Why, what's up? Your questions answered...

    

For a few journalists and others who have been invited to visit this blog, may I respectfully offer this introduction to answer two basic questions:

     

(1)  Who are you? We don't know you; so why should we even bother to read your blog?

(2)  What's in this for me? What have you done to touch our lives?

My short answer, quoting Othello: "I have done the state some service…."

What's this? James Bond 007 -- licence to kill?

     
 FORMAT 0007 #CC15,10,13#DE#MC
#QL#EL-13#DE#IT1.3#DE#MC
#QL#EL3#DE#XI#MP#IT1.3#DE#CF8,8#DE#MC
#QL#CF9#DE#MC
#QL#XI#MC
#QL#XI#MC
#UF7#DE 07#DE

Let's jump to:

     

FORMAT 1999 #CC8.3,8,8.6 7.9,8.2#DE#XL#MC

#FS#DE#CP8.2 7.1#DE#UP35#DE#FS2#DE#IX#CF9,8.4 7.8#DE#MC
#QL<#XI#EL22#DE#MB

Let me explain: What appears to be gibberish was precisely what was needed in
computer code, numbered from 0001 to 1999 (a total of about 1,600, skipping some
numbers) to drive a Linotron typesetter for a computerized publishing system installed
in Times House in late 1978 to mid-1979.

This system was capable of setting type for newspapers at upwards of 2,000 lines per minute, compared with the old Linotype machines (you can look this up via a Google search) which clanked along at 3 lines per minute.

Even with say, 40 Linotype operators working at top speed, that meant they could only produce a total of 120 lines per minute. If they had installed more than 40 Linotypes, they would have run out of floor space!

   

This newsroom revolution at Times House meant that more extensive and better information, picked up from the wire services like Reuter and AP, or written in-house and edited, etc. could be processed up to a later hour for the benefit of all Straits Times and Berita Harian readers.

The newsroom staff of about 140, including former MPs Yatiman Yusof and Zainal Abidin Rasheed, to name just two old friends of mine, were trained to use the new system, and having acquired new skills, they worked more efficiently… Our journalists were introduced to computers even before Mr Philip Yeo started to computerize Singapore's Civil Service operations.

    

The computer was also able to record advertising orders for multiple insertions, working like a plane on auto-pilot, churning out ads on the correct dates, even taking over billing… All readers benefitted.

    

Need I ask you to guess who was primarily responsible for this? The Straits Times paid me about $5,000 p.m. as a consultant. I was paid for two trips to America with generous per-diem allowances.There I evaluated systems offered by competing vendors and we settled on a relatively low-cost Tal-Star system.

    

The S.T. also provided me with a personal secretary named Margaret and a spacious room in the Times House annex which also housed the company's school for training journalists. Hong Kong's South China Morning Post installed an identical system, having entered into an agreement that input by the consultant in Singapore would be made available to the Post.

I realise with hindsight that I was underpaid. The Singapore Monitor compensated for this, paying me $9,500 p.m. for consultancy services in 1982. But even a princely sum for one who hadn't had any tertiary education wasn't enough to keep me there.

    

I saw LKY's hand at work in imposing certain restrictions on how the paper was going to be run. There was also a personnel problem. I liked working with the editor, Seah Chiang Nee, who had been the Singapore Herald's Kuala Lumpur bureau chief, and his right-hand man, Toh Thian Ser. However, a younger executive who had probably been humbled by an expatriate supervisor when he was a Straits Times employee, was adamant he did not want Seah to employ any expatriates.

    

Even at the Straits Times much later, its editor, Cheong Yip Seng. related how he was compelled to scour several countries for competent copy editors (called sub-editors earlier) because he could not find local talent to fill these positions.

The Monitor needed competent reporters and sub-editors. We were short-staffed and we were expected to do battle with the Straits Times lacking fire power! Faced with this younger executive's intransigence over the hiring of competent journalists from abroad and LKY's machinations in the background, I could see no future in the Monitor project. So I quit after about six or eight months.

    

Some months later, however, Seah asked me to return. We discussed a specific brief – to recruit and train locals. I decided to give it another go, completed that training programme, and resigned again. The paper folded soon after. A couple of weeks later, I was invited to join a small group of half a dozen unemployed ex-Monitor staff to go on holiday to the Maldives. It was there that I was told by Ken Jalleh Jr that he and Margaret Thomas would not have left the Straits Times to join the Monitor if they had known I wasn't confident it would succeed. I apologized.

