In commemoration of Valentine's Day, a properly formatted version of an email forward I got:


Need any inspiration for your Valentines card?

These are entries to a Washington Post competition asking for a rhyme with the most romantic first line but.... the least romantic second line:


Love may be beautiful, love may be bliss
But I only slept with you, because I was pissed.
*************************
I thought that I could love no other
Until, that is, I met your brother.
**************************
Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, and so are you.
But the roses are wilting, the violets are dead, the sugar bowl's empty and so is your head.
**************************
Of loving beauty you float with grace
If only you could hide your face.
****************************
Kind, intelligent, loving and hot
This describes everything you are not.
******************************
I want to feel your sweet embrace
But don't take that paper bag off of your face.
*******************************
I love your smile, your face, and your eyes
Damn, I'm good at telling lies!
************************************
My darling, my lover, my beautiful wife:
Marrying you screwed up my life.
************************************
I see your face when I am dreaming.
That's why I always wake up screaming.
***************************************
My love, you take my breath away.
What have you stepped in to smell this way?
****************************************
My feelings for you no words can tell
Except for maybe "Go To Hell".
*****************************************
What inspired this amorous rhyme?
Two parts vodka, one part lime.

For all those who don't know yet, I'm flying off this saturday morning to melbourne, arriving in the evening. Starting classes on the 16th- next week monday. If you want to catch up with me while i'm still here, drop me a note n i'll see what i can do; otherwise will see you when i get back. Melbourne-ians, call me when i get there! I'll mention "serve programme 2004 sjsm" just to see how many hits are generated from there, heh.

With the latest release, the reasons why I dislike it have become fewer. I suppose I'll have to switch some time (not yet though). Besides, it has a nice icon.


Q: Which is the most dangerous method of electricity generation per kilowatt produced - nuclear, coal, oil, sea (waves), geothermal, or wind?

A: Wind power causes the most deaths (from people injured by, or falling off, windmills) per kWh that is actually produced.


Q: In the USA 3 million teenagers play the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons and in 1992, 28 teenage suicides were related to it. Is this significant?

A: It shows that Dungeons and Dragons has very little to do with teenage suicide. In the USA, the average teenage suicide rate was 1 in 10,000. If anything, this suggests people who role-play are less likely to commit suicide than the average person.

Poke-a-sheep - Perhaps the most SCREWED UP game I have ever seen. God, now I feel like eviscerating some sheep in the most gory way possible.

Building Really Annoying Web Sites - Favourite website of singapore schoolgirls

Dog rape attempt goes astray - A Thai man was mauled when he drunkenly tried to rape a dog which fiercely resisted his advances

Total Defence Feature - "The passing of the Act saw anti-NS marches, the most serious by some 300 people at New Bridge Road, Rochore Canal Road near Albert Street and Kim Keat Road. Tear gas shells were used to disperse the crowd and about 13 people were arrested... Today, most Singaporeans accept NS willingly as part of their duty as citizens."
Pity modern Singaporeans are not as spirited, not after 38 years of social engineering. At least they acknowledge the existence of malcontents like me!

At least they tell you the truth now. From the propaganda, you'd think everyone meekly accepted it at the time.

You want to make a protest about some issue? Tear gas + arrests = rest of population cowed.

Someone paid GBP 6.50 to win an auction for nothing? This is a weird world.

One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge - To date no one has even passed the preliminary tests for this, which is why healthy skepticism about such matters is always warranted.

Pickled dragon mystery - A pickled "dragon" that looks as if it might once have flown around Harry Potter's Hogwarts has been found in a garage in Oxfordshire, England.

Women's Urinal (from a Dairy Queen restaurant in Port Charlotte, FL)

Pop-up killer test

Huge URL Maker

Self confessed spasticated lists (quite amusing)


Dr Bob's September 1999 Quiz:

Muslims hold that God has 100 names - the Merciful, the Compassionate, etc; what is unusual about the 100th one of them?

Dr Bob's Answer: The 100th name is not known to mankind. It is, however, known to camels. Hence the snooty expression of the latter beasts.

Some other answer: I'm not even going to try a funny answer to this one. Look what happened to Salman Rushdie.


In defence of lust

"Within the US, the federal government spends about $1m (£574,000) of taxpayers' money annually on abstinence-only programmes of sex education, even though such programmes increase young people's health risks by making furtive and unprotected copulations their only option. Human Rights Watch has issued a report which says that abstinence-only programmes pose a threat to teenagers' health because information they need is denied to them in schools. A quote from a Texas teacher introduces the report: "Before [the abstinence-only programme] I could say, 'If you're not having sex, that's great. If you are, you need to be careful and use condoms.' Boy, that went out of the window." The report notes that federal programmes often lie to children, for example about the efficacy of condoms."
So these silly abstinence-only programs not only don't work, they have the opposite effect. Hah!

Also amusing: "it has long been known that more prostitutes fly into towns hosting Republican conventions than Democratic ones."


My MP3 player arrived back from Hong Kong today. Their customer service is really good - they didn't charge me anything (not even the Fed Ex bill for the return) even though the warranty had expired and my brother in law had lost the warranty card, and the player is decent. Too bad Frontier Labs products don't seem to be sold in Singapore.

Recognition / Darwin's dangerous idea

Sigh. Just spent 1 hour doing exam papers for my mother. I shouldn't complain, really, seeing
as it's one of the few contributions I make towards maintaining home
and hearth, but this isn't how I envisioned spending my night off.


More recognition:

"can check this out. from a guy who was in rj. pokes fun at the powerful engrish we're exposed to everyday."


Darwin's dangerous idea. Evolution and the meanings of life (Daniel C. Dennett)

An interesting book, if one that frequently goes off on technical tangents that I doubt I would have understood even 2 years ago. The book's attempts to apply Darwinian theory in many other contexts, while interesting (at least when I could understand them), are sometimes unsuccessful, and the connections drawn sometimes seem contrived and a little suspect. At times, the author lets certain biases (largely unrelated to the putative subject matter) show obviously, but he does make attempts at other times at fairness.

While reading the book, it occurs to me that most - almost all, in fact - attacks on evolution are due to gross misunderstandings, deliberate or otherwise, about it.

