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I gave in to Astro

For many years, I’ve treated Astro as extortionist in providing so called sports package without golf channel. So I cut golf channel and told Astro I rather cut off my left arm than to subscribe to them again and give them all my hard earned money.

However.

After 3 years without Golf Channel, I finally could not resist the urge anymore and tapped in to subscribe to the channel for an extra RM10.60 per month. It’s not the money. Its the principal of paying this company.

Yes, I hear of so many alternatives like android TV etc. But am I brave enough to let go of Astro and go for these options? Sacrifice my football? Maybe, but let’s do it after World Cup. I can’t afford not to watch World Cup.

But yes, so I woke up on a Monday morning at 1.50 am to watch Mr Tiger Woods tee up in the second last group of the Valspar Championship. Honestly, without Tiger, nobody even knew what the hell this Valspar is about. I have no clue. Google Valspar and instead of the company information, everything is about Tiger Woods. You have one man instantly making a company nobody in this universe has heard of, suddenly famous.

To be honest, I had my misgivings of Tiger. Too many false dawns. Watching him chip and play in 2015 was like watching Michael Jordan missing a dunk in my 5 year old’s toy basketball game. It was painful and horrible. When he recovered a bit and wanted to play the 2017 season and then quit, I thought: The man is gone. How I wish I recorded all those games he played. You never know what you miss until it leaves you. And that was what Tiger was, not just to me, but to millions of golfers around the world.

But this time, he was sizzling. Like pre-car crash Thanksgiving day sizzling. You can see his drive. His iron shots. The swoosh sound of his irons and the thud of his impact. El Tigre was here and strangely, this time, the dawn isn’t so false.

So I watched, hole after hole. Birdie to start. Second hole, par save. Awesome. Par 3 4th hole, bogey couldn’t get up and down. It’s OK. Plenty of scoring opps.

However, he started missing his irons, he started missing his putts.

The most demoralising stats was for the final round 4 par 5s, he only birdie one. 14th was a heartbreaker. He was on with his second stroke, but three putted. If he had hit that, he would tie Casey. The next hole par 3 15th, he zoned in his iron to 6 feet but again missed his putt. He would have won the damn championship.

Instead he led in a 40 foot putt on the 17th to get everyone excited, but his last hole was poor. Too long a putt to tie, and he faded to second.

Disappointing?

Yes, for sure. Because I didn’t sleep and I went to meet a customer in the morning looking like a zombie.

But the great thing now is that I have Golf Channel back, and another Tiger Woods week in Bay Hill. Welcome back, TV golf!

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Astro, you are Stupid.

astrostupid

Yes. I am looking at you, ASTRO, you sorry piece of junk company owned by a guy who had been extorted money to bail out a big company, and in return passing the damn buck down to golfers, who are, as you assume, the lowest scums of the earth. Because you just took away Golf Channel from your sports package and demanding RM10 per month extra for something that you have agreed to give but now retracted. Oh how we so hate your company right now and the utter evil it represents.

ASTRO – I will just leave the legal, formal and polite complaints about you to our lawyer golfers, and resort to what Gilagolf does best – ranting like a mad man.

By the way, I’ve lodged a formal complaint against you and your kind at https://aduan.skmm.gov.my/eaduan_c/edaftar.cfm (and hopefully everyone reading this blog will do likewise) although the chances of them replying or even actioning against you is somewhat slim – seeing how important your owner has become in this country, what with bailing out the Big Boss and all. I would rank it as probable as sperm surviving more than 3 days in an anus (we all know that sperm can definitely survive in an arse for 2 days, but you cannot take a crap or wash it or even go for a bath, which is very difficult to do, but some people can do it, good on them). Well who knows, maybe there is an honourable soul in SKMM who will DO THE RIGHT THING.

So anyway, ASTRO, back to you. Having had experienced with your support staff, I will just list down the answers I know you will probably give if I were to call and lodge a complaint. I have already been informed by close friends who had worked in or with your company that your support staff mainly consists of apes. So there’s obvious leeway that I will give here, but then again, I am seriously more pissed off than I was before, when you refused to upgrade my package to HD even after billing me, until I threatened to call the SPCA on you and exposing the truth about your support’s species.

Here are a few of your standard response and my counter-response:

1) It’s in the contract that ASTRO can change our services anytime, and remove channels that we consider offensive, useless, degrading, or simply as stupid as a bunch of guys trying to put a white ball into a hole 400 meters away. – Yes, but fineprinting it in a font that requires a nano-microscope to read is not fair. Very few of us are micro-biologists who can own such an equipment.

2) You signed it and you agreed, so yeah, here’s a big F-you in the face. – OK, but what about ethical standards? Say, if I were to pay you monthly to wash my car and we agreed, wouldn’t I assume that the standards we have agreed on should be the same if the price is not changed? Would you suddenly revert to washing my car with dogshit just because you feel like it? Would your ‘wash’ expectation be the same as mine?

