I know, I was really slack because I should’ve blogged yesterday. However, I was a bit busy doing other things … like finalising the first edition of the Radio Free Bliss podcast! And it’s now available.

Get it here!

I mentioned several authors and sites on the podcast. In rough order of appearance, they are:

Eppie Awards : www.epicauthors.com/eppies.html
The Romance Studio : www.theromancestudio.com
Preditors & Editors poll : www.critters.org/predpoll/tally.html
Total-E-Bound : www.total-e-bound.com
Dayna Hart : www.daynahart.com
Samhain Publishing : www.samhainpublishing.com
Maya Reynolds blog : mayareynoldswriter.blogspot.com
Karyna da Rosa : www.karyna-online.com
Carol Lynne : www.carol-lynne.net
EDIT: And how could I have forgotten Just Erotic Romance Reviews : www.justeroticromancereviews.com

I hope you enjoy the podcast. Any feedback gratefully received.

I had great difficulty getting to sleep last night. So J and I lay in the dark, listening to the night noises outside, and discussing things. In the mornings, we usually discuss politics. I hit my news sources, he hits his, and we share our insights and the latest developments over tea and coffee. At night however, we tend to discuss more personal things, which is much more relaxing that arguing foreign policy in the Middle East or domestic policy in Poland (which will often have us running to gather corroborating references).

J started it all by asking what on earth I meant by including a review of Toer’s The Fugitive on the blog. It had nothing to do with either science-fiction, technology, romance, life in Singapore, or the kids, and it probably wouldn’t garner a single comment. I did it, I told him, because I thought it was important. People tend to think of their own communities as the only ones that can feel happy, sad, betrayed, hurt, torn. I wanted to present a different perspective. Of course it’s coloured by the fact that I come from this locale myself, but it’s vitally important, I said, for people to understand that everyone in the world has the same hopes and fears as everyone else. And exposing Toer’s first work on my blog (as insignificant as it is) was my way of trying to show that … as well as introduce some local writing to the population at large. Toer is dead, but there are many other Asian writers out there and I will review them, and write about them, in the future.

Then morning came, and I went to my friend Maria’s blog, and she had a quiz up: ‘Which Fantasy/Sci-Fi Character Are You?’. And I did it, because I’m a sucker for quizzes, and the answer was personally profound because it encapsulates my entire philosophy so elegantly.

Jean-Luc Picard

An accomplished diplomat who can virtually do no wrong, you sometimes know it is best to rely on the council of others while holding the reins.

[My emphasis follows because, gosh darn, these words have never been more important as they are now:] There are some words which I have known since I was a schoolboy. “With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.” These words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie — as a wisdom, and warning. The first time any man’s freedom is trodden on, we’re all damaged.

Jean-Luc is a character in the Star Trek universe. This The Next Generation fan site has an outline of his career.

Yeah, it may all be pop psychology but, as Maria says, I’ll take it!

Being a post-colonial, post-WWII, post-Japanese-wanted-to-eradicate-my-race-because-Eurasians-are-not-of-pure-blood child, the one label that strikes a chord with me, more than the vilest swear word you can think of, is ‘collaborator’. As much as I like to pride myself on my ability to see multiple sides to any story, I was very black-and-white when it came to collaborators. They were/are scum. End of story.

Until, that is, I picked up a copy of The Fugitive by Toer. By any definition, Pramoedya Ananta Toer was a true Indonesian patriot. That is, every action of his (mostly literary and as an educator) was geared towards the betterment of the Indonesian people as a whole. He was against the Dutch exploitation of his country, the Java-centric view of the independent government, and the discrimination of the Indonesian Chinese. And, although he died in 2006, he taught me that — like life — collaboration is also mired in grey.

The Fugitive takes place over one evening and the following day — the eve and day of the Japanese surrendering in WWII, and follows the steps of Hardo, a renowned resistance leader who will not rest until the Japanese have given up. He can feel the winds of change as he visits his home village of Kaliwangan, but the inhabitants of the village still believe the Japanese are unbeatable, and they have each come to some internal agreement within themselves on how they cope with the situation.

