Gizmo was the good Mogwai. Stripe was the evil one.

[Ed: There was an evil one?!

Drawing on my powers to add parasitic appendages:

What the hell is this?!

"I told you before, didn't I? You must use soya sauce with fried eggs!"

"hailing from the Soya Bean star ..."

"his finishing move is the Kikko-punch!"]

Ah. Parents out of town this weekend; another weekend of privacy and brooding! Such blessing makes my cilia all a-quiver with delight. In the meantime, I realise that it's coming nigh onto a full year since I came back home. More of my friends are becoming productive economic biomass for the capitalist grinder (ie. graduating). And still more are coming home for their holidays. The wheel turns.

Cousins coming back and we're heading out later tonight for a drink or two. It'll be good to meet up - I have some techincal PC issues I need some help with, and this cousin's a LAN-god from Perth.

And in the meantime, guess who's gonna be givin' Saddam a whuppin'?

Inspector's Resignation Rejected by U.N.'s Blix

"Chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix rejected yesterday a resignation offer tendered by one of his Iraq-bound inspectors after reports appeared that the Virginia man lacked a specialized degree and has played a leadership role in sadomasochistic sex clubs.

McGeorge founded, and has been an officer in, several sadomasochistic sex groups, through which he has taught courses on "sex slaves" and various techniques involving knives, ropes and choking devices. He had said that he would offer his resignation if The Washington Post wrote about his S&M background. On Thursday, the Post reported that McGeorge is a co-founder of Black Rose, a Washington-area S&M club, and a former officer in the Leather Leadership Conference Inc."

Yeh bought $45 of CDs yesterday at Jurong East - finally a reliable shop at a reasonably close location!

Parents leave for Beijing tomorrow and return next Saturday night. I'm off on Monday, Thursday's a rumoured off, Friday's Hari Raya and Saturday's a long weekend.

Mmm. I'll start on Age of Wonders 2 soon.


9:59AM:

AOW2 *really* reminds me of Master of Magic - even more so than AOW the original.

Word of the day: "rodomontadic."

Another weekend wasted at work. And it transpires that the proxy server now blocks out this blog AND www.blogger.com. The indignity! Ah well, I guess this means that my blogging activity will be severely curtailed from now on. Today was quite unpleasant; had to stay in until 4pm when everyone had left by noon. Month-end reporting duties; as well as catching up with all the shit I'd been malingering off over the weekdays. I realised ironically that I'd have been better off doing all that work during the working days as opposed to delaying it until the weekend; but oddly enough I'm really more productive on a Saturday when no one else is around. I have a feeling it's to do with the attire; I was wearing a t-shirt and slacks, as opposed to the usual stifling office shirt and tie.

I realise I still have yet to finish my long-winded chronology, two weeks after the events transpired. I'm hurrying as fast as I can, because a lot of interesting things happened on Sunday, but I keep procrastinating and stoning at home/work. And now, it seems I will have to type in Notepad or Word at work before mailing it home to post. Irritating, but maybe it'll breed better proof-reading habits.

In the meantime, comments squared. (Comments on the comments)

a) Someone should compile a page of blogs rated by pretension. Criterion would include amount of Javascript, number of different hues, numbers of frames, length of journal entry titles, and angst-o-meter.

b) Mozilla has slow load times, compared to Internet Explorer. And besides, I prefer functional; AND being able to use enter key after entering passwords into forms instead of having to use tab or click on "enter" buttons.

c) I'm actually quite irritated at the amount of detail I miss out in my blogs. But then again, I concentrate on different things. I don't write about what's going on at work around me - like how we're moving to a new office and it all resembles a warzone and the elaborate trials of locating the water dispenser through the maze of cubicles and desks and wiring as the partitions around our old workspace are being torn down and re-aligned.

d) God bless the British. They gave us Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Rowan Atkinson, Red Dwarf, Men Behaving Badly, The New Statesman, Yes Prime Minister, Mind Your Language, Goodness Gracious Me, and ALI G! British comedy rocks! Hm. Except for Benny Hill.

e) On honesty: "In courtships, one pretends to be something one is not until your partner loves you for whom you really are." Or, as Lenin put it. "Truth is a rare and precious commodity. Thus, we must be sparing in its use." I can safely say though, that neither treacherous deceit nor brutal honesty have worked out well for me. I'd try decency, but the concept's a bit beyond me.

f) Re: Mogwai - see below:



For some Mogwai context, check this out.

Word of the day: "scaphism". (*Unbelievably* cool word I came across while browsing through a biography of Saladin.)

Today I don't feel like blogging much, because my bipolar mood orbit is at its perigee - ie. closest to gravitational center. As *grounded* as I ever get.

Had a flurry of work today; not the intense, unrelenting focus on one huge task as it was the last few days, but multiple strands and stages of different projects happened to intersect at various points; resulting in a massive splintering of consciousness from one little challenge to another, every minute. Amidst this chaos, however, as I moved orthogonally within the complex world of tenure limits and parametric VaRs and counterparty lines of credit and PDS sector reclassifications and vol calc. backtests and BIS regulations and liquidity management, as more shrill emails flooded in from my boss and other colleagues demanding information, action, and reports.. amidst all this, I came to a startling conclusion - I was enjoying myself.

I've never actually believed it was possible to enjoy wage drudgery; I was holding on to the belief that it was a good trianing ground, good wages, something to do as a career foundation, a stepping stone to "greater things". But now, I realise, I *like* my job, on the whole. I enjoy what I do. I enjoy the challenge of being good at my job; I enjoy the learning opportunities it provides - and I enjoy the people I work with. I mean, there's always the sian bits; the dull bits, the irritating, flooded-by-work-what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-here-being-a-wage-serf feelings, of course - but by and large, I like my work, and I've just realised that I'm not consoling myself or biding my time or swallowing it down.

It's.. strange. When this kind of pure, limpid, *normal* happiness happens, and you take so damn long to recognize it because you don't remember what it feels like anymore.

Of course, it will fade, and wither, and the despair, as intimate as any lover, will return. It always does. But give me this moment, please?

And today, the conversation was about the ethics of cloning, cryonics, and Mogwai placentas. I mean, how cool is it to work in a place where you can spend half an hour chatting to colleagues about Mogwai placenta?

"See, there's this place in South America, where you have these things that look those.. erm.. those movie buggers. Mogthings that become monsters if you dip them in water -"

(ADDENDA: I KNOW MOGWAI ONLY BECOME GREMLINS IF YOU FEED THEM AFTER MIDNIGHT THANK YOU VERY MUCH PEDANTIC PEOPLE)

" - you mean Gremlins? Mogwai?"

"Yup. Gremlins. Now, anyway, they were showing on National Geographic or one of those documentaries how these Mogwais were banging; and then it showed a female Mogwai giving birth in the trees, and right after a bunch of baby Mogwai popped out, the placenta just oooozed out! And apparently these Amazon people collect it, and it helps keem them young. They say the PM injects some extract of Mogwai placenta everyday to keep himself healthy. A friend of mine also said that in Czechoslovakia, they use a similar extract from some other source that costs about RM25K a jab, but apparently makes you feel 20 years younger..."

"Do these guys look like gremlins or mogwai leh?"

"Hard to tell - they're furry, like Mogwai, but they're bad-tempered vicious little bastards."

"Something like my son lah."

One of my degenerate friends just emailed this to me:

"You need to stop sabotaging your chances with the opposite sex by constantly revealing your psychosis potential and your lack of embarrassment to having an extensive psychiatric history."

Heh.

More sites for your edification, vox populi, vox Dei.

Great news from around the world.

And man, I really need to upgrade my PC to one of these.

Top Ten Great Britons poll.

I can understand the obvious winner - Winston Churchill. But number 2 was a freaking total surprise! I mean - Isambard Brunel??? Ahead of Diana????? In a PUBLIC British poll?

But I'm not surprised in a bad way - I'm surprised in an *elated* way. Isambard Brunel wouldn't have been my choice, in all honesty, but it proves that there IS hope for the human race after all if people can put civil engineering genius ahead of an aristocratic whore with a sleek fashion sense on the cover of too many magazines.

THIS is what a country needs to rake in a few more medals:

"It is inconceivable that a national Olympic committee that maintains its own prison and torture chambers could remain a member in good standing of the Olympic movement."

Intermezzo Entry:

Today was a good day, because I spent most of it in conversation. About lots of things, with colleagues. One thing I love about my current job, unashamedly; the people I'm around like to talk as well. About all manner of topics. Yesterday we were actually discussing the psychology of Hitler (because I caught the clerk reading Mein Kampf); today it was random disjoint convo about A Brief History of Time, and seguing into some enthusiastic ranting about Gregorian cantos and Basel II regulations. Talk. Talking, chitter, rant, gripe, bitch. It's the shit I *live* for.

Among the topics of discussion was on the moral ethos of success; one of my colleagues has this game-theory inspired idea that people are basically evil. His assertion is thus - if everyone worked together, and obeyed a rational moral code, the world and everyone in it would be much better off. MUCH. (Think Kantian categorical imperative) But, if only a *few* people did all the fucked up, manipulative, and evil things that humans do, at the expense of everyone else, those *few* would benefit greatly while the rest suffered terribly.

If humans were basically good, we'd have worked together to overcome these difficulties for the greater good of all. Our capacity to cooperate for the greater good is evident - witness the formation of governments, religions, institutions, societies.

But because humans are basically evil, everyone tries to get ahead at the expense of everyone else. Massive log-jam. Think Prisoners' Dilemma, or the brief depiction of game theory in A Beautiful Mind where the guys bump into one another. As a result, the world becomes a confused, brutish mess, with knots of self-interest and self-organization in the pursuit of short-term goals.

It occurs to me that if one were to be terribly, really successful, ie. tycoon successful, that meant that you'd have to have trod on a trail of suffering - whether it's the employees you squeezed, the consumers you gulled, or the resources you raped. No one's hands are clean.

So could I do it? Could I live with myself, as a politician, or as a mogul, knowing that the peons working hours and being paid peanuts contribute directly to my neo-Impressionist art collection, the maintenance of my TVR Vanquish, the renovation of my million-dollar bungalow, or the price of sending my children to Eton?

But then again, one of my friends said, "Take care of your family, and don't screw your friends. And don't get caught. That's all you need to live with yourself." Very Godfather:)

"At the end of the day, I think I do more good than harm. What other standard have I got to judge by?"

And I come to the somewhat dry conclusion that I don't mind being corrupt, or parasitic, or screwing over the world for my own immediate gratification. Why bother pretending otherwise by making some huge tax-exempt philantropic donation or mouthing the moral platitudes? But of course, I'm not entirely devoid of moral character. *limpid smile* I mean, I'd still drop a coin in a beggar's bowl now and again. Better to squeeze and exploit; than to be squeezed and exploited. There is only black, or gray. There are only degrees of sinning.
(Not like I'd run a pedophilia ring or smuggle nukes. Maybe AK-47s though)

Other isolated thoughts:

a) George Bush is either a total moron, or the most cunning dictator in recent history. Either he's a gung-ho redneck totin' his nukerler shotgun - or he's effectively emasculated his opposition, imposed an embryonic Gestapo on the American public ("Homeland Security"), and being given an excuse to pillage and reshape the world in an image that promotes the interests of the American cultural and corporate elite whom he cosies up to. Although some of the Bush conspiracy theorists are majorly paranoid and contradictory; the fact is that the Bush family is filthy rich, with money that traces back to the WW2 years and the Thyssen industrial group's laundering of Nazi loot. And that Bush himself and his old man have had lots of corporate skeletons and vested bigwig interests - including direct links to the old BCCI bosses and their backers in the Saud royal family. These same backers who may be an indirect source of funding for various Islamic fundamentalist groups through charitable fronts.

b) Coming from an American university has this rather strange advantage - chances are the numbers of your fellow native countrymen will be reasonably small. Say, 50-60 a year, for a really popular but not exceptionally elite one? (This number can be considerably larger if the uni has a twinning or correspondent course, of course). This means that you can actually get to know almost all of them; it forms a pretty tight core of acquaintances and alumni you can draw on. Whereas in Melbourne, this number was in the *thousands*. One ends up shying away, sticking to a small circle of close friends. There's no real feeling of being.. part of a community.

c) The New Guy at work is an old family friend of mine from years past. We went out for dinner with one of the MDs of the group i work for. (not the merchant bank, the commercial arm). It was an interesting event.. the New Guy happens to be on quite good terms with him. Turns out this guy's application to the merchant bank was handed in through the MD - apparently the bigwig's son studied in the same uni as New Guy. This MD likes to surround himself with young people - mostly his sons' friends. My friend says it's partly because of personality and partly because he's been quite lonely since his wife died of cancer a few years' back and his sons are both still abroad. He was a very nice chap who talked to us as equals. (although not so westernised as to ask us to call him by first name:). Somewhat bizarre; given that top banking executives aren't normally given to hanging out with guys in their twenties, but it was an interesting experience nonetheless.

d) Just how much value-add does coming from a top-tier Ivy League or Oxbridge university provide one anyway? An acquaintance of mine from Duke University is now still unemployed; while another guy from Georgetown is working as a shipping clerk. But I suppose that's a symptom of present economic straitening. Still, someone I know made an interesting observation that coming from an elite university is not just an investment, but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy - the confidence and self-assurance it engenders in you as being part of an elite are what helps you go a long way, more than any real quality differential in education. And of course, the potential for networking, and the increased career options because the good MNCs all recruit straight off the top-tier campuses. Finally, it's also more of an achievement for an international student to get in - I think they need to stand out more 'gainst the Americans who have contextual home-ground advantage. The international students who can play the testimonial/ECA/academic games well enough to get in are the ones with the kind of diligence and quality to excel in the working world anyway, regardless of their educational pedigree. Or, in the case of Malaysia, without a scholarship caste, it means that you're wealthy enough - and the opportunities that an expensive, exclusive education provides is one of the ways which wealth and power is self-perpetuating.

e) I wouldn't mind being a corrupt politician; because all politicians are corrupt, in one way or another, but I think I could do a *better* job with a slightly lowered level of corruption.

f) I'm taking an awfully long time to do a lot of things at work these days. Urge to productivity seems to have slowed down. Nevermind; as long as the boss doesn't notice. But the world is such a grim place these days, that one can read the news for hours, fixated by the insanity (like the Nigerian Miss World riots), the absurdity (http://www.miami.com/mld/miami/news/weird_news/4609175.htm), or just the evil (http://www.pjstar.com/news/luciano/g137071a.html.

(Blogger cut me off in mid-rant. Just fucking great; it's bad enough when everyone I know does it to me; now even the machines have turned on me. This is projacient from the previous entry - I'm not being more incoherent than usual.)

Mustered sufficient coherence to proceed to interview. The building was a gargantuan edifice to the free flow of global capital; I was struck by how much the interior matched precisely how I always imagined Howard Roark's designs to be like. It's all the brutal, neoliberal economic certainty; the imposing, faux-Gothic sweep of rigid, efficient, corporate aesthetic. "Socialist realism", I think it's called. And there's a lot of the kind of marble/granite/bronze corporate art that's just waiting for a Tyler Durden to smash over.

There was a direct transit elevator on a mezzanine above the lobby with only two buttons -"2" and "37". Inside the elevator was fine-grained teak; usual burnished metal framings, and, charmingly, a television set to the Bloomberg channel. I suppose a few million dollars could be made in the seconds it takes to get from one floor to another; the bigwigs responsbile for billions of OPM ("Other People's Money") take their informational needs seriously. Although the growing ubiquity of television screens *everywhere* in Singapore is a bit weird. Maybe it's anoter mind control trick by the government; doesn't even have to be as outlandish as subliminal radio messages (although those are there, yes indeedy they are, quick wrap your head in aluminium foil! Gladwrap is your saviour as well!) - it could simply be that a tired population, sitting on public transport, staring slack-jawed at moving pictures on a screen is kept too mentally stupefied to fulminate unrest.

Anyway, arrived at the 37th floor, where the ceiling was cunningly arched somewhat akin to the proportions of Westminster Abbey. Directly down the corridor leading off the lift were stairs vaulting to Empyrean heights (thanks to a trick of curvature in the walls that made a corridor with steps take on the dimensions of the Parthenon), a massive portico framed in black marble, and a huge wooden monstrosity which seemed to span the horizon that served as a reception desk. Above this was an elaborate overhanging tapestry/frieze of some sort with the corporate insignia emblazoned on it.

They appeared to be quite taken with the Hellenic tradition, as one of the Erinyes served as their receptionist. Or so it seemed, only instead of a whip and torch, she was holding a pen and clipboard, and had a rather stylish woollen gray jumper/garment thingie in lieu of a tunic of flayed skins. And the serpentine hair was held firmly in place by a massive ivory clip. I did discern an ermine, demonic gleam in her eyes though. Or maybe that was because, after emerging from the muted, halogen lighting of the lift, I was blinded by the wall of sheer plate glass behind the reception, letting in the quotidian sunlight almost unfiltered. Probably to highlight the already imposing effect of the reception and hallway; thus forcing a supplicant for investment funds to drop his gaze in blinded reverence.

Anyway, Alecto addressed abruptly (alliteration is like binging on burgers; "going down, it's good, coming back up, it's not so good.") "What can I do for you, sir?"

After undergoing the whole presenting of credentials ritual: "Ah yes, Mr XXX is exPECTing you. (heavy emphasis on the middle syllable - a rather bizarre MittelEuropean accent I couldn't place) Would you laaahk a moment to freshen yourself up? (Less than subtle hint that my hair was a tad dishevelled by all the hand rubbing through it in the wake of losing cheque)."

The toilet was one of the more grandiose, six-star hotel marble, mahogany and glazed porcelain affairs with complicated faucets and eerily ostentatious IR sensors blinking rapidly over every urinal.

Was guided to another bank of lifts, and this time transported up to an ergonomically well-designed workspace, without the ostentation of the facade downstairs. Unfortunately, I only passed one set of glass security doors, and was immediately steered to a very compact meeting room. It would have been interesting to see what cubicles at a first tier investment banking outfit were like. A wireless hub was positioned in the middle of the desk; somehow I had a feeling this wasn't a company that scrimped on issuing wireless LAN adapters to every single staff member. Not to mention a superb view of the Golden Shoe skyline.

There was a whiteboard on a wall. Most whiteboards have a little metal shelf for the markers. These whiteboards (at least this specimen) have these strangely carved wooden, curling shelf thing, like an embouchure sucking on the edge of a metal sheet.

Was greeted by the Vice-President for Human Resources; an impressive title at first, until I later learned that the corporate career structure is Associate -> Junior Vice President -> Senior Vice President.

She was this rather cute chick, in a highly articulate yet vacant manner. The kind who uses the same breathy tone to enthuse about stuffed toys and/or the power of Kafka's prose to capture the poisoned, modern human condition. (I would be treated to both, over the conversational span that followed.)

Now, in order to crush all suspense, the ultimate outcome of this interview was made clear when I learned this fact after 20 minutes - 1 position, approx. 500 applicants.

Having made clear the futility of the situation, I shall now proceed.

Basically the first 45 minutes was the real serious stuff; describing my resume, qualifications, job experience, working life, a few practiced opportunities where I artfully slipped in some of the pre-memorised crap one vomits out at interviews, "yes, I'm highly fasincated by REITs, and I'm aware that you're is a very active player in the American mezzanine debt market..." "oh, I'd be perfectly willing to work in any capacity that you see fit because I believe that an organization like yours will provide excellent opportunities to learn and build my career on..." "oh and i'd lick your cunt too, repeatedly, if you'd hire me. That includes your harpy of a receptionist as well."

Anyway, the remaining two hours of our time together was spent making lots of bloody small talk. I suppose it's an effective interviewing tactic; in order to know more about a person, you lower their defenses, engage them in conversation, get afeel for their personality. Still, it was made very clear to me early on that my chances were effectively snowball + Hell, Gabriel + tact, irc + grammar, GEPpers + intelligence, me + sanity kind of odds. Was consequently not very eager to stick around and prolong the agony of having to be neat, presentable, well-heeled, and maintaining rigid control over a variety of bodily fluids and sounds.

However, the verdammt perky HR chick went ON and ON about a variety of topics too picayune to describe here. Some highlights however:

"Oh I'm really passionate about Australian universities! I used to cover Australian universities for the Min. of Manpower! And I think they really produce great education at an affordable cost for Asian students!"

"I like modernist stuff like T.S Eliot, that sort of thing!"

"I was from NUS Arts! Eng. Lit and Soci!"

"Oh, there's always some tension at work, but we're a great crew and everyone's really nice!"

(and my personal favourite)

"I really really really (yes, she said 'really' 3 times) hate it when people think we're a snooty employer! It's like, I get really annoyed when people come up to me and say, "oh, we probably won't get hired because we're not from Ivy League or Oxbridge". That's not true! Often employers like to look for so-called second-tier university students because they haven't go much ego issues and have less inflated expectations! (an element of truth here, I must admit) We even have senior VPs from not-so-prestigious universities like Macquarie! Everyone has a chance!"

(Note: the senior VP from Macquarie University, whom I've met before, had about 15 years work experience before joining)

I'm torn between wondering if she's that fucking na�ve, or if she thinks I'm that fucking stupid. Either way, at that point in time, it took great zanshin to be able to hold back my insane, octave-climbing peals of laughter. If nothing else, the rabid flecks of saliva spewing from my convulsing, hysterical lips would have caused her mascara to run.

I might add that I've seen some of their people in action, and if I recall, the least qualified fresh graduate on the team was a Masters holder from Princeton. Structural engineering. AND I've had some rather amusing encounters with their scholars before. ("Oh, we just heard there was a party with lots of scholars. Who's the birthday girl ah?" Really. I kid you not.)

After this farce, I languished around outside the building by some fountains, idly lazing and people-watching, frenziedly trying to finish my cigarettes. At this juncture, I had nowhere to go, at least until the lat evening. As I lay nearly supine on a branch, watching the trail of ashes, tie off and shirt rumpled, it occurred to me, really, that there are moments like this worth fighting for. Moments where the bleak, cryptic emptiness of life and boredom become so intimately familiar that it's almost exactly like a moment of perfect peace.

I threw some keropok to a few pigeons I saw alight in front of me, but none of them took the bait.

Eventually, I bestirred myself to take a cab back to my friend's place. This was inspired by my fifteenth phone call to Comfort only to be told: "Noone'sreportedinanything yete'reverysorrythankyouforcallingoodbye" - and a fervent hope that Singaporean rubbish collectors weren't as efficient as they were supposed to be.

