The Knee Issues

Setting: Green Green Grass of UPM Rugby Field

Rising Action: Touch Rugby, older man throwing dummy and breaking line at ease

Climax: Older Man dummying and scoring a try with an outstrecthed hand, older man laughing, older man not laughing anymore, feeling left knee, left knee slight off, feeling right knee, right knee is off, smart older man left the field contemplating rugby career.

Falling action: Older man having problems with both knees, still contemplating on sporting life.

Ending: Older man playing football happily and hurting the same knee, older man, wiser and smarter, conned the brain into believeing that he will be quiting.

Old man smiled while looking at new rugby boots.

Discourse and Coherence

A discourse is a coherent stretch of language (Cook 1994). A good discourse is more than just the sense of coherence and is always fascinating to be in or near to one. Discourse would encompass the full range of language in the participants’ attempts to get message across as well as to understand them. This fascination lead to the belief that an analysis on discourse can be done in some extensions, areas and ideas that could really add to the large body of work that are already in existence. The naked words glistening in mid air would possess some other secrets that could be unlocked and viewed objectively to aid the messenger and the messages not forgetting of course the receiver.
Scott and Kamp (1999) forwarded a satisfactory analysis of dialogue when they claim that it requires in general both semantic and pragmatic representation:
i. Representation of the content of what the different participants are saying,
ii. Pragmatic information - what kinds of speech acts they are performing
(are they asking a question, answering a question that has just been asked, asking a question for clarification of what was just said, making a proposal, etc.?), what information is available to each of the participants and what information does she want; and, more generally, what is the purpose behind their various utterances or even behind their entering upon the dialogue in the first place.

Debaters, thus, before cliaming to be successful need to be familiar with the speech acts in the debate dialogue or risk misrepresentation in responding to them.

Meaning and Context

Many applied linguistics researches have sought to explain the relationships between meaning and the situations in which it is produced. Approaches such as ethnomethodology in sociolinguistics, have dealt with situation, or context in various ways in showing some relationship between context and meaning. Pragmatics also focuses on language meaning in context and how context affects the meaning of utterances. Meaning in pragmatics is considered dynamic as context and utterances are both dependent on and resulting from each other (Levinson 1983). The theoretical construct that language meaning is dependent on the context in which it was produced makes the link between meaning and context or variables that influence context, an important focus for a discourse investigation. Therefore, in trying to caoch new debaters, we must not only focus on the points and general manner of sepaking but also various peripheral variables that can be influential in the context of the discourse. Contextual understanding can help in forwarding clear meaning and failure to grasp the context can leave you a wee bit embarrased.

The Yawn

The yawn was created by God to show that you're sleepy and also to help those with inferiority complex to have some kind of response against natural confident winners or even your average dudes. The yawn is simple to do, acts as both attack and defense mechanism with minimum intent. You canot be accused of not doing anything or doing too much with a yawn.

No bully, except Mike Tyson and Hitler, would punch the daylight out of you because you yawned. The yawner also would not be so bullish in declaring that he did so in the face of the bully, evil boss, develish customer, etc. The yawn is just that, an act which is just enough. Enough to say that you know and you're not particularly enjoying it.

Thus, we should coach yawning to those who are having inferiority complex, lacking in confidence, in an environment surrounded by trolls and orges as resident bullies and those living in North Korea and most parts of Afghanistan. Yawn, a bit, maybe a bit more.It will tell you that you're still human and would like to be treated as one. Next time you see people yawning, check if they are being bullied or surrounded by bullies, if you can help them, go ahead but if not, yawn a reconition yawn.

History and Community

In ancient Greece and up to the nineteenth century thought about literature is generally identified with thought about poetry. There is a clear concept of poetry, but there is not a concept of literature in the present-day sense of the word. Lyric poetry, of course, was sung; and epic poetry was often chanted to musical accompaniment. These activities were common in those communities. they have their special convention, roles and tasks. In order to be part of the community an indivudal must adhere to all these conventions, roles and tasks. Then they must learn when and how to do what in the community which is something that can only be done if you are constantly involved in the activities of the community. Thus if you want to be good in a particular issue or tasks, you must be in the midst of the activities.

Music was also a main feature in drama: Greek tragedies must have been closer to operas than to modern tragedies in this sense. Thus, since Greek was a great culture and they listen to music in appreciation of their cutural activities, we should listen to music too.

Count you blessings

Inherently, life is fantastically beautiful and sunny, if and its a very big 'if' you want it to be. I could be one of the saddest frustrated person in my department. I was overlooked for promotion 5 times in a space of 6 years. I have no inkling of the reasons other than perhaps they did not want to promote a good looking guy with irresistable charm.

I was angry for a few times and for a few days but thanks to Allah Allmighty, that was about it. Each time I was angry and frustrated, I needed only to remind myself of the blessings that were bestowed upon me. I got me, with my wife of course, 4 beautiful healthy kids (2 more than Tiger Woods), a beautiful house, 2 cars, a magnificent wife and loving family from both side of the fence and that's just for starters.

If you count your blessings and you should do it regularly, you will find that you're not really a bargain but Allah nonetheless has bestowed many miracles upon you. Just stop, and start counting ... 1, 2, 3...

Money Making Machine

In the 2nd and 3rd year I was at the uni. I worked in factories during the break so as to get dough to buy a motorcycle. The first one I worked at was a moulding factory that moulds small metal peices like the ones you could find connecting other metal objects like gates, hinges and doors. They were also making highway dividers and lamp posts.

My good looks and chraming personality got me into the highway divider unholy unit. With a supervisor from Bangladesh, I really felt at home in Malaysia. His instructions were fun to begin with and with some tutorial that included a lot of improvisations and guess work, I was announced to be ready to go solo on the 3rd day of work.

Work involved scrapping extra metal from the highway divider after it was galvanized. This was needed to be done as the crude moulding and galvanizing process would leave some blunt and sharp leftover zink on the edges of the dividers.

It was hard work and you could also accidently cut youself but of course nobody would do it intentionally unless you are Kim Jong Ill and this is the global equivalent of the metal factory. I found that the Malay songs sang with Bangladeshi rhythm by the supervisor and his unwitting back up singers helped with the actual scrapping. It must be due to the soothing rhythm or the slow building of develish anger that was pushing ever higher to the point of explosion like hot larva burning its way to the top, hot reddish smoking larva... and usually it was already 5pm and it was time to go home. This went on for a couple more days until I found the soothing rhythm cooling the larva and soon I was singing too.

The boss, a short chinese man, did not like the singing too and his larva must have blown his mountain tops many a time but being an efficient supervisor, he would not want to get in the way of productivity and employees' general happiness.