WHAT DREAMS MAY COME... ON "SANDCASTLE" AND THE UNBEARABLE SILENCE IN SINGAPORE

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works." - John Gaule

***

WHAT DREAMS MAY COME... ON "SANDCASTLE" AND THE UNBEARABLE SILENCE IN SINGAPORE
Z'ming Huang

Something is rotten in the state of you know where, and to the movie addressing the darker side of history here like never before, is given the beauteous title Sandcastle. It is an imagery that conjures the innocence of child's play and the delusion of a political myth all at once, rather fitting for a movie that seems halfway between a coming-of-age story and what almost threatens to develop into a political thriller. The heroic figure representing the idealistic era of 1950s Singapore is long dead and gone here, and the mystery of whatever transpired since – whether say the man was indeed 'brainwashed' in prison, is seen through the eyes of his young inquisitive son. And what we witness for the bulk of the movie are pretty much the daily challenges of an 18-year-old boy who is just growing enough facial hair to need shaving, barely legal for driving, and getting himself some action with a China girl. How exciting that can be probably depends on your personal definition of an eye candy, but the contrast between his quotidian lifestyle and what made student activists of his father's generation tick in the 50s or 60s is clearly the raison d'etre of the movie.

Whatever is lacking here in terms of reenactment of epic history or any high drama – don't expect a vivid depiction of White Terror like in Hou Hsiao-Hsien's A City of Sadness, or a scene of one storming through a kangaroo court like In the Name of the Father – is made up for by the poetic narration and the visual metaphors that make Sandcastle an appealing meditation on a seldom discussed chapter of Singapore's historical past, whereby many a young student were branded as communists and compelled to sign false confessions in exchange for release. Young director Boo Junfeng has cleverly crafted a movie that does not require one to reconstruct the past convincingly, that instead confronts the suppression of historical memories by way of a family drama about a missing father and a grandmother with dementia. The fear for loss of memories is a prevailing theme here, as hinted at by the childhood video that is converted from tape to computer, the hard disc that crashes and has to be salvaged at a shop, not to forget the jigsaw puzzle, which might admittedly have come into view one time too many as a metaphor.

The reading of the father's writings as a voiceover is another excellent device, along with archival footages of national day parade and general shots of Singapore's urban growth inserted subtly during national songs sung by the boy En's school choir and his English tuition for the China girl. Some reviewer out there has to be having fun by now likening the movie to a Hamlet of sorts. While our young protagonist has the choice of enjoying his comfy protected life in Singapore and thinking no further, his father's voice like a ghost reminds him now and then of the injustic which has been done to him. Meantime his mother is apparently having a suitor in an army officer who tries to win favour by buying a new laptop for our boy. The man is not quite the embodiment of evil here, just a civil servant with a life that can only be described as regular, and the scariest thing he does is giving one an earful of national propaganda. On the part of En, the only vengeful act he commits is a harmless practical joke, swapping the officer's presentation disc on climactic national day celebrations with a video of pornographic climax instead. If the tragedy of Shakespeare's Hamlet lies in his indecision, the plain and boring story of our Singapore protagonist is quite simply one of inaction and powerlessness. The ending of the movie consists largely of him being enlisted, getting his recruit haircut and doing area cleaning, images that evoke the routine social engineering.

It is with a cold and distant eye that the movie camera captures the city. The HDB blocks look like a concrete jungle so deep nobody can hear you scream, while the MRT station with a monstrous oriental roof looks simply fake and forbidding. Even the nursing home for senior citizens with its activity room looks so mechanical that it gives this vision of Singaporeans being kept in air-conditioned incubators like robots from cradle to grave. The slow pace of the movie is often a virtue in its depiction of a mundane existence, reminding one of the typical Tsai Ming-liang movies with a pervading sense of urban alienation. But three-quarter down the length of the movie, one does find it unnecessarily voyeuristic to watch our baby boy En doing nothing but caressing a pussy cat. One may also complain of a lack of character development in him, unless you consider that he has gone from jerking off to porn in his room to jumping into the bed of a China girl who lives next door (unlike others, he has somehow no ill feeling towards Chinese immigrants, presumably a sympathy inherited from his father?). Yet the boy who comes across as a space cadet half the time does in fact go through a journey in the movie, and a physical one at that, a trip to Malaysia in a fleeting Wong Kar-wai style, in search of his father's past. There is notably a grand view of the Causeway, which in this context feels kind of like an umbilical cord linking one to a historic past that one has been cut off from.

The greatest thing about this Cannes-worthy debut is that it chooses to be understated and allows space for imagination whenever possible through subtle suggestions, and despite the loose and much uneventful narrative, the overall structure still holds well. The opening scene of the movie at the beach for instance proves a brilliant stroke; at first all that voiceover talk of an 'underwater world' and 'utopia' (or "Peach Blossom Land") that one has turned his back on sounds totally cryptic in Chinese and one is not sure what kind of a wet dream the screenwriter has in mind, but the recurring motif of quiet waters as a source of solace gains significance in the course of the movie and soon comes full circle, revealing our young director Boo as a true romantic.

Since there have been enough loving praises showered on the man, it probably does not hurt however to pick just a few bones with the movie. First of all, being one who has long found political satires by way of slapstick comedies rather tiresome, I was all psyched up to embrace the dawning of a new age, a new approach of say a serious family drama that is sensitive and rich in emotions which just happens not to be afraid of straight talk on political history. Then I see this young pair rushing through the door for some privacy, and the very next second you hear a school choir singing Stand Up for Singapore. That's a wee bit of a cheap shot that one could have abstained from. Secondly, I demand it to be shown and demonstrated as to where in Singapore it might be possible for one to look out of a HDB flat window and see the action of your neighbour in bed without the aid of binoculars; if that is the case there will be no need for one to have webcam fun any more. Thirdly, I am not entirely sure the age of En's father (a student activist back in the 50s and supposedly married only at 38) and mother (a teacher who must be in her 50s at least and yet has a colonel as her new beau?) compute so naturally with the 'current year' of the 18-year-old son (roughly placed based on the fact that he uses Windows 98), plausibility seems a little stretched. Of course, fudging some chronological details should not be such a big sin, considering that we live in a day and age where even historical pictures can be photoshopped. Lastly, in the dialogue of En's mother reprimanding him, the Chinese vocabulary could have been more refined, considering that she was educated in a good Chinese-ed school and her character deserves a moment to shine with a piquant line or two. (All right we know she has become a Christian convert, very common these days, but losing her old belief needs not mean her brains and tongue alike have to be zapped, isn't that too sad and cruel?)

Such minor irritations aside, the biggest question for Singapore's latest bright new hope in movie-making would be whether to follow up on this success with a movie that explores further on the inanity of the lifestyle we know today (drawing more inspiration from Edward Yang's brand of the comical perhaps?), or one that further romanticises on Singapore's forgotten history (less need for political allegories this time?). Boo Junfeng has incidentally said in interviews that getting sources and informants on student movements in the 50s and 60s was not easy, a hurdle that is interestingly paralleled by En's difficulty in getting his family to talk about the taboo past. (I can so identify with that personally, having experienced first-hand the reticence of Nantah graduates who either reject interviews outright when it concerns the left-wing stigma of the Chinese-ed, or stop at euphemisms like 'being invited for coffee' without elaborating on ISD investigations.) Perhaps there have to be more ground-up oral history initiatives to encourage people to share their stories. But as it is now, such content is not entirely absent in local Chinese literature. Turmoil (Sao Dong), a novel by Yeng Pway Ngon which was published in Taiwan and helped him clinch the Cultural Medallion, talks about door-knocking at midnight, and how the mother of a student studying in Singapore would donate to the Malayan Communists simply out of pity, not to mention graphic descriptions on how the communists were killed and their bodies defiled. One has to be forewarned however that the novel is also full of gratuitous sex and in a chapter on the October 1956 arrests of student and union leaders, one would even stumble upon an episode of homoeroticism. Apart from this, there is a novel by Feng Sha Yan entitled The Man In Pursuit Of Sunlight (Zhui Zhu Yang Guang De Ren), which is apparenly about the sense of inferiority felt by Nantah graduates. Anyway, now that Chung Cheng High School has been immortalised on film (Boo seemingly taking a cue from Invisible City by Tan Pin Pin), it is high time too for stories of the ill-fated Nanyang University to be exhumed? Even apart from the Chinese-ed angle, movie directors here can easily draw on existing literature for suspense stories on law and justice. If Once a Jolly Hangman, Singapore Justice in the Dock by Alan Shadrake this year does not inspire Singapore's own version of Dead Man Walking, one may also turn to a lesser known book for spinechilling courtroom drama - Lee’s Law: How Singapore crushes dissent, by Chris Lydgate, an account of how a Malay labourer was tortured into confessing a murder that took place in 1989.

