"Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was." - Margaret Mitchell

***

3 food reviews (mostly sans photos, too bad):


Crystal Jade Hong Kong Cafe (Liang Seah Street)

California Girl and I wanted to visit Nadezhda Russian Restaurant (run by Russians) at Kampong Glam (140 Arab Street, facing Golden Landmark Hotel), but when I tried calling their number, it was invalid. Since the last review I found online dated from May 2007, we decided to try out luck, but when we reached the address we found a new 2-month-old Indian/Central Asian place. If anyone knows where Nadezhda moved to, or where to go in Singapore for authentic Russian food, such information would be welcome (Shashlik sounds like a joke).

After wandering for some time, we found ourselves in Liang Seah Street. Given that this was around the location of "Causeway Bay Cafe", the last bad Hong Kong cafe I'd tried, perhaps I should've taken that as a sign and stayed away (indeed, since I didn't see Causeway Bay Cafe, it might even have been on the exact same premises)

We ordered:

Pumpkin Seafood Soup, Baked Pork Chop Rice, Curry Chee Cheong Fun, Iced Milk Tea, Shaved ice with Chin Chow and Fruit [Cocktail]
Shark's Fin Soup in a Bowl, Vermicelli with Beef Brisket, Shaved ice with wolfberry and some translucent white thing

The first disappointment was my milk tea which had been steeped too long and was horribly tannic (I almost couldn't swallow it).

The Pumpkin Seafood Soup was alright, though a bit weird (I'm used to my pumpkin soup being thick and slightly sweet, but I guess this is called Fusion cuisine).

My pork chop rice came with the meat cut up. I can't remember if it's supposed to be given to you whole, but in any case cutting the meat up made it hard to discern the size of the cut, which was probably the intention. The mushroom sauce on top tasted like cream soup from a can. Now, using cream canned soup is a good shortcut (which I have used myself) to get a tasty sauce, but you must add other things to it to create a more complex taste; this sauce tasted like it was out of the can.

The Curry Chee Cheong Fun was weird. The flour rolls were limp and were solid pieces of flour, rather than being rolls (as Chee Cheong Fun is supposed to be).

I didn't finish my food, and that tells you something.

California Girl said her tang hoon was alright, and tasted herby. I didn't expect her Shark's Fin Soup to have real Shark's Fin, but they should at least have duplicated the taste of the stock. Instead, it tasted like mushroom soup.

The service was bad also. Ignoring the usual Singaporean phenomenon of the staff speaking to you in Mandarin when you speak to them in English, California Girl's soup came after her main order, and though she asked them to serve her dessert 10 minutes before I ordered mine, mine came first.

The saving grace was the desserts, which were quite good, but if you can screw up shaved ice desserts you suck.

I'm quite disappointed, given that hitherto Crystal Jade has never disappointed me. If you want good Hong Kong food, go to Kim Gary Cafe (one of the few good things that has come out of Malaysia) or better yet, Central.


Penang Place (International Business Park, The Atrium)


This place is billed as serving authentic Penang food.


Yet it doesn't use pork or lard, so its claim to authenticity is very contestable.

In any case, I judged it on its food quality, rather than its adherence to culinary principles (marketing notwithstanding).

It served a buffet of 20+ dishes. Most were alright, but the siew mai stood out for being awful and the lorbak for being excellent (despite having no pork - I preferred the York one though).

The signature dish, the Penang Char Kway Teow, was disappointing:


This 'authentic' Penang Char Kway Teow has fishcake, lap cheong (Chinese sausage) and sotong. A genuine authentic version has none of these. Personally I prefer taste over authenticity, but authenticity is authenticity, so. There was also too much vegetables in this.

The place is good for variety and service, but the food isn't quite there. Go to York Hotel's Penang Hawkers event for authentic and good Penang food.


Inagiku, Fairmont Singapore

Inagiku is hideously expensive, and the only reason I was there, as with my last visit, was because I was with someone who had the Raffles Gourmet card (when 2 dine and one uses it, there's a 50% discount, but even then the price is steep). It'd been 4 years or so since my last visit, and the hotel had since changed names (it used to be "Raffles The Plaza") and the restuarant been renovated (it has a darker interior now, and fewer teppanyaki grills you can sit in front of).

The golden sauce served with the seafood teppanyaki seemed to be down a little bit, saltier and less rich than before, but it was still delicious, and it's been 4 years, so. The teppayaki vegetables were definitely lousier than before (and I think you used to get garlic fried rice - now it's plain rice).

It was the first time I'd had the tempura. It was good, but I'd been expecting more given the rave reviews I'd heard about the batter being as light as air (and live prawns too, given the price, hurr hurr). The chef's skill in frying a dark green leaf such that it was almost straight (and not curled) was admirable though.

Portions were bigger than before, but so were the prices (A Prawn, Salmon and Beef set is now $70).

I was slightly annoyed as the chef was quite noisy (talking a lot) and kept calling his underling 'brother'.

"I've done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not." - Fran Lebowitz

***

Japan trip
Day 2 - 7th June - Ueno koen (上野公園), Tokyo (Part 3)

I then went to the Ueno park/garden.

I saw an ad for sex on the Metro. Well, it had the word "Sex" and there were pictures of sultry-looking Japanese women.


Ueno park map. The irritating about Jap maps is that they are not consistent. In maps in other parts of the word, the top part of the map is North, the bottom South and so on. In Japan, many area maps (those erected in fixed locations in a vicinity for easy navigation) do not have North at the top. Worse, the area maps are inconsistent - I saw at least one other orientation used by maps in Ueno park (ie unlike here, the lake was not at the right of the map). This made navigation with the aid of area maps very confusing.

I was actually looking for Tosho gu, the premier shrine in the garden, since it was about to close.


Some shrine at the top of a small hill

When I found the Gojo Tenjin Shrine (dedicated to the Gods of Medicine and Learning), I decided to give up since the area maps had confused me.


Multiple torii


Plaques


Inari, Japanese kami (spirit) of fertility, rice, agriculture, foxes, industry, and worldly success


Unfortunately I was there quite late so the shrines were closed, and the caretakers leaving (for example, before the last photo was taken, a woman emerged from inside and left the premises).


Place to wash your hands and mouth


Closed shrine


Wooden prayer plaques


"PAY RISE!"


Cute fox man (Inari impression?) and Russian prayer


How to do it, kids!


Shrine sign. I only realised at this point where I was.


Torii to another shrine


Another Ueno koen map. Note how the orientation is different. It's a different type of map, but the principle remains the same (I had a picture of a map in the same style as the first, but deleted it due to lack of space - oh well)

There is a Museum of Downtown Customs. I know the town is a different place from the country, but can it be that different?!


Kimono-ing in the park


Multiple torii


Hobo rummaging in the recycle bin

Japan tries to be Green, with recycling bins and exhortations to reduce carbon emissions, yet considering it is the land of excess packaging, it is not clear how useful such measures are.


Frog fountain


Akihabara, South view from Ueno park


I think this is to encourage women to have more children


3 identical drain covers. I think they read "low pressure", "high pressure" and "low voltage electricity"


Open concept toilet


Statue of Dr Hideyo Noguchi


Homeless men
I was a bit disappointed as Lonely Planet had claimed that there were rows of tents where the homeless lived, with their shoes lined up neatly outside. Maybe that's in winter.


Artistic photo capturing the disorientation and vertigo of the state of homelessness


Dr A F Baudin


Topless woman statue


Statue of Prince Komatsu No Miya Akihito. You can read the blurb if you want.

Male netizens of xin.sg sign up for cooking class

"When the men are starting to cook at home, your kitchen looks like a bomb. That's why it's much better when a woman is cooking, because then it's always clean. But in the end, when you have the finished dish on the table, there is no difference."

"I have a new philosophy. I'm only going to dread one day at a time." - Charles M. Schulz, Charlie Brown in "Peanuts"

***

Baltics trip
Day 2 - 17th May - Vilnius, Lithuania (Part 2)


These grotesque dolls were in the window of a hair salon and put Chucky to shame. Not the best advertisement for a place that promises to enhance your aesthetic appeal.


Vilnius University


Filosofijos Fakultetas



Given how big their Philosophy faculty is, it's no wonder they're still a Third World nation


Parking on the pavement is a new concept to me


Small road


Street


Disgusting top at a wedding


St Anne's Church


Altar


3 of the stations of the cross


Bernadine Church. As you can see it's very run-down. The only well-maintained bit is the floor.


Organ


It's back to INRI. Do you see the sign of the Illumninati?


Roof of same chapel. Do you see the sign of the Illumninati?


Wall paintings


Roof


Wall painting, tomb

A lot of Lithuanian royalty were buried at the Bernadine Church.


Tomb


Sacrificial altar above a bottomless pit?

Not all the huge tracts of land were fertile.


Superbaby?


River


YC chatting up 12, 9 and 7 year old girls. One of them asked "money money". Maybe she's been to Siem Reap.

We then went to the Republic of Užupis, a self-declared artists' enclave.


On the street


Angel of Uzupis


Plaque erected by the Republic


'Free Tibet'. There was similar graffiti at the Cathedral Basilica.


'Crush Tibet' in Lithuanian?


Weird cobblestone pattern. It's quite a novel way of keeping traffic in the proper lane.


Assorted snacks. I had the fried dough with chicken and onion inside.


No more Republic of Uzupis


Locks on the railings of the bridge. They should be meant to symbolise love, and the logic is that you put 2 locks together. Seeing how many single locks there were, it seems Western values are polluting their youth, leading to short-term relationships.

We saw a Mini driving about with a giant Red Bull can on top. Hah.


Hill of Three Crosses

We then went to the "Lithuanian Museum of Genocide Victims". This was a very misleading name, since although in its own words its purpose was to "collect, keep and present historic documents about forms of physical and spiritual genocide against the Lithuanian people, and the ways and the extent of the resistance against the Soviet regime", in reality there was no campaign to wipe out the Lithuanian people*. As such, the Soviet occupation does not qualify as a genocide and to call it that is to mock the enormity of real genocides.

* - The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide defines it as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."


Memorial monument


The dull former Communist building it is appropriately housed in


"Incorporation into the USSR: The Principal Committee was elected the same day, and was sent to Moscow 'to bring back Stalin's sunshine'"


Inspirational embroidery: "Only hope will overcome difficulties"


Holograms


These small photographs are tiny Lithuanian neoprints from the mid-1940s


Resistant Orbat (Organisational chart)


Anti-tank rocket launcher. I'm told the SAF still uses this WWII technology.


Pylon-climbing tool


MP-40 gun


"Military Organisation: Some violence against the civilian population occured, as happens in any war"
Justifying atrocities


The Battle of Varcia. Drawing.



The showcase of highlights the museum's contents will continue in the next post.


World War II was very fun since fighting against the Soviets there were the Pro-Nazi groups, the Anti-Soviet groups and the groups against both sides.

"Anyone who uses the phrase 'easy as taking candy from a baby' has never tried taking candy from a baby." - Unknown

***

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From the Hostelworld.com newsletter:



1) Why are beds in London ($9) cheaper than in San Francisco ($12)
2) Why are beds in Marrakech the most expensive?! ($15)

"Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory." - Albert Schweitzer

***

Japan trip
Day 2 - 7th June - Nihon Budokan (日本武道館), Yasukuni Shrine ((靖国神社), Tokyo (Part 2)

Next was the infamous Yasukuni Shrine. At first I was contemplating wearing my Kamikaze headband there, but that would get me sliced up after they realised I was a gaijin.


At first I saw "Y700" and was thinking that this must be the most expensive Iced Coffee in the world, even considering this was Japan. When I got closer, I realised the role McDonalds plays in combating inflation and keeping the cost of living down, with their Y100 menu (the picture is outdated: the hamburger and the McPork are the burgers you get, not cheeseburgers and McChickens; in research I found that the McChicken isn't sold in Japan anymore. Aww)


More annoyances in the name of security: the G8 Hokkaido Summit still isn't here yet, but down in Tokyo they were stepping up security a month before the event. I will note that even before the 'Period of Increased Security', the dustbins were already removed. Gah.

