"You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone." - John Ciardi

Random Playlist Song: Random Playlist Song: Trevor Pinnock - The English Concert and Choir: Handel - Messiah - But Who May Abide The Day Of His Coming (alto, air)

But who may abide the day of his coming, and who shall stand when he appeareth? For he is like a refiner's fire.


There is no definitive musical text for Messiah because of the many changes Handel was obliged to make during the seasons it was performed. Some numbers were recomposed, such as "But who may abide", which is best known as the alto virtuoso piece composed for the castrato Guadagni in 1750. Others were customised for the soloists available, such as another version of "But who may abide" transposed up for an additional soprano soloist in 1754.


Random Trivia bit:

Convicted of murdering a couple with a pickaxe in 1983, Karla Faye Tucker begged Gov. George W. Bush for mercy. Instead, he mocked her desperate plea in an interview with a reporter from "Talk" magazine by whimpering "Please don't kill me."

***

XenoBoy: Good writing. The tangle of your thoughts spill like gossamer, blurring
between insight and borrowed words. Alfianesque. Personally I prefer a
more manifesto approach.

Erm. I assume that this is supposed to be good. Though I'm not sure if gossamer can spill.

***

SourceForge.net Team: When the SF.net team sends out a site-wide email, we sometimes see replies that look like this: "Hey! I didn't ask to be on this list! You spammer. I hate you! I hate your dog! (insert other colorful phrases here)."

Heh, I thought replying to spammers only encourages them.

***

The Private Society at LSE


Email 1:

Dear XXXXX,

Peruse http://www.xtq.com to join the discreet private society networking club for LSE students only.

LSE has yet to produce a compelling student directory to expedite information exchange amongst students, including a colloquium for students to compose his or her phone number, address, instant messenger name, course work, interests, clubs, jobs, and the like. Without waiting for administrative action to correct this loss, I took it upon myself to develop and launch a community specifically for those of us adept enough to exclaim ourselves as London School of Economics students. Unquestionably, the world is cognizant of our reputation as the pre-eminent school in the cosmos for the study of business. Our alumni are beyond compare in their global triumph, influence and clout. I appeal to you as a world class student to join this premier sodality. My website is for us high achievers to network amongst ourselves in order to engender the most goodwill in our deliberating as LSE students.

If you feel the need to catechize or supply remark, my preferred email address is privatesociety@gmail.com. Thank you for your participation in one of the most exclusive clubs in the world. Only LSE students are permitted to join at http://www.xtq.com

The Private Society


Email 2, titled: clarification about joining The Private Society

Dear XXXX, We have received several attacks from irate students, and we deem it necessary to clarify our position. Our website is for proud LSE students. Emails from students that denigrate the significance of themselves as LSE students is unfortunate. Regardless, upon consideration of select comments, we tend to agree with the assessment that our initial email promulgating our site was excessive, if a bit "pretentious," as one student put it.

On the contrary, we seek to network LSE students amongst each other. One cannot appreciate this simply by reading words; they must be a part of it. But we ask that if you join the private society -- which you are entitled to do as a LSE student -- then we ask you do so to the fullest. We request you fill out your profile completely and especially post a picture of yourself in order to fraternize with fellow private society members.

Here are some comments we received. We found them particularly amusing, so we thought we would pass them along:

From Neshwa Chantal Boukhari

n.c.boukhari@lse.ac.uk: "wtf? (in case you are unfamiliar with this abreviation it stands for in my humble vernacular: WHAT THE F***??) whats with the inappropriate use of unecesarily hi-faluting language? gees at 3 am - thats so not the way to go. youll never reach your target audience of 'us high achievers' with such high pretention. sounds like a society for swats and hacks. im taking my significantly high IQ elsewhere... my own rival society perhaps... im not paid to write your copy for you. but just generally be less pretentious - its aweful - and if you arent capably of that then i suggest its probably not worth joining. really in all that crap thats written i couldnt extract what this thing is in aid of."

From Charlie Whitehorn (he later joined

the society after discussing with us) ""what the f*** is this site?"

From Simon Peter Guildford s.p.guildford@lse.ac.uk: "Please unsubscribe my e-mail address from this ridiculous spam bullshit."


Email 3

Dear XXXXX,

We apologize to those three student that had their names and emails accidentally included in teh last email we sent. This was absolutely human error and was not intended. I am sure all three of those people are upstanding individuals. That was a draft version and we made the error of selecting the wrong version when we sent it out. Please accept our apologies. We are sending this email as an apology for our so-called "spam." We did not intend this to disrupt peoples' lives. We have decided to not send anymore emails to students for while. If we decide to submit something, I assure you we will give more thought to what we submit.

"PS"


Note the PS at the end with nothing following it.

***

Techno Prince on his exams: "ANNABEL CHONG... I was screwed over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again."

One of the best analogies I've heard recently :)

***

"Groups such as "Focus on the Family" appear to me to be exercising their God-given right of free speech and thought with more than the usual assertiveness of late... The very idea that people should NOT want to form families and choose rather alternate modes of life is clearly a notion that will rock the very foundations of this earth and wreck unimaginable disaster upon this chosen nation. If truth be told, even telling innocent virgins about how they could minimise the risk of nasty genital sores, immune system failure or that live-long plaque known as babies by putting on a safety jacket is tantamount to telling them that's it ok to do whatever you want to your body. Sorry, that's not even right: it should be that the jackets don't even work at all, so don't even ask, don't tell and don't do anything until our Heavenly Father has thoroughly approved your license to fuck (and only in the right positions, sans unnatural barriers).

To our society's moral crusaders, such good work is surely a vital step into converting this nation into a veritable Kingdom of God. The effort to suppress all forms, expressions and manifestations of lust in this land will be a spiritual battle that will not be yielded. After all, it's by far the most abominable of all sins, a hideous demon that eats into the very core of humanity, compared to the paltry misendeavours that are pride, anger, envy, sloth, covetousness and gluttony."

(Focus on the Family, The Annotated Budak)

***

We can get rid of leg hair without pretending that we do a lot of cycling/swimming or any other sport that would require aerodynamic legs.

We absently hum tunes from musicals without anyone being suspect of our sexuality.

When we buy a vibrator it is glamorous. When men buy a blow up doll it's pathetic.

Should we wake up looking like something the cat dragged in, we can fix it with cosmetics.

We can have partners that are years younger than us without being called dirty old perverts.

We can scare male bosses with mysterious gynecological disorder excuses.

Our boyfriend's clothes make us look elfin and gorgeous. They look like complete dorks in our clothes.

We have total control over our eyebrows.

It's cool to be a daddy's girl. It's sad to be a mommy's boy.

We can cry to get out of speeding fines.

The thrill of surprising people by being good at darts... and pool... and football.

We live longer, so we can be cantankerous old biddies wearing inappropriate clothes and shouting at strangers... men die earlier so we get to cash in on the life insurance.

We know that games are fun, but don't believe there's a direct correlation between the size of our scores and the size of our... womanhood.

Taxis stop for us.

We get drunk quicker and cheaper.

We have no desire to arrange our possessions in alphabetical order. Ever.

We've never fancied a cartoon character or the central figure in a computer game.

It does not enhance our social standing to understand the inner workings of a 'ruck' (or any other football thing). But we look incredibly cool if we do.

***

Curse of the Mummy Review

Ah, FF59: the legendary final campaign of a once-mighty empire (current resurgence notwithstanding until it turns up some new spoils). Was it really only nine years ago? Looking back it's easy to wish for a more memorable final engagement, but in the absence of forward planning on Penguin's part, this is what we're left with - a frankly half-arsed, semi-literate slog through just about every Ancient Egyptian cliché known to man.

PLOT

The epic, age-spanning background to your mission in Curse of the Mummy serves as its only appropriate quality for a series finisher, even if the story wrapped around this framework is paper-thin. You can't help but be interested in a scenario which pits you against an enemy born before the shaping of the continents. True, after the first few encounters you realise with a heavy heart that this mighty confrontation is going to boil down to a hackfest with a Skill 13 boss followed by a slim chance of escape from the latest in a long line of collapsing temples - bloody terrible architects, these Disciples of Evil - but hey, that's FF for you. In fact that's pretty much fantasy in general. But it's still a shame that the ambition and scope hinted at in Akharis' origins couldn't stretch to spicing up the reader's quest with a few more tricks and twists, or in fact stretch beyond the Background section at all.

WRITING

There's also an air of naïveté throughout which manages to be irritating rather than charming, as seen in scenarios such as the one in which you can reduce all future battle damage by 1 Stamina point simply by rubbing yourself all over with embalming fluid. You know - like all the best heroes do.

Lastly, the story gives off mixed messages, one of the most aggravating of all gamebook faults. The best outcome from even the very first encounter doesn't arise from the most sensible choice, and although you receive the standard punishment throughout the book for displaying greed over caution, in order to make good your escape at the end you'll have to ignore all that and go against every instinct you've got. Well, except the one that tells you not to rely on such simplistic things as logic and experience when it's Jonathan Green you're dealing with.

ENCOUNTERS

In terms of traps, sorry to say there's even less imagination on show. Closing walls, plummetting ceilings, pits full of spikes, toppling statues... and plenty of them resulting in instant death, which is nice. There's also the obligatory maze, this one half-flooded for novelty but hampered in its challenge by the fact that it's largely unpopulated and possible to escape within three paragraphs, so the only way you know you've been in a maze at all is the text congratulating you on managing to escape "at last". It's fairly obvious that all those "you are at another crossroads", "you are hopelessly lost" and "look: another poxy Crocodile" entries were an easy way to bump the book up to a handy 400 paragraphs when the rest of it was done and dusted.

MECHANICS

Standard FF rules plus an extra Poison attribute, which doesn't do a lot except add to the already extensive range of ways in which you can die horribly long before the end... Also, it was a pleasant (if minor) surprise to see the sheer number of options available at the manly one-on-one with Mr. Akharis, possibly the widest range of attack strategies presented by any FF boss, but ultimately few of them are worth attempting as they either do negligible damage or hinder you as much as they do your evil nemesis. This *could* be because Akharis is a canny little tinker who's built up considerable immunity to all possible attacks during his long sleep and subsequent resurrection rituals, but I think it's probably more to do with the book being a bit rubbish.

DIFFICULTY

The stupidly hard fights and the sheer *volume* of stupidly hard fights are, as you'd expect, the main culprits. Within a mere few paragraphs of setting out, you'll find yourself in an unavoidable scuffle with a Skill 10, two-attacks-per-round Giant Scorpion, and it only deteriorates from there. Get anywhere near the final confrontation and there'll be so many enemies in your face, all the time, that you'll stand very little chance of making it through *and* surviving the constant bombardment of crucial rolls against Luck and Stamina. You can even run into a gratuitous Skill 14 enemy well before the end if you're the unluckiest bugger alive (but hey, at least you won't be alive for long).

What's particularly grating is that even when a fight needn't be all that challenging, the author feels obliged to raise the stakes either by giving the enemy arbitrary extra powers, engineering the situation to cripple your Attack Strength, or both. Take for example the shoal of weedy, hand-sized Skill 6 Snapperfish, now capable of dealing damage of 3 Stamina and 1 Skill with each and every hit while you stumble around in waist-high water at -2 AS. Even worse, the Vizier Amentut, apparently not formidable enough already at Skill 9 Stamina 8: no, surely to balance it out he also needs a one-in-three chance of trimming a tasty 1 Skill and 2 Stamina from your current *and* Initial scores with every successful hit, plus the power to boost his own life-force by absorbing and converting your Stamina losses. I mean, why not? IT'S ONLY FAIR.

A second Livingstonian trait is the unflinching focus on item collection. At times I was reminded of Trial of Champions by the book's insistence that I search everywhere and pick up as many random objects as possible, in the hope of having the right ones for the inevitable "if you don't have Item X, YOU DIE" sequence at the end - but then it also veered off to include the charming "if you *do* have Item X, YOU ALSO DIE" variation, which made me want to mutilate, raze, kill and defile.

***

Kureshi:

The anti-malaria measures that SAFTI is implementing are really getting on my nerves. Let's see:

Long 4 in or near vegetated areas, including Wings that are located next to large patches of vegetation (that includes my Wing). Come on, that's not going to help. They can bite through clothing. I found out during ATP.

Regular fumigating of affected areas and edge of vegetated patches. That doesn't help either. I've been bitten just minutes after the foggers leave. I'm waiting for the day I see a mosquito on my leg while the foggers are still fumigating the area. The fogging's getting pretty intrusive too - they've fogged our rooms about 3 times now.

No SOC/SEOC training, as the route is located near vegetation. Come on, exposure for 10-30 min isn't going to contribute much to your chances of contracting malaria (especially for my Wing, since we're located right next to vegetation). And because of this rule many of my friends had their SEOC test (veto factor for commissioning) unnecessarily delayed. Meaning 3 more weeks for 'special SEOC 5BX' before they passed the test and were exempted from it.

Use mosquito nets when you sleep. Come on, this one really rubs me the wrong way. The nets are irritating, I dont' sleep well in them, and if you don't close them properly they're not much help (come on, once you're in bed how do you tuck the last flap under the mattress?).

Now, this is just classic SAF-not-using-their-brains-when-implementing-measures. I don't know if they're just being lazy, but putting off any and all activities that increase your exposure to mosquito bites isn't going to solve anything. The problem is malaria, not the mosquitoes (though mosquitoes are part of the problem). Don't just implement the obvious measures; How about some maloprim/mefloquine (aka malaria pill, but that sounds nastily disease-causing) indents? Enforce usage of anti-mosquito devices (preferably electric - non fire hazard) in bunks? Biological measures (insert mosquito predators into vegetated areas)?


Ah, but that's because it's dengue fever they're warding off, not malaria.

***

10 Reasons why PAP will still be here for the next 50 years

1. Singapore, sad to say, has a too small population to support 2 major political parties, which is required if another major political party wants to take over the incumbent position of PAP. LKY is simply a rare political talent that surfaces only once in a blue moon, not only in Singapore, but in the world.

2. Singaporeans have to get rid of their "kiasu, kiasi and kia jeng hu" attitude, which means our "afraid to lose, afraid to die, and afraid of the government" attitude (sorry for any misspelled hokkien words). "Kiasu" implies that we are afraid to lose out to the others if we don't support our incumbent party, especially when it comes to receiving government incentives. "Kiasi" implies that we are afraid that we'll be condemned, or to be invited to coffee by our ISD, if we criticise or fail to support our government. Lastly, "Kia jeng hu", ie afraid of the government, well I don't think I'll need any further elaboration on that. These attitudes are simply too entrenched in Singaporeans. I think we need several more decades before we can change these attitudes.

3. There's a high chance that our politicians will not suffer from any scandalous rumours, such as a certain Mr. XXX has a mistress, unlike politicians from other countries for example our poor old Bill Clinton. Being discreet is a virtue in our ruling party and having just one official print media that is extremely pro-government will ensure that there is minimal chance that our politicians will be plagued with such scandals, unless he's from the opposition party, who happens to like taking "artistic photos".

4. There is low corruption in Singapore. The high salaries that our Ministers receive means there is no need for them to resort to corruption. Or perhaps, there might be other more "official" ways for "clean corruption" to occur, just that my ignorant mind just couldn't think of how it can happen for now.

5. The "top brains" in our countries will choose to either work for some big shot MNC, either locally or overseas, migrate, start their own business, or join the ruling party. Joining an opposition party is probably one of the last goals of some of our brainiest people around.

6. Our CPF and high national reserves are at stake if PAP suddenly stop ruling Singapore.

7. If our government suddenly decides to pursue ambitious or undesirably policies like waging wars with certain countries, it'll be the day when there will be falling snow flakes and not rain on our bright sunny island. Hence no worry, we'll never produce any "Bushes" in our country.

8. Our GRCs "electoral tactic" just works too damn well.

9. There are still plenty more years before our grandma and grandpa, or parents for some of us, will stop telling us that voting for opposition is a wrong thing to do, and LKY is Singapore's saviour and therefore we must support PAP.

10. According to some of the project research carried out by some groups from one of my modules (I don't know how accurate this is), some of our nation's future hope, that is the young bright undergraduates from our local university, still thought that Mr. Goh Chok Tong is our current Prime Minister. Let's assume that there is this scenario say 30 years later, when the PAP is no longer in existence. This group of people might still be saying, "Ey, I thought PAP is still running our government?"

The only way that PAP can ever cease to be our dominant party is probably when there is internal party conflict, which might result in a party split. Otherwise, seriously, I don't see how PAP will ever lose its popular vote.

(Sanz)

Re:

2. We also need less basis for people to have these misconceptions (or otherwise, as the case might be).

4. The Hotel Properties Limited Condominium discounts?

5. Which results in a vicious circle. The opposition is pathetic and gets sued to bankruptcy, so no one joins it. So it stays pathetic.

6. ??? I don't think our reserves are in the form of cheques marked: "Payable only if the PAP is in government"

7. Bush has increased his support by waging his wars. And we always have the siege mentality that we're cultivating to unite our people in a common cause.

8. Don't forget the $13,000 deposit.

***

AIDS: The Great Con Trick

"HIV does NOT cause Aids. HIV does not cause anything.

A staggering statement given the hype and acceptance by the scientific establishment and, through them, the public that the HIV virus is the only cause of Aids. HIV is a weak virus and does not dismantle the immune system. Nor is Aids passed on sexually. There are two main types of virus. Using the aeroplane analogy, you could call one of these virus strains a "pilot" virus. It can change the nature of a cell and steer it into disease. This usually happens very quickly after the virus takes hold. Then there is the "passenger" virus which lives off the cell, goes along for the ride, but never affects the cell to the extent that it causes disease."

More conspiracy theory crap. Some points conspiracy theory theorists may want to consider:

- Nearly 500 scientists agree with Luc Montagnier that "HIV is not capable of causing the destruction of the immune system which is seen in people with Aids", but how many disagree with him?

- Why do HIV-infected people in poor countries who do not have expensive anti-AIDS treatments die more quickly of AIDS than those in rich countries that have the cocktails that prolong life for decades?

- HIV antibodies only appear when the HIV is present

- Since AIDS weakens the immune system, it is not unreasonable for people to die of unrelated diseases

- Do poor people in Africa have access to the drugs he blames for causing AIDS?

This writer probably believes the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion were real,
and that the UN is an evil world government. Oh, and don't forget the Illuminati, Black Helicopters and Alien Mind Control Waves.