Hardo’s mother has died in the time since he became a rebel. Hardo’s father, once head of the village, was stripped of his title and spends his time gambling, as an escape from a life he refuses to face. Hardo was engaged, and his future father-in-law is the new village chief who — while trying to engineer the best outcome for himself and his daughter, Ningsih — ends up being a catalyst for disaster. Ningsih, Hardo’s fiancee, is the most faithful of all, still waiting for Hardo’s return, patient and gentle. Even more than the Japanese, the ostensible, mostly hidden, enemy in the book is Karmin, Hardo’s best friend, who continued serving with the Japanese rather than rebel against them in a failed coup as Hardo and two of his companions did. Hardo’s rebel friends and the villagers themselves want to kill Karmin because they view him as a traitor, but Karmin’s story is not as simple as that, even as he acknowledges the label, and Hardo, rightly, does not believe in Karmin’s unadulterated evil.

The short novel, Toer’s first I believe, is very readable. Its style is more oral rather than written, in much the same way as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is really meant to be watched and heard rather than read. And, like Godot, the story takes place over a short period of time. Complex concepts and situations are presented in clear and simple language, giving the reader plenty food for thought amid the storyteller-type repetition. This is probably the best piece of advice I can give a prospective reader. The Indonesians have always had a very strong oral tradition, and The Fugitive, although written, feels more like a tale being woven by a storyteller to a young audience at night. There are no deep characterisations (to my disappointment), but the language is soothing and evocative. Any interpretation of motive and emotion are left completely to the listening reader. This is more a play than a novel which, I think, is why I was so forcefully reminded of Godot as I read it.

The dilemma facing the Indonesian people on the eve of WWII was never an easy one. Was it better to support a cruel colonial power (the Dutch) or put their trust in the Japanese promise of the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere? Many, like Toer himself, initially supported the Japanese because they saw such support as the only viable route to an independent Indonesia but, as the atrocities of the Japanese became more evident, more Indonesians turned against them, like Hardo and his friends, Dipo and Kartiman. Fleeing the threat of summary decapitation, they melted into the burgeoning beggar population, biding their time, moving around and living off scraps. In one of my favourite passages, the new village chief (and future father-in-law) meets Hardo (who is fasting until Karmin approaches him and asks his forgiveness for betraying their cause) on the outskirts of the village. This is near the beginning of the book:

‘Are you able to manage in the condition you’re in?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are? That, I do not understand at all.’ The old man spoke as if to a child. ‘When you go to the city you see children sprawled lifeless at the side of the road. In front of the market and the stores, down beneath the bridge, on top of garbage heaps and in the gutters there are corpses. Nothing but corpses. The place is filled with the dead–children and old people. And you know what they do? If they’re going to die, before they take their final breath, they first gather together a pile of teakwood or banana leaves that have been used to wrap food in. And they cover their bodies with those leaves and then they die. It’s like they know that in two hours they’re going to die and that after they’re dead no one is going to prepare them for burial. These are crazy times we’re going through. And I don’t know why it is. In all my life this is the first time I’ve seen anything like it. Corpses. Wherever you go, unattended corpses. Come home, Hardo.’
‘Thank you but no.’ Hardo discounted the old man’s plea.
‘No one will betray you.’

But of course he does.

I am eager to read more of Toer’s work, and think I’ll hunt down The Mute’s Soliloquy next. This is a collection of essays and unsent letters to his family that he wrote while imprisoned at the penal colony of Buru island for eleven years without charge. For me, as a post-colonialist, Toer’s work is thought provoking and disturbing but, then again, most true education is.

The Fugitive is available in most bookstores through the Penguin imprint.

So you’ve read about our international travel glamour. Well, here’s our local tale, plus a story that’s currently making the rounds. A couple of weeks ago, we had a bright idea. We needed to stop at a couple of places in Singapore and thought we had figured out the best way to do it. First, grocery shopping. Then, on the way down to the next destination, we’d stop at our local station and J would trudge home with the shopping, put everything away, then come back, while I waited at the station platform with the kids.