I decided to pay 360Y to increase my fruit intake in the form of a strawberry shake. Not only was it mostly ice, the cup was this small:



Kitanomaru National Garden (it looks much better when the Sakuras are in bloom, according to Google images)

I tried visiting the Nihon Budokan which was very nearby before the Shrine.


Nihon Budokan. According to Lonely Planet you could watch martial arts demonstrations here, but apparently these are irregular, so it was a wasted trip.


The place was reminding me of Taekwondo grading, so I ran away.


Gate


Statue near the overhead bridge. If you want to transcribe the (partially-hidden) name into Romaji, feel free.


Tower near the overhead bridge


One of the many toriis at Yasukuni shrine


Avenue in


The large number of Japanese schoolgirls at the shrine led me to ask 2 questions:
1) Where are all the Japanese schoolboys
2) Was this some plot to indoctrinate their vulnerable (lower secondary) youth?
As I got closer to the shrine, I saw what seemed to be a school around the corner


Statue of Omura Masujiro, Vice-Minister of War during the Meiji Restoration. You can read the plaque if you want.


Avenue further in


Lantern

There was some joker walking around with what looked like the wartime Japanese flag (the sun with streaks of blood) but he disappeared before I got closer.


Inner and inner-inner torii


Praying to Class A War Criminals


The commercialism of Japanese temples and shrines is amazing, and all of them sell the same few charms. The large lantern appears to cost 200,000Y, which is extremely expensive - maybe the proceeds will fund the next Greater East Asian War. The traffic safety charm is available in two sizes. I theorise the smaller one protects you against morotcycles and cars, and the bigger one lorries and trucks.


I got a fortune telling slip. MR told me that in response to my question of whether Japan would ever face up to its wartime past, the answer was "eventually, yes" (or words to that effect).


The Japs love to collect stamps of the places they visit. The dove on the chop of the Yaukuni Shrine (sans olive branch) must be a masterstroke of irony.


Pseudo-doves on the grounds. Maybe someone will reveal that these birds actually represent war.


Flagpole

I was looking out for PRCs but didn't notice any.


Front of shrine


Instructions on shrine prayers. "Bow once, clap twice and bow a second time". I contemplated clapping 600,000 times for the victims of the Nanking Massacre (two claps per victim) but that would've gotten me hauled off, so.


Wooden prayer plaques


A peek at what lies behind the curtains (using my 6x zoom). The security guard who was looking out for PRC terrorists who'd blow themselves up to the cry of "毛泽东万岁" ('Long Live Mao Zedong!') didn't let me do this in the shrine proper.

Next, I went to the Yushukan (Yasukuni Shrine museum). I find the Shrine itself to be overtly uncontroversial, but the museum's revisionism rivaled the best academic relativistic accounts of World War II. Unfortunately, they didn't let me take pictures because like the SAF (and increasing numbers of private establishments) they knew the power of photographs and knew they would lead to an international incident ('incident', hurr hurr) if they were leaked (transcriptions by intrepid reporters have not had that effect), so I didn't take any, for fear of being forced to commit seppuku. Nonetheless, I spent about 3 hours in there, transcribing the outrageous things they said (apparently their website has more fun stuff, so you can go there and see them justify their war crimes). Luckily I didn't visit before the 2002 renovation, since there was much less English then; the text is outragoeus, laughable and ridiculous enough in English. I wonder how it reads in Japanese.

[Addendum: Someone who visited and took some pictures inside.

This confirms my suspicions that the Japanese don't bother enforcing no photography policies.]

Apparently Yushukan used to be even more fun and exciting as you could "don gas masks, fire air rifles, sit in the cockpit of a bomber, or drop simulated bombs on imagined foes"; yet all is not lost, as I can do similar things at the Singapore Discovery Centre. From the link above and from my visit there, it was much less popular than the Hiroshima Peace Museum, so its symbolic value is less than its influence on the Japanese psyche.

In the video theatrette they were showing a video. Although I didn't understand what they were saying I will describe how the video went. They showed figures of 10,000 Japanese troops and 250,000 Chinese troops (ie 25 times the number), showed the Manchurian Incident (I figured out from the damaged railroad), showed people waving Japanese flags happily, as well as one I didn't recognise (probably the one of Manchukuo - the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria). The peaceful city of Nanking (there was Kanji, IIRC) was shown and then it cut to the US helping China.

semi shek thru burn (I can't remember what this meant, but in my defence I was scribbling in the dark)

The video then cut to Southeast Asia, and showed a native chopping a tree. I kept hearing the word 'Amerika' repeated by a woman in an indignant voice. They had an ABCD encircling thing (IIRC this showed Japan encircled by hostile and/or colonial powers). Then they showed General Tojo and glorious music was played. The camera focused on an American document (in English) talking about non-discrimination in the commodities trade). There was a romantic shot of a Japanese flat. fighter sand dune (?) The narration had something about dying for the country.

Then we saw Pearl Harbour and a Kamikaze video with heroic music. We saw Japanese soldiers doing things like shaving and pouring water (and not beheading civilians). Then we saw the Tokyo war crimes trial, and some Indian-looking guy and black law books. At this point I left the theatrette.

A statue of what I thought was Europa and the Bull was captioned: "平和の女神", which is something about a Goddess of Peace (hah)

Entrance hall: "Throughout the ages, warriors have expressed their patriotism, their distaste for war, and their concerns for Japan's future in their poems"
Unfortunately the distaste for war was hardly obvious in this museum.

They claimed that Japan had been an independent nation for more than 2600 years. Right. There's a reason why all non-prehistoric dating in this country leaves out BC or AD.

In the Edo period, modifying firearms was banned - firearms technology was frozen. Nonetheless, the decorations could be enhanced.

Strange object: "土俵空穂" (I went through a lot of fun and games trying to get the last word to display, since I didn't know the pinyin and wasn't familiar with the IME pad). It was an oblong balloon covered with fur and in a quiver. There was lots of rope tied around the opening of the quiver and there was a hole in the bottom of the quiver, which could be plugged by a stopper which was hanging from it.

They had bows so powerful, they required 3-5 people to draw. Wth. Siege equipment ah?

After the small bit on Samurai Japan, the fun and games started. They talked about how 'Western powers encroach upon Asia' in the 19th century. A drawing of Commodore Perry made him look like Pinocchio, with a long nose and crow's teeth, and wrinkles between his eyebrows. A helpful photo of him above led me to conclude that the only resemblance was the large eyes (compared to the Japanese - does this say something about large eyes in Manga?) Japanese drawing: 3.5 stars for artistic value, 0 stars for realism.

Then they talked about the unequal treaties forced upon them as Japan opened up to the world, and incidents like the Phaeton incident and Russians attacking the northern islands.

Emperor Meiji's 5 article charter oath sounded strange, and I'm not sure if it was just translation issues. Articles 4 and 5 read:
4. Evil customs of the past shall be discontinued, and new customs should be based upon the just laws of Nature.
5. Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world in order to promote the welfare of the empire

During the Civil War they had around the Meiji Restoration, there were two parties: the Emperor's forces and the supporters of the Tokugawa shogunate. Interestingly enough, the latter (including such chaps as the victims of the Ansei Purge) were called martyrs because although they fought against the Emperor's forces, they did it in the Emperor's name.

"Greater East Asian War" was how they referred to the Pacific Theatre of World War II.

There was a room with "Imperial Family Exhibits". It was described thus: "The sun's rays, modulated by the stained-glass skylight in the ceiling, fill the gallery with a brilliant radiance". The sun was damn weak, and the glow of the electric lights overpowered that of the sun.

There was a standard from the 321st Infantry Regiment. The Lieutenant Colonel was supposed to return or burn the standard ceremonially, but he wasn't happy and burned just the pole and storage case. He kept the standard until the US left Japan, then put it back on the pole and dedicated the standard to the Yasukuni Shrine.

The Japanese Armed Forces redirected its efforts from "home defence" to "overseas operations" because of "confrontation with Qing China after the Korean military revolt in 1882". What actually happened was that Japan was forcing itself upon Korea just as foreign powers had forced themselves upon it (with the "unequal treaties") and Korean soldiers, pissed off at soldiers getting Japanese training being treated better, attacked the Japanese presence in Korea.

Cute bit: "Chinese Ironclad Battleship, Dingyuan
The Dingyuan and the Zhengyuan were the world's most advanced warships, and the Japanese navy considered them as their formidable adversaries. The last well-known words of the mortally wounded soldier Miura Torajiro were: 'Has the Dingyuan not sunken yet?"
I didn't know China was at the forefront of naval technology in the late 19th century

"With the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Korea became an independent state, which Japan had long hoped for"
Funny, given that in the same year (1895), Japanese agents assassinated Empress Myeongseong and desecrated her body, and that they annexed Korea 15 years later in 1910.

"The Japanese people were enraged at Russia's meddling and Japan's subsequent acquiescence to the Triple Intervention. They swore to avenge the insult to their nation, no matter what deprivations they had to suffer. 'Enduring hardships!' became their slogan"
No wonder they decided to engage in plenty of intervention themselves.

"The Boxer Rebellion
The Western powers (Russia, Germany, France, and Great Britain) competed with each other, making naked imperialistic demands on the Chinese... The Japanese troops advanced and carried out the rescue operations as the main contingent of the international force. Their military prowess and strict discipline excelled. They were respected and applauded by the residents of Beijing in contrast to the Western powers' soldiers, who looted wherever they went."

Quite a lot of Kanji words had hiragana on top (telling people how to pronounce them). Perhaps this speaks to declining educational standards.

Shokonsha has the only remaining triumphal arch in Japan (there appears to be something wrong, as shokonsha is not a place name, but I'm sure I transcribed it properly).

On the Russo-Japanese War: "Journalists... who traveled with the Japanese witnessed their bravery and tactical brilliance, and praised them in detailed reports. The effect of these victories on Asian youth changed the world in the 20th century"

"Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War and subsequent annexation of Korea resolved concerns about national security, which had been festering for years. The world situation, however, never ceased to evolved". They then said the US did not join the League of Nations and "hosted the Washington Conference and planned to establish a new international order in Asia and the Pacific".
Right. "You made us invade Asia!" It's also interesting how their conception of national security, just like that of Russia, involved annexing foreign countries to serve as buffer states.

"An anti-Japanese movement in Manchuria and a sense of crisis of the Japanese residents prompted the action by the Kwantung Army, and the establishment of Manchukuo". They also cited "anti-Japanese harassment and terrorism", so "under such circumstances the Kwantung Army resorted to force".
So basically we can blame the paranoid delusions of megalomaniacal army officers for the 'Manchurian Incident'.

At the Paris Conference, Japan requested a clause in the League of Nations' charter abolishing racial discrimination, but this was rejected because the US and the Commonwealth were not happy.

More Japanese grievances: the murder of Captain Nakamura Shintaro in 1931 in Taonan (they said Zhang Xueliang had a bad response to this) and the Wanbaoshan incident.

There was no mention of Manchukuo being a puppet nation. Instead, links were drawn with Kogryo (Koguryo), Bohai (Balhae), Jin, Houjin (?) and the Qing era.

There was something on the ohaguruma (sacred palanquin) and how after the ceremony to enshrine souls in the palanquin, its bearers said it was heavier than before. I'm sure fatigue has nothing to do with it.

They then talked about the "China incident". They blamed not just Japanese troops for stirring up the Northern China autonomy movement but "terrorism" by the CCP under Comintern orders. They blamed the "Second Shanghai Incident" (to their credit, at least they are quite consistent in calling things 'incidents') on China (which was fair enough but neglected the numerous Japanese-instigated incidents of the past 6 years) as well as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. They claimed that Japanese government policy was to prevent escalation, then talked about the Langfang, Guanganmen and Tongzhou incidents (there was no explication of these in English those). They also mentioned the Oyama Incident.

"The Nanking Incident
After the Japanese government surrounded Nanking in December 1937, General Matsui Iwane distributed maps to his men with foreign settlements and the safety zones marked in red ink. Matsui told them that they were to maintain strict military disciplines (sic) and that anyone committing unlawful acts would be severely punished. The defeated Chinese rushed to Xinguan, and they were completely destroyed. The Chinese soldiers disguised in civilian clothing were severely prosecuted." (This has slight differences from a more controversial 2005 version; I also didn't see mention of the 'Martyrs of Showa')

In January 1938, PM Konoe said "we are hoping for the establishment and growth of a new Chinese government with which we can establish a meaningful partnership". In other words, they wanted a new puppet government in the vein of Manchukuo.

