Where the Sun Does Not Shine

News

2006-12-23T17:30:00.000+08:00

Back by popular demand. How popular? Don't ask.

It's too cold to be creative, and I can't think of anything profoundly stupid that I've done recently. So, I shall blog about profound stupidity in other people's lives, examples of which are depressingly prolific. A few examples that stuck with me:

1.
I don't know what to think about people like her. The word "bullet" keeps popping up in my mind.

Yet another specimen of the kaobei-about-everything-except-what's-important tribe, which irritates me no end. Other recorded sightings include the hippie who hydrates himself with alcohol, smokes like a forest fire and insists on eating only organic food. My perennial favourite is the appearance-conscious female who restricts her slimming diet to half a celery and 10 tubs of ice cream per day.

2.This is just unfair. Why didn't I get such toys, suitably modified for males of course, as a wee lad? Now I know the kind of deprived childhood I suffered through. Makes my heart bleed, it does. Why are all these toys female-oriented, anyway? I mean, you get vibrating swords and spears and magic wands, vibrating guns, vibrating action figures, now vibrating broomsticks etc etc, but hardly anything for the young male demographic. Such a shame.

3. Woman puts baby through airport x-ray.

Wow. Maybe she was hoping to give the baby superpowers.

4. Woman complains about buying bad crack to cop .

Absolutely priceless. I can't quite imagine the thought process that must have led to that decision.

5. Bomb gone wrong.

Long video that's probably uninteresting to most people, so don't bother with the link. Basically, a bomb dropped from an aircraft landed right on top of a team of US and Afghan soldiers who were supposed to be aiming that same bomb with a laser beam. One of the possible things that went wrong was that the laser aiming device ran out of power, and when the batteries were replaced, the device reset the target co-ordinates to ITSELF. Pure, unadulterated genius. Bet a few engineers got yelled at over that one.

Exercise machines

2006-09-08T19:50:00.000+08:00

Today in the Straits Times, there was an immense full page ad advertising a new, $1980 exercise machine developed by a certain well-known lifestyle company. It purports to vibrate off any excess adipose tissue in just fifteen minutes a day of shaking around, by engaging the stabilizing muscles of the body.

After deciding to blog about it, I took quite a while thinking about how to convey my opinion that the idea's totally, absolutely, fucking ridiculous in a diplomatic and peaceable manner, one that won't land me in any lawsuits. Fifteen minutes on a $1980 vibrating platform is the key to health and a slim figure? No matter how many times I repeat the concept to myself, "totally, absolutely, fucking ridiculous" seems about the most accurate and succint judgement.

Let us assume the idea works. Let us assume that you're so negligent about your health you wouldn't unhesitatingly shell out a measly $1980 ($1480 with the introductory discount) for a lifetime of visible abs and good proprioception. What are some budget options exploiting the same concept you can try, no doubt for far inferior results?

1. You can try standing on a Swiss ball or Bosu board, for a cost of about $50. It's possible, some freaks have even managed to perform power cleans and one-legged squats on them.

Maybe, just maybe there's no way standing on an enormous, round plastic ball filled with air can be as unstable as standing on a motor-driven board mounted on a solid, immobile base?

2. Then, you can take a bus trip at peak hour, and stand without holding on to any rails or grips. Sure, all those people wedged around you reduces the instability some, but at least you'll have a moderately soft landing if you topple midway through your 15 minutes. Price? Okay, given the way bus fares rise, this might not turn out to be economical.

3. Alternatively, you can stand on a small coffee table, with a tennis ball placed under each of the legs. If you're too cheap to spring for tennis balls, you can always shorten all the legs to different lengths.

We assumed, however, that this is a feasible means of losing weight, that the concept is worth pursuing and spending money on. It should be plain fucking obvious it is not, compared with rather more traditional methods of exercise.

Still, I suppose we can applaud the doubtlessly good intentions of people who build and market such machines. Surely they do this out of a wish for more people to live healthy, fulfilling lives? It can't be that they're out to fleece people so blinded by their desire for an easy, effortless solution to fitness that they can't smell bullshit if they're lying face down in the stuff, can it?

Edit: I saw the damn thing in action on a TV commercial. The only way you'll lose weight with it is if you took a bank loan to buy the device and sold an organ to finance repayment.

Debates

2006-09-01T13:24:00.000+08:00

Papal summit to debate Darwinian evolution.

Well.