     

How computerized publishing started east of Suez: It all started, albeit in a primitive fashion, in the Singapore Herald. I had been reading about computerized publishing systems and was familiar with miniaturised electronic components. From 1967 I had been flying radio-controlled planes (after I was told while training in Gypsy Moths that I could not get a PPL because I am colour-blind).

    

My largest radio-controlled plane had a wingspan of 1.4 metres, but the controlling radio components were tiny. I learnt about transistors, capacitators, chips and dry joints, which caused problems with intermittent contact. I learnt to repair dry joints with a soldering iron.

Rudy Meissner, our Herald production manager, sought out and advised us to buy a small basic typesetting system from Germany, which served us well.

   

I continued to bone up on more advanced systems. I have found a copy of The Seybold Report on Publishing Systems dated June 28 reporting on DRUPA '82 among my souvenirs. DRUPA was the largest and most important exposition of graphic arts equipment before the advent of Desktop Publishing Systems.

The contrived death of the Singapore Herald: They had Tricky Dick in Washington D.C. We have Wily Lee, our local stand-in for Tricky Dick. Any reader of this blog who is under 55 years of age will not be familiar with the circumstances leading up to the death in May 1971 of the Herald because he or she would have been in Primary or Lower Secondary school in 1971.
  
Well, after Wily Lee pulled our publishing licence, Mr T.S. Khoo, Managing Editor of The Straits Times called me to meet him in Times House. He said that he respected what I had done for 10 days in defence of the Singapore Herald. His words: "I would like to nominate you for the Magsaysay award for defending press freedom, but you understand I cannot do so because of what LKY will do to me and this paper if we support you in defiance of him. But come back, you can have your old job."

Dear old T.S. decent, kind, competent editor, good friend and drinking buddy! I chose not to offend him, I could not tell him why I could not return to work as his assistant. When we were defending the Singapore Herald against Wily Lee's unfounded "black operations" charges, I declared in a Page One editorial that we were not defending press freedom but the right to live with dignity. With his "black ops" charges, it was clear he was planning to deal us a death blow.

And over a 10-day period in every Page One signed article, I declined to pose as a champion of press freedom. However, even if T.S. believed we were fighting for freedom of the press, The Straits Times did not print a single report to tell its readers that it was on our side, although many of its journalists flocked to our office to offer their services. Support came from many quarters, but not from The Straits Times – for obvious reasons, it kept a prudent non-committal silence.

I told T.S. that with the kind of money he would have to pay me perhaps he could pay two or three of my jobless Herald men to join the Straits Times. Eventually he did employ six or seven of them, including Seah – while I set up a Job Placement Centre.
   
I was also out of a job, but paid The Straits Times about $1,000 for quarter-page ads to launch this project, which eventually found most of the jobless Herald staff enough jobs to keep the wolf from the door. When our manager Jimmy Hahn, also jobless, learnt of my cash outlay for the ads, he offered to pay half, which I gratefully accepted.
     
So why could I not rejoin The Straits Times editorial team at the top – No3 in the pecking order? As the Herald's editor-in-chief, thundering in print against Wily Lee's attacks, I reasoned that if I rejoined The Straits Times, I would be judged to be like a bishop who had stood on a pulpit to denounce vice, then climbed into bed with a prostitute!
    
Oddly enough, of the many online comments vilifying former S.T. editor Cheong Yip Seng for his disclosures in his book, O B Markers, of heavy-handed mistreatment at the hands of Wily Lee, the word "prostitute" occurs fairly often -- he is labelled a PAP prostitute and lapdog.

Rather unkindly, the critics posted comments telling him that he should have quit – they argued that professional integrity was what was at stake. I don't agree. For close to 20 years, in my estimation, Yip Seng was earning upwards of $125,000 a year, perhaps excluding bonuses. It was too much to ask him to forgo that.

Also he needed to earn a living, doing what he knew best, even if it meant dodging the bullet most of the time.

   
Please don't get me wrong. I am trying to be impartial. I did rate his work in 1968 as chief reporter highly enough to invite him to join me and Francis Wong and Norman Siebel in starting the Herald.
    