They said when they attacked Wuhan "a perfect care (sic) was taken to secure the safety of residents and historical and cultural monuments".

They said they occupied Hainan "to block all supplies to Chongqing, capture Chinese bases for blockade". They said this led the West to suspect they planned for a southern advance (wow, I suppose those troops that invaded Malaya appeared in Thailand out of nowhere).

They then talked about Konoe's second and third declarations in November and December 1938, aking them sound good. And then below they mentioned how in 1940 Wang Jingwei, who opposed Chiang and favoured peace with Japan, headed a new government in Nanking (in reality it was a Japanese puppet government - I guess this was Konoe's "new Chinese government with which we can establish a meaningful partnership").

They said after the Second Shanghai Incident, Chiang joined the Communists to attack Japan, so "The Japanese government abandoned its efforts to prevent incidents from escalating". Given how hard they tried previously, I'm not sure that this was a big loss.

They had the story and bugle of G. Birvan. While fighting the Japanese, he noticed a group of them were surrounded but took their lives and saluted the East (the direction of Japan). He wanted to dedicate a funeral tune to them, but he was not allowed to. In 2003, he went to Yasukuni and played the funeral tune. In 2006, his bugle was deposited in the museum in accordance with his will.

They blamed Soviet skirmishes on the border between Manchukuo and Soviet Mongolia on the border between the two not being well defined.

On the Zhanggufeng Incident, they said the "the Japanese fought a strictly defensive battle".

They blamed the US oil embargo for triggering the war with Japan. Somehow I don't think this is what Japan has in mind when they describe their close ties with the USA.

There was a video on the China Incident. It was like a propaganda video. It featured happy music to scenes of children in school. I saw troops moving about, and warships to cheery martial music. There were very few scenes of fighting - what scenes there were showed Japanese soldiers waving flags from their rifles, and firing offscreen, but the enemy and gore were never seen. In fact, it reminded me of a SAF video.

They said they required Asian resources, and faced Great Britain and the Netherlands as obstacles, and that they were "politically aligned with the US"

"Japan's Quest for avoiding a war" blamed the US's helping Chiang Kai Shek and said the Tripartite Pact (ie the one with the Axis powers) was aimed at improving their negotiating position with the US. They then said the oil embargo "threatens Japan's very survival".

At the Atlantic Conference Churchill and FDR secretly agreed on measures to deal with Japan, but only announced the Atlantic Charter.

They said the Emperor Showa (Hirohito) requested the government try to get peace, and recited a poem of Emperor Meiji:
"Across the four seas,
All are brothers
In such a world
Why do the waves rage,
The winds roar?"

"Roosevelt rejects Konoe's proposal
The Japanese side loses hope in continuing negotiations because it was rather a restatement of the prior American position and a criticism of the Japanese position in principle."

They said on November 25, the President and the Secretaries of State, War and Navy met and "explore means to 'maneuver them (Japan) into a position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves'". They said FDR ordered preparations for a Japanese attack, probably on December 1.

They said the Hull note had the toughest proposals yet, so half a year of negotiations were "meaningless".

On the Pearl Harbor strikeforce, they said they had strict instructions to abort if negotiations succeeded, and said the US ordered its own troops to prepare for war.

The December 8 1941 Imperial Rescript declaring war on the US claimed they just wanted friendship and prosperity, that Chiang Kai Shek was not the legitimate government of China, and yet the US and UK were protecting him, said China had failed to understand their true intentions and recklessly courted trouble.

There were 3 PRCs in the museum (I recognised them from their language and accent), 2 girls and a guy. I asked (in Chinese) where they were from, and the guy said Beijing. I then asked him what his opinion of the museum was, and he asked if I was Japanese. I said I was from Singapore and repeated my question, but he and the 2 girls just laughed, didn't reply and walked off.

After Iwo Jima and Okinawa, "Its homeland had been reduced to ashes by air raids and atomic bombs, and for the first time in history, the nation experienced the agony of defeat".

Their explanation for losing the war: "When victories in initial offensives were far more spectacular than anticipated, Japanese strategists altered the original, more prudent operational plans"

On the Papua New Guinea campaign: "The new 18th Army led by Lieutenant-General Adachi Hatazo fought desperately and bravely until they learned the end of the war in Aitge (?). Their courageous acts have been passed down to us through anecdotes about tragic defeats at Buna and Dampier, and the arduous scaling of the Sarawak Mountain Range.

Okinawa was described as: "The battle of homeland defence by the unity of the soldiers and civilians"

They said in 1942 Togo Shigenori said ending the war was a top priority, and they tried to get Sweden to mediate "but the US had no interest in negotiating for peace".

They said FDR's offering the USSR the Sakhelin and Kuril islands caused the Northern Territory problems today.

They said after the Potsdam Declaration to Japan, they were asking the USSR to mediate, but PM Suzuki's response was reported by the press as saying they would "ignore" the declaration, "providing the Allies with an excuse to continue their offensive against Japan". I have photographs of a Japanese and an American newspaper article of this rejection, taken in Hiroshima; the American one seemed quite clear, but I don't know about the Japanese one.

They said the USSR killed a military envoy who had come to negotiate peace. Ouch.

In China not one unit defied the Imperial order to disarm. Presumably this means units in other areas did.

They said the US was impressed by the discipline, solidarity, spirit of self-sacrifice and patriotism of the armed forces, and so in the early occupation they focused on "eradicating those qualities to ensure that Japan would never again pose a threat to the US". To do this, they "outlawed State support for Shinto, reformed the education system, instituted censorship, established a new constitution and enacted the fundamental law of education". Presumably, gender equality, being told that the Emperor is not a god and learning that Japan does not have a duty to invade liberate the rest of Asia makes Japan pro-US.

They pointed out the UN charter was drawn up when the world was at war, so "enemy state clauses" versus Japan and Germany are still there today.

On the 1 million Japanese civilians in Manchuria: "Their fate was so cruel and their suffering so great as to defy all description".

As we all know, Emperor Hirohito repudiated his divinity at the end of the war. The Yushukan museum would have us believe that the "real intention" of the Showa emperor was to return to the principles of Emperor Meiji's 1968 charter oath.

"Saddened by the loss
Of the precious lives
Of so many of my people,
I ended the war.
It mattered not what became of me"
- The Showa Emperor

In contrast, Herbert Bix writes (and is not quoted in the museum) of Hirohito's unwillingness to give up being Emperor after the first A-bomb was dropped: "In his
single-minded dedication to preserving his position, no matter what the cost to others, he was one of the most disingenuous persons ever to occupy the modern throne".

The museum credited the Russo-Japanese War and Japan's actions in World War II for inspiring independence movements in Asia: "The desire for independence had been kindled under Japanese occupation". They did not mention that the latter was because the Asians did not want to be occupied by Japan again due to Japanese brutality.

They had rooms with "mementoes of war heroes" and walls with photos. I considered looking for the Class A War Criminals, but I'd spent enough time in the museum already so I didn't.

There was a Flemish-style still life featuring a suit of Samurai armour. I was impressed.

The Shrine also had some military items, including a human (suicide) torpedo ("回天" - "Kaiten"). I was amused that it was given to them by a US museum (the Naval Academy or something Navy-related IIRC).


"I was very moved by how loyal the young warriors were. In a time where the US is in war, I am ashamed of not knowing how horrible war is. Eternal Peace on earth.
- E.T 2008.06.06"
I found it very appropriate that this person signed off as ET, since like an Extra-Terrestial, he appears to have entered this museum without any historical context or knowledge. Luckily there are no Nazi museums bemoaning the suffering of the Germans during WWII's firebombings and the sacrifices made by the German people, or he might write something similar.

A more informed guestbook entry:


"The only museums I have ever seen as distorted and flagrantly dishonest as this one are in China.

Japan suffered a lot during World War II (or should I say, the 'Japanese Incident') but this was largely due to its aggressive Imperialism and expansionism.

I hope the Japanese visitors to this museum don't take it at face value. If you want to whitewash the Nanking Massacre (Rape of Nanking) to the 'Nanking Incident' maybe we can call Commodore Perry's forced opening of Japan the 'Perry Incident' and the A-bombs the 'Hiroshima Incident' and the 'Nagasaki Incident'

''Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori''

- Agagooga
7th June 2008"


The only picture of the exhibits I took in the museum (since I'd noted down the good stuff and it didn't matter if they threw me out). It seems to be inspired by the Last Samurai.

The museum shop sold headbands, but none saying "Kamikaze". They had old Japanese army style caps for 5250Y (more than a stripclub!), which was crazy. I'd been told that they also had old Japanese army style caps with the flaps, but I didn't see any (it's okay, I can raid the Mediacorp Channel 8 storerooms). Even if they had any, I wouldn't buy any for fear of funding the next Greater East Asian War.


More pictures of the Yasukuni Shrine


Place to wash your hands and mouth


This is hands down my favourite photo in the post.
This guy was wearing different clothing from the one I'd glimpsed from afar earlier. Besides having a radio beside him on the bench (at one point it was playing a song with the tune of Auld Lang SYne) he had a bugle as well.
After staring at this photo for a long time, I conclude that it is the Naval flag, which is currently still in use, and not the Army one, which isn't.

"Don't accept rides from strange men, and remember that all men are strange." - Robin Morgan

***

Japan trip
Day 2 - 7th June - Imperial Palace East Gardens, Tokyo (Part 1)

I decided to start the day (and my grand trip) with the only part of the Imperial Palace that is open to the public year-round: the Imperial Palace East Gardens.


Japanese schoolkids have school on Saturdays. This is very sad. No wonder they kill themselves.


Anti-suicide gates at some subway stations

Japanese train conductors have a lot of saliva. Even when there's already a pre-recorded announcement about the next station, they like to talk for a long time (in keeping with the Japanese tendency for verbosity). Maybe this is why you're told not to talk on your mobile phone on the train - you won't miss the sound of the human voice.


Park east of the Palace proper (or at least outside the moat)


Funky pond


Okay, so this sort of toilet sign is not just used in the Baltics


Map of the gardens


Otemon Gate


Moat, with modernity in the background


"The following acts shall be prohibited within the Gardens:
1) To hold athletic games
15) To create hideous noises"
'You see the tree over there? Go over there and touch it and come back.'


Apparently Kendo training doesn't count as an activity that creates hideous noises

I heard one ang moh commenting that in the Tokyo subway 20-30% of the people are reading, but in Beijing no one is.


Blue Flowers


Doshin bansho Guardhouse
You can read the description yourself




This seemingly empty space is in fact extremely important (see the plaque?): "Every Japanese knows that this corridor was the locus of the unfortunate event when Lord Asano Takumino-Kami Naganori attacked and wounded Lord Kira Kozuke-no-Suke Yoshinaka in 1701. Cf. The Story of the Forty-seven Loyal Ronin."
If you are Japanese and do not know about this corridor, please leave a comment.




More flowers


Path




Remains of the base of the Tenshudai Donjon


Unimpressive view from the Tenshudai Donjon


Shiomizaka slope




Suwanochaya (Tea pavilion). You can read the sign if you want.


Ninomaru garden


Carp


More reminders of modernity


Horde and even bigger horde


Flowers


Shiomizaka slope again


Lamp post


Big bird in Japan




The definition of a manicured lawn


A sea of grey. The vast empty space is probably the Emperor's way of saying: "Haha, I have lots of prime land in the centre of Tokyo!" and asserting his power and wealth


Tantalising glimpses of the palace


Bridge to the palace


But no entry


One of the non-negligible handful of White/Asian couples. I was trying to figure out how many were local and how many were tourists. The girl here had an American accent.


Exiting the palace grounds


"Sakuradamon Gate": Gate stone




Birds resting by the riverside on a structure that seems built for them

"The town where I grew up has a zip code of E-I-E-I-O." - Martin Mull

***

"Eating is out of place in public... A man eating as he walks down the street eats in the face of all passersby, who must then either avert their gaze or observe him objectifiedly in the act. Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone - a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.