Back at the Serangoon Gardens roundabout, I scoured the pavements more out of desperation that with any real hope for success. However as they say, it is darkest just before the dawn - for lying in a gutter just next to where I had a caught a cab that morning... I found it! - the envelope in which the cheque was contained! Joy!

This joy quickly turned to horror when I realised it was half submerged in filthy rainwater, and I quickly fished it out and delicately peeled off the rotting, water-ravaged envelope. It was an "Oh Lord; if there is a Lord - save my soul; if I have a soul to save."-moment.

As I hoped, the envelope had provided SOME protection - most of the cheque was still relatively dry and undamaged, apart from looking a little crumpled. BUT right along the MICR (the little row of computer-printed numbers at the bottom that identify the bank, branch and account number) a tiny chunk of paper had been macerated away - with about two digits of the account number. ARGH. Still, at least I had *something* to work with, and could avoid having to lie about how I got robbed and sodomised by Bangala construction workers with a bill-of-exchange fetish.

I stumped off dejectedly back to friend's house, hung up cheque to dry on some clothes pegs, and tried to read some trashy Anne Rice novel to take mind off things. When friend came home, he gazed at the cheque hanging off a jury-rigged clothesline strung from the cupboard to the desk, and deigned to comment.

At 9pm, I grabbed my sling bag, and headed out to my next saprophytic haven; another poor bastard who wasn't working on Saturday. Thanking my current host and his parents profusely, I made my way over to One Fullerton where I was supposed to meet up for drinks at Embargo. Obviously, my next victim was late, as my associates always are (should start imposing punctuality requirements when making new friends, grumble grumble), and I spent some time sitting quietly reading on the steps just outside Centro. I received a few quizzical looks from the assorted party butterflies, lians, and yuppies - clearly literacy was not a prized quality in that social context.

Noted that the new Arts Center at the Esplanade did not resemble a durian as it did a.. jackfruit.

Friend showed up, finally, sporting, much to my amusement, a tattoo on right arm. Once again, my familiars fall prey to moral turpitude. Am I doomed to be the last bastion of moral righteousness in a sea of iniquity? Maybe I should consider entering the clergy. Although it was quite a nice motif; a stylized black sun with appropriately elaborate corona.

We sat around, talking. Ah, talk. Sometimes I swear I would rather die than lose the opportunity for conversation. "I like talking. But I hate socialising." Chitterchatter, chitterchatter - the garbage rattling out of my mouth; or the weirdnesses I let filter into my head - anything's better than sitting listening to silences echo inside my own skull. Made some barbed comments about how bitchy all female lawyers look (a group of young corporate lawyers were at the next table).

"I swear, sometimes I think Lee and Lee imports these bitches by the cartload straight from NUS Law."

The last thing I remember that night was a rather expensive cocktail called Frustration. It was similar to a Flaming Lamborghini; the bartender ignites a shot glass of Baccardi 151 (76.5% alcohol! I've seen websites suggesting it as a bathtub cleaner.) and drops it into a huge glass comprising of "every liquor on the shelf plus a shot of Stella Artois." A pity, because we were having the usual flimflammery of good chatter up til then, and usual bitchy observations of the people and world around us, before everything became a gray haze.

As to what happened next - well. I'll get onto Saturday's long and convoluted rant soon enough.

Word of the day: "stylite"

Last weekend was spent the way the special occasion was supposed to be spent - primarily alone, consuming my neurons in an igneous ardour of writing, reading, and computer-game-playing. Finally completed Mechwarrior: Mercenaries; what is it about 100-tonne walking tanks that so stimulates the male imagination?:) Was actually inspired enough to dig up old Battletech sourcebooks and whip through a few hours of the original PC game Crescent Hawks' Inception - ah. I remember when, in primary school, before Ral Partha took over the model franchise and FASA becamse another Microsoft whore, there was only one guy in my class who actually had Battletech figurines. It was incredibly fun moving those classic mechs: Commando, Locust, Chameleon, Phoenix Hawk - through their paces. Nowadays everyone knows what a Mad Cat is, but who remembers the good old Catapult? In any case - yeah. DFA!

Christ almighty, more example of human degeneracy.

*raves* No matter how much sick, whack, twisted, shit there is out there, no matter how many times I tell myself that nothing on the Net fazes me anymore, not the scheisse videos, the refluxophiliacs, the Satanic pedophilia, the incest stories, tentacle-fucking anime, but THIS -!

Someday I will re-post the link to the Smurf porn websites, and, if I can find it again, Enid Blyton gay fanfiction. The latter is not for the faint of heart, because it involves multiple-partners (most of Toyland), inter-racial (golliwog + everyone else), and prosthetics (Noddy is *wooden* for good reason..).

Books read this weekend

Mao Zedong's little treatise on guerilla warfare written during the Yenan period. (an odd buy I had forgotten all about in Australia and excavated only a month ago). Translated by Edgar Snow, of course - for that appropriately sycopanthic effect.
Stephen King - Different Seasons (purely for trashy uplift)
Scott Adams - God's Debris (for some reason it was listed in Borders under "metaphysical studies")
Elizabeth Wurtzel - Prozac Nation (believe it or not, never read cover-to-cover prior to this date)
JS MiIl - On Liberty (again, first time cover-to-cover, as opposed to cribbing notes and passages for essay/hao lian purposes)

*studies the above list* Hm. Trashy, light reads, mostly. These days I have very little appetite for embarrassingly difficult books - which is why even, to my horror, I find myself shying away from a new Umberto Eco or even the temptation to finish up Crying of Lot 49. It's easier to read the likes of Nick Hornby or Don DeLillo or Zadie Smith - it's the way they feed you pop profundity in pithy one-liners which can be uploaded for cerebral processing at whim.

Bipolar manifestation of quotes:

At 11:15am on Saturday, was simultaneously reading and exulting over Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption:

"I find I'm so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend, and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope"

Half an hour later, was reading:

"I had invented the monster and now it was overtaking me. This was what I'd come to. This was what I'd be for the rest of my life. Things were bad now and would get worse later. They would. I had not heard the word depression yet, and would not for some time after that, but I felt something very wrong going on. I felt that I was wrong - my hair was wrong, my face was wrong, my personality was wrong - my God, my choice of flavors at the Haagan Dazs shop after school was wrong! How could I walk around with such pasty white skin, such dark, doleful eyes, such straight anemic hair, such round hips and such a small clinched waist? How could I let anybody see me this way? How could I expose other people to my person, to this bane to the world? I was one big mistake.

I did not, you see, want to kill myself. Not at that time, anyway. But I wanted to know that if need be, if the desperation got so terribly bad, I could inflict harm on my body. And I could. Knowing this gave me a sense of peace and power, so I started cutting up my legs all the time. Hiding the scars from my mother became a sport of its own. I collected razor blades, I bought a Swiss Army knife, I became fascinated with different kinds of sharp edges and the different cutting sensations they produced. I tried out different shapes - squares, triangles, pentagons, even an awkwardly carved heart, with a stab wound at its center, wanting to see if it hurt the way a real broken heart could hurt. I was amazed and pleased to find that it didn't."

Right.

Had another horrible lunch/encounter with paterfamilias. But parental whinging is one of the most common - and banally - archetypical content of blogs. But so is giving away vague hints and then refusing to go into further detail out of some coy discretion! Argh! A Hobson's Choice of bad taste in blogging!

Aunts on the distaff side gave me a bottle of cheap vodka as a birthday present, along with a hipflask of some really weird 60%-alc. content Chinese liquor. (Note: My primary drinking partners here in Malaysia are my maternal aunts and uncles; there's some primogenital context which would be too sian to relate.) Took a couple of my cousins from up north for a little libation - although in hindsight pouring that much vodka into a 13 year old may not have been the wisest course of action. Washed down these spirits with a good deal of Ribena, and had a generally merry time, for a change (as opposed to the usual fits of melancholic stupor my friends accuse me of falling into when drinking). Much exchange of personal ribaldries.

Sunday continued the gameplaying binge - am halfway through Mafia; completed Medieval: Total War; and finished off Europa Universalis 2 and aforementioned MW: Mercenaries. Ah, the joys of unrestrained gaming, sans food, sans the usual depressive fits, sans contact with the outside world... I really must devote less time to the Internet, and more time to single-player gaming affairs. The computer; the books - now those are faithful friends. They talk to you when you need them. They fill the mind with pretty images and concepts and ideas that dance in your head and set your mind aflame with imagination. And they can be put away, but never too far; so when one lies in bed, one can be transported, as if by anagoge, to a world, a piece of Utopia inside your frontal lobe where no one and nothing outside can touch you....

If only the computer at work had a better graphics card... and a soundcard, for that matter.

Mafia's soundtrack consists mainly of Django Reinhardt's swingy piano jazz pieces! Freaking cool!

Other than that, it's a great game - although the superficial comparisons to Grand Theft Auto 3 will no doubt be made; the only thing both games really have in common is that you drive through a 3d city in pursuit of criminal objectives and can steal cars. In terms of gameplay, linearity, even atmosphere, they're worlds apart. But I have to confess, there is something.. oddly appealing, for a while, in jacking a Cadillac V16.. oops, I meant a Lassiter V16 (in a fit of licensing paranoia, the cars are all genuine 30s models, but the names have been changed) The Bugatti / Carozella is particularly striking, and the cars all have lovely reflective surfaces. Somehow though, I need a rocket launcher or a chaingun; the tommy gun doesn't quite cut it. And the storyline, despite being a straight lift of every Scorsese or Coppola movie ever made, still shines through
because gangster rise-and-fall type storylines are immortal:)

In comparision with Need For Speed, though, the physics engine does mean that racing two Ford Model Ts doesn't have the.. visceral kick.. of racing two Diablos.

After watching Road to Perdition, the country drive bits in a Chevrolet Six really hit home though:)

Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries left me oddly unsatisfied; although it's a good tie-in with the conclusion of the FedComm Civil War as chronicled in the various Twilight of the Clans and Mechwarrior novels which affocionados of the Battletech Universe will have been following for the last.. six or seven years now. (Final novel - Endgame - chronicling the Pyrrhic victory of Hans Steiner-Davion was released just in August). MW4: Mercs has three endings that all tie in very elegantly to various events of the above novel; although I have to admit that these tie-ins are a bit 'insider' - either you get their relevance and nod, or you won't.

But when your lance of Atlases and Templars are blowing apart a few enemy Daishis, who cares??? ER-PPC effects rule! But somehow.. there's a lot of wasted potential - the graphics engine has been updated but slightly and is showing its age; the missions aren't really that original or inspiring; the storyline doesn't have the very tight, focused premise that Mechwarrior 3 did (along with the brilliant idea of having briefings WHILE the map was loading), and , the perennial bane of Mechwarrior - the assault/heavy mechs will wipe out anything in their path (although they did at least fix the horrible "laser snipe leg" issue with MW3)

What someone once quoted to me: "Come in, and try not to ruin everything by being you."

From the same source:

"OK, we all have these terrible stories to get over, but.."
"It's not true. Some have great stories, pretty stories that take place at lakes with boats and friends and noodle salad. Just no one in this car. But, a lot of people, that's their story. Good times, noodle salad. What makes it so hard is not that you had it bad... but that you're that pissed that so many others had it good."

Movies watched:

8 Mile - Hm. I'm an Eminem fan, for all the wrong reasons; because his pithy, commodified, marketable, paradoxically anti-social and raw and anti-pop and yet utterly mainstream at the same time - this kind of celebrity bigotry is fun to indulge in, particularly when it masquerades behind the cover of irony. "yeah, it's all a joke, we all get it, elton john hugged slim shady at the grammys". But in the movie, the nearly incomprehensible battle rap sequences speak a lot about a way of life, a way of thinking and of directing working-class anger that is the true root of the gangsta school and mindset. The glamorous money-hos-and-bitchas homeboy attitudes we see from the big success stories like 2Pac and Snoop Doggy only make reference to these roots; while coasting on platinum-sales figures from the kinds of teenyboppers and middle-class adolescents they're supposed to be gunning down in drive-bys.

Nonetheless, if you watch 8 Mile, you should watch it purely because in it, Eminem doesn't really have to act - he just has to be himself, with his pissed off smouldering glare and his abusive boozehound mother and all.. and because Detroit seriously resembles Hell on Earth in this movie.

Double Vision - hallucinogens, Dadaist grotesqueries, Tony Leung, and David Morse, the latter clearly slumming it. The double-iris effect is pretty damned eerie though.

Harry Potter part deux - Erm. As always, the book was better. (and that's not saying much.) I must confess, it's certainly getting grimmer - not entirely convinced that children should be treated to scene with a ghost who, as an abused girl sought refuge in a toilet, was slain by supernatural forces, and was condemned to an eternity as a spirit infesting septic tanks and toilet plumbing. Not to mention the line: "I was sitting on the toilet as usual, thinking about death." (sic)

However, the books are progressively getting darker, and so the movies should. I believe as of Harry Potter IV, he had lost a finger in ritualistic sacrifice, become an unwilling participant in the resurrection of demonic forces, *and* is developing into adolescence. Horror of horrors.

Didn't have time to watch Knockaround Guys. Pity.

Raging Bull - Considered by many critics to be one of the greatest films of the 80s; and most De Niro affocionados rank this with Taxi Driver as his greatest performances. Now, I can't really describe this show - but I can tell you that, as a male, the sheer.. psychological insecurity and fragility that manifests in explosive, shocking violence is nothing new, as a plotline. But in the context of the Italian ghetto in New York; in the context of a twisted relationship with a Lolita-like figure whom De Niro feels too abused to deserve and yet unable to love except in the most brutal of ways.... ah well. Enough pompous movie-critic talk. Go watch it. Go watch how De Niro lost 20 pounds in sheer method acting and reportedly went boxing in Bronx rooms to prepare for the role. (The real-life character on which this movie is based, who actually trained De Niro personally, has stated that De Niro was one of the best middleweight boxers he'd ever known).

Must.. finish.. Morrowind! And now with Tribunal installed.. the gaming... power.. overwhelming!

Sigh. On one hand, there's responsibility, and on the other, there's obligation. Nevermind. Shall continue fixated pursuit and working my ass off in order to secure a decent passive income in 5 years' time. (passive = no work.) Impossible? Certum est quia impossibile est. Besides, as Pascal would have it, what have I to lose?

Or, in the words of Adam Young - "Come and see."

Gabriel:

a) Like most things in Malaysia; there are halal segregations. Obviously the luncheon meat served at a rest stop would not be halal, but the curry chicken would be. And just what is it with you and the whole halal issue anyway?

b) Backpackers taking the bus.

c) I said I didn't smuggle pirated stuff in for *other people*. I do so for my own purposes. (In this case, the reason was ridiculously contrived - I had bought the CDs the afternoon at work; and didn't want to leave them in the office over the weekend, so I had to bring them to Singapore and back.

d) I agree with you that it's ridiculous that a half-glimpsed auroelae of some celebrity on an FHM cover is legal, while the fully revealed thing isn't. But as a matter of note, a scantily-clad person is often more sexually titillating than the ecdysiastic full monty.

e) I use a very few freeware applications, like IrfanView and Properties Plus, but generally, I'm not an open source proponent per se. I understand some of their intellectual arguments, and rational advantages, but the ratio ultima regum is this - most games are written for Windows. I'm not going to wait until Freelancer for Linux gets released.

f) The only reason the bloody 3d graphics in AOM look "good" is because 2d sprites that size are so bloody small and blurry anyway (even on higher resolutions) that who the hell can tell the difference? Not like we're talking Chaos Gate or Fallout sprites here (the latter having some of the best sprite death animations - blow the head off a Super Mutant and you'll see..)

g) I maintain my theory that Satan's Pariahs Beasts Terrorists is a secret code for something more ominous. A means of communication between conspiracies? Stranger things have happened.

h) What were you expecting? Love?

i) Maybe people are just tired of reading the rants. Much better that way, don't you think? More comfortable to know that no one is reading and/or absorbing what you say - you can be less restrained in your blogging. No longer an audience to pander to.

Onto interrupted chronological rant from last week. Organization? PAH!

Friday

Woke up the next morning, surrounded by usual feeling of disorientation. It was 11:30am; my scheduled interview was at 2:30 in Capital Tower on Robinson Road (the receptionist's helpful words were: "Just tell the taxi driver to look for the revolving balls opposite the CPF building.."). After some prolonged internal agonizing, I prevailed upon my friend's maid to borrow an iron - the aforementioned sling bag had proven to be of no use in preserving the shirt from the ravages of rumpling. My host and friend had gone out to camp much earlier in the morning; one of the very few people I know actually comfortable enough to let someone stay in their house after they and their parents have gone out for the day.

Did some hasty print-out of the actual address, floor, and person-designate-to-meet from hotmail (ah, the few brief moments of joy at being on broadband again). My friend's computer is on the seriously creaky, over-used, underoptimised precipice - the system tray contains enough programs to occupy two-thirds the width of the monitor. A quick visit to Run -> MSCONFIG increased start-up times by at least 350%. Geekdom has its benefits!

Also spent an hour or so doing last minute research. Now, I'm not entirely sure just how much value being able to spew relevant bullshit about an organization at an interview is. However, I've been assured by people in the know that many top-tier investment banking firms look favourably on candidates who take the time to thoroughly spew statistics and make favourable commentary of their latest mega-deals. So I did the same thing - after all, I figured the competition would be heavy, and every little edge helps.

Plan was to take a cab to Raffles Place, bank in a cheque for my mother at approx 1:45pm (fast cheque deposit - no queuing), then head on down for my interview. Usually, my trips to Singapore are punctuated with errands for my family. Headed out of the house, with sling bag (after all, at the time, I had no idea where to stay that night, as per standard modus operandi)

When I reached the Raffles Place area, I was caught by the instant smell of yuppiedom. The women in their Chanel, power suits, decent hemlines, and high but not stiletto heels. The styles range from the homely-receptionist, to the executive-bitch-from-hell, to the (horribly common) "I'm not quite over adolescence yet but I have to make some genuflection towards workplace etiquette"(characterised by shoulder-revealing, slightly more garish type of clothing, and either pants a shade too tight or skirts a tad too high. Occasionally an Ally Macbeal-esque scarf/ribbon around the neck. Multiple ear-piercings. That sort of thing.) The men were dressed the far more uniformly boring shirts and ties; with a few polo shirts scattered amidst the population. Some guys did display remarkable boldness of character; I spotted more than one Looney Tunes tie.

Basking amidst the flux of middle-class professionaldom, I suddenly had a horrible realisation that there was an vacuum in my pocket where the envelope containing parents' cheque should've been. After confirming irrevocably that, once again, I was a walking waste of oxygen, I sat down in a dull, vacant haze in front of OCBC for about 20 minutes smoking restlessly and watching people pass by with their happy, happy lives. Fortunately, someone I was talking to on the phone suggested the rational solution - "don't freak out, call Comfort Taxi Lost & Found to see if you dropped it in the cab, and if that fails, go back to the place you took the cab from."

Sweet pragmatism! If only I was capable of summoning it more often in extremis. Comfort Taxi L&F reassured me that they would get back to me after assigning me a report number.

Mustered sufficient coherence to proceed to interview. The building was a gargantuan edifice to the free flow of global capital; I was struck by how much the interior matched precisely how I always imagined Howard Roark's designs to be like. It's all the brutal, neoliberal economic certainty; the imposing, faux-Gothic sweep of rigid, efficient, corporate aesthetic. "Socialist realism", I think it's called. And there's a lot of the kind of marble/granite/bronze corporate art that's just waiting for a Tyler Durden to smash over.

A Canadian is drinking in a New York bar when he gets a call on his cell phone. He hangs up, grinning from ear to ear, and orders a round of drinks for everybody in the bar because, he announces, his wife has just produced a typical Canadian baby boy weighing 25 ounds.

Nobody can believe that any new baby can weigh in at 25 pounds, but the Canuck just shrugs, "That's about average up North, folks... Like I said, my boy's a typical Canadian baby boy."

Congratulations showered him from all around, and many exclamations of "WOW!" were heard. One woman actually fainted due to sympathy pains.

Two weeks later the Canadian returns to the bar. The bartender says, "Say, you're the father of that typical Canadian baby that weighed 25 pounds at birth, aren't you? Everybody's been making bets about how big he'd be in two weeks. We were gonna call you.... So how much does he weigh now?"

The proud father answers, "Seventeen pounds." The bartender is puzzled, and concerned. "What happened? He already weighed 25 pounds the day he was born."

The Canadian father takes a slow swig from his Molson beer, wipes his lips on his shirt sleeves leans into the bartender and proudly says, "Had the little guy circumcised."

This looks promising:

Bayesian Mathematical Analysis in Spam Prevention

Mozilla has this on the 1.3 branch ;)

LOL

"I have this odd habit to click on recently updated blogs to invade other people's private lives. And it's unbelievably easy to pick out a singaporean's blog because the blog titles are unbelievably lame. If you see a lame title it's either a Singaporean blog or a really bimbotic ditzy american teenage girl's one. The same applies for imood's email address. You come out with stuff like "a new beginning" or "starlite starbrite" or "friends r 4eva" or "wish upon a star" and if you see anything "z" replacing "s" it's also a singaporean's blog. Blogspotting! "

Hehe.

Something Fall-From-Grace... oops, that nick fell out of favour a long time ago ; dysgrace might conceivably be amused by:

NotWriting.com: Stuff one writer does when he should be writing

Went out with 3 BMT section mates. Ken wants to downgrade for moderate/gross obesity too :)

We watched Returner [NB: No IMDB information available at the present].

For once, the "teen" was a real teen, at 15 years of age. Not like all those faux schoolgirls. The guy was also one of those typical long haired, stubbly ones :)

The typically Japanese elements - the humour, the twists, ironies and paradoxes - were there, of course, this being a Japanese movie, but they weren't so strong as to be irritating. The audience enjoyed them, though, with people laughing uproariously at parts and some clapping at some of the more exceptional scenes.

I'm still wondering how a teen girl with a gunshot wound at her shoulder could run about and carry bundles in swaddling and what not with such deft grace, why an alien race would start a war ending with the annihilation of the human race for just one of their kind. And why we're still using Harriers in 2084 :)

I went out to check out the trailer. Not very impressive, but that might've been because I didn't understand the Japanese.