I suppose better late than never. About a century late, in this case. While we're in the mood for summits and debating, why not have one discussing whether the Earth actually orbits the sun? It's an idea only a few centuries older than evolution, practically bleeding age scientific controversy. I've never quite believed it myself, isn't it obvious that the sun, planets and stars all revolve around Earth, the centre of the universe?

And what about this ridiculous idea that the Earth is round? We need to debate this, I can't see why people would want to teach this to kids! After all, it had at one point been only a theory, and look at all the details it can't explain! Like, why don't people on the bottom half fall off into space? How come people can walk in straight lines? Any sensible person can see that the Earth is flat, supported on the backs of four giant elephants standing on the shell of an enormous turtle orbited by the sun, stars and planets.

Steroids, again

2006-08-14T09:48:00.000+08:00

Every time I see an article in the news covering "testosterone abuse" by top athletes, I'm alternately bemused and irritated by the mixture of hysteria, moralising, pseudo-science and laundry list of deadly side effects. Our dear ST, in my memory, has never attempted to cover the subject in a balanced, scientific, un-sensationalised manner. Then again, I suppose

"Top athlete XXX took testosterone! No wonder he won! Experts say that XXX risks falling over dead and exploding in a cloud of muscle, prostate cancer cells and breast tissue just for thinking about using steroids! Quick, cover the eyes of our own young athletes!"

does sound much more newsworthy than

"Top athlete XXX took a safe, scientifically-grounded, well-planned cycle of testosterone and other ancillary compounds (probably no more than many of his competitors who weren't caught), then worked his ass off to an extent that would kill most amateurs to win the ___________"

even though the latter would be considerably closer to the truth. I mean, look at all the side effects mentioned. You would think that steroid users have difficulty rolling 100m in hospital beds pushed by teams of strong nurses, much less setting a world record in it or cycling across France. That said, a certain TDF winner was being rather dumb in using testosterone during the race, knowing it is the first thing that's tested for. What with other more effective and less detectable compounds around, too.

One good thing is that these articles readily suggest novel, innovative ways of catching dopers to those with imagination. It's easy! Forget the epitestosterone and isotope ratio tests, all the knowledge you need to catch steroid abusers is right in the news. Most prominent among the side effects noted is usually shrinkage of testicular tissue. Therefore, I propose a new, absolutely free, 100% fool-proof and idiot-proof test to catch dastardly athletes: the CHEAT® test!

In the CHEAT® (Cupped Hands - Each A Testicle) test, trained practitioners simply reach between the legs of the subject and grasp. After getting a handful of the athlete's capabilities and feeling out the long and short of the situation, one can tell whether he is as well-rounded as he seems to be or if the truth is rather more sticky. Works for female athletes, too - if you grab something where there shouldn't be anything, you've got yourselves a headline. Man, I'm going to get rich and revolutionise the world of sports.

What's the point of this entry, you ask? I don't know myself, I just felt like throwing around a bit of hyperbole and a few puns.

Summer Hols

2006-07-14T13:17:00.000+08:00

Since the start of the holidays, I have completed 4 Pokemon games: Gold, Ruby, FireRed and Emerald. How productive. Someone give me a shiny medal.

I have also been exposed to near as much soccer news as I can stand. I was rather amused by today's ST, which devoted more column space to Zidane and affairs regarding his headbutt than to the Mumbai blasts and Israeli invasions combined. Granted, it was a good headbutt, as nice as any I have seen from the early days of mixed martial arts, but still... I mean, all Zidane's headbutt resulted in were at most a couple of beautiful bruises, a marred retirement and just maybe a lost World Cup.

The Mumbai blasts, in comparison, killed 190 at last count - 190 individual human beings just like you and me, who had families, hopes, dreams, futures and lives. Now they're piles of decaying flesh sitting around in city morgues. Probably destroyed any sense of security the residents of the city had, too. Yet I'm pretty sure the total surface area of Zidane's pictures alone exceeded that of the Mumbai articles. No point going into the toll racked up by the Israeli invasions, same thing.

I may be wrong but I'm quite sure that the amount of newspaper coverage tends to reflect public interest. So why is it that people are more interested in somebody playing a relatively unexciting (to me, pls don't flame) sport blowing up and heading someone else, than in wars and terrorist acts claiming more and more lives by the hour?

Fridge

2006-05-05T00:41:00.000+08:00

Man, our common fridge stinks, I swear the smell's so bad and the fumes so corrosive that all the metal items in the kitchen are dissolving. Someone left a bottle of milk inside for what seems like a couple of millenia. Long enough for it to evolve till I can carry on intelligent conversations with it, anyway. It's got clods of blue, green and grey stuff floating inside it, and more good character than all my floormates combined.