I fear I may by this remark lose the sympathy of many readers, people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the (not-only-Talmudic) view that eating in the street is for dogs. Modern America's rising tide of informality has already washed out many long-standing traditions - their reasons long before forgotten - that served well to regulate the boundary between public and private; and in many quarters complete shamelessness is treated as proof of genuine liberation from the allegedly arbitrary constraints of manners. To cite one small example: yawning with uncovered mouth. Not just the uneducated rustic but children of the cultural elite are now regularly seen yawning openly in public (not so much brazenly or forgetfully as indifferently and "naturally"), unaware that it is an embarrassment to human self-command to be caught in the grip of involuntary bodily movements (like sneezing, belching, and hiccuping and even the involuntary bodily display of embarrassment itself, blushing). But eating on the street - even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat - displays in fact precisely such lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now; it cannot wait. Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites. Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. Eating on the run does not even allow the human way of enjoying one's food, for it is more like simple fueling; it is hard to savor or even to know what one is eating when the main point is to hurriedly fill the belly, now running on empty. This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior."

--- Kass, Leon, The Hungry Soul, pp. 148-149

Leon Kass was also the chair of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001–2005, a body appointed to advise George W Bush on bioethics.

"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act." - Truman Capote

***


Incredibly lifelike statue which made me do a double take

I was at a Catholic-Christian wedding yesterday, and although the usual verse from Ephesians was read (sans context, but with nary a word of objection from feminists in the crowd), it was interesting that the wedding vows mirrored each other.

To wit:

Groom: I, [Groom's name], take you, [Bride's name], to be my wife. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honour you all the days of my life.

Bride: I, [Bride's name], take you, [Groom's name], to be my husband. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honour you all the days of my life.

In contrast, I was at a Fundamentalist Protestant-Christian wedding many years ago, and in addition to the usual verse from Ephesians being read (again, sans context), the wedding vows did *not* mirror each other. In other words, the wife vowed to submit to the husband, and the husband vowed to love the wife (with nary a word of objection from feminists in the crowd).

What *was* at both weddings, IIRC, was a promise to bring up the children in the faith. Which neatly contrasts with claims that everyone chooses the faith freely.


"Let us offer each other the sign of peace"


For feminists who might want to object at weddings:

When the preacher says "speak now or forever hold your peace," what happens if someone objects?

"If the bride or groom objects, the wedding is most likely off. Anyone else and, barring documented proof that the marriage is illegal, a drunken brawl is a more likely outcome...

Today, many ceremonies omit "speak now or forever hold your peace." Modern practices such as obtaining a marriage license have rendered the question obsolete."

The Online Citizen: Inflation drove this man to loansharks

Maybe next we'll see: "Porn ban drove this man to rape"


Postscript:

Last line: "Does unbridled inflation destroy lives? You be the judge."

Interestingly enough, the solution to unbridled inflation is to keep wage rises down.

Then maybe next we'll see: "Low wages drove this man to loansharks"

"Who is more busy than he who hath least to do?" - John Clarke, Paroemiologia Anglo-Latina, 1639

***

Baltics trip
Day 2 - 17th May - Vilnius, Lithuania (Part 1)


Back of the Gates of Dawn. We went during a morning service.


This Black Madonna is more than 500 years old. It and its part of the city wall (the only bit that remains) was not destroyed by Russia, Germany and then the Soviets due to religious reasons.



She is stepping on the Crescent (we saw representations of figures stepping on crescents in churches often). They must really hate the Golden Horde here.




Stuff at the side of the BM


Street from the window


Apparently they didn't like us (racism, hurr hurr) since they were quiet when we were there but started singing immediately once we left.


Church of All Saints


Inside. The Late Baroque Alabaster was, well, cute (not Italian standard - the use of light paled in comparison and emotion was lacking). This was during a service so we scooted quite quickly.


Strange egg, and cork boards as boarding in the background on the houses

[Addendum: The egg was a placeholder to signify the Republic of Užupis. It has since been replaced by the Angel of Užupis (see future post)]

There were a lot of huge... tracts of land.


Choral Synagogue

When we visited it was Shabat, so the synagogue was full and people were in straggly woolen shawls, skull caps and beards. Photography was forbidden normally anyway, so I didn't try because I didn't want to be hexed.


Dog


Church of the Assumption

Unfortunately it was closed, so we peeked in.


YC using his 10x zoom


Me without 10x zoom



Facade. A very spartan Franciscan church, it looks like it just came out of a Nazi-Soviet shootout (small arms only, please)


Truck with French on it


Street

We then went to the Church of the Holy Spirit, decorated Rococo style.


Hallway on approach in


Mural


Nave


Cross with "JNRI" - maybe they learn a different type of Latin here


Chapel


Paintings


Dome


Altar

We then climbed up to the pulpit, which for some reason was accessible.


People from pulpit

Apparently there were many well-preserved corpses in the cellar, but we couldn't find an entrance to the crypt.

You could see the Orthodox influence in the gilt on the icons, and the presence of icons themselves.


Street


Church behind a dump


Street


Demolishing their past


Scaffolding


Grafitti on wall


Church of St Catherine


Men looking like they're peeing in the Holy Fountain


Church door: "Pro ecclesia triumphanti. Pugnamus in militanti"


Church


Hordes of tourists


Multilingual welcome to fellow adherents of the faith


"SHRINE OF THE DIVINE MERCY... If you have received signal graces through the Divine Mercy (a conversion, deepening of faith, deliverance from a dependency, a spiritual or physical healing, etc.) please inform the resident priest or sisters attending the shrine"
With such vague phrasing I wouldn't be surprised if miracles happened daily.

"We must make do with the imperfect evidence that we can find, not merely lament its deficiencies." - Robert Putnam
Cannot, then much of the Social Sciences will be out of jobs

***

Too many black and Asian faces on TV, says BBC director Samir Shah - ""I don't think that such over-representation is a brilliant idea. Another thing that's not real is some of the casting of non-whites in fiction," he added. He pointed to the casting of the Ferreira family in EastEnders as an example. "If you were to cast an Asian family in the East End, it should have been Bangladeshi. Instead we had a family of Goan descent," Shah said. "The plain fact is that this tick-box approach to equal opportunities has led to an inauthentic representation of who we are: a world of deracinated coloured people flickering across our screens - to the irritation of many viewers and the embarrassment of the very people such actions are meant to appease.""
So instead they are going to have inauthentic quotas for senior executives. Brilliant.

Brain Aging and Midlife Tofu Consumption - "Poor cognitive test performance, enlargement of ventricles and low brain weight were each significantly and independently associated with higher midlife tofu consumption. A similar association of midlife tofu intake with poor late life cognitive test scores was also observed among wives of cohort members, using the husband’s answers to food frequency questions as proxy for the wife’s consumption. Statistically significant associations were consistently demonstrated in linear and logistic multivariate regression models. Odds ratios comparing endpoints among "high-high" with "low-low" consumers were mostly in the range of 1.6 to 2.0."

Drugs returned to red-faced Customs - "A SHOCKED airline passenger has returned a million yen's worth of cannabis that Customs staff planted in his bag in a bungled sniffer dog exercise."
If you find pot in your bag in Singapore, you're better off disposing of it otherwise you might have to prove you're not a drug trafficker.

Gay rodeo undermines sexual stereotypes - "Philadelphia's gay community sought to dispel some sexual stereotypes when it held the city's first gay rodeo... But the event - like other longer-established gay rodeos elsewhere in the United States - distinguishes itself from mainstream rodeos by injecting a little fun along with the strength and skill required to control a bucking animal. Interspersed with familiar events like steer riding and calf roping were "goat dressing" - in which pairs of contestants try to put hot-pink underwear on the hind quarters of an uncooperative goat in the shortest time - and "steer decorating" in which one partner of a team has to tie a ribbon on the tail of a struggling steer while the other tries to hold on to its horns."
I'm sure they undermined many sexual stereotypes.

Atheists caught having sex in cathedral - "The agency said the pair -- a 31-year-old laborer and a 32-year-old teacher -- defended their conduct saying: "We are atheists and for us, having sex in church is like doing it any other place." However, Bishop Antonio Lanfranchi of Cesena-Sarsina took said the couple's behavior was "an outrage of notable proportions which bespeaks unutterable squalor." He added that a special ceremony would be held to purify the confession box."
RC (TiT): "It could have been worse: they could have been using a condom."

The hardware way to boost your productivity - "What makes the Northgate OmniKey so special? First, the keyboard weighs in at almost five pounds. Its "Alps" key switches — the gizmos underneath the keys themselves — are rated for 10 million pushes. I bet most of Northgate's switches can stand up to ten times that number of presses, and I should know because I've pushed at least that many Alps switches over the years... Some keyboard purists feel that the Avants don't live up to the OmniKey ideal. For example, the letters on the Avant key caps are printed, while those on the OmniKey are embossed into the key caps themselves. This isn't a huge deal until you press a key 10 million times or so."

Learn to Be Nice to Your Wife, or Pay the Price - "A change in Japanese law this year allows a wife who is filing for divorce to claim as much as half her husband's company pension. When the new law went into effect in April, divorce filings across Japan spiked 6.1 percent. Many more split-ups are in the pipeline, marriage counselors predict. They say wives -- hearts gone cold after decades of marital neglect -- are using calculators to ponder pension tables, the new law and the big D... The husbands association ranks its members on a scale of 1 to 10. A "1" is a well-meaning but clueless guy who has done little more than show up at a group meeting. A "10" is a husband who has reached a Zen-like state of being able to show his wife through his daily behavior that he truly loves her -- and even manages to spit out the words "I love you." It is not common in Japanese culture for men or women to say those words, even in happy marriages, according to marriage counselors. So far, the husbands association has unearthed only one "10."... Asked whether he has yet mastered the art of telling his wife that he loves her, he replied: "I can say, 'I love you,' if I am drunk.""
Great. You slog for your family for decades and then get dumped and screwed out of your pension.

Intelligent people 'less likely to believe in God' - "Professor Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, said many more members of the "intellectual elite" considered themselves atheists than the national average. A decline in religious observance over the last century was directly linked to a rise in average intelligence, he claimed. But the conclusions - in a paper for the academic journal Intelligence - have been branded "simplistic" by critics."
Unless the critics had anything more than vague accusations lined up, this is like the classic accusation that someone is a 'pseudo-intellectual', ie "We can't refute what you're saying, so we'll try a Jedi mind trick and hope no one notices we haven't actually refuted you". It is heartening that he does controversial research linking intelligence to things other people would rather not link them with. Hopefully he won't lose his job.

"I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness." - James Thurber

***

Something I got via email (reposted via Azrul Hisham - My Real Life):

Culture West vs East

Blue --> Westerner

Red --> Asian

Opinion

B: Talk to the point
R: Talk around the circle, especially if different opinions

Way of Life

B: individualism, think of himself or herself.
R: enjoy gathering with family and friends, solving their problems, and know each other's business (keh poh).

Punctuality

B: on time.
R: in time.

Contacts

B: Contact to related person only
R: Contact everyone everywhere, business very successful.

Anger

B: Show that I am angry.
R: I am angry, but still smiling... (beware!)

Queue when Waiting

B: Queuing in an orderly manner
R: Queuing?! What's that?

Sundays on the Road

B: Enjoy weekend relaxing peacefully.
R: Enjoy weekend in crowded places, like going to the mall.


Party

B: Only gather with their own group.
R: All focus on the one activity that is hosted by the CEO .

In the restaurant

B: Talk softly and gently in the restaurant.
R: Talk and laugh loudly like their own the restaurant .

Travelling

B: Love sightseeing and enjoy the scenery.
R: Taking picture is the most important, scenery is just for the background.

Handling of Problems

B: Take any steps to solve the problems.
R: Try to avoid conflicts, and if can, don't leave any trail.

Three meals a day

B: Good meal for once a day is sufficed.
R: At least 3 good meals a day.

Transportation

B: Before drove cars, now cycling for environmental protection.
R: Before no money and rode a bike, now got money and drive a car .