Perhaps nostalgia above all is the order of the day for now. This year in Singapore which seems more troubled by the problem of censorship than ever, is also a year which has seen expressions like Royston Tan's Old Places documentary and the hype of a movie exploiting Singapore's heritage of haunted places, and it is great to see it capped by the release of Sandcastle, even if screening is limited to one cinema. This is a movie which has wonderfully encapsulated a deep suspicion in us, that the true Singapore spirit has long been crushed during our fathers' generation in what feels like a murder most foul, and the least we can do, is write an eulogy for it.


My own thoughts:

I'm surprised Sandcastle got so much gahmen support given its anti-gahmen themes.

The pacing was too slow and there were too many shots of cats. No wonder it's in Cinema Europa (for art films at Vivocity).

The film is cursed - it's In Loving Memory of 6 people. Usually films are In Loving Memory of 2 people at most.

In 1998 PRC immigrants did not feature in the National Consciousness, so the brief theme of PRC moral panic is anachronistic.

The film has the most depressing and disturbing version of "Home" I've ever heard (incidentally, "Home" is the only propaganda song that is actually nice).

They subtitled the Singlish as proper English

Is Teo Ah Kim (1927-2008) the director's grandparent?

'Filial Piety' can lead to worse outcomes for everyone involved.

チチをもげ！

"Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out." - Samuel Johnson

***

チッチッチッチ　おっぱい　ぼいんぼい～ん
チッチッチッチ　おっぱい　ぼいんぼい～ん
もげもげもげ

もげ　もげもげ　チチをもげ！
もーげプリリン　ポヨンもげー
もーげポロロン　プヨンもげー
まんまるチッチッチ　さんかくおぱーい
ロケットボイーン

やさしく（もげ！）　いきなり（もげ！）
微妙に（もげ！）　連続（もげ！）

★チッチッチッチ　おっぱい　ぼいんぼい～ん
　チッチッチッチ　おっぱい　ぼいんぼい～ん
　もげもげもげもげ　チチをもげ！
　…もげ！

もげ　もげもげ　チチをもげ！
もーげポヨヨン　パインもげー
もーげパイイン　ポインもげー
しましまチッチッチ　おさるのおぱーい
バズーカボイーン

今日も（もげ！）　明日も（もげ！）
とにかく（もげ！）　毎日（もげ！）

★くり返し

フォルゴレ「ハハハハハ、まてまてーー」
ぼい～ん娘「ウフフフフ、つかまえてごら～ん」
フォルゴレ「よ～し、つかまえたー！」
ぼい～ん娘「イヤン、そこはボインよ～」
フォルゴレ「ハハハハハハハー」
ぼい～ん娘「ウフフフフフフー」

★くり返し

Words of a Bigot

"If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane." - Jimmy Buffett

***

"If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.

Yours,
A. Lincoln."

(Abraham Lincoln's Letter to Horace Greeley)

Classic rant from genius

"A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes she's a tramp." - Joan Rivers

***

As featured elsewhere:

Friend's husband seduced by china girl

"When young, SG girls are slim, pretty, sophisticated and intelligent so kena tempted to marry. Then find out after unwrapping that got no neh neh, low sex drive and dead fish in bed. Somemore don't know how to cook and do housework.

Five years into the marriage, not so slim and pretty anymore, sophisticated and intelligent become nagging and grouchy. This is when the men are about
32-38, and realise tio pian, BIG TIME.

China, Pinoy, Thai, Taiwan and nowadays increasingly more Jap and Korean women find SG men best. Compared to the men in their own country, SG men are less chavinistic, ham sup, educated and wah lau eh, can speak the English somemore. Hong Kong don't want cause like SGD girl think angmo is high class and don't appreciate SG men.

These women from Chian or whatever come with hot bod, got neh neh, know hot to cook and clean and very importantly, think SG men are a catch. Compared to SG women who just 'settle' for SG men.

So at the end of the day, why stick with the SG girl who don't even appreciate SG men?

There are two ways to a man's heart - his kukubird and stomach. Ie. great in bed and know how to cook. These are skills SG girl don't have.

They only have one skill - like to communicate and share feelings (Zzzzz). But only the gay boy like to do this leh.

So all you straight men, nothing wrong with you going for foreign talent. The marriage was a mistake, how you know your SG wife is a dud and there is a big better world out there?The SG girl blame the foreign talent for taking their men but who ask them don't treasure the SG men and learn some skills in bed? haha.

When I go to China and speakie the English at the club - all the girls come. I see in their eyes they want to take me home and rape me and have my babies - it's love - I so clever, can speak English and Chinese, dress so nice.

In Singapore, the SG girl scream and shout for Jay Chou and whatever HK star who cannot speak English. Otherwise, they like the Euro type, speak English got accent, my English no accent CMI.

Only the foreign talent can appreciate I am very smart - two languages I can speak.

SG men don't like their wife after a while is because they are like American type - like to demand and fight for their rights very sian. But at least American women more open-minded in bed, SG women is dead fish.

They realise the truth: SG women are also slut but know how to package better. They don't say they want money, they say they want a man with future - same thing lah.

In my office, my women colleague is like me, go to uni. All gian to sit BMW and mercs but bopian 'sacrifice' and go out with honda civic for love. But no degree, u no need to try. Like that not call slut meh?

SG women think it is a 'sacrifice' to marry someone with no qualification.

The truth is the SG women are more slut. At least the China and Thai women know how to wild in bed and cook."

On reflexive (Western) self-blame and judging the past by the standards of the present

"Life is an unbroken succession of false situations." - Thornton Wilder

***

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Show 24 - Classical Hanson

"Victor Davis Hanson: The whole idea of globalisation, which is really a euphemism for Westernisation. The application all over the world of Western ideas of business, government, communications and science. And that, because it's the most powerful and it's the most self-critical, it also puts the greatest burdens upon itself to be perfect.

A lot of people who haven't studied the system that they participate in, but they do know it is self-critical, think that because it's not always perfect, then they don't think it's any good, they put impossible demands on it because they think that somehow we in the West must be Gods, rather than just mere human.

I think that's a fair rendering of what we mean in the historical sense of the word, and why it is that Westerners are so upset about our misdemeanors and they tend to think that the felonies that they see elsewhere - today, even - are either a result of some type of colonization, or imperialism, to see the others as victims rather than perpetrators of evil.

This Western idea of self-reflective criticism that puts such an inordinate burden upon us to be perfect. Unless we have leaders and scholars and moral, philosophical people of influence that remind us that this is a positive trait - within limits - then we become almost skeptic, cynic nihilists, and that's the danger that the West, whether it's 4th century Athens, or 17th century France, or 5th century Rome that lead to tear everything apart and examine it. Almost self-destructive

Dan Carlin: I think that there's a chauvinism that modern people have about our ancestors in the past, and I think that probably our ancestors (sic) 2,000 years from now will have about us. Where we just assume that people in the past were a bunch of superstitious folks, probably racist, usually sexist, not very knowledgeable about things like the Sciences. But you do a lot of reading of the popular material from the past. Tell me, are there any ways that the ancients who were our ancestors were our equals, or maybe in some respects, our betters?

Victor Davis Hanson: I'm not a, what the Romans call laudatore symphorevat (sp?), just a cheap praiser of the past. But by any fair token, what our great-grandparents had to do was so far, far more demanding than what we do. I mean, most of the people I know would be dead if they were alive in 1850.

I would have been dead at 23 with a major kidney operation. I would have been dead again at 51 with a ruptured appendix. I wouldn't have been able to live a very fruitful life. So the physical burdens that were put upon people up until just 50 years ago were incredible.

If we go back and we say that a family with 10, coming across the plains in a covered wagon and trying to homestead land and finding water that wouldn't make them sick, the food that they depend each day, and then we don't, we just ignore the physical demands and drudgery that they had to put up with, and then we say: you know what, they were not sensitive. They were not sensitive to people of colour. They were not sensitive to Native Americans. They were not sensitive to the environment. They threw bottles out the window.

Yes. May be true, but any of us who would go back into that physical environment would probably fail, because we've created, almost a very pampered populace who uses the standards of the present to condemn those of the past without giving them credit for undergoing great misery and sacrifice to create the foundations, the physical infrastructure that we of course enjoy. So we can talk all about this lake we didn't need, or this dam we didn't need, or this highway, but we we use it today. And we don't blow them up. So we use all of the contributions and the achievements and the investments of the past. We take it for granted and our daily life is so pleasurable. But then we also, sort of ingrate, say, well, they shouldn't have done that. But we don't just say: we shouldn't have done this, therefore we won't use it.