Wilfred the Waiter, Junxian the now big-built, Zhongyong and Yaoxian the Pioneer Photographer were watching the show too. En Leung was with them before the show, with a very shaggy mane. He actually sold his soul to the Air Force. I'm ashamed, really.

After the show, I tagged along with the first 4, and Tay Weeyang who appeared on Level 1 (and who's finally returned me the money I lent him for SAT I!) as they walked here and there.

Walking along the path outside Cineleisure, I offered Dennis the 42 Driver a perfunctory greeting. What a small world it is. But then he probably came from helping his mother at her pastry shop, so.

Weiyang is E1L3 (temporary) now. And he housekeeps the I-net room for Reservists in Maju (which is near his house), and doesn't do any form of Maju. Oh, and he's stay out too. GAH.

I followed them all the way to Mambo Billiard in Lucky Plaza. It's the first time I've actually been in a joint such as that, really, but after observing people whacking balls, I still think it's a poser game :) There was another bevy of people in there - Waiyi taking pictures of people playing pool with a digital camera (How come she always goes out with the ex-4K guys? Seems like she's the only non ex-4K-er who tags along so regularly), Ben Kang, Ivan, Eugene Huang, Qiying fingering Magic cards, Zhiming and a few others. I couldn't recognise 2 of them. I'm quite ashamed really, but I put it down to the haircuts - sparse hair does make one look different.

The joint supposedly doesn't allow people in shorts and/or slippers to enter, but a good fourth at least of the patrons had bare legs.

After that a few of us holed up along the corridor leading to Long John Silvers and drank from the bottomless cup of mystery drink mixed by Wilfred from the KFC/Taco Bell/Pizza Hut outlet and pondered riddles about weighing Gnomes :)


LOL - Revolution

"During the first third of the game, you play as a janitor employed by a futuristic megacorporation... it's an opportunity for you to spend four or five hours in what amounts to a miserably accurate simulation of actually having a boring job...

This may or may not be a major plot spoiler, but your megacorporation employer is actually up to no good. In fact, you'll know it long before your character does. One clue is that the corporation's logo appears to be a big, evil-looking winged skull. The covertly sinister corporation has also plastered the entire city with totalitarian propaganda, such as threatening billboards that simply read, "Power and Control." In keeping with the game's theme of not making much sense, the corporation has also stamped lots of things with the nonsensical slogan, "We Are the Sun of Your New Life." It's only vaguely threatening, but it is printed in a scary authoritarian font. And in a shocking turn of events, the corporation is called "The Corporation," and it's being opposed by a resistance movement that calls itself, of all things, "the resistance."...

Instead of any interesting intelligence, enemies display an ability to strafe from side to side at an inhumanly fast speed. Your own movement isn't any more realistic--you glide across every surface as if it were covered in oil... The people doing the talking are obviously native speakers of English, yet they apparently read the broken English lines they were given without attempting to fix them. Could it be that the voice-acting industry is so draconian that you immediately get fired if you make any suggestions about your lines? That might be a good setting for the sequel to Revolution.

We won't spoil Revolution's ending for you. Not because we wouldn't like to, but because after playing the final level three times, we're still not clear on what happened. Revolution's story problems, generic visuals, and tedious single-player game may not matter, though, because you can play deathmatch, team deathmatch, or capture the flag over the Internet--at least theoretically. A few weeks after its release, there isn't even one server running Revolution."


"As a rule of thumb, the more qualifiers there are before the name of a country, the more corrupt the rulers. A country called The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably the last place in the world you'd want to live." - HAHA

It seems few are leaving comments nowadays. Maybe it's my YACCS box's submit button's text :)

Bah.

It's not very nice having a cherished illusion, held for almost 2 and a half years, shattered.

20 months. A lie.

No matter, I have Blue Bear.

Meanwhile, I'm awaiting my calming cup of herbal tea.

Happened to strike up a conversation with someone over WinMX, who wanted my "Bounty Hunter's Pursuit".

His theory on why Japanese have big eyes in Anime:

"they have big eyes to signify themselfs and small eyes for americans. they truely think americans are beutiful while they are ugly that is why they have the eye thing

yep that is what i read from one of the most famous anime creators he wrote that the eye thing was what he learned in school for art so he just kept doing it like he learned"

Work of a true blue looney bin:

Satan's Beasts Terrorists Of Singapore Since 1995......

"Apart from all other weapons used, I call this as �beasts voodoo weapon� like the voodoo doll. With it these Satan�s pariahs beasts terrorists are hitting people at any part of the body while they can be at any position. Even at the sole of the foot! While a person is sitting pinning the bum! Piercing the eyes! There are thousands of unheard torture!
When that happens how is one going to explain that it is the work of the Satan�s pariahs.

Done by both Satan�s pariahs males and females beasts terrorists of Singapore on both females and males. (inserted on 5 Nov) From their �muscle men� and �blood suckers� teams also, learnt that from their transmission! (end of insertion)

Inserted on 25 Oct 2002.
Satan�s pariahs beasts terrorists knew and will know what is going to take place in Singapore and the rest of the world and than acts according to their objectives and benefit for years.
Well how the people of the world feel about this!!
Now aren�t these Satan�s pariahs beasts terrorists more than deadly, as the name I call them by!!
All details will be covered in my book/e-book!!
(end of insertion)

They are all Singaporean Tamils and some Indians from
Ministry of Home Affairs and maybe other Ministries of Singapore
only those who are involved)! There is more info as you read on.

Inserted on 9th Sept 2002
Satan�s pariahs beasts terrorists � on 8 Sept 2002 � while I was facing the computer in my room for minutes marked my white t-shirt at where the heart is with a red leaser or whatever as a dot � these beasts were likely at Blk 215 (and /or the two beside blocks including surrounding blocks - you will find my address at, �Overview�) � will not be surprised they were also at Blk 218 the block I stay at and which is opposite � all these beasts are involved in all the activities. They are around everyday or take turns to be at several blocks or the surrounding. You will also find them around wherever I go!
Which department or departments of the Ministry of Home Affairs (and / or Ministries) have this weapon? (end of insertion).

I have also e-mailed informing of the now deactivated (on 26th August 2002) web site to PM Goh Chok Tong (goh_chok_tong@pmo.gov.sg) requesting him to take action, c.c. to Chief of Defense LG Lim Chuan Poh (lim_chuan_poh@mindef.gov.sg & mfu@starnet.gov.sg) and Commissioner of Police Khoo Boon Hui (khoo_boon_hui@spf.gov.sg) of Singapore. This was sent at August or earlier, 2002. Obviously looks like they did not receive it! What would have happened?

Inserted on 24 May 2002.
In the local newspaper, Straits Times (Singapore) at the late 1990�s (exact date can be easily be checked) had an article about what the officers or operatives of an intelligence department of a country were doing. If in doubt please check with the Straits Times. Please do.
Up and down a busy boulevard (at their country) the said personnel were spraying water into the ears of innocent people from water spray containers. Later the water was to be substituted with liquid poison.

"Satan's pariahs (Tamils and a few Indians from Ministry of Home Affairs and maybe other Ministries; only those involved) beasts terrorists (created by Satan) if you have the guts (since you been operating from 1995 -inserted on 26 April 2002) send a Letter Declaring War on Singapore and other countries (including USA) also stating that you want me in the front line (I look forward) to the Prime Minister!" - Ron Doray

I have a pair of silver kris. Each one and half feet long. The handles are hand carved. They are mounted and covered by thin glass. Chances are you may have never seen this before.
A majestic sight.
I got them in the 1980's. Now putting it up for the next owner.
View to offer.
Or if anyone likes an arrangement for me to buy back at an accepted price is also fine with me.
If You Like To Sponsor This Site. - This is 'outdated'. Inserted on 12 Nov 2002. Please go to 'Line Of Action' at Overview!
Just sent One Dollar to this address:
Blk 218 Lorong 8 Toa Payoh #13-625 Singapore 310218
With a self addressed envelope for a receipt.
Thank you for sponsoring this site in advance. Ron.
Again there is nothing to be afraid of if one abides by the Law.

With the prevailing condition since late last year good looking females are propelling this awareness. There numbers are slowly growing too. From all walks and apperances.
They have taken some blows as well from it.
Just that we have not communicated yet. Will soon.
You guys got to see the singles! Got to see the guys girlfriends and wives also. One can only say, can't be better!
Most times I have difficulty differentiating!"

Though among other parts, this makes me think it might be a parody:

"One thing it has done which has become a blessing in disguise is it cut off my past so called friends.
Well the truth I am happier with all the people that I am mentioning though we have yet to chat!
Another thing is since I am broke I am unable to be in the food center or go else where.
You folks got to see what happens when I am at the usual food center."

N-man:

Can I interest you in a Planescape: Torment Ringtone? I hacked one out on Jurong Island but it sucked, so in desperation I imported the MIDI and modified it a little.

http://gah.web1000.com/ringtone.htm


Ooo. Age of Mythology review.

"Remember how we said that returning Age of Kings players might do a double-take because of the graphics? That�s because the 3D is so good, it looks 2D. Nono� that�s not a bad thing, this is a Good Thing�. When 3D graphics get so smooth, detailed and realistic they look as impressive in screenshots as 2D � that�s saying something. Normally it�s just too easy to tell where the polygons are, how flat the lighting is and how poorly the textures on various body parts interact with each other. AOM�s 3D graphics have all the fluidity and motion of 3D, but they look as detailed as 2D units in screenshots."

One of my main gripes against 3D games addressed!


12:06AM

I feel like giggling now.

Hee hee hee. Hee hee hee. Hee hee hee hee.

Okay now I need to find something to do this weekend.

*bleep*


I talked to someone who sounds like Yaoi Girl. For some reason, she thought that comment uncomplimentary (and that without knowing what Yaoi was).


Quotes:

You got downgraded ah? [Me: How come you know? How come the whole unit knows?] You so cute what.


Finally visited the Esplanade today with Screwed Up Girl as a tour guide.

Nothing of note - except that there was this girl with a fractured pelvis - she kept jerking her hips as she walked.

Momentary boredom.

A rather perverse indictment of bureaucracy follows. Just now, the New Guy, was putting out the paces on his freshly installed PC (a temporary workaround using an old piece of junk that had been resurrected from storage - we've all been promised new PCs when we move to our new office 8 floors down. Right.). He then received a zip file of some documents in the mail. However, he had also just read the company's personal user IT policy, which prohibits the download of shareware or freeware. (!). Now, given that WinZip is technically shareware (albeit without timelock or feature crippling), he hesitated between the obvious solution and the bureaucratic one. A further admonition was delivered by our PC coordinator who mentioned that the IT department now regularly conducts network scans for unregistered shareware.

Finally, in frustration, he emailed the zip file to my home PC, I unzipped it using remote control software (at home, my only personal IT policy is that every piece of software I download is followed by a quick visit to http://astalavista.box.sk), and FTP'ed the unzipped files back into the system network.

Last few days have been a positive deluge of work. Not even the fascinating, interesting, "ooh-this-tickles-me-elmo-on-pot" kind of work, but more like "dry-cleaning-the-big-bird-costume-by-hand" kind of drudgery. Still, once again the forces of Sloth have performed a Cannae-like maneuver - today I sluiced off some of my more menial tasks to the New Guy in my office (ah, seniority has its perks). And thusly, dear reader, I am free to entertain/bore you with another collegial rant.

"Just as the collected letters of Proust fill dozens of volumes, Dressler has stuffed Honig's Outlook Express in-box with e-mails totaling thousands of pages and spanning years. The writings of each man are a winding psychological journey, weaving experiences from his everyday life with memories from the distant past...."Clearly there is a higher purpose to these discursive ruminations," Honig said. "In describing in great detail the new dog his next-door neighbor just got or by writing about how he was tired and just drank three cups of coffee from the vending machine down the hall, Eric is seeking to rescue these moments from the clutches of the past. Proust had the same obsession with the inexorable passage of time.""

Last weekend was yet another quick, manic flitter-by down south for an interview. In the absence of any inspiration to structure this entry more imaginatively, will fall-back on tried and tested chronological order.

Thursday

As usual, departed from work straight to the bus terminal at approx. 7:30pm, only this time was toting a sling bag instead of my usual utilitarian backpack. The sling bag was a result of my mother's excessively repeated exhortations to avoid rumpling the shirt and pants I had packed for my interview on Friday.

I've been taking the bus up and down the highway for years now, and I can never get over just how pilgrim-like it feels, at each terminal end. On the Malaysian side, in the Pudu Interchange, there is this constant flow of human fodder - circulating up and down the arteries of our nation's highways and by-ways. The interchange is old, grimy, and constantly punctuated by this odd, flinty smell of fuel oil, human waste, sweat and junk food. The semi-lit departure berths are filled with all kinds of people squatting restlessly, waiting for old, creaky buses to take them to places distant. There are merchants and stalls in almost every corner, peddling dried snacks, soft drinks, newspapers, and other assorted mamak wares. All of this always makes me feel like I'm in some kind of modern-day Samarkand; amidst caravanserai preparing for a distant sojourn. Too bad we're missing out on the camels, mercenary bodyguards, and bales of silk, but it's still the same, in many ways - people travelling up and down for trade, to visit families, to seek work, all the old, human reasons. And certainly the highways have their share of bandits (the local police, although, generally, buses don't get cozened for a bribe).

I suppose I'm lucky that I can find some touristy wonder in something that should be as prosaically familiar as a bus interchange.

There are pros and cons to taking an evening bus like this one. The obvious pro is that you can save an extra day by leaving right after work (as I did), it's generally easier to sleep in the night, and the highways are slightly less crowded. On the neg side, however, I can't read to kill time, and for some weird reason, they *never* show VCDs or other movies on evening/red-eye bus trips. (The express coaches usually have a TV embedded somewhere in the front to play pirated VCDs, for those unfamiliar with budget transport).

As usual, I spent about half my trip glued to the mobile phone, chatting. The other half was spent trying to sleep; difficult, given that I had taken a slightly crappier bus line this time round, one that I am normally leery of patronising given that their buses have terrible suspension. Unfortunately it was the only 7:30pm bus available at that time.

Being a veteran of the highway route, I am intimately familiar with the two rest-stops the buses pull in at along the way for toilet and meal breaks. The one I prefer is the brightly-lit monstrosity off the highway at Ayer Hitam. At least they serve something other than mixed rice; like hay mee or porridge. Mixed rice is a *trap* at these price-gouging hellholes - adding just one or two lumps of meat can effectively raise the cost of your meal by 50% (painful experience). The valuation of your conglomerate meal picked from various trays and dishes is performed by some professional aunty assayer who eyeballs your plate of rice, luncheon meat, assorted veg, and baked beans, and derives the final price from some exponentially weighted algorithm designed to rip you off. But after about 3 hours in a bus, one is in no position to complain about a little sustenance, however expensive.

And there's always this feeling of desolation, sitting in a rest stop, idly smoking over the remains of a meal, watching bus after bus disgorge their human cargo ad infinitum. People taking a few days off from their salaried serfdom in the city to visit their relations back in the villages and kampungs they left for a "better life". Students going back to their families for a few days. Supervisors travelling up to out-of-state factories. Auditors going to distant, out-station business sites. Hitchhikers on shoestring budgets. Salespeople, foremen, factory workers, students, housewives, travelers, all passing transitory. Sic transit gloria humanitas... What was that line from Miller? "Funny, y'know? After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive."

"He had the wrong dreams. All, all wrong."

Anyway, they always sell steamed peanuts and corn at these places; a necessary snack for the rest of the journey. While watching the parking lot crammed with tour buses, I have this vague impression that I'm in a scene, an episode on a television screen filmed in washed-out palettes, perhaps the X-Files, with its familiar, opening onscreen note at the bottom left corner in Courier font text going:


9:37 PM
AYER HITAM, STATE OF JOHOR
94 KM NORTH OF SINGAPORE

Anyway, the rest of the trip was just languish, watch trucks roll by, note disappointingly the absence of any chio hitchhikers on the bus this trip round, and finally arrive at the JB Causeway at approx. midnight (FYI, the buses down from KL almost always go through the first causeway, because about half the passengers on any trip disembark at JB. The few lines that go straight to Singapore via the Senai-Tuas 2nd Link cost far more, and pick up from weirdly located hotels.). As usual, there was a thrill of fear at Singaporean-side customs due to the six or seven pirated CDs stuffed down the side pockets of my cargo pants. And as usual, I was waved past with nary a glance; just another weary traveller; part of the steaming biomass being pumped back and forth to be processed by two different national economies; simultaneously a cog in a machine(as part of the financial economy), a victim to be exploited (as a consumer), and a resource to be squeezed (as a worker enriching an employer).

Snuck off at Woodlands - I wonder just how long the bus (which terminates its route at Golden Mile Complex) waited for me. Some drivers take the precaution of counting first just how many people are getting off at Woodlands and how many at Golden Mile. This bus driver didn't; and given that I invariably shove off at Woodlands itself, I wonder just how far they go when they take a headcount after customs and find a passenger missing... Probably they just shrug their shoulders and drive off.

Took a cab down to my assigned quarters for the night. As some of you may know, my mendicant trips down to Singapore are usually carried out in a nomadic, "so who wants to put me up tonight?" fashion - you poor sods. It was a little tricky finding a place on Thursday night, given that my peer group no longer thinks of November / December as holiday or exam time but, rather, as just another working month. However, one of my kinder associates at Serangoon Gardens took me in at 1:30am in the morning - despite having to go back to Tengah Base at 7:30am.

First time at this guy's house, and it's *old*. The floor tiles were of this style I haven't seen in years - which some of you might be familiar with. It's this smooth, granite composite, usually pale cream in colour, but embedded with conglomerate stones - so the mix looks like a bunch of rocks swimming in a beige pool. No ceramic finishing or glaze; just bare, cold rock beneah your feet. It's the kind you still see in those old apartments around the Joo Chiat Rd / East Coast Rd block. Apparently it's due for renovation soon (more bomb shelter issues), but my friend's the Spartan kind; his room comprises little more than a mattress on the floor, a few bookshelves, a drum set in one corner, and a PC. Walls devoid of decoration. A study desk with nothing but CDs, scattered stationery and stacks of academic notes. Disturbingly, all of his books are old textbooks.

Hadn't caught up with him for a while, but I could see he was in no mood to talk for long. So we just exchanged the usual convival cigarette outside the gates, and headed off to sleep with little further preamble. I pride myself on travelling light, but it's always disorienting to have to set up all manner of paraphernalia upon travel - hunting for a power point to plug in phone charger, arranging toothbrush and razor (the only toiletries I require) in an accessible location, folding up clothes and piling them neatly in unfamiliar cupboards or on unfamiliar surfaces, possibly surfing the net on an unfamiliar PC where even the arrangement of shortcuts unsettles you. It's the little things like finding your way through an unfamiliar bedroom in the dark, or how the contours of the bed (or, in some cases for me, chair, sofa, carpet, gorilla nest, or horizontal surface) one sleeps on isn't quite the same. Clearly I lack adaptability skills.

Okay. Shall continue later. Am busy organizing the few trinkets I have recieved from colleagues who just went travelling; a pair of carved chopsticks in an embroidered holder from Thailand, a pack of mini-sized playing cards from Xi'an (each card decorated with a depiction of a terracotta warrior or sculpture), and an odd little Japanese beanbag ninja, cunningly weighted so that it always lands on its base. Ah, what master engineers the Japanese are.

Currently the chopsticks are positioned on top of my PC monitor, with the rear-ends protruding over the edge like a gangplank, while the ninja stands precariously at the end, performing the crane stance. (Or it would, if it had limbs - it's basically two beanbag-filled spheres on top of one another, swaddled in ninja clothes, with two painted dots as eyes.)

Usual commentary on tracker stats.

The most used keyword by unique visitors descrending on this blog via search engine is, unsurprisingly, "Singapore", occuring in 2.39% of searches. The second most common word is "nude" - 1.88%.

And today's usual weirdness includes "strange plastic drinkware" (A Tupperware fetishist?), "kansas city bbq connectin" (Yup, we're allll good ole farmboys), and "wilting sound wav" (???), amidst the usual assortment of sex and zaogeng.

Comments to the G-Man.

Firstly, the technical distinction between pornography is that it involves flagrant nudity meant to titillate for sexual purposes, whereas tasteful nudity, say, a Botticelli nude, is simply artistic depiction of the nude human form. However, in an era of scrotal infusion and Lego pornography, everything turns *someone* on in some way or another. And of course, the role of sex in what Irvine Welsh calls "the commodification of transgression" Check out that link - very good interview. After all, what is MTV, pro wrestling, and most modern reality TV other than a way of turning the perverse, outre, and bizarrely alternative cultures into simply another cash cow?

Secondly, as I told you, racial harmony only exists as long as one is in camp seeing the same guy day after day. One odd form of (benign?) racism I've noticed is how one can be pretty good friends with individuals "of differing ethnicity", while disliking or holding prejudices towards their race as a whole.

Thirdly, I'm not hated as a person; simply as a provider of irritating opinions and as rants on a screen. Most people operate on assumptions about my personality based on what I write and the manner in which I present my ideas (telling, but not the complete picture, methinks). You're hated as a real, breathing, sack of protoplasm.

Word of the day is: "quodlibetical"

Am carefully tapping away blog entry. In the meantime...

Actual Analogies and Metaphors Found in College Entrance Essays & Writing Exams

* Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two other sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

* His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

* She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

* She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

* Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

* He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

* The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.

* The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

* McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

* From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p. m. instead of 7:30.

* Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.

* The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

* Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

* They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.

* John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

* He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

* Even in his last years, Grandpappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

* Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

* The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

* The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

* "Oh, Jason, take me!"; she panted, her breasts heaving like a college freshman on $1-a-beer night.

* He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

* The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

* He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

* Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.

* She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

* It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

* She was as easy as the TV Guide crossword.

*bleep*

I tried F&N 'Freaky' Fruitade one day some weeks ago. The first time I tried it was at Farrer Market back when I was living in Tulip Garden and I thought then that it was the most repellent drink I'd ever tasted. Not so now, because I've drunk shallowly of the swill that is Dr Pepper. Jason, who used to promote the drink, said that it's flavoured with apple and banana, and after a while, I managed to detect the artificial banana flavour. I think he thought it okay, but Shao Chuan didn't, as he spat out the sip he took from my can =)

*bleep*

NS boys like to set pictures of women as their wallpaper. Usually they're scantily clad, so while they excite the hormones, they aren't indecent enough to pass for porn. However, I saw the wallpaper of one computer at the medical centre. It had a Japanese woman who was wearing only a white robe, which wasn't closed in front, but which covered her shoulders and her breasts. Well, much of her breasts - the sides were exposed, and - [mock] horror - part of her nipple could be seen. Time to charge someone :)

Actually the distinction between porn and pictures meant to heaten the blood of men is rather contrived and arbitrary. After all, both have the same intention, so who's to say that a mere peek of a brown protrusion automatically makes something Pornography, while covering it moves it back up into the realm of legality? Ridiculous.