Elderly in day to day life

B: When old, there is snoopy for companionship.
R: When old, guarantee will not be lonely, as long as willing to baby-sit the grandkids.

Moods and Weather

B: The logic is, rain is pain.
R: The more the rain, more prosperity .

The Boss

B: The boss is part of the team.
R: The boss is a Fierce god.

What's Trendy

B: Healthy Asian cuisine
R: Expensive Western cuisine.

The Child

B: The kid is going to be independent and make his/her own living.
R: Work, live and all for the kids, the centre of life.

"Never believe anything until it has been officially denied." - Claud Cockburn

***

Given differing desires about the order of my travelogues, I have come up with the horribly creative solution of doing both at once. Due to the lack of satiation effects, it will probably take slightly shorter than if I'd done both sequentially.

Despite my Japan trip only being 1-2 days longer, I scribbled twice as much stuff. Tells you something about the Japs, the Baltics or both.


Japan trip
Day 1 - 6th June - Aobadai, Tokyo

To save on cab fare, I went to Changi the night before. However I was unable to sleep (probably some combination of anxiety about missing my flight, uncomfortable airport chairs and annoying music - though none of that has stopped me in the past) and so observed a couple of things.

There was an Indian couple at Imperial Treasure La Mian and the man was annoyed at the PRC waitress being unable to communicate with him: 'This is Singapore. Nobody speaks English anymore!' He should try looking Chinese - it's even worse. I swear, one day I'm going to pretend I can't speak Mandarin and see what happens, to simulate the plight of non-Mandarin-speaking Thai Chinese/Koreans/Japanese in Singapore.

Later I saw 2 toilet cleaners, one PRC and one Indian. When the PRC spoke to the Indian she used English, but it was so heavily accented it sounded like Mandarin.

NWA (Northwest) had self-service checkin, but it was really silly because they had people to operate the machines for us.

The differing classification of Men's magazines in the airport was interesting. FHM and Maxim Singapore were untouched, but FHM UK, Arena UK and Ralph Australia were labelled "Unsuitable for the young" and sealed. I know that FHM UK has pictures of topless women, but I am extremely skeptical that that is allowed in Singapore. Maybe they mosaic-censor the nipples Jap-style or something, or paste the stickers that adult shops use to cover naughty parts (bah). I would've found out personally, but $13 for Ralph or $18 for FHM UK is too much without a research grant. Oddly enough, the women's mags weren't marked "Unsuitable for the young" also. Hah.

To kill time I snipped my split ends with nail clippers. Very fun.

Pilot to Japan: "Your last piece of useless trivia to impress friends and family back home with: *our speed and altitutde*"

I agreed to switch seats to let a family sit together, and at the end of the flight I was given 2 amenities vouchers. Air miles are a waste of time, and I didn't need a beer/wine/cocktail or snack on the plane (does this mean alcohol or snacks are not normally served to you in Cattle Class?) so I saved them for airport dining.

My flight was actually transiting in Narita on the way to Minneapolis, which apparently is a big air hub, so very few of us exited immigration. So few, in fact, that we did not get our own luggage belt - our luggage was unceremoniously dumped at one side.

Customs was extremely strict, and seemed to check most people's luggage. They claimed it was because of security, but I know they were actually checking for people trying to sneak in sacks of rice.

Sign in the Narita airport lift: "Do not jump in the elevator". Wth.


There was a UNEP photo exhibtion in the airport. This woman doing a hair flip and this "Jamping polar bear" (sic) were the best photos.

I was on my way to MR's dorm, which was off in the suburb of Aobadai. I chose the cheap way, so had a ridiculously long ride with 2 transfers.


"Women Only... On weekdays, the last car of selected up-bound commuter limited express trains is for women only"
No Chikan. I briefly considered trying to sneak in and see if it'd work, but I didn't have fake eyelashes, have a flashy wardrove or speak in an unnaturally high voice so it wouldn't work.

There was a 4-masted windmill in between 2 of the train stations near Narita.

I saw a Jap Miffy ad, which was amusing, since the first time I saw Miffy, I thought it was another Jap abomination (just try putting her and Hello Kitty side by side).

Most Japanese train station ticket gates are open. Although this means you can go through them in either direction, it made me wonder why people didn't just underpay or better yet, run through the ticket gates without buying a ticket. (Stay tuned for the answer)


"Movie
Sports
Music
Book
Disney
Adult"
I love how "Disney" was above "Adult". I was told that most of the products were porn. After grocery shopping (below) we went in to have a look, and 90% was porn (all Japanese, amazingly - it must be due to protectionism [they do have foreign porn, but they have to censor it and domestic demand probably doesn't like it much]), 7% gravure, 1% sex-related stuff (eg Tenga Cup and underwear in a packet with a girl's photograph), 1% assorted goods (e.g. nail clippers) and 1% non-sex-related DVDs (Disney etc).


Menu of dinner place. Calories are listed.


I had 'Southern Barbarian' style chicken - chicken in a general sweet sauce, with maybe a little chili (just for colour).

At dinner, there were 2 schoolgirls outside, and one squatted down to look at the menu, with predictable results. GAH GAH GAH.


Jeansmate - where you can buy jeans 24/7.


Something I didn't expect to see: Tesco products at the supermarket.


Bamboo

All the cold green tea sold in Japan has no sugar, whereas virtually all cold green tea sold outside it in Singapore does.


I don't know whether these were tied up because they were Hentai or because they didn't want kids reading them.


Tied-up dog outside grocery place.

Future days will have many more pictures.

"Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking." - Clement Atlee

***

HWMNBN: someone wrote that she saw and heard more crying and grieving at sex and the city theaters than in any war movie or mourning scene than she could remember in recent memory


Someone who asked for a Love Amulet: i just checked out the jishu website
din noe they actually have a website

it does give description of the amulets in english

Me: hoho
so what's yours

Someone: Find love

Me: yeah that's what it said there

Someone: they claimed tt the amulet is valid for a year
and if ur wishes r granted within a year, u shld go back and thank the gods

i wonder this attributes in any way to their booming tourism

Me: !!!
wth
tell them to go and die

I didn't know these things expire !@#$

Someone: http://www.jishujinja.or.jp/enmusubi/omamori/index.html
u wun throw it away after a year mah

Me: damn japs


Someone else: 輪h市t

Me: ?

Someone else: oh shit w
at least he didn't stab a lot of people this time

Me: yah
what does the jap mean

Someone else: what jap
wtf, it was just a swiss army knife

Me: "輪h市t"

Someone else: oh that's just ohshit

try it
go japanese IME then type in ohshit

Me: gah


Someone on overpriced sex toys in Singapore: 1000 yen is like less than $15 right?
sell for $30 lah

set up a ninja van business

go to the halls in nus
and ntu

best if you can get a hippie van

Me: haha
shagmobile

maybe at uni level they're still into vanilla sex

Someone: ah well with a shagmobile you can set up shop everywhere
go where the demand is


Me: the MDA block on websites is ridiculously easy to circumvent
!@#$

Someone else: how do you do it?

Me: ***

Someone else: wow

Me: I want to kick something

Someone else: don't. You know we have people who work in there, who give us these loopholes to work through

they are our heros

Me: yah I know
hahahahah

it's like how gay sex is officially banned in singapore to make conservatives happy
but consenting gay sex in private is legal

so everyone is happy except the liberals

Someone else: the door is there, it's just hidden. It;'s a cognitive filter

Me: and informational

but if too many people know, it gets shut

[Ed: A friend on Singnet tried it but it didn't work. It doesn't work with Chick.com - telling, huh? I found another easy method to circumvent that, though.]


Someone: china is fucking blocking sourceforge

i feel so sorry for cs guys in china
want to use a tool that's on sourceforge? oops, can't

Me: wth

what
subversive msgs hidden in code ah

Someone: i heard it's because notepad++ was protesting something

it's stupid lah w

"That's the secret to life... replace one worry with another...." - Charles M. Schulz, Charlie Brown

***

More local film-makers tackle sex and nudity

"Dr Tan says: 'A common approach to sex in many of these Singapore films has been the idea of sexual repression, where a materialistic, rigid, conservative and authoritarian culture is presented as a severe constraint on authentic human creativity and the erotic impulses.'

Or as Mr Zhang put it: 'The sex depicted is usually quite depressing and is very stark.'"


Haha, academic-speak.

"If I only had a little humility, I'd be perfect." - Ted Turner

***

Baltics trip
Day 1 - 16th May - Vilnius, Lithuania; Selected pictures from HWMNBN (I will get YC's pictures tomorrow, but I doubt I'll find anything I want to post so I'll move on)


One way I sleep on planes


Vilnius from the air

"I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world." - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

***

Baltics trip
Day 1 - 16th May - Vilnius, Lithuania (Part 2)

YC was very proud of his 10X camera zoom and kept using it.


Grafitti on the door of the tower beside the cathedral


Cathedral-Basilica



Cathedral-Basilica


Street


Plane trail in sky


Walking in the park


Papua New Guinea or Easter Island envy? Or a shrine to the Pagan gods?


National Museum in the New Arsenal. The grotesque statue is, of course, modern and is of King Mindaugas


River and fishing guys


Bridge

We walked a whole round around Gediminas Hill trying to find a way up to see the Castle Tower, but couldn't and so gave up.


Stream


Coins with rulers' heads


Nice little courtyard


"The Wine of the Month: Arrogant Frog", from Languedoc, France. What an appropriate name.


Vilnius building. I forget why it interested me.


Church of St Anne and the Bernadine Church







Church portal (it was closed)



Closer up




Street


Statue

We then had some fun with dandelions.


YC blowing dandelions








Dog in window


Non-Malaysian Mannikins. Hurrah!
I was very happy because I saw no Malaysian Mannikins in the Baltics.


Something we didn't expect to see - a stretch Limo


"Eden Club. Naktinis Klubas. Free Taxi Service. The best place to start your night. Hot Erotic Show. Sexy Girls. Turkish Sauna. Open everyday 21:00pm-06:00am"
Sex club ad


Church of the Holy Trinity at night. Do you notice something peculiar about this picture?


Closeups of the All-Seeing Eye on the church building. It seems the Illuminati run this city (and the rest of the Baltics!)

"The only time people dislike gossip is when you gossip about them." - Will Rogers

***

Japanese - "Another interesting feature of Japanese is the distinction between male and female speech. This involves vocabulary, grammar and particularly pitch - women tend to speak in very high, squeaky voices, at least in public, while men prefer low, gruff voices. If a foreign man learns Japanese from his Japanese girlfriend the results can sound very funny to Japanese ears!"

Face it, the right apprentice won - "Why are women so keen always to be seen to be victimised, even when they clearly aren’t victimised at all?... The female candidates in this year’s show spent their entire time bitching, backstabbing, bullying, scheming, lying and passing the buck. The men got on with it and managed to get over whatever petty arguments they had by the end of each episode. The women simply wouldn’t let theirs drop: some are continuing months after filming ended. This female trait is conveniently ignored when women complain of being overlooked or underpromoted, as if their gender exempted them from behaving decently. In my experience, women are far harder to work with than men. Men don’t give you a crap task because they’re jealous of your shoes or mistrust you for months because you have good highlights... I’ll tell you what the issue is with women in business or women and work. It is extremely simple. It is not to do with sexist dinosaur male bosses or with male-dominated industries crushing our genius. It is not to do with glass ceilings. It is to do, very straightforwardly, with the number of hours we are prepared to put in. If you’re happy to work a 16-hour day and never see your children, you too can become a master of the universe."
In the comments: "Well put, as only a woman would be allowed to say, of course."

UCB Rubberband Club - "The mission of this club is to teach how to shoot rubber bands to all members and to have fun while doing this. After the goal of shooting in many different styles has been accomplished members can enjoy a plethora of games to enjoy through the use of shooting rubber bands."

How much money do you need to be happy? Hint: Your sex life matters more - "How much money buys happiness? A wide body of research suggests the number is approximately forty thousand dollars a year. Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, says once you have enough money to meet basic needs – food, shelter, but not necessarily cable —incremental increases have little effect on your happiness... In terms of happiness, job satisfaction is very important but social relationships are most important. And by social relations, most researchers mean sex – with one, consistent partner. So consider giving your career aspirations a little less weight than you give your aspirations for sex."

