Someone: it's xxx's birthday today!

Me: so what did you get

Someone: not telling you

Me: wth
why not

Me: because there are a lot of things i don't feel comfortable sharing about with you.

Me: even such a minor thing?
sigh
nevermind then

Someone: that says something, doesn't it.


After 6 years, has it really come to that?

Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes.

Sigh.

i know this sounds really *off*, and i'm not transsexual or anything, but after what i've learnt so far in medical school, i'd like to know for myself what it's like to have periods, and go through PMS and cramps and all that jazz- so I know what half of my future patients (or in the unlikely chance that I specialise in OB-GYN) have to put up with for most of their lives.

An emotion stirs in my breast.

Something touches my brow, ever so lightly, for the first time in a few weeks.

My brows furrow in consternation, and my heart constricts.

Yes, I feel sian again.

[Now, was that not as effective as poetry?]


It's nice to know that I'm hardly in the minority. Either that or all my friends are weird :)

And not a small relief too. Though it doesn't help end the malaise, not really :)

Discussion with others is making me more confused, but a tad less sian. Is that good? :)

I now have a plethora of comments, but am none the wiser for it. Time to meditate.

Aum.


It seems everyone feels such at various points of time, and solutions to that seem to vary.

I am tempted to indulge myself and despair that I am deeper in the quicksand than the rest, but I shall not allow myself this luxury.

Some suggest distractions. And indeed, when I'm busy, I never inhale the foul miasma. Especially in camp, when my short term aim is to book out. But is immersion in short term distractions really a suitable solution?

As I was musing to Xephyris, it probably boils down to me having no direction in life, no aim, no purpose and no goals ; That my life is empty, and I feel adrift. And drifting from some friends too.

Now doesn't this sound familiar? It's a rarely seen but regular feature here, I think.

Restored Post

The system admins in the e-learning centre are evil. Instead of going around saying "guan1 dian4 le4" (We're closing shop), they have thought up a nefarious way of chasing us out without much effort on their part. After posting on Friday I was merrily twiddling my thumbs, when an ominous dialog box came up, saying "Self destruct sequence has been initiated. 5... 4..." Oops. Wrong message. The one I actually saw went something like, "Automated shutdown has been initiated. You've 30 seconds to save your work". !@#$%^&*()

Mr Au-Yong (Kelvin) thinks that he can get away with not displaying his Corporal rank. I hope someone catches him before his ORD date (in 8 months time!)

Deployment at the SAF Ferry Terminal was very boring. I got to catch up on my reading (after sifting through the current affairs magazines available, and reading Ger's GP stuff, I had no stomach for Donald Kagan's "On The Origins Of War And The Preservation Of Peace", though, so I fell back on the reliable salve of 'Mistress of the Empire') and got enough beauty sleep for a week :) Luckily it's going to be for only 3, or at most 4 days at a time. The poor platoon commander and platoon sergeant will be there for the whole 2 weeks though :) I hear they're bringing in a TV too, though I predict it'll be tuned to Channel U most of the time.

I hate Malay food, and not only because of the chili and no pork (though I brought along some bak kwa for solace). The food that I had to eat while at SFT was all from the Malay cookhouse on the Island of Doom. Of the 6 lunch/dinner meals, apart from 1 pseudo-Western meal of Fish and Chips (with much more rice than chips, of course, and with smelly fish to boot), each looked the same and all included a Chicken Wing. From this I conclude that Malays have a love affair with the humble chicken wing. Which explains why all Malay food stalls sell chicken wings. In addition, we got black sauce mutton 3 times. Maybe they cook one huge vat every month and give it out every other day. Suspiciously, for 2 consecutive meals we had sotong balls. Must've cooked too much the first time. Lastly, every meal was drenched in coconut milk. So now we know why, in BMT, the people eating Muslim food lost less weight than those eating non-Muslim food :)

At least we got the more varied selection of drinks that NTUC Foodfare provides.

Luckily, the monotony was broken on Saturday night, when some of us ordered Malay 2 for 1 Pizza (Intensely misleading in its advertising, for a pizza from them costs nearly twice as much as one from another company, so). Naturally, both the person answering the phone and the person delivering the pizza were Malays. I swear I've only seen 1 Chinese employee - the guy delivering it to the RV Alumni chalet in a private car. Oh wait, maybe that's the boss.

We also had some visits from Angels of Mercy - S3 showed up on Saturday with 24 cans of Coke and some magazines. Later that day, S2 came with BBQ Chicken Wings (which those of us who had eaten Malay 2 for 1 Pizza had no stomach for), and the next day with Durian Puffs and on yet another occasion, curry puffs and sausage rolls. Hehe.

Singtel is very evil. They have a micro station on the Island of Doom. No wonder reception there is so good!

I was reading SAF hair regulations. Apparently dyed or bleached hair is illegal, and females have to tie their hair up - and with black hair accessories too. Sounds like Raffles Guys ;) Beards are illegal too. Too bad for (Warning: Trite and hackneyed reference coming up) Osama.

On Monday, someone left a walkie-talkie in the Ops Room, so all throughout the day we were treated to Mat Radio - 9 hours of music sung by Malays, non-stop chatter and commentary. Among the topics covered were: How to find child porn on Kazaa (You must use version 2.0 and you must search 'underage', not 'lolita'), the relative merits of females walking by and the necessity of getting the police to arrest some schoolboys walking by at about 12pm for truancy. We were also treated to the latest chart toppers in Malay and English both. The 'DJs' also whispered disturbing things, like "Come and play with me... Let your body take control... Come and play with me", and entertained their (small) audience with quips such as, "For 5 dollars an hour, for 5 dollars an hour, I will give up my life for this place! This pathetic place". I wonder how they can keep it up. Now I know how RPs can stand the boredom, and why most of them are Malays, the race being of the gregarious sort and more able to entertain themselves such.

1 possible reason why my Unit has no Muslims - they don't want to take the chance of placing Muslims into "Kaffir" Company ('Kaffir' means 'unbelievers' in Arabic)

As a 'parting' gift for me before I booked out, I got a bout of SOC training - running in Standard Battle Order with dummy rifle, 9 dummy loaded magazines (including the one on the rifle) and 3 water bottles. It was so siong, my webbing straps fell out. And my shoulders still hurt to the high heavens.

Yaoi Girl and Jiamin are trying to convert Geraldine to Yaoi. On hearing that, I let forth a torrent of giggles comparable only to that belted out when I see the Asian Prince website.

Had dinner with Tim at Sizzler (which has rock melon, which is surprisingly good too) on Tuesday. The idiot peeked at my ATM pin and had to repeat it, for which he got a kick.

Just what is Boysenberry Swirl swirled with? I can't taste what's in the white base in which the berry flavour is swirled.


Quotes:

You're in NS, of course you're sex deprived

I'm not 154[cm], I'm 155[cm]

[On why I don't want her to join "Yourself?"] You're just afraid I'll tell everyone about your gay tendencies

[On deployment at the SAF ferry terminal] Why, Gabriel, afraid to see me? [Me: No, Sir] Don't worry. I won't make you run here.

I'm sick and tired of chinese schools. Loads or [Ed: sic] rubbish they are (sms)

I think [John] Cage should be shot.

[On the MGS motto] To Master boys and Serve yourself

Saturday, obese recruits... 'Armour good what, wash tanks'. Fuck you lah, wash tanks.

[On Mat Radio] Now I know why RP can survive. Because they love to talk cock. (how RPs)

[Opinions of the RSM] Face like Super Mario... Everytime walk like that... It took me a month to understand what he was saying [NB: Battalion, Watch Your Front. Battalion - Keep Still There]

Gabriel, I always see you smile

[On people trying to convert her to Yaoi reading] I'd rather read Hentai than Yaoi, but don't tell them that

[Me: My friend was trying to play with me] Play with you? [Me: He has a rifle with 30 rounds] Oh. I thought you meant... [Me: No]

[On why Geraldine is a good match for Yechao] You're both short, you're both scrawny and you both have a bad sense of humour

[A damning indictment of CAP] It's just a little club where people pretend that they're the only ones in the world with inspiration and humour in them

[On 'Krusty the Klown'] Is his hair really green? (No, but he laughs like him, makes bad jokes and laughs at them, has a paunch and stubble aplenty, so.)


Newsweek had an interview with Abu Bakar Bashir, and I was astounded by the depth of his ignorance and the level of his sheer bull headedness. He lives in his own world, really. And besides, he used circular logic, so that's another strike against him. It's a wonder anyone believes the rubbish he's spewing.

"What is your opinion of Megawati Sukarnoputri�s performance as president of Indonesia?

Megawati is a Muslim woman who doesn�t really defend Islam. Her leadership will not be successful because, according to the Prophet Mohammed, a nation led by a woman�nothing personal against women�will not succeed. In Islam, women have their own place. They can lead, but in these places only. Not at the top. "

Bah. How come everyone gets to quote Mohammed? I should quote him too.

I'm accused of being fond of making "puerile anti-islamic tudung snipes". I meditated some upon this and I think that the reason why tudung related matters have become a pet topic of mine recently, leading many to accuse me of being mildly anti-Islamic, is that I share some of the late and lamented Pim Fortuyn's views on Islam and libertarianism.

Quoth I: "In Holland, homosexuality is treated the same way as heterosexuality. In what Islamic country does that happen?... Christianity and Judaism have gone through the laundromat of humanism and enlightenment, but that is not the case with Islam. Modern society places an emphasis on individual responsibility, whereas Islam places an emphasis on collective responsibility and the family. We have a separation of state and church. The laws of the country are not subject to the Koran. We have equality of men and women in western society, whereas in Islamic culture women are inferior to men" - Pin Fortuyn

Though, unlike him, I do not "see Islam as an extraordinary threat, as a hostile society", I do think that the dictates of demographics will lead to it becoming the dominant religion in a few decades.

"I don't hate Islam. I consider it a backwards culture. I have travelled much in the world. And wherever Islam rules, it's terrible. All the hypocrisy. It's a bit like those old Reformed Protestants. The Reformed lie all the time. And why is that? Because they have norms and values that are so high that you can't humanly maintain them. You also see that in Muslim culture. Look at the Netherlands. In what land could a leader of such a large movement as mine be openly homosexual? It's fantastic that that's possible. That's something that we can be proud of. And I want to keep it that way." - Pim Fortuyn

Not having travelled as much as he had, I am not in as unassailable a position to comment.

Oh, and I'd like to state categorically that I support immigration.


I realise that, if I wanted to make my entries a lot more tidy and disciplined, I should use the invention known as "Footnotes". Too much trouble though.

Woo!

Power Rangers X: Tenth Anniversary adventure

Episode Summary


Low Self Esteem Teen Magazine!

Ah hell I'm too lazy to format this time. Especially after I've been tired out by the SOC training yesterday.

I'm worried about my RAM chip though. Copying any files greater than 12MB in size each across my hard drives causes a blue screen, but it seems to work in DOS. And disabling fast boot, letting the BIOS check the RAM, didn't result in any RAM flaws detected.

Maybe it's my messed up system (that's what comes from installing too much rubbish) or my HDDs, or the connections.

*shrug*

On to the book out post.


A few thoughts on the Chechen hostage taking furore:

At least they didn't cite as their motives the trite issues of the Israeli-Palestinian tussle, or an attack on Islam by malicious foreign powers with nothing better to do. They did, of course, proclaim their eagerness to be martyrs and how they would go to the Islamic heaven where every man gets 40 virgins to bed every night, who miraculously have their flowerheads restored the next day for another night of wild debauchery, but primarily, their motives were nationalist.

The repression and outrages perpetuated in Chechnya are really much worse than those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Somehow, all the Muslims are fixated on how Arafat and friends have their sheds smashed to bits, but no one cares about the 100,000 or so civilians that have died in Chechnya due to Russian oppression which is arguably much more unwarranted that what the IDF is doing to the families of the suicide bombers. Perhaps no one cares about you if you're not Arabic, unable to rally pan-Arabic nationalism, and not in the Middle East. And of course, they forget how the "Anti-Islamic" West saved Muslims in Kosovo and Bosnia, but that's another story altogether.


Warning: something on a topic which I've become enamored of recently:

Here's an article by a Dr Maznah Mohamad to counter the claim by some MUIS official who wrote the the Straits Times claiming that Muslim scholars agree that the tudung is compulsory as the Prophet said that "when a woman reaches puberty, the only parts of her body visible should be these, and pointed to his face and hands". Apparently the verse above came from one of the Appendixes to the Koran, which means that they codify not the word of Allah, but just lay down traditions practiced at the time.

The verse from the holy Qur�an from which this edict is derived, reads, "And tell the believing women to lower their gaze and to be modest, and to display of their adornment only that which is apparent, and to draw their veils over their bosoms, and not to reveal their adornment save to their own husbands or fathers or husband's fathers �...And let them not stamp their feet so as to reveal what they hide of their adornment." (Surah An Nuur, verse 31, from Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, 'An English Translation of the Glorious Qur�an').

And a little research on this issue reveals an article Alfian Sa-at wrote for the BBC, one line of which says, "There is a Quranic line that reads, 'There is no compulsion in religion'." Well, so much for the Saudis lopping off your head with a sword if you're an apostate.

Manga and Anime haters speak:


you know, there was a time when i didn't know manga and hentai were different.

--- Sister of the one formerly with orange hair


fanfic allows one to exercise omnipotence, to explore ertain aspects of the given story which the author hasn't. that said, i don't particularly admire fanfic or manga. but there're too many fans around for me to voice that without suffering bodily harm!

--- The one with the oh-so-slight accent


there was a time when i didn't know what manga -or- hentai was. i look back at it nostalgically.

--- The one with brown hair


really? the ones around me tend to accept the fact that i won't be converted to seeing odd people with oversized eyes and indeterminate sex do suggestive things with one another on tree pulp. on hte other hand, maybe it's my method of going "oh. that's a boy?"


