Yes, the title is misspelled, but on purpose, it’s too late at night (early in the morning) to figure out how to better make the alliteration work. And I do so adore amiable alliteration action.

I scanned the content of my 1mpx wonder phone today and realised I’ve been taking quite a number of food-related shots. So this post is dedicated to the freaky food fexperiences that I had around Kota Kinabalu recently.

Freaky Fish Fotos

I was browsing for nothing in particular at the Giant at City Mall the other day when I walked passed the fresh fish section and I swear this fish said “psssst”. I turned around looked square into a fish face. He didn’t blink. I didn’t blink. We stood there for a good 60 second show down. But finally I had to blink - besides, it’s a fish - even if it wasn’t dead and just a head, it still would have won (because fish have no… ah, never mind). I had a bit of gander to see what other colourful and wonderful sea-life the fish counter had, and there was plenty.

Sabah has some of the best dive sites in the world; Layang Layang, Sipadan, Mabul. But you won’t be seeing these fish there anymore. The head likely belonged to a barracuda and that’s a school of batfish - I’ve seen both types whilst diving and they were beautiful and alive, so it’s a little disconcerting seeing them like this. Fish is good for you, but I eat it pretending not to know how it’s caught or what it looks like before it arrives on my dinner table covered in a light and tangy soya sauce.

Bird Nest’s Drink

Light, refreshing, hits the spot when it’s chilled and the day is hot and it has a host of curative abilities. That being as it may, I just can’t see this product taking off anywhere else other than in Asia. Bird’s nest is a highly sought after commodity that sells for hundreds per gram. It’s hell difficult to obtain as it’s usually harvested from impossibly high cave roofs by people who literally risk life and limb to get what is essentially bird spit.

Bird nest, in this context, is the gooey saliva of a particular type of swift common in these parts of the world. The nest is built entirely out of their spit with the odd bit of feather, twig, leaf and a good dollop of bird shit. The nests are then plucked, cleaned and sold to gullible people who believe in its curative properties and ability to give rock solid erections - or was the rhino horn, or abalone, or turtle, or ginseng… I lose track.

And now you no longer have to cook up a soup and wait until dinner time to get your bird nest fix. Nope, simply crack open a cold one and instantly gratify your bird nest craving. Aaaah!

Magic Flavors

These biscuits are magic for various reason. Nothing other than magic would enable the biscuit to contain as many e-number preservatives, flavour enhancers, stabilisers, colorants and god-knows-what-else as it does. It can also magically induce virtual diabetes mellitus as it prompts a flood of insulin from the body to deal with the aforementioned. If you magically want to fall asleep due to low blood sugar, just chew one of these after you had a long day at work and only a small meal for lunch.

Micro Portions of Fatty Desserts - They’re doing you a favour!

This was one of those scary experiences that puts me off ala carte or menus without pictures. I was at a well known 5-star hotel, middle of the night, coffee and dessert and chose the cheese cake. Hmmm, cheese cake. And at RM 20 a pop I was expecting a decent portion - I mean, it’s a five star hotel, sure, so it’s expensive already, compared to a chunk of cheese cake I could get at Starbucks or Coffee Bean for RM12. When the plate arrived with crumbs on it and I was told that the crumbs were in fact the cheese cake, I heard the flushing of a toilet and my money kinking around the loo bowl on it’s way down.

But at least it was heavenly, divine and the best cheese cake I’ve ever had and certainly the king of cheese cakes in all of Kota Kinabalu, right? Right!? Er… no - it was disappointingly average.

Hantzel & Gretel - Quintessentially Christmas

In another 5-star hotel in a country far far away from you (but very near me), there once lived a wicked witch. The wicked witch lived in a ginger bread house, which was perfect. Perfect from a marketing perspective, because comes Christmas when they want to sell Christmas biscuits and cookies and stuff, what better than to build a ginger-bread house and sell ginger cookies and biscuits from the house. Never mind of course that Hantzel and Gretel had nothing to do with Christmas and that Santa Claus has nothing to do with ginger bread, or biscuits, save for the plateful that he shoves down his gullet at every other house where he delivers those damn presents.

But I digress. That’s it for this freakishly feisty food furore.

If you enjoyed this post, do subscribe to the 1Earth RSS feed!

Christmas is now really just around the corner. I was in a shopping centre yesterday and they were playing Christmas carols and was about to moan about how early they started to play carols this year when I realized it’s already the end of November.

Clearly, I’m panicked as I haven’t done any shopping yet. In fact, I haven’t even drawn up a list of who was naught and who was nice – Santa’s surely hovering with his pen above my own name on his list, ready to scratch me out for procrastinating.

So I’ve reverted to the easiest way I know – online shopping. But you wouldn’t want to take on the world of online shopping without being armed with a few coupon codes.