People in San Francisco are always talking about Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. National tragedy that they flooded this beautiful valley. But they don't say, it's a national tragedy, let's tear down the dam and let's not have any fresh water in San Francisco.

And that's the problem with modern man. Rather, modern post-Western man. That he has this strange attitude that he's trying to - we saw this with Senator Obama saying the other day that he might like to bankrupt the coal industry and make it so expensive to build a coal plant, which we have the world's largest reserves. We have to go solar and wind, but that would - at least for the temporary period - would say to Americans: okay, let's just use electricity 5 hours a day.

If I'm living in Chicago, I'm the Obama family, I'm going to tell the children: do not turn on television because it's not windy today, or we don't have enough sunlight today, and we want to be good citizens and not burn coal. But nobody does that. They want it both ways, or three ways, or four ways, and that's my greatest sense of disappointment in the present generation"

"Picnic Supplies" / The supermarket in the eyes of children / The MAD Guide to Moobs / Symptoms of Sexual Abuse in Children

"Picnic Supplies"


The supermarket in the eyes of children


The MAD Guide to Man Boobs (moobs)


Symptoms of Sexual Abuse in Children:

"Displays advanced, unusual or bizarre sexual knowledge

Ex. A child sees a couple kissing - Says, 'the man is going to put his finger in her wee wee.

Ex. A child comments, 'You know snot comes out of Uncle Joe's ding dong.'"

I am also amused that "Unusual fear of males" and "Sexual promiscuity among girls" are other indicators of sexual abuse. This was not written by a feminist (not a reflexive one, anyway).

Soldiers' needs during World War I

"Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug." - John Lithgow

***

delanceyplace.com 8/11/10 - war, loneliness, and sex

"Loneliness was constant. Men missed women...

Just behind the battle lines only a mile or two from the front, girls waited to 'comfort' men, irrespective of whether they were German, British or French... One innocent young officer, hearing his turn called, made his way to room number six where in the bitter-sweet, dirt-smelling near darkness he could see the outline of a female figure who, turning towards him, hiked up her black nightdress to her waist and fell backwards on the edge of the bed. He realised that the highly anticipated delights of seduction were already over. She was ready.

These women estimated that operating a strict schedule of ten minutes per man, they could service an entire battalion every seven days, a production rate that most were usually able to sustain for only three weeks before retiring exhausted, and invariably unwell, but proud of their staying power. This experience had been, for many of the prospectively syphilitic young men, their introduction to the 'joy' of physical love...

The threat of venereal disease sometimes led soldiers to seek sexual relief with each other. The Field Almanac issued to Lieutenant Skelton cautioned men not to 'ease themselves promiscuously', although the detailed instructions on the necessity for cleanliness of the body at all times were impossible to implement in the filthy conditions of the camps. George V, hearing of the extent of homosexual activity in the army some two decades after the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, had been heard to mutter: 'I thought men like that shot themselves.' There was also a belief that homosexuality might be infectious and Scotland Yard kept a register of known homosexuals. Recovery from prosecution was at best rare and in reality unknown. Two hundred and seventy soldiers and twenty officers were court-martialled for 'acts of gross indecency with another male person according to the Guidance notes in the Manual of Military Law'"

--- The Great Silence / Juliet Nicolson

Conversations - 31st August 2010

"If it weren't for my lawyer, I'd still be in prison. It went a lot faster with two people digging." - Joe Martin

***

Someone: u notice most women in their late 30s-40s in managerial positions are really hard to work with.

those are the really societal rejects

most women who are better have already removed
themselves from the workforce.

Me: gah

Someone: which lady of leisure do u find unbearable?

Me: I dont know ladies of leisure
do you

Someone: i do.
they are a lot nicer than the female DXO officers i know.

Me: DXO is a special sample
it's not like regulars are very nice


Someone else: Sometimes, being passive-aggressive is just the most satisfying way of dealing with thick-skinned people

Me: Isn't being outright aggressive better? Hurr hurr

Someone else: Not when dealing with the fairer sex sadly


MFTTW: maybe you won't like biking
maybe the posture is not good for you
maybe yotu have tender ass

Me: har
I ride you lah
oops yours

MFTTW: i can tell a deliberate faux pas when i see one

Me: hurr hurr


Female friend on everyone else's opinions: i utterly hate female bosses too

although, in *** my female direct bosses weren't too bad
but that was bcos they were still quite low-ranking

maybe promotion turns them all into idiots


Someone: aiyah
the only misery of man is man himself
vanity, ego, and whatever the other sins are

but tell me, why are you sad?

... why would silly men make you said
and i like to tell people

Me: silliness in general makes me sad

Someone: one could be 80 years old and not be wise.
so.
such is the true condition of men lar.
and sadness is extraneous in this case cos it's not like you could do
something abt human stupidity.

Me: I bleed for humanity
even if it doesn't help it

Someone: bleeding for humanity is like white guilt
useless
and unproductive

a bleeding heart does't cure stupidity

Me: no, but I believe there is some value to it still
this is the reason why people having you in their hopes, wishes and
prayers helps
even discounting the presumed efficacy of prayers


Me: am I right in detecting wordplay between the words for "friend" and "enemy" in:

"Der Mensch der Erkenntniss muss nicht nur seine Feinde lieben, er muss auch seine Freunde hassen können"

MFTTW: errrrrrr
am i the right person to be consulting

Me: the word for enemy is easy right
HAHA

MFTTW: ....

Me: yeah it seems so
I am meditating on how the only folly of man is women

MFTTW: ......
you seem to spend a lot of time meditating on that
have you reached enlightenment yet

Me: hahahahahahahahahahaha
freud didn't manage to solve the mystery in 20 years
I doubt i can in a few


Me: shall we go to the cinema together
a mandate

Someone on the former Shaw Beach Road: i bring all my dates there ;)
wish i could bring you


Me: je voudrais mouiller

Tim The Great: then !

uh
sing in the rain


@hellovirnnnn: boys think with their penises

Me: What do girls think with?

@hellovirnnnn: They don't. HAHAHAHA.


Someone: if any girl sees this conversation, we would hung, strung and quartered.
if i end up sexless, i'm emasculating you, gabriel.

Me: it's ok, I'm already sexless


Someone else: well, i'm free this weekend
we can do a mandate this weekend

Me: hmm
someone asked me for a womandate
HAHA

Someone else: we can make it a three-way

Me: I thought you're not into girls
HAHA

Someone else: you assume that she's into boys.
maybe it'll be a weird three-way where no one is into anyone


Someone: [anorexia]'s nothing to do with genes

Me: it's a genes-environment mix

Someone: what does genes have to do with it at all?
it's a conscious choice to starve yourself

i don't feel compelled to starve
i choose to starve

Me: free will is an illusion

Someone: hurhur
that's rich comingfrom you

Me: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1575523.stm

Someone: relying on something as structured as academic writing to comprehend sometihng as chaotic as women's psychology is fail
all academics cando is to explore an extremely small portion of women

Me: that's like saying god is a mystery
so the human mind can never understand him

Someone: if god exists

if you can't even prove that then i don't even know what's there to explore
whereas female psychology is pretty real

Me: and general explanations of female psychology are pretty accurate too
for example women are more neurotic than men

Someone: well
to say that anorexia is mainly based on genes

how can they really prove it? scientists don't even know how genes really work up tothis point

they can only draw trends

and their sample size probably missed about 70% of girls who have anorexia
at leaxst 70%

they only got the medically critical ones
the ones who're dying from anoreixa
or malnutritioned
whatever

Me: did you even read the whole article

Someone: no i didn't read it

Me: SEE
can you at least read before making comments

Me: ...
this is like when research finds that short people are less healthy and poorer
and indignant short people write in saying that they're doing very well
people are statistically illiterate

Someone: i trust BBC health asmuch as i trust dailymail
unless you can give me a academic study of this

Me: the article DOES mention academic studies
but you already mentioned that you don't trust academics
so why waste (y)our time

Someone: it mentions academic studies from where?

what's the sample size
etc

you know the british press are great at taking things out of context
or creatiing news out of nothing

Me: that's why I read details

and what's wrong with BBC health
you are just dismissing things without even looking at them
likem ost people

Someone: most health articles on websites are sensational
or written to be sensational

Me: you didn't even read the article
and BBC health does not report breathlessly like most newspapers

popular science reporting is largely shit
but BBC health has a good record

Someone: right
you should give me more sources than BBC health then

Me: hello
most of them will report on the same study

and you can go and look yourself
I'm not your miner

Links - 30th August 2010

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Gang rape, aggravated outrage of modesty or more than meets the eye?