--- The one with brown hair


Cool product from Mike's List:

A 'Stunning' Cell Phone

Controversy rages over whether cell phones are dangerous. But If you're worried about radiation-induced brain damage from your cell phone, don't buy this product. It's a $99 stun gun that looks like a cell phone. That's right. The antenna and a metal knob on the top deliver 180,000 volts of debilitating electricity to attackers. When muggers ignore your requests that they don't steal your wallet: Zzzzzzaaaaap! "Can you hear me now?" A button on the keypad activates a panic alarm. I'd like to see a remote control -- in case someone steals the "cell phone" itself!



Help Bucky eat steaks - this uses real video, not animation.


I haven't been checking my guestbook, because I thought they'd email me when I got new entries. Apparently you have to pay for that now.

Seen there:

"Great Site You Have Here, My Hats Off To The Person That Wrote How Women Waste Time This Isw Sooo True! See You On The Net!"

"i think u n gabriel suck!!!! u ppl look like freaks and u diss mgs and scgs gurls! hav u got a probolem????u look soooo like freaks in the first place!!!!!!!!!!!"

Ever since we moved in and I started cooking, my housemate has declined every offer of food I cook. I don't know whether to be offended or not- but it's ... weird when my coursemates have eaten more things I've cooked than my own housemate. To date, the only thing he's tried is a small piece of my carrot cake (and that was under great pressure- and when someone else was offering it some more). And I really think it's very far-nee he's refusing all of it... today i decided i just couldn't take it anymore and ate out.

I wish he wouldn't.

They have a FAQ for everything. EVERYTHING! EVERY DAMN THING!

http://www.angelfire.com/in/ghcfaq/

*appalled and yet strangely fascinated by the depth of profundity available on the net*

Restored post

From tomorrow, in 3 day shifts, I'll get to sit indoors again, while waiting for people to come for Panadol. Yeh! A marvellous view of the Island of Doom I will have, from across the Straits. The troublesome thing is, they issued us with morphine, so we've to guard it studiously, and have to fill out more paperwork. I bet anyone needing morphine would be contraindicated anyway, rendering it useless. Gah.

I got a foot rash and they gave me potassium permanganate. Wth?

I was exchanging pleasantries with a Malay cleaner one morning and she was complaining that it was hot. I refrained from reminding her that she could solve that expeditiously by removing her tudung :)


I bought a can of Heaven And Earth tea a few weeks back. "Orchid Tea" looked interesting... Till I looked at the side and found out it was Oolong. Gah.


Quotes:

[On people impersonating officers] Some guy with the colonel rank... You are very suspicious... Kanina, chao private... Bangla (a)

E-mart got a lot of rank. It's whether you dare to wear or not. One day I shave my moustache... 2 stars. General Ang - everyone salute me (sells many ranks, them or, can shave, everyone will)

[On the Singapore Propaganda Centre, aka the Singapore Discovery Centre] Not many people visit nowadays. Soldiers from BMT go right (go there)

What is ironical (ironic)

Look at you, so cute... RJ guy. I like you. My cousin is also from RJ. Act and talk like you (Acts, talks)

[Ops Sergeant to me] Please downgrade [Mimes praying to me]

[On the 20 finalists in the New Paper New Face competition 2002] All cannot make it ah

[On the SCGS uniform] I actually like the uniform. If I were an attractive girl the uniform would make me look better than, say, a Raffles Guys one eh... Maybe I'm just slutty... Think my fave's SC now:) RGS uniform's so schoolgirl yuck. For japanese fetish-pervs only. (sms)

Everytime I go to S1 department, heehee, haha. Either you all make fun of Chief Clerk or Chief Clerk make fun of you all (the Chief, she makes)


Perhaps my drive to narrate is sputtering, or I just felt very sian. There were actually quite a few things I thought of scribbling down, but I decided against it.

Word of the day: "colophon"

Ooh. They caught the Washington snipers - and so much for the profile of a white man in his 30s' with military sniper expertise. All they got were a couple of Muslim African-Americans, one of whom was dishonorably discharged from the Army.. where he served as a mechanic.

(Remind me not to piss off those guys who service my car in the future.)

And straight out of Tom Clancy, we have another hostage situation in Moscow.

"The network, whose crew was allowed to accompany a doctor inside the theater, also showed two female hostage-takers wearing head-to-toe robes that revealed only their eyes. Arabic script was printed on their hoods, they cradled pistols on their chests and wore what appeared to be explosives taped to their waists and wired to a small button they carried in their hands."

Signs and portents, some say. Another Nostradamus nut in my office was going on and on about quatrain this and quatrain that, and the impending apocalypse. Five minutes later I caught him going over share prices.

Me: "If you think the world is ending, why do you still bother investing?"

Him: "I need money to go out in style."

Patrick got downgraded to E9L3 recently - no reservist for him! Unfortunately, he still has to go for an M16 technical handling test. Hmm :)

In other news, the guy a few terminals away is doing research on the Israeli-Arab conflict. I referred him to the Library of Congress for more information. Apparently his boss wants information. I have anagging suspicion it's going to be used for some propaganda project. Or maybe a 'Heritage' one.


8:25PM:

"Nestl� (ICQ#) Wrote:
well... your icq nick is a girl's name and your chinese name is a girl's name so in my imagination you look like a boy in a dress."


I swear there was something else after the above snippet. And I swear it got published. No matter.

I hear the Evil Council has organised *2* Soya Bean Curd (Tao Hui) eating competitions, and 1 Watermelon eating competition. I'm constantly amazed at how they manage to surpass their previous "feats".

In other news, the Borg has assimilated again. Yaoi fangirls are growing in number. I wonder if the Hentai club's growth is commensurate, though it is underground, by necessity.


Msg from Melvin Tay:

"http://web.pitas.com/dreamlands/june23.html

lists your site! gratzs u're fmous!"

Quotes from there:

"according to the guys in my class, mugger = a girl who likes mugs. can you tell how intelligent they are?...

"The colours of the Shirt are disgusting, with the Crest being mainly in shades of red and yellow and the word "Raffles" at the back being in a font that would disgust even those who have abyssmal tastes."
think i have to agree...and also the shorts are really uncomfy.

we'll rather... eat m&ms or skittles. my class fave are the sour skittles :) lately powerpuff gummies have also made their appearence and i happen to enjoy chewing buttercup's face :P

"There is even a resident ghost, who is often seen haunting the hallways of the school with her pound of makeup"
this teacher scares the hell out of me. she puts on so much make-up her face is a ghostly-white and to add to all that, she has BIG curly long hair. try and imagine what she looks like now. thank god i don't do physics.

[Ed: You can look for her here]

"The HOD's elocution leaves much to be desired, and he manages to mangle even simple words"
ummm that would be my maths tutor. if you understand him, it's good cos he's really very funny and nice. "


More weird referrals:

"Tudung girl sex", "islamic hentai" - bring out the Islamic police! This is an insult to the Prophet!

"scgs naked" - Why they are so popular I still haven't figured out. Maybe it's because it's the "school with the light blue pinafore with nothing inside and holes at the side so boys can look in". Or something. I can't remember the exact quote.

"had to pee in the bushes" - Err.

"how to downgrade and chao keng in army" - Ever popular

Reading the latest GP bulletin is immensely demoralising.


Yeh! Yaoi Girl has written her "Why I like Yaoi" essay. Which I will quote her for reference purposes.

"I think I owe you this.

Yaoi isn't really about homosexuality, is it? Speaking as a yaoi fangirl of the type who immediately starts pairing up boys in every new medium of entertainment she gets her claws into.

I think it's more like a kind of fantasy ground, where everything is as the fangirl- or author, or artist, to use more gender and series non-specific terms- would like it; where love is true, intransient, and beautiful; where if men are only interested in sex at least they are elegant and considerate about
the entire business, or not, depending on the individual's fantasies or preferences.

Yes, heterosexual or non-yaoi situations also give you the chance to play God.. but yaoi affords the average fangirl the ease and the safety of detachment. However much she might feel for or identify with the character, there's always, by dint of gender, a sort of barrier, a safeguard against hurt.

Then there is always the jealousy factor, that if the individual can't have the object of her fantasy, at least no other woman is, at least there was never a chance that he would have liked her in the first place- but I put this badly, maybe it'd be more coherent as even if he rejected her (which the
characters do by default because they are generally not real or unreachable) it wouldn't be due to the individual's shortcomings, it would be because the individual wasn't of the right sex to begin with. Ego eased, unconciously. No woman in the romantic equation also means no stressful comparison and finding oneself not up to par. (And
fictional women are like fictional men, I suppose; mostly fantasy, and sometimes unnaturally perfect.)

And of course yaoi is complications free- not talking about the risk of disease, which I suppose must be present in many sorts of sexual enterprise especially involving intercourse, but of the risk of having children. As much as I personally like children, I can't deny that in today's kind of society children are often complicated and consuming burdens on the support
side- in almost every way, regardless of whatever else they might bring into their parent's lives. Most yaoi fans, I think, probably wouldn't be wanting a child in their lives at this particular point- except perhaps those who follow the practice of mpreg, which personally.. ah well, that's another think. Incoherency, blargh.

Then there is another factor, which involves children as well and operates on the theory I have that the subconcious purpose of the human race- or any other living things
is to perpetuate, which usually means having children. Which puts an element into every heterosexual romance, usually subconciously, of evaluating the partner's genes to make sure that you make the optimal match. Yaoi obviously can't be about that, so maybe in comparison it is more romantic? The "love" more pure? I don't know. I'm not entirely sure about that. Generally speaking, of course, not using the "case-by-case, no-two-stories-or-loves-are-entirely-the-same" thing.

After that.. well, some people are interested in yaoi because of the fandom, or the community, just as some people pick up a sport or an art to meet new people.

I should elaborate on that, I think, and there are more points but I'm tired and I've run out of steam. Probably finish this thing some other time. If I ever do."

Well. Yaoi's really an updated Japanese form of Romance Novels, I think, concluding from what information I have. I'd figured many of the points out already, but it's nice to list them and elucidate :)

Fangirls are evil!

Interesting event of the day - an itinerant Indian worker with a box of wares came in today .. selling fireworks. Now, as some of you will know, these are highly illegal under today's repressive, totalitarian regimes extant in both Malaysia and Singapore. The Indian worker, however, fearlessly lugged a *huge* crate of sparklers, travellers, Catherine's wheels, pop-pops, sizzlers, firecrackers, volcanoes, spinners, moon-flyers, butterflies, hoppers, bouncing betties, etc etc... My colleagues all immediately placed orders - although the guy was selling ostensibly for Deepavali, quite a few of us stocked up for New Year's and Hari Raya as well. Forward planning and law-breaking; the multi-ethnic way.

Now, while I'm a great fan of law and order insofar as it keeps the terrorists and rapists (and idiots) away from my doorstep, most of the time I cheerfully operate under the aegis that the only laws to be respected are those that keep life happy for you. As far as intellectual property and the right of some idiot to blow his own hand off when he lit the fuse too close to the gunpowder is concerned, the issue for me isn't about law and order, it's about not getting caught.

On a happier note, I finally upgraded my graphics card to a brand spanking new MSI Ti4400-VTD! Although the video-in/video-out and DVI functions are completely useless to me for now, it's nice to know they're there once I get a new PC (fat chance) and a TV with Astro in my room (fatter chance).

Am pleased to be able to overclock it up to 300/620 speeds, with stock cooling! (granted, blowing a table fan straight at the CPU may help a little). That practically means I have a Ti4600 for all intents and purposes! So far have stress tested it for 48 hours straight with nary a crash (running various 3d benchmarks over and over again).

Unfortunately, my piss-slow P3-1Ghz is barely capable of keeping up with the raw power of my graphics card, so I still get jerky frame rates when playing No One Lives Forever 2. Rargh. Nonetheless, the first, iterative step has begun - on the long process to making my computer.. compleat (not a misspellng; I'm simply in MTG mood)

Back to work. Just returned from Disaster Recovery site. Managed to progress reasonably smoothly for a change; this month's Business Continuity Exercise involved the following scenario - we show up to work one day, and the building is no longer there..... Although, in all honesty, if some disaster large enough to take out the entire office complex in which I work occurs, business continuity is a fairly moot point. Was highly pissed off when one of the managers insisted that everyone show up to work at 8am, simulate gaping at the hollowed crater where the office building used to be, take attendance according to department, and THEN drive over to the disaster recovery site. Fortunately for me, my supervisor took the more rational view, gave me permission to drive straight to the DR site, and simply forged an attendance sheet for the two of us that depicted our shock and horror at picking through the charred bodies and twisted steel pylons where our place of work once stood.

(In the scenario stated above, my department only requires two people as an absolute minimum to handle all our critical functions in a crisis. That means 90% of us are expendable in any explosion.)

Also, was disappointed to notice that the DR site was not a hardened bunker under tonnes of reinforced concrete and natural bedrock, equipped with ominous banks of servers, nuclear-proof six-foot-thick titanium vault doors, banks of security card scanners, ancient lifts descending creakily into chthonian depths, and heavily armed guards. Simply another office with cubicles, but thankfully located quite near my house.

Work is killing many of my most cherished illusions.

It was also next to a golf club with a pretty good fusion restaurant, so was able to have a decent working lunch. Ah, the slow metastasis into yuppiedom proceeds apace.

Thankfully, this exercise went quite smoothly, despite a few hiccups, in contrast to the horror stories I heard about the last time such an exercise was held. This time, we actually *had* PCs to work on, and my supervisor had stocked out our on-site locker with paper cups and candy bars (to fortify us against the impending nuclear onslaught?). Paper cups were a godsend because the few non-bio-degradable cups there were either encrusted with layers of filth or rapidly filched by the horde of refugees streaming into the bunker at 9:20am (many of them were terribly late thanks to the "drive-to-work-stare-at-ruins-drive-to-backup-site" practice)..

*thoughtfully*

Firstly, I'm glad that *someone* else is saying what I've been saying for the last few years - angst as an art-form is terribly irritating. Sometimes, if I had my way, I'd just post my few journal entries as txt files and let whoever wants to read, plough through the Courier New font at their own leisure.
Unfortunately, technology does have little benefits, such as that funky comments link, so it's an acceptable trade-off, I guess...