KNS, when I leave a bottle of milk in the fridge, it disappears the moment I feel like drinking milk. Other people leave milk in the fridge, it rots through the rise and fall of decent-sized empires. Amazing to see how much value I can add to 4 pints of milk just by buying it.

Problems of perception

2006-04-29T16:56:00.000+08:00

Male contraception and its reversibility.

The cliff notes version of the above article is that you can inject (or somehow introduce) testosterone into a man to suppress sperm production, and that the depressed sperm production will rebound after a few months.

Introduction of exogenous testosterone into the body. Hmmm, sounds very familiar. Somehow, I get the feeling that just about every male athlete in USA will suddenly decide to get contraception. Lots of contraception. You know, just in case their sperm count is really really high and each individual sperm tougher than Fedor Emelianenko.

Let's see:

Anabolic/androgenic steroid (AAS) usage in athletes:

Introduction of testosterone or testosterone analogues into the human body.

Media, pop science coverage and public perception:

Cheating, desire to win at all costs, irreversible health problems - liver damage, high cholesterol, blood pressure through the roof, horrible acne and skin problems, feminisation/masculinisation, impotency, erectile dysfunction, increased risk of cancer, increased sex drive, increased aggression ('roid rage) and psychological disorders.

Male contraception:

Introduction of testosterone or testosterone analogues into the human body.

Media, pop science coverage and public perception:

About time! Good news for all swinging males! Infertility reversible in a matter of months. Side effects include weight gain (hurhur).

I'm no expert on such matters, but I've read a bit and am pretty sure that the dosages involved in athletic use (bodybuilders excluded) aren't all far removed from that recommended for male contraception. I also know that the (side)effects of AAS are linearly dose-dependent within the ranges that are purportedly abused by athletes.

I'm not condoning the use of AAS in sports, or debating the morality of it. I'm just curious about why in the public perception all the side effects are associated with athletic use, and none of it with contraceptive use. I'm curious why the side effects are so often brought out to condemn the use of AAS in sports, while hormonal male contraception is seen as safe enough for mass use. It's the same bloody compounds that are used in both cases! What's more, athletes often take steps and the right drugs to allow their endocrine systems (and fertility) to recover within a matter of weeks. With the right precautions while using AAS, the side effects don't even appear. I don't see the same kind of therapy being offered for going off male contraception. If anything, this potentially makes the risks of side effects with male contraception greater than with standard sporting use.

Media portrayal and seeing what you want to believe over-powering facts, it seems. Same thing with the potential health benefits of alcohol.

Reminds me of some recent news about a murder-suicide in the US. The suspect was taking medication for depression and schizophrenia, had a medical history of the same. A search of his residence found cannibis, a number of rather exotic and illegal stimulants, and an empty vial that probably contained an injectable steroid. The police then decided to examine his body for the use of steroids, in possible connection with the murder. How screwed up is that? Suspect was a mental patient that was in all likeliness stoned out and amped up on any number of possible psychadelic substances, and the police zoomed in on steroid use as the blame for murder-suicide.

Dieting

2006-03-21T17:07:00.000+08:00

No, not me, of course not!

Finally had something interesting to blog about, though. Warning: long entry ahead.

After walking around one of the enormous parks near my college, I decided to plop my butt down on a bench for a while and take a breather. As it happens, there were two girls of about my age seated on the bench next to mine, chattering animatedly and breaking out a packed lunch. Upon examining each other's packed lunches, they went, simultaneously:

"Hey, you sure you want to eat that? I thought you were trying to lose weight!"

An argument started as to the amount of carbs, fats and calories in each other's sandwiches. They both knew, down to the 1st decimal place, how much carbs, fats and calories were in things as diverse as ham, chicken breast, turkey breast, tuna, salmon, egg white, egg yolk, white bread, brown bread, bread crust (I kid you not), any sort of cheese, mayo, dressing, yoghurt, mustard. They were so concerned about carbs they argued over the sugar content of lettuce and tomatoes. Each tried to justify their lunches by recounting the exact weight of carbs and fat they had for breakfast. Both recited their entire nutritional intake for the past 2 years, and laid out their eating plans for the next 2 bloody decades.