"For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news." - Gloria Borger

***


(all pictures from Sexually Oblivious Rhino, HT @GenkiGenki)

A post by Robin Rheaume on the AWARE blog decried a recent case where 5 boys sexually assaulted a girl ("factually rape"), and instead of being convicted of rape the boys were slapped with the lesser conviction of "aggravated outrage of modesty".

Muhammad Shafie Ahmad Abdullah, Mohd Sadruddin Azman, Lim Boon Tai, Rishi Mohan and Mohamed Firdaus Roslan will now get 3.5-5 years and 5-8 strokes of the cane each (rape gets you up to 20 years).

The parents being out, they had gotten the girl's number from a friend and called her over. She had come, even though she had not known any of them. They drank lots of alcohol (she had 5 cups) and she then had consensual sex with one of the 5. Later, all 5 decided to have sex with her.



The speculated reason (according to The New Paper) was that the victim was partly to blame for what happened to her - what is commonly called "victim-blaming".

Now, what is commonly labelled "victim-blaming" (where rape is concerned) is really a conflation of several issues, mainly:

i) if the victim should (or could) have done something to avoid being raped
ii) if the victim incited the rape (i.e. whose fault it was)
iii) how to prevent future rapes
iv) what causes rape (e.g. if it is about sex or power)

Strictly speaking, only ii) [and i), depending on how you frame it] should be treated as "victim-blaming", but too often i), iii) and iv) are dragged in (which is bad if you want to protect other women from rape). For example, it is incontrovertible to say that you should watch your alcohol intake if you don't want funny things to happen to you, but overzealous feminists sometimes pounce on that as victim-blaming.

In this case, happily, there was no conflation by the AWARE writer, though [s]he was responsible for the infelicity of expression that is: "It seems the victim was guilty of drunk driving a vulva".

The example of drunk driving Rheaume refers to was brought up by a lawyer The New Paper spoke to: drunk drivers are deemed responsible for their actions. I do agree that this is not an entirely relevant analogy; drunk drivers are responsible for what they do not just for the sake of deterrence (i.e. so people won't get drunk and drive and then knock people down) but because they are hurting other people. Whereas in this case, if you get drunk and then get raped, you are the one getting hurt. So it doesn't seem quite true that drunk drivers are held responsible for their actions (despite alcohol making them effectively a person with diminished volition and thus responsibility) because they knew what might happen when they started drinking.

I do disagree with Rheaume's analogy that we do not hold the victim responsible when a man gets drunk, wanders into a blind ally and then gets beaten up and robbed. This is because people do not typically consent to getting beaten up and robbed, but people do typically consent to having sex every day. Not always in a straightforward manner and yes, lubricated by alcohol too, no less.

Intrigued by this case, I read up more about it (or at least what was reported in the popular press), and the more I read the more suspicious it became.

1) Consent

For one, take the issue of consent. Consent is an extremely fuzzy variable to evaluate (and kept deliberately so). If nothing else, many women still subscribe to the view that "If she says yes, then she's no lady", so men can't entirely be blamed for not taking "no" to mean "no"; when the lines between "yes", "maybe" and "no" is so fine, it is no surprise that there will always be confusion about which side of the lines one is on.

Indeed, this case itself illustrates the nebulous and shifting nature of consent:

In the room, Lim asked the victim to kiss him, and pushed her onto a mattress on the floor.

Lim lay on top of her and persisted in his sexual advances despite the victim's attempts to push him away.

"The victim was feeling tired and her head was very heavy whilst resisting him," said DPPOh.

In the end, she gave in and allowed Lim to have sex with her.

So we can see that "no" became "yes" (probably stopping in the "maybe" stage in-between). If you have sex with a boy you have just met the same night (after some de rigueur protest), while his 4 friends are outside, it is not unreasonable for the 4 friends to think that you will not be averse to consenting to having sex with them as well (even if you might similarly [pretend to] protest at the start). Especially if you know that she had voluntarily come over, drunk alcohol and had sex with one of you despite having a boyfriend (this case gets more and more interesting, doesn't it?)

Someone: she probably has a history lor
thats why her number is passed ard like tht.

Furthermore, when she was being assaulted later, she:

"lay still" throughout... the girl never resisted, but only lay down "with her eyes closed and never said anything""

While absence of objection does not necessarily indicate consent (Human Organ Transplant Act, Medishield and CDAC/Mendaki/SINDA contributions aside), if I wanted someone to stop doing something terrible to me, I would surely voice out my objections at at least one point.

2) Misleading behavior



Yet, this is not the only relevant or suspicious aspect of this case. Consider:

The victim drank alcohol voluntarily, gave a massage to one of the boys who attacked her and entered the bedroom voluntarily... "she had gone to the flat even though it was close to midnight and she had no idea who she was meeting"...

"The behaviour of the victim was also unusual. She acted in certain ways. It is not fair to ignore what she has done.

Her conduct, her actions did create a certain impression on the minds of the accused persons. We cannot ignore this"

If you act as if you have Weapons of Mass Destruction, you cannot blame others for thinking that you have them.
If you act as if you're trying to make a nuclear bomb, you likewise cannot blame others for thinking that you have them (especially if you have abundant oil reserves).
And if someone asks you if you have a gun in your pocket or are just happy to see her, you cannot blame her for executing a swift jujitsu chop if you make a sudden movement with your 'gun'.

Similarly, plausible deniability aside, a reasonable person would have to admit that she gave the impression of being, at the very least, not closed to the idea of hanky-panky that night.

3) Lack of injury

Other suspicious bits include the testimony of a gynaecologist:

When asked by lawyer Mr Adrian Wee if her medical observations were consistent with a victim of sexual assault, [Gynaecologist Nurhidayati Mohamed Suphan] replied: “There were no obvious clinical signs”.

She also said that it was possible that therewas no bleeding at all...

Furthermore, the convicteds' testimony was that they stopped "after they realised that the girl was bleeding", which is something that you would not typically expect of rapists - if they know that they're raping someone, why would the sight of blood stop them? Also, according to the prevalent feminarchal theory of rape, since rape is about power and not sex, the sight of blood would presumably egg the guys on rather than stop them. Also, contrary to Rheaume's assertions, the girl was "not physically restrained".

4) Reduction of charges

One might ask why the prosecutor reduced the charges from rape to aggravated outrage of modesty. Again here, there is much to question:

It is unclear what emerged during her testimony behind closed doors, but the charges were reduced after defence representations to the Attorney-General's Chambers.

It was mentioned in open court on Thursday that the defence produced the girl's blog during the trial. It also emerged that the prosecution had no plans to tender a 'victim impact' statement, typically submitted to show the effects of the crime on the victim.

The blog extracts and her testimony would be very interesting, and perhaps the lack of a victim impact statement means there wasn't much impact (add to this the fact that the one who called the police was her boyfriend, which makes us suspect that he was upset that his girlfriend cheated on him).


A Twitter contact's altogether harsher take:

"Though I think the 5 bastards did not deserve to have their charges reduced, the girl IS TO be blamed as well.

Most likely she KNEW what MAY happen, but went ahead with it anyway, for the thrill of it. And then, she can't accept what she did.

"cheebye itchy" is a very apt description. She subjected herself to be caught in that situation in the first place..

I've always supported Aware and their takes in many instances. But Aware's take on this gang rape issue is beyond my comprehension.

As a person who was once caught in a similar situation, I do not think I am being unsympathetic towards the girl.

She could have LEFT/RAN/TURNED BACK at the doorstep. But she went in! No one forced her at that point of time!

Then lagi best, SHE DRANK. Shots after shots. She CONSENTED to having sex with the 1st guy. Eh WTF is wrong with her?!

Then after that, go back, call boyfriend, cry father cry mother. Unless she has an IQ of <40, she should have saw it coming. Retard. If someone comes to me & goes "you've never been raped, you don't know how it feels! you unsympathetic bitch!" I'm gonna break his/her face. What makes you think I don't know? I know it better than you do! It takes time to get over for sure, but CONSENTING to having sex with the 1st guy = leading the rest on! They are all MEN for God's sake! What did she expect? Play masak masak? She wanted it lah pls! Then after that act ke lian. Must be scared kena ditch by the boyfriend or kicked out of the house by her parents. Sorry excuse of a woman. I think the girl wanted to try out being part of an orgy, but regretted it & then screamed murder, said she was gang raped." Postscript: Another strike against the "power not sex" theory of rape:

The rest of the guys just wanted to "enjoy" themselves.

They had earlier made plans to sleep with any girl who turned up at their friend's flat...

He said he thought the girl was enjoying herself at some points...