But since we're on the topic of angsty journals, I would like to point out that there's nothing wrong with angst per se. It exists. It's a condition that's impossible for a rational human being to avoid, particularly in this world we live in. A lot of us cope by focusing on getting rich - which, if we succeed, means that we end up as very intelligent people who never have to make difficult
choices - a condition that is arguably far worse than being a moron.

However, it is not angst-as-emotion that ticks me off, but angst-as-fashion-statement. A badly written journal describing pain and suicidal tendency does get cliched after a while, but it at least has a modicum of sincerity that a slick, polished blog with elegant colour schemes and lyrical depictions of world-weariness over the most picayune of observations kind of ...lacks. I don't know - I mean, God knows, on a rational benchmark, most of the issues which I bitch about here are fairly, post-modernistically trivial, when
considered against the larger framework of human suffering that a great deal of the world endures. We no longer have to eke out the balls-to-the-wall starvation/survival type of existencee our forefathers had - but.. something else is lost with it. Something that died when we got to a stage when we didn't have to worry about the Japanese occupiers anymore; when our biggest issues were
exams, fashion, shopping, and careers.

Lacking that Great Struggle, we turned inward. We grew smarter, hipper, more self-assured and more empty. Every single trivial gratification these days has to be orgiastically enhanced. An in-grown toenail becomes an epic paean of loss and betrayal. We lost our gods and found MTV. We look to great movies as artistic expressions of the intensity and grittiness which our lives now lack.
We watch on CNN the suffering of those still mired in that deeper, fundamental quest for daily survival in the Third World as substitutes for the suffering that we wish we had, on some subconscious level - because that primal state of being is all we, as a living organism, are genetically built for. When you take that away - when those survival edges are ground away by the lapidary effect of yuppiedom & consumerism - what's left?

Where do I stand? I don't know. Sometimes I want to be immured in the little cocoon of gratification I create for myself - hiding in my swathe of movies, anime, computer games, and books. Fuck the outside world. Forget such thoughts. Delve in a daily haze of fine graphics, proxied emotions and manufactured sensations. What else is there?

And here I am, guilty of the same haze of confusion, hypocrisy, and ego which I denounced earlier:)

Perhaps the problem with intensity of emotion is that we live in a world where intensity of emotion has become another commodity. We can't help feeling it; but we can't help feeling cynical of its manifestations. These days everyone wants to be angsty, but everyone wants to have a disclaimer that goes, "oh, i know i'm being angsty, ha-ha, insert-self-loathing (as I am doing now).". All of those
kiddie blogs (myself included, ha-ha - more hypocrisy) with the funny titles for entries always - *always* - talk about how amused/confused they are their own emotional situation - at how they realise that its pathetic and what-not but "hey, that's the way it goes. Now let me suffer in style."

I blame it on Nirvana:) On that similar note, Kurt Cobain's diaries are about to be published, and I'll probably pick it up. Here's an excerpt:
"I like punk rock. I like girls with weird eyes. I like drugs. (But my Body And mind won't allow me to take them). I like passion. I like playing my cards wrong. I like vinyl. I like to feel guilty for being a white, American male. I love to sleep. I like to taunt small, barking dogs in parked cars. I like to make people feel happy and superior in their reaction towards my appearance. I like to have strong opinions with nothing to back them up with besides my primal sincerity. I like sincerity. I lack sincerity ... I like to complain and do
nothing to make things better. I like to blame my parents generation for coming so close to social change then giving up after a few successful efforts by the media & Government to deface the movement by using Mansons and other Hippie representatives as propaganda examples on how they were nothing but unpatriotic, communist, satanic, inhuman diseases. and in turn the baby boomers become the ultimate, conforming, Yuppie hypocrites a generation has ever produced."

See?:) A whole generation reared to believe that revelling in equal doses of self-love and self-loathing are de rigeur.

(Nicked without permission from grace's blog. Does that run counter to blog ethics? No matter, she nicked something from someone else, so I'm exonerated :) )

"we've got a completely different new generation of gep/cap juniors on our hands, ie the J1s downwards. They're all plenty intelligent enough, and talented enough, nobody of yisheng caliber yet but there's always time for that to grow. A lot of them blog - i mean hardcore blogging, webdesign and pretty pictures and all, and worryingly, a lot of them also sound as if they've not grown out of the angst/ frilly poems stage. Words like 'solace' and 'shimmer' and 'angels' and 'darkness' appear a lot. Nobody quite has that wonderful childlike sense of humour, the i-refuse-to-take-myself-too-seriously outlook, or at least they don't sound that way on their blogs.

Somewhere between my generation (generation??) and theirs, something happened. People decided to devote more attention to the pictures and the layout and the words than to making every word count. I think I'm a last relic of an ignored age. (We don't even get the dignity of 'forgotten', just the indignity of 'ignored'.) I think I come from a time when words were more expensive to write down and paper was expensive; and so you didn't flagrantly use so much space for the expression of nothing. A whole batch's mindset shifted and went 'click' - when did everyone decide to return to ethereal Byronic heroism (not to mention hedonism)?

And so this is what happened. Very ordinary people like me, who just sort of happen to write, and play warcraft3 on the sidelines, and watch too much star trek, and do other very ordinary things rather than trying to pose as something we're not - we're lost in the net of brilliantly design-savvy, perpetually morose, artsy online people. The web is their domain. And there's some really excruciating poetry online (my own included).

Maybe it's only the online ones. That's what I'm hoping. Maybe the ones who don't blog are off somewhere, spending their time quietly writing something real..."

I believe, senile in my dotage, I have also lamented the angst of the young uns.

Precocious they are. I'm not sure I was that mature, or at least seemingly mature, at that age. I think my mind was rather spongy at that time, but then I've always been a little wacko.

They change layouts like footwear. Not that it detracts from the content, but the content is dark, depressing and gives you the impression they're gonna asphyxiate themselves auto-erotically anytime. Our juniors have the same content, it's just that it's presented more nicely (and with Evil Comet Cursor, dammit!)

I don't know what's worse - dark angst in dull colour schemes with a prevalence of red and black, or mindless animated gifs and a basketful of neoprints.

Verbosity can be fun. I think I tire too many with mine.

Today we got to go off after lunch, because of the Deepavali Celebrations. I was 'arrowed' to send a patient to NUH, so I was free only after 2:15pm or so. It wouldn't have been very efficacious going home, so I got the driver to drop me at Buona Vista. Screwed Up Girl was supposed to meet me, but she was busy so I ended up being a voyeur at McDonalds Ghim Moh, all without treading onto the premises of my Alma Mater. I think I will try to equal Mr Downhere in my observations for once, so here goes.

My previous RJ vs AC observations still hold true, mostly. Nothing is new, but for the explosion of Hot Socks in the former, till the problem is on par with ACJC, conceivably worse. The AC guys I saw today also looked a touch more guai than before. Doing inane things like this gives me a comforting sense of deja vu :)

RJ students' choice of footwear seems to be rather dismal now. The shoes I saw were mainly in shades of grey, and I saw no shoes with flourescent colours. I guess the sportsmen finally realised that the luminous colours didn't make them run faster.

I'm told the new Vice-Principal is very strict, and it kinda shows - I saw but one person with dyed hair, and she had the A03 look, so the hair's a given.

I think I should start counting, some time soon, the number of Malay women I see who DON'T wear tudungs. I wonder if it will be more or less than the number of ACJC girls who don't wear Hot Socks.

I find the swaying of hips very irritating. It looks as if there was something loose, that a joint was broken, and it is irritatingly hypnotic in its effect often. Is it done on purpose? Or can most females not help it? And jiggling is very funny, especially when the hair bounces along (like when running). Perhaps that is why I was so amused by Jiggle last time :)

Cursory glances would seem to suggest that skirt length and socks length are directly related. And, depressingly, I saw no one NOT in the purple uniform made with alien fabric.

For all my time there, I only saw and conversed with 2 people I knew. The first was Caleb coming in after a remedial lesson. Happily, I saw no ear holes - at least Johann's not been influencing him in that direction.

Sometimes later, I was sitting at my seat next to the toilet (I've wonderful taste) when a buzz sounded in my ears. Growing gradually louder, I began to sense that something was not right, that there was something out of place somewhere in my general vicinity. Looking to my right, I saw someone looking askance at me. I couldn't see her knees, she wasn't anorexic and the socks were only lukewarm, so I was reasonably sure it was... Megan. She's shed her glasses for contacts, as many seem to have done, is still enamoured of clipping her hair at the back with a butterful clip such that a tuft falls from the top of the clip, and she -still- doesn't have or chooses wear her school badge.


Perhaps listening to bad music broadcast over the PA system for too long dulled my senses, for I was remarkably dull taking the 92, not only walking all the way to the MRT station to get onboard, but taking it in the wrong direction. Gah. At least I got to see the ruins of the old SMM. Not a soul was stirring inside - I think even the cats have moved away. And at the sentry box with a cardboard figure of an MP in a luminous poncho.

We trekked up stairs and steep slopes, and finally reached a court where we watched a variety show. I think after tonight, I've heard enough Indian Music and seen enough Indian Dances to last me a lifetime. Nuff said about Deepavali Celebrations.

Oh, and Saravanan says he's marrying a Muslim girl. Conversion time, ugh.


Quotes:

I like Secondary School girls lor

Pakistan Disease (Parkinsons)


Heard through the grapevine:

"hmmz thinking about girls and sex... When I was sec 3 ..... some rgs girls asked (your seniors!!!) if they were stuck with a guy in some inhospitable place awaiting rescue, how much calories are there in semen. The teacher reportedly turned red and said, you don't wanna do that. Or something to that effect."

Restored Post

I have reached new depths of depravity - I actually went to wash my bunk's dustbin.

I went to the cookhouse for lunch one day... and I saw Zhongyong. Him having professed that he never went there, I enquired as to the reason for his presence - "COS Duty". By a Private? They're really short of men.

People rarely take fruit at lunch and dinner when at the cookhouse, as they are lazy - since the fruits aren't put beside the soup, but instead in a refrigerator some way off. Except when watermelon is available that is, when most will take 2 slices, and there will be no more watermelon left by 11:40 :(

More tales of lasciviousness: I walked into the bunk one day, only to find Boon Huat, Yi liang and Yong Siang on one bed, sprawled on top of each other and giggling softly like demure schoolgirls. After a while, they began grabbing at each other's clothes and trying to pin each other down. And after I wrote that paragraph, I was attacked by Yiliang and fled the bunk yelping, slamming the door after me (and spoiling the door handle in the process).

Tales of our ridiculously strict OC:
- He gave the batch of medics prior to mine one extra duty each because they didn't greet him while they were reading the Routine Orders one day
- He gave a driver 7 extras for sleeping in the ambulance during Games Day
- One morning, wanting to use a vehicle, he gave a driver 8 confinements for not washing said vehicle after coming back from a detail late the previous night
- He gave 2 people 1 extra each for not filling in their leave forms properly

Gah.

We now have a strenous physical training regimen - runs with static stations Monday, Wednesday and Friday, IPPT/SOC training Tuesday and Thursday and IPPT/SOC tests on Saturday. Argh. The new CSM is either going to train us up till we can pass all our tests, weeding out all who try to skive, evade or lie low (ie 'siam'), or get us injured and downgraded. Either way, that will be good for the Best Unit Competition results *sullenly* 40SAR is 1st, 41 is 2nd, 46 is 4th, and we are a "lousy" 9th.

The Best Unit Competition (BUC) was probably conceived as a way of promoting healthful inter-unit competition, but allegations and rumours of skulduggery have emerged. One of the best units has 'magic' rounds during range - one magazine of six rounds, load and ready! - and this has been verified by someone who used to be from there. Apparently some units send most of their vehicles out on long details just before the inspectors arrive, and attach their armoured vehicles to other units during that period of time, thereby getting good results for vehicle maintenance.

All this - for what? "Pain is temporary - glory is forever" - Dicky, testosterone charged T-Shirt slogan. I beg to differ. "Infinitesimal glory gained from the performance of silly, imprudent, breast beating endeavours is temporary, injury and death are forever". So what if we get Best Unit? Whatever modicum of glory and honour that we get is fleeting - it will be forgotten by the next year, when a new unit wins the BUC (unless we win again, but how long can one keep winning?). And if every unit is good, even being 9th place is not a badge of shame. There are no palpable benefits arising from winning BUC. Perhaps regulars get promoted, and we get more money for more useless souvenirs, but that is all. And for this dubitable goal, we have numerous strenous training sessions, much hollering, and people are even - gasp - threatened with an extension of their ORD dates.

I realise many inspirational/self-help books send out contradictory messages. Maybe one day I shall expose this deficiency, and explore the negative consequences of following the advice given.

Amusing forum letter:

"People who try to find a cultural basis for criticising the choices made by others are just being petty.

The writer also advances his notion of 'Western cultural imperialism'.

I would like to know if there is a conscious and orchestrated effort being made by any organisation or movement in the West to impose, either overtly or covertly, this grand-sounding term on witless Asians...

I do believe that the very people who purport to champion all things Chinese seem to harbour feelings of inferiority, a notion propagated by their chauvinistic actions and defensive behaviour..."

Haha. Kudos to the writer!

They had a dance remix of the cheerleader chant from 'Bring It On' on the BBC World Service one day. That was astounding enough, the fact that a dance remix exists. The clincher, though, came when the presenter said that. "That's the first half of... 'Cheerleader'. The rest of it contains vulgar language which would not be appropriate on the World Service."

I believe they only played this part of the mind numbing remix:

"I'm sexy, I'm cute! I'm popular to boot!
I'm bitchin', great hair! The boys all love to stare!
I'm wanted, I'm hot! I'm everything your not!
I'm pretty, I'm cool! I dominate the school!"

but they omitted the much more, uhh, naughty part:

"Who am I? Just guess! Guys wanna touch my chest!
I'm rockin'! I smile! And many think I'm vile.
I'm flyin', I jump! You can look but don't you hump! Whoo!
I'm major, I roar! I swear I'm not a whore!
We cheer and we lead! We act like we're on speed!
you hate us cause we're beautiful well we don't like u either!
We're cheerleaders! We are cheerleaders! uh oh!"

