JAN 19 — It’s a new year, but before we get our hopes up, here is our professional wet blanket to help you abandon any such illusions with all the best of facepalming action from the last month. Watch as the government decides that people are so confused no one cares what it says anymore, but the Perak mufti decides that people really care about what he says even though he is so confused and Christmas happened. Apparently.

Money ain’t a thang

The government, sensing that reducing the price of kangkung will not satisfy a populace hungry for real chang... uhh, change, is putting its austerity drive into turbo, and announced today it will stop dotting its “i”‘s and crossing its “t”‘s. This will save huge amounts of money on ink, since as we discovered previously, ink is so expensive it costs as much as a car to maintain a dot matrix printer.

So, in future, missives from the government will sound like a bunch of short and long lowercase “L”‘s, jusl like lhis, excepl wilhoul lhe dols of course. Which make as much sense as previous announcements to cut government spending.

Who else but Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak could possibly end the year with a haircut — just a little off the top and a shave of the sideburns, without actually having anything there in the first place. So a treasury which somehow manages to spend money it doesn’t have, Najib announced, is now not spending the money it doesn't have. But just a little of the money it doesn’t have. Not much, because, as one analyst figured out, “how can you deduct out of zero?”

Perak mufti continues to tell people to do stuff no one in their right mind will do

Hot on the heels of telling people to pray instead of party, and that it’s okay to go around killing people, Tan Sri Harussani Zakaria has now advised people to wear shirts instead of trousers over their lower halves.

The Perak mufti said this would save many time in the toilets, as it would not require one to take his or her pants off before relieving themselves.

He also called on citizens to learn how to read Jawi backwards, so as to make sure Jews, Christians and Shiites would not be able to insert backmasked messages into reading material. Harussani insisted that not being able to read Jawi the normal way should not be used as an excuse not to learn this important skill to ensure the sanctity of one’s faith.

It has been speculated that his next pronouncement would be to tell people to set fire on any car with four digits in their license plates to discourage gambling on 4D, make it compulsory to wear glasses that do not match one’s own visual impairment so as to make sure if a naked woman walks in front of you, you are not drawn to sin or that “blood is green and yucky.”

Shock as no one insults anyone on a holy religious day

Malaysia’s seemingly unstoppable momentum leading to a ruinous downward spiral into religious disaster was halted last Christmas as somehow, everyone failed to offend anyone. Father Aloysius Loquacious called a press conference in front of his megachurch on Boxing Day, to address the gaping lack of any firebombing or demonstrations on the day of the birth of Jesus Christ.

“Seriously, I thought others would protest the idea of Jesus as God since the majority only thinks of him as a prophet,” he said.

Elsewhere, leading Muslim cleric Datuk Seri Ulam Sedap admitted that he much preferred hanging stockings, rather than hanging Christians.

“I dunno man, this is just a lot simpler and there isn’t any nasty cleanup after that,” he told The Malay Mail Online as he removed the lights from around his Christmas tree, and put away his 12-piece Nativity scene set.

Other leading religious figures also bemoaned the “waste of time” having “a public holiday when people don’t take advantage of it to make senseless attacks against other religions.”

“In future, we should just make people work,” said Judas Priest.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malay Mail Online.