Underachievement - Special Hello! Edition

Malaysian popstar Siti Nurhaliza yesterday married the presumably very wealthy businessman Datuk Khalid Mohamad Jiwa at a highly-publicised ceremony in Kuala Lumpur yesterday. Apparently it caused a bit of a stir in Malaysia, as Nurhalzia has been accused of wrecking the previous marriage of Khalid, 20 years her elder, and has lost a bit of the goodwill of the Malaysian public. Ms Nurhalzia's music is unknown to me, though she is hugely popular in South-East Asia and my guess is that I would hardly find her warblings any more listenable than those of her Western counterparts. What this episode (which was broadcast in both Malaysia and Indonesia live from a real mosque) demonstrates is the possibility of Islam co-existing with the modern West. They really are, as the Onion would say, into the same dumb shit as us. Not the good people of South-East Asia to hate our freedom. Hell, if it's packaged by MTV, bring it on!