TEHOITLWTKTSWAF - May Edition

Yet another edition of "Things everyone hears once in their life and wishes to kill the speaker with a fork".

One of my staff quit so I was interviewing job applicants for the post. While looking through their CVs and thinking about what possible questions I should ask them, I recalled my own job interview process years back. Applying for jobs and going for job interview is always a daunting prospect, make worse by all those scare-tactics from our so-called seniors who frankly, are dispensers of useless advice. You know, you drop a coin into the machine and the dispenser gives you crap advice like:

"Must make sure your application form is put in the envelope the right side up, so that the interviewer sees your photo immediately when he takes out your application."

"When interviewers ask for your weakness, must always phrase your answer in such a way that it comes out as strengths instead. E.g. say you can be too hard-working." (snigger)

Like I said, as useless as an aneroxic model in a pie-eating contest.

People also wanted me to prepare for THE QUESTION which all interviewers seem to enjoy asking. Not whether have I eaten or have I seen any good movies lately, but:

"WHAT DO YOU SEE YOURSELF DOING IN THE ORGANISATION IN 5 OR 10 YEARS TIME?"

I don't know about you but this is like one of the stupidest questions you could ask the job applicant. Seriously, what would you expect the job applicant to say? Most job applicants will lie to you anyway, using stock answer (found in self-help books) like below:

"I expect to have become a valuable worker in your organisation, able to function as a team player as well as independently. I hope to have learn a lot on the job by then so that I could value-add to the organisation's business. Together, we can work towards a better future."

MUWAHAHAHAA. Mirrors can crack, ok? Think I stupid, ar? Come to think of it, anyone who can tell the above lie with a straight face deserves to get the job for being impervious to shame. If you dare to tell the above lie, there is nothing else you wouldn't do. Sell your mother for profit? Sounds good. Blow job for your bosses? Pass the tissue. Kill your competitor to rise to the top? Sure, by the way, would you mind lean closer to the open window so that I could tip you over?

Job interviewers really shouldn't ask this question because they are forcing the applicants to lie. They can't jolly well tell the truth as below:

"I expect to be dead since I smoke like a chimney and have sex with strange women every night. What's your number?"

"I expect to be your boss, man-bitch!"

"I expect to use the experience I got here in this company to job-hop to a better company which can afford better coffee than this shit you are serving me and more importantly, pays me more. Suckers!"

"None of your business, asshole!"

"How the fuck would I know?"

"You sure your cheap, 20 cents company could last 5 years?"

"Hey, that's an interesting question. Here's another one. What do you think will happen to you in the next 5 seconds?"

Seriously, don't ask questions which force the other party to lie. Unless the whole point is to hire liars, like for your law firm.

Oh, the incompetence and injustice

This morning, I walked into my office, flipped open the papers, absorbed the contents and decided that really, this place sucks ass. I feel like walking out of the office now and just go home and watch Vampire Lesbian Kickboxers till bed time(oh yes, there is such a movie).

I attended an event opening with my French co-organiser yesterday. I gave a speech and dutifully played the standard video while the French guy just laid back and drank coffee. I wrote the speech myself the night before. It wasn't a particularly sterling and inspiring speech due to time constraints but the job was okay.

The next morning, the event got covered in the papers. The whole article was based on my speech. BUT the media reported that the French guy was the one giving the speech instead. This is such BS. Monsieur Frenchy sat back, drank coffee the whole morning and the media actually gave him all the credit for giving the speech and doing all the hard work.

Truly a WHAT THE FUCK moment. Courtesy of those idioits at the newspaper who could not even tell an Asian from a French. Do I look French?!!!?! Which part of me look French??!? (I do realise that I have no photo of myself online). I am as Asian as one can get. Heck, I don't even like french fries. Maggie mee > hamburgers anyday.

