Nope, it certainly does not smell like teen spirit. As a matter of fact, many old people smell of it, old women in particular. A Kuching friend once called it the “Foochow perfume” (Now, don’t shoot me! I wasn’t the one who said it! LOL!!!)…
This is “Minyak Cap Kapak” or Axe Brand oil or what we call “hong eyew” (wind oil). It seems to be some kind of panacea; they use it for insect bites, headaches, stomachaches…and if you have heat stroke, some Amazon-like Foochow woman lady would come and pour a whole lot of it on your back shoulders and neck and pinch you black and blue. When I was still working, sometimes I would get bitten by a mosquito or something and all I needed to do was to ask around the office and without fail, there would be some lady who would fish a bottle out of her handbag…and let me use it.
Students would keep a small bottle handy in their pencil boxes to apply when their heads started to spin and some would even apply some on their eyes when they felt sleepy so they could stay awake. I did not mind this…but I could not stand the other type – green in colour with a strong horrible smell. Somehow, I do not seem to notice its presence that much these days. Maybe people do not use it anymore? I wonder if those of you who are younger are familiar with this “Minyak Cap Kapak”.
And since I’m recalling things from days gone by, you may remember the radiogram that I was talking about in an earlier post. Later in the late 70s, I bought one of these in Singapore…
This is a SHARP portable stereo hi-fi. Someone was saying the other day that stereophonic sound reproduction was the in-thing in those days. This set is quite heavy, despite the claim that it is portable…and it incorporates a radio tuner with an FM band, MW (medium wave, now known as AM) and short-wave bands…and a cassette recorder/player. In those days, we could record songs playing on the radio on blank cassette tapes, so to prevent that sort of music piracy, radio announcers/deejays had to “speak over the songs”.
I had just started teaching in a rural town then…and that set was used during school assemblies, talks, forums, meetings and even parties! One can tell from the size of the speakers that it was loud enough. So at parties, we would play the songs on cassette tapes, thus eradicating the problem of the stylus jumping grooves during the “chu tor liao lor!!!” (the house is falling down) phenomenon! For the uninitiated, these are cassette tapes…
…or at least, the cassette cases, and this is what a cassette tape looks like…
There is a very thin tape rolled up inside a plastic casing…and you should not fast-forward or rewind it too often as it would stretch the tape and spoil it. If it gets stuck in the rollers, you must get it free carefully because it may break easily…and that would be it! Bye, bye!!! If you keep it for too long, the brown coating may come off and stick to the playback head in the player and ruin the sound production. In a nutshell, it had a lot of problems…and eventually gave way to the compact disc (CD) as you know it today.
Well, that should be enough for this time. We’ll go for a walk down memory lane again some other time…
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 