We considered it a win-win. The kids wouldn’t get so hot and tired (and did I mention grumpy?) walking in the midday tropical sun, J moves quicker by himself, and I sit down in some shade, people-watch, and work out some plot points in my head.

When J finally got back, we headed to our next stop and things were going swimmingly, until we tried to exit the station. OVERSTAY, the exit station said. Wha-?! No! So we walked to the Customer Service desk and it was explained to us.

The Singapore government, in their wisdom, has designated a maximum of 20 minutes travel time between 3 stops. This extends to 30 minutes between 4 stops, and so on. And we had busted that maximum. The penalty is SG$2 for each passenger. Little Dinosaur is on a child’s pass, and usually pays half price, but she got the $2 penalty as well. So a bright idea of ours ended up costing us $6. We would have been better off sitting at the local McDonald’s sipping iced lemon tea.

I suppose it’s to stop loitering. Ask any tourist and they’ll tell you that all Singapore train stations are frighteningly barren after a train leaves. But it’s also an indication of the general way the government treats its people. There’s a stick-and-stick approach that Singapore takes, to a limit that no other Western-style government seems to. (Although, with the legislative door open thanks to the War on Terror, that’s changing.)

It’s part of the political/administrative culture here, a pervasive patronising paternalism that sees foreigners banned from something as silly and entertaining as the Complaints Choir–a bunch of people living in Singapore who sing about what’s wrong with the city-state–because it touches on “domestic affairs”. The video at Asian Offbeat is a bit difficult to understand, so here are the lyrics:

We get fined for almost everything / Drivers won’t ‘give chance’ when you want to ‘change lane’ / The indoors are cold, the outdoors are hot; / And the humid air, it wrecks my hair / Those answering machines always make you hold / Only to hang up on you

When a pregnant lady gets on the train / Everyone pretends to be asleep / I’m stuck with my parents till I’m 35 / Cause I can’t apply for HDB /
We don’t recycle any plastic bags / But we purify our pee

*chorus:
What’s wrong with Singapore? / Losing always makes me feel so sore / Cause if you’re not the best / Then you’re just one of the rest

My oh my Singapore / What exactly are we voting for? / What’s not expressly permitted / is prohibited

When I’m hungry at the food court, I see / People ‘chope’ seats with their tissue paper / To the aunty staying upstairs: / Your laundry’s dripping on my bed sheets / Please don’t squat on the toilet seats / And don’t clip your nails on MRT

Stray cats get into noisy affairs / At night my neighbor makes weird animal sounds / People put on fake accents to sound posh / And queue up 3 hours for donuts / Will I ever live till eighty five / to collect my CPF?

*chorus

Singaporeans too kiasu! (so scared to lose) / Singaporeans too kiasi! (so scared to die) / Singaporeans too kiabor!(scared of their wives) / Maybe we’re just too stressed out! (even the kids)

Old National Library was replaced by an ugly tunnel / Singaporean men can’t take independent women / People blow their nose into the swimming pool / And fall asleep on my shoulder in the train

Singapore’s national bird is the crane (the one with yellow steel girders) / Real estate agents’ leaflets clogging up my mailbox (en bloc, en bloc; en bloc, en bloc) / Why can’t we be buried when we die? / No one wants to climb Bukit Timah with me

*chorus

There are not enough public holidays / My neighbor sings KTV all night / Wedding dinners never start on time / My hair is always cut shorter than I want / Channel 5 commercials are way too long / Why do men turn bad?

*At first it was to speak more mandarin / Then it was to speak proper English / What’s wrong with my powerful Singlish?

People sit down during rock concerts / We have to pay for tap water at restaurants / ERP gantries are everywhere / But I can still see traffic jams on the road / All the bus stops have tilted benches to keep you off balance

*chorus

As you can see, once the writers of the lyrics got going, they really built up a head of steam. But at the foundation is a government attitude best typified by Singapore’s Minister Mentor and founder of the state of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew (incidentally, his son is Prime Minister; make of that what you will), saying this about Singapore’s lack of press freedom (they ranked below Zimbabwe in the 2006 Reporters Without Borders annual rankings):

There’s nothing that you’d want to read which you cannot read in Singapore…

I think someone should put that on a t-shirt.