I don't see what's so vulgar about that. Evil Political Correctness!


Quotes:

I need someone who can spit (speak)

I can't change your face. If you have a baby look I can't change your baby look, [Refers to self] not like this fucking rusty face... If you have a baby look, all the girls will love you

[On impressing girls] Don't bring your weapon. Bring your own personal weapon that is attached to you for 21 years. Mine is 45 years. [Laughs from audience] Never miss. Never IA. [Racuous laughs] (has been attached for, I never)

I will not call you 'jee bye' because you are not a jee bye (you a)

HQ has no CSM... CMI - Company Major Idiot

[Me on someone he doesn't like: Call him, call him...] Chauffeur. [Me: 'Chauffeur' sounds better than 'driver'.] Fuck you, 'driver' sounds better.

I was telling my mother about Geraldine deciding not to go for the government internship, and she said something about me screwing up my life and me studying in the UK and the US as a PSC Admin Scholar if I hadn't.

Gah.


"coz i found it in his room with half the pages like torn out and then i took it back into my room and then it disappeared"

This is very depressing. And Web1000 doesn't like me to host big jpegs there. Bah.

Am currently typing in stuff for my mother, while simultaneously helping a friend to rewrite atrociously written paragraphs of a project report.

The English's simply hilarious :) That's what NS does to guys.

Before:

"The Theatre
Located at the top of the building, the exterior part of the building is enclosed with glass. When a visitor stands at the top floor and in the theatre, he or she can experience the sensation of �This is the theatre, this is the world�. Vice versa, all the visitors on the ground floor can expect a different kind of sensation when looking up to the theatre; they will be able to feel: �That is the theatre, the world is up there.�
this thingy is like an extension at the top of the building.. think the changi airport control tower. but in glass."

After:
"Perched atop the building is an extension enclosed in glass. Standing in the extension and the theatre, any visitor looking down from that lofty height would feel that he was in another world, a world separated from the mundane one he'd just left."

Before:
"The LCD Screen
Perched at the top of the old Capitol was a sky board holding up hand painted movies posters of movies showing at Capitol Theatre. To replace the sky board that once stood proudly at top of Capitol Building is an LCD screen.
The LCD screen is one of the symbols of the new theatre that demonstrates the fact that the theatre is keeping up with the pace of the advanced technology despite the fact that the setting of the theatre is set in the past era. This is to ensure that this new theatre will be competing with her competitors side by side. Positioned at the top of the theatre, the screen can be seen from afar and can be used for various purposes such as advertising."

After:
"Instead of the hand painted movie posters of yesteryear, or the pre-printed posters used by most cineplexes today, the new theatre will showcase the latest movies on a LCD screen - a feature of the new theatre that is a symbol of how it combines the best of both worlds, marrying old world charm with cutting edge technology. The LCD screen will be clearly visible from afar, and can be used for other purposes, like screening advertisements."

12:18:
Am currently helping to edit the whole document.

I'd rather slash my wrists than continue reading but.... must.... endure... 8/16... Half over...

Apparently the gobbledygook above was written by an Arts student.


Ex-NTU student:

"well. u know. ntu students
really. they can't string a proper sentence together, and those r the local students
the foreigners r worse, 328938x worse"

Word of the day: "Theogony"

Why should I write a diary entry, I think? Everything I could ever feel, think, love, experience, hope, despair or believe has *already* been said, somewhere in the Alexandrine library of human literature. And said *better*. Neal Stephenson writes in the Cryptonomicon about externally-generated-representations or patterns which are captured and filtered by our internal human perceptions into recognizable archetypes - like the Trickster Deity; the Triple Goddess - or, in Neal Stephenson's unique take on the old Platonic ideals - Athena as technological prowess and nerdism used as a means of defense; versus Ares as destructive, neanderthal warlordism. We see these same patterns emerging out of chaos; patterns that recur and manifest in every cultural paradigm; we see these old manifestations torn down in every great cultural conflagration, only to emerge, in a different guise, or in a different mutation. But on the micro level of the individual; isn't it the same thing for all emotional and personal travail? The events and contexts and facts may be different; the feelings and suffering and joys remain the same. Sylvia Plath (damn the woman!) may have felt alienated by her asshole husband, abusive family background, and manic depression; I get ticked off because I've run out of blue cheese. Different inspiration; same effect.

From the disiecta membra of others' words, it is not only possible, but it is, I feel, *respectful*, to construct a Frankensteinian collage of emotional scholia. Why not? Like the character of Jacopo Belbo; why should I create? Whenceforth comes this strange, human need to be *original*; when, in an old Benedictine's words, "the truth requires only fearless defense and not foolish increment. Knowledge is, at best, a subtle and divine recapitulation; the Word repeating itself to itself".

(Some of you sharper chaps / chapettes can already read the underlying leitmotiv in this post, I think:) The sweet, astringent pickle nestled beneath the turkey and lettuce and mayonaise)

I don't really believe that everything that has to be said *is* already said; and I certainly agree that, as a factual narrative, one *is* forced to, if not to be wholly original, to be at least descriptive in one's own words; verbalizing your perceptions and experiences into something resembling a readable passage. But then again, sometimes, one blogs not to describe in mind-numbing detail every meal eaten, every person loved, every single factual and specific nuance of a day in our brief lives. Sometimes, I think, one should blog (at least I do), to paint in broader strokes - an emotional swathe; a general sense of malaise or euphoria - not the nitty-gritty tiles of our daily mosaics. A fragment of gossip, a detailed shard of an interpersonal relationship, a calcified account of a walk down a road or a day spent.

No. no, sometimes I think it is best to just.. overarch. Instead of the tapestry of loving detail we find in a Bruegel; I choose the garish crayon scrawls of a kindergarden girl. Short on detail; long on colour and frenzy.

So today; me feeling numb. But not quite numb numb. Dazed, numb; the feelings not dampened; but the capacity to be hurt by them attenuated.

And onto the quote:

"But yesterday it was you offering it to me, and I thought that maybe this was your way of offering yourself, so I smoked, trusting. We danced close, the way nobody's danced for years and - the shame of it - while Mahler's Fourth was playing. I felt as if in my arms an ancient creature were yearning, a serpent rising from the dephts of my loins, and I worshipped you as a old and very universal thing... Probably I went on holding my body close to yours, but I felt that you were in flight, ascending, being transformed into gold, opening locked foors, moving objects through the air as I penetrated your dark belly, Megale Apophasis, Prisoner of the Angels.

Was it not you I sought all along? I am here, always waiting for you. Did I lose you, each time, because I didn't recognise you? Did I lose you, each time, because I did recognise you but was afraid? Lose you because each time, in recognizing you, I knew I had to lose you?

But where were you this morning? I awoke with a headache."

My favourite Pioneer's comic strips are so bad, I think I will set up a "Hall of Shame" soon.

(In his defence: "why do you hate my cartoons so much? can't you understand that i have to make them easily understood by ns men you moron?")

I love Getright! It helped me find a fast Brazillian server for the new LOTR trailer. Even cablers should download and install Getright expeditiously ;) That's one program I still have from the distant days when Filemine was still, simply, Filemine, rather than the current unwieldy-named IT Pro Downloads.


Juicy snippets from Yourself?:

"if this defines lesbian: "kept doing a couple dance with other girls" then the whole population of rg is homosexual :) and so is mrs kavanagh [oops, did i say something?] oh oh i see. oops." - LOL

"After class is over we see our heroine speaking to her two cute friends about how she is totally stupid and worthless at whatever she does. The director gets points for realism here, as he has accurately described how most teenage girls really are. It's just that our heroine has yet to start threatening suicide to her Internet friends, or writing dark gothic poetry onto her arm with a knife. But this could change by episode two, depending on how bored the aforementioned animators get." - HAHA

"I don't think its been very successful... sure there are some GEPs that I can really talk to and like. But really... the more I see of them the less I wanna see of them (GEP girls in my batch). It has to do with the package I guess. To me, and I believe most Singaporean men, intelligence is not an overriding factor in our decision for a girlfriend? Intelligence breeds cynicism and cynicism brings about maladjusted unhappy teenagers that complain about everything under the sun all the time.. I've never seen such unhappiness on such a large scale elsewhere outside RGS. I mean... what are the chances that an angsty blog is written by an RGS student current or otherwise(okay okay... I'm definitely overgeneralizing. Sorry!) " - ROFL

What was supposed to be posted on Wednesday:

--------

Restored Post

Bryan, the HCJC driver, is called 'Hwa Chong' by all. Trying to turn the attention to me, he tried calling me "Raffles" and "RJ", but I refused to respond :) Anyhow, if there's a "Hwa Chong" and a "Raffles", there's also a pHD... Poly Halfwar Dropout :D

Our CO was giving us another of his long talks, and he shamed a group of officers who were talking at the back by asking them to come to the front. Tut tut :)

I was berated, again, for my lack of tact and loose tongue. Ah well.

I left my packet (opened) of Chicken in a Biskit on the floor of the treatment room Tuesday night when I was on duty, and it was crawling with ants by the next morning. GAH.


After dithering overly long, I finally read through my material on the application question. It appears hideously difficult. Blah.

I think one of the New Face contestants looks like a horse, at least in the poster of the 20 of them where half are tugging at their necklines :) So we now have 3 ex-/present-RJ horses. Whee.

"You speak of me as you would a venus flytrap" - Well, perhaps I've been too suspicious of your motives ;) (Doesn't this beat nebulous references to 'you'?)

kr asks if I'll ever get started on an uber boliao project worthy of even me - a schoolgirl calender. Haha.

One very irritating thing about 93.3 FM is its compulsive, morbid repeating of its jingle. What makes it even more irritating is that they've recorded at least 5 variations on the jingle, from one of a man crooning the jingle slowly and sultrily to Chang Huimei / Zhang Huimei / A*Mei (whatever) belting it out, to an acapella version with harmony. All of them make me even more pissed off than Muzak or elevator music, but I think the worst version is one where some girl sings it in an "Act Cute" voice, and then giggles at the end. !@#$%^&*()

The stigma on Weapons of Mass Destruction seems to be rather unjustified. Nuclear, Chemical and Biological weapons are merely newer, more efficient ways of delivering death and destruction - dead's dead, whether you are felled by a bullet, the stroke of a sword to your head or the depredations of flesh eating bacteria. Of course, they *are* easier to use against civilians (and slave soldiers who are civilians), but firing squads and razing cities to the ground do the job too. All the conventions remind me of the Catholic Chruch's attempt, in the Middle Ages, to ban the use of the crossbow, on the grounds that it was too efficient a killing device, albeit with less success than at present.

I am amused. Wednesday's Straits Times has an editorial on Literature, which started with a crushing rebuttal of the oft-repeated, improbable and far fetched allegations that Literature humanises and civilises people - the people who ran Auschwitz et al were very cultured and listened to Beethoven and read Goethe - hardly unwashed brutes. I heartily agree - studying a subject may enrich one intelelctually, but it does not necessarily contribute to emotional, intellectual, personal and/or spiritual development. I do not dislike pieces of literature per se - reading is fun and enriching - but it's the study of it - the analysing to the last inkdrop of every comma, the pondering of the significance of every ink blot caused by a malfunctioning fountain pen, the colour of the spots of coughed up phlegm and the celebration of tracts which, for all you know, could have been written when the author was roaring drunk.

I was pondering the miry issue of honesty in my web journal. Now, as we all know, very few are totally, completely honest with even themselves, and as the object of communication moves further from them, the level of ingenuousness plummets. Well, it's obvious that some things are left unsaid here, and a few remain unacknowledged even to myself, due to preferences and meta-preferences. Eg Many matters of the nature of what made "yinkae" so infamous, notorious and popular.


Quotes:

Don't you think kat is ugly? When I first saw her I was like, omg, it's walking A03... I don't get how she made New Face! I mean, hell, any of your seven should make it ahead of her. (sms)

[On the New Paper New Face Competition] i think it's such an opportunistic platform for comely singaporean females of my generation to air their intellect and garner nationwide respect for my sex. [Name witheld without request]

I listen to the bitchy voice of Jamie Yeo, but I forgive her, because she's beautiful.

Thank God for unerase.


"For a while I thought I was the only person in the world who'd read Samuel R. Delany. Okay, w.t has, but he doesn't count because he's read *everything*." - LOL


Weird - Earth Erotica Photography by Heather Firth

Snippet of a highly amusing conversation.

I was talking to my friend on ICQ about some exam-related stuff and Melbourne reminisces.

Friend: "well, (our troubles are) not over yet.i had a divination yesterday... and the "ball" told me i am gonna fail my exam..."

Me: "HAHAHHAHAAHAH. fuck lah you believe that shit? how come you even went to the temple?" (Me assuming it was some mystical fortune-telling technique proffered him by a wizened old crone in exchange for crossing her palm for silver.)

Friend: "no la, it's a snooker ball as big as a lawn ball, you shake it, then turn it over and it gives you an answer. got 20 answers.i dont believe in it, but it's a good reminder of not to fail any subjects in my final semester."

Me: "hahahahahaahahaha .. oh.. the magic 8-ball!:) but yeah.. better be careful about the exams."

Friend: "haha, you know that too? keke.... it is really famous? Do they have it in yellow? and do they need batteries?"

Me: "it's like a cultural thingie.. some american hippie shit like lava lamps. anyway, .. erm.. no batteries. you just shake it a bit. i think."

Friend: "and my friend bought it yesterday for $20. and whenever she asks the question "have i been ripped off?", shake it, and the answer is always "yes, definitely"...haha... and today, my sis saw the Target flyers, and it's only selling for $9..."

Anyway, some quick web research uncovered a startling wealth of information on the magic 8-ball. Here's one of the better sites.

