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Monday, May 12, 2008

Thanks for the support!

Dear fans,

I have just returned from PJ yesterday after collecting my first batch of books to be sold to my classmates at Penang Medical College.Demand has been good, there were 57 confirmed orders, and more are buying!Many thanks to all those who have already bought the book,I am very excited thinking of you guys reading the book as I am typing this.

Also, note of thanks to Leowania,my editor and Cassy from the Marketing Dept. and my Dad who made it possible for me to get the books to Penang Medical College.

Cheers everyone and happy reading!

More posts to come on this blog!

-Jason Leong, author of The Twisted Stethoscope.

Piracy to Porn

Every year seems to be Visit Malaysia Year.2008 seems to be no different.Malaysia has always been dependent on tourism as a vibrant component in our economy.In direct correlation to its importance is the efforts by our Government to promote Malaysia as key tourist destination.

While their efforts are certainly commendable, I feel that there is area for improvement. I say this because we have not tapped in the true marketing potential of Malaysia. For instance, why do we not promote the fact that Malaysia has the biggest thriving piracy industry in the world? Every year, piracy saves millions of consumers millions of ringgit by providing a cheap and readily available alternative to entertainment, be it Hollywood movies, or the latest Sony Playstation game. Thus with the money saved, Malaysian consumers have more buying power for their ringgit, and this in turn will boost the flow of ringgit within the nation and strengthen the ringgit.

Let’s not be secretive of the obvious fact that tourists stand to benefit from piracy. An original DVD in a country like Ireland, for example will cost roughly 20 Euros, which after conversion is equivalent to about RM 92.The apek who has bad breath and wears a gold chain with a dragon-shaped pendant at Sungai Wang Plaza sells the pirated versions of the same DVD containing the exact same content at the exact same quality for RM 15,and sometimes RM10 if you bargain well and wear a spaghetti strap. This means that the Irish person can potentially buy 8 more DVDs for the same amount of money back in Ireland. If you are a pampered rich momma’s boy and don’t understand the implication, this means that the foreign consumer will save. A. Lot. Of. Money.

Since piracy is already a huge problem which doesn’t seem to be solved soon, I say let’s make the most out of it and exploit the opportunity for improving our tourism industry. As they say, the Chinese have the same word for ‘crisis’ and ‘opportunity to make money’. My vision for the future is seeing tourists shipping back huge containers of pirated stuff back to their country and starting their own business there. Think about it. Not only will this also increase business for our local shipping companies but all peripheral industries like CD and DVD manufacturers as well as companies who produce digital-copying hardware and software will stand to gain from this and thus increasing also the government’s revenue through tax. It’s WIN-WIN! Think about it,open your minds!

For many years now, the government has tried to track down the hidden warehouses and clandestine factories which produce thousands upon thousands of pirated software and entertainment media. While the efforts of the police are commendable,I think we are overlooking a very obvious fact. Have you ever thought of the technology these pirates have in their hands? Let’s ponder about it for a moment. There are multinational conglomerates worth billions of dollars which manufacture their product, be it a CD album or a DVD movie, and sell them at high prices which though affordable by the average consumer, is greatly annoying. What does this mean?

This means that the technology that they use to manufacture their product gives rise to such high costs that they have to sell at high prices in order to make a profit. But wait a minute, what about the pirates in Malaysia? They sell their products at absurdly low prices. For instance ,an original CD album will cost around RM 30 to RM 40.But a pirated one only costs RM 5 to RM 10!If you follow closely, this means that the pirates, through their R & D department have come up with a way to produce CDs at a much lower cost ,thus enabling them to sell at low prices and effectively compete with the international conglomerates.

It is so obvious and yet we have missed it all this while! So, my proposal is this. Instead of cracking down their operation and arresting them, let’s have an open dialogue and sign an agreement with them which will result in the government gaining the secrets of their technology in exchange for freedom to conduct their operations. Once we do that, we immediately obtain an international patent and then market the technology internationally. What will result? Obviously international brands will flock to purchase our patent because it lowers their costs. This means that whatever they choose to produce and sell using our technology, we stand to gain a profit from it! I am not much of a businessman, but realistically, if we earn 1% of every CD sold by a recording label like EMI or from every game sold by Sony, taking into account that they earn BILLIONS per annum, by the end of the fiscal year, we will be flying around in our private jets because the tyres in our Ferraris are flattened from ferrying our rich fat butts from sauna to sauna.T he opportunity is there, let’s go for it.