"Anybody who won a coin-tossing tournament would be tempted to think he was blessed with magical powers, especially if he had no direct knowledge of the other players. Suppose you were to create a ten-round coin tossing tournament without letting each of the 1,024 'contestants' realize he was entered in a tournament. You say to each one as you recruit him: 'Congratulations, my friend. I am Mephistopheles, and I am going to bestow great powers on you. With me at your side, you are going to win ten consecutive coin tosses without a loss!' You then arrange for your dupes to meet, pairwise, until you have a final winner. (You never let the contestants discuss your relation to them, and you kiss off the 1,023 losers along the way with some sotto voce gibe to the effect that they were pretty gullible to believe your claim about being Mephistopheles!) The winner - and there must be one - will certainly have been given evidence of being a Chosen One, but if he falls for it, this is simply an illusion of what we might call retrospective myopia. The winner doesn't see that the situation was structured so that somebody simply had to be the lucky one - and he just happened to be it." (pp 179-180)

Addendum: Driving to Chicago is more intuitive than this

"But engineering has always had second-class status in the intellectual world. From Leonardo da Vinci to Charles Babbage to Thomas Edison, the engineering genius has always been acclaimed but nevertheless regarded with a certain measure of condescension by the mandarin elite of science and the arts. Aristotle did not help matters by proposing a distinction, adopted by the medievals, between what was secundum naturam, according to nature, and what was contra naturam, against nature, artificial. Mechanisms - but not organisms - were contra naturam. Then there were the things that were praeter naturam, or unnatural (monsters and mutants), and the things that were super naturam - miracles (Gabbey 1993). How could the study of what was against nature shed much light on the glories - yea, even the monsters and miracles - of nature?" (pp 188)

"Gould himself has endorsed some of the most daring and delicious of adaptationist Just So Stories, such as the argument by Lloyd and Dybas (1966) explaining why cicadas (such as "seventeen-year locusts" have reproductive cycles that are prime-numbered years long- thirteen years, or seventeen, but never fifteen or sixteen, for instance. As Gould says, "we seek answers to the question, why. Why, in particular, should such striking synchroneity evolve, and why should the period between episodes of sexual reproduction be so long?" (Gould 1977a, p99). The answer - which makes beautiful sense, in retrospect - is that, by having a large prime number of years between appearances, the cicadas minimize the likelihood of being discovered and later tracked as a predictable feast by predators who themselves show up every two years, or three years, or five years. If the cicadas had a periodicity of, say, sixteen years, then they would be a rare treat for predators who showed up every year, but a more reliable source of food for predators who showed up every two or four years, and an even-money gamble for predators that got in phase with them on an eight-year schedule, If their period is not a multiple of any lower number, they are a rare treat - not worth "trying" to track - for any species that isn't lucky enough to have exactly their periodicity (or some multiple of it - the mythical Thirty-four-Year Locust-Muncher would be in fat city)." (pp 246-247)

"We would like to think of ourselves as godlike creators of ideas, manipulating and controlling them as our whim dictates, and judging them from an independent, Olympian standpoint. But even if this is our ideal, we that it is seldom if ever the reality, even with the most masterful and creative minds, As Mozart famously observed of his own brainchildren:

When I feel well and in a good humor, or when I am taking a drive or walking after a good meal, or in the night when I cannot sleep, thoughts crowd into my mind as easily as you would wish. Whence and how do they come? I do not know and I have nothing to do with it [emphasis added]. Those which please me I keep in my head and hum them; at least have told me that I do so.

Mozart is in good company. Rare is the novelist who doesn't claim characters who "take on a life of their own"; artists are rather fond of confessing that their paintings take over and paint themselves; and poets humbly submit that they are the servants or even slaves to the ideas that teem in their heads, not the bosses. And we all can cite cases of memes that persist unbidden and unappreciated in our own minds, or that spread - like rumours - in spite of the general disapproval of that spreading by those who help spread them." (pp 346-347)

"For instance, whatever virtues (from our perspective) the following memes have, they have in common the property of having phenotypic expressions that tend to make their own replication more likely by disabling or pre-empting the environmental forces that would tend to extinguish them; the meme for faith, which discourages the exercise of the sort of critical judgment that might decide that the idea of faith was, all things considered, a dangerous idea (Dawkins 1976, p. 212); the memes for tolerance, or free speech; the meme for including a warning in a chain letter about the terrible fates of those who have broken the chain in the past; the conspiracy-theory meme, which has a built-in response to the objection that there is no good evidence of the conspiracy: "Of course not-that's how powerful the conspiracy is!" Some of these memes are "good," and others "bad"; what they have in common is a phenotypic effect systematically tends to disable the selective forces arrayed against them. Other things being equal, memetics predicts that conspiracy-theory manes will persist quite independently of their truth, and the meme for faith is apt to secure its own survival, and that of the religious manes that ride piggyback on it, in even the most rationalistic environments. Indeed, the meme for faith exhibits frequency-dependent fitness: it flourishes particular in the company of rationalistic memes. In a skeptic-poor world, the meme for faith does not attract much attention, and hence tends to go dormant in minds, and hence is seldom reintroduced into the infosphere. (Can we demonstrate classic predator-prey population boom-and-bust cycles between memes for faith and memes for reason? Probably not, but it might be instructive to look, and ask why not.)" (pp 349)

"Political correctness, in the extreme versions worthy of the name, is antithetical to almost all surprising advances in thought. We might call it eumemies, since it is, like the extreme eugenics of the Social Darwinists, an attempt to impose myopically derived standards of safety and goodness on the bounty of nature. Few today - but there are a few - would brand all genetic counseling, all genetic policies, with the condemnatory title of eugenics. We should reserve that term of criticism for the greedy and peremptory policies, the extremist policies... we will consider how we might wisely patrol the memosphere, and what we might do to protect ourselves from the truly dangerous ideas, but we should keep the bad example of eugenics firmly in mind when we do so." (pp 465)

"As George Williams (1988) note not only is cannibalism (eating conspecifics, even close relatives) common, but in many species sibling-cide (we won't call it murder, since they know not what they do) is almost the rule, not the exception. (For instance, when two or more eagle chicks are born in a single nest, the first to hatch is very likely to kill its younger siblings if it can, by pushing the eggs out of the nest, or even pushing the hatchlings out.) When a lion acquires a new lioness who is still nursing cubs from an earlier mating, the first order of business is to kill those cub so that the lioness will more quickly come into estrus. Chimpanzees have been known to engage in mortal combat against their own kind, and langur monkey males often kill the infants of other males to gain reproductive access to females (Hrdy 1977 ) - so even our closest relatives engage in horrible behavior. Williams points out that, in all the mammalian species that have so far been carefully studied, the rate at which their members engage in the killing of conspecifics is several thousand times greater than the highest homicide rate measured in any American city. This dark message about our furry friends is often resisted, and popular presentations of nature (in television documentaries, magazine articles, and popular books) often engage in self -censorship to avoid shocking the squeamish. Hobbes was right: life in the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short, for virtually all nonhuman species. If "doing what comes naturally" meant doing what virtually all other animal species do, it would be hazardous to the health and well-being of us all." (pp 478)