In O B Markers, he explains why he declined to join us and was rewarded with an increase in salary! He faithfully recorded that I had predicted that his salary would be increased once it was known I had approached him. I also invited Peter Lim to join us, and Francis independently invited David Kraal to join us. Both declined. I look back on that episode with mixed feelings. I guess I was a pretty good talent scout. Both Peter and Yip Seng were elevated to editor-in-chief in succession…
   
So what do you think? If some thought Yip Seng should have quit, even if he did choose
to resign, someone else would have taken his place ...
    

Again, please don't get me wrong. I am not a dissident with only unkind words for

Wily Lee and his ilk. I like many things here, even our public transport system,

breakdowns and all... Still, some Government policies, e.g. denying opposition

neighbourhoods any upgrading work, although they pay their taxes, COEs, etc.

like everybody else, must be hard for many to swallow.

I believe most, if not all, of the PAP's officials/MPs are or have been decent, upright human beings who learnt long ago that if you wanted to serve, to make a change, to create better living conditions, you would have fewer problems getting things done by joining or supporting the PAP.
    
Even without lofty ambitions to change the world, if you only wanted to make a living, joining the PAP bandwagon was a desirable option.

How were ordinary Singaporeans to know Wily Lee looked upon the masses with thinly-disguised contempt, regarding voters as just so much electoral fodder to be manipulated.

   
And we know the newspapers here and the State-controlled TV station only feed us what Wily Lee wants us to know. In O B Markers, he is quoted as saying that press barons in the West are guilty of controlling what their newspaper readers should read.
     
Well, he ranks above press barons in the Singapore context and has done exactly what he thinks the press barons should not be doing! Belay that! Perhaps he did not mean to condemn the press barons, in which case we can read his own actions as a deliberate demonstration of how he could emulate those press barons.
     
By the way, commentators on Yip Seng's O B Markers were puzzled by what they read as a strange endorsement of his book by Wily Lee.  The pithy endorsement: "It is worth a read."  "Why?" they wonder. "The book clearly portrays Lee as a bully, a petty despot. Clearly he has shown he cannot tolerate unfavourable comment."
     
I think I have the answer. There are his self-serving memoirs. Marshall said it best about Lee's "compulsive self-promotion." Read the memoirs carefully. He is telling how he did this and that, glossing over the less savoury aspects of past events.
     
Like all histories written by the victors, not the vanquished, he is telling all and sundry: "See how clever I was." In O B Markers, he is gloating over what he could make journalists do, with direct threats and arm-twisting… "I was so clever, see"
     
 Self-promotion, let's face it, isn't entirely bad. The problem is that far too often, it is coupled with self-aggrandisement – even worse, after Wily Lee embarked on his self-promotion and self-aggrandisement journey, he lost or discarded his moral compass. Before he returned from his law studies in Britain he supported a Labour candidate in the election which Clement Atlee won. It is recorded that he made an impassioned speech, talking about "social justice." Wither social justice now?


            Another Wily Lee quote: "Everything I did was for an honorable purpose.
                         I had to do some nasty things…" -- 1 Sept 2010

Also, lest we forget. Wily Lee declared soon after assuming power: "If you don't like how things are done here, go form a party or join one. Otherwise shut up." I am paraphrasing him, of course, but he got his message across to his audience then – mostly citizens with little education or none at all, or citizens literate only in Chinese.

    
What they understood was exactly what he intended… And he got away with many things that most decent Singaporeans are beginning to abhor. Want a list? Okay, here goes…
    

According to a press release, Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said: "Singapore's status as a world-class economy has not kept it from having a remarkably poor record in respecting the rule of law and civil and political rights. The Singaporean people must be wondering when their government is going to trust them enough to exercise the same basic rights as people elsewhere."

However, according to Wily Lee, Singaporeans should ignore Western criticism of how this country is run. He knows best and never fails to remind us of this. And he tends to dismiss such criticism and online posts critical of him and his works as "noise." And Singaporeans are "daft," by definition. Whose definition? Why his, of course.

Closer to home: "I can only express the hope that faith in the judicial system will never be diminished, and I am sure it will not, so long as we allow a review of the judicial processes that take place here in some other tribunal where obviously undue influence cannot be brought to bear. As long as governments are wise enough to leave alone the rights of appeal to some superior body outside Singapore, there must be a higher degree of confidence in the integrity of our judicial process. This is most important." -- Lee Kuan Yew in Parliament, March 15, 1967

Having said this, with hand on heart, I guess, he simply went ahead and abolished appeals to the Privy Council anyway. He also abolished trials by jury. No half measures for Wily Lee.

