Monday, February 26, 2018

It's been 10 years!

Mon. 26th. Feb. 2018.



I read that "the Scribe, Kadir Jasin" posted that his blog is 12 years old. So I checked. Why, my blog started in 2008. So I'm 10 years old!  Not bad.

I used to write to the reader's column in the "Straits Time". I thought my friends didn't notice them, but they did, and commented about them. I remember a fellow golfer I called "Lu Tipu" especially well, because he commented on that piece about the long, long names used in Brunei. He used to teach in Brunei, and I went to Brunei in 1966, and was there with the group from the Geography Department, University of Malaya, doing some research there for 8 or 10 weeks, I can't remember exactly now. It was my first flight, and from the brand-new Subang Airport. I think we flew in a "Comet". There was an overnight stop in Jesselton, as Kota Kinabalu was then called. From there we flew to Brunei in a "Dakota."

In 2008 I fiddled around on my newly acquired pc and got my blog going, and thus ended the newspaper commentry.

Unlike Kadir, though, I only have 2 or 3 followers. But I'm not a journalist, and I'm not anywhere near the circle of Kadir's. I write for myself, though I've mulled the idea of collecting all my posts into a short journal, or even a small book. Just a sort of memoir. Something I could slid into my stack of books and look at from time to time.

I choose English because I feel more "flexible", not because I'm not proud of my Bahasa Melayu. I also believe that I should add to the number of Malays doing this, as a supporter of well-written English by Malays, or even Malaysians. To this day, I can't resist correcting my children's English, the badly-written English produced by my golf club, or even when reading the in-flight magazines in the local airlines. You might come across such magazines, if they haven't been thrown out, and see my ball-pen corrections of simple grammartical mistakes and my unsought notes "poor edition!" and such similiar ones.

Halim says my blogs are all "political". Maybe so, but it's not intentional. I have to be in the mood, as you can see from the variable pauses between blogs. But nothing raises ire for me like stupid politicians talking to us as if we are as stupid as they apparently are! And one more thing, Halim, I was a politician once.

Let's see now. My average posting has been about 400 words. I've posted 383 times these 10 years, giving about 157,000 words in total. I'm re-reading an old golf book published in 1981 - "The Inner Game of Golf" by W. Timothy Gallwey which has 238 pages with probably 78,000 words. That makes my total blog equivalent to 2 of this book. As I said, not bad !

Hopefully 10 years would extend by another 10. And another 10.

We'll see.


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