When the authorities bullshit us.

Last Sunday, 5th of May, 2013 was election day. It was a day I looked forward to. You know why? I just had to know the truth.

You see, earlier voters from the army and police had found the so-called indelible ink not as claimed. According to someone, the ink came off easily when washed. Pictures were seen. Can they be believed? Then, the Election Commission admitted that it was true but explained that it was due to one of the officers on duty being too nervous and had forgotten to shake the bottle before using the ink. Okay, nothing wrong with the ink. Merely, inefficiency of a worker.

I was an art teacher who has used the Indian ink for years to teach my students manuscript writing. The ink is water-proof and it is the best for answering the SPM (the name of the examination at the end of secondary school learning) art paper. It is really indelible and world have your pretty finger looking ugly for at least a few days, So, my students are always very careful with them.

So, it was that at half past eight I was at the voting center to do my duty as a citizen to choose the best possible leaders for my country. I went into a classroom (A school has been chosen as the venue for voting.) and when they found my name, it was read out and one lady painted my finger with a thick ink. Since it is so thick, it must have been well shaken. It did look like it could stay on my finger for a long, long time. I was given a tissue to dry it so that the ink would not smudge my ballot papers and spoil my vote. My marked ballot papers went safely into the ballot boxes, one for state seats and the other for parliamentary seats.

With the ink dried on my finger, I waved to some friends whom I met before taking a slow walk home.
Upon reaching home, I waited for half an hour before I washed my hands with soap and ......fantastic as it may seem the ink came off! What soap was that? Was that a wonder soap? Where did it come from? Oh, no! It may be wonderful for removing ink stains which the election commissioner claims will stick for at least seven days but what can it do to my skin? But, no. It was just an ordinary soap.

Ah! My girlfriends will certainly be happy as it will not blacken their beautiful hands for seven lonely days. So, I phoned a few of them but they were not surprised. Some of them had beaten me to it. Their fingers were already clean even earlier. And that was the cheerful part of this episode.

However, from what I have read, the authorities concerned had spent millions of our country's money purchasing inferior ink.To make the citizens happy with the heavy expenditure, they claim it was ink good enough to stain my girlfriends' fingers for seven days. None of them are going to appear in front of me for seven lonely days. But, it was all bullshit.

To cover up their wrongs, they give other excuses. After all, they have a magnifying glass to look for even a little stain left behind. And it cannot be too indelible, otherwise it is not halal.

Folks, this is what my dictionary inform me:
  indelible    /In"del.I.bl=/ adjective
    1    describes a mark or substance that is impossible to remove by washing or in any other way.

When you get such bullshit from a high ranking officer, what would the law do? I wonder.

My lovely females.

The betta splendens seen in the video above are females of a cross between a striped multicoloured Indonesian double-tail male and and a Dumbo (super big-ears) female. The siblings have so many variety of colours. And they are so active!
I give them enough food to ensure that there is no nibbling of fins. They are certainly lovely and a delight to watch. So, I have uploaded them to share with anyone who would like to watch. Well, enjoy!

How some friends stopped smoking.

April 21st 2013 is a day when three classmates of mine came to Sungai Petani to visit me. We had lunch at Ma Brown's and then we looked up another Penang Free School classmate who told us to meet hin at SP Club. We had a long talk about those good old day as well as what each of us had been doing.

One of usfound out that he was the only one among us still smoking. I was the only one who had never taken up the habit. I had tried to see how it felt like but it never appealed to me and I never liked it. However, the others did allow it to become a habit. So, they were telling David who wants to give it up how it should be done.

Richard Quah who came all the way from Australia told us how he did it by just telling himself he would stop. That was it and he did stop. Of course, he went through some withdrawal symptoms but he managed to overcome the problem. Then after about two years, he met some old friends and was offered a cigarette. Thinking that he was safe from cigarettes, he took a puff and got stuck with it for the next one year. Then, he told himself that that was enough of smoking and he did stop immediately although the same nasty withdrawal symptoms did wreak his a week or so of his life. The point is that he did it and he has been free from cigarettes since then. Like me, he is sixty six years old.

After hearing Richard's story, Tai told us that was also exactly how he stopped from smoking. For him, it was a health reason. But stop it, he did with the same method as Richard's. However, he told us the urge can easily return whenever he comes across people smoking nearby or an advertisement with someone puffing on the screen. Still, he has not been on cigarettes for more than three years.

Well, hope their experience can be of help to soneone who happens to come here.

A beautiful dumbo betta.

Here is another beautiful fish I wish to share with all of you. It is more towards the purple colour with places more red than purple.

It is so lively as you can see from the video I have uploaded for everyone to enjoy. And those huge pectorals are so clearly obvious due to its size and whiteness. I really wish to have it in my blog as I myself would soon lose the opportunity to appreciate its beauty when I have to sell it.

It is slightly past three months old now and with the more than hundred fish I have, I have to let some go. Furthermore, the more I breed these lovely betta splendens the more I hope to achieve with them. And to be able to do that I have to continue breeding them even though space constraints and time limit do not allow me such a pleasure. Well, I will just have to go the distance and find out how far I can reach.

