From Falling banana kills woman - NSW/ACT - Breaking News 24/7 - NEWS.com.au:

She survived brutal Nazi and Communist regimes to ultimately be brought down by a banana.

Slovenian migrant Ivanka Perko died in hospital last week in bizarre circumstances - she suffered complications after she dropped a banana on her leg.

Comical to the end, the 73-year-old old quipped to friends and family while on her deathbed: ‘I can’t believe after all this time it was a bloody banana that killed me.’

Simply surreal but strangely heartwarming too - mainly because she has lived a colourful life that most ppl could only imagine about, and because her attitude towards her own death is completely refreshing. She had lived a life with no regrets. Awesome.

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Stumbled upon via Digg. I can’t believe I missed this considering that I read news.com.au daily.

We congregated at aunty Lee-Hoon’s place before lunch, for some coffee and typical CNY tidbits. This was also our substitute for the traditional house-to-house visit.

In attendance and not in attendance … my dad is in Penang, and my brother wasn’t there because he was still sleeping. I would be too normally, this being late morning Sunday.

After munching on the tidbits, I was actually quite full already but it was off to lunch we went. Was at Chan Kee’s in Leeming for some roast duck and noodles.

We headed to my parents’ place after for more coffee and tidbits. The rest of the day went by in a food-induced lazy blur. Before I knew it, I had to wake up for work the next morning already. *sigh*

It doesn’t feel like I should be at work today. It is afterall, the second day of the Chinese New Year. Around most of East and South-East Asia, today would be a public holiday.

It also doesn’t help that I feel so lethargic and bloated still from all the food that we had - good though they had been. At least the new year fell on a weekend this year. It would have sucked even more if it was during the working week.

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I stumbled upon this Washington Post piece about Asian-Americans fighting for the recognition of CNY as a public holiday. Or at the very least mark it as a “day of commeration”, a day that ppl could take leave off work without any difficulties.

From the article (free registration req’d):

The Lunar New Year — which is celebrated today by more than a billion Asians around the world — presents a troubling annual dilemma for many of the country’s 12 million Asian Americans: honor your millennia-old traditions by taking the day off, or bow to the pressures of Western society by going about business as usual?

Good on them, but I doubt that this will happen in Australia - Asian-Americans have a bit more clout when you combine the number of Chinese, Koreans and Vietnamese in the USA, whom all celebrate the Lunar New Year.

At least we get street festivals in Sydney and Melbourne, and smaller versions in the other capital cities. And the banks give out packs of empty “red packets” to Chinese customers for their use. I guess, a little bit of recognition is better than nothing at all.

CNY eve 2006 was on a Saturday. The day started off with lunch at uncle Alex’s place. This is the prayer table with food for our “ancestors”: mom’s parents and her 3rd aunty. It is customary for the ancestors to “finish” their food before we’d begin eating - uncle Alex tosses the 2 crescent-shaped pieces of wood to ascertain that.

My family is big on the gatherings and I love them …

… and not just because there’s always good food involved. Here was the curry chicken and braised duck.

The following pics are of the aunties and mom, and the cousins (and honourary cousin :)).

More pics of the cousins.

The family reunion dinner was had at a Chinese restaurant in Myaree - Yummy BBQ. Silly name, good food.

This is us stirring and tossing the “yu-sang”, or as I’d like to call it “Chinese raw-salmon salad”. It’s a tradition to toss it as high as you can to bring the good luck for the year.

These were the 3 families in attendance.

We had 10 courses of food and 2 bottles of wine. Boy, were we stuffed.

Misc. shots to round off this post.

A great day was had by all. Videos to compliment this post were uploaded previously here. More pics of CNY day to come.

Year of the Dog, woohoo! Happy Chinese New Year to everyone! Gong Xi Fa Cai! Kong Hei Fatt Choy! 新年快乐! 身体健康!

Had photos taken today and will upload tomorrow. Here’s two teaser videos of the family reunion dinner with the 3 families here in Perth.

I discovered italk2much.com in its early days. Back then it was a one-woman blog about a military wife (Ms. Chatty) living on a US Army base somewhere. It has since evolved into a blog-review site with a team of blog-reviewers who take turns reviewing blogs that ppl submit into them.

Watching them tear down a blog and especially a blog owner’s ego is like watching Simon Cowell rip into a tone-deaf person on American Idol. It’s brutally honest and brutally funny. I don’t have a critical eye for blogs but even I know when a blog is not user-friendly, painful on the eyes, written poorly or just plain boring. These blogs deserve the shit they cop from the ladies.

The funniest responses are from ppl who go “My blog IS good! You all suck!” Reality check: like in life where not everyone likes you, not everyone has to like your blog. And it is you who are masochistic enough to submit your blog for a review.

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Lately, for some reason they’ve been getting quite a few Malaysian blogs for reviewing. And one thing that irks them beyond the above reasons is the slang. Not only because their rules state that the submitted blogs should predominantly be in English but the slangs make it *really* hard for a non-native to understand.

But, even though they hate the slang, the ladies have somehow picked up the correct usage, especially with the “lah”. Here’s some examples:

“I believe IT2M says to submit blogs that are in ENGLISH only, lah.”

“1. Your browser so senzitive, lah. You not miss much, lah. It sucky blog-blog, lah.

2. Oh, CRAP, lah. She talk about how baby-poo learn to say word, “Lah”, lah.
It sucky-sucky blog, lah.”

“2 - Pop-up, lah. Probably from TagBoard, lah. Boring, icky, lah.”

“i’m a rick folk with no mac .. LAH”

“Annie, I checked in Firefox and Safari and it looks fine in both, lah!”

“Word to your mother, lah!”

And to top it all off, here’s what Ms. Chatty said:

“Dear Malaysian bloggers who submit stupid ass blogs to IT2M:

hisap telur and bodoh and chilaka. “

Hahahahaha! To get the full effect, read their latest two sets of reviews (here’s one and here’s two) and the accompanying comments.

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Somehow I made it onto their Blogroll a while back. Initially I didn’t know how I made it, but they were gracious enough to explain it to me.

This is going to be mundane but what the heck, it applies to almost everyone of you who reads my blog because:

1. You work and therefore you earn a salary,
2. thus you have money and would therefore use a bank account,

I’m gonna use myself as an example. Even though the details may be different, especially if you don’t live in Australia, the principles should be the same.

You only have a set amount of fee-free transations, whether they be EFTPOS*, direct-debit to pay your bills or the ATM. After which, your bank would charge you a fee for each transaction.

The quick and easy way to bypass all that is to get a credit card. Credit card companies do not charge you on the transactions. But they do charge you interest if you don’t pay your account in full at the end of every month, so be aware of that.

Once you’ve got a credit card:

1. transfer all your automatic bill-payments to the credit card,
2. and use cash or your credit card to make most of your purchases.

The only bank transaction that you should be doing is withdrawing cash from the ATMs. But avoid other banks’ ATMs as well as those at convenience stores, pubs and nightclubs. You should always try and withdraw from your bank’s ATMs. Otherwise you’d get slugged with another fee again. Yeah bloodsuckers, I know.

The precaution that you have to take with credit cards is that you have to be disciplined - pay off the bill every month and don’t splurge on it. Remember that you are still withdrawing cash from your ATM. Do not be tempted to use revolving credit as well, ie. using one credit card to pay off the other. You’d be trapped in an endless cycle of debt.

* EFTPOS = Electronic Funds Transfer Point-of-Sale. Works like debit-cards.

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Idea for this post was inspired from reading:

• ATM fees $600m and rising: report - National - smh.com.au
• Dominic Knight’s (Radar @ SMH) reaction to that story.