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Durian Man

By robin on July 28th, 2010

By now, the fruit man should know I hate Durian.

I have tried to signal my disgust in as animated terms possible without disparaging his profession nor the tastes of my companions.

The local shopkeeper has let him pitch his table up outside her convenience store and he is there every day when I go to buy my diet coke.

His offerings vary. Some days he has rambutan… sticky with juice and crawling with ants. Other days he has lychee with skin so tough as to rival a blister package. And then there are the little mangosteens which don’t look like they offer much fruit at all.

They are all just feeble placeholders until the next batch of Durians arrive.

He sits by his table, touting his wares to everyone who passes. He’s a fruit pusher. A cigarette dangles languidly from yellowed fingers as he mumbles something that sounds like “good, good!”

No I still don’t want the Durian.

Lest he interpret any communication as an overture of interest in his product, I resort to ESP: For the love of God just keep it away. My thoughts are loud.

Without actually making eye contact, I convey that I know my failure to adopt a taste for the king is some kind of shame. I know Singlish, I can navigate the island better than any cab driver, I can order my kopi-C-kosong with barely a trace of accent… but my localization will always be incomplete.

Note to self: take holidays in July.

Even when all his fruit has been sold for the day, he remains, sitting around, smoking and eying up potential clientele as they make their way home in the evening. A pile of empty shells is there to keep the air pungent and remind me of the threat. Without thinking, I quicken my step.

On thing is for sure: I’m cutting back on diet coke until the season is over.

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Superstitious Singapore

By robin on February 15th, 2010

Singapore is a modern city but many of its citizens remain strongly influenced by beliefs from the past. You can live here a long time and be completely oblivious to this reality.

For the most part, superstitions seem to be simply quaint cultural vestiges from an ancient time. But to treat them as irrelevant and benign is a mistake.

I learned this fact under very sad circumstances when the death of a loved one exposed the detrimental power of these beliefs.
 

After struggling two weeks in ICU with a drug resistant infection, my best friend’s mother – who is Chinese – finally passed away before the first light of the lunar new year. It was 6am which according to Wikipedia was the tiger hour of the tiger month of the tiger year.

The family and a couple of close friends gathered at the hospital to make final arrangements. One friend could not tell her family where she was lest she be accused of bringing bad luck back home during an auspicious time.

“I just can’t tell them,” she said. “My father is very superstitious, and so is my aunt. If anyone were to fall sick after this I would get the blame. It’s not worth it.” She snuck out later that day to attend the funeral under the pretence of ‘visiting’ – the new year tradition of calling on friends and family.

At that early morning hospital gathering, the siblings decided they would not hold a wake. Many of their friends would not want to come and they didn’t want to cause a dilemma for them and make them feel bad. They made arrangements to have the body cremated later that day.

There wasn’t even room at the church for a service. A combination of it being a Sunday and the first day of Chinese New Year meant there wasn’t a single Catholic Church island wide that could accommodate a funeral.

So less than 10 hours after my “auntie’s” death, a small group of us gathered for her funeral service at Mandai Crematorium.

There may be no good time to die but I can tell you dying on Lunar New Year’s Day is probably the worst possible time if you are Chinese. It’s the epitome of bad luck.

 
I am very sad that due to these superstitions, my friend was denied a time of public mourning she really needed.

No doubt the superstitions came from an era of disease and plague when it was more than just bad luck one could carry back from the house of the sick or the dead. But now the perpetuation of these old beliefs only serve to deny comfort and compassion to the bereaved during their time of need.

They are pointless and cruel.

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Open Source Essentials

By robin on October 25th, 2009

My last PC was literally held together with bits of tape… but event that started to fail and I finally bit the bullet and bought a new machine.

Instead of reinstalling all my old software wholesale, I decided to start over with just the essentials. This is the list of what is now on my machine just 24 working hours after first power up:

- AutoHotKey (this was my first install)
- Firefox (OK THIS was really my first install)
- Chrome
- 7zip – essential alternative to WinZip
- Gimp – Image Editor
- Filezilla – FTP
- VLC Media Player
- Foxit Reader – essential alternative to Adobe
- uTorrent + PeerGuardian2
- Avast

I’m not loading them now but I expect I will no doubt be reinstalling:
- Audacity
- Irfanview
- WinAmp
- CCleaner
- Spywaremaster
- AdAware
- Spybot
- DVD Flick – great for burning DVDs

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The Stoli-Pepsi Barter Deal

By robin on July 6th, 2009

In 1972 Pepsi became the first foreign product sold in the then USSR. However instead of selling their product for cash, Pepsi entered into a barter trade agreement with the Soviet government and took payment in the form of Stolichnaya “Stoli” Russian vodka.

Stolichnaya VodkaAt the time, the Soviet Union had limited access to foreign currency because they were not a major exporter (such capitalism was at odds with the communist ideology).

Typically, Pepsi would have set up bottling plants and sold their product for Rubles which they would have taken to the central bank in exchange for dollars. However the USSR, without access to dollars, was reticent to approve the sale of foreign products. The barter trade eloquently got around the currency issue and enabled Pepsi to secure exclusive rights to the Stolichnaya name in the US, not to mention establishing themselves in the massive Soviet market.

By 1990, the barter trade reached a value of $3 billion with Pepsi trading its product not only for vodka but also for ocean going freighters and tankers which were earmarked to be sold as scrap. By this point, Pepsi Co was not just selling syrup but was expanding in the fast food business via its Pizza Hut franchise.

The barter agreement carried on through the end of the cold war in the early 1990s. Then, after the break-up of the USSR, there were various disputes over who had the right to use the Stolichnaya name. Ultimately the courts ruled that Pepsi would retain the exclusive rights to the name in the US.

Pepsi was not, however, able to maintain exclusivity in Russia. With the Soviet collapse, Coca-Cola was introduced to the Russian market and captured a significant market share eventually overtaking Pepsi in 2005.

..

Factoid: It is worth noting that Smirnoff, unlike Soli, is produced in the US and is not a product of Russia.

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