A word of caution: Don't ever say, hint or convey, even by innuendo, to anyone in public that you think we may have a compliant judiciary. Strike "compliant judiciary" out of your vocabulary!

Things may have begun to change after the May 2011 general election and the Punggol East by-election, who knows?

    

So your daily paper is better, despite Wily Lee's control. Here's how it all started:

    
Even if you want to read only the Obituaries, the sports pages or check the cinema ads, the small ads and display ads, your daily paper is professionally produced (okay, you suspect it is a Government /LKY mouthpiece), on Saturdays you get 166 pages or more – not bad value for sale to the karang-guni man! Personally, I have never stopped reading it. There is still some value, most of the "think pieces"/op-ed features cannot be faulted.
   
Now, the story I am about to relate may smack of self-promotion too. Please bear with me, after all, this is a personal story…don't be upset if you come across much that you think is boring;

I expect that you will skip over those parts, the way you would flip the pages

of a book. In the Foreword of this blog, I announced that I would be

ruminating. Pardon me if I do tend to ruminate a bit.

     
After declining to rejoin The Straits Times, I still had to find a job. I had six children from two wives to feed. All from the days when the Government did not have to plead with its citizens: "Marry and have children, PLEASE!" Also my first wife was a Catholic and when she was in KK hospital, she asked me what name we should give our third child.

"That's easy," I responded without missing beat: "Let's call her A. Khaw." "What's A?" "A for Accident," I replied with a straight face. Like Queen Victoria, she wasn't amused.

Anyway, off I went to Hong Kong to join Pacific Newspapers Ltd in time for the launch in late 1971 of The Asian, a weekly English language broadsheet. Its Editor-in-Chief was Tarzie Vittachi. It was a happy and rewarding experience for me working with a team of outstanding journalists from several countries. I was the paper's Production Editor.

     
But after four or five months, T.S. Khoo appeared suddenly in HK and called to say his wife Rose had taken ill and could not meet me, but he would like to have me join him for dinner at a posh hotel over in Kowloon. The cross-harbour ferry deposited me on the Kowloon shore.
     
At dinner, I learnt that his wife was not really that ill. He wanted to speak to me privately and said that he was sorry I did not rejoin him in Singapore, but how about a posting in Kuala Lumpur?

He then spilt the beans. A.C. Simmons, head honcho of the Straits Times company, had asked him to try to get me to go to K.L. where trouble had been brewing in the newsroom for some time.

     
The locals there did not see eye to eye with their last few expat colleagues in the newsroom. T.S. did not give me all the details, but when I finally made it to KL in late February 1972, I learnt that the locals had held a union meeting and had sent a letter to the Malaysian Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak demanding that the expats be given their marching orders. I was the only expat they would accept, so I was told.
     
Only the red carpet treatment for me in K.L. In addition to a generous salary deal, the company agreed to pay the rent of any house I chose to live in – in any area. I chose P.J. where I had formerly bought a house, then persuaded my father to sell his Kota Bahru house and move to K.L.when I left in 1970 to launch the Herald. In P.J. they got me a double-storey bungalow, next door to a Minister's home, so every night on returning from work, I would be greeted by at least two of the Minister's armed guards
    
My home had six bedrooms, four bathrooms, pretty extensive gardens front, back and sides for my wife, a toddler and me. I have never lived in a better house. In my Hong Kong flat on Tin Hau Temple Road, there wasn't room to swing a cat in…

And all was going well at the office in Balai Berita in Jalan Riong, right up to the day an Umno group bought over the company in late 1972 and the New Straits Times was born.

That Umno group installed an executive who was to be my partner in getting the first computerised publishing system installed East of Suez! His name was Mansor Wahab, a jolly man with a ready smile. He came to us from Lever Brothers, where he had been their Sales Manager.

At the New Straits Times, almost daily the editors and the production team were at each others' throats arguing. "Copy (edited sheets of reports) was late again last night. Our time stamps show that last copy was sent down at 11:46pm." This from production. The editorial response: "Ok, but that was only two pars. All other copy had gone down by 11:25."