*bleep*


We left camp at about 1+ today to go to... Jurong Library. We've to hand up a book review next week, but it beats being in camp! And we fell out at 4:05pm or so too. My first choice of book was The Satanic Verses, but they didn't have it there, so I'll just have to read one of the two copies I have at home on my own time. War and Peace wasn't available at that branch. After that, I happened across a Romance Novel, the sort my sister reads, about single women in their late twenties to late thirties wanting a man, but I changed my mind later. The last one I thought of was this year's Man Booker prize winner, but all copies were on loan or reserved. Well. So much for my attempt to investigate pretentious/'good'/acclaimed books for a change. The book I finally chose to review is not actually the one I borrowed - Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon, as I don't think I'll be able to finish it in a week, let alone in 3.

My trip to the library must have been really taxing, for I feel very drained now. But then that might have something to do with the lectures we medics got this morning about bucking up and forthcoming punishments if we transgressed regarding minor rules even and my helping out in our rehearsal of setting up of a Bronco BCS for the Chief of Medical Corps' visit tomorrow.

During the aforementioned, I saw Qingru and Melvin. The former had a nametag which said "Qing Ru". Lucky him. We didn't have much time to catch up as they had to run off with a mob of people to the Armour Training Centre, probably for a course, but Qingru said he was a CQ (Company Quartermaster)

Yong Siang thought that the Polar Bear on my shirt was a Koala Bear. Maybe I should bring both to show him ;)


Quotes:

[CO on The Economist] Wah. This is good.

[On the pictures of Kimberly the Pink Ranger on my bunk cupboard] I prefer the one from season one. That one is better.

I really must try Procter & Gamble's Ariel Soap Powder one day, in part to compensate for the brainless Arab boycott. Support Ariel Sharon by buying Ariel Soap Powder! 10% of the proceeds goes to the fund to establish settlements in the West Bank...

The Johor State Government is too free again! This time they're chiding shopping centres which have put up Christmas decorations for being insensitive because Hari Raya is before Christmas. Ma-laysia boleh!

Naomi Klein got savaged in the Economist. Poisoning the well, it was, but funny anyhow. Hehe, I must get around to reading "No Logo" one day.

Yechao didn't know what a smoothie was. Sigh.

M1 is evil. They charge $10 for each session you change one or more of the numbers for the "Family and Friends" service.


As usual, whenever someone suggests that NS be extended to women, some woman, leery of the thought of having to be a slave, will write in to the Forum and protest that women do NS too. Their form of NS apparently includes rearing children, cooking and acting as maids and caring for the family, and since men don't help, women have done their NS. Right. So if medically fit (non-PES E, shall we say) women choose not to bear children, or give them up for adoption, or neglect their 'duties' in some other way, we shall throw them into Detention Barracks for not performing their National Service! Those who hire foreign maids and don't do any housework should likewise be thrown into the slammer. Also, some man also wrote in to say that NS would delay childbearing and make our already precipitous birth rate drop further. Well, if someone wants or doesn't want children, I think NS would hardly be a factor.

[Luckily someone wrote in to dispel her sophistry. His parting shot: "By the way, Ms Wee neglected to mention that it takes a little contribution by the men to the women before conception takes place. So if her argument holds, Singaporean males would have served NS twice." A tad awkward, but effective.]

In the same day's issue, I also saw Mr Fatmonky writing in about lifelong learning and the government's overemphasis on O and A level results. Hehe.

I must get down to slamming the lamentable standard of "Chinese" in Singapore soon. That better not be rejected, as the letter a friend, err, sent in about racial harmony in NS was.


There was this show on "TPI", probably an Indonesian channel, where some Women and Men of Malay stock (90% of the former in tudungs, naturally, and maybe 60% of the latter on songkoks) were singing a cacophonic dirge. The women all looked dead or possessed. Maybe they were dead eyed because they were wearing the symbol of their subjugation and inferiority to men.

Women's Lib in the 60s had bra-burning. Maybe the women's lib of the 00s will have tudung burning!


I was discussing with someone why PJ Girl's friends hate both of us so much.

I think it's because we're both more outspoken, while they like to loiter in the background and keep their views to themselves. Clever lot, but not very vocal.

I'm disliked more, but apparently that's only because they've seen me in "action" ;)

Not going to name (nick)names here, hee hee.

Rejected Forum letters:

"Re: NS a social distillery for ethnic cohesion


National Service has always been lauded as a medium for ethnic bonding. Indeed, this is borne out by tales of NSmen acquiring lifelong friends after their 2 or 2 and a 1/2 year stint in the Singapore Armed Forces.

Anecdotal evidence, gathered from some casual observation and interminable NS Stories shared by relations and bosom friends suggests, however, that there are ways to further enhance ethnic bonding during our young men's service to the nation.

One can't help but suspect that race is one criterion in allocating NSmen to their units. I have never seen any Malays or Muslims in the Air Force, Navy, Commandos, Artillery and Armour, and the veracity of this fact is confirmed by some of my brother's friends. A Malay friend of a friend of mine was very keen to enter the Navy, and told the interviewers that he did not mind eating non-Halal food since Halal food was not served in the Navy, but he wasn't accepted in the end. At most, there is a token Malay presence in these wings. In addition, senior Malay Officers are hard to find, though this might be due to the fact that fewer Malays choose to sign on in the Army.

The preponderance of Malays in other areas is also unhealthy. I understand that the Singapore Police Force and Civil Defence Force are overwhelmingly composed of Malays. In fact, a bus I was in once passed the Civil Defence Academy. Of the 20 or so SCDF personnel who got on the bus, all but 2 were Malay. I have great faith in our Malay brothers - in their ability to keep the streets safe and to save our fellow countrymen from burning buildings, but I am equally confident that, if there were a war, they'd leap unhesitatingly to the Defence of Singapore.

Once NSFs ORD and return to the Outside World, they also lose touch with their friends from other racial groups, and fall back into theeir usual racial cliques. Also, racist jokes are commonly exchanged between NSmen when the race in question is not present. They may be meant lightheartedly, but still this is testament to how racial bonding needs to be encouraged further.

Perhaps the supreme irony of the article was that it showed an APC, whose tracks spelled 'Ethnic Cohesion', steaming along. I don't think there were any Malays in that APC. "


Sexism in the Bible:

Ephesians 5:22-33 :: New American Standard Bible (NASB)

"Marriage Like Christ and the Church

Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything.... Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband."

Luckily most of us aren't too restricted by the Letter of it. The socio-political-econo-historical context must always be remembered - just like how Islam, in its day, was actually rather tolerant and generous towards women.

[Ed: Dec 1st:

Addendum: "Ephesians is not a letter written to Western marriages! It is a letter written to Christians who were living in a culture where marriage was a type of slavery. Young teens were wedded to middle-aged men in order to bear them a legal heir. It is difficult for us to imagine the level of degradation and hopelessness these young wives must have experienced... perhaps more than the slaves. Paul was not intending to set up gender hierarchy in marriage in these passages any more than he was endorsing slavery by encouraging slaves to submit to their masters. He was simply referring to the slavery and male headship that was already a part of their secular culture."]

Oh my goodness. Power Rangers has just topped itself, when I thought it had already reached its nadir in goofiness a long time ago (and had since become better). This is the most improbable Deus Ex Machina I've ever seen.

Excerpt from episode transcript:

"Back at the warehouse, Moleman has the laser moved into firing position... Suddenly, a wall suspiciously covered with a ton of empty cardboard boxes gets blown up from behind!... a forklift was driven into the warehouse. The driver becomes revealed, it's Grandma Winslow, in hockey gear! What's most amusing about this, is Granny gasps upon seeing Kelsey there. Either she accidentally drove the forklift into the wall herself (which makes the most sense), or she discovered the Batlings converging on this location and decided to take matters into her own hands, much like her granddaughter did... Moleman orders the Batlings to destroy the Ranger, Granny yells for them to stay away from her. She whips out her hockey stick and hits the gas, plowing into the warehouse with a mighty "Kiyaa!" Vypra suddenly regains her mental composure and orders, "Attack!" Have I mentioned how useless she is today? It's very sad when the Batlings are doing more useful tasks than your main villainess. Moleman covers his eyes with his paws, whining about how this isn't happening, his work being threatened yet again. Granny Winslow drives the forklift into the Batlings, and swats at a few with her hockey stick. This frees Kelsey, who gets back to the hand to hand combat with them (it appears Kels is as senile as her grandmother when it comes to remember things, like Morphing). More fighting, the Batlings swarm all over Granny, but she bats them off. Finally, Granny heads towards the laser (notice Vypra is standing in the way, and then vanishes, apparently not only do demons fear water, they fear people pulling a Fugitive Alien on them and trying to kill them with a forklift!) and bashes the forklift into the machine. This causes heavy damage, and causes Granny to laugh like a wicked witch. Moleman hops up and down whining about how she's going to pay for that. He hits her, knocking her out of the seat. Or so it appears, as suddenly Granny is about ten feet high, landing on top of a Batling as she falls. She then snatches his sword and begins to stab the crap out of him with it. Kelsey is concerned, but has her hands full with Batling problems as it is."

Someone's comments:

"This was a good episode up until that ridiculous old woman showed up in that silly armor, fighting off Batlings, and pretty much saving the day. What were they thinking? This ranks right down there with Grandma Matchmaker from Power Rangers in Space."

Mary had a little lamb
Her father shot it dead.
Now it goes to school with her,
Between two chunks of bread.

Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet,
Her clothes all tattered and torn.
It wasn't the spider that crept beside her,
But Little Boy Blue and his horn.

Simple Simon met a Pieman, going to the fair.
Said Simple Simon to the Pieman,
What have you got there?
Said the Pieman unto Simon,
Pies, you idiot.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the kings horses and all the kings men,
Said "Forget him, He's only an egg."

Bah I can't go for my MO's housewarming tomorrow because I'll be on Ops.

And there's something else I forgot. No matter.


*Pork chops pay for university *

Haram education!


Rules for Writing

Star Control 2 tracks I particularly like, in no particular order:

Supermelee music
Hyperspace
Quasispace (PC version)
Melnorme
Orbit
Orz
Pkunk
Sylandro
Thraddash
Ur-Quan Kzer-Za
Yehat

But the rest are almost all nice too :)


Weekly Aborted Site: Akadama-Ya

"When you first arrive at the site, you will probably be saddened by the fact that the entire site is written in Japanese. I have no fucking clue what any of it says either, so don't ask me. However, I'm pretty sure that it would read something like this:

"Hi! I am a big pedophile from Japan, and enjoy drawing pre-pubescent anime girls being raped and molested by Digimon, and other strange creatures. I have no life whatsoever. Please donate $5 to my Paypal account so I can continue to indulge your sick fantasies."

ROFL

Travel Guide

FIFTH STOP: LONDON

Home of Mr. Bean.

The People: What�s a British person, you ask? Take an American. Then take an electrified cable and ram it deep into their ear canal to give them a �peculiar� and �charming� personality.

Sites to See:
1) The Queen: You�ll have a hard time seeing her. She�s surrounded by ninja guards.

Visited Downhere's house with Ger. Visit was spent looking at screens.

First was Wuthering Heights. A French adaptation, rather. Very ZZZ-ish. I felt like bludgeoning myself with Kenneth's bolster. I think Battle Royale would have been much livelier.

After that was Anime watching. I wasn't really keen on that, but it was somewhat of an eye opener. Both shows - Cowboy Bebop and Kodomo no Omocha, were eminently more understandable than the crap that was "Shoujo Kakumei Utena", though the Japanese are really disturbing - For Kodomo, what's an 11 year old girl doing with a 25 year old boyfriend? Kenneth also played a bit of Chobits, but both of us were barely tolerating it, so we shut the window after a while.

Japanese Anime does have its merits, but I still say it's overblown and overrated. People talk in such fake voices, timbres and tones, act really over the top, make lame jokes and do improbable things. And all the characters have hellishly large eyes - probably the Japanese artists subconsciously compensating for their inadequacies (small eyes).

I also saw a copy of RJ Outlook. It looks much better now. The RJ Chamber Alumni had a concert - 'Noteworthy' - in July and Ee Kia and some other person with a male-sounding name ('Yap Shing Nan') sang soprano for Pergolesi's Stabat Mater. Yeh!

Later, Geraldine was supposed to watch Harry Potter with her friend formerly from The School With The Most Indecent Uniform In Singapore Bar None (SCGS). However, the latter was asked out by a hot guy, so I ended up accompanying Screwed Up Girl. Wonderful it is attending movies on the first few days, with considerate audiences, most of whom are probably ardent fans. There were no irritating noises from the audience, and only one handphone rang (and it only rang too, and the guy was hushed by everyone). Though I didn't see anyone dressed as Dumbledore.

Jiamin apparently has been formulating lots of slash (why's it called slash when it doesn't involve slashing or violence?) theories about Harry Potter. Gah, corrupting the young boys. Anyhow I know why Yaoi Girl likes Harry Potter. Tons of pre-pubescent boys. Magic. Benevolent and avuncular superior figures. Perfect. Of course she denies it, but we all know the truth :)


Yechao doesn't, or didn't rather, know what Carrefour was. *Slaps forehead* And I thought "Maki" was the worst he could go.

And Yaoi Girl refused to let me know where she was having her haircut, so I couldn't go annoy her :(


Everyone loves Wo-Hen Nankan!

"-PUKE-
he's like, super gross and U-G-L-Y and has that long hair that probably has kutus and dandruffs (whatever spelling) and is dirty and.. yucks!! i mean JUST LOOK AT IT!!!

GROSS!! looks like a pile of dried algae -eewww-

he's a HAiRY man -nods self-
gwad disgusting!!

and those "princesses" probably dump him after getting half of his millions and billions"

"He'll go to heaven. the legions of Hell don't want him."

"eh...the person looks really gross,cant believe girls will like him and even wanna be on the bed with him... :X"

"ROFL
its money they're after.."

"Y
U
C
K
S
!"

"maybe one day i'll go to a lan shop and sign the guess book:

Name: none of your business
Homepage:
E-Mail:
Referred By:
City/Country:
Comments: hey Asian Prince, you suck. yep, S U C K. LOSER!!
Am I Not Hot?: didn't i just say you suck?"

"haha is this for real...what a thing....is it a male or female?"

"I shall print his picture out and distribute it to my ex classmates... (meeting some of em tomorrow)"

"print his face out and wear it to a fancy dress party"

Interesting observation on today's referrals: one from another person's referral stats page on extremetracking.

Which means that when someone was checking his or her extremetracking to see the referrals to his or her blog, he/she saw someone who had clicked there from a link on Balderdash, and subsquently that person checked us back out by clicking on the Balderdash link in his/her extremetracking stats.. and now that click-through from extremetracking has shown up on Balderdash's referral stats..... But it doesn't really lead to an infinite series of click-throughs; unless even the *referral stats* page has a meta-referral stats function to track who's been checking out stats..... Whoa. Deep.

*takes in a deep, throaty gulp of hashish smoke - or at least feels like doing it*

Argh. Head hurts.

I meant that. I am still in shock after typing in a few innocent names at random.

At least now I know what to say to a friend who asked me of Geraldine's essay: "Who is Gabriel? Shouldn't it be Gabrielle?"

I realise a lot of anime fans are into Neil Gaiman as well. What a travesty, at times, but the kind of people who would be intrigued by some of the more outre storylines of anime are the kind who would enjoy Neil Gaiman's dark, yet quirky writing.

Gabriel's obsession with the AsianPrince has dragged him to new depths of perversion

Extract from old meatspace diary:

"They say death teaches us about the value of life. And I suppose it does - as long as it happens to someone else."

Accolades for an anime mush generator Jiamin linked to:

"at the generator
aaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggggggghhhhhhhh

still screaming in agony

KILL ME! KILL ME NOW!

i am forever tainted

i have been to S&M parties, satanic rites, and hello kitty conventions

but i have seen no degeneracy on earth, no vileness that even matches the horror i have witnessed on this page.

i beg of you.. slay me now!"

*bleep*


I realise Yaoi Girl too has an Oh-So-Slight Accent. She can form a club with the other one :) And to her rebuttal of my objection to her thinking dirty thoughts about LOTR, I reply: You don't understand manly/kingly Death Rituals ;)

There was an article in the "Commentary" section of Monday's papers - "NS a social distillery for ethnic cohesion". Very ironic, as the cartoon showed an APC rolling back and its tracks spelling 'Ethnic Cohesion'. I doubt there were any Malays in that APC. I should write a letter to the forum in protest, but I'll be charged under the Official Secrets Act. They allow names to be changed if there is a "very real threat to life and limb". I guess DB does not threaten my limb or my limb, so it's okay.


Quotes:

[On someone named 'Nah'] The 'Nah' is really nah bey. Fucked up.

[On not being allowed to leave camp on the night of the ORD function] Married personnel, don't take it personally. [Points to someone] Don't ask your wife to call me again ah

[A Lance Corporal] I'm downgrade ah [Spec: I think you should be upgraded and promoted] Fuck you. (downgraded)

[On retaking GP] Then you go Hua Cu to take. Then you will feel that your English is very good. Serious. (should go to)

Try this.

Not exactly a hate IM site, but it puts the salient points across quite nicely.

It was out of context in the sense that those phrases were sputters of incoherent rage. Yet, behind the bitching, there is madness to my method. Which requires elucidation and further ranting, which I might do at a later date. Nonetheless, I've said all I have to say on the topic.

It could be a hydra on the mend. Either that, or it's downsizing. Haven't you heard? Times are bad. Too many mouths to feed.

Aarrgh! MMPR! Begone, foul beast! Voltron, save me!

I don't really know what they do inside the toilets either, but from the few brief tantalizing glimpses I've had, it involves crowding in front of the sinks (usually three to a mirror), using their compact, adjusting their straps, some arcane ritual called "powdering their nose", and usually the females there are divided into groups that went together to the washroom en masse, leaving the guys they went with back at the bar or dance floor, staring bewilderedly at each other.

Stumbled across the webpage of a "Rachel Wu Sikorski". It hasn't been updated since 1996, but Geocities hasn't deleted it.

Apparently this is one of the 2 RJ girls who died in the ODAC rafting accident at Pulau Ubin in 1999.

Her boyfriend still signs the guestbook from time to time.

Touching. Coming from me, that's something.

Has anyone ever noticed just how much this guy:



Looks like what this kid will in 20 years time?



Pay close attention the physiognomy of the nose and browline, in particular. And ignore the hair.

Putin .. Potter.. am I the only one who fails to see the connection???? The increasingly darker storylines in the series.. the corruption of Harry Potter as he becomes the new Dark Lord... his ascension to power on a wave of sorcery and intrigue (think about it - Putin was a total rank outsider who emerged out of nowhere as the annointed heir when Yeltin's vodka-saturated bulk was hauled out of office. Don't tell me that some sorcerous glamour was not involved - hell, forget magick, all Putin needed to do was to put a few bottles of Stolichnaya in front of Boris and he'd have signed anything). Evil wizardry and access to thermonuclear weapons - a most puissant combination.

This is more metaphysical proof of the inevitable triumph of darkness over light.

Word of the day: "novation"

Your appended comments are more like dead ugly conjoined twins.. like that South Park character with a fetus on her forehead. The comments are probably the tumours, since they're the ones that grow. Although how come no one comments that much on our garbage? Probably due to the fact that the comprehensive ranting of our entries leaves little space for marginalia.

As I said to you, I assisted in the redesign of your blog commentary template in the interests of ensuring that our enduring commitment to the complete and utter absence of any aesthetic artistry on this blog is adhered to. Already there is one little irritating sidebar, but since the links there help to faciliate archive retrieval, I tolerate its presence. Don't push it.

A two-headed snake might survive if it was a hydra.

Why do you want credit cards? They are EVIL objects meant to trap you within the samsara of consumerism forever. Erm. But they make paying for petrol really easy. As well as ordering shit off the Internet. ARGH. (*muttermutter* stupid crappy rate of exchange and absence of purchasing power parity)

My set is more precious, simply because it's mine, and as for shipping it overseas - obviously the worry it would cause me as a more emotionally sensitive bipolar depressive merchant banker is less than the worry it causes you as an apathetic, yet oddly Zen-like NS-man. It's a matter of applying some of the Benthamite "felicific calculus" - ie. my happiness is more important than your lack of it. His protege J.S Mill has good words on the distinction between higher and lower classes of pleasures too. In any case, promoting Blood Sword to the masses is a noble cause; and like all noble causes, it's always about the older person telling the younger person to go sacrifice himself for the greater good. Karmic accrual.

M$N is evil indeed, but an anti-M$N page is going to be pretty cliched, methinks. And yes, your cause is lost. The distinctiveness of your PC will be assimilated into the Gatesian conglomerate.

"The worst thing about being Bill Gates is that you can never be sure if your hand isn't having sex with you just for the money."

I can see why you shouldn't plan for a wedding dinner. *sincerely*

Ask me to explain my chick-rating system one day. If anyone knows anything about credit ratings (Standard & Poor, Moody's, Fitch), and is interested to know how equity = marriage while bonds = relationships, just drop a line.

Because in clubs, female toilets inevitably have a queue snaking out the door, and wending serpentinely for miles outside. Blame it on women and the inefficient anatomy of their biological waste disposal mechanisms. That, and the way they all crowd in front of bathroom mirrors with eyeliners, tweezers, lipstick, and other hideous cosmetic paraphernalia. It's quite possible to see more than you want to when walking past an opened female toilet door.

I still think you're awfully stubborn over the submit button thing. But I put up with your little eccentricities.

Why should Microsoft release the Mech Paks as a patch when they can squeeze a few extra dollars out of the consumer? I mean, there are people who *really* want a Cauldron-Born or a Highlander in their game. Fortuitously, the only economic contribution I shall be making will be to the happy pirates, who deserve my money far more for providing me a necessary psychological prophylactic at affordable prices.