When I called up the idiot reporter who wrote the paper, I gave him the standard yelling with a huge dose of desk banging and upsized the whole rant with some cursing. He yee-hawed a bit and said that he just took the first name on the list of attendees (the French guy of course - the Lao people still have a hard-on for their past colonial masters and this irrational respect for white men) and just credited him with the speech. So, the lazy fucker wrote the whole article based on MY speech and decided to credit the wrong guy in the process. Oh, joy.

I am irritated. The office tea lady took a look at me and decided to just put my tea down at the far end of my desk and ran away. I now have to explain this whole shitty debacle to my bosses back home which would suck. I decided that I am just going to drink coffee the whole day today and not do any work. If the Frenchman could get away with it, why can't I?

Nothing is going to turn out right today. I can feel it.

Earthquake in Laos

So, there was this 6.1 richter-scale earthquake in Laos yesterday.

Yep, that's about it.

You would think that an earthquake weighing in at 6.1 on the richter scale would do some serious damage. Afterall, it is generally believed that it would be a major disaster if a 3.8 earthquake were to strike Tokyo. But heck, I can't even feel it in Vientiane. Reports indicated that here were no damage or casualties from the earthquake. Not a surprise since most buildings here are below 20 metres (building regulation set in place to prevent tall buildings casting their shadow over smaller ones). The earthquake epicentre is also in the northern province of Luang Namtha which from personal experience, is sparsely populated with small urban centres. So not much worries over there.

Speaking of which, this is a strange way to celebrate my seven years of working life (16 May 2000, I think). I still remember taking the entrance interview together with a girl from NUS and a lawyer. I walked out of the room thinking that there was no fucking way I was going to beat some hippy lawyers for this job. I mean, who the hell are they going to hire? Some successful lawyer or a fresh grad with a useless degree from good ol' NUS? Of course, I ended getting the job (horrors) but I always knew that I got the job not because I was better. I was just younger than the middle-aged, mid-career lawyer and it is always safer to hire some fresh graduate so that you can underpay him and make him suffer in the name of "getting experience".

So, here I am; seven years later and watching bad B-grade movies in a strange country. Speaking of which, I just watched "Bloodsuckers". Not because of anything, but because it stars Natassia Malthe, half Malaysia, half Norwegian model. She walks around in the movie as a lesbian vampire in tight leather. AWESOME.

The Kingmaker should be called How not to be a Stupid King

Before anyone questions why I keep watching crappy, low-budget movies, let's just say that:

(a) I actually enjoy watching crappy-low budget movies because it is interesting to see what the director could do with a super-limited budget;

(b) I watch any crap involving men in armour fighting with swords or big-breasted bimbos running away from monsters or best; big-breasted bimbos in armour dropping their swords when running away from monsters and getting eaten;

(c) Kingmaker is not a crappy, low-budget movie from Thailand. It costs 250 million baht which is about S$10 million. Thus it is not low-budget. It is of course, still crappy.

It is seldom I watch Thai movies. A few Thai movies are ok, most are bad. Even the Thai people think most of their movies are pretty crappy - the same way we Singaporeans think Singaporean movies are cliched and crappy. Kingmaker seem to be among the worse movies you can find around here.

There is nothing terribly wrong with the Kingmaker. The problem is also that there is also nothing exciting about it either. Within 5 minutes of watching the movie, I decided to turn to ESPN and watch Americans play baseball. And I hate baseball. The movie was that fucking boring. The movie is something about a Portugese mercenary ending up in Thailand after a shipwreck off the Siam coast in 1547. He was captured by Arab slave traders, fought Thai northern rebels, saved the Thai King from Japanese ninjas (I am not shitting you! Japanese ninjas with shurikens some more), romanced a Portugese lady, captured a witch (a laughable bomoh) and uncovered the truth behind the queen's plot to assassinate the king. Some Chinese merchants also made an appearance, hawking some wares in the middle of Siam. There is also a subplot somewhere that the hero fell in love with the daugther of his father's murderer but this was conveniently forgotten after a while. I tell you, this movie has odd-ball foreigners popping up everywhere. The queen even had an tall, African Zulu guard with a nasty spear doing her personal biding. This movie is shit weird! In the one and only decent battle scene in the movie, the Ayutthaya King's army looked like a United Nations Peacekeeping Force comprising of Thai guards, Japanese Samurais and Portugese Riflemen, with a few bored looking elephants. Holy Shit.