"There is no doubt that the sorts of facts we can learn about an individual, or a type or group of individuals (women, people of Asian descent, etc.), can profoundly affect how we tend to regard them and treat them. If I learn that Sam is schizophrenic, or profoundly retarded, or suffers from dizziness and periodic blackouts, I am not going to hire Sam to drive the school bus. When we turn from specific facts about individuals to generalizations about groups of individuals, the situation is more complicated. What is the reasonable and just response of insurance companies to the actuarial facts about the different life expectancies of men and women? Is it fair to adjust their premiums accordingly? Or should we treat both genders alike in the premium department and accept their differential rate of receiving benefits as fair? With regard to voluntarily acquired differences (smokers versus nonsmokers, for instance), we see fairness in making the smokers pay for their habit in higher premiums, but what about differences people are just born with? African-Americans are, as a group, unusually prone to high blood pressure, diabetes runs higher than average among Hispanics, and Whites are more prone to skin cancer and cystic fibrosis (Diamond 1991). Should these differences be reflected in calculating their health insurance? People whose parents smoked in the home while they were growing up run a higher risk of respiratory disorders through no fault of their own. Young men, as a group, are less safe drivers than young women. Which of these facts should count for how much, and why? Even when we deal with facts about particular individuals, rather than statistical trends, there are quandaries aplenty: Are employers-or others-entitled to know whether you have ever been married, have a criminal record, a safe driving record, a history of scuba-diving? Is there a principled difference between releasing information on a person's grades in school and releasing information about that same person's IQ score?" (pp 482)

"We should abandon the fantasy that either science or religion can uncover some well hidden fact that tells us exactly where to draw these lines. There is no natural" way to mark the birth of a human "soul," any more than there is a "natural" way to mark the birth of a species. And, contrary to what many traditions insist, I think we all do share the intuition that there are gradations of value in the ending of human lives. Most human embryos end in spontaneous abortion - fortunately, since these are mostly terata, hopeless monsters whose lives are all but impossible. Is this a terrible evil? Are the mothers whose bodies abort these embryos guilty of voluntary manslaughter? Of course not. Which is worse, taking "heroic" measures to keep alive a severely deformed infant, or taking the equally "heroic" (if unsung) step of seeing to it that such an infant dies as quickly and painlessly as possible? I do not suggest that Darwinian thinking gives us answers to such questions; I do suggest that Darwinian thinking helps us see why the traditional hope of solving these problems (finding a moral algorithm) is forlorn. We must cast off the myths that make these old-fashioned solutions seem inevitable. We need to grow up, in other words." (pp 513-514)

"Save the Elephants! Yes, of course, but not by all means. Not by forcing the people of Africa to live nineteenth-century lives, for instance. This is not an idle comparison. The creation of the great wildlife preserves in Africa has often been accompanied by the dislocation-and ultimate destruction-of human populations. (For a chilling vision of this side effect, see Cohn Turnbull 1972 on the fate of the Ik) Those who think that we should preserve the elephants' pristine environment at all costs should contemplate the costs of returning the United States to the pristine conditions in which the buffaloes roam and the deer and the antelope play. We must find an accommodation... Save the Baptists! Yes, of course, but not by all means. Not if it means tolerating the deliberate misinforming of children about the natural world. According to a recent poll, 48 percent of the people in the United States today believe that the book of Genesis is literally true. And 70 percent believe that "creation science" should be taught in school alongside evolution. Some recent writers recommend a policy in which parents would be able to "opt out" of materials they didn't want their children taught. Should evolution be taught in the schools? Should arithmetic be taught? Should history? Misinforming a child is a terrible offense." (pp 515-516)

"Safety demands that religions be put in cages too-when absolutely necessary. We just can't have forced female circumcision, and the second-class status of women in Roman Catholicism and Mormonism, to say nothing of their status in Islam... A faith, like a species, must evolve or go extinct when the environment changes. It is not a gentle process in either case. We see in every Christian subspecies the battle of memes-should women be ordained? Should we go back to the Latin liturgy?-and the same an also be observed in the varieties of Judaism and Islam. We must have a similar mixture of respect and self-protective caution about memes. This is already accepted practice, but we tend to avert our attention from its implications. We preach freedom of religion, but only so far. If your religion advocates slavery, or mutilation of women, or infanticide, or puts a price on Salman Rushdie's head because he has insulted it, then your religion has a feature that cannot be respected. It endangers us all." (pp 515-516)

"Many a fine New England church, costly to maintain, is in danger of destruction. Shall we deconsecrate these churches and turn them into museums or retrofit them for some other use? The latter fate is at least to be preferred to their destruction. Many congregations face a cruel choice: their house of worship costs so much to maintain in all its splendor that little of their tithing is left over for the poor. The Catholic Church has faced this problem for centuries, and has maintained a position that is, I think, defensible, but not obviously so: when it spends its treasure to put gold plating on the candle sticks, instead of providing more food and better shelter for the poor of the parish, it has a different vision of what makes life worth living. Our people, it says, benefit more from having a place of splendor in which to worship than from a little more food. Any atheist or agnostic who finds this cost-benefit analysis ludicrous might pause to consider whether to support diverting all charitable and governmental support for museums, symphony orchestras, libraries, and scientific laboratories to efforts to provide more food and better living conditions for the least well off. A human life worth living is not something that can be uncontroversially measured, and that is its glory." (pp 519-520)

8 Things Stores Don't Want You to Know - "Supermarkets have learned to locate their bakeries in a place where the smell of fresh bread wafts throughout the store -- which means they wind up selling more of everything." Wah so cunning.

A Modest Proposal For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland
From Being Aburden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public [Jonathan Swift (1729)] - "I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout."

Meditation 182 - "When you stand before Him, what will you say?", a reply - Almost exactly echoing my sentiments


Perhaps the most funny (and irritating) song I've heard recently, that sends me into convulsions:

"Max, Don't Have Sex With Your Ex", brought to you by the same people (E-rotic) who gave us "Do It All Night", another amusing tune.

<Image removed on a request. Word spreads really fast.>

What some people do when they are bored - vandalise people featured in newspapers. I thought they stopped doing this in Lower Secondary. Now, whoever said NS makes you more mature?