And of all the online magic 8-ball sites, THIS one takes the cake, the plate, the knives, and the table on which the cake is resting. Words do no justice to the limitless possibilities to which the nadir of human technology, the deepest secrets of mysticism, and sheer human boh-liaoness can do for you.

Today's quotes.

"I'm sick and I'm in love."
"You seem the sort of person who confuses the two."
"That's right. That's the first time you've been right. I confuse the two and I don't care."

"I really do have love to give; I just don't know where to put it."

"I'll tell you everything, and you tell me everything, and maybe we can get through all the piss and shit and lies that kill other people."

"The book says, we might be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us."

"I will not apologize for who I am."

"Don't let anyone tell you that you shouldn't regret anything. You regret what you want."

And, in the final analysis, the truest thing you can ever say in a world full of lies:

"In this life, it's not what you hope for. It's not what you deserve. It's what you take."

Yeh, I just had Shen1 Mian4 (deep fried noodles with sauce poured over it) at the ATC canteen, due to a series of talks and meetings that made us miss our dinner.

Will solve the formating problem below once I get home to a place without irritating firewalls. And I've to format, and have a BMT section outing too. Ooh.

Perfunctory blog entry. Word of the day: "mesothelius"


Am in bad mood, but tomorrow I'm off to Melaka for company induction - two days
of team-building orientation activites; and much to my pleasure, a lot of
great-looking babes from the new batch of Private Banking and Corporate Finance
recruits are going as well:) Best of all, one of the Private Banking babes is the fiance
of a friend of mine - which means I have a not-too-subtle entry point as far as conversational
gambits go:) Blech - I wish.

Still, I could use some serious asset management.

Not that I expect anything to happen - I'm happily domesticated, after all
*insert sardonic drawl tag*, but who knows? Some eye candy, and getting away
from this damned systems backtest at work might do me some good.

Actually, have already returned, and spliced my post-Melaka entry with the pre-Melaka one which
didn't make it through a few days ago. Nothing of particular to note; fun trip, got reasonably wasted
one night with some of the Corporate Finance people, chatted up some chicks, to little avail, obviously,
watched some of the local Melakan transvestites with amusement, went through the usual inane
team-building and corporate seminar crap of which little value was retained. It galls me how utterly similar
the exercises and the tone of the "serve-the-company" rhetoric is from firm to firm - although at least
my current employer had the decency to splurge on a hotel resort, whereas my last employer crammed us
all into a tiny classroom in their corporate headquarters.

Also managed to shake hands with the company chairman. Very soft palm. The "helping the obscenely
rich get obscenely richer" issue was a recurrent conversational theme I had with some of the guys I met there.

Quite a few bastards from Melbourne as well, particularly in the corporate finance side. Invariably, the
tech support and IT people were all Malay guys, the tellers were all Malay women, the legal and trustee
side were all Indians, and the business front-liners (retail, card sales, corporate banking, wealth management) were
all Chinese. Racial advantages of specialization?

Back now, and really tired. Parents coming back from China this weekend; an hour-long drive to the airport implicit. Gak.
I really must go swimming this weekend too.

Games currently occupying cubic volume in my "To-play" piegonhole:

Hitman 2: Silent Assassins
Medieval: Total War
Icewind Dale 2
Celtic Kings
Mafia!
No One Lives Forever 2 (a much better Brit-spy parody than the overrated Austin
Powers)
Stronghold: Crusader (which, unlike the original brings the emphasis back to
good old castle-storming rather than the accumulation of cheese)
Earth 2150: Lost Souls

And at least three or four others I can't name offhand...

Currently playing Syberia - while superficially similar to The Longest Journey
(classic European adventure game, old-school mouse-only interface, female
protagonist undergoing spiritual and emotional character development through
surreal journeying), it has some of the most gorgeously baroque backdrops ever
designed, and one thing's for sure - the game designers take potential kinetic
energy (the game revolves around superbly complicated clockwork automata) to the
max.

Managed to finish off all my outstanding VCDs in a 14-hour binge of viewing,
thanks to parents' sojourn to China (and hence no irritating interruptions for
lunch, errands, family-bonding time, etc.), although my physical state is
degenerating visibly. I *must* start swimming again soon.

Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever is one of the most mindless, explosive-saturated,
slow-mo-addicted movies I've ever seen. Still, it might have a certain crackling
appeal to those who think the value of a good action movie is directly
proportional to the number of massive explosions per frame. Warning though - the
story makes absolutely no sense, even by the standards of the genre.

Barbershop - good, wholesome, nigga-value comedy. Worth watching just to listen
to R&B singer Eve go on about the theft of her apple juice.

Red Dragon - Worth watching simply to see Anthony Hopkins cash in his check one
more time at the Hannibal Lecter franchise. Edward Norton seems a little stoned;
a good actor walking the paces. Ralph Fiennes, however, has that peculiarly
glazed, psychopathic look of confused hunger that he does well in his more
bizarre roles - and ogling his buff physique while he cavorts naked, sporting a
gratuitous Blake tattoo might appeal to some female affocionados of his genre.

*Entry deleted*

Pondering on my foibles doesn't seem to yield much product. Bah.

Tim suggests religion as a way of finding my grounding and centring myself, but attempts so far have foundered.

Oh, and i dropped a note to Mrs. Chan in RJC that i'd be glad to entertain any queries any RJCians have about studying in melbourne uni, or staying/studying in melbourne. Extending this to anyone here ... even though most of u are still doing o levels. Actually you know me, you can approach me if you need help in anything.

NB: This post deals with my religious beliefs, so please don't read it if you think you may be offended.
And i would appreciate it if you contacted me directly by icq or email if you had any comments, instead of leaving one-line smartaleckyremarks.

For all those whom I haven't been in contact with, i've been reorganising many parts of my life.

I quit the college choir about 2 weeks ago. I spoke to the dean, who volunteered to speak to the choir conductor on my behalf. I attempted to call the conductor on several occasions: I reached his wife once, and left a note in his pigeonhole as suggested. Whether or not he clears the copious stack of mail in his pigeonhole is his affair. Have told ross, edgar, meta, kate, claire (in chronological order) and I don't feel obligated to speak to anyone else about my leaving the choir. (As of today when i spoke to claire she didn't seem to know that i had left choir permanently)

I moved out of my on-campus residential accommodation in Ormond college one and a half weeks ago and am now staying in an apartment on swanston st with a housemate, a singaporean guy i met in ormond. I really like my apartment- it might be old, and i have to walk up 2 flights of stairs, but i love my spacious room (with a balcony!) and the kitchen (i've already commenced baking) and having my own space and my own life. And my own computer.

I baked a carrot cake for my ocf cell group- they came over to my place for home cell last friday and the cake turned out pretty good! Will bake another one to use up the carrots, and try something else... something safe like cookies maybe.

It's my birthday this saturday. I don't have anything planned for it ... if nothing comes up i'll spend saturday shopping maybe. My bunch has something planned tomorrow after the test in the afternoon.... 7pm at crown, dinner and maybe a movie after that. I'm not too keen on the movie part- very few good movies being shown now. I don't know what else they have planned, but i'm thinking of using the few hours between test and 7pm to do some more baking.... but i don't have any containers big enough to carry food around. Tupperware!

In other news, I completed the workers training course... ended with a Very exciting retreat in ballarat.
Over the last few weeks, God's been challenging me to give myself up to Him and God's been working, he's been changing my life in so many ways and so magnificently ... at some points I was so low and so depressed i couldn't handle myself anymore ... i was an emotional wreck... but God's been pulling me through... thru bringing people to minister to me and thru my discipler and thru God's Word and his Holy Spirit speaking into my soul. It's a new direction that God has pointed me towards, and though I can't see the end, I can't see the entirety, I know it's going to be good- just being in His will and purpose. It's not going to be easy, but at least I'm not going down alone.


I also wanted to say that I won't be posting on this blog on a frequent basis anymore. If you want to contact me, drop me a line by email or sms my mobile at +61411811260. I don't want to lose touch with all of you but i'll be hitting the whole round of yr blogs less and less.

Andrew gan

Actually, I have that feeling all the time; the short-term goal simply helps foster a psychological illusion of doing something to overcome the problem.

It's a hollow panacea - but the anoydyne of little victories accomplished through its pursuit are better than nothing...

[Partly shamelessly patched together from ICQ log]

I feel nostlgic, melancholic and a touch depressed.

My life seems rather empty.

I was asking Geraldine just now what normal people do, and listening to some of the recollections, I think even if I did them, I wouldn't feel very fulfilled

He-Who-Might-Not-Want-To-Be-Named says he's had the feeling before, of detachment, apathy and aloofness, but that it went away once he found a short term goal, complementary to his slightly longer term but still quite short term goal.

Direction in life. Mmm.

Probably misquoting murderously, but:

...The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned...

I was griping about how women spend needlessly and buy too many clothes and such, and how it's a shameless, shameful waste, and Cassanova comes up with a: "Women lubricate the economy? Very poetic. Nice going. Then again, the economy is a woman herself. They all need lube sometimes."

Gah. And I just deleted that accidentally.

NB: Only one person riposted with "men buy cars and gadgets". Which isn't as valid as it sounds because fewer men do that, and most men don't buy more than one car, or more than one digital camera.

I am wroth. My singlets keep being spirited away by the goblins.

And my parents place an inordinate focus on reading the Straits Times. They like to make references to some events, then when I inquire they refuse to elucidate, and my mother utters her favourite refrain: "Never read newspaper".

Not that, out of camp, I'd want to read about how many people got disemboweled, who was carnally violated, who was knocked down by a bulldozer, the identity of the latest girl to get defenestrated, or how many people fell for the latest 'magic stone' scam. Not that I would in camp, but I've fewer things to do then, so.


Ooo, Dictionary.com has an excellent FAQ.

"Q. A misogynist hates women. What do you call a person who hates men?
A. A misandrist.

The word misandrist comes from Greek, mis-, a prefix meaning "hate" + andr-, "man" + -ist."

The answer to the eternal question. But - Damn. I should have guessed, deducing the answer from "polyandry" and "polygyny".

And of course:
Q. What does "floccinaucinihilipilification" mean?
A. It means "the estimation of something as worthless."

Which leads me to wonder why "sesquipedalian" is such a long word.

In addition:
What is the plural of "Virus"?

There was also a link to a page with the world's longest run-on sentence. Since the page is no longer available, I will take the liberty of linking to the Internet Wayback Machine's version of it.

The Amazing Run-On Sentence Page

In fact, many of the pages linked from the FAQ aren't around any more. Oh well.


How Girls Waste Time

12. a) Compulsive email forwarding syndrome, especially "cute", "sweet" or "meaningful" ones, where the probability of forwarding rises with the size of the attachments

Deigned to update About Me. Rather tiring.

Here's a list:

About Gabriel - A List

Monikers: kimberly, Agagooga
Idols: Asian Prince, Alessandro Moreschi
Eccentric whims that've improbably come to fruition: Scanning
the 1999 and 2000 RGS yearbooks, semi-successful
anti-purple uniform campaign
Ingenious ideas: Hiding my handphone in a bag of Ruffles during a School of
Military Medicine inspection

Bright ideas from anyone welcome :)

Stronghold is like Caesar 3 and Pharaoh in a lot of ways, but strangely I don't hate it as I do the others :)


I was talking to someone who, as Tim would put it, uses sex to gain power. One of her motives is boredom, and she gets a kick out of doing it. It also makes her feel more self-confident (and she does have valid reasons for wanting to do so).

I wonder if the motives such people have are all the same, if underlying their exterior, they actually have deep inadequacies to assuage.


12:43AM:

Mysterious messages - "i'll bet you're one of the kind of people whom our [rgs] secret prefectorial board are sent out to assassinate. you know too much."

And - "and all the ways you are not have nothing to do with the government (except for NS, which, frankly speaking, is your misfortune. again, if you don't like it - don't be a citizen. or, if you wish to evade it - there are SO many ways to zaogeng and elude.)"

?

Ah. The joys of a super-long weekend. Below is my usual recounting of my week in concentration camp.

Restored Post

Ah. The joys of a super-long weekend. Below is my usual recounting of my week in concentration camp.

The main event in this short week was Range. My third range so far, this was perhaps the best range, in many senses of the word.

The Nee Soon range, where I spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday, is reputed to be the best in Singapore, and is always fully booked. It's certainly well furnished - the training sheds have fans, the canteen does not come in a van but instead is in a concrete building (though the variety of refreshments on offer is parlous, and expensive besides) the toilet has soap in the dispensers and there's free toilet paper provided (!). And to top it off, they have metal detectors to check shooters for any live rounds, empty cartridges or any other form of pyrotechnics. High tech!

160 Squadron was having range at the other range, and Saravanan the Younger from BMT was there. He gets to drive for them, but Air Defence isn't stay out. Aww. And it turns out Joshua knows him. There was also this guy with a very pronounced Australian accent (which reminded me of my cousin Marc) who went up to the Pepsi-selling canteen to ask if could "have a Coke".

During range, I realised that my CSM-to-be's laugh sounds unnervingly like Krusty the Klown's. And they both've a husky voice, a paunch and are balding ;)

Anyhow I screwed up my first day. I suspect that, to some extent, the more I shoot, the worse I score - I failed the worst I ever have the first day. Though I was a few shots short of Marksman the second. They can send me for range as much as they want (for one Specialist, this was his 9th range. And he still didn't get Marksman) - it's just going to waste their money on ammunition. I don't really care if I get Marksman, except that I'll not have to go shoot till next year and I'll get a day off. There *is* the $200 incentive, but that's tainted money, so. I am as ambivalent about passing or excelling in IPPT or SOC - many may be proud of their achievements in those, but passing them would give me about as much satisfaction as gassing Jews. Since I was doomed already, so to speak, I fired off a shot each into the lanes to my left and right. Maybe I helped someone get his $200 :) Kudos go out to Kelvin, though, who OOCed from BMT in the first week. He got Marksman though this is only his second range!