"No lives" isn't such a bad thing. I haven't got one too. *shrugs* But I like to think I spend it constructively furnishing my own internal mental dioramas, scratching my navel, reading philosophy and watching pornography, compared to inflicting execrable graphic pretensions on the world. *primly* I'll stick to verbal pretensions, thank you very much.

*peers* You really do enjoy quoting me out of context, don't you? Should I qualify my statements in greater detail? *rhetorically* But it's more masturbatory than usual to annotate one's own quotes as paraphrased by someone else. Oh well.

I've refused to do a webpage of my own all these years mainly because I'm as lazy as a sloth on pot. That, and the fact that I haven't got a message to say to the world at large that demands my own personal presence on the net. On the other hand, renting space on a blog allows me to organise my thoughts a little, kill time at work, and occasionally archive down some of the more interesting events in my life, without the responsibility of owning my own *territory* that demands a personal imprint, personal pretension, and an expression of my retarded aesthetic sense. And of course, the hassles of maintaining a rented blog are borne by the landlord.

Why do you think I blog here? Because of the brutally utilitarian format, devoid of any artistic trapping or fancy colour scheme (cranberry is not a colour scheme). It's only the words that matter. Not the fancy backgrounds or the 3l33t chatboxes or the brooding fonts. Simple Verdana text on a white background.

And as for that essay, I believe these words sum up my feelings best. "I could gouge out my eyes, smash the tainted orbs on the floor, sprinkle salt over my bloody sockets, and whip myself repeatedly with a broken-glass-laced cat 'o nine-tails, but I could never gouge out my memory."

Still, it's nice to be loved, isn't it?:)

Delta Secondary School has lots of chickens. And even there, I wasn't safe from "Army News", one copy of which was tacked on the notice board.

I didn't write a very good essay. "Does a study of history make you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of mankind?". Bleah. Forgot the stuff I read in Primary and Secondary School.

At least I remembered how to spell Hatshepsut ;)

Was very un-indulgent and un-cynical today. Wow.

There were quite a lot of ex-JC students taking the exam. Well, they looked like they used to be from a JC. Some foreigners too - I saw some passports. And there was a middle aged Indian couple - the guy was balding. Lifelong education indeed :) The invigilator caught one girl writing after time was up. Uh oh.

I was quite pissed to see that I had the only Green IC in the room :(

3 times the number of people taking the revised paper took the old paper. Not many were as foolhardy as I and my intrepid lot! But they cheated - at least 4, and probably all of the essay questions were shared between the two papers! And apparently, somewhere not too far away (well, this is Singapore), Aravind was retaking his too.

Comprehension was interesting. There was only one passage, which means that the teachers have been getting the format wrong all this while :) And, trite though it might be, was on Singlish. Hah! Some of the questions were quite odd. "[If they cannot switch between Singlish and English, they will be left behind] economically and socially" - "What is Mr Lee saying?". And it wasn't a "in your own words" question too. Erm.

I miss sentence making though. Making subversive sentences was most fun :)

GP was weird. David agrees. Cambridge is trying to be farnie this year.


"every time I talk to you
I must drop by dictionary.com...

there are some people who are older than you, and have trouble keeping up with your language"

Haha :)

Gak. My name has been used in vain!

Screwed Up Girl has just topped herself.

"A Night To Remember

Amidst a bed of flowers, Yechao drew Geraldine into his arms and declared, "Geraldine, you look exquisite."

She blushed at the intense gaze that swept over her. "Oh, Yechao."

He drew her nearer, his eyes closing slowly. "Geraldine, how many times do I have to repeat myself?"

She was jerked back to reality at the last remark, the traces of her daydream disappearing as she looked up to see Helen Tan glaring at her, a vein threatening to pop out of her forehead. Geraldine could almost see the lightning
bolts flashsing behind her teacher's back as her voice thundered over the room. "Your mind is obviously somewhere else, Geraldine, and I will not tolerate such behavior in my class!"

But before she could open her mouth to apologize, the bell rang. Helen Tan shook a finger in the air. "We're not done yet, young lady." But the warning was drowned by the rush of students that filed out of the classroom. Geraldine heaved a sigh of relief. From the corner of her eye, she noticed the object of her affection walking away.

Her best friend Gabriel joined her. "Don't tell me you were daydreaming about your Prince Charming again," her friend teased.

Geraldine flashed a guilty smile. Ever since she met Yechao at the start of the year, he was all she could think about. At first, she was drawn by his attractive features -- his sparkling black eyes, his striking black hair. She felt so warm inside when he first smiled at her, and she could swear that the world was brightened by the twinkle in his eyes. But when they were recently paired as Chemistry lab partners, she fell even more in love with his gentle, thoughtful side. Once when she was sick, Yechao visited her house and brought her their homework. Another time when she accidentally broke her beaker, he slid it over
to his side, just in time to catch the ire of their lab teacher about damaging school property. When Geraldine tried to speak up, he discreetly placed a hand on her arm and stopped her. His mere touch was enough to silence her.

But even though Gabriel knew that she was in love, Geraldine didn't dare tell her friend with whom. She was a bit reluctant that her friend would tease her to death, or worse, do something like deliver him to her bound and gagged.

"So, has this mystery guy asked you to the prom yet?" Gabriel asked.

Geraldine shook her head. "No, and I don't think that he's taking anyone else."

Gabriel scowled. "What is he, gay?" At the murderous look that Geraldine gave her, she backed off. "Okay, okay. But what are you going to do? The prom's tomorrow night! You can't wait for him to take action, you have to invite him yourself!"

Geraldine paled at the thought. "I couldn't do that! He might think I was too forward. Besides, you're one to talk. I don't hear you telling me that you have a date for tomorrow."

Her friend placed a hand over her mouth and laughed. Gabriel had a very disturbing laugh, the sound echoing through the halls. "Ohohohohoho!" Then she winked. "You've been so secretive lately that I decided to teach you a lesson. So my date is for me to know and for you to find out."

By this time, they had reached the cafeteria. Gabriel, who always brought lunch from home, went to look for a table while Geraldine got in line to buy her food. As she
debated on getting what appeared to be baked macaroni, she felt someone standing close to her. Too close. Geraldine turned to discover Yechao there, holding a lunch tray in his hands.

"Hi," he greeted her with a smile. Geraldine could feel the blush coloring her cheeks as she returned the greeting.

Complete silence. As the line moved on, they both got the macaroni and a drink. But Geraldinewas nervous. Inwardly, she cursed herself for being so flustered when he was around. Then she remembered what Gabriel told her, that unless she took matters into her own hands, she might end up alone on prom night. "Uh, Yechao," she began. Then stopped and took a deep breath. "Uhm, are you going? Uh, tomorrow night? To the prom, I mean?"

He nodded, a slight blush on his face.

They were near the counter now. This was it. She had to find out. "Uhm, so who are you taking?"

Yechao opened his mouth to reply, but the entire basketball team chose that exact moment to cut through the line on their way to the gym. Geraldine sweatdropped. A moment later, she gasped when she saw Yechao lying on the ground, his macaroni on the ground, his eyes swirling around in confusion. He looked well, semi-deformed.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

He was up in a second. "Yes, I'm fine. But I think I'd better go and have this mess cleaned up." He refused to look her in the eyes. "I guess I'll catch you later." Then without another word or a backward glance, he walked away. It was only when he was gone from sight did Geraldine realize that he didn't answer her question.

The rest of her day was uneventful. In Chemistry class, they had an exam so there was no way that she could continue their conversation. But it was after school when
she had the shock of her life. She was fixing her blouse in one of the bathroom stalls when a pair of girls walked in and started talking. "That new guy Yechao is so hot," one of them said.

Geraldine perked up at the remark, feeling her fox ears popping out of her head as she strained to hear what they were saying.

"I know," the other girl agreed. "It's a shame he's taking someone to the prom."

"Really?" the first girl asked, and Geraldine nearly spoke the same word at loud.

"Who?"

"Didn't you hear? He's taking Gabriel!"

Geraldine's life was over as she felt an anvil drop on her.

***

Of course she was still alive, but Geraldine really felt like dying. Yechao and Gabriel? It wasn't fair! As she tossed and turned in her sleep, she couldn't help but glance at the dress she was supposed to wear for tomorrow. It was in her favorite shade of blue and Gabriel had even helped her pick it out. They had planned on going together in case they didn't find dates, but Geraldine was sure that hanging out with her friends was a fun way to spend the night. But now, how can she go? How can she even face them?

Needless to say, her sleepless state didn't go unnoticed. Gabriel shot her a worried glance when they met during homeroom. "Are you okay? You don't seem to be
too excited about tonight."

Geraldine managed a small smile. Technically, she wasn't allowed to feel jealous -- after all, Gabriel never knew that she was deeply in love with Yechao. There was no reason to worry her friend. "Just a little under the weather. It's
nothing," she assured her.

From across the room, she felt someone eyes on them. Geraldine raised her head to see Yechao looking at her with a concerned expression. Maybe he saw Gabriel looking worried so he was curious. In any case, Geraldine didn't think that she could stand looking at his beautiful black eyes a moment longer. She tore her gaze away. "Listen, about tonight..."

But her friend was already chatting away. "I'm still going to go over to your place to dress up, remember? I'll have my mom drop off my dress later. We're going to have so
much fun, I promise! I've already taken care of our ride and all, so you don't have to worry about anything."

"What about your date?" Geraldine asked bluntly. She wanted to ask her about Yechao, but she couldn't just find the words. She wanted Gabriel to be the one to volunteer the information.

Gabriel casually waved her question away. "Don't you worry about that, I've already fixed my plans. Hey, I'm bringing a whole bunch of nail polish for you to try on. I think I have just the right color to match your dress. And Mom lent me her pearl necklace to wear--"

Geraldine tuned her friend out, not caring anymore. It was nice to see Gabriel excited but in truth, it hurt her that she was the one that Yechao liked. And yet she couldn't stay away. If she did, her friend might suspect something. And
more importantly, Geraldine realized that she couldn't walk away from him. If he only saw her as a friend then that was enough for her.

***

"You look beautiful!" Gabriel exclaimed as Geraldine twirled around in her gown. Even if she felt depressed, putting the dress on lifted her spirits a little bit. She stared at her reflection in the mirror. Was that really her? The smooth satin clung to whatever curves she had before pooling into soft folds at her feet. It was designed to look like a dress from ancient Greece, the one goddesses were often
depicted as wearing. One shoulder held a curtain of chiffon while the other was left bare, emphasizing her glowing skin. What would Yechao say if he saw her in this?

But Geraldine had no time to worry as Gabriel began applying makeup on her. "Thanks for the compliment, but don't fuss over me, please. I can do this by myself. Besides," here she swallowed the lump in her throat, "your date might be here any moment now and you haven't even fixed your hair."

Then the doorbell rang. Gabriel let out a short shriek. "He's here! Geraldine, would you mind letting him in while I fix myself up. You're already good to go. I promise I won't take long." Before Geraldine could protest, Gabriel had already pushed her out of her own room.

Geraldine felt her chest tighten. He was going to see her now, of all times, but she didn't think her heart could stand the pain. Still, she squared her shoulders and went down to open the door.

Yechao stood at her doorstep, looking so breathtakingly handsome in a black tux. He gave her a shy smile. "I've come to pick up my date."

"Gabriel's still upstairs, you'll have to wait--" Geraldine made a move to get her friend but she stopped when Yechao suddenly grabbed her wrist and held on to it firmly. With his free hand he handed her a corsage of one pure white orchid.

Geraldine looked confused. Her heart was pounding so loudly she was afraid he could hear. "What's going on?"

"I'm taking you to the prom, Geraldine," he replied.

"But I thought you and Gabriel--"

He shook his head. "She was just kind enough to help me set up this date. I didn't have the guts to ask you to your face because I was afraid you would reject me. Which is funny, because before you, I was never afraid of rejection at all. But Gabriel kept assuring me that it would work out in the end, but I guess I didn't believe her. I hope you're not mad that we went through this."

She could only stare at him in surprise at each word. She couldn't believe what she was hearing. "Of course I'm not mad."

Yechao took a step closer. "I really like you, Geraldine, and I think you like me too?" He turned the statement into a question, standing there like a shy little boy.

Geraldine closed the distance between them. "Yes, I guess I do," she murmured.

He took her into his arms. "Have I ever told you that you look exquisite?"

She smiled. Yes, she wanted to tell him. But this time, it was no longer a dream."


Excuse me, I think I'm going to go outside and puke.

*retches*


At least there's a chiton in this.

I want to puke again

*vomits out remains of lunch*

Me: how come people nowadays all have such good graphics skills

Someone: because people have no lives and thus they spend their days in front of adobe photoshop?


Mmm. Good one.


For all his bluster about me changing my YACCS template, nw.t was only too happy to help out :)

[Him:

HORRIBLE HORRIBLE NEW ARTISTIC COMMENTS PAGE
I DISAPPROVE

i want you to know i'm very very very displeased at changing the template
what's wrong with the old one!
the new one just makes us look as pretentious and "arty" as the rest of the robots.

i still wish to register that i consider this a very personal attack from a friend. you do not take the magnitude of the offense seriously enough.

typical of the collective, happy, white-bread, artistically-pretentious, slappedtogether with lame photoshop andcollage skills kind of bloggery. and linking to it only propagates its heinous stupidity, shallowness, and general lameness.

seee?
we had an old, nice functional comments form
then, you young turks demanding change went and messed it all up
change is bad

your friends are proof that webdesign is a privilege of betters, not a right of the masses.

why do you think i've refused to do a webpage of my own all these years? because i know my place and what i have to say.]

Maybe I'll add a sidebar next. Oh, the iniquity!


Yeh Haoxiang has a blog.

New YACCS template.

Yay.

Check it out.

Ripped, with compliments, from Blue Infusion, one of Zaixiang's interminable list of hostees.


Now I will go try to write a third GP essay in as many days. First the Death Penalty, then Immigration.

So what happens now?


10:24

I finally found out what sans serif actually means - that it's sans the serif. And I found out what a serif is.

First, to comment on all of Gabriel's witty comebacks. I mean,unfortunately, as a tenant, I don't have the authority to append tumour-like paragraphs on the edge of other people's diary entries, so I have to create a new one to deal with him.

Obscene pay right now when you're still young means you can put money aside, invest it, hopefully, retire early and enjoy it then. Mediocre pay which you keep spending now means that you'll be a wage slave forever AND you still work crappy hours.

Buka puasa is that period during dawn (Maghrib prayer time) when Muslims eat their meal before fasting from sun-up to sun-down.

The SMM's friend the finance clerk. One of my fellow misanthropes.

I was practically raised in shopping centres. My father worked in Suntec for a while. So I toured the complex a few times in its various stages of completion.

Big feet mean small dicks. Or is it the other way around? Gah - it's okay. I DON'T want to know.

Langkawi is a terrible rip-off, other than its value as a liquor import haven. The hotels are shoddy (except for the hideously expensive Mutiara); there are other islands with better beaches, less crowded resorts, less wonky guides, etc etc.

I have five credit cards. Three were obtained from my first horrible job, and the only reason I retain them is because they're still registered as staff cards (ie - no annual fee). I get my ex-colleagues to make sure they STAY staff cards in the computer system every now and then. The other two I use because they (Citibank) can be used for promotional offers in Singapore as well. You can have one, but my credit limit is damned low, and unfortunately I seem to use it more often than I should across the Causeway.

And if you want to buy me a present, buy me a Demotivational Poster:) I'm seriously considering buying a few for my office. Get my Dysfunction or Failure.

I drive a Honda CR-V. Family surplus car. Petrol-consuming bitch box SUV.

A Proton Arena has been described by my friend as "the pickup truck for a contractor with only one worker" (because you can't really fit people into the lame rear portion, and there's only room for one other passenger in front).

Do you think fattening is at all an issue to my emaciated self?

I would rather have myself sodomised by a rabid bull elephant on pachyderm Viagra than live in the same house with you. Nothing personal. But I don't mind you visitng and/or crashing on occasion.

Good call on giving Sarinee the Blood Sword books for free. Given that you and I are possibly amongst the few human beings left alive on the planet who actually have a complete set, yours is more beneficially sacrificed to the vagaries of the postal service (imagine what a disaster it would be if mine were lost.). I assume you used registered mail.

ICQ UINs of SCGS and RGS girls; I suppose they're like those SDU lists of single people. A desperate semi-government conspiracy to get these lians and muggers off the streets of Orchard Road, and into Matrix-esque creches producing scholarship students and CAP/GEP biots.

MSN is not a bad product; the enter instead of 'alt-s' combination has its benefits. But the point is - I don't *trust* Passport; and the way people are growing ever dependent on its convergence with hotmail and MSN. But it has a small memory footprint (gee - Windows product, all those undocumented APIs and procedure calls), but it's irritating because other people can tell as soon as you take someone off your list. And .. I don't TRUST Passport.

Went to the wedding dinner I mentioned earlier. The wedding dinner was for my ex-assistant-manager in my first job; ironically his wife-to-be had just moved two months ago to the merchant bank I *currently* work in and we'd both been to the same orientation batch, so I know both sides of the happy couple. Was seated at a table just *next* to the entrance; my chair was being constantly shoved by the hordes of people streaming into the restaurant. I didn't expect him to have such a damn huge turnout.

My table was comprised of the groom's immediate colleagues; ie, the staff at the branch he's posted in. I suppose as an ex-colleague, it was the most appropriate grouping for me to be placed in. One of the treasury dealers where I work was at the same table as well; his wife was, coincidentally, enough, the groom's boss and my ex-manager in my previous place of
employment.

My replacement in the branch turned out to be this rather fetching ex-platinum-card salesgirl with a great figure, but a rather meek attitude throughout the whole dinner. Pity. Fortuitously, there was yet *another* replacement for one of the other officers (my branch has a hideously high turnover rate); a very cute, if somewhat over-perky chick. Another Australian alumni. And, praise the powers above, she was the only other smoker at the table; which meant that I at least had someone whom I could surreptitiously slip out in between courses of rather badly-cooked seafood for a quick smoke.

Was somewhat embarrassed to note that only half of the branch turned up for the wedding. Kind of a blow, when the employees of the branch the groom worked in previously showed up and occupied two tables. One of the guys at the table also noted that we were probably placed at the corner nearest the entrance because the groom sees his immediate colleagues every damn day - he probably didn't want a subconscious reminder of his daily toil on this joyous occasion.

Also learnt much to my great edification - if you ever have a wedding dinner, NEVER EVER EVER EVER FOR GOD'S SAKE HAVE FUCKING KARAOKE. NEVER. For one thing, all the horrible geriatrics, particularly those from the more rural parts of the world. Your more fanatic, dewlapped, gleaming-at-the-eye, "Wah sey Ah Boy/Ah Girl finally getting married I damn happy leh" type may
even bring their own laserdiscs, the better to croon/serenade/bawl out their favourite selection of Teresa Teng ballads and old Hokkien ditties.

To top it off, a successful career in commercial banking means that the groom had met a lot of clients in his time; particularly a lot from his first ulu posting, where he made close acquaintance with a large number of loansharks, property developers and contractors. Now imagine TABLES of this ilk, a free-flow of alcohol, and before you knew it, some old bastard was belting out "hai yuan" , followed by a song with the incomprehensible refrain of something like "chiu kang chang puey bo".

I watched, horror-stricken, as aged relatives soon joined in the degeneracy. Caught a glimpse of the groom; while his features were benignly impasssive, I thought I could detect an involuntary tic in his left eyebrow. The bride had vanished somewhere, probably to prevent her wedding dress train from withering.

My colleague at my desk had his face buried in his hands, and his wife murmured to me, "This is why I forbade karaoke at my own wedding."

My perky-fellow-smoking-kaki whispered, "It could be worse; at my cousin's wedding my father was dancing with a bottle of cognac in one hand to 'sha la la la la.. sha la la in the mooorning.'. At least none of them here are related to us."

Mercifully managed to flee with a deluge of other attendees with taste as soon as the last course was over, while the diehards were still caterwauling on the stage. At least the groom could be sure that there wasn't going to be leftover alcohol.

Final observation: Why do guys tend to have this semi-belligerent, yet semi-nervous look in their eyes when facing each other within the confined, rancid depths of a crowded club male toilet? I see females looking at each other with either absolute apathy or catty, open bitchiness. But never the same half-glazed, ambivalent mixture of fight-or-blush discomfort that males do.

Have finally purchased Mechwarrior : Mercenaries; while the engine is a tad dated, the game system looks *good*, and the whole "mercenary company" feel is very well captured. Might seriously consider getting the Mech Paks as well.


[Ed: The tumours could be malignant. And grow. And grow. And grow.

Anyhow a two headed snake would never survive.

Give me a credit card! Argh.

I'm giving "Stupidity" to Council. "Never underestimate the stupidity of people in large groups". Shows people skydiving. Perfect for the 23rd at their investiture.

I'm not GIVING Sarinee the books. I'm LENDING them to him. How's your set more precious than mine, apart from my battered #4? Bah. Not sent them yet.

One day I'll make a M$N is evil page. And list why it sucks. But I'd have to go scrape the barnacles off my plant pots first, since it's more pressing. The evils of integration with WinXP means my cause is lost anyway.

Sister didn't have a wedding dinner. I don't plan to have one either. Maybe a small tete e tete with friends.

Should you be checking out cute chicks? *ahem*

How come you've seen inside female toilets before?]

"The average blue whale produces over 400 gallons of sperm when it ejaculates, but only 10% of that actually makes it into his mate. So, 360 gallons are spilled into the ocean every time one unloads, and you wonder why the ocean is so salty... Beach anyone?"

Here's a good article on the real value of the female sex.

I still say the buffalo owner got dissed.

Quote of the day:

"I will never trust a squirrel again."

Friend from 40SAR on my unit:

"there's a kaffir coy rite? or smtg...
tt csm is a real asshole...
we were attached to him for ndp... every sentence he said is targetted at us.. "

NB: This is my current CSM :(

8:33PM:

After crushing a 1/3 finished essay earlier today, finally got off my butt and did an essay on the Death Penalty. Not bad, if I say so myself.

Mmm I feel more confident. And less lazy and guilty ;)

Thanks for the comments, Gabby (wryly). In reciprocation, I'm posting something here again.
- Her Accused of the Slight Accent

To: Yaoi Girl

"a nice large movie screen wherein two men lie down one on top of another and they kiss?"

Erm. I don't remember this part. Ergo why I thought you were being too obsessive.