Reading the entries from before enslavement is quite amusing, for I was much more free with my tongue then :)


Newest comments on How Girls Waste Time:

"ARE U RETARDED
U are talking about girls
U idiot, look at your whole website its a complete waste of time
damn...whos stupid now

ooops"

"Hello, i liked your list. im a girl. and i agree. all we do is waste time. we worry to much about dumb ass things. like "do you think shes mad at me?" and all she did was not notice you in the hall way. WHen guys are much more laid back.. well in most cases anyway. Im sorry to say. I dont like girls. and i feel bad for the guys who put up with girls. if i was a guy...i would most likely be gay just so i would not have to spend my life with a women. Sure its nice that men and woman have equal rights and such.. but that doesnt mean i have to like being around girls... does it? (besides my self.. i can stand my self... you get the point i hope) all in all nice list. it was a good way for me to spend my time... "


The modern generation cannot abide silence. Even if they are not listening to what is playing in the background, they want some noise blaring just to break the silence.

Me on myself: embodying some of the worst traits of both genders :)
Someone: what, you have to serve NS and menstruate?

This post was updated at 12:37AM

I am told that one of the standing orders in the 42SAR Ops Room is that if any fat people are found in any of the three canteens in the camp, the BOS on that day will sign 7 extra, and the person in question 3. Never mind the fact that the BOS cannot be in 3 places at the same time, even if he spends the whole day patrolling the canteens - if 42SAR wants you to do something, you will have to do it, even if it is impossible. They never let reality get in the way of operational readiness, no.

We have been told that if, after our meals at the cookhouse, we are still hungry, we can always drop another chip in and eat a second round. This is surprising, for what we'd always been told had led us to believe otherwise. I wonder if this applies for obese personnel as well.

I think people who have fetishes for mountains of data suffer from insecurity.

When I was booking in on a rainy Sunday morning for duty, I saw a host of dogs in the vehicle sheds, and 2 of them were mating. Perhaps because I had disturbed their sacred ritual, or maybe because the rain had made them short-tempered, I suddenly found myself set upon by a horde of ravenous, rabid stray dogs. I was surprised, to say the least, for usually they are quite amiable - friendly, even. Hurriedly, I closed the umbrella I was using and swung it around wildly, fending off the slavering jaws bared at me. I then quickly bounded over the chain separating the vehicle sheds from the gate area, and went back to the company line by another route. I should have had my staff with me, but it was lying in the medical centre, so maybe I shall have to bring it with me next time whenever I walk around that area. Later in the week, I found that the continuous rain had its effect on more than dogs, for normally nice people became nasty.

During one session of company PT, a stray dog came by and sniffed the admin instructions, and then peed on it. Looks like even the dogs know that my unit sucks

We had a bunk inspection for contraband, which I found most ironic, for the people guilty of possessing the most contraband were the very ones who were doing the inspection. Oh, the injustice of this world! During the same inspection, my beloved pictures of Wo-Hen Nankan, the Asian Prince, were torn down. I was wroth, for they had survived 2 bunk moves and many months (more than a year, even?) of display, but not the caprices of one person. However, new pictures have appeared on my cupboard, and soon will elsewhere.

The SAF has thrown its wraps off Chemical Defence training. Yet another product of the policy of unreasoning paranoia has been discarded. I sense a healthy trend here.

I was curious and tried some Water for Injection. Curiously, it had a faint taste of vanilla about it.

As the magic date approaches, somehow I think I've forgotten what it's like to lead a normal life, and I'm more neurotic and less self-assured now. I do not feel ready to face the world without going through the Civilian Conversion Course (CCC).


"Time travel classified? Good God, why?"

"Hell, boy, didn't you ever work for the government? They'd classify sex
if they could. There doesn't have to be a reason; it's just their policy."

--Chuck Freudenberg to Daniel B. Davis
The Door into Summer, Robert A. Heinlein

This reminds me of the SAF Which is why, to get the true security classification of something you must downgrade its security classification by one level. An interesting book, by the way. Some (well, one, actually) term it "pastoral", but it's refreshing to read relatively upbeat and unpretentious tales. Though the pedophilic tendencies of the main character were somewhat disturbing :0


Marche's frozen yoghurt tastes like cottage cheese. I will never try it again.

'Project Boyfriend' is a java game for handphones. What makes it interesting, however, is that in it you play a girl, where in all other dating sims I've heard of, you play a male. I thought only boys would want to play games such as these, but I guess now girls can live out their screwed up fantasies (though I don't think you get to bed the guy at the end).


Quotes:

[On a LCP driving into the range in an expensive looking car] I threw the cigarette. I thought officer or what. Fuck lah.

Food tastes better when you eat it with your left hand

[On my surviving some of the depredations of slavery] You are 25% female

'Attitude' can't change my life. Only ORD can change my life.

I know a lot of people who read motivational stories, but they still suck.

I don't want to be the people that say [other people's lives are good], I want to be the people other people call 'ah gua peng' [Ed: Sissy Soldier] (someone who says that, someone whom)

[On the combat pay of 42SAR] Receive all the money to go to [a] psychiatrist

Black Shoe Polish is not available for sale temporally because of quality problem (temporarily, problems)

PSI card (PCI)

42 will be celebrating Hari Raya in the field. Celebrating the festival of the mat in the mud.

[On Wo-Hen] Can't take it, can't take it. I need to read FHM, or what.

Life isn't fair. If life were fair, Gabriel would be my CO. (?)

The new MMI is at DSO building right? [Me: Yah] NUS right? [Me: Yeah.] I wouldn't mind working there. All the pretty girls... NUS girls *slurps* [Me: Shrill, anorexic, chinese-speaking ah lians] NUS is full of JC chicks - all should be quite cute.

Andrew:
I returned it to you this month!!! What's happened to your sense of time?

The Associate:
I agree with your acquaintance that it was ironic, for free speech seems to be a pre-requisite for debate. Perhaps saying that your friend expects a debator to have an ideological commitment to freedom of speech is a stretch, for I wager he expects a debator to at least respect the idea of free speech, even if he doesn't have an ideological commitment to it.

If freedom of speech weren't a pre-requisite for debate, then it would be possible to knock down opponents not by refuting their points sensibly, but by saying that points were "immoral", "ridiculous", "racist" or the like, and making them untenable for scoring purposes.

Today i went back to re-read "Stranger in a strange land" after gabriel returned it to me a couple of months ago... picking up things in the book that i had never noticed before. It's like watching "The sixth sense" for a second time.