If we follow through with the above plan,then it also makes sense to legalize piracy. This will mean that those interested in selling pirated media will have to register their business as a legitimate one. Any fool will rather be legitimate and pay a one time nominal registration fee than running away from the authorities all his career Again, the government will gain through taxation from the income of those businesses.

Another problem which I wish to address is porn, a taboo of our society. Pornographic material is now available everywhere and too readily so, if I may add. As a society,we cannot stop the influx of pornographic material in our black markets ,for that is too big a logistical problem. The Internet is being perceived these days as an information superhighway but in reality,it is a superhighway of porn.

However, we can subtly change the perception of porn in its’ consumers, mainly men and a minority of very liberal women. Before I go further, let’s review a famous psychological experiment done by a dude name Pavlov.

For the unfamiliar,Pavlov conducted an experiment which involved conditioning a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell.This he did by sounding a bell near the dog every time before he fed it..This Pavlov continued many times over. After an extended period of similar repetitions, the dog became ‘conditioned’ to salivate whenever he heard the bell, and whether or not food followed thereafter was of no consequence to the initial salivation.

So how do we use the phenomenon of conditioning to our favour? First let us ponder for a moment our education system. Have you ever felt like just dozing off, falling into a coma or dying when you were in a classroom or lecture theatre and your teacher or lecturer was, with all due respect,as boring as trying to watch a baby worm grow to adulthood? I mean sure, he could be a brilliant academician who writes textbooks and research papers on his subject of teaching, but there is not just a line between a brilliant person and a good instructor ,there is an entire Great Wall of China with armed sentries every hundred feet.

I had a teacher once who had a voice so monotonous you could record it and sell it as a cure for insomnia and you would be a billionaire by tomorrow. There was absolutely NO DIFFERENCE in her tone. Whether giving an instruction or giving birth, she sounded exactly the same. You could drink an entire gallon of coffee and shoot yourself with amphetamines that morning, the moment you sat through half an hour of periodical tables and chemical equations with her ,you would be half dead. She was so bad, she could bore an unwanted foetus to self-abort .There was no subject on earth that she could make interesting. Not even porn.

Aha, you see where I am going now. In order to psychologically condition men of porn, why don’t we get boring teachers like her to star in porn movies which will absolutely bore men to deat….whoa..wait wait..let me backtrack here. Sorry about that.

Aha, you see where I am going now. In order to psychologically condition men of porn, why don’t we get boring teachers like her to teach the subject of Sex Education and Pornography ( SEP) to boys at an early age? Teachers will be encouraged to use as many visual and multimedia aids as possible to enhance the conditioning effect. After 12 years of school learning various facts, figures, graphs, equations and writing essays, answering multiple-choice-questions in pornography exams, men will come to regard porn the same way many regard the subjects they were taught at school. A forgotten, tiresome, pointless and obsolete subject, like Add Maths and Moral Studies. A subject that is connected to the memories of fighting hard not to fall asleep and of watching pictures of naked ladies through heavy eyelids and tears of boredom. The result is of course,men being conditioned to immediately spurn pornography for after years and years of laborious repetitions of pointless exams and criminally boring teachers, they become bored of pornography. Success!

I will like to end my article here with a disclaimer : This has been for entertainment and comedy purposes only.I do not for a single moment support piracy. To prove this, I will set up a website promoting anti-piracy propaganda. The website will be filled with awesome effects and HTML produced by software I bought from Imbi Plaza. I also do not support pornography, and have endeavoured to stem the influence of such materials by confiscating all my friends’ stashes of porn and safekeeping them in my house.

Okay seriously, I do not support piracy. Belilah Ori. Buy Original. And as for porn, let’s be grown up and avoid it, for it demeans women. And I have a girlfriend .I love you Komella! But I do want to point out that although this article has been produced just for my own personal amusement and largely composed of words and sentences shooting out from my arse, I have one question for you.

Isn’t it scary that it actually makes some sense?

Life in UCD

As the book I wrote is about my first year in University College Dublin,Ireland, perhaps it is fitting also that I introduce to you a video of what life was like in Dublin. Everytime I watch this, I am reminded of why I always say the years in Dublin were the best ones of my life