Wargames, Japanese game companies, haemorrhaging Malaysian carrier and what not

It's a Friday! Finally, the end of the week draws near. I shall visit Borders tonight and do my usual weekly book hunt. I may pick up Norman Spinrad's 'The Druid King'. Then, I will go sit at a cafe, draw some stuff and read the rulebooks to my newly acquired wargames 'Under the Lily Banner' and 'Men of Iron'.

On the matter of arcade and console games, I read on the Asian Wall Street Journal that Square Enix is buying Taito. And Bandai bought Namco some time ago. Has there been a wave of consolidation in the Japanese game industry? These are names from my younger days when I still visited the arcades. I have fond memories of Namco's 'Assault'. Ahh... those days in the late eighties when 'greed was good'. Heheh.

The Malaysian national carrier, the Malaysian Airline System (MAS) appears to be haemorrhaging to the tune of 280.7 million riggit this quarter. It is obvious that the other Malaysian carrier, the discount airline, AirAsia, has been a major contributing cause. Will this eventually be a case of national pride sustaining the national carrier like in the case of the Filipino national carrier? If AirAsia were to finally destroy MAS, will it be renamed to AirMalaysia? I wonder.

While I am interested in the Cheng Ho expeditions, I am loathed to spend money for entry to the exhibition held at Suntec City since it is associated with the '1421' book, a volume, surely, of somewhat dubious scholarship and research, something akin to the von Daniken and Velikovsky schools of research in history and science. Hmm... I am undecided.

I am reminded. I will keep a look out for Sterling's new book 'The Zenith Angle' and Robert Sawyer's 'Mindscan'. 'Zenith Angle' doesn't seem very promising. Oh well. More on those later.