Firefox 3 Memory Benchmarks and Comparison - "Safari on Windows shows extremely poor memory management, and I do not know whether it ever reaches a high water mark. If this is by design, it is certainly a design that looks inefficient and seems to contradict Apple's marketing... After browsing for 14 hours with these programs, and recording all the results into spreadsheets, the most memory efficient browser in my usage is very clear--Firefox 3.0 not only trumps its older version, but every other popular offering on Windows. This article may help other vendors rethink their marketing campaigns, and may prompt further improvements."

The Straight Dope: Is it crazy to eat clay? - "I'm a student at the Art Institute and I've been eating clay for four years. You are probably not familiar with the process of clay so I will briefly explain. When the clay is completely dry but has not been fired it's called greenware. That's when I eat it. But I once ate a whole teacup after it had been fired (bisqueware)."

The Straight Dope: Do left-handers die young? - "There's a fair amount of evidence that left-handedness is caused by minor brain damage at birth (though there seems to be a genetic component as well). Possibly as a result, lefties are clumsier if perhaps also more creative. Looking through the medical literature, I find studies reporting that lefties have a higher accident rate, are more likely to have their fingers amputated due to power-tool accidents, suffer more wrist fractures, etc. What's more, lefties suffer a higher incidence of allergies, epilepsy, schizophrenia, and certain learning disabilities. Lefties, a 1992 article in the Atlantic notes, also show unusually high frequencies of depression, drug abuse, bed-wetting, attempted suicide, lower-than-normal birth weight, sleeping disorders, and autoimmune diseases."

Priest who was chaplain gets 4 years for sex with inmates - "A Roman Catholic priest was sentenced Monday to four years in prison for having sex with two inmates while a chaplain at a women's prison."
If he'd been having sex with altar-boys, prison might have been a blessing instead.

Urge to kill doctors increased by pain - being-human - "David Fishbain and colleagues at the University of Miami, Florida, found that just over 1 in 20 (5%) of roughly 800 physical rehabilitation patients admitted feeling like they wanted to murder their physician. Even amongst a control group, who were not being treated for any condition, slightly fewer than 1 in 50 (2%) said they had previously had the same urge."

Clothes Unmake the Man - Weird News Story Archive - "The 29-year-old mayor of Chepstow, Wales, has quit rather than dress up for city council meetings. Armand Watts, 29, a hairdresser, liked to wear T-shirts and jeans. “I really don’t see the point of wearing a suit, shirt and tie to sit around in council meetings,” Watts says."

"If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee." - Abraham Lincoln

***

Baltics trip
Day 1 - 15th-16th May - Flight, Amsterdam Transit; Vilnius, Lithuania (Part 1)

We flew in to Vilnius, Lithuania via Amsterdam. The first flight was the racially homogenous flight I'd ever taken.

One thing about KLM that distinguishes them from other airlines is the food you get. They really pay a lot of attention to it (yes, even in Cattle Class), from the packaging to the contents:


Breakfast tray


Extolling the symbolism of soup: "For all of us, soup means protection, food for the soul. It's one of the most primitive and simple ways of saying I love you." You just need to mess up the grammar a bit and add "Please enjoy this soup" to make it Engrish. It's probably due to shared translation and intercultural issues.

Meanwhile, the packaging of the pumpkin seeds and croutons read: "This food was prepared especially for high altitude consumption". Don't ask me why.


Breakfast tray


Breakfast spread


A primer on Dutch breakfast: "The main ingredient in a traditional Dutch breakfast is bread. The Dutch usually eat slices of white or wholemeal bread spread with butter and topped with cheese, jam, chocolate sprinkles, peanut butter or ham (or another type of thinly sliced cold meat). Alternative or additional breakfast fare consists of rusks, rye bread, ginger cake, currant loaf, a boiled egg or a bowl of porridge. As well as coffee or tea the Dutch like to drink dairy products such as milk or buttermilk with their breakfast"
This was amusing, since there was no bread in the breakfast set (I had the pancake but the other option was an omelette), and I know the Dutch feel sick when they smell hot food in the morning. Of course, if they served Dutch breakfast no one else would fly KLM.

Unfortunately, not as much attention was paid to the in-flight entertainment as to food. The system lag was the worst I'd ever seen. TVs and CDs under the Kids' section were not available under the Adults section (this might not sound problematic, but they put the Simpsons under the Kids section, so).

Worse, the standard of in-flight service was totally unacceptable. On two occasions, I pressed the attendant call button, and when the light above me lit up, no one attended to me even after many minutes, so I gave up. How un-gezellig. I like that at the back of the plane (and presumably near the other galleys) there were carts set up with water, Orange Juice, Coke and chocolates for passengers to help themselves, but this probably resulted in moral hazard (the stewardesses were tiao kar-ing [putting their legs up] and reading magazines or newspapers when I peeked in the galley to ask for stuff). In fact, one woman asked one of the stewardesses for something, and the stewardess pointed to the self-service trolley and response. I prefer self-service actually, but service is paid for, so KLM gets bottom marks for service.

As a minor point, there weren't sanitary pads in the toilet, but since this doesn't affect me I won't harp on it.

Commands to cabin crew were made in English, not Dutch. Hah.

Schiphol's X-ray machine is like an MRI chamber - a long plastic tube (YC has a pic somewhere but I haven't gotten his pictures yet).


Swingy chair at Schiphol
I love technology. Don't you?

I couldn't find frites in the airport. Boo hoo. I couldn't find the "Not everything in Holland is flat" shirt either, let alone one with the two strategically-placed hemispheres.

I saw a male cleaner going into a female toilet. Hurrah for gender equality. I love this country (then again maybe he was gay).

The flight from Amsterdam to Vilnius was farmed out to FlyLAL, which operated like a low cost airline despite seemingly being the national carrier of Lithuania.

The cockpit window of a 737 can open and the pilot can stick his head outside. How cute. As long as it's not done during a flight, of course (someone can always remove the black rubber window linings).


Vilnius Oro Uostas Airport. Note the Communist-esque carvings above.


Run down Communist buildings. Unfortunately we didn't see much of the most sombre ones except for the transit to/from the airport.


Birds on the walls



Gates of Dawn



Ditto


Rundown houses


YC and nw.t in a tunnel


Subverting capitalism: "M-otherfucker"


YC and nw.t walking on the street. Notice the suffering of the one carrying the trolleybag


St Teresa's Basilica. Pastatyta


Perfect rainbow from Hotel


Street with St Teresa's Basilica

Lithuania felt like Malaysia, with their signs reading Baras (Bar), Apartamentai (Apartment), Rezervusta (Reserved), Policija (Police) and Taksi (Taxi).


Church of the Holy Trinity gateway

There's something about the smell of grilled onions on the cool temperate air that is irresistable.


Town hall


The two things they're most proud of: inscription on the World Heritage List and George W Bush's: "Anyone who would choose Lithuania as an enemy has also made an enemy of the United States of America"


Town square


Church of St Nicholas. There were Byzantine-style icons inside, and a nonatych (9-panelled polytych) below an arch, and red cyrillic letters which glowed like neon in the light.


Huge amber necklace


Street


Dragonball in Lithuanian


Jewelry


Russian Dolls - including Harry Potter, Osama bin Laden, a Beatle and more in addition to the normal cast

I saw a guy in a ponytail (which was very tangled) with a fieldpack, fatigues and boots.


Viesbutis "Narutis" - A hotel which claimed to be established in 1581.


Street

We then went to the first of many underground restaurants (they have a lot of underground food and alcohol establishments in the Baltics).


The Underground Restaurant


The wonderful menu. As you can see the meat with the biggest share is pork.

The black sourbread was the most sour bread I'd ever had. It had a complex flavour, a bit like raisins (maybe there was wine must inside).


I had Kvass (the yellow thing on the right), a sour drink made of bread that all 3 Baltic states had. It was quite nice, tasting like slightly sweet beer without the alcohol. It's probably what beer used to taste like in the past before they added hops, since they had to drink it everyday (due to bad water quality).


Me having mushroom soup and sourbread.


Snack plate: "Smoked bard (sic) (non-rendered pork underskin fat with little or no meat), smoked bacon, herring, pickles, blue onion, black olives"
The smoked lard had an extremely strong bacon flavour. We couldn't finish it (especially not the skin).


Pork chop. It was very nice, but it was still a pork chop (tenderloin).


Potato pancakes and herring


Restaurant cellar

We then went to the vicinity of the Cathedral-Basilica.


A horse about to push a man over a precipice. This is a monument to Gediminas, Grand Duke of Lithuania.


The statue from other angles


The cathedral and a tower


The throng


Ang mohs playing chapteh

Picture of Otaku pillows JX sent me

Are people more interested in reading the Baltics travelogue or the Japan travelogue first?

"When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading." - Henny Youngman

***

โฮเวอร์คราฟท์ของผมเต็มไปด้วยปลาไหล

"Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view." - Lillian Hellman

***

Stuff I managed to get:
Tenga Cup
Manta Ray stuffed toy
Love amulet x2
Shiroi Koibito 1x18+1x36 x2
Macallan 18 year old Scotch Whiskey
Sofy Tampons

Stuff I didn't:
Gyoza crimper
Takoyaki keychain


Ugh. Everytime I come back from a place with a civilised climate, I get a headache.

Distance from the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn is probably a good predictor of health, correcting for GDP and health systems.

See if you can spot me in "Where the Hell is Matt? (2008)":

For some reason, there're at least 5 Singaporean girls at my Hiroshima youth hostel (in a group of 2 and one of 3; there might be more hiding in the rooms but these 5 are those I've seen).

When the second group came in, one of them was unable to carry her trolley luggage up the stairs by herself, and one of the other 2 who'd gone up made some remark about getting the guy to help. She then publicly voiced her realisation that she'd been talking too loudly. I helped anyway, since there's nothing to do at night (there's an onsen but it uses artificial 'spring water' and I had dinner a bit too late).

Then later one was trying to figure out how to find the "@" sign; it was a Jap keyboard but on EN layout mode (the solution is to pretend you're using a normal keyboard and touchtype).

Two all-pork patties, special sauce, lettuce, onions on a bun.

Note to self: Don't ever order anything with Shuto ("酒盗" - bonito guts pickled in salt) again.

Useful site for checking train schedules in Japan: http://www.hyperdia.com/ (click on 'English')

(Courtesy of Kenny)

After having a meal of Shōjin Ryōri ('精進料理' - Japanese vegetarian food with no garlic, onions, leeks, chives or shallots), I now understand why it is the only thing you can eat if you are to attain Enlightenment.

"When I cook, I am always amazed at how beautiful the vegetables are... All of the vegetables are full of energy, and they reinvigorate us. I feel Buddha in each plate, and appreciate the vegetables' offerings all the time."

"Public speaking is the art of diluting a two-minute idea with a two-hour vocabulary." - Evan Esar

***

Outrage as French judge annuls Muslim marriage over bride's virginity lie - "The annulment of a young Muslim couple’s marriage because the bride was not a virgin has caused anger in France, prompting President Sarkozy’s party to call for a change in the law... Mr X went to court the following morning and was granted a annulment on the grounds that his bride had deceived him on “one of the essential elements” of the marriage. In disgrace with both families, she acknowledged that she had led her groom to believe that she was a virgin when she had already had sexual intercourse. She did not oppose the annulment."
Naturally, if a guy lied about his job before marriage, not allowing the wife to annul the marriage would be sexism and yet another ugly manifestation of patriarchy. However, I am informed that in the sexist and patriarchal society that is Singapore, lying about your job is not grounds for annulling a marriage.
Someone: people can get divorced because one of the spouses plays their music too loudly
why not because one of them lied about being a virgin

Why China Loves to Hate Japan - "After Japanese invaders shoot Little Zhang's grandmother in the back, the boy seeks revenge by joining an underground Red Army detachment. He moves among heroic Chinese patriots, sniveling collaborators and sadistic Japanese. The finale comes with Little Zhang helping blow up a trainload of Japanese soldiers and receiving a cherished reward: a pistol with which to kill more Japanese. "I thought about including one sympathetic Japanese character, but this is an anti-Japan war movie and I don't want to confuse anyone," says Sun, who will premier his film on International Children's Day... The problem is that just as Japanese soldiers once dehumanized Chinese, Beijing's propaganda often paints Japanese as pure monsters. Grade school textbooks recount the callous brutality of Japanese soldiers in graphic detail, and credit the Communist Party with defeating Japan. (Another reason for Japan's surrender, it says, was the atomic bombs dropped by the U.S.) More moderate voices are silenced. A 2000 film by one of China's leading directors, Jiang Wen, remains banned because it depicted friendliness between a captured Japanese soldier and Chinese villagers. Although the film showed plenty of brutality, censors ruled that "Devils at the Doorstep" gave viewers "the impression that Chinese civilians neither hated nor resisted Japanese invaders.""
It's no wonder "young people are more anti-Japanese than their elders who actually experienced the Japanese occupation"

LiveLeak.com - Evolution of mobile phones 1985-Today (Video) - "Sharp J-SH04 (2001) The first popular cellphone to feature an internal camera, released in Japan in 2001. These days you'd be lucky to find a phone without one"
Maybe on a SAF contract. Oh, maybe it's a conspiracy to increase sales of basic handsets.