Anyway, I'll be going back to melbourne in exactly 2 weeks' time. Firehouse, waking up to the sight of uropa apartments, tramping (or hurtling, if i'm late) to the faculty at 10 to 9 in the morning, clambering the spiral staircase in the brownless biomedical library after dinner, evenings hanging out at college square, friday nights in union house (and lygon st after that), hands in pockets walking against the wind, bumping into EVERYONE in safeway supermarket, trips to the greenhouse/ leicester gardens/ will's new house?/ rowville/ flagstaff. Arrrgggh! Must go visit werribee (rural farm campus for the vet students; also location of a large sewage plant) before the last old vet student graduates.

I attended a talk by a couple, gary and joanna koh, from Focus on the Family - the organisation that promotes sexual abstinence before marriage and takes a stand against homosexual lifestyles. One thing they pointed out - that comedies such as Will and Grace have subconsciously but definitely influenced my perception of people. Many gay people dislike the character Jack (the classic queen) because he's irritating, whiny, and not representative of the majority of them (as opposed to maybe ... Will? The stylish lawyer who earns a lot, has many friends- straight and gay, has impeccable taste and dresses spiffily, etc)

Last night, Gil called to talk. We've been talking a lot these days; him asking for "career counselling" (not that I see why he needs any from me of all people, given my lack of anything resembling a career at present, and the fact that he's had seven offers to date) - and myself needing someone to rant to while trapped within the molasses flow of traffic along the Federal Highway.

Snippets:

Me: "Fault is immaterial. No matter who's wrong, or right, whatever happened, happened. Nothing you do changes one bit of that."

Gil: "Okay. So let's say, hypothetically, you were driving your CR-V down the road one night. And, say, a motorcycle swerves in front of you, and you oversteer to avoid it, and you slam into a lamppost, and the car flips. Furthermore, there's no Indian guy to pull you out of the burning wreckage, and you end up a quadriplegic, with third-degree burns, and blind. And say the guy on the motorcycle is Ananda Krishnan's godson? Aren't you going to sue his ass for everything he's worth? What about fault then?"

Me: "Can I still talk?"

Gil: "Erm.. okay lah. Yes, yes you can still talk."

Me: "Am I impotent?"

Gil: "HAHAHAHAHAHAAH.. yeah, of course!"

Me: (after some thought) "Well, that's about finding fault in a legal sense, not a moral one. It's not so much out of vengeance, it's more for practical purposes. After all, I'll need the money to buy a motorized wheelchair and cybernetic limbs."

Gil: "So you're not going to hate him?"

Me: "Hatred is baggage. I'm trying to be Zen about everything."

Gil: "But let's be frank. We're never going to let go of our hate. Isn't it more Zen to admit that you can't let go of it? That it's a part of you you can't escape?"

Me: "So you're saying it's more Zen to admit you can't be Zen.. that's a pretty zhai paradox."

(few rants later)

Me: "Well.. yeah. Put it this way. If hatred is baggage, I'm a student flight from Melbourne in December."

Gil: "What?"

Me: "You know. Full of baggage, especially from those assholes graduating who are too cheap to courier and think they can lug their VCR, old textbooks, and entire wardrobe without exceeding the weight limit and end up begging the check-in person at the airport for a few extra kilos.

Put it another way. Imagine a convict who pulls out his wisdom tooth with his bare hands. Imagine that convict sharpening that tooth fragment on the wall of his cell everyday for 10 years until it's sharp enough to use as a weapon to kill the warden who fucks him in the ass every night with his truncheon. Now imagine how much hate that guy has. Well - I think I've got more."

Gil: ".... That's one of the reasons why I still talk to you. For these colourful metaphors."

Someone else I know recently got a stinging order never to post anything related to God on a debator's blog told me he found it ironic that a debator would want to censor freedom of speech.

I stared incredulously and told him that expecting a debator to have an ideological commitment to freedom of speech is like expecting a politician to serve the public trust. After all, a debate isn't about freedom of speech. Quite the opposite, as any good debator should know, it's about winning a contest of structured argumentation within fairly proscribed rules - such as the restrictions against hung cases, for one. (Hm.. do they penalise hung cases in JC debates?)

In any event, as I advised my friend, a debator's role in the debate is to win an argument by oratory and logic. It has nothing to do with his personal opinions or preferences, particularly on private property such as his blog. However, as a consoling sop, I admitted that the "shut up I don't want to hear about it" tactic rarely wins points from adjudicators in a debate. But a blog isn't (necessarily) a forum for debate.

A colleague of mine showed me a (pirated) DVD of Cinderella which he'd bought or his daughter. Much to his amusement, the blurb on the reverse of the pirate-manufactured) DVD case displayed an MPAA rating of "R - May contain foul language, nudity and drug use."

My response: "Maybe it's the director's cut"

Possible deleted scenes:

Foul Language - Evil stepsister ranting at the ending "How did that @#$%ing whore Cinderella snare that asshole of a prince! Bastard! @#$%ing glass slipper!"

Drug Use - Cinderella shooting up cocaine and popping amphetamines in the cellar on the night of the ball. That would certainly go a long way to explaining how the mice transform into footmen and pumpkins become carriages. The fairy godmother was probably her local pusher.

Nudity - Hmmmm.. Cinderella running home in the nude after midnight and her gown turns into rotting sackcloth?

I wrote the following after being forwarded yet another "motivational" story:


Attitude - is it everything?.., based on a fairy tale by Francie Baltazar-Schwartz

Jerry was the kind of guy you love to hate. He was always in a good mood and always had something positive to say. When someone would ask him how he was doing, he would reply, “If I were any better, I would be twins!” This, of course, confounded and annoyed everyone he said it to, for it made absolutely so sense at all.

He was a unique manager because he had several waiters who had followed him around from restaurant to restaurant. The reason the waiters followed Jerry was because of his attitude. He was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day, Jerry was there telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation. Of course, his boisterous enthusiasm about thinking positive despite the vagaries of reality infuriated people who were not hooked on self-motivational techniques, and he was especially unwelcome at sorrowful occasions - funerals, for example, when his zest for thinking positively and inciting others to do likewise was just inappropriate. Everyone remembered what had happened when he’d shown up at Jane’s mother’s funeral and scandalised everyone with his upbeat remarks about how her hernia would never trouble her again, and how she would not have to pay taxes anymore, dancing as she was in the Elysian Fields, while Jane would not have to take care of an incontinent, Parkinson’s Disease-stricken crone anymore, and would get her mother’s old house to boot!

