Engel-Cox Organization

Now that I'm a veteran expat in Malaysia, I thought I would share a few things I've learned in the past year and a half. These are applicable for those expats coming from the U.S.; your mileage may vary if you are relocating here from other countries.

• Malaysia pharmacies carry Panadol for pain relief and Actival for heartburn. I found both poor substitutes for aspirin/Advil and Tum/Rolaids. If there are other over-the-counter drugs that you are partial to, you might want to put a year's supply of that in your luggage. On the other hand, obtaining prescription drugs isn't as much of a problem, although the name may not be the same as what you received in the U.S.


• Transformers should be bought and brought for any U.S. appliance you are bringing with you that can't handle the 220 voltage. Note that some appliances draw a lot of watts when they start up, so the watt requirement for your transformer should be double the amount listed for the appliance(s) you expect to connect to it. (Converters for two-prong U.S. cords to three-prong outlets are also very useful.)


• Live close to what is important to you. If you don't like to sit in traffic, live close to your work. If you want to be able to walk home from any number of restaurants, live in an apartment downtown. If it's important to you that your kids be close to their school, live close to it. Because the traffic is BAD. New York, L.A., Washington bad. We've been stuck in jams from 1 hour to 3 hours. Be prepared.


• Things will mildew here, especially stuff that you sweat on. Think: hat bands, leather shoes, gloves, armrests of furniture. Things also melt and collect moisture here. Soggy Rolaids and melted zinc lozenges are tough to stomach. Bring lots of ziplocs and dessicant packs (food-grade for things you plan to ingest).


• Internet speed is slow. My wife explains it thusly, "You never really understand the concept of the digital divide until you are on the other side." This is not something you can spend more money to get faster access (i.e., the U.S. model)--it's an infrastructure problem emerging from the state-owned telephony monopoly. So, if there's something that you need Internet speed for, think of what your alternatives might be. Also, note that many internet services don't work here because of copyright issues: Pandora, Roku, Hulu, etc.


• You can't have enough light-weight clothes for this climate. In the last year and a half, my casual clothing collection has blossomed with more shorts and sleeveless shirts than I have ever owned in my life.


• There are two things that I know of that are much more expensive in Malaysia than in the U.S.: automobiles and alcohol. The solution for the auto is to either live without (taxis are cheap here) or buy local (if you can live with the safety and reliability issues for the locally produced cars). Your alcohol solution is to always remember to buy a bottle per person from the duty free, and make sure that all your out-of-country visitors do the same. I never understood the point of duty free when I lived in the U.S. In Malaysia, a 1-liter bottle of gin from duty free is Rm66 while a fifth of gin is Rm120 in the store. Also, if you're partial to a certain brand of liquor, pack it in your suitcase (sealed within a ziplock and surrounded by bubble wrap).


• Don't ship batteries, and remember to remove batteries from all the appliances in your sea shipment. Trust me. Battery leakage is ugly.

The lead off track of this album by Rush, "The Spirit of Radio," was written for and about a Canadian radio station, and it perfectly captures a moment in radio history, between the payola of the 60s and the corporate conglomerates of the 90s. For those of us who grew up listening to radio in that period, the tune is bittersweet, especially the prescient ending wherein Neal Peart rewrites Simon and Garfunkel's lyrics from "The Sound of Silence" to lambast the emerging profit-only centered radio programming. It's a strong statement and song, and one of Rush's best singles (it may even have been released as a single, which would have been unusual for Rush).

Permanent Waves is the first album that adds synthesizers to their three main instruments of guitar, bass and drums. Subsequent albums would increasingly feature the use of synthesizers, but it is here where Lee began to use them for more than atmospheric effect; there's an occasional solo as well as background melody/harmony provided by synth here. There are still remnants of the excesses of previous Rush albums present here, with two songs extending over 7 minutes. All of the songs are self-contained (rather than multi-part suites), however. Peart's lyrics reflect his literary aspirations; some people, like me, find them intelligent; detractors find them pretentious. "Freewill" puts forward a basic philosophical concept across in 5 minutes (not deciding to choose something is still making a choice), while "Natural Science" uses biology (tide pools) to illustrate how humans can't see the bigger picture.

