Of Avian Flu, Alvin Tan , Vivian Lee and our changing standards...

Brace yourself. A new strain of bird flu is hitting Malaysia: Alvin + Vivian = H5N1 Avian. It was recently reported that Avian flu jumps from birds to seals and could potentially threaten humans and animals. I wonder if the couple had been smoochiing seals of late.

It's indeed astonishing how fast our standards change with the advent of the Internet. A female friend and I were discussing the brouhaha over the Alvin Tan and Vivian Lee bare-it-all scandal on the Internet. She said that if the young couple had been featured on the centre page of Playboy mag, it wouldn't have been so bad instead of them posting their sumptuous erotica on their blog for the whole world to see. I know this lady friend wouldn't have said this even a year ago. It's like Alvin and Vivian have raised the benchmark. I'm sure, it wasn't long ago that it would have been quite shocking for a woman from Malaysia to be featured in Playboy. Now that we have Alvin and Vivian, the bar has been raised several notches. Perhaps, in another ten years, when another couple do something even more daring or outrageous than what the two have done, who knows we might just react: "If they had done what Alvin and Vivian did in 2012, it wouldn't have been so bad."

You don't really have to go all the way to Bali or burn your pocket paying for pricey "package" trips to Pulau Redang to find good beaches. Recently, I drove up to a beach in Cherating, Pahang - somewhere close to the famed Club Med resort. As my wife and children aren't sun lovers, I left them in the hotel. Except, for an elderly Caucasian couple, I had the beach all to myself. Not that I needed the whole beach. But think of the bliss, the peace, and the sheer joy of simply doing nothing!