Lim later told his friends what had happened [that he had had sex with her].

"We were all jealous and also wanted to (have sex with) her," Shafie added.

"We asked (Lim) to plan so that we could all (have sex with her) and he agreed."

The Evolution of Soul Calibur

Ivy's Boob Evolution: "For some reason, her clothes keep getting smaller. Let me try to describe how her puppies have evolved:

Soul Calibur: Oranges
Soul Calibur II: Melons
Soul Calibur III: Torpedos
Soul Calibur IV: Small moons

For Soul Calibur V she should just show up naked with a utility wheel cart under each tit."

Le marché est toujours calme

- Monsieur Ibrahim, est-ce que vous trouvez que je suis beau ?
- Tu es très beau, Momo.
- Non, c'est pas ce qe je veux dire. Est-ce que vous croyez que je serai assez beau pour plaire aux filles... sans payer ?
- Dans quelques années, ce seront elles qui paieront pour toi !
- Pourtant... pour le moment... le marché est calme...
- Évidemment, Momo, tu as vu comme tu t'y prends ? Tu les fixes en ayant l'air de dire : << Vous avez vu comme je suis beau. >> Alors, forcément, elles rigolent. Il faut que tu les regardes en ayant l'air de dire : << Je n'ai jamais vu plus belle que vous. >> Pour un homme normal, je veux dire un homme comme toi et moi - pas Alain Delon ou Marlon Brando, non -, ta beauté, c'est celle que tu trouves à la femme.

--- Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran / Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt

Anthony Kenny on Derrida's old age and Descartes's [male] chauvinism

"Every crowd has a silver lining." - Phineas Taylor Barnum

***

Anthony Kenny on his New History of Philosophy

"I divided the Historical part in the final volume into Continental and Analytic...

The [last] Continental one was Derrida, whom I knew and admired when he was a young philosopher. We used to meet together occasionally to discuss our joint ideas.

But, I have to say I thought in his old age he turned rather into rather a comedian than the philosopher. I found it difficult, in my book, to treat him with the reverence that I treated other philosophers so I ended in making some rather rude jokes about him...

I think the prize [for the best prose] has to go to Plato. Plato's early dialogues (at any rate) are written in very beautiful Greek, but their enormous achievement is that there was then no philosophical vocabulary. There were no technical terms in philosophy. He had to get across any philosophical point he wanted to put across in the plainest of language.

The philosopher that is, I think for modern people, easiest to read is probably
Descartes, because he wrote elegant, short pieces. Whereas Descartes said he wanted to write so smoothly that even women could read them.

I think he was punished for this male chauvinist remark when the one person who quite clearly defeated him in argument was Charles I's niece Princess Elizabeth, who pointed out the complete incoherence of Descartes's views on the relation between Mind and Body

And Descartes, I think, knew he was defeated because he was reduced to telling her not to bother her pretty head about the topic because it was dangerous for women to spend too much time on metaphysics. It would damage their health"

Chinese characters are dead! Long live Chinese characters!

"The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun." - P. G. Wodehouse

***

Wired youth forget how to write in China and Japan

"Like every Chinese child, Li Hanwei spent her schooldays memorising tens of thousands of the intricate characters that make up the Chinese writing system.

Yet aged just 21 and now a university student in Hong Kong, Li already finds that when she picks up a pen to write, the characters for words as simple as "embarrassed" have slipped from her mind.

"I can remember the shape, but I can't remember the strokes that you need to write it," she says. "It's a bit of a problem."

Surveys indicate the phenomenon, dubbed "character amnesia", is widespread across China, causing young Chinese to fear for the future of their ancient writing system.

Young Japanese people also report the problem, which is caused by the constant use of computers and mobile phones with alphabet-based input systems.

There is even a Chinese word for it: "tibiwangzi", or "take pen, forget character".

A poll commissioned by the China Youth Daily in April found that 83 percent of the 2,072 respondents admitted having problems writing characters.

As a result, Li says that she has become almost dependent on her phone...

Character amnesia happens because most Chinese people use electronic input systems based on pinyin, which translates Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet...

In Japan, where three writing systems are combined into one, mobiles and computers use the simpler hiragana and katakana scripts for inputting -- meaning users may forget the kanji, a third strand of Japanese writing similar to Chinese characters...

Character amnesia matters because memorisation is so crucial to character-based written languages, says Siok Wai Ting, assistant professor of linguistics at Hong Kong University. Forgetting how to write could eventually affect reading ability.

"There is no way we can learn the writing systematically because the writing itself is not systematic -- we have to memorise, we have to rote learn," she says.

"Through writing, we memorise the characters. Reading and writing are more closely connected in Chinese."

Chinese reading even uses a different part of the brain from reading the Roman alphabet, Siok's research has found -- a part closer to the motor area, which is used for handwriting.

Chinese characters are so complex that the country's revolutionary leader Mao Zedong told the US journalist Edgar Snow in 1936: "Sooner or later, we believe, we will have to abandon characters altogether if we are to create a new social culture in which the masses fully participate."

Instead, Mao eventually chose to simplify many characters into forms now the standard in mainland China.

Victor Mair, professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, said character amnesia is part of a "natural process of evolution"...

Some argue that the perceived decline in character knowledge is, in fact, nothing to worry about.

A survey by the southern Chinese news portal Dayang Net, found that 80 percent of respondents had forgotten how to write some characters -- but 43 percent said they used handwritten characters only for signatures and forms.

"The idea that China is a country full of people who write beautiful, fluid literature in characters without a second thought is a romantic fantasy," wrote the blogger and translator C. Custer on his Chinageeks blog."

Dalai Lama says there is no gender bias in Buddhism (but...)

Dalai Lama says there is no gender bias in Buddhism

"Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama said in Himachal Pradesh's Lahaul district on Friday, there is no gender bias in Buddhism and nothing prevents a woman from becoming his successor.

"So the purpose of the incarnation is to serve people about dharma (faith). If the circumstances are such, female form is more useful, then why not," said Dalai Lama.

He also added that that the female Dalai Lama should be attractive.

"And I also mentioned in case Dalai Lama's incarnation one female comes then must be very attractive female. So the very reason, you see more influence to others, an ugly female then may not much effective," added Dalai Lama.

Dalai Lama is on a four-day-long visit to the region, to give discourses on Buddhism."


(emphasis mine)

The most iniquitous motivational yarn I've yet read

"A committee can make a decision that is dumber than any of its members." - David Coblitz

***

Title: If U're in a relationship, married or none, read this. U'll know why at the end.

Story: MARRIAGE

When I got home that night as my wife served dinner, I held her hand and said, I've got something to tell you. She sat down and ate quietly. Again I observed the hurt in her eyes.

Suddenly I didn't know how to open my mouth. But I had to let her know what I was thinking. I want a divorce. I raised the topic calmly.

She didn't seem to be annoyed by my words, instead she asked me softly, why?

I avoided her question. This made her angry. She threw away the chopsticks and shouted at me, you are not a man! That night, we didn't talk to each other. She was weeping. I knew she wanted to find out what had happened to our marriage. But I could hardly give her a satisfactory answer; she had lost my heart to Jane. I didn't love her anymore. I just pitied her!

With a deep sense of guilt, I drafted a divorce agreement which stated that she could own our house, our car, and 30% stake of my company.

She glanced at it and then tore it into pieces. The woman who had spent ten years of her life with me had become a stranger. I felt sorry for her wasted time, resources and energy but I could not take back what I had said for I loved Jane so dearly. Finally she cried loudly in front of me, which was what I had expected to see. To me her cry was actually a kind of release. The idea of divorce which had obsessed me for several weeks seemed to be firmer and clearer now.

The next day, I came back home very late and found her writing something at the table. I didn't have supper but went straight to sleep and fell asleep very fast because I was tired after an eventful day with Jane.

When I woke up, she was still there at the table writing. I just did not care so I turned over and was asleep again.

In the morning she presented her divorce conditions: she didn't want anything from me, but needed a month's notice before the divorce. She requested that in that one month we both struggle to live as normal a life as possible. Her reasons were simple: our son had his exams in a month's time and she didn't want to disrupt him with our broken marriage.

This was agreeable to me. But she had something more, she asked me to recall how I had carried her into out bridal room on our wedding day.

She requested that every day for the month's duration I carry her out of our bedroom to the front door ever morning. I thought she was going crazy. Just to make our last days together bearable I accepted her odd request.

I told Jane about my wife's divorce conditions. . She laughed loudly and thought it was absurd. No matter what tricks she applies, she has to face the divorce, she said scornfully.