After hitting a stalemate and starting on their sandwiches, the girls discussed the caloric expenditure of various types of exercise and how much was required to torch off what they were currently eating. It seemed like they've managed to memorise entire exercise physiology textbooks - they were debating with authority over this source showing a certain value for hatha yoga and another source showing a value that differs by 0.8723541906%.

Once the sandwiches were over and done with, one girl dug out a one pint tub of Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream. Not entirely to my surprise, the girls ate the entire tub so damned fast that not even an intravenous injection could have gotten insulin into their systems more rapidly.

Even though I've almost never initiated conversations with stranger ang mohs, I had to point out the irony: "Err... Excuse me, don't you think it would be much better to forget about all that nutritional data and just avoid unhealthy foods?"

They stared at me with an expression somewhere between pity and incredulity. "But we like this stuff! It's fantastic!"

Some people I would just like to strangle on the spot, what with a handy river nearby to toss their bodies in. I did some research - half a pint of that ice cream contains 540 calories (RDA 2000 calories/day for women), 20 grams of saturated fat alone (that's the RDA already), 64 grams of carbs, likely to be mostly simple, high GI sugars too. It would take over three fucking hours of hatha yoga just to negate the caloric intake. The sandwiches, next to the ice cream, look like plankton next to a blue whale.

It's rather sad that I know quite a few females who are like that when it comes to dieting and weight loss. They'll bitch about their lunch and how fat they are, yet they'll gladly gulp down any piece of sugar and lard that comes their way. These females' penchant for dark chocolate is especially irritating, their excuse invariably being: "But dark chocolate is good for health!" Well, according to the British Heart Foundation and a little bit of calculator punching, about 100g of dark chocolate (30g of fat, ~500 calories) would be needed per day to get a possibly therapeutic dose of cocoa, not to mention that these therapeutic effects are far from proven scientifically. I don't know, 30g of additional fat daily, with a good bit ending up on my waist and in my arteries, versus a rather tentative correlation with health. Get a better excuse or face up to the fact that you're greedy and lack self-control, is my recommendation.

At least I never claim to be trying to lose weight. I wonder, if I wrote up a diet book based upon forgoing obviously unhealthy foods and getting a good dose of intense exercise, would I get rich?

Threes

2006-01-30T16:01:00.000+08:00

Hong King - unmarried, moral and yet desiring some acceptable form of entertainment - has requested that I answer that quiz of threes that's been around for quite some time. Please keep in mind that my answers are not meant to bare my soul to the world, which would probably leave quite a number of people blind and give the rest an awfully itchy rash. This is just an opportunity for me to do what I do best - spew nonsense.

Three names I go by:
1. Yi Fan (duh)
2. Bun (don't ask)
3. 大的 (my parents call one)

Three screen names I have had:
1. Yi Fan (duh)
2. Bunn
3. fankai

Three physical things I like about myself:
1. Hair, which probably qualifies as a separate individual from the rest of me. It certainly behaves like it's an independent nation.
2. Legs - nice and long. Strange that my best physical qualities are rather feminine.
3. Upper back and shoulders. Pretty nicely V-ed torso, even if I say so myself.

Three physical things I don't like about myself:
1. Nose - bloody genes, acts up for no particular reason sometimes.
2. Skin - bloody genes, smooth as a mountain range, scars all over the place. Could use a transplant using, say, Orlando Bloom's skin.
3. Eyes - so short-sighted I could just about see behind me.

Three things that scare me:
1. Usually myself
2. When I was much younger, I used to wake up at night almost unable to breathe because my nose and respiratory tract were momentarily stuffed up with gunk.
3. I don't know, a comet hitting the earth and wiping out all life?

Three of my everyday essentials:
1. Eat
2. Sleep
3. Rinse and repeat

Three things I am wearing right now:
1. Political geek t-shirt, shrunk to toddler size. More organ tight than skin tight, really.
2. Black microfiber shorts with HC logo.
3. Blue slippers of indeterminate brand and origin. Underwear? What's that?

My favourite bands or musical artists:
1. Disturbed - gets me psyched enough to eat concrete.
2. Savage Garden - I like male artistes with andro voices, go figure.
3. Penny Dai - voice like a heavenly chorus, could use better songwriting.

Three of my favourite songs (currently, anyway, in no particular order):
1. Jay Chou - mumble mumble mumble (发如雪). Very Jay Chou.
2. Damien Rice - Volcano. Strangely soothing.
3. Disturbed - Meaning of Life. Virulent and mad enough to make my earphones leak bile.

