Quote of the Day: "It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do." - Jerome K. Jerome

***

Not too long ago:

Mrs Chan (JC GP teacher): Where are you now?
Me: NUS - the premier institution of Social Engineering
Mrs Chan: You haven't changed.
Me: Is that good or bad?
Mrs Chan: I don't know


Meanwhile I'm being blamed for doing all sorts of "unethical" things that I never knew about. Gah.

***

NUS canteen food is cheap, but many - maybe even most - of the stalls give small servings. Besides cutting costs for the stallholders, who presumably aren't allowed to increase prices, this is also because:

1) People go to the canteen when they're bored, so this prevents over-eating.

2) Anorexic girls won't eat if the servings are too big

3) Anorexic or small-stomached girls can't finish their servings even if they do decide to eat

The power of the constituency mentioned in 2) and 3) is also the reason why the Arts and Business canteens have better food (so it is said) than the Science and Engineering ones; if the food sucks, they won't eat it. Which is also the reason why girls schools supposedly have good food, while RI was stuck with Monty's for 4 years.


I sat in for half of one of PaRaDoX's maths lectures; now I understand the pain that he has been going through over the past year. I had to concentrate very hard to figure out what words the lecturer was using, let alone to understand the Advanced Calculus that he was teaching. Hell, I think more people would have understood what he was saying if he had spoken in Chinese. So when I stumbled out of the LT after 45 minutes, I was reeling in shock, and my mind had been wiped even more effectively than it would if I had been reading Plato.

One surprising thing was the number of girls in the maths lecture, for they filled at least three quarters of the lecture theatre. Even assuming that most of the lecture skippers were guys, the girls would still fill two thirds of the LT. After all, the female gender generally always has problems with maths, so I would have thought that once it was no longer compulsory, they would no longer take it.


I was at Fuzion Smoothie Cafe in Prince George's Park Residences, where they make smoothies without ice, but instead with IQF (Individually Quick Frozen) fruits. While waiting for my order to be processed, I noticed that they advertised their smoothies as having "no sugar" and "no ice". I also noticed that they had a soft serve machine with a curiously ice-like slush swirling around in it.

My curiosity was piqued, and I asked the man at the counter what the stuff in the machine was. He replied that it was "fruit extract". On my pressing him, he conceded that it was fruit sugar to sweeten the smoothies. When I pointed out that fruit sugar was still sugar, he replied that there was no artifical sugar in the smoothies. Now, I don't know about saccharin, except that it isn't used much these days, but aspartame is hugely expensive, and only used when they need to advertise a product as low-calorie and/or sugar-free. In all other cases, people rather use natural sugar, not least because it tastes better. I then gave the man some examples of natural sugars: cane sugar, which is from sugar cane; beet sugar, which is from sugar beets and just as I was explaining about how high fructose corn syrup is also natural, he conceded my point.


Interesting Sociological studies:

1) A guy sat in a car and took notes while bank robbers used it for their robbery

2) A Lord Humphrey watched men having sex with other men in public bathrooms and tracked them down months later, pretending to be an insurance claims investigator, and found that most of them were married with children.


We watched a hilarious BBC interview with Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the President of the Maldives, and all he could say to the correspondent's questions was: "It's not true", giving that bland reply even when faced with proof of his regime's human rights abuses, and so implying that the correspondent was lying about his observations.

Due to a clashing of timetables, my South Asia tutorial group is going to meet for a discussion next Monday. So boo hoo, there goes my free day. No matter - I shall view the webcast of my sole thursday lecture and declare it my free-day-in-lieu.

USP students can't vote in the Arts Club elections (which were a walkover, but even if they hadn't been, we still wouldn't have been able to vote), and this is enshrined in the constitution. It's no wonder we're forced to be elitist and hide in our little corners.

I should arrange to be Handsome Boy Steven Lim the Eyebrow Plucker's agent and get him to come down to NUS to pluck eyebrows. Then I cane take a 10% cut of his earnings.

Lots of people wear their JC and even Secondary School T-shirts to school. Unfortunately, I can't fit into those of mine which fall into the latter category.

Qiying says I am like Michael Moore in "the way [I] do things". Right. I thought it was because I look sloppy.

One advantage of watching webcasts is you can set the playback speed to "fast" and finish a 2 hour lecture in under 1 1/2.

People have suggested, in the past, that I write a book about my experiences as a slave. Now someone has suggested that I turn How Girls Waste Time into a book too. Heh.

We were shown a Tesla coil made by a 14 year old RI boy mostly from off-the-shelf materials and junk. Costing less than S$100, its sparks are more powerful than that of a commercial Tesla coil which costs US$1,000. My juniors are so outstanding :)

Friend: Do you live in hall?
Me: No, why?
Friend: *gestures at me* Just a random thought
Me: I customarily look sloppy

I saw a stall near the Arts Canteen selling "special" T-shirts for $2 each. On closer examination, they turned out to be the white-coloured, suspiciously-transparent Arts Orientation Week T-shirts. Great way to recoup costs!

It seems SMU has such fluffy sounding classes as "Analytical Skills" and "Creative Thinking". Ho ho. *ahem*

One guy in my tutorial group raised the point that most Philosophy professors are agnostic or atheist. Haha.