We had our share of skullduggery, though it was not as bad as what a certain unit (Best Combat Unit, ahem) was reputed to have done - magic rounds. Namely, we, many of us, were cajoled into declaring IA (Immediate Action - your rounds won't load or the empty cartridges get stuck in the chamber of the M16) during the rundown of one stage of the range, so we could retry it. I was one of them. Unfortunately, the 3 times I retried the rundown, I *really* got IA, and I scored worse than my first time, so my 3 rundowns were for naught. And at the last stage on Day 2, Figure 11 Illuminated target, one guy needed 4/4 shots on target to get Marksman. To improve his odds, he moved one round from the "Sensing" Magazine (so you get a 'sense' of where to shoot) to his Test Magazine. But he only got 3/5. Aww.

I booked out Wednesday night at 10:40pm, and caught the last train back (11:30pm). Then, the next day was the Battalion Ops Anniversay, held at Sentosa.

It was hot. Scorchingly, mind numbingly hot. They should've held it at 5:30pm instead of 12:30pm, then we could've had a foam party after that :)

It was larger scale than normal Games Days, but one station involved building a sandcastle (?!). Creative, they are.

Most of us arrived at the end point earlier than the stipulated time, so we sat down and drank hideously expensive drinks - my 616ml bottle of Gatorade Apple set me back by $4.00, while watching some of our Unit Mates play Beach Volleyball... with Beach Lians and Beach Bengs!

The people who run Sentosa have really upped the bullshit factor - now there're quite a few exhibits retelling the "Legend of the Merlion" (Yeah. 'It appeared in the 1970s magically, conjured into existence by the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board. STPB wanted to con tourists and make up for our deficit in historical character'), and how it saved Singapore from a flood. Bah, I suppose this is how legends come about. There's also this point they proclaim to be the "Southernmost point of Continental Asia", and the fuzzy logic goes - it's connected to Sentosa by a suspension bridge, which in turn is connected to Singapore by a bridge. Ergo, it is the Southernmost tip of Continental Asia. Right. They forgot the part about Singapore being linked to Malaysia by the Causeway and Second Link. I hope, for their sake, that Malaysia and Indonesia never get down to building that bridge between West Malaysia and Sumatra. Give me Tierra del Fuego anyday.

Perhaps the reason they need so much bullshit is that the beach isn't sufficiently attractive. Sure, the sand is fine, the water is clear (for Singapore) and they built islets offshore, but look beyond and on the horizon you will behold the sight of... container ships. They ingeniously try to turn this drawback into an attraction with a poster proclaiming that Singapore is a busy port, so if you just look you will be able to see ships of all sorts, and maybe even an occasional warship. Right. And bedbugs on mattresses are good because they draw off excess blood - leeching is healthful, but we don't have any leeches, so settle for bedbugs. Enjoy!

The thing that made us most happy, though, was not the romp across Sentosa, but the 1 1/2 days of FREE off. Unprecedented. At least in my limited experience.

And the usual short soundbites and one-liners:

In the ongoing re-regimentisation of my company, we've now been told to lock our cupboards. Oh bother.

Having been somewhat tardy all along, I was pushed by the Senior Medic to speed up the screening of obese regulars. Apparently, they are worried because if they don't lose enough weight by next April, they lose some pay. Aww.

Joshua from my BMT section has popped up in my camp. He's a signaller at HQ Armour, so he just stays indoors. Gah.

Nigel likes to sing in falsetto. How rare.

On Monday night, our CO came to talk to us. For 1 hour straight. Ugh. Luckily, his speech at the Ops Anniversary in Sentosa was less than 10 minutes! I was beginning to fear for my sanity when, at the Games Day at Bishan Park last monday, he ended his discourse at 10 minutes and said that he would "say the rest" of what he had to say at the Ops Anniversary.

In Tim's camp, you get 1/2 a day off if you do Sunday duty, and you can't do such 2 weeks in a row. Gah.

Disturbing dream: Somehow I dreamed of a certain someone frolicking in bed with a colleague from another unit. Ugh.

I got asked, "Eh, your name is really Shuqi ah?". Gah. Even after so long, they still haven't gotten over it. I wonder if the Shu Qi in the RGS Choir gets this much unwanted attention over her name.

We were recently given an FM Receiver by our unit. This is much more useful than the miniature face towel we got the last time, which is so small it can't be used for much.

The latest thing to be spirited away - my towel. In the morning it was hanging outside the bunk. At night, after range it was gone. Someone really doesn't like me.

Quotes:

SAF creed: "we are the unfortunate, led by the unqualified, doing the unnecessary, for the ungrateful." pls pass this on -to let everyone know the dark truth (sms)

[To me] Eh, your name is really Shuqi ah?

[On marksmanship money] $200 means a lot to me. It may not to you... Use the $200 to go for a spa.

[On the New Paper New Face competition] Beauty need not be flaunted in pubic manner (public) (sms - a Freudian slip, mayhap? ^_^)

[On my suggestion that she join the New Paper New Face competition] sounds great! Why dun u join with me, kimberly? (sms)

I know sometimes I say things, very boring. Teoh boh? [2 people: Teoh] Those who say 'teoh', go and carry on 20 [pushups].


Proselytisation troubles me somewhat. I'm supposed to spread the good news, but then I wouldn't like someone trying to convince me by convincing me of the benefits of fasting a month a year, praying 5 times a day. And yet.

There was something on the BBC about the benefits of fasting during Ramadan. Many benefits were touted, but what I wonder is this - if it is so beneficial, why don't they fast the whole year round? During fasting, Muslims are supposed to be spiritually pure, not get angry and generally be paragons of virtue. Why can't they do this the other 11 months of the year? Perhaps the world would be a better place then, with no more Palestinian suicide bombers (not to mention the fact that they will be so weak due to the fasting that they will not be able to kill anyone), manipulating of oil prices through OPEC for material gain, threatening of Singapore when they have an Israeli Prime Minster over for a social call and such. Ariel Sharon and friends should fast too :)

I was at Concorde Hotel's Melting Pot Cafe yesterday for lunch. Horror of horrors - they're removed their excellent, unequalled pork satay from the lunch buffet, because Muslims complained about the pork fumes. !@#$%^&*() They're renovating next year, though, and apparently plan to install something to suck up satay fumes, so there may still be hope *crosses fingers* The pork chop was still excellent though. At least there's still City Satay, though if and how long they'll be able to hold out against the temptations of going Halal is unknown...

And now I will go attempt to play Stronghold.

1:25PM:

Stronghold was great fun. I think I'm getting the hang of it. Now, however, I am required to type things for my mother. Gah.

"Professional Portfolio Form
Accreditation For Senior Teacher Appointment (Yr 2003)" (Read: Shameless Bullshitting)

2:14PM:

Woah. Whaddaya know. 20 months left!

I love SqrSoft Advanced Crossfading 1.75!

2:45PM:

I'm told Bayley won Drama Feste this year, with an adaptation of 1996's play - "5 people sitting around a table arguing". A bit lame, "about how they couldn't write a script, so they sat down to sort it out and the ending was them taping the whole conversation and using the scenario as their actual play which they acted out", but beats angst so thick you can cut it with a butter knife. And Hullet's was politically incorrect, insulting prefects, slamming ruggers and social studies (ie Propaganda Studies). And it has a transsexual too.

3:38PM:

The focus in the game seems to be more on the Military - there are 4 times as many Military as Economic missions. I'm currently done with Economic Mission 2 of 5.

But I think I tire of doing things like accumulating 500 units of cheese ;) So I'll move on the Military missions. Just as soon as I type the next batch of bullshit for my mother.

Using archers to shoot the naughty rabbits who nibble at my wheat crop sounds like a most interesting proposition (I can just hear Bunny Killer yelping now...) ^_^


I quake in fear at the prospect of facing the inestimable might of the imp... err, omnipotent one - He Who Must Not Be Named!

Am currently preparing a devastating rebuttal to your lame, neo-liberal, Western-intelligentsia, demagogic claptrap, but in the meantime - think on this.

So what if your factual assertions are true? Most of them are, grudgingly, but with a lot of caveats - after all, it seems you've taken the source material from yet another wellspring of equally biased propaganda; the opposition(vis-a-vis the Official propaganda). No one has ever been able to convincingly argue to me that a lassez-faire approach to the political market is the best approach, from a utilitarian standpoint. In fact, by definition, applying economic criterion to the political arena is like comparing apples to oranges, and inferring that the system is flawed due to issues with its individual features is fallacy of composition to the max.

Freedom and liberty as axiomatic "goods" in and of themselves? I think not.

So it's an early saturday morning, and I was awoken by the construction work next to my new apartment accommodation. Munching on 4 slices of wholemeal bread thickly spread with Vegemite and downloading kazaa.

I could honestly say I had never dreamt i would be in this circumstances.

In other news, i have 2 plasters on the same hand for the second time this week (when i first moved in last saturday i had 2 plasters on my fingers for cuts while moving furniture. The plasters stayed on for 3? 4 days)- these were incurred while - sweeping - the balcony (it's just been such an accident-ful day: i walked into closed doors twice- consecutively- yesterday). I could leave off with the plasters, just that i hate the stinging feeling when they touch soap.

Last night, my ocf cell grp came over to my apartment for home cell. They were having dinner at mark's place while i was... baking a cake. Yes, baking. I finished classes at 3.45pm and decided to go to safeway to buy ingredients- i needed something that would make me feel happy. Went off to bake it and it took longer than expected (by the time i joined them for dinner everyone else had finished eating. Siew min innocently asked "Were you cleaning up your house?" while the rest looked expectantly at me).

Anyway, it was a carrot-banana cake... actually a carrot cake because i forgot to add in the bananas. It came out chaoda but everyone said it tasted very nice. I hope they weren't just being polite. It's my first solo baking in melbourne! Then again, carrot cake is one of the easiest things to bake. (I'm so delighted with my pyrex baking dish!!) I didn't tell anyone i was baking until it came out just in case it was really bad, then i could throw it all away. Anyway it came out looking quite chaoda (it was actually just the top 1cm that was burnt)

But i didn't expect it to cost so much- i ended up spending $20 in the supermarket for all the essentials that i didn't have in my rather empty kitchen- flour, egg whisk, walnts, carrots, sugar .... anyway they should last a long time i hope. I don't even have a mixing bowl or proper containers- i mixed my ingredients in the plastic microwavable casserole pot and shredded my carrots into my lunch box.

Now i have a cup of shredded carrot and i dont know what to do with it. (brightly) I could bake another carrot cake (=.

I wrote the below for Yourself? and have decided to cross-post it here.

-----------

And now, the promised tract on some market imperfections of the Singapore political system, based largely on what I scribbled in a fit of boredom at Range. Are we going to have a full fledged political discussion here? No matter. I tried to keep this short so I won't lose *too* many of you :)

First, there's the issue of GRCs. The official line is that they help minorities be represented, and lead to greater efficiency due to co-operation between town councils. However, the evidence is that Affirmative Action does not work. Why can't minority candidates get into Parliament on their own merit? I am sure that there are many competent minority candidates around - putting them into a GRC team casts doubt on whether they were elected on their own merits. If racial prejudice is still prevalent, then I fear that the attempts to craft a multi-racial society, where we are one united people regardless of race, have failed dismally. Incidentally, the reason why voting along racial lines would mean that no minority candidates enter the legislature is the direct consequence of another government policy - racial quotas for public housing. So one reasonable sounding policy leads to another, but the inevitable conclusion does not sound as plausible as it should.

Extending this argument to majority-ethnicity candidates, and all of them, indeed - every candidate should be elected on his or her own merit. What sort of democracy is this, where those in Parliament aren't really chosen, but were elected in a group? With the GRC system, weaker candidates can be grouped with uber strong ones, and still get it - who would dare contest Tanjong Pagar? Who could even win if he tried? No one would dare go up against the Senior Minster. The GRC system, and in tandem with that the hefty $13,000 deposit required for one to stand for elections, just weakens the ability of small political parties and Independent (Read: most of the opposition) to contest elections. And on co-operation between Town Councils: Town Councils shouldn't be run along party lines, and due to their nature they should be non-partisan.

And then, the issue of gerrymandering. Whither Cheng San, ask I? Suspicious, is it not, that it disappeared after the PAP almost lost it. The broader issue is the independence of the electoral commission. Its non-independence may not mean that it is biased against the opposition, but anecdotal evidence would seem to indicate otherwise. Besides Cheng San, there is also the fact that for the 2001 election, the boundaries and seats were announced on October 24, a mere day before the elections were announced on Oct 25 and just 17 before November 5th's polling.

Then there's the Public Entertainment Licensing Act. Stringent laws govern all sorts of "public entertainment" in Singapore (another issue in and of itself), but for some strange reason, political speeches and events are considered "public entertainment" and thus need a license from the relevant department to carry out their activities. Furthermore, the department has, on many occasions, been tardy in giving approval for functions, and has inexplicably rejected some applications, citing the threat to public "order". The PAP, however, can wriggle through a loophole by going under the auspices of the People's Association.

There is also pork barrel politics. In the 1997 and 2001 elections, this was especially evident, with constituencies being openly threatened that they would not get upgraded if they didn't vote for the PAP. So public money - taxpayer's money, is used for partisan causes. Poor Potong Pasir, old and decrepit, is passed over in favour of newer estates, all for the crime of voting for Chiam See Tong. And the 2001 election came suspiciously close after the announcement of the New Singapore Shares initiative.

The use of libel and defamation lawsuits, with large amount of damages awarded, to ruthlessly and mercilessly smash opposition members against brick walls for the most trivial of matters is also prevalent. I believe that, so far, only Chiam See Tong hasn't been the target of a lawsuit. Admittedly, that is because he is cautious in the extreme, unlike the others. It is known that the Singapore Government has -never- lost in a defamation suit. Ever. And it keeps slapping them on opposition politicians. The connections some judges have with the ruling party does not help matters any, and brings to mind the doubts cast on the credibility of Silvio Berlusconi, Prime Minster of Italy, due to numerous conflicts of interest. When Jeyaratnam successfully appealed to the Privy Council to overturn a verdict delivered against him (which said that he had been offered "grievous injustice," and that he and a colleague had been "fined, imprisoned and publicly disgraced for offences of which they were not guilty."), sometime later, the law was altered to disallow appeals to the Privy Council. Besides lawsuits, the government is also fond of casting doubt upon the character and integrity of opposition candidates. Whether the accusations are true or unfounded is not for me to say, not having done enough research on this topic, but while reserving judgment, I still have my doubts.