Mansor, circulation manager, took no part in the arguments – but if the paper was late, he had every right to know why. The later the paper rolled off the presses, the more problems he had in distribution. We are talking of getting the paper out to the remotest corner of the country!

On duty I would be found regularly seated in the middle of a horseshoe-shaped table designed to seat the Chief Sub/Managing Editor in the centre/slot surrounded by a team of eight subs to whom I would hand out copy to be subbed. It was my job to know each sub's strengths and weaknesses. I also had to make sure that a financial report or a human-interest story went to a sub deemed to be best able to deal with it. Eventually, anyone found deficient in any department would be given appropriate training.

So one morning, usually a lax period, Mansor stopped by for a chat. "How can we
make sure we can get our paper out on time every day? Do you have a cut-off time? 
Meaning, you will not accept any report after a certain time – making allowance 
for the time needed to sub it." I assured him we did operate exactly like that, but
there would always be emergency situations.

Days later, he was back. In the meantime, I had been thinking how to get him hooked.
So there he was, charming and courteous as usual. I began: "Dear Inche Mansor,
I believe you have some influence beyond these four walls. Now, if you could persuade
the people running the Stock Exchange to close 60 to 80 minutes earlier, that would
help us get our paper out on time."

That left him gaping. What a ridiculous proposition! But it got his attention. So I asked
him to sit down and make himself comfortable while I bent his ear.

There were many production problems – but Sports and Stock Exchange reports all came in from 5:30 to 8:30pm and the 6-point Linotype machine operators just could not cope. Other problems just piled up… much like a highway pile-up.

His grasp of the problem was excellent: "Let's buy more 6-point machines." I had not wanted to broach the subject of going modern with computerised typesetting because I figured I would be offending Junus Sudin, the CEO, charming dapper man in white with matching shoes, also the equally charming Production top bod, Zakuan Ariff, who might have been criticised for failing to keep up with the latest trends, even Chong Pang, newly-employed engineer…

But Mansor could be roped in to report to the management that the NST

was operating, in my words, "like a factory producing jeans but employing

seamstresses to sew and stitch, ignoring the fact that sewing machines had

already been invented and had been installed in other factories."

I told him Associated Press and several newspaper offices, mainly in America, already had computerised typesetting systems.

A.P. used their system mainly for online storage and distribution of edited news items
to clients, not much typesetting required, but they could print anything they wanted.  I
reckoned that the management team would not take offence if the suggestion to look
into the computerised option came from Mansor.

A quick learner, Mansor still had doubts. "We don't know anything about computers.
How?" I told him I would put it to the board, if he could set up a meeting. I needed
the board's approval, I said. Just talking about it was not going to solve our problem.

The board wasted no time. I presented details, down to stop-watch timings of how fast
Linotypes could set type and charts showing peak copy-flow patterns. I told them to
send a team to the university to learn the basics of data processing. Why? So that when
we were talking to vendors of typesetting systems, we could understand what they were
talking about.

The university agreed to arrange for a special course for our team of five. So Zakuan,
Chong Pang, Shivadas (editorial), Thava (personnel) and I were selected to learn
about the basics of data processing, beginning with zeros and ones. Each one received
a certificate of attendance – and a clear plastic template for drawing flowcharts. I still
have mine.

Several vendors offered to show us what they could supply and made arrangements for us to visit a number of newspaper offices where their products had already been installed. 

We could judge for ourselves how well they performed. We travelled quite a bit, so
much so that I made jokes of our itinerary: "If this is Tuesday, we are in Peoria!" Also
passed through Ottawa, Baltimore, Battendorf, one of the Quad Cities (flew in on
Ozark Airlines!) Rochester, Mn, where the Mayo Clinic is. The other Rochester in
New York state is the home of Kodak.

In Chicago, in a Rush Street bar, after downing my first Martini, I plunked the glass down, caught the eye of the bartender and, in my best imitation of a Mickey Spillane private eye, intoned: "Hit me again!" It was all wasted on this guy, though. No Mickey Spillane fan, of course. He just kept staring at me, obviously Chinese or Japanese in a three-piece suit – speaking funny English!

Back home in K.L. we hired an engineer who could use an oscilloscope. The system we ordered came with a mainframe computer made by DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation). The engineer Mohd Noor had quite a simple job – if the system went down he was to trouble-shoot to card level. Pull out the faulty card, insert spare card and presto! We never lost an edition.