My wife and I hadn't had any body contact since my divorce intention was explicitly expressed. So when I carried her out on the first day, we both appeared clumsy. Our son clapped behind us, daddy is holding mommy in his arms. His words brought me a sense of pain. From the bedroom to the sitting room, then to the door, I walked over ten meters with her in my arms. She closed her eyes and said softly; don't tell our son about the divorce. I nodded, feeling somewhat upset. I put her down outside
the door. She went to wait for the bus to work. I drove alone to the office.

On the second day, both of us acted much more easily. She leaned on my chest. I could smell the fragrance of her blouse. I realized that I hadn't looked at this woman carefully for a long time. I realized she was not young any more. There were fine wrinkles on her face, her hair was graying! Our marriage had taken its toll on her. For a minute I wondered what I had done to her.

On the fourth day, when I lifted her up, I felt a sense of intimacy returning. This was the woman who had given ten years of her life to me.

On the fifth and sixth day, I realized that our sense of intimacy was growing again. I didn't tell Jane about this. It became easier to carry her as the month slipped by. Perhaps the everyday workout made me stronger.

She was choosing what to wear one morning. She tried on quite a few dresses but could not find a suitable one. Then she sighed, all my dresses have grown bigger. I suddenly realized that she had grown so thin, that was the reason why I could carry her more easily.

Suddenly it hit me... she had buried so much pain and bitterness in her heart. Subconsciously I reached out and touched her head.

Our son came in at the moment and said, Dad, it's time to carry mom out. To him, seeing his father carrying his mother out had become an essential part of his life. My wife gestured to our son to come closer and hugged him tightly. I turned my face away because I was afraid I might change my mind at this last minute. I then held her in my arms, walking from the bedroom, through the sitting room, to the hallway. Her hand surrounded my neck softly and naturally. I held her body tightly; it was just like our wedding day.

But her much lighter weight made me sad. On the last day, when I held her in my arms I could hardly move a step. Our son had gone to school. I held her tightly and said, I hadn't noticed that our life lacked intimacy.

I drove to office.... jumped out of the car swiftly without locking the door. I was afraid any delay would make me change my mind...I walked upstairs. Jane opened the door and I said to her, Sorry, Jane, I do not want the divorce anymore.

She looked at me, astonished, and then touched my forehead. Do you have a fever? She said. I moved her hand off my head. Sorry, Jane, I said, I won't divorce. My marriage life was boring probably because she and I didn't value the details of our lives, not because we didn't love each other anymore. Now I realize that since I carried her into my home on our wedding day I am supposed to hold her until death do us apart.

Jane seemed to suddenly wake up. She gave me a loud slap and then slammed the door and burst into tears. I walked downstairs and drove away.

At the floral shop on the way, I ordered a bouquet of flowers for my wife. The salesgirl asked me what to write on the card. I smiled and wrote, I'll carry you out every morning until death do us apart.

That evening I arrived home, flowers in my hands, a smile on my face, I run up stairs, only to find my wife in the bed - dead.
My wife had been fighting CANCER for months and I was so busy with Jane to even notice. She knew that she would die soon and she wanted to save me from the whatever negative reaction from our son, in case we push thru with the divorce.-- At least, in the eyes of our son--- I'm a loving husband....

The small details of your lives are what really matter in a relationship. It is not the mansion, the car, property, the money in the bank. These create an environment conducive for happiness but cannot give happiness in themselves. So find time to be your spouse's friend and do those little things for each other that build intimacy. Do have a real happy marriage!

If you don't share this, nothing will happen to you.

If you do, you just might save a marriage.
Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

A CHRIST-CENTERED MARRIAGE IS A MARRIAGE THAT IS SURE TO LAST A LIFETIME.

So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate. Matthew 19:6.

By Stephanie Halmilton


Obviously, this story is ridiculous:

1) Only an idiot would not know that his wife was suffering from cancer

2) Only an idiot would suffer from cancer silently

However, on further examination, this story is not just ridiculous but repellent and repugnant. The most disturbing part of this 'uplifting tale' is the following:

3) Only an utterly cruel person would not tell her family that she was suffering from cancer, and break everyone's hearts by dying on them in one month. The fact that she knew she had only a month to live meant that she had had adequate medical advice, so this would be no excuse.

Furthermore, only a base sadist would emotionally manipulate her husband into falling back into love with her (we know what intimacy does for humans - it stimulates oxytocin, which promotes bonding) when she knew she was going to die - when the humane thing would be to keep him disconnected so he would not suffer as much when she finally went (since she inexplicably decided to go without telling anyone). She obviously felt the intimacy returning in their relationship, yet chose to keep up the deception to aggravate the pain that he would finally feel. We can see that she put her selfish pride above the welfare of her husband - who she claimed to love.

The fact that cancer does not kill you within a month means that she knew she was dying for some time, so she doubtless had been planning to get her revenge on her husband and the woman he was cheating on her with, by making him fall back in love with him and leaving the other woman - and then dying on both of them. Truly, it takes a cunning mind to formulate such a plot, and similarly only a sadist of the highest degree would sacrifice her life in this way just to spite others (and traumatise her son for eternity since he would never get a chance to say goodbye to her and might one day even cotton on to her byzantine plot).

There is also the fact that people *do* fall out of love. Just because someone wants to leave his wife of 10 years does not mean that he is a scummy philanderer (especially since only adroit emotional manipulation by his wife got him to change his mind). The story is obviously framed to make us despise the husband and Jane, but the fact is that marriages *do* break down, the spark *is* lost and people *do* fall out of love with their original partners - and back into love with others.

Also, we cannot forget:

4) The religious preaching at the end is totally irrelevant to the story (I've seen this story posted elsewhere, sans the cancer at the end - apparently it was tacked on by some zealous fool, unaware of how he was making an already atrocious story even worse)


So, contrary to the professed moral of the story, we can see that it actually chronicles the dastardly plan of a twisted, spiteful woman determined to get her revenge on her husband - even in death, and to hell if it scarred her son for life. I am glad to say that this story is probably not real, for I would not want to go to the funeral of such a sick and wicked woman.

Banal stories which have no relevance to real life are not only empty, but on closer inspection are far from what they appear to be. Self-indulgent emotional masturbation in a vacuum might feel good, but in the end you're only fucking yourself. And sometimes even sodomising yourself with a 12-inch dildo.

Unrealistic and ridiculous motivational stories are really mocking what they purport to celebrate.


Addendum: Here is an earlier version where the wife doesn't die (the story cuts off at his buying the bouquet)

Katie Mullaly on The Buzz Media hates this story too, tagging it as "Humor & Fun":

Wait, the son is clapping his hands and shouting,”Daddy is holding mommy in his arms?” How old is this kid? I thought he had exams in a month? What kind of exams? I’m thinking he’s studying for his LSATs or some shit, and he’s like FIVE…or retarded.

One commenter: "a few of my best friends found it and think this is the greatest thing ever. I was starting to think that I was the only one who saw this story in a negative light after how they have been worshipping this story and that maybe there was something off with me. Thanks for letting me know that not all women fall for this stuff"


Addendum 2: Snopes on the evolution of this crap

Links - 25th August 2010

"The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed." - C. S. Lewis

***

Competition for a mate shortens men's lives - study - "The more imbalanced the ratio of men to women, the more pronounced the effect was"

'I wrote 2U B4'! British Library shows up textspeak as soooo 19th century - "It turns out they were doing it in the 19th century – only then they called it emblematic poetry, and it was considered terribly clever... There will also be the first book ever printed in English, which, reassuringly perhaps, has inconsistent spelling"

Wanted - Baby Sitters With Foreign Language Skills - "Bilingual children tend to have smaller vocabularies in English than their monolingual counterparts... “Bilingualism carries a cost, and the cost is rapid access to words”... At the same time, bilingual children do better at complex tasks like isolating information presented in confusing ways... One arena in which being bilingual does not seem to help is the highly competitive kindergarten admission process."

West Midlands police force bans the thin blue panty line - "Thongs or boxers creeping over waistbands and colourful bras peeping through white shirts outlawed under new uniform policy"

YouTube - Living With Steel Wool Hands (How I Lost My Nipple) - "Nothing compares to the day that I woke up with steel wool hands. It has its drawbacks, but with the help of case-mate products and industrial strength nipple tassels, I am able to live a normal life.
If you struggle with steel woolen extremities, check out case-mate to protect your iPhone."

