Chastity were worn around the neck.

                Hey, you win some, you lose some.

A tale of three pregnant men

A tale of three men, all of whom were sort of pregnant

By Nury Vittachi

Many readers, most of whom are clearly intellectual giants focused on items of global geopolitical significance, wrote to ask me what I thought about the Pregnant Man. According to Google Trends, this has become the World’s Single Most Important Issue. 

It concerns an American citizen called “Thomas” Beatie, 34, who claims to be (a) male and (b) pregnant. To prove this is true, Beatie sought confirmation from the world’s most authoritative medical scientist, Oprah Winfrey. On her TV show, viewers were duly shown a set of Beatie’s ultrasound scans.

                Big deal. All that the show really proved was that a human being exists who is simultaneously (a) pregnant and (b) has hairy armpits and a moustache.

               How is this unusual? Clearly, we need to send the entire population of the United States on a tour of continental Europe, where they will find several million people who fit this description, and who could book the Oprah show solid for the next 37 years.

“Mr” Beatie, who used to be a beauty contest entrant called Tracy, reminded me of Lee Mingwai, a Taiwanese artist who also claimed to be the first man ever to have become pregnant – see his impressive website malepregnancy.com.

There’s just one teeny problem with it. Mr Lee has now been gestating his baby for seven and a half years. I wonder if instead of First Pregnant Male, Mr Lee may prefer to opt for an alternative impressive title, such as Most Overdue Birth, or even Most Transparently Fake Hoaxer?

To move from rot to reality, it’s well known that men in certain cases can breastfeed babies. In a famous article called Milkmen: Fathers Who Breastfeed, mother Laura Shanley wrote about her husband David: “He began telling himself that he would lactate, and within a week, one of his breasts swelled up and milk began dripping out…. This was yet another example of the power of the mind.”

Actually, I think this was yet another example of Men Doing Silly and Pointless Things.

Why on earth would any man want to muscle into the whole “having babies” business?  A female friend of mine described childbirth as follows: “Imagine the most painful thing you can suffer, and then multiply that pain by ten, and then by ten again, and then by ten again, and then by ten again, and then by ten again, and then by…” (I fainted at that point).

               Actually, Asia has a much better candidate for the title of first pregnant man: Sanju Bhagat of Nagpur, India. He thought he had a pot belly, and then thought it might be a tumor. When he was 36, doctors cut him open and found that he had a fetus inside him. The shocked doctor said, “I reached into him and there was this hand inside…”

When Sanju got home to Nagpur, his male friends looked at his flat stomach and joked, “So you had the baby, then?” Actually, he had.

Much of the confusion about babies and pregnancy can be blamed on the lack of knowledge about reproduction in modern society, especially among males. As proof of that, here’s a genuine transcript from a criminal trial:

Male Lawyer: So the date of conception was August 8^th?

Female Witness: Yes.
               Male Lawyer: And what were you doing at the time?

Women and men speak different languages

MY SPORTS CAR IS NOT FUCHSIA

By Nury Vittachi

WOMEN IN ASIA have smaller vocabularies than men but talk more, scientists have discovered. Yet females have a much larger choice of words in certain areas, such as in the description of colours, boffins say.

Well, hel-lo, scientists. Welcome to Planet Earth.

Honestly, you have to feel sorry for these people. They spend years finding out what the rest of us already know.

I mean, take the business about colours.  A friend of mine decided to buy a sports car recently. “I think I’ll get a red one,” he said.

“But what shade of red?” his wife asked. “Blush? Brick? Cerise? Fuchsia? Cherry? Russet? Claret? Crimson? Salmon? Ruby? Scarlet? Vermilion?”

We could hear her continuing to identify sub-categories of red as we left the flat and travelled 20 floors down in the elevator.

These discoveries appeared after a team of male scientists spent months analyzing speech patterns. (It apparently never occurred to them to use the time-saving but rather risky technique of Talking to a Woman). It’s a subject I’ve discussed before, but let’s revisit the main findings.

Discovery one: Men and women use entirely different words to describe the same thing.

Example: words for the lower midriff.

If you are a woman, you have an “abdomen” or a “tummy”.

If you are a man, you have a “belly” or a “gut”.

To test this hypothesis, I re-watched my entire library of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Amazing to relate, Arnie never once said: “Damn. They got me in the abdomen.” Or “He’s still alive—I feel it in my tum-tum.”

The aerobics teacher on my wife’s exercise videos spoke endlessly about “abdominal scrunches” but never once said, “Belly in. Belly out. C’mon, you can do it. Let me see you thrust those bellies around.”

Discovery two: Girls are better are forming complex sentences than boys.

                I observed a little girl making a chocolate spread sandwich and emerging from the kitchen to make the following speech: “Mummy sayth I’m a vewy good lickle girl ‘cos I know how to make myself a samwidge and I know how to clean up the kitchen afterwardth and I’m nearly five and a half and this is my dolly who is called Emma and she’s gonna help me eat the samwidge.”

                Before she had finished speaking, the sandwich in question had been summarily inhaled by a small boy belonging to a visitor. The only sounds he had made during his visit were preternaturally loud expulsions of air from various locations on his person.

Discovery three: Men’s brains are wired for systematic recall (that means they can remember lists of facts) while women’s are wired for empathetic recall (that means they can remember periods of heightened emotion).

                Somehow, Mother Nature knew that males would bond by swapping statistics about sports while females would exchange opinions about relationships.

                Guys, try starting a conversation with “Let’s talk about our feelings” and watch your buddies fight to abandon the scene. I don’t need scientists to tell me this. I have a gut feeling about it.

And I don’t mean a tum-tum feeling.

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Tomorrow: The revolutionary new form of English Asians use

Writer scooped by real life

FROM THE SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST:
By Andrew Sun
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It was a weird bit of deja vu for fiction writer Nury Vittachi when he learned a billionaire had recently bought one of those gigantic new double-decker Airbus jets - the ones that carry 800 passengers and cost about US$300 million - to be his own private airborne limousine.
     So, what's the deja vu part, you ask?
     "It's a key part of the plot of the next fung shui detective book, which I delivered to the publishers several months ago, but which won't appear until the end of the year at the earliest," the author wrote on his blog.
     Last autumn, Vittachi negotiated a three-book deal for his fung shui detective books to be released in parts of Europe and the US, so news of the sale might smear his reputation for original ideas.
      "Furthermore, environmentalists are up in arms over the deal - just as they are in my novel," Vittachi writes.
     "One said that buying an A380 for private use was like buying a power station to charge your mobile phone. It's a good quote, but too late to sneak into the book. That's the trouble with being a fiction writer. Reality has this habit of creeping up and overtaking on the left."