But this is still Rush, with many time/key changes contained in each song, syncopation plays between bass and drums, and some of the best coordinated playing of the time. There's not a dud song on this album, although the long ones do seem to go on a little more than you expect them to. This would be resolved in their next, and best, album, Moving Pictures.

On our way back to Malaysia from the U.S., we stopped off at Amsterdam for three days, including New Year's Eve. It wasn't necessarily a planned trip, but the fortunate occurrence of a flight routing and timing that enabled us to do so without increasing the cost of the plane ticket. Since I hadn't ever been to Amsterdam, and J hadn't been there since she was 12, it proved perfect.

We stayed in the heart of the city at the Hotel Estheria, which was a fairly impressive boutique hotel that was still family owned. We weren't in the smallest room, but not by much--it reminded me of the rooms we used to get in New York, where the bed takes up the majority of the floor space. Since you're just in a hotel to sleep, it makes sense, but the cramped quarters makes it somewhat difficult to access your luggage, not to mention increasing your proximity to the folks next door. Overall, though, we were happy with the Hotel, except for the afternoon when we returned to find a note hanging with our key that basically accused us of smoking in the room. Since we weren't even visiting smoking establishments, we were dumbfounded, but suspect that it was the room next door and the maid misreported the number.

It was cold (snowy, even, which natives reported as unusual), so most of our pursuits were indoors. We visited the Rijksmuseum, which housed paintings by Rembrandt and his contemporaries. The museum is in the final stages of a remodel, so many sections were closed off. We were able to see everything in around three hours. After that, we headed to the Van Gogh museum, which was much more crowded, especially in the summary highlights on the first floor. The crowding was exacerbated by the now ubiquitous audio tour crowd. Since nearly every painting on the first floor had audio commentary, and once you pay for the dang thing, you're going to use it, the headphone gang would simply stand gaping in front of painting after painting, hindering the natural progress. It's kind of like getting caught behind a school group where each kid has to mouth the words of the informational plaque hanging beside the art. Thankfully, the upper floors, which showed Van Gogh's development as an artist by exhibiting a fairly large percentage of his output, wasn't as crowded, and the special exhibit on Alfred Stevens nearly empty. The next day, we got up early and stood in line for the Anne Frank House for thirty minutes before gaining entry. I had never read the book, although I knew most of the salient details of Anne Frank's life, but I found the way they had turned the house into a museum very affecting and powerful, like a small version of D.C.'s Holocaust museum, and about as sad. The special exhibit when we visited was an interactive survey of museum visitors about various freedoms (privacy, speech, etc.).

A brief note for anyone going to Amsterdam: buy your museum tickets online. We were able to do so for the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh, but the Anne Frank House had already sold out. For the ones that we had e-tickets for, we were able to skip some fairly long lines (on the order of an hour or more in the cold).

We spent a lot of time walking around the city. Yes, we walked through the red light district and saw the legendary windows with their wares. I was surprised because I thought the "windows" would be on the second floor with the women half-naked gesturing you to come up and visit them sometime, but instead they are more like plate glass doors to the street, with the ladies sitting on stools on the other side in their lingerie. The other side of Amsterdam's famous tolerance for vice was mainly contained in establishments labeled "coffeeshops," but which instead of coffee featured "Dutch gold," the locally grown weed. You didn't have to see a sign for these, as they were pretty obvious from the smells that emerged from the occasionally opened door. Amsterdam's architecture was also impressive, but the general weather conditions led us to a fairly hurried walk and we didn't linger much.

Our other major indoor activity was eating and drinking. People had told us that Amsterdam wasn't known for its food, and I'll have to agree; nothing was horribly bad, but nothing was that wonderful either. Our best meal was on New Year's Eve, at the Casa di David, where we were able to get a reservation the day before for 5:30pm, and we were happy about that. Seems that restaurants in Amsterdam pay their servers on salary, and really had no desire to max out their seatings on such a popular eating out evening. Casa di David provided us with excellent service and some nice bruschetta (zucchini and truffles) and salads, with decent pastas. Other meals didn't pan out so well: the best thing about the rifstaafl (an Indonesian rice table, one of the imports of the Dutch trading past) was our conversation with the Malaysian waiter who had lived in Amsterdam for 40 years, while our one traditional Dutch meal was notably only for the cold fish appetizer.

