After spending, or rather, as I see in retrospect, squandering well over a decade watching and writing about the Umno/BN regime’s alleged criminal misrule of Malaysia, I find it hard to get a laugh out of the antics of this gang of crooked clowns any longer.

But last week I couldn’t help having if not a giggle, at least a snide snigger, at its staging of the latest in a long, long line of allegedly record-breaking events designed to divert attention from its own disgraceful wreckage of formerly promising nation.

This latest attention-diverting extravaganza involved the setting of what was billed as a national record for, of all idiotically trivial achievements, gathering the highest number of people to eat together cross-legged (duduk bersila).

And I used the word ‘billed’ in the previous sentence advisedly, as doubtless the cost of transporting the more than 21,000 participants in this ridiculous charade to and from the venue, plus the food they ate cross-legged and the tents erected to shelter them from the elements, was billed not to Umno/BN but to the endlessly put-upon Malaysian public.

But whoever was paying, guest-of-honour, or rather, given what a bad joke it was, jest-of-honor Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak hailed the eat-in as a triumph for Umno.

And I guess it was in a sense, considering that it was held in the heartland of the long-imprisoned de facto leader of Malaysia’s opposition, Anwar Ibrahim.

Though it seems to me that the ‘cross-legged’ seating attitude required of the attendees could well have been misinterpreted by some as suspiciously suggestive of Christianity, and thus should by rights, Islamically speaking, have been specified as ‘crescent-legged’...