Being active is a priority at the moment as Flabby Gut and I have some co-exiting issues. I find boring sports tedious, so I thought I would encourage my friends to join me for something interesting. That’s how I happened upon a cool skateboarding and inline skate store called Blades and better yet, I found these Blades discount coupons, so I can chop the Christmas bill a bit.

Frisbee also features on my gut-busting schedule every Sunday and it’s getting serious. That of course means buying some sports gear to increase my (er… my friends’) performance (and to look good in lieu of skill). And for all my sports gear requirements, I found these Sports Authority coupons for shopping to my heart’s content.

Christmas is coming and my wallet and my body is going to be in good shape leaving me plenty of leeway to get stuffed with Christmas chow.

If you enjoyed this post, do subscribe to the 1Earth RSS feed!

I’m South African. You know, from that country that sits as far south as you can go on the African continent?

You laugh, but I once got talking to a girl while I was on a bus in Ilford, east of London and when I said I was from South Africa, she went pensively quiet before she looked up and asked “South Africa? Where’s that?”. As a sidebar and for the record, because I still get this question frighteningly often: lions do not roam freely in the streets of South African cities.

Anyway, I’m a South African who’s mother tongue is Afrikaans, and I’m white. That doesn’t make a me white, Afrikaans, South African racists bastard though. Ok, it does make me a white, Afrikaans, South African bastard, but that’s as much as I’ll give you. Also, bastard isn’t stereotypical of the country, but it is of the gender

Afrikaans, although it looks confusingly similar compared to African, should not be confused with it. Afrikaans is pronounced ‘ah-free-kaahn-ss‘. And it’s not a plural form, don’t let the ’s’ confuse you. It’s confusing for other reasons though as Afrikaans, the language, could include people from various ethnic origins. Black and brown, or coloured people (mixed origin I guess would be the PC term), can also be Afrikaans. They would refer to themselves as black, Afrikaans South Africans, for example, although I doubt that anybody does. But Afrikaans is not just a language, it could be a people too, although the majority of Afrikaners (’ah-free-kaahn-errs‘) happens to be white, Afrikaans doesn’t denote ethnicity.

Hardcore white (possibly racist) South Africans who happen to speak Afrikaans would possibly disagree with the following statement, but in my book, an Afrikaaner is any person who was born into a Afrikaans speaking household, cheers for the Springboks or Proteas and knows how to braai a steak on a grill alongside chicken wings, mielies and boerewors and can eat pap (porridge) for dinner with the aforementioned.

Anyway, Afrikaans, the language, was Dutch about 350 years ago. The Dutch frequented what is called Cape Town today, on their way to the East for trading spices. Back then when resources were plentiful, they set up shop to supply fresh fruit, vegetables and water to passing ships and never left. Thus, the Dutch they brought with them started a fork that over the next centuries would evolve and end up as Afrikaans.

Afrikaans speakers can still communicate with the Dutch from the Netherlands though, especially those from rural areas. I once met a random somebody on the Tube in London, who described themselves as Flemish, and we had a fluent, effortless conversation in two different languages that may as well have been the same. The Dutch from Amsterdam speak a modern Dutch, which is more difficult to follow. Besides, they speak it at a speed which makes it hard to tell one word from the next, never mind what language they’re speaking.

There was a point to this post… oh yes. So, I got talking to Julia about Mielies.

A Mielie (’me-lee‘) is a corn-on-the-cob. But who the hell wants to go around calling it corn-on-the-cob when you can describe it perfectly by saying Mielie. The obvious ease of use is why many people continue to live their lives referring to that thing of yellow things growing around a white thing as Mielie.

Julia recent read Nelson Mandela’s semi-autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. For reasons that I can’t phatom beyond the fact that an English South African (or worse, a non-South African) assisted the man in writing the book, Mielies are spelled Mealies.

Of course, I understand the reasoning behind wanting to spell it as Mealie, because phonetically it seems like it has to be right. And I will relent if somebody can prove that the word has been accepted into the English vocabulary and dictionary and adapted for ease of use within the language.

In Afrikaans (the language) ‘ie‘ is pronounced ‘ee’ and thus Mielie, is pronounced Mee-lee.

Now to make me a liar, you can scour the Internet and type mealie into every dictionary you can find and you’ll find an answer. Dictionary.com says it’s “an ear of corn“. What is an ear of corn? But I will stubbornly refuse to believe that mealie is the correct form of this word.

Of course, consult any Afrikaans Dictionary, and you will soon realise that Mielie is the dominant form, and as the word is Afrikaans in origin, that’s all I have to say about that.

Unless the additional research I’m going to do after this post proves me wrong, in which case this might be the second, or even third last thing I have to say about that.

If you enjoyed this post, do subscribe to the 1Earth RSS feed!

This next activity is a sensitive issue for Flabby Gut, but only because it’s exercise, which reduces his standing in society and he really doesn’t like that.