…to tell you that Liane Spicer, the author of an upcoming Dorchester multicultural novel, Cafe au Lait, has an interview with me up on her blog. Please hop along and have a read if this blog isn’t masochistic enough for you!

Most people are envious when we mention where we’ve lived and worked. I can understand that. There’s a wanderlust that I think is part of everyone’s psyche and we are perceived as a couple/family who do what a lot of others usually only dream about. I like moving around because, I think, I have such a low boredom threshold. Or maybe it was because I was an Army brat from the time I was born and just got used to it. But there isn’t as much freedom in it as a lot of people might think.

The first two months when you set down in a new country are incredibly stressful. Besides the quest for new accommodation, adjusting to a new grocery experience, schooling and finance pressures as you’re in banking limbo, there’s also clearing the stuff that you’ve carted along with you. We used our last move as a way of cutting down our possessions and over 60% of all our current possessions (by volume) are books. However, there was also a cute scooter we just couldn’t bear to get rid of. And this is where the receiving country has you by your secondary sexual characteristics.

You see, there’s always something in your consignment that you’re worried about…that you’re not sure whether you’re going to get charged for. When we moved to Australia, it was a PC that we bought a month before. (And, yes, we ended up paying AU$400 duty on it. Yep, just the one computer. I’m still as mad as heck about that.) When we moved to Singapore, it was our scooter.

At first we couldn’t figure it, because we thought Singapore Customs might want to get it cleared as soon as possible. We even gave them an inflated value for the scooter so we could just get the damned thing through. In retrospect, that may not have been a wise move because they kept coming back with more queries for the next 2 months. I don’t know whether they thought we had spray-painted a solid gold fuel tank on the bike, or stashed illicit drugs in the battery compartment, but they refused to budge. We wrote letters and emails to the Customs Service, provided the written registration details, gave them permission to carry out a full inspection on the vehicle (with us present), and directed them to websites around the world that contained valuations, all in an effort to bolster our case.

In case anyone is wondering why we didn’t get a written valuation from Australia, well folks, we couldn’t find a single motorcycle dealership willing to give us one. The reason given was that we bought the scooter in a private sale. The valuation, we were told, was private proprietary information only available to new and existing buyers from the shop in question. WHAT?! The value of a vehicle is proprietary information??!! Exhausted by various hurdles exiting Australia, we thought we’d just dump our statutory declaration and paperwork in the hands of Singapore Customs and be done with it. But the government wasn’t finished with our little scooter yet.

Two months later coincided with the 2% rise in GST in Singapore. I didn’t think much of it until, magically, a week after the increase went through, we got our Customs bill, based on on our original customs declaration. There was nothing we could do. Complain? To whom? To the government who waited 2 months so they could nab an extra 2% on duty? To an ombudsman? Who regulates the Singapore government? Are you nuts? The removal company told us to keep quiet and pay up or who knew what might happen if we ever wanted to move again and Customs had to vet our paperwork on the way out. Sounds a bit…unsavoury, doesn’t it? Well, I’ve got some news for you. ALL governments are like that, not just Singapore. If you move around a lot, you get used to it.

That’s the glamour of travel at an international level. I have a story for you at the local level too, but that might just have to wait until next time…

I try to stay current with the latest slang and abbreviations. I can understand, for example, “pretty fly for a white guy” (a little out of date, I know, but bear with me) and FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt). (Example of usage: “They get funding dollars by spreading FUD around.”) But the real problem comes when you think you know what something means and you’re wrong. Thankfully, the latest example of that has not resulted in me spouting off, uninformed, to other people, so I can breathe a sigh of relief and pass on the knowledge.

Yogi Berra. Y’see, for a couple of years now, I thought it was some smart way of referring to Yogi Bear, like people pronouncing the Target department store as tar-jhay, to give it some ironic cachet. I mean, I could so imagine the Hanna-Barbera bear coming out with such gems as, “It’s deja vu all over again”.

