Backdated entry
Hilarious article today in the papers. The headline - "Competition reveals students' atrocious English". Basically there was a local competition a while ago held amongst university and college art, design and architecture students, to submit ideas on how to "revitalize" Beach Street in Penang (i.e. come up with some architectural ideas on how to make it look a little less like the sh*thole it currently is). Anyway, the designs were great, but the accompanying text notes, as the article put it, "gave a shocking revelation of the poor standard of English among tertiary-level students". I'll let the article speak for itself:
One entry that describes Little India as "Litter India" and Esplanade as "Espanaid" proposes to "unity these three spots with Beach Street to form Pedestrian Mall", adding that "The Point is well treat to be a cultural center of races in Penang".
The entry entitled "Heritage Trial" said "Building de art' decorated with canopies extending out, increases the mobility of flow and walk able, tolerated with tourist.
"Traditional elements, arches and trishaw are largely rendering as streetscape tell derived crowd for crowded spots; requiring input from users and designer."
That didn't even make sense. But worse yet, there were some entries who were obviously trying to impress the judges with their "college-level" vocabulary...and, well, failed miserably:
The entry entitled "Antispace Rehabilitation" said that "Existing public space, streets and parking lots that presently dysfunctional and incompatible with their context can be transformed into viable open spaces".
The entry "Authenticity Within The City" said "these potentials will rebirth the area to a fascination destination of artistic, acoustic and touristic exploration".
"Artistic, acoustic and touristic exploration". That just cracks me up to bits. This is what comes of depriving two generations of Malaysians of the right to an English-medium education. Ladies and gentlemen, if you ever run a country, be sure not to make this mistake. See this site for more detail, if you really want.
In other news, I have sprained my ankle Quite Badly, on account of being kicked by Jun Linn while playing defense in a small football match at Bukit Kiara today. I might add that I did manage to stop him from scoring, but seeing as it's Jun Linn, that isn't really saying much :) I also got kicked a bit by Rutvik, Nigel and Han Ping...and two of them were actually on my team. That's football for you. Speaking of which, Man United plays Blackburn tonight. Not that anyone cares. From what I've read of previous comments, I don't think I have many footie fans here on idleThinK :)
NB: I backdated this post because I wrote it offline, came online and discovered idleThinK's downtime announcement, so actually it was written yesterday (Saturday) and posted today (Sunday). So it isn't too ethical by my normal standards of blogging, but hey.