Frisbee has been a regular Sunday afternoon activity of a steadily growing group of Frisbee lovers for the last two months now. You might either remember Frisbee, or have heard of it, as that pre-war time child’s game that evolved into a sport somewhere in the 70’s, involving grandma’s pie tin that gets thrown about, but what has hit Kota Kinabalu, Sabah ain’t your grandma’s sport.

Ultimate Frisbee landed on the jungle bed of Sabah, Borneo when one fine day not too many moons ago, Ken Kassim sent out an email to a friend saying he wanted to get some Ultimate Frisbee going in Kota Kinabalu and Sabah. The times that we live in being what it is, viral marketing took it from there and that very first Sunday about 15 eager potential Frisbee fans showed up for Ken’s first demo.

The water-soaked and muddy field at the rugby slash football field in Tanjung Aru near Terminal Two of the KK International Airport was, and has been ever since, the venue for the Kota Kinabalu chapter of Ultimate Frisbee. Since that very first day we were hooked and bar the odd totally rained-out Sunday, Ultimate Frisbee has been played pretty much every Sunday since.

Yesterday was no exception, in fact, a beautiful Sunday afternoon with an unexpectedly dry field, considering the rainy week we had, saw the biggest turnout of Kota Kinabalu’s Ultimate Frisbee fans yet - we had near on 40 people, including families with little kids who came out to enjoy the great weather and opportunity to run around.

The premise of Ultimate Frisbee is fairly straight forward. Two teams, 7 aside, a field of roughly 70m long and 35m wide with two end-zones either side 20 meter deep. The game starts off with both teams in their respective end-zones. Team 1 throws the Frisbee to team 2 who then has to run it into their opposing end-zone. If you have the Frisee, you can’t move. You are allowed to pivot on one foot and have to throw to your team member within a count to ten. If your team reaches the end-zone, you score a point. If you drop the Frisbee, or if the other team intercepts it, if it’s slapped to the ground or if you don’t pass the Frisbee within the 10-count, it’s turn-over and the other team takes possession of the Frisbee.

The number one rule of Ultimate Frisbee, as Ken keeps on reminding us, is the Spirit of the Game. The main objective is to have fun and Ultimate Frisbee is self regulated. Even in tournaments there are no referees and it is up to players to call a foul, often on themselves. The second most important thing about Ultimate Frisbee is beer - but I’m usually way too wiped out after the games to join in for beer.

On average we play for at least two solid hours - not because we have to, but because we can’t help ourselves - the first bit of the afternoon is a warm-up before we get down to the loosely structured Frisbee games. Ken runs quick clinics every now and again, spending 10 minutes to teach us something about the more technical aspects of the game, be it strategy or technique - both of which we, as Frisbee novices, still struggle with a bit. It’s all in good fun though. During the game, whenever you tire, you simply swap with somebody ready and willing, standing on the sidelines waiting for their turn - but it’s often with reluctance that people come off the field.

Kota Kinabalu’s Ultimate Frisbee welcomes anyone of any gender. In fact, in Ultimate Frisbee Tournaments teams are usually made of 4 men and 3 women as a guide, but should at least consist of both male and female members. In our Sunday games the girls rule and often equal or outnumber the guys.

So, if you’re keen on playing Ultimate Frisbee with the rest of the Kota Kinabalu Frisbee fans, then do join us on the rugby field in Tanjung Aru near KK International Airport’s Terminal Two. We play ever Sunday from 4pm onwards - and we’ll be there, rain or no rain.

If you enjoyed this post, do subscribe to the 1Earth RSS feed!

A lot of attention has recently been given to bloggers who get paid to blog, especially in light of certain search engines going on the rampage and doing all sorts of not-so-nice stuff to those of us who make a living through blog advertising.

There is, however, a company who’s standing unshaken against such behemoths and is conducting business as usual. If you blog for money, then you’ll probably know that I’m referring to the guys from Smorty. I hooked up with them a few weeks ago through blogger friends of mine who blogs for money with them with great success and I thought I’d try out their system.

To advertise on blogs is a great resource for both advertisers and bloggers and Smorty bring’s the two together. The advertiser benefits through word of their product spreading and bloggers benefit because they get paid for their opinion, which is something we all do every time we write a post anyway - isn’t that the perfect job?

Their blogger dashboard is simple and straight forward, so there’s no guessing what to do and where to go to do it, which saves a lot of time when you’re going in, getting an assignment and getting on with the business of posting. Their grading system, although it includes the dreaded p-ranking system, doesn’t rely on it solely, but instead uses a propriety aggregate of information to determine the standing of your website and the value of offers you can apply for.

If you’re keen on blogging for money their definitely worth a try.

If you enjoyed this post, do subscribe to the 1Earth RSS feed!