On the drinking side, we had much better luck. One night found us drinking three different types of jenever with a dubblebock at a bar popular with the university set, while we found a jenever tasting room on New Year's Eve that proved fantastic, with some great conversations with both the bartenders and the patrons about cocktails and Amsterdam. I also got to visit the Bols Experience, where you could test your olfactory senses in a room filled with bottles of their fruit and herbal liqueurs attached to bulbs that wafted the aroma to your nose (see picture below). The conversation with the bartender there was also nice, and the desk staff was very friendly.

After the early dinner and our visit to the jenever tasting room, we hung out in our hotel room and watched a Lewis Black comedy special until minutes before the New Year's, where we re-bundled up and hit the roads to enjoy the fireworks. Our first indication that something wasn't the same as elsewhere was the folks from the hotel next door who had a string of orange firecrackers that had to be nearly nine feet long. Once the time arrived, fireworks began to be set off from everywhere in the city. While there may have been organized fireworks from certain spots (one of which we had seen being setup near the Westerkirk earlier in the day), every neighborhood seemed to have a group that had spent quite a lot of euros on fireworks and were doing their individual shows on the bridges. We walked from bridge to bridge, enjoying the shows. On one, the group had built their own bonfire in the middle of the street. The fireworks went on for quite some time--we returned to our room at 1am, but I could still hear fireworks going off before I finally got to sleep around 2am.

Overall, we had a great time in Amsterdam, and three days seemed to be the right amount of time for the city itself. We wish we could have spent some time in the rest of the Netherlands, but that will have to wait until some future trip.

At the end of every year for the last several years, we write a letter to send out to family and friends updating them on our lives. Since we never do anything quite normal, each letter is written in a different style, typically related to something that had happened in the year. Here's an archive of past letters.

• 2009: the year considered as a compilation of Facebook status updates
• 2008: the year considered as just another "boring" Christmas Letter
• 2007: the year considered simply (annotated)
• 2006: the year considered as a CD review (based on allmusic.com)
• 2005: the year considered as a cocktail menu
• 2004: the year considered as a series of unfortunate events (homage to Lemony Snicket)
• 2003: the year considered as entries in a blog
• 2002: the year considered as a photo comic
• 2001: the year my muse gave up
• 2000: the year considered as a Supreme Court Decision
• 1999: the year considered as a writing assignment in a college course

At some point in the development of a writer, you have to stop reading and start writing. Many writers find it difficult to write in their own style if they are simultaneously reading something very stylistic, as most writers are mimics--a thing that comes in quite handy when you are trying to write about characters very unlike you, but awkward in the case I'm describing where you unconsciously start copying another writer's style. This isn't confined to writers, of course, as musicians, painters, and most likely artists of any other stripe find that to create their own original work, they have to isolate themselves so that the influences aren't quite so immediate.

Which makes it quite difficult for writers to work certain jobs, the worst being that of book critic or reviewer. Lev Grossman is the book critic for the news magazine, Time, and this is his second novel. I didn't read his first, Codex, but glancing at it recently in the bookstore, it was obviously marketed to the same folks who enjoyed the Dan Brown books (I can't say it's deriviative of Brown, as I didn't read the thing, as I said). This one, The Magicians, is very obviously a deriviative of the Harry Potter books crossed with C.S. Lewis's Narnia, and I might have dismissed it offhand if I hadn't seen some comments from people whose opinion I trust that said it was worthwhile. While they mentioned that it was "Harry Potter for adults," they noted that it transcended its source material.

Rather than transcend, I think The Magicians is actually a meta-fictional commentary on its influences, while retaining enough of an interesting story line that if you don't care about thinking in such ways, you don't have to. Grossman clearly takes on themes that Rowling avoided in her books, including much more believable turns on alienation and sexuality. There's also an implied criticism of C.S. Lewis's simplistic moralistic and structured adventures, and a devil of a villain that comes close to being original except that I think I've seen all of his special effects in horror/fantasy movies of the last decade.