Three things I want in a relationship:
1. A young woman with movie star looks, Victoria's Secret body, Bill Gate's wealth, Feynman's brain, an angel's personality, Mother Teresa's heart and a puppy's blind, unquestioning devotion. What? It's what I want, isn't it? I shall go rub my energy-saving desk lamp now, in hopes of a genie. Nah, I've got better things to rub, thinking of a woman like that.
2. Shared interests would be good
3. Happiness, really

Two truths and a lie:
1. I tell the truth all the time, being physically incapable of lying.
2. No, really.
3. Don't believe me ah?

Three things about the preferred sex that appeal to me:
1. The usual list of physical characteristics, which I'm too lazy to list here. I'm a shallow man, so sue me.
2. The way girls want their independence and to have their own way in some matters, and yet expect men to queue up and fall over themselves helping in others. Make up your mind! Oh wait, appealing... oops. I suppose it is, in a very roundabout kind of way.
3. Their absolute irrationality and lack of reason when it comes to things like shopping, among others. Kind of endearing in the same way that a cute kitten falling off a building is. So many things about girls frustrate and fascinate at the same time.

Three of my favourite hobbies:
1. Reading
2. Sleeping
3. Lifting weights

Three things that I want to do really badly right now:
1. Sleep
2. Eat
3. Strike lottery

Three careers I'm considering/considered:
1. Civil servant. There, I've discharged my responsibilities.
2. Police officer. Stop sniggering.
3. Professional stunt man. Considered for all of five seconds, I think.

Three places I want to go on vacation to:
1. Antarctica
2. Mars
3. Greece

Three kid names I like:
1. Don't kids have the same names as the rest of us?

Three things I want to do before I die:
1. Gain immortality.
2. Find the best chicken rice in world.
3. Accomplish something that I can be really proud of. How original.

Three ways I'm stereotypically a boy:
1. I got all the right bits in all the right places. Does that count?
2. Smelly feet and armpits. Especially now that I'm back to eating oily fish.
3. Enough testosterone in any single artery to drown a lifeguard.

Three ways I'm stereotypically a girl:
1. Nice hair
2. Long legs
3. At least 22 similar pairs of chromosomes

Three ways I'm stereotypically Yi Fan:
1. Not quite the best person to answer this question, am I?

Three persons I would like to see take this quiz now (as if they'll bother):
1. Yeong Heng - your blog has been dead for ages! You'll probably produce the most worldly and cynical answers possible too.
2. Agnes - I'll never pass up an opportunity to waste your time.
3. Anyone doesn't have anything better to do? You can always volunteer.

What a monumental waste of time.

Mock exams

2006-01-22T18:22:00.000+08:00

Of all the mock exams I have had to endure over the past week, one in particular deserves special mention.

Every Singaporean I know regards QB (quantitative biology) as the easiest subject to handle, yet the QB mock kicked my butt all the way up to geostationary orbit, where the view is pretty terrifying. The only positive thing that can be said about the test was that I could sort of, vaguely, if the angle of light is right, if I squint as hard as I can with my head tilted to the left while standing on my right foot, recognise the syllabus inside there somewhere. Rather tenuous, though - blink, and suddenly every word on the paper will revert to sanskrit.

How did I handle such an insurmountable challenge? For 15 minutes, I:

- stared at the paper
- hummed all the Jay Chou songs I could think of
- planned all my meals for the coming week
- audited my expenses for the entire month
- laid out my budget for the coming year
- pondered the political issues currently discussed by S'porean society
- invented my own language
- found the meaning of life
- gained and lost a couple of superpowers
- thought of a solution to poverty and inequality
- worked out a road map for worldwide peace and prosperity
- prepared to take over the world

as opposed to, say, looking at my pretty supervision partner for 15 minutes and then falling asleep.

Thank goodness for the power of brute force mathematics, with a little sprinkling of luck.

Studying

2006-01-09T01:53:00.000+08:00

Why do I hate mugging so irrationally, and with such vehemence?

I'm not normally adverse to acquiring knowledge, reading widely etc etc, but during exam season I suddenly become severely allergic to textbooks and notes. I'll break out in rashes if I think about mugging. Blood starts to gush from the usual list of orifices if I see other people mugging. Various organs wilt from sheer terror and implode if people talk to me about mugging. My very cells get up, scream and spontaneously combust when I start mugging.