I love Mike's List:

Unfortunate Product Design

AudioBooksForFree.Com, a UK-based online MP3 audio book publisher, offers the AK-MP3 Jukebox, a $300, 20-gigabyte MP3 player built into a Kalashnikov automatic rifle ammunition magazine. You can carry it in the included camouflage ammo pack, or, if you happen to have a Kalashnikov, snap it into the rifle. Don't bother trying to take this player as carry-on next time you fly...

Picture

Buy a MIG 21: Classic Mach 2 Russian Jet Fighter

Someone suggests that, to not waste my time in bondage, I learn driving and take some courses, especially the technical sort.

I'm slightly more convinced about the merits of learning driving, hearing him tell it, but still... Bah, maybe during the battalion's lull.

Of course, there's the obligatory commentary on females. Trite, but still somewhat intriguing :)


1:09PM:

I HATE MALAY FOOD.

My mouth's aflame.

*bleep*


More Malaysia Stories:

In Penang, a burger seller was irritated by his noisy housemate and threw a Molotov cocktail into the room. Malaysia Boleh!


Quotes:

[On Jamie Teo] I just find she is more, higher class of Ah Lian (a)

Imagine it's the ACJC age group, the Katong Convent look, and the Nee Soon girl's attitude to you. [Someone: Xia la. I'm getting married now. Stayout some more.]

Had dinner with Kairen at Bishan's Dome. We were supposed to work on GP, but in the end... Well.

On the way there, I met Zhixiang and his J1 A01C water polo friend who were also taking the train from Orchard. Zhixiang was at the gym in the morning and and swimming in the afternoon. He proclaims that army training is 'nothing' compared with what he used to do. Hehe. So committed.

I asked the J1 if he knew Yechao. Apparently he's quite popular now. He asked if I knew he was attached, and I replied that I did and that his girlfriend was very screwed up ;) And apparently the new vice-principal is very strict, and he's making RJ like other schools. Sad, very sad.

Minrui's an MP at Mindef. WHY DOES EVERYONE ELSE GET ALL THE LUCK?!

But then again: "that was last time mindef....
now is damn boring, conducting checks whole day, no more stayout, and no more off.
try standing out there and wave at cars for 5 hrs and you will understand"

Oh well.


Comments on blogs of friends:

"yechao's blog is irritating....
hm.. there's the jugs blog you post in (what fucking morons)
aureate's blog is okay
there's kun (??)
there's the yaoi blogs
there's the mugger blog
there's flippant.blogspot.com
the list goes on
GOD...

aureate's blog is pretty interesting"

At home now, having spent the whole afternoon sleeping. Am replete with dinner and rest; now what the hell do I do tonight?

Andrew (Gan)'s kind advice on the wedding money issue: "hey, re: wedding angpaos, what my parents do is ascertain the cost of the wedding dinner per person, i.e. if they know shangri-la or mandarin hotel charges say $50 per person for use of the function room plus the lavish dinner, they use that as a rough estimate. But they consider that the baseline."

One of my recently married colleagues showed me her very cool wedding valuation Excel spreadsheet, which included a very nifty macro for calculating the ideal angpao amount based on a variety of factors - overall economic outlook (value pulled from another spreadsheet she uses for personal financial planning), closeness to bride, closeness to groom, wedding venue, fengshui factors, personal vs couple's wealth differential, number of guests, etc etc. I plonked in all the numbers, and came up with RM128.50. A bit more pricey than I would've thought.

Other comments:

"Is it a hotel or a restaurant?"

"The guy is your friend, or the gal is your friend? If you give too much money to your guy friend.. it's like insulting him.. but if you give too little money to the female friend.. it's like you're being cheapskate."

"Weddings can have damn good return on investment man... from your family and close friends can probably make back the cost already."
Me: "That's one way to measure your social rank in life; how much of a financial success your wedding was."

"THE BLOODY RESTAURANT 'SAPU'-ED THE WHOLE (leftover) BARREL OF BEER! WHY DIDN'T YOU DRINK MORE!" (My recently-married colleague venting her frustration to another of our colleagues who was only concentrating on hard liquor at the wedding dinner)

Another Saturday, and I'm immured at work. What is it with spending weekends doing productive labour?? One of my colleagues remarked to me wryly this morning, "I don't remember what my daughter looks like."

Ah, primary and secondary school holidays have begun - cry for lost freedom. Nothing has hammered home the reality of working life as forcefully as the sudden awareness this morning that, for the first time in my life, December is no longer a month to spend zoning in front of the PC - playing games, that is. Now all my zoning is for - *spit* - PRODUCTIVE purposes. Although I get paid for it, so...

Back to work. Shall clear as much effluvium from my desk as humanly possible; it might make my Monday a little easier to deal. Have a wedding tomorrow to go to as well; my ex-colleague's. Parents actually asked me - "how much angpao are you giving?" I said, "50RM". They immediately launched into a tirade at my niggardliness and the need to "show face". THIS, from the people who lambast me when I order too many fishcakes at the yong tau foo stall.

Shall now go an ascertain going market rate for wedding angpaos. *curses* I hate the trappings of civilization.

And these Tissot watches are remarkably cool! A colleague of mine has one, and it's FUN to watch the hands fly smoothly back and forth as you invoke different functions.

Pithy quote: "Keep your friends close, and your friend's wife even closer."

More scary referrals.

"Kids lolita sex" - Starting to get a bit weary of all the pedophilia floating around, and just why so much of it gets steered to this blog. We're not all sweaty, child-lusting perverts hanging out around a primary school, right? Right??

"Foxes having sex in animations." - Perhaps someone looking for hu li jing porn.

"Numbers handphone from gay personal in Indonesian" - Aren't there enough gay Indonesians around? And how many of them have handphones?

"Burgermeister Meisterberger pics" - .. Right. I swear, Kris Kringle always scared me more in that classic Christmas flick.

"origin of kimberly" - In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was "Gah" (or "Air").

"Singapore NUS chio SOC", "chio nygh girls", "jasmine kok rgs", "scgs rgs icq" - ARGHARGHARGH. PEOPLE! If we had access to chio women, would be even bother blogging so damn much?????? Has it ever occurred to you that people who talk so much about girls' schools and chioness are the people least likely to be actually out doing (something about) them (chio girls)????? And would chio girls need to leave their contact details on the net, given that they're more popular than a keg of Tiger at a contractors' convention, and their handphone numbers have probably been passed around more often than a hors d'oeuvres tray? FACE FACTS - the only women on the net looking for dates are those so butt ugly they can't get a date or even someone to tell them the time in real life, or those with obscure and freaky interests (disorders) that can only be assuaged on the net (yaoi, crocheting, Hello Kitty pics, or bestiality). Same applies for males (*raises hand*), but remember, considering that, ceteris paribus, females are on the "limited supply" end while males are on the "overwhelming demand" corollary - any female who ISN'T able to get some in real life in the face of such (meat)market conditions must have serious ISSUES. (such as morality, celibacy, prudishness, bulimia, etc). Males, on the other hand, even some of the average and not so bad ones, HAVE NO DAMN CHOICE at times.

The above is of course discounting people who go on the net for legitimate reasons such as furthering one's body of knowledge, enlightened discourse with like-minded fellows, maintaing contacts with distant friends and loved ones, and keeping up with world events and social developments. And neopets. Ahem.

And below is an excerpt from a brilliant article which goes into the reasons why I've seriously cut down my irc usage.

"As online ads become more aggressive and clever and self-consciously crafted, what impact does that have on the human interactions that result from them? What does it mean to peddle yourself so effectively before you even meet your prospective partner? Can there possibly be any room left for the real, flawed, fragile human behind the ad?
And after buying into the suave, vegan pancake-maker and cognac-sipping reader of Whitman, can you possibly accept the humble, nervous accountant who stands before you? With such a marketing blitz, followed by frisky, flirtatious instant messaging and countless e-mails, followed sometimes even by long midnight conversations and phone sex, is it remotely possible not to be disappointed with the real thing?"

However, it's not just in the dating scene; it also applies somewhat in the platonic relationships / friendships arena. Although making platonic friends online seems far less stigmatizing, as the net represents the most efficient way for like-minded people with similar interests to get together and chat. But the issue of distorted perceptions and unrealistic expectations still remain - not to mention all the various solecisms and misinterpretations because there's no denotative body language or vocal tone context to put a statement in.

The text on a screen is not a person. But then again, in its defense, someone has once wrote that all perception of another human being is mediated in some way; through the eyes, ears, senses - so why shouldn't words on a screen (e-mail, icq) be just as valid a representation of an individual as far as communication and interaction is concerned? This person also added, "At least online one is consciously aware of the distortions; whereas in real life, we take them for granted." Very good point.

Ah well. Another pithy quote: "The worst part about being Bill Gates is not knowing if your hand is having sex with you just for the money."


[Ed: Well, maybe a secondary school.

And wah. A correct referral for once. Though Jasmine Kok doesn't have a blog afaik.

Why'd anyone make a list of ICQ UINs of RGS and SCGS girls? Anyway M$N's the rage nowadays.]

Word of the day: "G�tterd�mmerung".

Oh well. Over the last week, and over the upcoming one, work promises to be particularly brutal. Both my backups AND my authorising supervisors are on long leave. This is due to the fact that 1/3rd our department is Indian, who are all taking two weeks off for Deepavali season, and my direct (Chinese) supervisor just *happens* to be on mandated leave these two weeks as well. (Mandated leave: banking regulations state that each staff member has to take at least 10 consecutive days off a year - this is to catch any irregularities that he or she may have been covering up at work.)

I also just heard that buying new landed properties in Singapore, particularly for construction of bungalows (believe it or not, there *are* still plots for sale at obscene prices); or redevelopment of existing landed property (defined by URA as "complete demolition and rebuilding") actually requires the developer, under what is quaintly called the CD Shelter Act, to build bomb shelters in every new development. This applies to apartments as well, ironically. Bet you didn't know that your typical HDB apartment store room is actually a legally mandated architectural feature meant to shelter you from the impending holocaust, eh?

Apparently the requirements for a landed property's bomb shelter are somewhat stricter, whereas for HDB apartments the household shelter seems to be just for show - I mean, do you REALLY think that flimsy little pantry next to your kitchen can protect you from a nuclear fallout when the whole building probably collapses in a glowing pile of rubble?

The Powers That Be decree the laws of physics:

"Singapore�s apartment blocks are robust structures that will not easily collapse even after being hit by a bomb (although localised damage to the target is expected). However, because household shelters are stacked one on top of another, it forms a continuous vertical hardened tower with a firm foundation to provide added stability and resilience against collapse."

RIGHT - in the PAP universe of physics, the outer shell of the building collapses when bombed, leaving a hardened pillar standing amidst the rubble. Or, rather, *several* hardened pillars - not every single apartment in a block is stacked up directly over each other. (Try to vsiualize this - all the units on one side of the building will constitute one "continuous veritcal hardened tower", and the other side will have another "continuous vertical hardened tower." All of this while the corridors and elevator shafts collapse into the void deck.)

Even they acknowledge some fundamental facts of the universe.

"The concept of household shelters is not new. Houses in Switzerland, for example, have household shelters as well. The difference between Switzerland and Singapore, however, is that the Swiss build their shelters underground to:

� Protect against the powerful heat and blast effects of a possible nuclear threat.
� Last for protracted stays of several weeks to survive the lethal nuclear fallout period.

Aboveground household shelters cannot readily meet these requirements. (Emphasis added)

NO SHIT, SHERLOCK!

"Even after being hit by a bomb, it is very unlikely that local buildings will collapse like a pack of cards to leave the household shelters standing on their on. From engineering studies and tests conducted, buildings damaged by weapon effects are usually localised in nature. While several floors of the building may be perforated, thus causing the collapse of the adjacent areas, the building as a whole will remain standing."

Notice - *a* bomb. If conflict reaches a stage where a plane can get through Singapore's pretty good air defence systems; it isn't just going to be one plane; it's going to be *squadrons of planes* dropping *bombs*. Plural. And this obviously doesn't refer to terrorist attack of a single bomb - because terrorists don't give advance warning leading to them sounding the air raid siren to send your whole population into shelters.

Further skinflintery:

"Shelters should be fully utilised even during peacetime to make it cost effective. Therefore shelters are not purely designed and built to be dedicated shelters, but to serve peacetime functions as well. As these shelters are integral to the dwelling unit, separate maintenance is not required."

Wasn't that one of the reasons why they built MRT stations underground? Granted, those would be a little crowded now considering the growing population. Still I think the government could afford to stump up enough for a few rations, some generators, and some supplies. (Although the engineering cost of building a new reinforced underground shelter may get a bit high, I'll admit).

To add insult to injury, HDB home-owners are obliged to pay for the incremental costs of building such deathtra... erm.. I meant, HOUSEHOLD SHELTERS.

"On the issue of who should pay for the incremental cost of building shelters, the basic principle is that owners should bear the cost of their own protection at home. ...This figure can be regarded as a one-off up-front lump payment of the premium for assurance of protection in war � which is a relatively small price to pay."

I agree with the basic principle they outline - ie, homeowners paying for the maintenance and construction of personal home protection. There is, however, ANOTHER basic principle - that a person should be free to risk being explosively turned into incandescent vapour if he feels the "premium for assurance of protection in war" does not match the actual risk of war occurring. And, given the kind of "protection" that is being offered here, HDB owners are not only being coerced into insuring a risk against their will; they're getting crap coverage for that risk to boot.

Although, once again, to be fair, someone else has pointed out that the shelters serve another purpose, like NS - as part of Singapore's psychological arsenal of deterrence against would-be invaders. "Bring on the war, our people are ready to hide in their storerooms." After all, Who knows what the local geopolitics will be like 20 years from now? Better to be prepared, than dead. I might also note admiringly that little touches like this help to preserve a barrier mentality in the population that increases their dependence on (and hence likelihood of voting in) a strong central government - ie. PAP

If economic free-riding was *really* an issue here ie, the government not wanting to give away for free something as unimportant and voluntary as, say, protecting the welfare of the people in times of war, they should at least collect that money they're levying on all HDB apartments, and use that pool of money to construct and maintain proper communal shelters instead. THAT would be more cost-effective than building storerooms-cum-bomb shelters in EVERY Singaporean apartment.

"By comparison, a communal shelter at the basement would take occupants a much longer time to reach from their dwelling units. This would considerably increase their exposure [to] weapon effects even before they reach the safety of the communal shelter."

So which is worse; ten minutes of exposure to alpha radiation or sarin gas as you run to the nearest MRT or void deck, and the waiting arms of properly-trained and equipped paramedics, or HOURS of slow exposure in your HDB shelter without professional medical care? I suppose one compensation with the latter scenario is the higher likelihood that your whole family will asphyxiate / irradiate / go into convulsions together - that way you won't have to worry about getting lost or separated while fleeing the building. Or dying alone, for that matter.

SCD estimates that a family can last up to 4 hours in a sealed HDB shelter. We can compare this against one's life expectancy in a mandated, *ventilated*, reinforced bunker beneath a Nassim Hill mansion - I guess it's more important that the "Issue Elites" (Microsoft internal documentation jargon) and the economically successful lawyers, politicians, bankers and businessmen be protected to rebuild the economy and society after the years of hiding underground to avoid the nuclear winter and radioactive dust storms (Freeway Warrior meets Mr Kiasu). The upper-crust of the expatriate population in corporate-provided bungalows will be preserved as well along with their respective harems of Filipino-maid look-alike girlfriends and SPGs, so that they can repopulate the nation with hardy, mutant half-breeds capable of carrying out the brutal manual labour of reconstruction that the genteel, radioactive-illness-afflicted Chinese won't be able to stomach, but somehow able to plan, administer and manage.

In contrast, heartlanders are expendable. A few million casualties might even raise the PAP's electoral margins after the nuclear blizzard. "And the votes are in - all 50 of them (surviving expats, PAP supreme council members, a few lucky MPs, Caldecott Hill residents, etc). Ooh, perfect vote turnout this time." (Not that there's much else to do in a bunker apart from round-robin Twister. Or, for the more adventurous, some cavorting amidst gamma-irradiated Shenton Way ruins.).

Someone I know was griping because he had planned to construct a wine cellar in a new house he was building, and the law apparently calls for a strict separation of one's wine cellar and one's designated bomb shelter, even going so far as to stipulate certain dimensions and structural criterion. Now, this new homeowner is justifiably upset because the wine cellar he planned to design has to be resized downwards considerably to make room for the bomb shelter, and for some bureaucratic reason, you can't combine the two of them into one general structure.

I wondered, "Why not?". I can think of worse things than getting pissed out of your head while the ICBMs are reducing the world above you to a giant radioactive parking lot (the badly paved, open-air kind with an old man sitting on a stool issuing tickets, not the nice multi-storey ones with autopay machines).

Incidentally, it just occurred to me that those inspirational pieces of government propaganda on Signaporean TV really says a lot about the population. The ads I had in mind are:

a) The one where a despondent looking guy walks into his HDB living room over and over again, to the glum looks of his family, before entering in one glorious day to their hugs and smiles. This is followed by the soothing, "Three quarters of those who get retrenched find another job. Don't give up."

b) The one that's a bit too weird and abstract for my taste or capacities for description (it involves a park, flowers, cartoon graphics, and a bench) which ends in the words "Don't stop advertising."

I'm told there are others.

What does it say about the government's attitude to the population that it feels the need to pat them on the shoulder reassuringly just because they're unemployed, WHILE still hiking up prices for all manner of things? Note also that for all the gornaw about creativity and entrepeneurism, the official line is, "Get another job.", not, "Try to create something of value." or "Be your own boss." Get back to work - there's always some other MNC or GLC willing to take on a wage slave like you.

Also note the pleading exhortation of creativity - that they have to place an ad for ads. (Very charmingly post-modern:). Do they really feel that creativity and economic necessity has to be dictated? Okay, they're not the only country in the world to do this, but most interfere directly (like Malaysia has) with things like "Buy local goods" or :"Promote local tourism." Singapore goes, "Advertise more.".

I can only draw two conclusions about the latter ad; either that the government feels their captive populace are so easily manipulated that they will actually be inspired to buy more simply because more ads are being foisted onto them; or that advertising is such a vital sector of their economy that its continued health must be assured, no matter whether it works or not.

Btw, what did the Underdogs guy want from you?

Word of the day: "parastatal."

Been working late the past few weeks. Not entirely sure how long more can continue on with the 9am - 10+pm routine without cracking, although I am assured that people working in global investment banking firms have it far worse. Possibly - an old classmate of mine residing in Hong Kong in Credit Suisse First Boston tells me war stories of averaging up to 110 hours a week (that's about 15 hours a day - including weekends). But then again, the bastard is *paid* commensurately; this year his take-home pay including bonus was approximately 140K SGD. I get paid about.. well... let's just say it's an order of magnitude less.

As my colleague puts it, "We do First World work for Third World wages."

There has actually been a fairly rich panoply of events to blog about recently though, and a lot of it non-work-related. However, my few scrounged hours of leisure at the office are, inevitably, spent surfing news sites and keeping up with mail. The impetus to record my daily events for posterity has waned considerably; this entry is being made solely because I got to work remarkably early today thanks to a combination of 4 hours sleep the night before (I tend to wake up earlier when I sleep less, but I end up suffering more during the day), and light traffic (because of Ramadan; all the Malays are "buka puasa"-ing themselves for the day ahead.). Actually, fasting time tempts me to conversion - they get to go home earlier, and spend lunchtime slacking (obviously they don't have to go through the whole "quest for food" thing).

I just came back from a brief trip down to Singapore last weekend. That sojourn was made at terribly short notice - due to irritating bureaucratic legalities prohibiting Singaporean PRs from driving Malaysian cars, my aunt requisitioned me and my cousin to drive her car down to move stuff from her apartment. Not that I particularly minded - it *was* the long Deepavali weekend, and I expected to reap a pay-off in the form of food) Such expectations were gratified - on Saturday night, my aunt and uncle (who flew down to Singapore separately), took us to a herbal Chinese food restaurant opposite Raffles Hotel, which, I am told, Ong Teng Cheong was fond of frequenting. Probably for stress relief purposes - dealing with the PAP party machinery in a hostile government situation is enough to give anyone an infarction. The meal was superb; I particularly enjoyed the cod in herbal sauce and the braised scallops with whipped egg-white. And of course, my uncle brought out some choice selections from his cellar; a '96 Jasper Hills Shiraz; and a '94 Chateau LaGrange St-Julien. (Too bad he wasn't sufficiently induced to lay on the Sauternes for us:).

Later that night, went out to Crazy Elephant over at Clarke Quay to meet a few Melbourne friends; one now in SMM, and the other serving out his SAFOS bond at Tengah base (Air Force engineer logistics course). They all seem a tad burned out now - I suppose working life tends to dull one's sensitivities a bit. A lot of the boisterous clamouring one would have seen in days of yore was replaced by a sullen, stare-at-beer-mugs kind of awkward silence. Occasionally, a flash of the old humour would come through, in a brief remembrance of things past (the damn book still sits heavily on my shelf half-finished), and a few lighter moments when one of us using the bar's pool table as practice for his camp's upcoming tournament romped past several competitors in straight frames. Other than that, it was just the four of us, tired, prematurely burned-out, and just generally sian, and having little to fill in the conversation void once the first hour of general catching up was over.

How do people do it? How do people tolerate years of wage slavery - and often in far more appalling conditions than what we go through? Or is it simply that me and my generation (Read: "peer group") are (sic) "spoiled bastards?".

How do the adults of the previous generation endure up to 30+ years of such brutal living? Granted, my father has admitted that in his time, he was able to leave the office by 5 pm most days, but that obviously has changed in recent years, as employers realise to their joy that people are willing to be squeezed in this day and age.

Digression: The other day, while walking past Petaling Street, I noted the air mata kuching (longan drink) stall at the corner which has been there for about 40 years (current proprietor is second-generation). A rough estimate of his cashflow based on a 1000 customers a day, on average, puts his disposable income at about 50K SGD a *month* after rent (read: protection money), labour (he hires a couple of Indonesian maids to serve while he watches on benignly - they probably get paid in food and water and lodging), and materials (after all, the overheads on a bowl of air mata kuching are minimal. How much can longans cost, wholesale? Sugar? Ice?). He even reputedly owns a good number of the fake-watches and fake-sunglasses stalls in the immediate periphery. My point is - while he's certainly raking in the cash now, he must have spent at least 10 years of his life slogging it from 6am to 9pm *seven* days a week serving out bowls of sweetened longan crap to the incessant flow passers-by. Am I prepared to take that kind of sacrifice and hardship needed to spend my middle-later life just lounging around a cornershop watching the money flow in? Is it worth it? Tough question.

