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.