3) That’s stupid, Gilagolf. Of course not. How would dogshit make your car cleaner? – So likewise, I signed up for Sports package that consisted of Golf. Now you take it away, how can I consider it as a Sports package?

4) What? What about football, netball, hockey, WWE and all that? – What if I don’t watch any of those horseshit and I don’t consider them sports? Wouldn’t my expectation of ‘sports’ be different from yours? How can you make the assumption that Golf is not ‘sports’ and therefore cannot be included in your sports package?

5) This is going nowhere. Can you just get to the damn point? – The Damn point, Astro, is that either I want a cheaper sports package because it doesn’t have the sport that we all agreed on in the first place, or you to reinstate golf back into the package – at least for current subscribers.

6) Nope. That’s not gonna happen. We need the money, what with us losing 2 billion and all. – Why golf? Why can’t you torment all the housewives by removing the Korean drama channel? It’s just a bunch of men and women who look alike crying all the freaking time!

7) Obviously, Korean drama is something that is being watched by housewives during their hair dye sessions in their home. Housewives are already messed up with GST and their tailors extorting money from them, how can we be so inhumane to take away their channels? Come on, Gilagolf, have a heart! Besides, since Tiger has quit golf, nobody gives a shit about your stupid sport anymore  – OK, that Tiger argument is reasonable good point. But I am still pissed. I am just going to lodge a formal complaint against your company and its black heart dealing in this. You can’t just change like this without consultation or compensation. It’s unethical.

8) Ethics? Ethics are for losers. ASTRO’s motto is ‘Ethics is the sure way to hell. Corruption is the highway to heaven.” Look – it’s in the contract that we can change anytime. If you don’t like us, go screw yourself, because we have no competitors. The alternatives are those bunch of losers and wankers at HyppTV or ABNXcess. They are like a trishaw and a cart pulled by a diseased monkey compared to our Ferrari. Good luck watching your golf from Loserville, we can afford to lose all our golf viewers and we wouldn’t even lose a single second of sleep because we are so RICH. This is also why our channels never work when it rains and we know everyone is at home trying to watch their miserable ASTRO shows. This is because we are using satellite dishes that are actually cobbled from actual metal dishes that we found in a Russian landfill in 1962 in Khazakstan. These were the actual plates and dishes used by their peasants to eat their food from! HA! We just like being a$$holes to all of you just because we can!!- I hate your evilness, ASTRO! What other devious and dastardly stunts are you going to pull after this? Now that you have set your precedence will you also force those wannabe footballers to pay for their BPL?

9) It’s obviously in the works. Those are the second bunch of losers next to golfers. It’s just because we know you have no alternatives because we are so mysteriously protected by some unknown force, and so secretly blessed by some unknown persons, that we can treat you slightly better than how we treat our catshit but not as well as we treat our cats. You guys are bums. Live with it, and take a hike if you don’t like ASTRO, because we have a bunch of housewives willing to pay RM1,200 for us every month subscription. Life is REALLY good for us now.

Screw you, ASTRO. You are STUPID.

MUAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA <Support staff hangs up>.

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Golf Channel – You suck.

Or to be more precise, your commentators suck.

I don’t know what’s their name, but those two flers commentating the Ryder Cup absolutely get on my nerves…especially the guy that talks in a half whisper with a bit of English accent.

This is the Ryder cup. There’s home court advantage to the Americans. What the h*** is home court advantage if they just clap their hands, drink tea and say, “Good day everyone?”

The fact is, the commentators in Golf Channel covering Ryder Cup 2012 in Medinah should be sacked. They have obviously demonstrated their biasness and bigotry for the Europeans. Note:

Poulter standing over a crucial putt. Commentator: “Come on, show us as you have always done, what you are made of.” And when the skinny pants Poulter makes it, commentator: “Yes! He is all courage.” Or something like that. The one thing I can’t stand is his demeaning and condescending view of the fans in medinah, at one point, saying the “vociferous” crowd has no class in laughing at Sergio Garcia duffing an easy chip like a 24 handicapper. He mentioned that they should not jeer or laugh, and it was inappropriate.

I don’t know who the heck this guy is, but he should shot point blank up his nose with a paint ball gun. He seemed to have forgotten that this wasn’t golf. It was the Ryder Cup event. The home advantage is “Advantage”. And Sergio fluffing a chip? He’s making billions from playing this stupid game and he can’t take a bit of jeering? Come on.

The commentator for the Ryder Cup is absolutely pathetic. Don’t cover the Ryder Cup if you don’t know what home advantage is. And above all, don’t demean paying fans to watch millionaires play a game that most of us play by sneaking out of the office or home. The fans deserve to jeer or cheer, it’s the nature of the Ryder Cup tradition.

I’ve muted this annoying idiot and am now watching silent golf.