Animal expert Jack Hanna is currently in Borneo as part of his two-week tour of Sabah, Sarawak and Peninsular Malaysia where he will be shooting wildlife for his “Jack Hanna’s Into The Wild” television show.

The 62-year-old and crew members will film orang utans, sunbears, proboscis monkeys and pygmy elephants in their natural habitat in Sabah and will later head for Sarawak and Peninsular Malaysia. You can follow Jungle Jack’s adventure on Twitter or Facebook.

Hanna, whose visit to Malaysia is at the invitation of Tourism Malaysia, told the media in Kota Kinabalu, the capital city of Sabah, that he had always wanted to visit Malaysia but was delayed due to his tight schedules.

I thought the movie “From Hell to Borneo“, released in 1964, is the oldest movie with the name “Borneo” in the title.

That is until I came across information about the existence of a movie much older than Hell, called “The Beast of Borneo”.

It tells the story of a mad scientist named “Boris Borodoff” who conducts strange experiments involving men and apes.

EZTakes says the film “contains the most laughable ape ‘growl’ ever committed to film.” The film is available for download in selected country and region, here.

Before Arnold Schwarzenegger, before Sylvester Stallone, long before Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, there was George Montgomery.

The tough man of his era, Montgomery acted in numerous ass-kicking, bandit-shooting, explosive-throwing action movies. One of them is From Hell to Borneo, released in 1964, a year after North Borneo or Sabah, together with Sarawak, Singapore and the Malay Peninsula, formed Malaysia.

The film is originally titled Hell of Borneo. According to Sandra Brennan of All Movie Guide, From Hell to Borneo is about “A wealthy mercenary lives in blissful solitude upon his private island in the Philippines. This actioner chronicles what happens when it is invaded by pirates, mobsters, and smugglers.”

Movies need not be historically or geographically correct; so, it’s okay if North Borneo is referred to as an island in the Philippines. It’s just a movie. It must have been one kind of era back then.

If scent can be digitised and sent as an attachment via email or downloaded from a site, I would definitely want to download or be emailed the samples of a fragrance named after Borneo, the world’s third largest island where I was born.

The Borneo 1834 by Serge Lutens seems to be so unique that the smell can only be described if one utilises fully all the writing techniques he or she may have in his or her disposal.

One reviewer, for instance, wrote that Borneo 1834 “takes the sweet winey effervescence of patchouli and layers it with silkiness of chocolate and darkness of resinous woods.”

Another reviewer says Borneo 1834 has “something that has been long-forgotten, bone dry but still powerful…”

The perfume is Paris-exclusive as of 2005, the year the perfume was created by Serge Lutens.

However, there have been reports that the perfume will ship for the export market sometime in the fall of last year, which is sometime during the third quarter of 2008.

Still, I think the brand is too exclusive to make to the mass market, let alone to the remote island it is named after.

Perhaps there is indeed a bottle or two of the fragrance, tuck away somewhere in the mansions of the rich and powerful in Borneo.

Anyone related to Howard Ng of Sandakan and Joan of Kudat? Because if you are, you are somehow connected to Barack Obama.

Here’s how. Ng and his wife, Joan, both Sabah-borns, migrated to Canada a more than three decades ago.

The photo above is from The Star newspaper

Their son Konrad Ng was born there and later ended up in Hawaii to pursue his education and career. He is now an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii.

The meeting in Hawaii

While in Hawaii, Konrad met Maya Soetoro, who is Obama’s half-sister. They later got married. Maya was born to Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian businessman and Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother.

Watching an Independence Day parade in the US four years ago were (from left) Michelle Obama, her daughter Sasha, Obama, Malia, Maya, Ng, and their daughter Suhalia. — AP

Maintaining contact

“I have many relatives who live throughout Malaysia, especially in Kuala Lumpur, Kota Kinabalu and the two towns where my parents came from,” Konrad, 34, told The Star.

The Star did not mention who is the older — Obama or Maya — but after some research, it was clear that Maya is the younger one. Below is a picture of Obama as a young boy and the toddler Maya, with their mother Dunham.

Father left when Obama was two

What happened to Obama’s father? Well, in Obama’s own word: “He had left my mother and myself in Hawaii back in 1963, when I was only two years old.”

“As a child, I knew him only through the stories that my mother and grandparents told,” said Obama. [Source]

Obama was born “Barack Hussein Obama II” at 7.24pm in Oahu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961.

So I guess, Dunham had married Soetoro about several years after Obama’s birth.

On Obama, Ng said, the Democrat candidate was “exceptionally brilliant.”

“He has a thorough understanding of the challenges we face and sound judgment on how we should address these challenges.

“Barack is a dedicated family man and cares deeply about transforming the world into a better place so that all families will have the same opportunities to do better,” he told The Star.

What happened to Obama’s father? He died in a car accident in Nairobi in 1982.

While surfing the web recently, I came across a very interesting map of Borneo Island, with the British Isles “embedded” in it to show just how vast Borneo is.

What amazes me is the fact that the map was drawn in the 19th century, an era where global positioning system and satellite navigation, not to mention Google Earth, were still light years away.

The map is included in a 1869 book titled The Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), a 19th century British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist.

Wallace wrote in the book that he dedicated The Malay Archipelago to Charles Darwin, the author of The Origin of Species.

He said the book was “not only as a token of personal esteem and friendship (with Darwin) but also to express my deep admiration for his genius and his works.”

The book also has many interesting hand-drawn illustrations depicting the lives, people and the flora and fauna of Borneo and other islands in the Malay archipelago.

One of the many interesting drawings is about an orang utan attacking a group of Borneo natives. See all the unique illustrations and read all of Wallace’s adventures in The Malay Archipelago here, courtesy of Papua Web.

George Bush hater Todd A leave left the United States soon after Bush Bush’s re-election in 2004, saying, “I became so depressed that the idea of sitting under a palm tree far, far away from George Bush became more appealing.”

The Firewater frontman travelled the world but returned three years later in time for the US 2008 Election, with a new album “The Golden Hour”, with Borneo as the opening track.

“Got a monkey for a president” is the third line in the lyrics.

[Photo Source] A Malaysian chef decided to wrestle with fate and ended up opening a restaurant in Portsmouth UK.

According to a report on Portsmouth news online, “Vietnamese-born Tring Lim, her husband Yan Lim and brother-in-law Woo Lim, from Malaysia, of which Borneo is a part, opened this colourful neighbourhood restaurant five years ago.” The article says:

“A succession of chefs from the Borneo village of Sandakan have arrived to cook for their Western brethren who crowd out the restaurant, attracted by the food, a Malay-Chinese mix, and the friendly atmosphere.”

The reports said Malaysian dishes include udang sambal (king prawns cooked in prawn paste with a chilli sauce); ayam santan (chicken drumsticks braised in coconut milk); ikan nyonya (monkfish in a tamarind sour sauce with chilli); lembu rending (beef curry with a coconut sauce) or nasi goreng (fried rice with chicken, prawns, onions, peppers and a touch of chilli sauce).

I definitely want to try the beef rending.