True Colors - "White marble has been the norm ever since the Renaissance, when classical antiquities first began to emerge from the earth... Knowing no better, artists in the 16th century took the bare stone at face value. Michelangelo and others emulated what they believed to be the ancient aesthetic, leaving the stone of most of their statues its natural color. Thus they helped pave the way for neo-Classicism, the lily-white style that to this day remains our paradigm for Greek art... Armed with high-intensity lamps, ultraviolet light, cameras, plaster casts and jars of costly powdered minerals, he has spent the past quarter century trying to revive the peacock glory that was Greece. He has dramatized his scholarly findings by creating full-scale plaster or marble copies hand-painted in the same mineral and organic pigments used by the ancients: green from malachite, blue from azurite, yellow and ocher from arsenic compounds, red from cinnabar, black from burned bone and vine"

What's After The Credits? - "What's After The Credits is simply a site that you can utilize to quickly find out if a movie, television show, video game, etc. has any special scenes during the credits or post credits (aka Stinger / Movie Stinger)"

Best. Decade. Ever. - "The first 10 years of the 21st century were humanity's finest -- even for the world's bottom billion."
Nobody ever got funding by saying that things were going well

On Facebook, wife learns of husband's 2nd wedding

The queen feminist thinking twice about employing young women - "If Sarah became pregnant, I would be legally obliged to keep paying her for a full year after she’d given birth – which the business could ill afford. Now, on top of this, the government has announced that parents of children up to the age of 16 (as opposed to only up to six) will have the right to ask employers for flexible working arrangements... My pigs certainly aren’t going to thrive on flexi-feeding schemes. And neither is my business... At least one thing seems clear to me now: the femi-nist mantra of the 1980s – that a woman “can have it all” – has turned out to be a lie"

The Wickedest Man in Oxford - "One of the last of the many legendary contests won by the British philosopher A. J. Ayer was his encounter with Mike Tyson in 1987... [He] was entertaining a group of models at a New York party when a girl ran in screaming that her friend was being assaulted in a bedroom. The parties involved turned out to be Tyson and Naomi Campbell. ''Do you know who . . . I am?'' Tyson asked in disbelief when Ayer urged him to desist: ''I'm the heavyweight champion of the world.'' ''And I am the former Wykeham professor of logic,'' Ayer answered politely. ''We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.''"

Company tries to get gun classed as medical device

More Evidence That Intelligence Is Largely Inherited: Researchers Find That Genes Determine Brain's Processing Speed

Third of women earn more than their men - "Working women resent female colleagues who have children because they think they get better treatment... childless working women - are bitter about co-workers leaving work early for childcare reasons or having their hours cut on their return to work after maternity leave. Nine out of ten women said those without children 'resented the flexi-hours and time off mothers can have'. Seven in ten said other women were their harshest critics in the workplace and a third of female directors thought mothers less productive. A third of working women without offspring think working mothers use their children as an excuse to get off work."

Report: Men Unfaithful to Women Who Earn More
Naturally, men being unfaithful to women who earn more was explained as "Men might engage in "hypermasculine activities" — displaying their sexual virility or sexual competence — as a form of compensatory behavior", while women being unfaithful to men who earn more was positioned as "economically dependent women may encounter fewer opportunities to cheat, and they may make a calculated decision that cheating just isn't worth it"

If Women Were More Like Men: Why Females Earn Less - "Women who become men (known as FTMs) do significantly better than men who become women (MTFs)... The less-convincing appearance of MTFs probably explains part of the reason they earn so much less after they transition"

Artificial Ape Man: How Technology Created Humans

Kuo Chuan Primary School students FORCED to pay $5 deposit to ensure they watch YOG games
I love how "no outside food and beverage" (sic) is positioned as a way "to ensure a safe and enjoyable experience"

Boeing 727 Convertido en Hotel

New research: Children's vegetable intake linked to Popeye cartoons

Museum Of Bad Art Gives A Home To Forlorn Paintings

Top 11 Ways to Get Fired at Apple - "3. Start a Twitter account without approval from the Communication Geniuses Department.
1. Suggest a mouse design that functions properly."

Finally, an excuse for pregnant women to eat bacon and eggs

Brainless slime mould makes decisions like humans - "To us, a thing’s value depends on the things around it. Economists often refer to this as “irrational”. But if that’s the case, we’re not alone in our folly. Other animals, from birds to bees, make choices in the same way"

How black people use Twitter. - "Black people—specifically, young black people—do seem to use Twitter differently from everyone else on the service. They form tighter clusters on the network... black people [have] the means to dominate the conversation on Twitter... "It's the same issue I have with certain black comedy shows," says Elon James White, a comedian who runs the site This Week in Blackness. "They put out these ideas of blackness that—if it were someone of another race saying them—you'd go, 'Whoa, that's racist!' I remember when #ifsantawasblack hit, I lost my shit. I was freaking out. It was literally a game of, What's the most racist thing we can say? And it was black people saying it!""

How Many People is Enough in Singapore? - "Profits in Singapore are increasingly being earned by foreign, not local capital, and in many cases subsidized by tax breaks and other incentives not enjoyed by local business. Hence Singapore becomes ever more reliant on inflow of that capital for continued growth as well as on importing foreign labor to supplement a now almost static indigenous labor force. Recent public disquiet over immigration may be prejudiced and seem irrational to a leadership that thinks it always knows best what is good for Singaporeans. But the nation badly needs a real debate about demographics and growth priorities."

Reporters Sans Frontières - Open letter to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange: ‘‘A bad precedent for the Internet's future'' - "Revealing the identity of hundreds of people who collaborated with the coalition in Afghanistan is highly dangerous. It would not be hard for the Taliban and other armed groups to use these documents to draw up a list of people for targeting in deadly revenge attacks... The precedent you have set leaves all those people throughout the world who risk their freedom and sometimes their lives for the sake of online information even more exposed to reprisals. Such imprudence endangers your own sources and, beyond that, the future of the Internet as an information medium. A total of 116 netizens are currently in prison in a dozen countries because of the comments they posted online"

Boomerang for Gmail: Send email later or receive it when you want

Teen sex doesn't cause bad grades - "Teens in committed relationships do no better or worse in school than those don't have sex... Last year, nearly half of high school students reported having sexual intercourse, and 14 percent have had four or more partners"

Opinions vs. Data - "I immediately figured out how to use it, but my gut reaction was «most people are not going to get how this works.» It seems I was wrong. This is one of the reasons why I don’t put too much trust into opinion-based usability reviews: There’s a lot of guesswork involved, and guessing how humans behave is an endeavor fraught with peril. Expert reviews can be helpful, but they are no substitute for actual testing."

Obama's Islamic America - "President Obama says Islam has always been part of America, which raises the question, does the president know something about American history that we don't?... Islam had no influence on the origins and development of the United States. It contributed nothing to early American political culture, art, literature, music or any other aspect of the early nation"

Why don’t Anglo women like Asian men?
Amidst the meaningless motherhood statements, I like this comment: "Asian men, well, you tend to be shorter and skinnier. You have figures most women torture and starve themselves to achieve, except you lack boobies. You challenge our femininity, basically."

Why photographer was handcuffed - "POLICE handcuffed a photographer taking flood pictures along Bukit Timah Road last month because public safety was involved... The photographer had stopped his car illegally along the road at about 7.40am to take the photographs, causing an obstruction to other motorists... 'There was clear danger not only to the photographer but to other motorists as well,' said Mr Shamugam. When the photographer ignored a second advice from police against taking pictures on the flooded centre divider, he was handcuffed."
Someone parks illegally and you handcuff them for public safety. Nice try, do you think anyone other than Singaporeans will buy that?

Former RCP president backs review of drugs laws - ""Everyone who has looked at this in a serious and sustained way concludes that the present policy of prohibition is not a success"... He argued that many of the problems health staff encountered were the consequences not of heroin itself, but of prohibition... decriminalising personal use could free up police resources, reduce crime and improve public health"

I will not be your father

"Si seulement tu connaissais le pouvoir du côté obscur"

The gender pendulum has swung too far

"In strictness we are all mad when we give way to passion, to prejudice, to vice, to vanity; but if all the passionate, prejudiced and vain people were to be locked up as lunatics, who is to keep the key to the asylum?" - The Times, 1853, on the verdict of "not guilty by reason of insanity"

***

The gender pendulum has swung too far

"True or false

1. The majority of medical research and outreach has been done on men.

... most gender-specific health care research has been done on women. When I searched PubMed, which indexes 3,000 medical journals over the past 60 years, there have been 43 articles on "women's health" for every one on "men's health"...

Also, the overwhelming majority of gender-specific health outreach has been to women. Although sudden heart attack kills more men and kills them younger, most of the heart-disease public relations campaigns have been aimed at women. And although almost as many men die of prostate cancer, we see a sea of pink ribbons for breast cancer in our supermarkets and advertising campaigns but rarely the ribbon of prostate cancer. (Do you even know what color that is?) There are seven federal agencies for women's health, none for men.