I enjoyed the book quite a lot, but I would hesitate to suggest it to lovers of either of its major influences if they can't stand a bit of criticism, which seems appropriate in context, given Grossman's day job.

This year, to say goodbye to the previous year, our annual letter was compiled from a selection of status updates over 2009 from Facebook. It was a cheap and easy way to create the letter, but I think it also reflects just how powerful Facebook has become. Medley noted the other day that she felt dirty when she used the Facebook interface to send a message to someone (as opposed to regular email), and I agree, but after dealing with 10+ years of increasing spam in our email boxes that reduce the chance that a message to someone will actually appear in their inbox and be recognized as an actual message, the Facebook interface becomes a godsend.

(You can check out a bunch of the past year-end letters on this page, which also describes the theme for each.)

And since it's the start of the new year, a summary of what I'm up to on the Internet is due. Here's where I am in 2010:

• immediacy, my blog, somewhat sadly neglected in 2009. I'm hoping to reverse that little trend, but that's something I've been saying for a couple of years now, so I'm not going to be making any resolutions to that effect.


• glEN World, my own personal forum, which was once used for some Play-by-Post role-play gaming, but now is just a place for my friends to hang out. I've contemplated shutting it down, but it's still up for now.


• Facebook - it's an evil, but like Google, a known evil


• RateYourMusic, a music rating and information site that I wished more of my musically-minded friends used so I could take advantage of recommendations based on friends rather than the greater RYM unwashed, who tend to like more death metal than I do


• Flickr, where I'm trying to take advantage of my iPhone's camera and post more day-to-day pictures of life in Malaysia, as well as trip photos


• Last.fm, another music site, which collects my listening data


• Twitter, which remains a mystery to me--I like Facebook updates a bunch better, but some people are on Twitter who aren't on Facebook, so there I am

In addition to the social networking (i.e., Web 2.0) sites above, I am a regular listener to two podcasts (Coverville and All Songs Considered) and one videocast (iFanboy). I read some ungainly number of blogs, probably including yours. I manage that through Google Reader through the Next button that actually takes me to the site rather than reading it in the Reader itself, which I like a lot, except for it always does reverse time-order, where I'd rather read my oldest unread feed first (I'm not the only one who dislikes this).

Think there's a site that I'm missing? Please leave a note!

I'm not Polish or a Christian, but learned about the Polish custom of Wigilia through my life partner, writer George Zebrowski. That most excellent progressive blogger, Susie Madrak, charmingly describes Wigilia here. Happy holidays, everyone.

Every year, Coverville does a countdown at the end of the year of the best cover songs as voted on by the podcast listeners. Right now, the nomination process is underway. The following five songs are my nominees for the best covers (keeping in mind that I didn't nominate any of the songs recently featured as on the Coverville "Hall of Fame"):

• "Rusty Cage," Johnny Cash, from Unchained (original by Soundgarden, from BadMotorFinger)
• "Trian in Vain," Dwight Yoakam, from Under the Covers (original by The Clash, from London Calling)
• "I Know There's an Answer/Hang on to Your Ego," Aaron Sprinkle, from Making God Smile: An Artists' Tribute to the Songs of Beach Boy Brian Wilson (original by The Beach Boys, from Pet Sounds)
• "David Watts," The Jam, from All Mod Cons (original by The Kinks, from Something Else by the Kinks)
• "Crazy in Love," The Magic Numbers, from KCRW Sounds Eclectic: The Covers Project (original by Beyonce, from Dangerously in Love)

You might be musically challenged if you play along with Coverville's regular listener-sent episodes of music-oriented quizes. I made up a quiz a few months ago and it was featured recently in Coverville Episode #631.

I always hate what I sound like on the "radio," but I had a lot of fun making up the quiz and have a few ideas for some more, which will have to wait until January, probably.

These are my top five favorite (sometimes more, sometimes less) albums for the year of the album's release. (Links take you to comments that I may have made about these albums on immediacy.)

2009
Lily Allen, It's Not Me, It's You
Florence and the Machine, Lungs
Metric, Fantasies
Tom Allalone & The 78s, Major Sins Pt. 1
The Decemberists, The Hazards of Love
Phoenix, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix