The Geylang Methodist Secondary School uniform and badge look surprisingly like ACJC's. In fact, at first I thought some students I saw from the former were from the latter.

"Donut house pop idol" in Basement 2 of Takashimaya informs customers that their "products and frying oil contain ingredients of pork origin". I wonder how their products taste.

At Kallang MRT, the Chinese translation of the station's name as "add cold".

My sources inform me that Jamie 'Despot' Han applied to NIE, but was summarily rejected. Odd, considering how desperate they usually are for teachers.

I was complaining that lawyers only know how to think in terms, and in the framework of the law. For example, they consider only whether something can be argued to be legal, rather than if it should be legal in the first place (someone else characterises it as their seeing the law as an elaborate game which they then try to worm their way into winning, rather than questioning the game itself). Someone remarked that that's why they make them study something else first in the US.

***

The Myth of Male Power - "Men who make their way through the interminable subtitle and embark on this orignal and significant study will find that they haven't lost the ability to cry after all. While some feminists may assert that it is an attack on women, the book attempts to show areas in which males operate at a disadvantage without claiming that women are responsible for their plight. Psychologist Farrell stresses economics, pointing out that the 25 worst types of jobs, involving the highest physical risk, are almost all filled by men. He also considers warfare, in which virtually all of the military casualties are men; the justice system, where sentences for males are customarily heavier; and sexual harassment, which has become a one-way street. He concludes with helpful advice on "resocializing" the male child, adolescent and adult."

Pornography, Rape and Sex Crimes in Japan - "Despite the absence of evidence, the myth persists that an abundance of sexual explicit material invariably leads to an abundance of sexual activity and eventually rape (e.g., Liebert, Neale, & Davison, 1973). Indeed, the data we report and review suggests the opposite. Christensen (1990) argues that to prove that available pornography leads to sex crimes one must at least find a positive temporal correlation between the two. The absence of any positive correlation in our findings, and from results elsewhere, between an increase in available pornography and the incidence of rape or other sex crime, is prima facie evidence that no link exists. But objectivity requires that an additional question be asked: "Does pornography use and availability prevent or reduce sex crime?" Both questions lead to hypotheses that have, over prolonged periods, been tested in Denmark, Sweden, West Germany and now in Japan. Indeed it appears from our data from Japan, as it was evident to Kutchinsky (1994), from research in Europe and Scandinavia, that a large increase in available sexually explicit materials, over many years, has not been correlated with an increase in rape or other sexual crimes. Instead, in Japan a marked decrease in sexual crimes has occurred... The upbringing of sex offenders was usually sexually repressive, often they had an overtly religious background and held rigid conservative attitudes toward sexuality"

Catherine Lim on Singapore politics - "So what the Government has been doing quietly is to develop a strategy by which it can simultaneously achieve two objectives that appear to contradict each other: on the one hand, reassuring the electorate through a generous slew of opening-up measures; and on the other, making sure that nothing has changed. The first objective can be made as overt as possible; the second is necessarily covert. The result is a dual model of managing political dissent that is unique to the PAP leadership. It comprises both the soft, gentle, consultative approach of the Goh Chok Tong rule and the hard, stern no-nonsense approach of the Lee Kuan Yew rule; the soft approach being at the forefront, open for all to see, and the hard approach being in the background, hardly visible but clearly the prevalent one."