Seeing this style really made me curious, if not a bit apprehensive, so one day I went up to Jerry and asked him, “I don’t get it! You can’t be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it?’

Jerry replied, “Each morning I wake up and say to myself, ‘Jerry, you have 2 choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood. I choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or I can choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it. Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive side of life.”

“Yeah, right, it’s not that easy,” I protested.

Yes it is, Jerry said. “Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how people will affect your mood. You choose to be in a good or bad mood. The bottom line: It’s your choice how you live life.”

I reflected on what Jerry said even though his words rung hollow. Soon thereafter, I left the restaurant industry to start my own business. We lost touch, but I tried hard to be inspired by his philosophy about life. Nevertheless, it failed for I could not deceive myself. Every morning from then on, I woke up and said to myself: Man, you have 2 choices today. You can choose to delude yourself into thinking that you are happy regardless of everything that happens, and looking at the ‘silver lining’ of every storm cloud, even if there is none (hallucinating one if need be to continue the elaborate self-deception), or you can stare reality straight in the eye with no illusions and face life. I chose not to look at the world through tinted lenses. Each time something bad happened, I allowed room for regret, grief, self-pity and other cathartic emotions, and everytime someone came to me trying to convert me to Jerry’s deceptive philosophy, or something very much like it, I pointed out how they were deceiving themselves, and how it was like being addicted to Magic Mushrooms or plugged into the Matrix. Regretfully, I did not manage to convince many, for they were content to wallow in their addictive cocktail of feel-good stories, self-help books grounded n sophistry and “motivational” seminar after “motivational” seminar, delivered by saccharinely fake characters reminiscent of the worst sort of used car salesman I’d ever seen.

Several years later, I heard that Jerry did something you are never supposed to do in a restaurant business: he left the back door open one morning and was held up at gunpoint by 3 armed robbers. While trying to open the safe, his hand, shaking from nervousness, slipped off the combination. The robbers panicked and shot him. Luckily, Jerry was found relatively quickly and rushed to the local trauma centre.

After I8 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, Jerry was released from the hospital with fragments of the bullets still in his body.

I saw Jerry about 6 months after the accident. When I asked him how he was, he replied, “If I were any better, I’d be twins. Wanna see my scars?

Somehow I was not surprised that he was still spouting that gibberish, and almost delivered a choice repartee under my breath. I declined to see his wounds, but did ask him what had gone through his mind as the robbery took place.

“The first thing that went through my mind was that I should have locked the back door,” Jerry replied. ‘Then, as I lay on the floor, I remembered that I had 2 choices: I could choose to live, or I could choose to die. I chose to live.”

“Weren’t you scared? Did you lose consciousness?” I asked. Jerry continued, “The paramedics were great. They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the emergency room and I saw the expressions on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, I read, ‘He’s a dead man.’ I knew I needed to take action”

‘What did you do?” I asked.

“Well, there was a big, burly nurse shouting questions at me,’ said Jerry. “She asked if I was allergic to anything, and I decided to be a wiseacre. ‘Yes,’ I replied, with a great effort. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply. As I took a deep breath, the unnecessary effort caused more air and blood to gush into my punctured lungs and croaked, ‘Bullets!’. Waves of pain shot through my already pain-wracked body, and my breathing became more laboured. Over my pain, I dimly heard that burly nurse scolding me: ‘Screw you! We’re trying to do a job here. So stop cracking bad jokes and lowering your chances of survival.’ Chastened, I managed to whisper, ‘I am choosing to live. Operate on me as if I am alive, not dead. The burly nurse shouted at me again: ‘If we thought you were dead, we’d have stopped life support long ago and sold your organs to geriatric billionaires, or maybe to that guy in charge of Body Worlds. Now shut up.’

Jerry lived thanks to the skills of his doctors, but no thanks to his ‘positive’ attitude. 20 years later, I met Jerry again. He was still working in the same job and commanding the same pay, while being abused by all his superiors. Everyone else had long moved past him up the career ladder. I was curious, so I asked him why he hadn’t changed his job if it sucked so much.

He replied, “Each morning I wake up and say to myself, ‘Jerry, you have 2 choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood. I choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or I can choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it. Everytime someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive side of life. Every time a customer spills hot soup onto my lap, or someone “accidentally’ leaves a banana peel on the floor in front of me and I slip on it, landing heavily on my tailbone, I look on the bright side: At least I still have a job. It could be worse - I could be begging on the streets”

I neglected to point out to him that, especially with a booming economy, any employer would be more than happy to take on an employee who accepted pay below the minimum wage and worked so cheerfully, motivated by empty words and hollow motivational slogans instead of decent pecuniary or even non-pecuniary benefits. With such an attitude, it was no wonder he was content to stagnate in his job and let everyone walk all over him.

Attitude, after all, isn’t everything.

I learnt from him that everyday we have the choice to deceive ourselves, and sadly, many choose to do so. Being unhappy is not necessarily bad, for it motivates you to do something about your situation and terminate the source of your troubles. After all, what do we gain by tricking ourselves into believing that we are happy? Perhaps more troublingly, if everybody were happy all of the time, the concept of happiness would be meaningless, for just as there is no good without evil and no light without darkness, there is no happiness without sadness. If one is happy all the time, in the face of reality, it cheapens the concept of happiness and makes a travesty out of it.

I have now learnt that we should not take all motivational stories at face value and send them to all our friends, because one must realise that most of them are disingenuous pieces of writing meant to deceive you about the reality of the world, and set up a self-perpetuating cycle of dependence on and addiction to self-help and motivational products and seminars to enrich those who furnish them.

You have 2 choices now:

1. Delete this crap from your mail box, or,
2. Forward it to everyone you know (and some you don’t for good measure), and annoy the hell out of all of them.

Hope you will choose choice 2.


The grammar quiz is so easy. 4 out of 11 correct answers gets you the Hitler result. Gah.


How was the Muppet Show altered for screening in Turkey?

Answer: No Miss Piggy, since the pig is unclean for Muslim audiences.

Other answers submitted:

- After uncovering some of Edison's early research, they played the soundtrack backwards so they could understand what the Swedish chef was saying?
- Miss Piggy wore a headscarf, Kermit grew a beard, and Gonzo strapped 10 sticks of dynamite to his body and drove his motorcycle into the American Embassy.
- Big Bird and the Cookie Monster are caught smoking hash and stoned to death.
- I'm not sure. Did it have anything to do with the subtitles that were shown when the Swedish Chef went ballistic, screaming "Stuff Turkey ... Stuff Turkey"?
- It was translated into Turkish, which caused quite a ruckus when they discovered much to their chagrin that "Gonzo" is a Turkish slang word for indecent activities involving pork products and frog's legs...
- They changed the frog's name to 'Kurdmit.'


