RIFLE RANGE BOY

Conspiracy Theory (1997) Director: Richard Donner In the pre-internet era, Malaysian coffee shops were fertile grounds for conspiracy theories. At a time when all news was coming out in print and the airwaves were tightly controlled, information was a priced commodity. Everyone had their version of what was going on beyond the iron curtain of bureaucracy, of what was reported and what was not.  Surprisingly, at least in Malaysia, all the coffee shop banter that would initially be denied by the powers that be will turn out to be true. Investigational journalism is better done by the single cup of coffee purchaser sitting in the shop the whole day than by people trained and paid to do the reporting job.  In the infancy age of the internet, in the early 1990s, internet buffs scrambled to be on the mailing list of MGG Pillai's discussion forum, Sang Kancil. His brand of hard-hitting fire brand exposè journalism excited young minds who were quite fed up with paternalistic informati...

Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife (2023) Documentary Perhaps the media is the one that needs to take the blame. It may be people's fascination with the high life and their gullibility. Or the society's rules on the confidentiality of information or the restriction. Some have perfected the art of staying in the limelight to awe others with their stories so tall that they cannot be refuted. These do not make sense, but watching Dr Paolo Macchiarini's shenanigans, they would.  Dr Macchiarini is an Italian maverick surgeon employed at  Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, between 2010 and 2013. With a long, impressive CV, including a stint as a visiting Professor at University College London and multiple revolutionary discoveries in regenerative medicine in Russia, he hit the headlines performing groundbreaking trachea replacement surgery using a plastic mould and stem cell technology.  At the height of his success, he meets journalist Benita Alexander. She is swep...

Crime Scene: The Vanishing at Cecil Hotel (S1 E1-4; 2021) Netflix Docu-series. This case shows how information in the wrong hands can create a lot of unnecessary tension and can sometimes be potentially dangerous. With the ease of access to an ocean of information literally at their fingertips, everyone goes around with a halo thinking that they are better than the professionals who spent half their lifetime learning and doing the things they are trained to do. In 2013, a 22-year-old Canadian girl, Elisa Lam, goes missing in Los Angeles (LA), where she went for a short holiday all by herself. The police were alerted when the girl failed to call home daily as promised. Three days into the investigation but the police were at a dead end. They knew she stayed in Cecil Hotel, and the hotel had a CCTV recording of her acting bizarrely as she was entering a lift. Even the sniffer dog could not locate her. All investigations revealed was that she had a personal blog on Tumblr, where she pour...

Freakonomics (2005) Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden Side of Everything The conventional thinking is that economists are nerds who fancy numbers, statistics and balancing GDPs and expenditures. Now, we have come to realise that economics is more than statistics. Statistics are the greatest lies invented by mankind. It can be made to work for either side of the fence if you know how. The same numbers can be used to assert both sides of the argument if you know how. That is the reason for the frenzy of data in the 21st century. Information is knowledge. The authors try to freak us out with numbers that baffle us with information that actually questions whether our supposedly scientific approach to solving our day to day problem is indeed appropriate. For a starter, they suggest that the reason for the reduction in crime in the 1990s is not because of great policing, increasing prisons or use of resources to curb crime but instea...

Looks like a new form of parenting has crept into our society. The little one, usually a toddler would be given sort of of a running commentary of all the things that go around him. Bring him to a checkout counter, while the mother is busy unloading the trolley of food stuff, the father would be busy narrating what is being done and how the transaction is recorded, calculated and so forth. At the obstetrician's office, whilst having the good doctor examine the yet-to-be-born addition to family, father does his duty again. He explains to the confused toddler of the various anatomical parts of his offspring as seen on the ultrasound screen much to the annoyance of the attending obstetrician. The doctor who is still living suspended in the good old time where children were seen and not heard,  seriously wonders whether the child really understands what in heaven's name is going on, but the father's duty has to go on! He is waiting for the son to ask the father, "Who ...

Thanks SK for input! Me wanna go to Norway for continuing education ... Them Moscovite dogs surely are smarter than me ! eeeerie ! remember the movie "Final Destination" ?? ... nope, not applicable in Malaysia nor China : ... can prisoners be deported to Netherlands then ? ... naaah ! I won't be joining the queue to try poop-meat anytime soon ... : ... Wow ! I would certainly be the DEARly departed .. ... no wonder ... betcha I would made trillions if I could bottle it & sell it ... :) so sad ... why did the mama elephant reject / kick the baby ? : ... there you go - never judge a banana by its skin ... - fatal attraction of the vehicular kind - that's why pandas are called China's national treasures ... - so what is the message - don't stop generating rubbish ? T, this was the size of our Pekingese, Mimi's puppies...