I guess this movie tries its best to tell everyone what a prosperous, international seaport Ayutthaya (ancient capital of Siam) was during the 16th century - where Japanese, Chinese and Westerners came and work together (besides trying to cut people's heads off with their swords). Unfortunately, the movie sucks as a whole. Everyone was speaking in English. Yeah, the setting was in the 16th century but every fucker could speak English - from the King to the priest; Japanese Samurai to the Thai maid; crazy Thai bomoh witch to six year-old kids playing on the streets. And they speak bad English. WTF? I thought this movie was based on Siam in the 16th century?

The plot was also unbelievable and far fetched. The queen first plotted to kill the King because he was too busy with work and could not have dinner and sex with her. WTF? Not only did she kill the king, she also stabbed her own son to death. I think most people would agreed that killing your husband and son because you are not getting sex might be a little overboard.

And I have no idea why the movie is called Kingmaker. The King spent most of his time ordering his underlings around, sleeping in his tent and NOT having sex with his wife. No one became King in the end of this terrible movie which by then, I had already fallen into a deep sleep.

A movie that is absolutely must-miss.

The Fountain is a big, wet dose of Supersuck

I watched The Fountain. By the way, if you are watching The Fountain on DVD, your best friend in the whole world would be your DVD remote control. Why, I hear you ask.

Because, you can press the forward button and skip the entire fucking psychobabble bullsit, that's why! Better still, press the STOP button now. And trust me, there is more bullshit here than if a hundred cows suddenly appear in your living room and proceed to shit all over your carpet.

The whole movie is sucktastic! I know I am inventing words but this movie require new words outside the English lexicon to do its suckiness justice. Somewhere in this movie is a story. Well, kind of. Actually, sort of. No, really, it is around here somehere. Ha ha, just kidding. What story?

I am not going to waste any more of my time talking about this tripe of a movie. Essentially, this is supposed to be some love story spanning thousands of years. Which may seem romantic to girls who go teary and wet but is essentially a death sentence for guys (I bought the movie thinking that it was going to be some horror action movie with great battle scenes. Silly me.). The movie keeps jumping from the 15th century to the present to two thousands years in the future. E.g. Thomas in the 15th century decided to look for the Tree of Life in South America. He got killed. Then the movie jumped forward two thousands years into the future when he became a Buddha meditating and doing Tai-ji in void. Yeah, you read that, right.

We then jumped back to the present times when he was a doctor trying to find a cure for cancer. Back and forth and forward again. And then back again. It would be nice if the storyline was coherent but it wasn't. There were gaps in the plot everywhere and viewers were expected (can you feel my eyes rolling?) to "draw their own conclusions". Yeah, right. My conclusion is that the movie is arty-farty and it sucks.

There are some subplots along the way. Like the bastard keeps losing the ring and the Buddha keeps eating bark off the tree. I am not sure why these are relevant. At the end of the movie, I felt so disoriented that I don't even know the movie had ended! I only realised that the whole shit has ended (mercifully) when they started rolling out the credits.

I surfed the internet just to check out what other movie-watchers say about the movie. As usual, all the pussies were praising The Fountain for being ground-breaking and beautiful. Some people have the balls to compare it to Space Odyssey 2001. Some of the praises heaped on the Fountain are as below:

How couldn't they be touched the same way as I was? How come they couldn't feel what me and some more people felt after that? (Because we are not pussies).

I just felt spent, moved , and incredibly eager to engage in discussion. (Discuss what? Most of us had fallen asleep.)

GO SEE THIS MOVIE! (NO.)

Don't listen to all the love and praises. See this movie at your peril. Get some aspirins ready, for I guaran - damn - teed that you will get disoriented at the incoherent bullshit.