And then there's the matter of the press. The press is often seen as a tool of the government, as one of its official voices. Indeed, so strong is the perception that Malaysia has, in the past, asked the Government to apologise for things published in the Straits Times that offended it, as if what was written in there was official policy or dogma. The Government doesn't help dispel this perception - it has often touted the Press as a tool for "Nation Building", a most nebulous term. And it has, in the past, chided it for things such as "undermining public trust in the police", when all that was done was that valid questions of police actions were merely asked. Many people who work in and for the press also have government connections - Chua Lee Hoong [who often opines pro-Government views] and one former journalist, for example, used to work for the infamous Internal Security Department (ISD), and many managerial posts are filled by former Civil Servants. Many publications have also been closed by the government - Utusan Melayu (1969), the Nanyang Siang Pau (1983), the Eastern Sun (1971) and the Singapore Herald (1972). Many societies acknowledge the vital role that a free press has in a democratic society, to question relentlessly and encourage transparency, and thus to arrive at the truth. The Government responds that whoever wishes to participate in politics should do so from within the framework of the political process, but the role of the press is unique, really. Ideally non-partisan, it can, with responsible reporting, play a complementary role in a civil society.

Our late former President Ong Teng Cheong, our first Elected President, voiced some of the difficulties he faced in his job. His job was to safeguard the reserves, and so, while in office, he asked for a listing of the reserves. He was told that a full, detailed listing was not available, and even the one he finally got after a few months of dithering was incomplete.

Of course, the anemic showing of the Opposition is not due solely to the PAP's machinations, but also to their own failings. Opposition politicians tend to like showy, flamboyant populist acts, which does discredit them to some extent. The PAP is also adept at snatching up talent, and due to the poor showing of the opposition, most who enter politics gravitate towards the PAP, thus perpetuating a vicious circle.

And now I wait for the men in black suits to take me away :)


More materials available at Singapore Window and the Think Centre.

Talking with Yisa is very interesting.

The first part of "The Transporter" seemed to me like a BMW car ad in disguise, like a longer version of the shorts that were commissioned some time back.

After all the explosions and rockets, there was a sex scene between Shu Qi and Jason Statham. Now, I know such is obligatory in all modern movies, but this one was especially contrived and stilted. It must have been one of the most artificial I've ever seen.

Jason Statham looks quite rugged, really. He exudes charisma from every pore :) Shu Qi on the other hand... Well after all that's been said about her, this is actually the first of her movies that I've seen, really. But I've gained enough of an impression from other sources :) She isn't as slutty in the film as she normally looks, but her english is TERRIBLE. Every time I hear it I cringe, which may be why they made her speak in Chinese as much as possible.


Latest spam disclaimer:

"This email is sent to subscribers only. It requires a lot of time and resources to send out this newsletter so there is no reason in the world why we would want to spam you."

Gah.

Delicious offering from Law Girl:

SINGAPORE PROVERB$


One man's urine is another man's drinking water.

Citizens should be seen and not heard.

You pay millions, you still get monkeys !

We pay monkeys to get peanuts.

After the government takes enough to balance the budget, the taxpayer
has the job of budgeting the balance.

Cleanliness is next to a Corrective Work Order.

The early bird catches the Hello Kitty.

Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man an NSF.

Familiarity breeds people who might borrow money from you.

Where there's a will, there's a potential lawsuit.

Absence makes the man a quitter.

A land that rewards foreign talents over locals, will soon be foreign of
talents locally, and eventually be foreign of talents totally.

What goes up can never come down: Law of GST and PTC.

You can lead a citizen to Newater, and you can force it to drink.

One good hike deserves another.

Every big hike starts with a small hike.

Lightning can strike twice if you suay-suay defame the wrong person.

A bird in the hand is cheaper than going Geylang.

No news is SPH news.

Make hae while the mee boils.

Old soldiers never die, they merely become insurance agents.

Two's company, but three's a GRC !

Wth.

SINGAPORE ARMED FORCES
ELECTRONIC PAY SLIP

OCTOBER 2002

Rank/Name : LCP SEAH SHU QI, GABRIEL

Salary/Allowances :
1 COMBAT ALLCE 150.00
2 RANK ALLCE 370.00
3 * ARREARS-C YR 20.00
Total $ 540.00

Deductions :
1 SAFSA 0.40
2 * THE CHEVRONS 1.50
3 PIONEER MAG 0.40
4 THE CHEVRONS 1.50
Total $ 3.80

Why do I have to pay subscription for The Chevrons now? !@#$%^&*() And I still don't want to pay anything to SAFAS. Pioneer's okay - $0.40 is good value for laughing at Kairen's horrible drawing and lame jokes ;)

Yisa just called me to ask me to watch The Transporter with him tonight.

Since I've nothing to do (as always), I obliged :)

Weird. For some reason I had a dream where one of my J1 orientation group mates showed up. And it's not even one whom I knew well.

Not that I knew any of them well.

WTH.

And, topping that, WTH?!

My, aren't we verbose today?

12:12AM:

Welcome This New Day For Womanhood
Tampons in American History
Sarah Kowalski, December 1999

Yeh my computer is back and seemingly works.

And now it's off to sentosa for the Battalion Ops Anniversary.

Now this brings back memories.

Somehow, I managed to drag myself home after the second day of range.

Only to find that 'Privatenet', some sex dialer, has somehow infected the laptop. GRR.

I just discovered that the Delifrance near my office sells its stuff at half-price after 6pm! Woo hoo! Meaning of life once again rediscovered!

(normally Delifrance only does the half-price thing after 9, except at this particular branch)

Word of the day: "titanomachia"

Today, I read about the so-called Portland Six; there was another terrorist in custody in Malaysia, and, most lovingly, I finally settled down to read some details of the so-called Montgomery Sniper.

We live in a chaotic, degenerate world, and my misfortune is that I am aesthetically fascinated by the suffering - as long as it happens to someone else. I suppose I should feel morally repulsed - but consider the Montgomery Sniper. One man, a high-powered sniper rifle, picks off seven unconnected individuals in a two-day spree. Sniping from up to six football fields away. One .223 caliber bullet per victim; mostly head-shots. The man (or woman, you never know, even girls play Counter-Strike) fires once, then moves on. Disciplined chaos. The targets have no connection; are of all races, ages, religions, ethnicities. They include a WASP, a Haitian immigrant, an Indian, and a Hispanic.

Brilliant, freaky madness. No pattern. No motive. No warning. Simply insanity. And probably some serious marksmanship training.

They still haven't caught the anthrax mailer either.

I suppose the suffering of others is one way I can vicariously and voyeuristically remove myself from the Gehenna of my personal banalities; my personal.. *trivia*.

I don't see portents of the impending apocalypse - that implies a direction and history. Simply an intensitifcation of the kind of random, senseless chaos that characterises human existence. There is no pattern, no order, no justice. Simply pockets of enforced stability; and even within those pockets entropy rules. A government is broken or made by the chaotic aggregates of voter demographic. One man is born a pauper; while the next into silver spoon-dom. Another man is insane; a second suicidal, a third, an Everyman. One person a scholar, another a convict. No patterns. No destiny. No meaning. Just random chance. (Although there's a remote possibility of karmic reincarnation, I grant:) And the occasional ability of the individual to impose his own meaning on the world around him. Those men we call geniuses, madmen, .. or heroes. Or villains.

And this is who we are.

"Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."

Dang. I forgot some of what I wanted to post.

No matter.

I'm disturbed by this set of referrals:

"Google: "serbee" rgs choir
Google: "serbee" sex"

Someone's after Culottes Girl?

And someone's being doing research on Yangyang and Jeremy Lim Renyang too.

People are STILL looking for Hunter Seeker. Lin Yucheng's little program sure did upset the Neopets people :)


I am amused.

Andrew Tan will be a fellow scholar of Number 1 :)

And somehow Yong Jin got both the A*Star and MAS scholarships. (?!)


I'd decided to stop playing all the games that are nice, sometime back. The trouble was I shifted to playing no games at all. Mayhap, when my computer comes back, I will try Stronghold and accumulate 500 units of cheese. Or install WinXP!

NB: Can the person who sent me feedback about "Lim and Chinese" please send me his/her email address so I can reply?

Thank you.


Tim needs to gain 10 xp at the School of Manpower, so his XP can go from 25 to 35. He can then level up and become a 3SG from his current rank of CPL :)

I, on the other hand, became a LCP, wef 1st Sept. Interestingly, my payslip says "Private", and my pay slip gives me $350 rank pay + $150 combat pay. Someone's screwed up again it seems. But the life of a clerk is not easy. It matters not.

Tim was being difficult, so I had to go dig up some info:

kimberly: their logic is twisted
"we're forcing you to do NS, so we will pay you less to show you you're being forced"

njytim: who said they employ such logic

kimberly: they do!

kimberly: wah lau waste 6 mins of my time looking for it for you
the things I do

njytim: you are a nice person.

kimberly: that won't work on me bruder :)

"NS is a duty to the country and not an employment. NSFs are therefore paid an allowance and not wages like salaried employees. "

http://www.mindef.gov.sg/display.asp?col=newsdb&tb=newsview&number=1473&charset=iso-8859-1

The words of the dispatch rider Guan Hong and Joshua talked to come to mind: "You pay me peanuts, you get a monkey."

Well if they paid me my weight in gold (a not inconsiderable sum at that!) they'd still get a monkey.

Title: "Subversive stuff is fun" or "How I spent Sunday duty"

Some of the following are risibly biased in their "Lee Kuan Yew is evil" vehemence, but mostly ring true, or bring up some good points.

Former president (Ed: Devan Nair) criticises suppression of dissent

Don't become yet another tool of Lee
This is very funny: "Lee is an evil plague whose legacy must be eradicated, not propped by fawning praise that does not even begin to understand what he has wrought". Though the article this letter was written in protest against was indeed rather silly, simple and sycophantic.

Singapore's Jeyaretnam fights for another day

Harry Lee's 'tolerant climate'
"I have the honour of being banned from Singapore since 1982. Not being a shopping addict or fanatic I miss nothing, actually; moreover, I have been given to understand that our shops in Malaysia are actually better and cheaper. And as for tall buildings, they have never interested me, after having seen some of them in different parts of the world." - LOL

Against the odds: one man's bid for democracy aka how Tang Liang Hong got screwed. I notice there's no mention of that sedan chair quote, which is quite telling. Here's something more balanced.

Ong Teng Cheong: Extended interview - Ever delicate, he.

Singapore authorities use libel laws to silence critics

Singapore facts stranger than fiction - Another view of the Jemaah Islamiah arrests

The following is from an article about the recent Jemaah Islamiah arrests. The writer's biases are evident - witness the long diversion on how democracy in Singapore is flawed - but it makes for somewhat insightful reading anyway ;)

Dragnet in Disneyland:

"The most interesting it gets here are the comings and goings - often to the defamation court - of Singapore's emasculated opposition, notably a clean-cut lad called Chee Soon Juan who shockingly thinks it reasonable to suggest that 43 years of uninterrupted power for Lee's People's Action Party (the world's fourth-longest tenure after the North Korean, Chinese and Cuban communists) might be enough.

Lee hates Chee. Indeed, if George W. Bush's speechwriters are short of insults to spray at evil-doers, they could hire people like Chua Lee Hoong [Ed: I hate her writing style. And it's not just because she's shamelessly so pro-PAP most of the time], a former "analyst" with Singapore's secret police, cum Straits Times columnist.

Chee's been called a liar, a fraud, a gangster and a loser. But in the cruellest cut of all for local xenophobes, Chua dubbed him a "Sarong Party Boy" seeking solace with sympathetic foreigners, just like Singapore's notorious Sarong Party Girls, the local temptresses who prowl for (willing) erstwhile foreign studs possessing the coveted "five Cs" - condo, car, cash, credit card and club membership.

A loser Chee certainly is. The PAP controls all but two of Singapore's 85 parliamentary seats and neither maverick seat is carried by Chee.

Still, that doesn't deter official obsessing about Chee, who gets the Lee family's goat by pointing out that its half-a-dozen-odd members run or chair some of Singapore's biggest public and private companies, its two leading government investment companies, founded its leading law firm while also running the central bank, the finance ministry, filling the positions of the senior minister and deputy prime minister and sitting on a number of corporate boards, local and foreign. (It's not nepotism, insists the government - it's just that the Lee family is very capable and there's not enough qualified Singaporeans to fill the posts. And Singapore insists it abides by world's best practices of corporate governance.)"

Restored post

We've gotten our new medics. Finally, I'm not the most 'xin jiao' of the lot. Interestingly enough, 3 of the 5 were from NJC, and one knows Tim, and another, though from ACJC is, like Andrew, surprisingly un-ACish, at least as far as their choice of language goes (but then Andrew does look a bit ACish, so.) Strangely enough, 2 of them know Yaodong - one from BMT and one from Secondary School, during which he apparently already displayed his tendencies. Maybe the voices have been there all his life. The new medics told me about the new SMM. Besides having gigantic toilets and snack dispensers (!), it has enough bunks so the clerks have to stay in. Oh well.

I've finally gotten to talk to Yisa. He was sitting in the CCO canteen one day and I smiled at him. It took him a while to puzzle out my identity, till he finally mouthed my name at me. Alas, he told me that, if not for my distinctive smile, he wouldn't have been able to recognise me. So much for me recognising him even with his shaven head (which he claims is a measure he resorted to to keep cool). The guy's a bloody PES C1L2 clerk at the Armour Training Centre (ATC), though he assures me (bah) that his life is not good. He told me that telling them thet you're gay gets you C1L2 only. Hmm. What a waste of hundreds of dollars. I hope he manages to con the SAF psychologist - who is very good at spotting fake-os like him - the next time. Intimidated by the testosterone and feeling sexually harassed my foot :) Learning of my tragic and cruel fate fo GP, he advised me to give up - he says he got a B4 and Aravind a C6.