In the meantime it is my pride and pleasure to enjoy my beauties with all of you. Looking at them, I have no alternative but to realise what a wonderfully beautiful world ours is.

One of my best Dumbo.

This dumbo betta is a favourite of mine as its mustard colour and extremely big pectorals are beautiful. This vieo was made when it was about three months old.

He is among a batch of very beautiful dumbos that I bred. Many of them have big dumbo pectorals while some have merely big ears. The big ears, although their pectorals are smaller, are just as lovely. I have sold a good number of them to Malaysians only as despite having been in this fish hobby for a long time, I have not thought of selling them to other countries. As such, I lack the knowledge of exporting fish. However, I think it is time I learn to do so. It would be my pleasure to share with many more people this beautifully coloured fish. So, there is still much to learn.

In fact, there was this person from Sabah who wanted some dumbos. The couriers were reluctant as it would involve having to put them on a plane.But then, I had known of a person who worked for an exporter regularly sending discus fish to other parts of the world. So what is the difference? Is it only possible to export or send fish by plane through a company? Are individuals discouraged from doing so? Never mind, I will seek for the answers to overcome this minor problem.

I have sold some of my fish to hobbyists in Peninsula Malaysia through 'Mudah.com", sending those who asked for them through the courier services available.

With this hobby taking up a lot of my time, I have not been able to do much sharing in my blog lately. However, I hope to do more as things settle to a more manageable pace.

My Dumbo bettas

Two months ago, I bred my large dumbo bettas. They are lovely with giant sized 'ears' or pectorals. And with excitement I waited for the dumbos' embrace. Oh, so romantic are these fish! Yes, they embraced long and passionately till the eggs emerged from the female. Almost as if drained of their emotional energy, listlssly, they loosened their embrace and each of them sank slowly. However, before their bodies reached the bottom of the tank, they revived and looked around for their precious eggs, took the eggs up in their mouth to place them in their bubble nest.

Again and again, they locked each other in their arms, or rather their bodies. as passionate as any two lovers can be. Eventually, exhausted, they stopped. Then, with fatherly concern over the safety of the eggs, the male told his lover to move off from the nest, fearful of the now hungry female devouring the eggs. So, he sent her off to a corner of the tank while he continued with the task of picking up every egg at the bottom.
I instantly sprang to the aid of the male as well as the female. For the male, it was to remove the fear that the female may return to eat the eggs. For the female, I removed her to ensure her safety from an angry male parent.
For the next three days, usually without food, the male has to work constantly, 24 hours a day, to make sure that any egg that falls out of its bubble will be cleaned and taken back to the safety of its bubble. And on the third day, the male is rewarded with tiny little fry darting out from their nest in search of food. Once the fry can swim in search of food, the male should be removed for the safety of the fry. However, there have been times when the male left with the fry did not eat or kill them.
While I am writing this, there may be some who know not what a betta is. It is a Siamese fighting fish. What is a Dumbo fighting fish? Well, it is a fighting fish which has giant pectorals. And so, some people call them 'big ears'.    

 And now the fry of my first batch of Dumbo bettas are more than two months old. They are mostly of good quality with huge pectorals. Below is an example of my first batch of Dumbos. Since I have a big number of them I am selling them to other hobbyist. And all of them are surprised at the size of the pectorals. Well, take a look. 

Let us take a look at some of my Dumbos.

Fish Breeding: Bettas

Since I was a teenager, perhaps a little younger, I have been interested in fish. I have been keen at observing their behaviour, the differences among the males and the females and the different ways of breeding. It has held my interest all the years and today with even more time to enjoy myself, I have gone more deeply into the hobby.

Although I have bred fish as a teenager, caught my first wild betta splendens in a paddy field at my uncle's house in Bukit Besar near the little town of Kota Serang Semut approximately ten kilometres from Alor Setar in Kedah, and saw and bought  my first pair of crown tail betta in the 1990s , I found it difficult to breed the fish then.

Looking back I must have thrown away minute fry so many times. Each time I saw the two fish, male and female, embrace, pick up their eggs to have them placed into the bubbles that comprise their nest, remove the female when it was driven away from the nest by the male to protect the eggs from being eaten by it.Then there was the waiting period which ended a few days later with the bubbles more or less gone but my eyes saw not the fry in the water. No fry means failure and so the water was removed, the tank cleaned and another attempt was made.

Failure did not deter me from going on. I was not a total failure at breeding, as I was already a very successful discus breeder, selling my young discus from home. (Today, I am still breeding discus although there is hardly any demand. I now have more than a hundred 3cm line-bred blue discus.) However, the guppy seems to have such great demand that I soon had red flamingos, metallic dragonhead, red glass and blue glass guppies. Since they are live-breeders, they were, of course, so easy to breed.

In fact, the number of guppies increased at such a tremendous rate, I had to buy three large fibre-glass tanks to breed just the flamingos. The joy of successfully achieving better colours through line-breeding was so great that I went on to the metallic dragonheads, hoping to create bigger and better coloured fish. Eventually, another three even bigger, seven feet length, fibre-glass tanks had to be bought.

Of course, my breeding of the bettas continued, breeding plakats, halfmoons, crown-tails and the latest, the dumbos (big-ears). Well, that's all for now. I will gradually introduce them to you.