A Treatise on the Astrolabe - Geoffrey Chaucer, appr. 1391

Boobies or Butt - Harder than the Moobs of Boobs quiz. I only got 5/10. I attribute it to a lack of practice, really.

Flustered, somewhat. Found out only a handful of cinemas in singapore still show Lord of the rings 3 (RoTK) and none show The Company anymore. I want to watch the odd couple before it ends its run (rather, before i leave singapore); i want to attend the jitterbugs jazz dance classes though they're far away (millenia walk is far away by my standards). Should I show my face at the melbourne uni pre-departure seminar? (I know i asked myself the same question last year)

But what is important to me? are these all worthwhile? (considering the costs, especially)

Australia (and the 1.31 exchange rate ) is looming nearer. Yikes!

Went running yesterday. Haven't gone seriously running since.... early december. Really enjoyed it.... something about pushing yourself beyond where you last went. Okay, so 2.4km is kinda wimpish to a lot of you, but that's probably 2km more than i've run for the last month or so. Same goes for weights training - if you're (like lazy me) stuck on the same weight dumbells/barbells for over a couple of months there's something wrong; you should be progressing to a heavier set/more reps by then. Going beyond the routine, progressing, stretching yourself - that is The way of achieving big goals and visions. Also refer to this. Despite intellectualizing and rationalizing everything, the only way you know you can break the time record for a run, or prove that you are able to lift a heavier set, is to actually do it. Same goes for everything - your spiritual life included.

And that's .... why I'm here in this time and place, i guess. The andrew who left melbourne on 22 november 2003 is not the same andrew who landed in singapore on the same day; likewise the andrew who wound back in the singapore airport on 5 january is not the same andrew who will be departing the same airport in 19 days' time. Everything must progress and go on .... like a friend said, I do have the choice; I always have the choice open to me ... and this path is the one i've chosen. I know what is ahead of me is virgin territory; I don't have to like what I see ahead of me; all I have to know is that the Master is in front of me preparing the ground. I don't have to like the fact that I will have to traverse many parts of this road alone, but I know one Person who will always be my side. Andrew, quit comparing your road to others' !

That's all I have to say for now.

Quote of the Day:

"Nunquam ubi sub ubi!"




create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

Aiyah, very pathetic. Anyway this thing is misleading. If I just put a foot in each country for one second, the whole map would be red.



Which Evil Villain Bad Habit are you?

Very accurate quiz.


I got this Canon S200SPx Bubble Jet Printer for $88 at Carrefour today, which is a great price for such a small printer (or maybe I'm just out of touch with the tech market). But it didn't come with a USB cable. Argh!

And this brings the number of USB peripherals I have to. One cable modem, one scanner, one MP3 player (currently down), one digital camera, one printer (What's wrong with LPT1?!) and one external cd-rw drive. All sharing 2 ports. Yeh.

I'd get a USB hub, but I remember what happened the last time I tried using one. *shudder*


140 days (20 weeks) to ORD!

You are the grammar Fuhrer. All bow to your
authority. You will crush all the inferior
people under the soles of your jackboots, and
any who question your motives will be
eliminated. Your punishment is being the bane
of every other person's existence, because
you're constantly contradicting stupidity.
Everyone will be gunning for you. Your dreams
of a master race of spellers and grammarians
frighten the masses. You must always watch your
back. If only your power could be used for good
instead of evil.


What is your grammar aptitude?
brought to you by Quizilla

Haven't deteriorated that much. At least in non-verbal skills.


Penguin Batting

I got zapped by metal surfaces due to static electricity discharge twice. Seems I'm becoming like my sister. Maybe it's due to the new shoes. Or maybe I should get mattresses that reduce the level of static electricity in your body.

I think bureaucrats are extremely comforted by the sight, feel and smell of redundant paperwork, especially since they don't have to create it. They also suffer from a paranoid fear of having too little data to work with, so they call for a suffocating excess of it instead.


Ramblings from a distant land:

"a friend of mind has suggestged picking up 16-17 year old chicks because they've just hit puberty but are still young enough to con. you've been down orchard road. 14 year olds these days dress like geylang whores. most girls these days have seen more at 16 than we have in our whole lives."

Stolen baby Jesus figurine comes back black - Someone who took a baby Jesus figurine from a church's outdoor Nativity scene painted its skin black and then brought it back.

TV sitcom so transforms use of English - Language from popular Friends sitcom provides viable reflection of changes in American dialects

Terrorists of Another Brand - If you visited Disney World in Orlando sometime in the late 1990s and had occasion to ride a water taxi in one of the several theme parks, your boat driver just might have been a friendly middle-aged fellow with a nametag bearing "Jean-Claude." The tag may have even shown he was from Haiti. Perhaps Jean-Claude would have answered a few of your questions about the park, or even patted your young son or daughter on the shoulder as your family disembarked from the vessel. Disney officials, after all, have publicly stated that Jean-Claude Duperval was a fine employee until he left in 2002. It’s likely Duperval’s former employer did not provide a reference letter to Disney, since the former employer was Haitian dictator Raoul Cedras. Major General Jean-Claude Duperval was once the Deputy Commander of the Haitian Army under Raoul Cedras and helped Cedras and his band of thugs run that impoverished island country after they overthrew the duly elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991.

The last dinner of King Midas.

Kokomo Spoof

Guess the Dictator or Sit-Com Character

The Official Ninja Webpage: REAL Ultimate Power

Black People Love Us - We are well-liked by Black people so we're psyched (since lots of Black people don't like lots of White people)!! We thought it'd be cool to honor our exceptional status with a ROCKIN' domain name and a killer website!!

What Beagle 2 was supposed to do on landing on Mars: "To the amazement of any nearby denizens of the Red Planet, it will play a pop song (by Blur), display a modern art picture and release balloons with sponsor’s names on them. (These are all genuine scientific experiments, but the Poms have noticed a way to make money, hopefully enough to fund the entire space program)." (Dr Bob's Skeptical Quiz, Sep 2000 issue) Maybe the little green men didn't like Blur and zapped it with their photon guns


Handsome Boy, Steven Lim aka the Eyebrow Plucker has updated! Now he's writing a book "that includes tips on... fast and magical weight gain and loss and also better skins with less acne problems!!!"