For the Straits Times system in Singapore, the computer code formats were designed to make life easy for subs. In the old system, using Linotypes, subs would instruct the guys in the production room to set type with this instruction: "6pt x1, ½ + ½" – with the new system to get the same result out of the Linotron all we had to do was to type "uf006"; for 8pt we would type "uf008"; "uf" = "use format."

This was my second system installation. I was the only one who could figure out how to write all the computer code entries. That was because I had already done similar work in Balai Berita.

The vendor sent a husband-and-wife team to Singapore to help us get the system up and running. Sorry to say, in this department they were clueless.

However, they sent such a glowing report of my work back to their head office

in Anaheim, California, that within a week their boss flew in to offer me a job to

work for them. I declined this and a few other offers to work abroad.

I had determined, after the death of the Herald, that I would not emigrate. I vowed to plant my flag firmly on Singapore soil and tell the story of Wily Lee's nasty, even despicable, manipulation of the facts… I did not want him to accuse me of taking pot shots at him from abroad.  

A few words about our training programme for reporters and subs… This was all
new; I had to allay their fears. To get them to understand the first rule, i.e. don't give
conflicting reports to the computer, I resorted to telling them how a drill sergeant could
get his platoon to raise their left legs, then give a second command to lift their right legs.
There would be no problem.

With the computer, however, it had a memory and would remember that if the left leg was up, there was no way that it could lift the right leg WITHOUT a command to lower the left leg first!

This went down rather well with a lot of laughter. Also, for the girls, I said that it was possible that in the future, if they should sit in front of the Visual Display Terminal (PC monitor in modern lingo) and felt somewhat down in the dumps, they could hit a combination of keys and a pair of arms would come out and hug them! With robotics in Japan, this may still be possible.

    
After the first Tal-Star installation in 1978-79, The Straits Times
has acquired more sophisticated newsroom equipment. When I was
invited by Peter Lim to join him as consultant for the launch of The
New Paper in 1988, the Tal-Star system at Times House had been
replaced by a Systems Integrated Inc. (SII) system. These days,
they are relying on network-linked Desktop Publishing systems,
dispensing with mainframe systems.

Earlier, for the Singapore Monitor, in 1982 I visited the United States with Tom Lennon (who was replaced by Mr Mah Bow Tan as CEO by the time the paper was launched) to buy a market-leader Atex system. A similar system was installed in The Star in Kuala Lumpur in 1984. I was engaged as consultant for this project as well.

The Singapore Herald: Water under the bridge? May 1971 to
today -- nearly 42 years ago. Why am I dredging this up? Simply
put, after the paper had been put out of business by the
Government, had we been able to appeal, I wouldn’t have had
to start this blog.

The background: Do not forget that Wily Lee’s towering intellect managed to dazzle the likes of Henry Kissinger and Lady Thatcher. Well, he knew how to act lawfully to withdraw the publishing licence of the Herald. The law allowed him to do this without having to assign any reason, but he decided he had to offer a reason for doing this. So he cast about for a plausible excuse – “black operations” and dragged in a red herring, i.e. Dato Aw Kow’s Eastern Sun had received funds from Communist China…

The law that allowed him to act in this instance was one of
two inherited from our former British colonial masters that he
could use with impunity. The other law? Why, just jail people
without trial – some for years, even when he was kowtowing
to the Chinese Communist rulers in Beijing! We had no legal
recourse… there were no provisions for appeals.

There was also a very personal reason why I could not state my case after the Herald died. I had to make a living to feed my family (remember, six children?) and provide for my aged parents, who died aged 86 and 94! I was keenly aware that Wily Lee had taken care of anyone who dared to oppose him. His nasty, even despicable, actions were legion.

Even when I was invited to work for the Singapore Monitor and The New Paper, I deliberately chose NOT to be appointed to line command positions – always avoiding even any inadvertent   area of conflict with Government policy; I asked to be engaged as a consultant. I chose to keep silent all those years.

I am now no longer so vulnerable. At 85, going on 86, I no longer harbour hopes of being gainfully employed. So here goes. I am whistle-blowing, telling the story of how Wily Lee lied, how he duped people…

                               ------- more to come -------