Amsterdam delicacy: Herring - "Stamppot is a reflection of traditional Dutch values: soberness, hard labor, and moderation — values rooted in Calvanism, and still very much in evidence outside Holland’s big cities... Traditionally, the fish (minus its head) is eaten by grabbing it by the tail, throwing one’s head back, and — while gently lowering the fish — biting off tasty morsels... Suffice it to say that for most people herring is love at first bite."
Hahahaha

UCPD Crime Alerts & Advisories — 2008 - "Annoying/Molesting a Child" is a crime in Berkeley. Truly, it is a Liberal campus.

Japanorama's Subliminal Kana Screen Savers - "Subliminal Japanese Screen Savers allow anyone of any age to learn to read Japanese. With these colorful screen savers slowly cycling on your Windows PC, you can passively absorb characters at your own pace, while protecting your computer's screen!"

Mobile phones expose human habits - "The results showed that most people's movements follow a precise mathematical relationship - known as a power law. "That was the first surprise," he told BBC News. The second surprise, he said, was that the patterns of people's movements, over short and long distances, were very similar: people tend to return to the same few places over and over again. "Why is this good news?" he asked. "If I were to build a model of how everyone moves in society and they were not similar then it would require six billion different models - each person would require a different description." "

Bond breakers - "A couple of months ago, I was asked by a professor J in the office building to review the credentials of a graduate school applicant X from my alma mater, the National University of Singapore... Then, I noticed that X was from the PRC. More specifically, X is an MOE scholarship holder (as stated in his resume), the kind that is obliged to serve out his/her bond in Singapore for 6 years after graduation in exchange for a tax-money sponsored university education in Singapore. What on earth was he doing, applying to go to graduate school in the US immediately after graduation when he has signed a 6-year contract with the MOE?... The irony is, for people like X who will probably 'break' his bond and mind you, not fulfill the terms of his contract, i.e. not pay the financial penalty of not serving out his bond, the Singapore government will stay silent, very very silent. By letting someone like X go, at least 100 to 150 thousand dollars of Singaporeans' tax money spent subsidizing his eduction has gone down the drain. Where is the accountability so often trumpeted by our civil service? On the other hand, in contrast, when one of our PSC/EDB scholars does not serve out his/her bond but pays back the money to the government, plus a little bit more, the national broadsheets scream bloody murder"
takchek: Now you know why there is so much ill-will and resentment by the Singaporean students towards foreign undergrads in NUS/NTU/SMU when it comes to this topic of foreign MOE scholars (leeching off the goodwill and generosity of the Singaporean tax-paying public).

"The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found." - Calvin Trillin

***

Japan edition:


MFTTW: i've played [all look same]
i'm not too bad, 13/17 i think

Me: WAH
no one else I know has gotten >=10

MFTTW: relaly

it's not too hard, just look at eyes
the koreans are all slitty

Me: we all 6-8
then jap/chi?

MFTTW: facial hair
japs have more

Me: err

MFTTW: it's true lah
jap guys can grow beards

chinese guys cannot
they can only grow cheekopek goatees like ***


Someone: are u going kyomizu dera?
in kyoto

this place is very famous for blessing love
supposedly

Me: AHAHHAHAHA
so did you get any luck?

Someone: i din pray for it
regret
haha

Me: damn
cannot test the hypothesis

maybe the gods only understand jap

Someone: no lar not true

Me: maybe chinese ah

Someone: supposed to be omnipotent

Me: not all gods are like God

Someone: there are 2 famous rocks there 18m apart

it is said if one can walk from one stone to the other blindfolded, he/she will definitely be blessed with TRUE love

Me: just memorise the direction lor
if the sacred chickens wont eat, let them drink


Me: sure you dont wnat anything from spore ah

Someone else in Japan: my rmmate wants hello panda chocolate
and instant milo... if u have space...

Me: hahahahah
ok I'll go look

EH WAIT
ISN'T HELLO PANDA FROM JAPAN

Someone else: dunno...

i dont know... he say cannot find here...
not so common maybe...


Me: people are asking me to buy all sorts of shit from japan

tampons
gyoza maker
18 year scotch whiskey
shiroi koibito
love amulet

wth

[Update: I've been asked to get a Tenga Cup also]

Someone: haha
i bought a ice kachang maker in kyoto

Off to the land of Soaplands, shōjin-ryōri (ie no garlic or onions) and disguised racism on a morning flight.

Back on the 23rd.

"Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of witnesses." - Margaret Millar

***

Search Referrals:

Kah Seng Serene Wedding - This is ridiculous. Do I look like some social news hub?!

justwhitegirls.com website review

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"nude sumo" -spoof

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study that shows children who are exposed to cigerate smoke have less adult allergies s

The impromptu human waves which we fondly call the kallang wave, making rounds after rounds around the stadium, was such a impressive sight and is something that is solely missed for the past 13 years.

+"tv show" +"lives in a warehouse" +sensory

fiona xie orgasm

fresh bratwurst in the microwave

mas selamat exchange hostage

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Apsara topless demonstration

IRRELIGION A MATHEMATICIAN EXPLAINS rapidshare

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Eating Sperm Is Immoral Conduct megaupload

people who masterbate pets

blog taiwanese girls topless in school

toilet slave story + sanitary napkin

Macro Interference Schrodinger Cat cartoon

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pastors @yahoo.com.do

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artical on breast sucking by men during intercourse - There's an article on everything.

jc girl short fbt photos

sourpuss cafe

sentai suit fetish - There's a BBS thread on this, but I can't read it.

http://make-girls-wet.blogspot.com bitter

malay escort+rapidshare - Haram!

Naxos website "in ntu"

FUCK MARTIN TAN 377a

julia andrews flashes her breasts

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lab vivian tang+blog+singapore+bitch

ntu "make love"

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tudung oil palm malaysia - Is there some secret?

jelly girl hentai

sir dookie gummie bears cartoon

Successory wth 18 kids, Vagina is not an assembly line

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x-ray hentay pics

HOW OFTEN DO U GOTTA LET UR PRUNO BREATH

+disney+employee+demerit+point+system

masterbation and hair falling for girls ..

how to tell which faulty from nus matriculation number

+"walkers sensations" +"palm oil"

singapore rjc erotics stories - Maybe I should write some, since there's a market for it.

weird japanese frog insertion - Genki Genki!

cjc hostelites

starhub prepaid hack

sharapova hairy armpit

kathleen peacock katong convent

Alternative Lifestyles Revisited, "Journal of Family Issues", 2001, rAPIDSHARE

Michelle Yeoh's knee to groin


Google site search:
molestation
shortest highschool skirts in tokyo
shortest highschool skirts in japan
xxx shortest high school skirts in the world galleries - I get the message.
girl on girl sexual headshave
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why am i number 1 search result
is swallowing sperm halal - I'm not qualified to issue a fatwa.


Image search:
chinese jamaican shop
jap girls cut the other way - ???
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geylang hooker - This got the angel girl.
Psycho Care Bear
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barack obama high res photo - This got my delicious bukkake.
yaoi sucking cock - This gave James Levine.
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Scat covered Metallic anal beads
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infinty art - This got Pieter Bruegel I - De Val Van De Opstandige Engelen, 1562.
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freiburg anal - This got the Harem restaurant.
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malay girl pee - This got my girls at urinals post (still no picture submissions from the public! Argh!)
tranny fucked grass
beat up girls - This got me in a dress.
singaporean fucked - Why this got girls at urinals is entirely beyond me: the word 'fucked' didn't appear in that whole month's archive.
bukkake - This got 2girls1cup.
physical hair morrowind
unique and unusual breasts - This got the Realdoll Torso
asia rejoice shampoo model
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patient doctor humor sex

"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." - Samuel Goldwyn, Goldwyn's Law of Contracts

***

"Today I took a cab to school because I had a test at 4.15 and I was freaking still at home at 3.30 so fine. I hailed some comfort cab, and this malay cabbie with a nice smiley face greeted me. I was kinda happy, cause he seemed nice -maybe he'll give me a discount? Total opposite of what was to come!

He was so fucking rude from the start, it's like once I shut the door this whole other person who resented his life as a poor taxi driver took over his smile. He asked;
"do you know the way!?"...

he had the guts to tell me:
"Next time no change don't take cab!"
HELLO ITS NOT LIKE THE CAB FARE COSTS LIKE $2 OR SOMETHING ITS $20 OK and I just shut up cause I had the perfect comeback, which I dished after I collected my change, before slamming his door;
"You're such a stupid useless malay, GOD!""


Comments:

A: your racist thread is being marked
sending to ISD and Singapore Police Force with a complain for your racist overtone.

Good luck............. :)

B: you fat piece of shit, can't even spell 'underprivileged' properly.

no wonder.. youre from RP.. the shit school.. why so elitist? you don't deserve that right when youre from a shit school like RP.

STOMPed and reported to the ISD and Police Force racist pig

C: If we were to report every single possible cause of "potential racial riots" due to such posts, I believe most cabbies woulda been thrown to jail about now.


I'm sick of the lynch mobs.

You're such a stupid useless malay, GOD!

One small line, and people are rushing to give our security services even more work. Please, they've better things to do.

There're huge differences between "You're such a stupid useless XXX, GOD!", "All XXX are stupid", "All XXX must die" and "All XXX must die, let's kill them now!".

I don't read Malay, but I bet my hat you see similar or worse complaints about Chinese by Malay bloggers; as they say in Malaysia, "tak tipu, bukan cina" ("if you're not a conman, you're not Chinese"). There're similar descriptions of the other two races, but mentioning them would surely be seditious. Presumably, we don't have spiteful idiots who speak Malay.

With the police bogged down taking care of all the police reports lodged by spiteful idiots, it's no wonder we haven't found Mas Selamat yet. And the fact is that people respond to incentives, so the more people you prosecute for making offhand "racist" remarks, the more spiteful idiots you'll have making police reports about alleged "racism" that grows steadily more trivial.

Malaysia is a much more racist, racially charged and racially stratified country than Singapore, but you don't hear the police catching people for offhand racist remarks or the country descending into racial riots. Maybe that's why they're progressing faster than us.

Everyone's a little bit racist
Sometimes.
Doesn't mean we go
Around committing hate crimes...

If we all could just admit
That we are racist a little bit,
And everyone stopped being
So PC
Maybe we could live in -
Harmony!

"The reason there is so little crime in Germany is that it's against the law." - Alex Levin

***

Law Minister Shanmugam condemns attacks on judiciary

SINGAPORE: Singapore's Law Minister K Shanmugam said it is the duty of all citizens to condemn attacks made on the country's judiciary.

He was responding to questions at a community event on Wednesday on the recent behaviour of Singapore's opposition politicians, Chee Soon Juan and Chee Siok Chin, at the High Court.

This was during a hearing to assess damages for defamation to be awarded to Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew.

The Chee siblings were found guilty of contempt of court and surrendered themselves on Wednesday to begin their jail sentences.