Sunday afternoon, I spent shopping. Yes, even I have to occasionally succumb to the lure of crass commercialism. Was down at Suntec, enjoying the lighting and architecture, especially the Stargate-like fountain terrace. Stark reminders of past times when I had occasion to tour the whole sprawling complex while it was under construction, and Suntec's fledgling years when most of it was empty, sprawling corridors as shoppers thought it was a difficult place to access. Managed to purchase a new pair of Fifth Avenue office slip-ons as was terribly sian of tying shoelaces in the morning (actually, tired of constantly replacing shoelaces as I tend to yank them too hard). This represents my first shoe purchase in almost 4 years. Now I officially own 4 pairs! (I face great sianness buying footwear due to my abnormally small size 5(British) / 37.5 (European) feet). Although the shoes are a little too big and they chafe my heels; I will have to find a cobbler to get some padding.

Was also irked to discover at DFS Galleria that overland (ie. non-plane) travellers are not eligible. Looks like Langkawi remains my only source for cheap liquor for now.

Sunday evening was spent glazing out in front of my uncle's plasma flat-screen TV with my cousins watching hackneyed DVDs (Rules of Engagement, Gladiator, Ben Hur). Dinner was leftover chicken rice. However, in a pleasant surprise, uncle called to take us out for 'supper' - which culminated in us ending up at Jeremy's Restaurant in the Carlton Hotel (run by the owner of Vis-a-vis (the restaurant, not the mailing list) in Bukit Timah as a more upscale (vis-a-vis Vis-a-vis(!)) version). Again, had more exquisite food - foie gras (been YEARS), escargot, mussels, and, of course, the usual assortment of grand cru Bourdeaux wines (none of which I recognized, except for the Lafite Rothschild).

Someone pointed out that my evident pleasure at such fine dining reflects the aristocratic bastardism of my 'spoiled brat' upbringing. Probably. But I like to think that my appreciation is heightened due to having spent years in Australia living off Coke, scrambled eggs, and instant noodles. Seriously though, I prefer to think of it as a preview / inspiration for the level of material comfort I should achieve - the stage where you don't have to squint at every item in a restaurant bill / menu, do service tax calculations in your head, and decide to go for the salad instead. But one thing I *do* realise is that I have a distorted perception of economic welfare - mainly because I seem to know of people my age who own Jaguars, hold 20,000SGD house parties in Nassim Hill, spend thousands of pounds on their mother's credit card WITHOUT THE MOTHER NOTICING BECAUSE SHE THOUGHT IT WAS PART OF HER OWN PURCHASES, take holidays in the Swiss Alps as regular constitutionals, and actually have a university education (note, a lot of people I know with those first few qualities miss out on the latter). You readers think everyone has a university education? Living your life assuming a university education is the *norm* instead of the minority privilege it actually is seriously distorts your thinking, as it did mine, I confess. One learns the hard way that out in the working world, "Where did you study?" is NOT always a good conversational starter, particularly if you have a senior executives who worked their way up from being clerks.

Back at the apartment, I rang Gabriel on the phone to help me carry out some eBay transactions for me as the only Net access in the house came from a terminal wired into the plasma screen TV, and my uncle and cousins were watching some interminable Korean VCD series. Due to some communication issues (re: continually being unable to log on), it took a while before I could leave the toilet in which I had sequestered myself to talk in privacy. Upon coming out, the cheese platter that my aunt had lovingly laid out for us was half-empty, and most of the icewine had been finished. Feel my rage. *deadpan tones*

Anyhoo, spent Sunday just catching up with some old associates and acquaintances, and nothing much happened. No one seems to have changed appreciably; nor were the conversations sufficiently fascinating to blog here (although it *was* good to catch up with a lot of you guys. Really. I mean it:) It does strike me that I almost never have friends in the same age group - it's always older or younger. Maybe I enjoy bridging mental gulfs?

On the long drive back to KL, it was spent listening to my uncle go on and on about his newfound love for wuxia novels and Korean series. He even waxed lyrical on the Korean cultural renaissance and how Korean series now placed an emphasis on romantic love, compared to the more seamy Taiwanese and Hong Kong series currently on the market. It's bizarre how this workaholic uncle of mine, after 30 years acquiring wealth through shrewd and ruthless deal-making to the point where he doesn't need to work anymore, now chooses to spend his nights watching Return of the Condor Heroes or Summer / Autumn / Spring VCDs until 3 am. Me - I simply passed the time tuning him out, chilling to Teresa Teng tunes and stared at the headlights trawling past.

Certainly there is a yawning chasm of perception between myself and my younger contemporaries; particularly those still mired in education. I mean, the sheer.. difference between the concerns I had 9 months ago and the concerns I have now are massive. Of course, being part of the productive economy as opposed to being a resource-devouring minor (or, to be more charitable, human capital investment) is the primary reason. That's why it's increasingly difficult to empathize with people who are, however justifiably, worried about their examinations or their university options.

The things I worry about these days seem to be more - real, for lack of a better word. Of course, since I went into university, the pressure to excel academically was totally expurgated, but I still had exams to pass. I still had all-night, pressure-learn-panic sessions for those subjects which I attended only two or three lectures the whole semester. But now, the nature of worry changes, as well as the object of worry. Before, it was a sharp, adolescent kind of fear, kinaesthetically akin to splashes of acid on parts of your skin. Now, it's more of a dull, incessant haze - like the throb of bruises all over that just won't heal. Before, I panicked to cram factoids into my head and complete assignments in time. Now - I worry daily that systems will fail or that information goes incorrectly checked. Interestingly enough, the... pressure applied at work is more subtle. Being late for a policy paper at work can be hedged, fudged, or called-off entirely, unless you have the misfortune to have THAT kind of boss, whereas being late for a university essay (although there are notable exceptions) results in an instant blow to your bottom-line, markswise.

But some things don't change. I still stare glumly at my phone bills each month, and I still can't afford all the books I would like. Nonetheless, even the gaps feel better in my highly cyclical financial state (overspending the first week after payday; scrimping dollars the week before). It's good to at least know that money is coming, and it's not coming after a painful confrontation with your parents as to why you spent all that money on comic books. It's good to be able to tell your parents that it's my damned money, and if I want to buy a new Furby, I don't have to answer for it. And perhaps I'm conservative, but it's good to be able to at least give a part of your pay back to your family every month, even if it means you have to eat one less meal at Deutsche Bierhaus, or spend less time making IDD calls.

It's NOT good to have credit cards though. Have resigned to simply clearing out my bills by next year, and starting 2003 with more stringent financial planning.

There's also the odd feeling that you're doing something - if not exactly socially relevant . .something that *matters* in the real world. Passing my philosophy paper or finishing an Oracle assignment in university was simply me getting my family's money's worth out of overseas education and hopefully opening the way to a job. Working in a real firm - well, I'm under no illusions about the morality of my work, which basically entails safeguarding corporate interests and widening the wealth gap. But nevertheless, I'm doing *something*. A paper I write directly affects how the bank I work for values a billion-dollar investment portfolio (not nearly as grandiose as it sounds, but I don't think anyone wants a long discourse on risk management at this point:). A system I helped plan makes work a little easier and our job a little more efficient. A bit of research I contribute helps affect a policy decision. Things like that. Material contributions to the real world - although "material" makes little sense in the nebulous world of capital markets, where *value* often exists as a digital exchange between computer systems in different banks, or, more metaphysically, as a notional pipe dream representative of investor expectations.

I don't worry so much anymore about the usual meaningless yet charmingly adolescent subjects of depressive introspection - relationships, personal popularity (or lack thereof), high-flung existentialism, low-brow nihilism, etc. Instead, my worries seem to have sharpened at both conceptual extremes; from the extremely trivial - stuff like finding a cobbler for my shoes which don't fit properly, wondering what to eat for lunch, dithering over what colour tie to wear, getting irritated at leaves falling all over car - and stuff at the other brutally practical and concrete extreme - career future, personal future, financial difficulties, further studies, workplace politics, and workplace problems (Like my boss' irritating tendency to pick at this horrible huge wart on his neck, while insisting on about 8 or 9 rewrites of a paper in successive drafts. All of the rewrites involving spending HOURS, I swear, HOURS trying to decipher his fucking horrible handwriting and shorthand notation, which all involves sentence restructuring and virtually NO value-adding amendment).

But I guess the only adolescent hangover is that I still suffer from the one things which all humans share according to the Cherokee Indians: loneliness. The nature of what I have to deal with may have changed, but my capacity to deal with it remains fixed in the childish mindset I've been carrying around for years, it seems. So much for "maturity."

In related but practical matters, I have yet another dilemma to contend with. Currently am on tap for a job at GIC. Given that the vast majority of the readers on this blog are probably from the cultured ("cultured" in the Yakult bacteria sense of the word), Ecole Nationale d'Administration-type scholarship caste, I probably won't have to explain what the GIC is or does.

"On tap" basically means that I get to go for the interview, next week, with a strong implied chance of getting the job assuming I dress up, comb my hair, dance the dance, talk the talk, and don't vomit all over the interviewer. This is not as much of an achievement as it sounds, for a variety of reasons, some of which I'll share here.

The primary reason is that I'm just *not* sure what kind of job I'm interviewing for. Is it some lame admin or HR position? But then again, as someone once pragmatically pointed out - in your CV, people tend to see the "Goldman-Sachs" or the "Morgan Stanley", and ignore the bit that says, "Clerk" or "CEO's coffee-pourer".

Another reason is that this interview is with a very specific subset of GIC. Despite their justified notoriety as being one of the tougher scholarships to obtain (I am told), it's not very well-known that GIC is split into three separate companies - GIC RE, GIC SI, and plain old GIC. They have different investment mandates - go to www.gic.com.sg and see for yourself. My interview is with GIC RE - which potentially means a *very* narrow specialization, and (to me, at least), fairly boring investment opportunity sourcing. I mean, how fun is it to do the PV of leasing cashflows for the next 20 years? The most technical thing one ends up doing, even in a front-line position, will probably be haggling over IRRs with truculent developers. On the plus side, they *do* have significant portfolios in REITs and other associate property securizations, which makes it a little more interesting. And now, having successfully bored every single reader worrying about ORD / A levels / O levels / getting laid, I shall move on.

See, I'm of two minds about taking up this job (contingent upon it being formally offered me, as compared to the current verbal handshake offer). Firstly, the logistics issues are frightening. I have to move back *down*; re-apply for a PR, get new credit cards, get new housing, (possibly) apply for a car loan, shift all my crap (ie. books + PC) down south, abandon the creature comforts I have here, and so on and so forth. The administrative difficulties are staggering. Not to mention the brutal work hours - but I'm already used to pretty brutal work hours. In fact, I work much better late at night. Another thing to worry about is that the GIC RE team comprises of either old, highly-experienced lao jiaos, or young, sprightly, over-qualified post-grads from Stanfrod types. It's bad enough being the one-eyed king in the valley of the blind, which I am in my current job, thanks to my ability to format graphs in Excel any way people want; it's even worse to be the vegetarian at the Meat-Packers' Association technical symposium.

But the opportunities are tempting too.

Firstly, I can achieve the "get out of family's house" dream I've been ranting on about at length in earlier posts.

Secondly, as I also mentioned previously - BROADBAND!

Thirdly, by all lights, GIC's still GIC, and even if the specific job scope is narrow, the prestige is still greater, and it would be good to move away from a support-centre job and into an actual business unit. An ancillary benefit of this is that the job means meeting more people, widening scope of contacts, networking, etc.

Fourthly, GIC RE's mandate is in *offshore* investment - which means I won't be sizing up HDB financing (hah!) or wondering if it's cost-effective to chop down another nature reserve for another golf course (at least not a local one. I believe in exporting one's environmental despoliation to other countries for *their* descendants to handle). Travel - now there's a tempting prospect.

Fifthly, I can lose weight! Currently am weighing in a bit too heavy at 65kg (by my semi-anorexic standards); living alone would mean eating a lot less consistently and wholesomely as I'm the person who'd rather drink a lot of milk than walk all the way down to 7-11 for a hot dog. Ergo: weight loss.

Sixthly, I might have more friends around me. But this one is tempered by the realization that these days, everyone's going to be too busy working to meet up or hang out. A sad but true fact of life.

Actually, if anyone knows of a decent place for rent or even purchase (not bloody likely, but if the price is reasonable...), please let me know. Gak. More post-tertiary education issues to contend with; like finding a house, signing a lease agreement, and not pissing off your landlord. Am looking for a plce with these factors, in order of importance

a) MRT-access - 300m or less would be perfect.
b) Reasonable rent. $400-600/month.
c) SCV; if not actual SCV, then at least cabling / port for subscription
d) Enough space for all my books and PC.
d) Freedom to smoke
e) Freedom to get quietly smashed in private (if a room).
f) Laundry would be nice.
g) Cooking would be nice as well. Willing to pay reasonable extra.
h) Freedom to bring 'hos back to my chillin' bachelor digs! (Fantasy world, but who knows? Oceans rise. Cities fall. Hope prevails. Yeah right.)
i) Reasonably near Central is nice, but I don't care if it's in Boon Lay as long as it's NEAR THE MRT.

And that's all I have to say for now, as work calls. Damn, I haven't even gotten in any serious gaming time in over a week. Am losing my edge.

Hopefully Andrew Gan [8/11/02 - edited upon request] has transferred some merchandise he purchased for me over to my sister - for some reason he seems chary of hanging on to it until December. Oh well.

A final anecdote that sums up today's climate - my colleague who just came back from leave related to us how a stentorian Indonesian customs officer took away a yellow plastic gun she had purchased for her four year old son. The good customs officer promptly went through the scientific process of assessing its lethality by simultaneously peering down the barrel and pulling the trigger, whilst my colleague's son was wailing plaintively, "That man took away my gun!". After some altercation, the deadly weapon was allowed into the country, and reportedly the weapon's owner immediately retorted, "Once he gives me back my gun then I shoot him!"

This is a pointed political analogy to the issue of Iraqi regime change, North Korean disarmament; and the general attitude of the Israeli army to the occupied territories:)

Someone's getting snotty about language, I see:)

Here's a quote that says everything you need to know about politics and human nature:

"There would be dancing in the streets if the (Iraqi) regime fell. Half would be dancing because they are happy, the other half because that's what they are used to doing for whoever rules them.�

*bleep*

This is ridiculous. They look like they're posing for a movie.

The Last Action Heroes!



HERE COME THE MEN IN BLACK: Special undercover Indonesian police officers showcased their anti-terrorism tactics during a demonstration at the Brigade Mobile Police headquarters in Jakarta yesterday. The demonstration was held to show that the government was ready to face any terror threat.

[From 30th Oct's Straits Times]


Lively Star Control 2 Discussion Thread

They're remaking SC2 in time for the 10th Anniversary. Yes 2002 is the 10th Anniversary. Woo hoo!

Quicktime Commercial for the remake

Toys for Bob - the company set up by Paul Ford and Fred Reiche III, which is remaking it

Estimated time of release - November 2002 (At least that's what they say)

Estimated price - FREE

Open Source too.


Someone on Zhen1 Qing2:

i think there has already been 5 kidnapping cases
and they used the same good ol' cliches
mr. a broke up
then he goes to a park
then he sees a lovey dovey couple
haha quite funny

extremely heart warming eh
the people in zhenqing are always eating by the way

NB: Above person just got me into trouble. Gah.


My sources tell me Horse is in Prague now!

Human rights: A suitable target for foreign policy? Cover story The Economist April 12, 1997

"WE SET this nation up to make men free, and we did not confine our conception and purpose to America," proclaimed President Woodrow Wilson in 1919. As the century draws to a close, the Wilsonian idea that it is America's mission to promote freedom abroad retains a powerful grip in his country.

On a recent visit to China, Newt Gingrich, the speaker of the House of Representatives, told his hosts that the idea of freedom was so central to American identity that a Chinese-American relationship that did not include discussion of human rights was impossible. In such a dialogue, proclaimed the normally garrulous Mr Gingrich, "I can't speak. I have nothing to say." Yet, for all the boldness of Mr Gingrich's words, western policy on human rights is a mess.

For the past six years, the European Union has sponsored a motion censuring China at the annual session of the UN Human Rights Commission. This year, however, France and Germany have backed off, making a common EU position impossible.

In Washington meanwhile, the Clinton administration has been facing a barrage of accusations that America is sacrificing human-rights policy on the altar of trade with China. Fighting for human rights in places like Myanmar and Nigeria has become more difficult as a result.

The whole shambles will merely confirm the prejudices of sceptics who think that the very notion of linking human rights and foreign policy is mistaken (see article). "Realists" argue that the "internal affairs" of other states are not the proper business of foreigners.

that rule is broken, they say, the door is opened to all sorts of unnecessary disputes. Why argue with another country if it presents no threat to your security and is prepared to co-exist with you peacefully?

The realists also often argue that it is hubristic to try to export western ideas of freedom to places with different traditions and levels of development. Attempts to introduce western political models into poor countries have a habit of coming unstuck: look at Africa or Cambodia.

The West's own experience teaches that rights evolve over time. Universal suffrage came to Britain only in 1918. Racial segregation continued in parts of the United States until the 1960s. These are powerful arguments, but they are not ultimately convincing.

It is true that in the long run internal changes, particularly wealth and better education, tend to be the main agents and underpinnings of civil rights. But that is not to say that there is no role for external pressure.

In some places-South Africa, for one-such pressure has undoubtedly helped to bring change. The pressure need not be for wholesale reform. It is possible to object to governments torturing or silencing their citizens without asking them to adopt the American constitution in its entirety.

But why bother to object? Why should it matter to the citizens of Western Europe or America if one lot of foreigners is mistreating another lot?

For several reasons. The first is simple morality. If you hear your neighbour beating up his children, do you give a shrug and say it is none of your business? Most people think not.

Realists argue that the moral rules that apply to individuals do not apply to states, whose relations should be governed by considerations of national interest not of morality.

But countries are made up of individuals, and in democracies their wishes are meant to be reflected. Few voters would endorse the idea that their governments should completely ignore moral issues in making foreign policy.

Most tend to feel-correctly-that at some stage their own countries would be defiled by maintaining uncritical relations with an utterly barbaric government. Who would argue for normal relations with Nazi Germany?

Good for one, good for all But morality is not the only reason for putting human rights on the West's foreign-policy agenda. Self-interest also plays a part.

Political freedom tends to go hand in hand with economic freedom, which in turn tends to bring international trade and prosperity. And governments that treat their own people with tolerance and respect tend to treat their neighbours in the same way.

Dictatorships unleashed the first and second world wars, and most wars before and since. Democracies seldom, if ever, take up arms against each other. Even in more prosaic issues than those of war and peace-the observance of international agreements on trade or the environment, for instance-liberal democracies are more likely to play by the rules.

They, after all, accept the concepts of scrutiny and legal challenge. A world in which more countries respected basic human rights would be a more peaceful and orderly place.

All very well, the sceptics reply, but even with a global economy the world is not a global country with a global set of laws, a global police force to enforce them and a global judiciary to try wrongdoers. Moreover, in the real world, western democracies trade enthusiastically with countries like China and Indonesia.

They may wince at massacres in Beijing or East Timor, but they will not, in Jack Kennedy's words, "pay any price, bear any burden" to promote liberty. They will almost certainly not go to war and they are generally reluctant to disrupt trade.

The countries singled out for a bashing are often soft targets, like Myanmar, which offer few economic opportunities and have little power to hit back. Sometimes when the West claims to be acting in the interests of human rights, it is really responding to domestic pressures-such as protectionist demands against cheap competition.

It is true that there are elements of inconsistency, even hypocrisy, in the West's attempts to foster the cause of human rights round the world. So what?

That is an inevitable consequence of the fact that human rights are only one of many foreign-policy concerns. Keeping the peace and encouraging trade are also important goals.

The point is that democracies should both accept and proclaim that promoting freedom is an important aspect of foreign policy.

that objective should be pursued will depend on circumstances. Some governments are more brutal than others; some are more susceptible to pressure than others.

Depending on the egregiousness of the offence and the other interests at stake, supporting human rights may mean anything from armed intervention to a statement in parliament. The effort will not always succeed, but it is unlikely to be wholly ignored.

Nowadays autocrats are defensive, especially when they are accused of failing to respect human rights-witness China's outraged protestations every time it stands accused.

The idea of democracy, and indeed the practice, albeit often in a flawed manner, is spreading as never before. Pressure for human rights discomfits oppressors, encourages their victims and, in the long run, makes the world safer. Apply it.

I've always thought he looked like a clown.


Yaoi Girl's arms are aching from "carrying boxes of sweets and cds around".

Bah :)

I'd love to see females carrying chairs next time. Sexism is evil.

"as I ate my dinner I was gratified to find out that he had got close to the part where surely manly comradely kingly kinly and whatever other ties don't go as far, Aragorn and Boromir! Or, I have yet to see what reason you had for lying full body on top of Boromir, Mister Aragorn, Sez the Evenstar. You know, if you've watched the show.

So. Anticipation."

You. Stop thinking filthy and perverted (in all senses of the word) thoughts.

Or I'm gonna pick up Yuri just to annoy you.


Stanley's doing office work for the CID now.

I repeat: How come everyone gets all the cushy jobs?!

And the incomprehensible mystery is solved.

The mystery caller was He Who MUST Not Be Named.

Of course. How could I have been so stupid?

Perhaps I didn't know him for who he was because he didn't use any bombastic words.

And he denies that he was the one who called twice, only revealing his identity this time because he needed me to do dirty work on eBay for him.

Gah.

[1st call:

Him: "Who do you know who talks like that?"

Me: Actually a lot of people]


Charles Tan Yong Chye is an IQA inspector for medical centres.

He's stayout but opts to stayin (?!)

How come everyone gets all the cushy jobs? :)

Oh this's ridiculous.

Tired of reality TV? Try the Everitt road show

THE most talked-about show in town is not playing at the Esplanade, but at an outdoor theatre in the east with a cast of amateurs and an unpredictable plot.

The Joo Chiat drama - a long-running neighbourhood war in which seven families are united against one - has become Singapore's answer to reality TV.

But the fans watch it live.

Up to 100 people a day, from as far as Malaysia, turn up at Everitt Road hoping to catch some action...