2. The vast majority of severe domestic violence is initiated by men.

False. The media mainly reports the misleading police reports, which grossly underestimate the amount of female-initiated domestic violence because men are far less likely to report abuse. One reason: men are embarrassed to say their wife abused them. In contrast, women are considered heroes for reporting their abusing men... A California State University metaanaylsis of 200 studies with an aggregate sample size exceeding 200,000 "demonstrates that women are as or more physically aggressive than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners." Yet much female-initiated abuse is ignored by the police and shelters overwhelmingly serve only women.

3. Girls do far better than boys in school.

True. Male school achievement used to exceed female. Today, however, by high school graduation, girls are reading 1.5 grade levels higher than boys, a far greater gap than the tiny edge boys have in math. Boys are eight times as likely to be put on a chemical leash such as Ritalin, nine times as likely to be disciplined, twice as likely to drop out...

In graduate school, despite the fact that a far higher percentage of men work full-time after they get their degrees, fully half of students in medical school, law school, and MBA programs are women., as are almost 80 percent of veterinary school students. Yet inexplicably, there are far more scholarships set aside for women than for men...

The response to boys' falling far behind girls is too often for boys to be told to sit still for ever more seatwork, as recess and other physical activities, which used to allow boys to drain energy, are cut. Otherwise, it's a trip to the principal, a suspension, and/or placement in special education and/or that Ritalin leash.

4. According to the Dept. of Defense, 99% of U.S. soldier deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been men.

True: You might ask, "How could that be? The media and government constantly say, 'Our men and women fighting in Iraq.' Media interviews with soldiers are roughly 50/50." Fact is, only men are allowed to serve in direct combat and only men must register for the draft.

5. Men comprise 80 percent of completed suicides.

True, yet there are many programs aimed to prevent women from committing suicide, almost none for men.

6. Women earn less for the same work than men.

False: For the same work, women earn, on average, the same

... today, unmarried women who have never had a child earn 113% of what men earn. That suggests that for the same nature, quantity, and quality of work, women likely earn more than men...

Here is further evidence that when women do earn less, it's not because bosses undervalue them: Working women who have no boss (they own their own business), earn only 49% of what the average male business owner earns. Why? A Rochester Institute of Technology study found that money was the primary motivator for only 29 percent of women versus 76 percent of men. Women put a premium on shorter work weeks, proximity to home, fulfillment, autonomy, and safety...

7. While women's employment rates remain steady, one in five men ages 25-54 are now unemployed, the highest percentage since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started collecting data in 1948

... How did you do on the quiz? If you didn't do well, why?... society's mind molders--the colleges and the media--employ many hard-line feminists and men afraid of being called sexist. So, for example, rather than dig beneath the misleading statistics trumpeted by women's advocacy groups such as the infamous "women earn 80 cents on the dollar," they report those statistics unquestioningly. And movies, TV, and commercials disproportionately portray men as boors, sleazebags, and/or morons. For example, the box-office-record-breaking movie Avatar disproportionately displays the women as strong and ethical, the guys as troglodytes. The major exception is a jarhead who is shown the path to wisdom by a woman. In the leading kids' movie, Princess and the Frog, it's the same: Tiana's (the heroine) dad is killed off immediately so she can be raised by a wise woman. Consulted to by her and Granny Bayou, Tiana beats all the bad guys who are, yes, all guys.

If a Martian read the above information, he'd reasonably infer that to be treated this poorly, men must be the inferior sex...

We perceive men who earn more money as having privilege but we are blind to dads who sacrifice their own dreams because earning more, even if the job is disdainful (e.g., traveling widget salesman) better helps their children live their dreams. When we view men's higher earnings only as discrimination against women, our anger blinds us to his mid-life crisis when he realizes he will never be the writer or artist he once hoped to be. And more important, it blinds us to how his love for his wife and children made him make the enormous sacrifice of giving up his dreams. In turn, our blindness deepens his crisis of meaning and often, his depression or anger...

25 years ago, when I began as a college and career counselor, both sexes were equally confident about their futures. Today, most of the girls and women I see are optimistic while far more males are dispirited or angry"

Crazy Jeremy makes it to Twitpic

"#NUSOddities - A PRC student wearing his VERY DIRTY LAB COAT stained with a multitude of dyes. GPGT."

This is, of course, inaccurate.

1) He's not a PRC
2) He's not an NUS student [anymore] (this bit was implied)
3) His lab coat is not dirty - it's stained on purpose (who could possibly get this sort of stain accidentally?!)

Great pickup lines

"I don't have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who'd be mad at me for saying that." - Mitch Hedberg

***

Nice try, creep.

"What began as an innocent foray into the world of online dating quickly turned into a degenerate parade of quirky, amusing, odd and nauseating characters vying for female attention."


My favourite (and evidently theirs too) attempt currently on the first page:

Subject: Hell bitch. I'll be your much older friend.

Message:We can hang out.

I wear a motherfucking chicken suit. And I use it to play pranks on my local KFC. I go around their store saying "I'm a chicken on steroids!" They call the cops. I run for it down the streets. The cops are forced to chase a man in a chicken suit. I get tasered and start crying. People put it up on youtube. I become a celebrity.

I think what we have together could at least be friendship, but at the very most be true love with lots of mini-golf and butt-sex.

And that would be awesome. Cause I'm really good at mini-golf.

Motherfucker.


And an incisive observation (on "Are you a FUCKER, or a TALKER"):

"I want to believe that the success rate of messages such as this is in the low decimal points of a tiny fraction of a marginal percentage… but if that were truly the case, they wouldn't keep on coming.

Perhaps we ought to be examining this social scenario from a diametric angle: Who is responding to these messages in a manner that suggests such obnoxiousness is erotic, or even acceptable?

I'd like to meet her and tell her that this website is all her fault."

(in other words, it takes two hands to clap)

Raffles Stands with Jairus

Dear Raffles Alumnus,

As you might already have heard or read from the papers, Jairus Ang Jun Heng from the Class of 2009 and former boys' captain of the school's Canoeing team was attacked by a gang of robbers while on his way home from Kallang MRT station on 29th May at around midnight. Jairus sustained many injuries and had to undergo many operations.

Six weeks on, most of his wounds have healed and he has been discharged. However, his four fingers were amputated. Despite the physical and emotional pain, Jairus remains a fighter- staying positive and refusing to give up on his dreams.

The school has launched a Fund, open to contributions from the school community, to help his family with the medical bills and cost of future therapy and treatment. Cash and cheque contributions are welcome. Please address cheques to “Raffles Institution” with “Funds for Jairus” on the back, and mail it in to the school. For cash donations, please walk in to drop off your donation at the Student Affairs Centre at Blk D of Raffles Institution (Yr 5-6 campus) anytime between 8 am to 5.30 pm.

Over and above financial support, the Fund is a token of the school's undivided support for a fellow Rafflesian during these difficult times. Let us stand with Jairus and his family, so they may know that they are not alone in the long journey to recovery that lies ahead.

Thank you very much for your kind attention and generous support. For more information, please contact Canoeing Teacher Mentor, Mr Koh Say Yong at sayyong.koh@ri.edu.sg or Girls' Canoeing Captain 2008-09, Ms Quek Xin Er at quek_xin_er@yahoo.com.

Regards,
Raffles Alumni Portal Administrator
Raffles Institution
One Raffles Institution Lane
Singapore 575954


On my suggestion, they hve also set up a Paypal account:

"Good news! our school recently set up a PayPal payment facility. Our registered email address with PayPal is peggy.lee@ri.edu.sg. So if you have a Paypal account, you can make a donation to "Fund for Jairus""

"Live Our Dreams, Burn Our Flag"

"It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear." - Dick Cavett

***



"CRIME ALERT: BURNING OF STATE FLAGS

Police have received reports on state flags hung outside residential units or other premises being burnt.

We seek your assistance to alert Police on persons who loiter suspiciously in your neighbourhood... Your vigilance will contribute greatly to the safety and security of the neighbourhood"


.


"Where they burn flags, they will ultimately also burn ballot papers."


Flag Burning Made Safe and Easy - BurntFlag.com:

"If you've come to burn a flag, you've come to the right place. Flag-burning without repercussion is our specialty. So, if you come from a country where freedom of speech isn't policy, or flag-burning isn't considered freedom of speech, burn away. If you come from a country where flag burning is a protected freedom, burn your flags here to avoid those nasty arson and public disturbance laws!

After all, at the end of the day, it's just a bunch of pixels, right?

Top Five Burning Flags

1. Al Qaeda
2. United States
3. Nazi
4. Sweden
5. Algeria"