MAN, i'm in need of a hot bath. you know, fill a bath with loads of water... pour in some scent, and... AWAY WE GO!!! oops! i forget - in these dire times of water rationing and low water pressure, having a bath would not be too acceptable. Would it?

MY main wonder for a long time has been: in a country with one of the highest rainfalls in the world, a supposed tropical country teeming with lush rainforests, blah blah blah, why would we be in the midst of a water shortage? We're short of water catchment areas, we're not supposed to develop hillsides, and yet... just drive around the Klang Valley and watch the trees and hills being mowed over. Government decree does not equate to practical actions? And the JBA admits that piped water losses are about 40%... and it does not have the manpower, the resources to fix the problem. Hmmm. Solutions so near yet so far. The irony is great: I laugh to myself when it's pouring cats and dogs outside, and... the taps are dry at home.

LOOK AT THE SMOG outside, day and night. It's got nothing to do with the Indonesians carrying out open burning, nor the El Nino phenomenon. It is US, the prosperous Malaysians, hungry for homes to live in, to invest our money upon. Throw the papers away (they don't say much anyway), go around with your eyes open, dudes and dudettes. See the MASSIVE clearing going on, indiscriminately. The trees... fully mature trees, chopped bald for nothing (take a drive along Bandar Tun Razak and witness the damage. I loved those trees, beautiful and majestic). Don't think they were gonna widen the road, it's big enough for the amount of traffic. So WHY? DBKL? why?

THE WORST OF IT IS... our local papers are not allowed to report on the environment. Remember the Air Pollution Index (API) figures they used to publish a long time ago during the early days of the 'haze'? Poof... in a wisp of smoke, disappeared. Newspapers can't report on the damage being done. The thing is, what we don't read in the papers, we breathe in. We drink it. We can see with our own eyes. Wouldn't it be better to take off em blinds of the people, and we can actually do something about it through some democratic process? If that's possible, that is.

Butterflies are no more. Guppies are no more.