Ms Chan said laughingly to her father: 'Dad, all these people have actually been waiting for us to come home. This is so sad, they have no life!'

A young man with spiffy gelled hair called out: 'Hey, old man, we came to watch you dance. Dance leh!'

A smiling Mr Chan obliged by waltzing in his driveway with an imaginary partner for about 30 seconds or so, to the onlookers' amusement...



Video footage from the Gan's security camera catches Mr Chan dancing in his front yard.

Mr Chan said jokingly the following day: 'People have to join Star Search to become famous, but we have become instant celebrities.'...

The dispute involves a tangled web of old hurts and recent slights spanning 10 years and incorporating issues such as parking space, littering, verbal abuse, harassment and stalking...

Public interest in the case has heated up, fanned by two Mandarin documentaries aired about two weekends ago, which showed video footage taken by the Chans' neighbours.

The most talked-about clips: Ms Chan and her mother showing off their diamond jewellery and asking their neighbours: 'You have or not?'; Ms Chan saying that she dislikes poor people; Mr Chan, clad in just a pair of shorts, dancing around and shaking his bum at the camera, with his daughter singing 'Call the police'.

The footage has caused much eyebrow-raising over how a well-educated person like Ms Chan, who holds a doctorate in life sciences and teaches at a secondary school in Bedok, could behave in such an arrogant and childish manner.

Avid gamblers also became devoted fans when the Chans' car licence-plate number, 3174, came out tops in the 4-D draw on Oct 13...

Madam Cheong said: 'Last November, Ms Chan followed my eldest son to the bus stop while he was going to school for an exam and scolded him in public. My son felt so embarrassed.'

Ms Chan denied it indirectly, saying: 'They must think I am very good at multitasking. Where do I have so much time to do all that they accuse me of?'

The Chans said that after some conflict with the older Chua brother's family and the Lohs over parking space, their two cars were vandalised repeatedly - 132 scratches over two years, in fact.

They also said that the Tays had dropped cigarette butts into their backyard, burning a hole in their awning.

All three families have denied responsibility for the incidents.

The Gans' unhappiness stems from the spotlight outside the Chans' house that shines directly into one of their bedrooms. The Chans say the spotlight is for security purposes.

The families are also rankled by the name- calling dished out by the Chans, such as 'cheapskate', 'low-class' and 'bastard'.

The Chans say these were merely said tit-for-tat - in response to their neighbours' Hokkien expletives.

Both sides claim that they have video and photographic evidence of the other's wrongdoings.

[NB: This whole thing reminds me of Lin Yucheng - from the quotes to the story to the writing. LOL]

Contrapunto Bestiale Alla Mente - Adriano Banchieri (1568-1634)

Tempo: 160

4c2 4c2 4c2 4.c2 8c2 4c2 4c2 4c2 4b1 8c2 8b1 8c2 8d2 4e2 4c2 4c2 4c2 4.c2 8d2 4c2 4d2 4d2 4d2 8b1 8a1 8b1 8c2 4d2 4c2 4c2 4c2 4.c2 8c2 4c2 4c2 4c2 4b1 2c2


I go searching for a digitised form of one of my old GP handouts and I find it, in its entirety, on the web. Wah.

Allan Bloom - "The Closing of the American Mind" - Music (1987)

"Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music...

When I first started teaching and lived in a house for gifted students. The "good" ones studied their physics and then listened to classical music. The students who did not fit so easily into the groove, some of them just vulgar and restive under the cultural tyranny, but some of them also serious, were looking for things that really responded to their needs. Almost always they responded to the beat of the newly emerging rock music...

This is the significance of rock music. I do not suggest that it has any high intellectual sources. But it has risen to its current heights in the education of the young on the ashes of classical music, and in an atmosphere in which there is no intellectual resistance to attempts to tap the rawest passions... But rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire-not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored. It acknowledges the first emanations of children's emerging sensuality and addresses them seriously, eliciting them and legitimating them, not as little sprouts that must be carefully tended in order to grow into gorgeous flowers, but as the real thing. Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.

Young people know that rock has the beat of sexual intercourse. That is why Ravel's Bolero is the one piece of classical music that is commonly known and liked by them. In alliance with some real art and a lot of pseudo-art, an enormous industry cultivates the taste for the orgiastic state of feeling connected with sex, providing a constant flood of fresh material for voracious appetites. Never was there an art form directed so exclusively to children.

Ministering to and according with the arousing and cathartic music, the lyrics celebrate puppy love as well as polymorphous attractions, and fortify them against traditional ridicule and shame. The words implicitly and explicitly describe bodily acts that satisfy sexual desire and treat them as its only natural and routine culmination for children who do not yet have the slightest imagination of love, marriage or family. This has a much more powerful effect than does pornography on youngsters, who have no need to watch others do grossly what they can so easily do themselves. Voyeurism is for old perverts; active sexual relations are for the young. All they need is encouragement...

These are the three great lyrical themes: sex, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love. Such polluted sources issue in a muddy stream where only monsters can swim. A glance at the videos that project images on the wall of Plato's cave since MTV took it over suffices to prove this. Hitler's image recurs frequently enough in exciting contexts to give one pause. Nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful or even decent can find a place in such tableaux. There is room only for the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art, combined with a pervasiveness, importance and content beyond Tocqueville's wildest imagination.

Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy...

The music business is peculiar only in that it caters almost exclusively to children, treating legally and naturally imperfect human beings as though they were ready to enjoy the final or complete satisfaction. It perhaps thus reveals the nature of all our entertainment and our loss of a clear view of what adulthood or maturity is, and our incapacity to conceive ends...

I believe it [rock music] ruins the imagination of young people and makes it very difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education...

I suspect that the rock addiction, particularly in the absence of strong counterattractions, has an effect similar to that of drugs. The students will get over this music, or at least the exclusive passion for it. But they will do so in the same way Freud says that men accept the reality principle as something harsh, grim and essentially unattractive, a mere necessity. These students will assiduously study economics or the professions and the Michael Jackson costume will slip off to reveal a Brooks Brothers suit beneath. They will want to get ahead and live comfortably. But this life is as empty and false as the one they left behind. The choice is not between quick fixes and dull calculation. This is what liberal education is meant to show them. But as long as they have the Walkman on ' they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf."


Huihui [NB: They're coming back mid December!] just introduced me to Tom Lehrer.

Wickedly delicious ;)

National Brotherhood Week

One week of every year is designated National Brotherhood Week. This is just one of many such weeks honoring various worthy causes. One of my favorites is National Make-Fun-Of-The-Handicapped Week, which Frank Fontaine and Jerry Lewis are in charge of as you know.
During National Brotherhood Week various special events are arranged to drive home the message of brotherhood - this year, for example, on the first day of the week, Malcolm X was killed, which gives you an idea of how effective the whole thing is.
I'm sure we all agree that we ought to love one another, and I know there are people in the world who do not love their fellow human beings, and I hate people like that!
Here's a song about National Brotherhood Week.

Oh, the white folks hate the black folks,
And the black folks hate the white folks;
To hate all but the right folks
Is an old established rule.

But during National Brotherhood Week,
National Brotherhood Week,
Lena Horne and Sheriff Clark are dancing cheek to cheek.
It's fun to eulogize
The people you despise
As long as you don't let 'em in your school.

Oh, the poor folks hate the rich folks,
And the rich folks hate the poor folks.
All of my folks hate all of your folks,
It's American as apple pie.

But during National Brotherhood Week,
National Brotherhood Week,
New Yorkers love the Puerto Ricans 'cause it's very chic.
Step up and shake the hand
Of someone you can't stand,
You can tolerate him if you try!

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews.

But during National Brotherhood Week,
National Brotherhood Week,
It's National Everyone-Smile-At-One-Another-Hood Week.
Be nice to people who
Are inferior to you.
It's only for a week, so have no fear;
Be grateful that it doesn't last all year!


More tales of prurience:

"bloody hell im feeling pretty err lusty at this moment. hahahahaha. im sorry. just hafent ogled at guys in such a long long time. haha. and have guys with sexy sexae voices bump into you and brush their fingers on your arm. hahahahahaha. im sorry i didnt mean it in such a perverted way. sorrysorry. feeling like triking that out too. hahahahahahaha. how fun. we were people watching on orchard yest. wif max and leeying. fun man. but no cute guys. wat a downer. except the oohhahh-able international sch guys!!! =]=] and the malay posers. malay guys in their "rap hiphop" getups are hot! hahaha. sorry. so are international school guyyss!!! haha. too bad la. just feeling deprived. he is like yah not exactly hot but sigh. i love him so much anyway. blardhy. haha. and that cute guy on the bus. wtf. he sat down! just when i got into a position to observe him better! lieuuu. hahah. i am sorry i sound so errrrrr slutty. nono. im not that type lehz. whoever i ogle at is forgotten once i lose sight la. im not that shallow. blardhy hell.... hahahahaha. amusedddd. oh btw i think it is true the attached guys somehow have so much more appeal. =] but of cos. tt doesnt apply in some cases! wink."

A paean:

Are you blind when you're born? Can you see in the dark?
Can you look at a king? Would you sit on his throne?
Can you say of your bite that it's worse than your bark?
Are you cock of the walk when you're walking alone?

Because Jellicles are and Jellicles do
Jellicles do and Jellicles would
Jellicles would and Jellicles can
Jellicles can and Jellicles do

When you fall on your head, do you land on your feet?
Are you tense when you sense there's a storm in the air?
Can you find your way blind when you're lost in the street?
Do you know how to go to the Heaviside Layer?

Because Jellicles can and Jellicles do
Jellicles do and Jellicles can
Jellicles can and Jellicles do
Jellicles do and Jellicles can
Jellicles can and Jellicles do

Can you ride on a broomstick to places far distant?
Familiar with candle, with book and with bell?
Were you Whittington's friend? The Pied Piper's assistant?
Have you been an alumnus of heaven or hell?

Jellicle songs for Jellicle cats
Jellicle songs for Jellicle cats
Jellicle songs for Jellicle cats
Jellicle songs for Jellicle cats

We can dive through the air like a flying trapeze
We can turn double somersaults, bounce on a tire
We can run up the wall, we can swing through the trees
We can balance on bars, we can walk on a wire

Jellicles can and Jellicles do
Jellicles can and Jellicles do
Jellicles can and Jellicles do
Jellicles can and Jellicles do

Jellicle songs for Jellicle cats
Jellicle songs for Jellicle cats
Jellicle songs for Jellicle cats
Jellicle songs for Jellicle cats

Can you sing at the same time in more than one key
Duets by Rossini and waltzes by Strauss
And can you (as cats do) begin with a C
That always triumphantly brings down the house

Jellicle cats are queen of the nights
Singing at astronomical heights
Handling pieces from the Messiah
Hallelujah, angelical choir

The mystical divinity of unashamed felinity
Round the cathedral rang "Vivat!"
Life to the everlasting cat!

Feline, fearless, faithful and true
To others who do what

Jellicles do and Jellicles can
Jellicles can and Jellicles do
Jellicle cats sing Jellicle chants
Jellicles old and Jellicles new
Jellicle song and Jellicle dance

Jellicle songs for Jellicle cats
Jellicle songs for Jellicle cats
Jellicle songs for Jellicle cats
Jellicle songs for Jellicle cats

Practical cats, dramatical cats
Pragmatical cats, fanatical cats
Oratorical cats, delphioracle cats
Skeptical cats, dispeptical cats
Romantical cats, pedantical cats
Critical cats, parasitical cats
Allegorical cats, metaphorical cats
Statistical cats and mystical cats
Political cats, hypocritical cats
Clerical cats, hysterical cats
Cynical cats, rabbinical cats

Jellicle songs for Jellicle cats
Jellicle bells that Jellicles ring
Jellicle sharps and Jellicle flats
Jellicle songs that Jellicles sing

Jellicle songs for Jellicle cats
Jellicle songs for Jellicle cats
Jellicle songs for Jellicle cats
Jellicle songs for Jellicle cats

There's a man over there with a look of surprise,
As much as to say, "Well now how about that!"
Do I actually see with my own very eyes
A man who's not heard of a Jellicle cat?
What's a Jellicle cat? What's a Jellicle cat?

[NB: The original Broadway lyrics have been replaced with the LONDON lyrics]


Something I don't understand.

Band with former RI, present RJC boys called "The Hotties" (Ugh). Band performs mainly Chinese Pop (eeeeee). Band is so "hot" that it performs at numerous events including:

2002
RJC Talentime // 15th February
Solace // 16th February
RJC Friendship Week Mini Concert // 20th February
RGS PSL Carnival 2002
Oasis Competition @ Heeren
Teacher's Day Celebrations
Asianbeat 2002
HOTTIES LIVE IN CONCERT (NUS University Cultural Centre)

2001
Arts at the Atrium (RI) 2001
RGS PSL Carnival 2001
RI Teachers Day
Nanyang Prom Night
RI Grad Night
MusicWeed // 28 Dec

2000
Arts at the Atrium (RI) 2000

With my lame foot, my options are limited.

Heh heh I found an option in the System Configuration Utility that allows you to limit physical memory. It specifies the maximum amount of physical memory Windows 98 will use.

I'm using 100MB now. System's at a crawl, but problems seem to be gone. And Norton Diagnostics doesn't show any problems with memory.


The pain relief lotion - LMS (Methyl Salicylate Lint.) that the SAF gives smells unnervingly like that you get from Chinese medicine shops - an off-Sarsaparilla scent. And it doesn't work, too.


Hmm this guy says his jv16 Powertools' Registry Cleaner is the best on the market.

Shocking statistics! Perfidious cover ups! Diabolical concealment!

The lotion's smell must be driving me mad.

I believe some of these have been posted before :)


Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me, either. Leave me alone.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a broken fan belt and a leaky tire.

It's always darkest before dawn. So if you're going to steal your neighbor's paper, that's the time to do it.

Sex is like air. It's not important unless you aren't getting any.

Don't be irreplaceable. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.

No one is listening until you make a mistake.

Always remember you're unique. Just like everyone else.

Never test the depth of the water with both feet.

It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.

It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help.

If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments.

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.

If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.

Duct tape is like 'the force'. It has a light side & a dark side, and it holds the universe together.

If you lend someone $20, and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.

Don't squat with your spurs on.

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

Some days you are the bug, some days you are the windshield.

Don't worry, it only seems kinky the first time.

Good judgment comes from bad experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

The quickest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket.

Timing has an awful lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.

There are two theories to arguing with women. Neither one works.

Generally speaking, you aren't learning much when your mouth is moving.

Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

Never miss a good chance to shut up.

We are born naked, wet, and hungry. Then things get worse.

Cottleston Pie

Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie,
A fly can't bird, but a bird can fly.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie.

Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie,
Why does a chicken? I don't know why.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie.

Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie,
A fish can't whistle and neither can I.
Ask me a riddle and I reply
Cottleston Cottleston Cottleston Pie.

-- A. A. Milne

Grr. I got another mystery call. And I'm not sure if he's the same mystery caller of Thursday.

Clues:
- He knows (of) Kairen
- He knows (of) Andrew Tan
- He knows (of) Andrew Gan
- He's ORDed.

Hmm.


*Sputter* Someone is very mean.

"gabriel has just introduced me to sggirls.com, no doubt his favourite site or something... still feel rather nauseous at the thought of army guys pouring (sic) over the photos and making lewd remarks on the message boards though"

I shall punish the aforementioned by showing her THIS.


I've been emailed by no less than Sarinee - webmaster of The Underdogs, the premier Abandonware site, regarding scanning Blood Sword!

Heh.


Hmm. Who's Human Bear?

Looks like the work of some J4s :)


I know I normally diss this sort of thing, but this is a rather interesting type of test :) And it doesn't have the most irritating aspects of those dime-a-dozen quizzes, namely:

- Cut and Paste HTML code
- An irritating graphic in a table cell
- An admonition to everyone to "find out what type of Feces you are"

Your Results:
The top score on the list below represents the faith that Belief-O-Matic, in its less than infinite wisdom, thinks most closely matches your beliefs. However, even a score of 100% does not mean that your views are all shared by this faith, or vice versa.

Belief-O-Matic then lists another 26 faiths in order of how much they have in common with your professed beliefs. The higher a faith appears on this list, the more closely it aligns with your thinking.


1. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (100%)
2. Liberal Quakers (92%)
3. Reform Judaism (86%)
4. Orthodox Quaker (83%)
5. Unitarian Universalism (81%)
6. Neo-Pagan (69%)
7. Bah�'� Faith (67%)
8. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (65%)
9. New Age (63%)
10. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (63%)
11. Islam (61%)
12. Orthodox Judaism (61%)
13. Secular Humanism (59%)
14. Mahayana Buddhism (55%)
15. Sikhism (54%)
16. Theravada Buddhism (54%)
17. Seventh Day Adventist (50%)
18. Eastern Orthodox (49%)
19. Roman Catholic (49%)
20. Jehovah's Witness (48%)
21. New Thought (47%)
22. Taoism (45%)
23. Scientology (44%)
24. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (44%)
25. Jainism (37%)
26. Nontheist (31%)
27. Hinduism (24%)

*bleep*


They're lowering the minimum age of marriage to 14 in Russia. Ooh - Chinese traditionalists and Muslim men rejoice!

Wednesday's forum:

"Socio-religious groups are notorious for being selective in what they take literally from their scriptures whenever it suits them.... It is time for all religions to scrutinise their doctrines and use common sense to recognise the spirit and the circumstance to which the 'laws' related to when they were scribed." Truly.

Rereading my past GP essays, I'm surprised at just how indulgent I was, and how irrelevant some paths I meandered down on were. And how much needless cynicism I injected (all for the sake of good, clean fun of course). Haha. And I've also been perusing old (and new) GP bulletins - some of the essays in them -are- indulgent at times too, but I think I took it a touch far. And some in this year's issues are actually rather limp, making me wonder how they made it into them. Jarring phrase seen in one essay: "Resplendant splendour". Grr.

There's this spastic radio ad that keeps playing on RCS stations nowadays. It is a dialogue between a Texan accented guy and someone with a REALLY strong Malay accent, about the former physically torturing the latter because he's eloping with his daughter to Singapore, and he's worried about her not being able to eat good Western food. So the Malay assures him that he'll 'take care of her' and bring her to Warner Ria Cafe at Causeway Point in Singapore where they serve "Western Food" like Buffalo wings, juicy steaks and baked potatos. Hope he doesn't make her wear a tudung!

Continuing in my "proud tradition", Julian got a day off for writing an essay about how "Who Moved My Cheese" is a waste of $19.90. And got a day off! Woo hoo! Haha.

There's this funny ad on Channel 8 for Way-Way detergent. At first, I saw loads of housewives clustered around a man and a washing machine, and a neon sign saying 'Sexist' lit up in my head. However, a few seconds later, a whole line of men appeared onscreen in white long sleeved shirts and black pants, doing a 'Las Vegas' (locked together shoulder to shoulder, while swinging their legs up in unison). Talk about post-modernism.

I got a mystery caller on my cellular line on Thursday night, but he refused to tell me who he was. And caller id didn't tell me his number too. Gah.


Quotes:

ouch. say no more. I think I just had my dose of exercise for the week (SMS on my partial listing of SOC obstacles)

He's a black horse (sheep) --- (Me)

[On Yaodong] Put his photo - SAFTI range. Pahm [Mimes shooting rifle]

There are a lot of bengalis who like to look like terrorists. I also don't know why.

That's just sick. You have a festering, diseased mind. (SMS on an, erm, suggestion of mine)

I was musing on why pool's so popular - half the people at e-learning're playing it.


kimberly: why's pool so popular?

someone: i think .. cause people look cool playing it

kimberly: it's so poser

someone: but you will play it, wont you, if your friends ask you to?

kimberly: erm. I've been asked
maybe at knifepoint :)

someone: get good at it
it's very rewarding

kimberly: why? how?

someone: 1. peer esteem
2. babe appeal

kimberly: riiiiiiiiiiight

does *** like pool?

someone: she's bad at it
but most girls are

Big post on Agagooga's part. Not that I mind, see, because I'm in camp, have nothing to do, am trying to avoid getting shot with "arrows" (this is an army term referring to the act of "delegating responsibility"), and have access to the internet PC in my office.

Agagooga hasn't mentioned it yet, so I thought it'd be a good idea to say that to "avoid breathing in the foul miasma", as he put it, I've been translating songs from Japanese to English as a distraction.

I can tell you, one doesn't appreciate how hard it is to translate songs from an Asian Language to English until you try it for yourself :) Although that still isn't an excuse for some of the really poor translations (In my opinion) found floating around out there on the internet. See here:
Geki! Teikoku Kagekidan

and here: Ai wa daiya

-_-;

Another nice distraction is playing "Sakura Wars 3: Is Paris Burning?" I'm nearly through with it (after about 40 hours...) It's an excellent addition to the series - I like it a lot. One of the reasons why, i think, is because the battles are a lot shorter and less tedious compared to the first two games in the series - just enough to provide a pleasant change from the unfolding of the story through the series' "interactive book" approach, and yet not coming across as being a barrier to the story's progression, or character development (one of the main draws of the series). The game itself also highly refreshing because it features a whole new cast (with the exception of Oogami) - the Paris Kagekidan. My favourite character's Erica Fontaine. (Why do I tell you this? because once, a wise person said that "You can discern the personality of a person from his favourite character in a Sakura Taisen game". Well... maybe not.)

Although, admittedly, if I weren't looking up every single word / phrase I didn't understand and writing it all down, it'd be a much shorter game (i'd estimate around 20 hours or so).

I've made plans for distractions after completing Sakura Taisen 3, too - going to try to make a webpage to put up my translations on. Tentatively going to try to make it run a CGI script so people can post comments and stuff on the translations themselves. Coranto seems to be a good candidate.

Gotta keep finding distractions for myself, or I think I'll go insane in the army.

In this week's episode of "Tales From Malaysia": Some Wanita Umno (Yet another of the uncountable branches of UMNO) member called Ummi Hafilda is alleging that her rival, the pro-tem Puteri Umno head, Azalina Othman is a lesbian and thus disqualified from holding that position. For good measure, she's also labelled her a "rotten fish head".

I love Malaysia. Malaysia Boleh!


In another part of the world...

The Evil One's daughter is called Shanae. Wah.


Yaodong got first place at a swimming competition at HQ Armour's Games Day. No one clapped. On prompting from the MC, polite scattered applause was offered. Then 30 mins later, he got 'asthma' again. Maybe he shouldn't swim so hard next time.