Silence, it can be stunning.

I was driving home just a couple of hours ago (around midnight) when it occurred to me that my car was being uncharacteristically silent. You see, it's normally a hell of a noisy beast when on the move - the slightest of surface undulations would normally send the car flying off at a tangent, resulting in all manner of squeaks, creaks and very worrying, metallic sounding "Clunk!" sounds. Oh, and they seemed to have forgotten to attach the suspension when it was on the assembly line.

So yes, it's put together like a typical Italian car. Which meant that it should've been really noisy considering that most of the roads leading to my house are dotted with small craters attempting to pass off as potholes.

But no. There was absolute silence. It was like a magic carpet ride.

The reason, of course, was that the potholes were no longer there. And the reason for that, of course, is that the roads have been paved. ALL of them.

And the reason that ALL of the roads have been paved is because the general elections are just around the corner and the federal government needs to show that it's actually running the country properly.

And to show that it is indeed running the country properly, they've decided to pave all the roads with glistening, fresh, black tarmac. Mmmmmm...

Never mind that the crime rate is soaring, that inflation is slowly turning my 50 ringgit notes into small change, and that for some reason, it has become socially acceptable for you to thrust a sword into the air during a political party general assembly while screaming some sort of battle cry - as long as our roads are paved, we're happy.

Now this is actually a good thing. I recently spent over 600 ringgit repairing my suspension (turns out there was one after all) after several years of driving into inverted speed bumps.

Want better roads? Vote for this guy!

But here's the thing.

The roads are only paved about once every five years, which coincides with the general elections (held every five years or so). Which is a problem because the roads normally deteriorate into the rut-infested variety after two years, which leaves us with about three years of shitty roads.

This means, of course, that unless we have general elections every two years we aren't going to get freshly paved roads every two years.

Which means, of course, that we must somehow get the government to hold general elections every two years.

And to do that, we must... must... erm... well you know. Yeah.










Sorry, but that's about as far as I thought. I do like the freshly paved roads, though.