World Cup and Fried Rice Paradise

The World Cup is here! Halleujah and the football gods be praised! Time for all the ladies to go shop for their LV bags alone while bitching about why their guys are holed up in some friend's dingy house with beers in one hand and fried chicken in the other. I know, I know. All the women are shaking their heads and wondering what the hell is the big fuss about. By the way, if I hear one more woman saying "It is just 22 men running around after a ball", I might burst a blood vein. First, it is 20 men running after a ball (goalkeepers stay put in their boxes, dumbass) and second, guys measured their life by the number of world cups they have seen. Primitive tribes have this rite of passage in which the youth must go into a jungle and kill a boar with a flint dagger before he could be considered a man. We have the World Cup. One cannot be considered a grown man if he had not passed out drunk from drinking in sorrow after the latest cock-up by England.

So I am going to be happily oblivious to everything else in my life from now till July. I am going to be pretend to be generous and tell my maid she could come in later and leave once she had done her stuff. All engagements in the evenings are off. Cute girls ranked 1-4 on CO's beauty scale could not drag me from the TV in my living room. Maybe Kelly Hu and when some shit matches are on like Tunisia vs Saudi Arabia (SNOOrre). Although it will be fun to hear the British commentator wrestle with Saudi and Tunisian names when commentating :

"Mohammed Al-Shalhoub passed the ball to Hussein Abdul Ghani who backheeled the ball to err . . Mohammed Al-Anbar, I think. Ooh, here comes Tunisian striker Yassine Chik -err- something trying to win the ball back. He missed but team-mate Chaouki Ben Saada or was it Kaies Ghodban, helped with a wonderful tackle on err, I think that was Saad Al-Harthi. No wait, it is Nawaf Al-Temyat who was backheeling to Yasser Al-Qahtani. Or was it Abdul Aziz Al-Khathran? I thought Aal-Khathran was already subsititued for Saad Al-Harthi? ARRGH. F- it all. (throw microphone down and started crying)".

I am going to stock up on important necessities of life such as beer. I am going to do my f-king war-dance when I run around the room screaming like a girl who had just found a special edition of an LV Murakami bag on special offer when England scores (it f-king better). Hey, it is once every four years, ladies and gentleman. Let the good times roll.

Blogging-wise, I am taking the opportunity to put up short stuff which I wrote but never seen the light of the day because (a) I am appalled by the quality of my own writing and (b) some are written when I am straight up tipsy (aka : drunk). Like the one below:

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FRIED RICE PARADISE

Fried rice. I don't get it.

I got into an argument with my Thai language teacher in Bangkok in early 2003. That woman was claiming that the one of the national cusinies of Thailand was get this : FRIED RICE. Fried Rice? You know the dish made up of leftover rice which you fried it with eggs and maybe some luncheon meat? I remember putting up my hand to politely point out that there was no way Thailand could claim fried rice as their national dish. I have tasted their fried rice, it doesn't taste any different from our fried rice except they threw in enough MSG and oil to marinate a whale. That woman got agitated and started repeating louder and louder that papaya salad and fried rice are Thailand's national cuisines.

The whole freaking argument was conducted in Thai. At the school, we were forbidden to use English to converse when learning Thai which was like one of THE dumbest rules in education. Apparently the school was following this up-class (aka posers) educational method which believed that students would learn a foreign language faster when they were forbidden to use their mother tongues. Which was stupid since all of us ended up using F-KING SIGN LANGUAGE FOR FOUR MONTHS and still couldn't tell whether mai (Thai) refers to wood, silk or fire.

My language proficiency at that time was limited to "khow pad may chay aahan thay ler. Tuk prathaat thong mii khow pad." (Thai translation: Fried rice is no freaking way a Thai cuisine. Many countries got it, you - - - -). I would have punctuate my line with a "dumbass" description but I don't know what's Thai for dumbass. The school vehemently refused to teach me. So I couldn't possibly win the argument. All my Japanese and American classmates were looking in amusement at our verbal volley exchanges until I gave up and spent the rest of the class thinking how satisifying it would be if I could drop-kicked her into a tub of yangzhou fried rice which would wake her up because yangzhou fried rice are awesome.

Fried rice is fried rice. They might look different but just because someone adds sausages and a couple of prawns in it doesn't make it the Thai national cuisine. I like to add century eggs on my fried rice when I cooked on Saturday but it doesn't make it Singapore's national cuisine. The Thais have wonderful food such as Tom Yum Kung (spicy soup) which is original, unique to Thailand, is awesome and kick incomprehensible amount of culinary ass . Now that truly a national cuisine. But not fried rice. Blah.

(Just by adding eggs and basil leaves, this dish is a national Thai cuisine?)

If the world of food are oceans, fried rice would be considered international waters. No countries could claim it under the Law of the Sea and all ship could sail in its waters in peace. Fried rice is probably the one and only thing everyone in every country can cook and I will be damned if I let some country claimed it as their own just by adding sausages and basil leaves on it.

P.S : Pineapple rice is also not a local Thai dish either. It is a strictly Singaporean creation which was exported to Thailand.