We were in the gym during RT (and I was, among other things, trying out the 'Mystery Hike', 'Forest Walk' and 'Trail Blazer' on the treadmill since I'm excused running) and the preliminaries of the Women's Table Tennis matches between Singapore and Korea were on. For some reason, the women kept cursing/blessing the balls before serving them, and yelled unknown vulgarities/exclamations whenever they or their opponent scored. Must be an attempt to use magic charms.

On Thursday, during our CPR refresher lesson, I saw that the last nominee for the New Paper New Face Competition 2002 is a J1 in RJC. Somehow, I wasn't surprised when Geraldine told me she is in A03. Ahem. :) Of course, she has lot to say on her home to the most number of personality tests ever taken and displayed on a page. Oh sorry I got the link wrong. Here it is. Students are so precocious nowadays - there's at least one other 17 year old YJ student, and one 16 year old.

Our QM (storemen) branch now has a policy ost wonderous - don't report sick for a month and you get 2 days off. I want! Apparently too many of em had exhuasted their leave and off (Being in a battalion about to ORD when you've just been posted in is not a good thing - poor Kelvin had -1 days of leave before the new CSM came in, letting people with no leave left do fatigue work when the time came to clear off/leave).

Besides being kind to people with no off/leave left, the aforementioned new CSM (well, it's not confirmed yet, but I'd say the odds are higher than 1:1) - who many say looks like some Soccer player called 'Zidan' - has been most sparing in giving out confinements and extras - he even cancelled a few from the previous CSM. He also didn't give me and 3 others any punishment when our rifles were found to be dirty, and cancelled weekend RT for this week, and hopefully subsequent ones. However, he's very fierce, and strict about regimental stuff - he appears to be serious about making us wake up before 6:30 and to go for breakfast.

Going to clear mail (the Klez virus has been making my mailbox very full) after RT is good. The e-learning centre has free slots for a short period of time (I think I want to complain to the system administrator about people booking slots till they ORD) and after I get chased out I can go eat dinner and get more food since no one else will be coming to eat anymore. Win-win situations are fun. I just have to remember to bring my little piece of paper next time.

Recently some my bunk mates seem to have gone crazy. The most drastic change has occured in Yong Siang, hitherto extremely quiet, soft spoken and demure, has suddenly become less reserved and more boisterous, singing songs to himself and generally talking more. Yesterday night, while 'doing work', he, Yiliang and Boon Huat took part in an orgy and started laying into each other, sprawling on the floor, drawing the curtains round themselves while noises of pleasure emerged from behind the shrouds, giggling and stamping each other with ink stamps until the letters of one fell out and theyhad to scour the floor for them. Must be pre-bookout stress.

Americans seem obsessed by 'closure'. I wonder why.

Seen in the forum: "An NSman's race and religion... are not relevant to where he is deployed" - Colonel Bernard Toh, Director, Public Affairs, Ministry of Defence, 04/10/02. Right. I suppose I better not say that as far as I and most people know, can tell and observe there are no Malays (well, maybe one or two token ones) in Armour, the Commandos, the Air Force and the Navy.


Quotes:
[On why he doesn't want to be the MO's Personal Assistant] Xiong leh. He keeps talking about Jesus Christ.

So I brought my mini-tower to the computer shop at Bukit Merah. While transporting it, I heard something move inside. On its arrival at the shop, said unit was opened up and Lo and Behold, the Athlon fan had dropped out. Bah.

At least I still had my mother's MOE laptop I thought, but Zapsurf (Mysingtel) was even slower than a 33.6 modem. A flash of inspiration struck, and I examined the back of the laptop and beheld a USB slot! Quickly, I hooked up my SCV modem and installed it, and for good measure I plugged my Optical Mouse in. And now I'm surfing at warp speed, and Blogger posting is no longer disabled.

Sometimes I'm so smart and ingenious I amaze even myself.

Sometimes I'm so sad I amaze even myself.

The last Games day, being a day after the Half Marathon (the 10km fun run of which most, I heard, walked since it was easier), was more mental than physical. At least, that was the intent. One game called "Mr Balloon" involved dressing Officers up primarily with Balloons. These being army guys, they started trying to turn their officers into Neolithic Fertility Symbols. One gained FF breasts, and a pert, albeit very pointed butt to boot, and his black shorts were shortened to become Hot Shorts.

After going for the focus group at NTU, I was walking around Boon Lay and Jurong Point, which is much larger, livelier and, dare I say, funkier than Lot One. Among other things, I saw women selling Porn VCDs like "Asian Fever (wth?!) - a first, in my admittedly limited experience. However, as always, the porn VCDs were scattered messily on the table, while those a shade more legal were arranged nicely. Perhaps it's an unwritten code. Jurong Point also has 2 food courts - a Halal one and a non-Halal one. Gah. There was also "Hejab Iran", a shop selling Iranian women's clothing. The shop assistant was clad in a tudung, naturally.

Restored Post

My poncho has again undergone a miraculous transformation and been transmogrified into a groundsheet! I attribute this miracle to the power of Providence (a word that, oddly enough, I've only seen used in subtitles to Chinese Gongfu movies).

In one of my more introspective moods, a thought occured to me. Franklin Delano may have promised a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage, but we've a TV in (almost) every bunk. Hah!

One night at about 9pm, 3 of us were in our bunk enjoying a peaceful night when suddenly I heard someone at the door saying, "Okay or not?". Turning in the direction of the lintel, I saw our Commanding Officer. Maybe this was his way of trying to get closer to the men. Hmm.

Just tonight, the rest decided, in a fit of enthusiasm, to tromp down to the Medical Centre to do work. However, from the start it became a computer game playing session for most. Oh well.

Quotes:

[On why they need so many clerks] The senior specs have the education level of a stone

So I'm at the e-learning centre, after RT (the only time I can go there where there will be free terminals, what with people booking slots in advance till their ORD dates). Since I forgot to bring my little piece of paper, posting combined search referrals from my 2 extreme counters will have to suffice. Add to that the fact my home comp's power supply died yesterday with a crack and a pop and...

42sar - Err.

viconia porn - People are on to Dark Elfs now? Does that count as bestiality?

Sherlock Holmes scgs - What connection could he have with the School With The Most Indecent Uniform In Singapore Bar None?

do girls surf porn? - This is Google, not Ask Jeeves.

chij top porn - CHIJ porn seems to be a popular query. Maybe it's got something to do with it being a popular franchise.

"benefits of conscription" - Over my dead body.

instant maggi market share in malaysia - All cooked with palm oil of course.


Straight Dope of the day:

Is it true about Catherine the Great and the horse?
17-Nov-1978

Do Chinese lack sweat glands in their armpits? Why does spicy food make you sweat?
04-Oct-2002

Restored Post

Thoughts of a peaceful, bucolic weekend were shattered by a call I got on the MRT back after Weekend RT. I suppose I'd never get a social call from Tse Ming (who seemed back to his usual self). So off I trudged back to camp, laden with food bought for the other duty personnel. At least (as is expected), I get a day off, though I'm not supposed to tell even my bunk mates. Well they don't read this blog.

When I was at the gate of camp, I saw some of my School of Armour friends (Edwin Kek, Jianwen and Robin) I was booking in as they were booking out. Gah.

Saturday, I had to send a guy who cut his hand with a saw first to Tengah, then to NUH. Because the vehicle sent to pick us was on another detail, we had to wait from 8:30 to 11:00 for it, and I only reached camp at 11:40pm, to find the rubbish not thrown (my job but they're supposed to help me deal with it if I'm not around), a big mess from dinner on the table and the 2 other duty personnel and a specialist reading Sammyboy forums on the computer - Commercial sex in Japan - Fulfill yr sexual fantasies. Gah.

And on Sunday, I found that, with the recently completed extension of the medical centre, I have even more tiles to mop for my area cleaning. Whee.

Supposedly, with great power comes great responsibility. However, in organisations where rank is paramount, the ability of underlings to question doubtful flaunting of the authority is impeded. Witness the time Sergeant Koh, in BMT, made my whole platoon crawl across the field because guard duty personnel didn't come down when called. I suppose that's why we have a chain of command.

Yaodong has probably pushed it too far. I'm told that, while I wasn't around, he came to see the Doctor one day complaining of stress, poor appetite and insomnia, but only the sarcastic one who's good at flushing out skivers was around. What passed between them is unknown (well, not unknown if you have access to records) but he came out crying and was referred to the Institute of Mental Health. He's now at Alexandra.

Ethan, the reviled RJ medic one year my senior, reads the Economist too - I was pleasantly surprised to see it on the Duty Medic's table one day, and when I looked up I saw him (actually yhis is the first time I've ever seen him. Ahem). Hmm.

Although we've no Malays in our camp, racial balance is still maintained in a way, by means of... Pseudo-Malays! These people have Chinese or Indian names, and aren't Muslim, but somehow, they look Malay. Whoever said there was no racial tolerance in the SAF?

Yogen Fruz, that apparent attempt to capitalise on Haagen Dazs' appeal by setting up a chain with a similar name, seems to be in the doldrums. I was at Great World City and the branch there has diversified. They now sell, among other things, muah chee, canned drinks, hand scoop low-medium class ice cream (the Green Tea flavour, 2.4 times the plainer flavours' price, wasn't very good) and Madeleine's Portugese Egg tarts.

There was this trailer on Channel 8 which used the "Across The Stars" theme from Attack of the Clones as the background music. I bet they didn't pay royalties. Sue sue sue!

Some Islamic Orphanage was having a flag day on Saturday. I didn't have small change, so I gave the girl (a Chinese schoolgirl mind you) $1. I hope I didn't just help fund Jemaah Islamiyah or Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) activities. So much for accusations of racism. *Cough* And that's more than I can say for one Islamic groups in Ma-laysia with nothing to do (don't they all) some years back, which kicked up a storm about some Christian charity, proclaiming that Muslims shouldn't donate to it, whereupon the charity had to reassure the worried masses (ahem) that they also funded Islamic causes. I always thought charity was a non-partisan affair. Aside: Did they really give out real flags last time? Must've made a boatload of losses, what with flags being expensive.

The obsession most countries have with "Defence" is rather disturbing. Perhaps they are all paranoid about being conquered (Ahem - The lessons we learned from the Japanese Occupation...) but I trust most countries err on the side of, shall we say, caution. It's mind boggling to calculate what the peace dividend could be. Perhaps the most telling piece of evidence - Why does everyone call their War Ministries the Ministry Of Defence? At least Saddam's honest in naming his. It's probably just the boyish fantasies of all those men projected onto a big scale. "When women are depressed they either eat or go shopping. Men invade another country." - Elayne Boosler


I went to check it up. They have soup for the souls of (among the more ridiculous):

- Christian Women
- Golfers (2nd helping)
- Pet Lovers
- Dog & Cat Lovers
- Writers
- Prisoners (I can get one...)
- Surviving + Unsinkable soul (what's the diff?)
- Dentists (???)
- Sports fans (!!!)
- Singles
- College Students
- Expectant mothers
- Garderners (!@#$%^&*())
- Nurses
- Teenagers: Tough Stuff (isn't this what the original 4 or 5 books for teenagers were about?)
- Baseball fans
- Volunteers
- Travellers

I kid you not.

Gah. My comp at home's down because the video card got fried (as the Oracle advises me).

Gah.

3rd Oct 8:33PM:

A twist in the tale. It will boot sometimes. A screw's loose (lit), mehtinks.

Word of the day: "narthex"

To show that I am not a brutal, heartless warmonger looking upon the impending war with Iraq as a source of entertainment, betting fun, weapons technology research, excuse to slack in front of CNN, and all out pleasing coversational topic, (in fact, I'm a very nice warmonger), here's an excerpt from a particularly moving Newsweek article.

"Last week President Bush�s speech at the United Nations almost guaranteed that my country, America, will soon be engaged in a battle with Iraq, my ancestral homeland. Military analysts on the evening news are already speaking of bombarding Baghdad first for a �strategic edge.� Never mind that the densely populated city is home to 5 million people (about 100 of whom I am related to), or that my cousin Zaniab or her baby or my uncle Hassan are far more likely to be taken out than Saddam himself. To be an Iraqi-American right now means to be on edge, to cry a lot, not to sleep at night."

I wish I had it in me to summon up more than this vestigial, bare flicker of compassion.

Even Sesame Street has surrounded to the all-encompassing malaise of politically-correct, valueless liberalism.

Sesame Street is adding to its cast a muppet who is HIV-positive.

In September 2002 it added to its cast of muppets a female character who is HIV-positive. Segments including this new muppet will air only in South Africa (where the show is called Takalani Sesame -- takalani means "be happy" in the Tshivenda language), but it is possible that eventually this character will appear in shows broadcast to the other eight nations that air Sesame Street.

The South African character has been named Kami and will be a female mustard-colored furry Muppet who likes nature, telling stories and collecting stuff. Kami is a "monster Muppet" like Grover or Elmo, the least human-like of the Sesame cast, said Joel Schneider, vice president of Sesame Workshop. The muppet will associate freely with the show's other characters as a way to fight stereotypes about people with the virus, said Yvonne Kgame of the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

"We know that she'll be lively, alert, friendly, outgoing, and HIV-positive," said Schneider, who in July 2002 announced the character to delegates attending the 14th International AIDS Conference in Barcelona. "It's about instilling positive attitudes toward people who are HIV-infected," Kgame said.

Hell, I'm all about education and I certainly remember how Sesame Street has provided layered, surprisingly rich education to children for decades, unlike today's modern crop of soulless, mercantilist, stuffed-toy-pushing Nickelodeon crap, but this is ridiculous....
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