I was wrong. Yogi Berra is a real person. He used to be a baseball player and manager, in fact. And he was renowned for twisting the English language into pretzels. Here are some more of his gems:

It ain’t over ’til it’s over

Never answer an anonymous letter

I usually take a two hour nap from one to four

When you come to a fork in the road…take it

I didn’t really say everything I said

When asked what time is was……” You mean now?”

On why NY lost the 1960 series to Pittsburgh: ” We made too many wrong mistakes”

You can observe a lot by watching

The future ain’t what it used to be

It gets late early out here

If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be

If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them

If you’re interested in finding out more about the man, he has his own site, which has autographed photos, baseballs and, yes, books for sale. I just hope you’re suitably cashed up.

I’m just happy to help out anybody who isn’t as up on US cultural references as s/he thought. I hear the current US president is a big fan of baseball. Wonder if Berra is one of his role models…?

You can tell you’re slowly building up a circle of online friends when you start getting tagged for things. Hey, I’m not complaining! Maria tagged me for a meme, so here goes.

Six Random Things About Me

1. I have small feet, which has led several sundry people in the past to ask if my parents “bound” my feet when I was a child. Being Asian was the obvious tip-off. Not!
2. I dream in colour and about a third of my remembered dreams involve buildings and/or cities I’ve never seen in my waking life.
3. I worked in a shoe-shop for 6 years while I was at high-school/University and, in all that time, only ever had two customers with smelly feet!
4. In primary school, I wanted to be a nun when I grew up.
5. I wish I’d studied Economics at University.
6. I’m an atheist.

Oh dear, tagging six people with blogs. Okay…

a) Liane Spicer, who is my friend from other exotic equatorial climes,
b) Jordan Summers, who I hear is a sucker for memes,
c) Lyn Taylor, who is a kick-ass cover artist imo,
d) Gennita Low, who doesn’t know me from a plate of nasi lemak but who I’ll tag anyway,
e) Brynn Paulin, a fellow Total-E-Bound author, and
f) Rebecca James, who’ll at least have something to blog about when she starts up again … like, er, LAST WEEK!

The Rules

• Link to the person that tagged you
• Post the rules on your blog
• Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself
• Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs
• Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website

Generations ago (computer time), Information Technology/Computing was the place to be. It seemed that if you had a degree in computing, a job was assured. And that was correct. While I saw teachers, airline pilots, dentists, struggle through recessions, I was inured to this because I worked in IT.

Then, in the late 90s, the boom-crunch cycle started to accelerate for those of us in the business. It used to be 3-4 years between boom and crunch. Now, it’s more like 3-4 months. I’m writing this because I recently found out about the oil company, Shell, sacking 3,200 of its IT staff this year. In an effort to cut costs by GBP250 million a year, Shell is essentially outsourcing its entire IT infrastructure. Both J and I have been through restructures, retrenchments, reassignments. You can call it whatever you like, but it all boils down to reduction for all concerned … reduction in salary, responsibilities, career opportunities. Sometimes it means nothing more than termination.

I don’t give a lot of sympathy on this blog, but my heart goes out to all the Shell employees who’ll be affected by this. Doubly so because this is a dumb-ass decision and time will vindicate all of us … but not before a lot of lives are thrown onto life’s rubbish heap.

There have been a few spectacular IT blunders over the past few years. Well, too many to name, but I’ll focus on two of my favourites.

Number one, China. Do you remember when China was the Hot IT Destination? When companies wet their pants waiting to “penetrate” the giant Chinese market? At that time, both J and I were managers with large IT companies and, at the weekly meetings, we both (independently) used to tell our employers the same thing: China is a trap. The culture and way of business is different. You’re stepping in their territory which puts you at a disadvantage. Chinese companies will take whatever you do, replicate it and undersell you under your very noses. You don’t have enough people who know the language and you can’t trust the blanket loyalty of those local staff you hire. Given a choice, we said, invest in south-east Asia, where you’re a bigger player and are more likely to have more influence in negotiations. In south-east Asia, governments will want to work with you; in China, they’ll want to analyse then compete against you on the world market.