Mr Shanmugam said: "If you take a country like Singapore, based on democratic principles, and you look at the institutions that underpin our society, then conceptually, rule of law is important. It means independence of the judiciary and equality of everyone before the law.

"In order to have that – not just as a slogan but in reality – you need an independent judiciary that really protects the citizens and in fact, anyone who goes before the courts. People must have confidence that the judiciary is independent.

"In order to make sure that we protect the integrity of the judiciary and people's confidence in the judiciary is not affected, you have to be very, very strict with anyone who attacks the judiciary in scurrilous ways or calls into question its independence."


Scurrilous attacks are to be condemned, but if you don't ask questions, you're never going to get answers.

"I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave." - E. M. Forster, as a small child

***

Club mad

"He had planned a night of revelry with friends at St James Power Station last Saturday, but when National University of Singapore student Matthew Rao flashed his identity card (IC) at the door of the popular nightclub, he was requested to pay the $20 cover charge.

His four friends - from England, Germany, France and Finland - filed in for free.

The reason: They were foreign students on exchange in Singapore, while he was local...

Ms Khong said the policy aimed to "encourage a cosmopolitan party atmosphere for our young partygoers" and added that St James regularly hosts parties thrown by local tertiary institutions and students."

The reaction to this is unequivocably negative, and there are cries of discrimination and such.

Yet, nary a sound is heard about Ladies' Nights, which are equally discriminatory. This is probably because Ladies' Nights work out for everyone - women like the free entry and men like the women, so no one complains.

Policies designed to attract and which give advantages to tourists are not unique to Singapore. Tourist-only beaches in Cuba aside, the Eurail pass cannot be bought by residents of non-European countries, the Japan Rail Pass cannot be bought by Japanese residents, the Great British Heritage Pass can only be bought by "international visitors to Britain" and in Denmark you have tax-free cars which only tourists can rent. Furthermore, in most countries with Value Added Tax (VAT), tourists can get a refund upon leaving them.

***

Singapore Peak Oil: Energy, Entropy, Economics, Ecology: Axioms of Sustainability for Singapore

"I compiled these axioms of sustainability from Heinberg, Feeney, Bartlett and Monbiot. The Singapore government needs to abide by these axioms if we are to tackle climate change successfully and ensure a sustainable living environment for present and future generations. Failure to conform to these axioms will render MEWR's blueprint (Green Plan 2012) towards environmental sustainability ineffective in the long term."

Much of this is New Age Neo-Malthusian rubbish. I agree with some parts, but a lot of the rest is dodgy. The more misleading bits:

Our flawed neoclassical economic growth paradigm.
This article accuses Economics of being stuck in the 19th century, but that's because it attacks 19th century Economics. Among other things, there are economic growth models incorporating limited natural resources and there are ways of internalising environmental damage into economic analyses.

Our fractional reserve banking system which is based on a flawed assumption that infinite economic growth is both possible and desirable.
I don't know why fractional reserve banking and economic growth are mentioned in the same breath. Given that the energy intensity of GDP (Energy use per dollar of GDP) has been steadily declining, I don't see what the problem is (ie infinite economic growth is possible). And it is certainly desirable, since without it people are unhappy due to hedonic adaptation.

Food self-sufficiency
Singapore and food self-sufficiency do not go together in the same sentence. One word: trade.

(Tainter’s Axiom): Any society that continues to use critical resources unsustainably will collapse.
True enough, but this is a tautology. Ditto for many of the other lines there.

(Bartlett’s Axiom): Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.
Yes, but development lowers population growth: look at the Developed World. And if new resources are discovered, then increasing consumption of resources can certainly be sustained.

The system which governs our economic lives, which we call capitalism, is itself is a limited resource. Capitalism is a pyramid scheme.
????????????????????????????????????????????

The response time of populations to changes in the human fertility rate is the average length of a human life, or approximately 70 years. ( Bartlett and Lytwak 1995 ) [ This is called "population momentum." ]
This seems to be a misunderstanding of the term. Fertility rate can change due to many things - family planning, contraceptive availability, one-child policies etc.

The size of population that can be sustained ( the carrying capacity ) and the sustainable average standard of living of the population are inversely related to one another.
This is assuming a static world. Technology progresses.

The benefits of population growth and of growth in the rates of consumption of resources accrue to a few; the costs of population growth and growth in the rates of consumption of resources are borne by all of society.
This ignores how 60 million Chinese were lifted out of poverty between 2001 and 2004 or how the number of people living on under a dollar a day has fallen and is projected to fall further.

When large efforts are made to improve the efficiency with which resources are used, the resulting savings are easily and completely wiped out by the added resources consumed as a consequence of modest increases in population.
This is one of those grand sounding statements that doesn't mean anything. How large is large? How modest is modest?

The benefits of large efforts to preserve the environment are easily canceled by the added demands on the environment that result from small increases in human population.
Ditto.

When rates of pollution exceed the natural cleansing capacity of the environment, it is easier to pollute than it is to clean up the environment.
I would think that it is almost always easier to pollute than clean up the environment.

The chief cause of problems is solutions.
????????????????????????????????????????????

Humans will always be dependent on agriculture. Supermarkets alone are not sufficient. The central task in sustainable agriculture is to preserve agricultural land.
If agricultural yields keep increasing, agricultural land can be reduced.

In every local situation, creating jobs increases the number of people locally who are out of work.
????????????????????????????????????????????

"People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history." - Dan Quayle

***

David: So, how was your trip? What was the most interesting thing you saw?



Gotta love these Europeans.

"Making duplicate copies and computer printouts of things no one wanted even one of in the first place is giving America a new sense of purpose." - Andy Rooney

***

Someone: you're right you know: when women blame men, they say it's patriarchy; when men blame women, they say it's misogyny, like wtf


Someone else: if we go on the basis that hatred is a feeling,
without any necessary rational justification whatsoever,
then a thin form of hatred is just as scary as the thick form

Me: that's like saying if you shout "faggot" at a gay guy it's as bad as if you stab him to death

Someone else: if you stab him to death, you will be charged for murder.

anyway, hatred is just intention, no? not consequences
we're still on defining the word here
this is starting to soudn like a [Jol] conversation

Me: whose fault is that ah

if you shout "faggot" at a gay guy it doesn't mean you hate him as much as you would if you stabbed him to death

Someone else: okay
so?

Me: you claim all hate is as bad

Someone else: no, i said it's as scary

Me: yes
but that draws a faux equivalence

why is it as 'scary'?

Someone else: because it can swing without reason from thick to thin to whatever in between

it doesn't need a provocation, even.
at all.

Me: that's the slippery slope fallacy

just because I shout 'faggot' doesn't mean I'll feel on a level so strong that I want to murder

Someone else: what is this thing about murder

Me: you say small hate and big hate are as scary
I'm saying they're different


My Toy: my lappie is down

Me: too old liao

My Toy: no la
i tried to reformat and fail

this is something tt only happens to a girl
like what can go wrong when u juz have to run the recovery??????

Me: no lah
just that only girls can't solve it themselves :P


Cunning Linguist: btw the one where there was homicide
the person really died

the chancellor sent a circular

Me: err
that's the definition of homicide

Cunning Linguist: hahaha
FINE


Someone: it seems your friends thinks you're a purveyor of sex toys and menstrual goods

Japan sketchpad

Itinerary:
6 June - Tokyo. Arrive Narita 14:25 (Fri)
7 - Tokyo (Sat)
8 - Tokyo (Sun)
9 - Kyoto (3 hrs from Tokyo) (Museums closed on Monday; Nijo Jinya?! Reservations, Jap-speaker. Closed Wed.) (Mon)
10 - Himeji-jo / Kyoto (1 hr Osaka, 1.5 hr Kyoto) (Tue)
11 - Kyoto (Wed)
12 - Amanohashidate (1.5 hrs from Kyoto): Train info (Thu)
13 - Nara (<1 hr from Kyoto), Horyu-ji (<1/2 hr from Nara) (Fri)
14 - Osaka (Daytrip? AWASHIMA JINJA) (Sat)
15 - Koyasan (more interesting than Yoshino, through Osaka 1.5hr); Festival (Sun)
16 - Hiroshima (Mon)
17 - Itsukushima (1/2-1 1/2 hr from Hiroshima) / Hiroshima (Tue)
18 - Nikko (1.5-2 hrs by train) (Edo Wonderland - similar to Hokkaido place?) (Wed)
19 - Mt Fuji views: Fuji Go Ko. Hakone also? Bus up Fuji? (JX's suggestion: stay a night at Fuji Go Ko, "u feel a sense of peace") (Thu)
20 - Matsumoto Castle (2.5 hrs from Tokyo) / Tokyo (Fri)
21 - Matsushima Bay (30 mins from Sendai: 2 hrs from Tokyo) / Tokyo (Sat)
22 June - Tokyo. Leave Narita 18:40 (Sun)


I considered the overnight bus but:

1) there's no toilet
2) I still need rail travel on shorter routes. eg Tokyo-Nikko, Tokyo-Hakone, so I should be better off getting the JR pass.


Osaka sounds rather boring. Universal Studios can burn down for all I care.

Someone: osaka got food.. and red light district

Someone else: THE AQUARIUM
i'm sorry i swear by it
1i go to it EVERY TIME i go to osaka
but it's just me


Someone: help me buy sofy tampons back

i heard they're good
only found in japan
ahahahhaha

Wth.

Someone else: HAHAHA
help me buy vibrators they're cheap in japan
HAHAHA

Wth x2

Why are there no toilets on Japanese overnight buses?

DAMN JAPS

"Women's intuition is the result of millions of years of not thinking." - Rupert Hughes

***


Clear and damning evidence of racism in the French Football team


Why you shouldn't get a boob job


Whoever designed this should be fired


"I love you this much"


Simply indescribable (NSFW)

"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson, on ESP

***

Because, unlike the last time, I can't be bothered to censor out potentially seditious representations:


A: The God rejected by ATHEISTS is not the God a true Christian would recognise

God cannot be EMPIRICALLY investigated - He is INEFFABLE, beyond our thought capacity

A true believer in the MYSTERY of God knows that proper talk about God is always HUMBLE, always TENTATIVE

As St Augustine said, if you understand it, it is not God

B: Does that mean you are going to STOP trying to tell everyone what God thinks about things like Embryonic STEM CELL RESEARCH and GAY MARRIAGE?

A: No

"It's never just a game when you're winning." - George Carlin

***

Police arrest former Singaporean for insulting public servant


The sad thing is that the activists are just perpetuating the hegemony they so loathe by discrediting alternatives to it.

Damn, forgot to ask Chee about that when I met him.

"I'm too shy to express my sexual needs except over the phone to people I don't know." - Garry Shandling

***

Malaysian-made Pringles are a world away from US-made Pringles.

There's a reason why they're labelled "For sale in ASEAN only" - if you tried to sell it outside of ASEAN, people would complain.

Whereas the Malaysian-made product is thick and insipid-tasting, the real thing feels thin and crisp, and it packs a whole lot more flavour into the chip.

I just popped open a tube of Cheese and Onion from Schiphol and sadly, they are like Malaysian Pringles.

An examination of the first two ingredients in the ingredients list provides us with a clue to solve this mystery:

US Pringles: DRIED POTATOES, VEGETABLE OIL (CONTAINS ONE OR MORE OF THE FOLLOWING: CORN OIL, COTTONSEED OIL, AND/OR SUNFLOWER OIL)
Malaysian/European Pringles: Dehydrated potatoes, vegetable oil

It is no surprise that potato chips fried in Sunflower oil taste much better than those cooked in "vegetable oil" (read: Refined Bleached & Deodorised Palm Olein, better known as Palm Oil). Given that the centre of European Pringles production is Mechelen in Flanders, it wouldn't be surprising, given that the Dutch are the top importers of palm oil in Europe and Belgium's long history in palm oil production.

Oh well, at least I can't get either Cheese and Onion or Salt and Vinegar in Singapore anyway.

Insist on Kualiti with a Kapital K - buy US Pringles, not ersatz Malaysian shit! (Buy European Pringles only for flavours like Paprika that you can't get here)

(Oddly, my friend had some Indonesian Pringles and she claimed they tasted oily and tasty, like they were fried with **** )