Yahoo! Answers Blog Malaysia

What is Halloween? Besides knowing that it falls on the last day of October, all things scary and goes bump in the night appears, and American children like to dress up and go around asking for sweets, what does it actually mean and how did it originate? Have you ever wondered?

Doing a search on Yahoo! Answers with the keywords “Origin” and “Halloween” actually gave me 168 answers! (the number 168 is lucky in Cantonese by the way – “prosperity all the way” – but I digress )  One Answerer, talesofafemalenoamd, asked “What is the true origin of Halloween? Where did trick-or-treating come from?“. Fiona replied, giving a really long and well-thought-out answer that highlights how the name “Halloween” came from (from the words “All Hallows’ Even”), where the scary bits came from (it originated from an ancient Celtic festival called Samhain) and even a small paragraph on trick-n-treat!

However, for an Asian country like Malaysia, I think Halloween has become commercialised. Pubs join in the fun by promoting Halloween-themed parties (there’s a Halloween party at Pure Bar in Malacca this Friday!). Supermarkets sell candy and chocolates in shapes of ghosts, skulls and zombies. Horror movies are coming out in droves this Thursday in the cinema. To me, Halloween doesn’t mean anything much, but just another opportunity to have fun. I think the Chinese “7th Month” and other types of hantus freak me out more! LOL! What about you? Does Halloween mean anything to you?

You know, under the Yahoo! Answers Community Guidelines, we tell all users to “Share what you know”. So what do we mean by that?

Well, take myself for example. I must admit I’m not very knowledgeable about everything (if I am, then I can be the first human walking encyclopedia! But I’m not, sob.). However, I do watch quite a bit Japanese Anime, play RPGs (Role Playing Games) in my spare time and I love to do research online (yes, I’m a closet geek). So I do my part by helping to answer questions that ask about Anime and games, as well as factual questions where I can just do a quick research online before answering them.

Now I really like animals, dogs in particular, but I’m not an expert. So thank goodness there are other knowledgeable Answerers like joniboni and hammy sharing advice and their expertise on animals in the “Pets” category. It is because that I know there are all these dedicated Answerers on Yahoo! Answers sharing their knowledge that I’m confident in approaching Yahoo! Answers for help. Consequently, I also feel that it’s important that I share what I know because maybe there’s someone out there searching for answers to questions about Anime (yes, Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales is showing on Animax right now and while the drawing style is very archaic, the OP is funky and reminds me of Samurai Champloo’s OP ) and RPGs.

So while sharing is good, becareful not to violate the Community Guidelines by letting your personal agenda get in the way of the community spirit of sharing knowledge!

Last Friday I received a happy sms, a friend of mine just gave birth to a baby girl! And the very next day, I received another one from an ex-colleague, who had just given birth to a baby boy. Both are very, happy news. But I guess in life, if there’s birth of life, there’s also death. Yesterday I attended the funeral of an ex-colleague’s mom. And tonight will be another funeral, of a dear friend’s mom. Both mothers passed away due to illnesses.

(Photo many thanks to Kervinchong)

A friend of mine said upon hearing the news, “I feel mortal”. I think that’s true. When we are healthy and young, we feel that we can achieve anything and that we will never get old or fall sick. Eat fastfood everyday? Sure! We’re young and can work off the fats and cholesterol. Surely we won’t get any heart attacks or need any by-pass surgeries. Smoke and drink and sleep in the wee hours of the morning? Sure! I’m young, I’ll never get lung cancer and my energy levels are still very high. But when we are faced with death, we then remember again that life is unpredictable. It doesn’t matter if we are young, old or in-between. Age doesn’t matter to death.

How then should we make life more meaningful? I think the way to do so is firstly, love yourself. Only when we learn to love ourselves, we will be able to love others. And secondly, keep the passion to learn alive. I feel that having a healthy curiosity and a willingness to learn can make us more vibrant and interested in our life and our surroundings. This in turn makes our lives richer and more fulfilled. So let’s go forth and celebrate new life and let’s keep on learning!

Can you imagine being in a world without Instant Messaging? No? Well, neither can I. :O I mean, how can we chat with our friends sneakily while at work? How can we continue those juicy gossips once we reach home? Phones? Emails? What are those? (let’s not even talk about writing letters! lol!) Imagine not having instant messaging, would that mean we can only talk to our colleagues and that we may have to pick up the *gasp* phone? Alright, granted we can sneak in some smses with our flexible thumbs. But that definitely doesn’t make us look very “hardworking”.

So Yahoo! is proud to introduce you to Yahoo! Messenger 9.0. Nope it does not have an invisible-ability to hide itself on your desktop. But what it has are all these…

• Express yourself with new cool skins
• Show off your style with Emoticons, Avatars, Audibles and IMVironments
• Get real-time updates about what your friends are up to
• Share favourite videos and Flickr photos with your friends within your chat window
• Chat privately with friends on your social network profiles, blog or website through Pingbox

Go ahead, give Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 a try!