If I ever meet him on the streets, I will ask him to pluck my eyebrows and then take a picture with him!


Entries in the The Online Atheist Dictionary:

Bear - A wild animal used by God to kill groups of children for making fun of bald prophets (2nd kings 2:23-24)

Circular Argument:
* (See circular logic)

Circular Logic:
* (See circular reasoning)

Circular Reasoning
* (See circular argument)

Many other mirth inducing examples abound. The entries are mostly shorter and less dense than those in the equally excellent, albeit more verbose Devil's Dictionary (The latter link is non-blasphemous - well, largely anyway - and is safe for reading by people of all ages and dispositions).

CNY

Chinese New Year. Ho hum. Got bored several times during the dinner, but at least the food was good.

I think the Chinese have this really macabre obsession with making money, striking it rich and worshipping the God of Fortune, as reflected in their New Year Songs.


Rants and Sites

I updated my A70's firmware from 1.0.0 to 2.0.0 and all that happens is it becomes PictBridge compatible? They've got to be joking.

~NEVER BUY TAMPONS AGAIN! ~Menstrual Cup~New! - Melvin finds the weirdest stuff on ebay.

The Spice Boys - THE DARKNESS have done the impossible — and become Britain’s fastest growing band in the United States since the SPICE GIRLS.

"I will nail you all night, I'll hit like a mountain. Don don don diri diri don don don don" - Madrigals can be vulgar but it's okay as long as the lyrics are in Italian (First line in Italian: Mi ficcar tutta notte, urtar come monton. Now, don't that sound innocent!)

"not only do they touch each other's boobs
they touch other's ppl's boobs
ppl who do not want to be touched"

- Someone studying overseas on JC age girls from Singapore. I thought only guys liked molesting each other.


Intellectual Whoring

Why VERY INTELLIGENT Men Fail With Women

Got the above via E-mail - presumably the one who sent it to me thinks that he falls into the category of "VERY INTELLIGENT" :P

"If you don't know what to do at every step along the way, you'll be shut down very quickly. Women have an AMAZING "He doesn't get it" radar system. Women have all kinds of subtle and ingenious tests that they throw at men to separate the "get its" from the "don't get its". And if you don't get it, then you're going to fail one of these tests VERY quickly. But the worst part is that you won't ever KNOW that you were being tested... OR that you failed."

In a related note, was sent (by the same person) - Intellectual Whores. In short, it does not refer to a "smart slut" as it were, but rather to males who are kept around by women for their mental entertainment. These men usually want to sleep with these women who usually consider these men friends.

Among other things, there is an article on "Ladder Theory", "a theory of adult male/female interaction".

'you're everybody's favourite intellectual whore!!... what got me interested in the first place was because you were a "intellectual whore"' - Gee.


Sikhism

we all know the turban is an intergral part of sikhism, while the tudung is not.. but rather a mere accessory with religious conotations, such as wearing a cross.

Unfortunately, modernity has eroded the basic tenets of sikhism. How many Sikh boys do you see with turbans these days? The bracelets you see more frequently. I wouldn't know how many still carry the Khanga or wear the Kachha, but you sure as hell don't see people brandishing their Kirpans! I'm not sure whether using the dagger-toothed comb to symbolise the Kirpan is disingeneous or not - could someone enlighten me as to this (someone who is not He Who Shall Not Be Named will be most welcome ;) )?


Meetup.com

Unfortunately, fewer than 5 people confirmed that they'd attend
the Singapore, SG Atheists Meetup, so this month's Meetup is
CANCELLED. Help make it happen next month!

What you can do now:

Spread the word for next month:

* Tell friends about http://atheists.meetup.com/
* Post flyers around town: http://atheists.meetup.com/flyer/
* Tell good websites about http://atheists.meetup.com/share/

Similarly,

http://brights.meetup.com/

Help spread the word for next month:

* Tell friends about http://brights.meetup.com/
* Post flyers around town: http://brights.meetup.com/flyer/
* Tell good websites about http://brights.meetup.com/share/

(For the uninitiated: A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview. A bright's worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements. The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview.)

14.8% of Singapore has no religious affiliation, I'm sure we can get at least 5 on Meetup.com.

Viruses of the Mind by Richard Dawkins

Even for those who frown on controversy and political incorrectness, Section 2, Computer Viruses: a Model for an Informational Epidemiology, makes for an interesting read.

The article also explores something that has puzzled me for a long time thus: "Is it possible that some religious doctrines are favored not in spite of being ridiculous but precisely because they are ridiculous? Any wimp in religion could believe that bread symbolically represents the body of Christ, but it takes a real, red-blooded Catholic to believe something as daft as the transubstantiation. If you believe that you can believe anything", and includes a seemingly paradoxical (and thus intriguing) quote: Certum est, quia impossibile est (The fact is certain because it is impossible.) (Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullian, De Carne Christi [ch. V, pt. II])


George W Bush and the real state of the Union - 0: Number of coffins of dead soldiers returning home from Iraq that the Bush administration has allowed to be photographed, 0: Number of funerals or memorials that President Bush has attended for soldiers killed in Iraq, 100: Number of fund-raisers attended by Bush or Vice-President Dick Cheney in 2003

F*** THE NAZIS, SAYS CHURCHILL'S PARROT - SHE WAS at Winston Churchill's side during Britain's darkest hour. And now Charlie the parrot is 104 years old...and still cursing the Nazis.

Passers-by stop to watch as flames envelope a young Buddhist monk, Saigon, October 5th, 1963., Buddhist monk sacrifices himself - A Vietnamese-born Buddhist monk who self-immolated outside a U.S. pagoda on Christmas Eve sacrificed himself to call for an end to religious repression in his native country The more things change, the more they stay the same

Hotel Erotica - We have all had one night - The things people get up to in the Sims Online

THE SIMS AND THE ALPHAVILLE HERALD - As they observe, When you try to censor someone, though, everyone else will automatically believe that what they're saying must be true


Had a spin on the Beta version of Technorati, and found yet more people I don't know linking me. Wah. Who are all of you? :0


It seems most Nokia phones support only 4 simultaneous tones. That's pathetic.

I have just removed the opacity, partly in preparation for a new layout (sometime in the distant future). IE shouldn't choke up on it anymore.

My page's new layout is "commissioned for $15 from someone".

And maybe the only people to go on Friendster now are bored NS guys in camp and kairen, though the latter may have something to say about that *g*