Blackberry wanted to enter the Chinese market. Lots of angst ensued as RIM tried to negotiate penetration protocols with the Chinese government. Tried, failed, tried, failed. It finally succeeded in getting an okay date for the middle of 2006…only to find the Chinese got there first with their—get this—Redberry. J and I laughed so hard we pissed ourselves. It didn’t stop there. Patent disputes, trademark suits. What did RIM expect? A level playing field? In China? Now we’re finding that companies are slowly backing away from the behemoth. Oh, they’re putting a lot of spin on it, but it seems they’re finally using some of that caution that was so absent when they were thinking with their “little heads”.

Number two, outsourcing. I don’t get it. Even economics professors are touting the benefits of outsourcing. But how can it possibly be profitable? In the money sense, you now have at least two companies having to justify the one budget, and all the companies involved want a profit. They want profit, they want growth. In the medium- to long-term, this can only mean a ballooning of expenditure, even if the initial Powerpoint presentation looked damned fine and contained many impressive animations.*

Okay, say you outsource to some mob in the Asian sub-continent, as Shell are doing. Costs are down. But so is customer service. There are technical, infrastructure, cultural and language difficulties. And as much as people like to bash the Asian outsourcing, even if you choose a Western company, you still have problems. The time to problem resolution is greater. Efficiency and productivity, naturally, falls. As more than one commentator to the Shell news notes, jobs for customers that used to take a quick 5 minutes will turn into 6 months of contract negotiations and project specifications, with appropriate cost/time/resource blowouts.

And how do you effectively manage such situations when Shell’s management is sitting several levels above (and geographically away) from the coal-face workers? But, then again, why should top management care, as long as they pocket their insanely large end-of-year bonuses? And you just know what each level of the ensuing bureaucracy is thinking: “I don’t need to oversee the expenditure directly. I’ll just hand it over to my good friend over here and he’ll do it. Oh, after I’ve taken my cut, of course.” Outsourcing, human nature and creative accounting. It’s a combination that goes together like lamb and garlic, bacon and eggs, or roti and curry.

It’s my belief that the same thing will happen with outsourcing as is happening with China. That is, the rosy spectacles will fall off and companies will start to wonder what the hell they were thinking for so many years, and start building up their in-house expertise again. In the meantime, though, how many workers will be destroyed?

---

* I bet it has to do with accounting. When an organisation is in-house, it’s an operational cost, but when it’s outsourced, it’s a tax deduction. In which case, it logically follows that the bigger the bill, the bigger the deduction. I think I’m right … does anyone know for sure?

[Firstly, sorry for taking so long to get to the Comments. I didn't know I had them! I've fixed the appropriate options now, so they should appear as quickly as they used to.]

It’s been a very interesting yet tiring series of days for me. I meant to do some more writing on “The Turk” (my current wip) but got caught into a long series of hopscotching articles that led from structural engineering to global monetary systems; from electromagnetism to a recently released book called “Liberal Fascism”.

I am not a fascist. Quite the contrary. And that makes it doubly important for me to read and understand the opposition. But the result of all that somber self-education is a form of mental shell-shock and I was somewhat happy to have, in the end, stumbled across a light-heavy 1941 article by a woman named Dorothy Thompson, and published in Harper’s magazine, that still followed the general mood of my ponderous journey but happily offered to shoulder some of the burden itself.

Dorothy Thompson was an American journalist, expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934. Harper’s printed an essay by her in 1941 entitled “Who Goes Nazi?“. It’s a kind of parlour game, she tells us. A mental party exercise to analyse the attendees and guess who would “go Nazi”. She says, for example, that:

Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.

It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation–the
generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”

Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work–a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.

And so she goes, one by one, around the various people at her hypothetical gathering and dissects them. Have a read of the article. While I don’t agree wholeheartedly with all of Thompson’s analyses, I do agree with her more than I disagree. I think she leaves out, for example, the Deceptive Do-Gooder, but I can’t work up the energy to progress this thought right now. Maybe later. Reading her smooth style of writing, you feel you are being spoken to by a friend. And so the last paragraphs are all the more telling:

[T]he frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success–they would all go Nazi in a crisis..

…Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t–whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.

If something in you resonated to what Thompson wrote, go to her Wikipedia entry and scroll down to her Quotations. You’ll find more food for thought there.