By the time I've read more than a paragraph of anything syllabus related I feel like going out to strangle the cutest, plumpest squirrels I can get my hands on. Or bashing my head on the floor until I clear a path through to the Pacific. Or eating my newly returned room mate, the one with such an affinity for other people's milk.

Maybe I'll set out a 4 pint bottle of milk later, generously fortified with detergent, SAF foot powder and lint from my bedsheets, now so finely aged that I feel like I'm sleeping on concrete.

Tripping

2005-12-22T22:24:00.000+08:00

Been back a couple of days from the grand Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam tour. No doubt much better accounts of the trip than I can manage have been put up in various other blogs by now, so I shall not bother with a cathedral by cathedral, museum by museum photolog. I don't have many good photos of my own anyway, despite having been forcibly appointed someone's official motion photographer.

Some points of note:

1. I challenge you to think of a better name for a gay bar than "The Homo erectus", found in Brussels.

2. I challenge you to find more helpful people than those in Brussels. Someone looking blur in that city probably gets more help than a man drowning noisily elsewhere.

3. I've carried so much luggage and shopping that my arms have permanently elongated, so I look like an orangutan. My knuckles are getting abraded from all that dragging on the floor.

4. We must have seen every single hat and postcard shop in Paris, every single chocolate and lace shop in Brussels. Now I wake up in the middle of dark and stormy nights waving my hands wildly and screaming "No! No! NO! NO MORE HATS!"

5. Anyone who thinks that Singaporean youths today are immoral and corrupted by western values should go have a look at Amsterdam.

6. I forgot to ask at least one lady of negotiable affection (thanks, Terry Pratchett) in Amsterdam about the value of her services. Oops.

7. I've unknowingly let suspiciously act cute phrases like "yayness" slip back into everyday use.

Seems like quite a lot of stuff has been going on around the world while I've been dragging luggage across four countries, too.

1. So, Woo Suk Hwang was forced to retract his seminal paper on therapeutic cloning. Many of the accusations levelled against his research would have seemed plain unbelievable otherwise.

Come on, massaging one set of data into four supposedly different ones? Photoshopping graphs and photomicrographs to present as separate samples? Hoping no one at all will notice or leak? What the fuck were the authors of the paper thinking? Just about every secondary school kid knows how to do this!

More, claiming that someone swapped your precious, ground-breaking stem cell cultures around during independent testing? Having 6 out of the 11 controversial cell lines die conveniently from fungal contamination when everyone is demanding proof of your work? SIX entire cell lines! If a meteor hit the S. Korean lab, it couldn't have killed more cell lines. It must have been raining fungal spores from the lab ceiling.

Is this how research at the frontiers of knowledge is done? Crap, get yourself a marker and label your samples clearly! Make your lab staff wear gloves! Or be a man, do the right thing, and plain confess.

I mean, even my SMP and SRP papers of old had stricter experimental procedures and more rigorous checks on the validity of the data. Maybe I should try to get them published in Science, too.

2. Judge rules against intelligient design. About time. I don't care what your beliefs are, ID is plain not science.

Long time no blog

2005-12-02T21:59:00.000+08:00

Finally, the holidays are here! I've been running an enormous deficiet of sleep and gigantic surplus of undone work for the past week, all the while cursing my caffeine insensitivity and banging my head against the desk to stay awake. If only stuff like modafinil isn't prescription medicine.

Anyway, thanks for all you people's birthday wishes and gifts! They couldn't have been better =) Now I'm officially too old to receive free medication from the UK government.

Here's the obligatory list of the most stupid things that have occured to me recently:

1. I've finally laundered my bedsheets. Sleeping on what feels and smells like a fungal culture just doesn't make for very restful nights.

2. I'm starting to get good and bad hair days. My plan to grow a ponytail isn't going too well.

3. Oatmeal is arguable the cheapest, healthiest, cheapest, most nutritious, cheapest form of breakfast around. It, however, looks like cheap compost, has a texture like cheap glue, smells like cheap wood and tastes unarguably like cheap cardboard. Did I mention that oatmeal is cheap?

4. One of my room mates can't aim. A couple of days ago, I entered the common bathroom and discovered that the toilet seat had turned a nice, rich shade of yellow. Why not colour the floors, walls and ceilings yellow too, while you're at it? Get a hold of yourself, please. A firm, directional hold. Use a bloody pair of chopsticks if you're too small for fingers.

5. The amount of static that builds up everywhere is amazing. When I wake up in the morning and throw off my blanket, it's like a miniature lightning storm.

6. I've been eating oily fish like they're going extinct tomorrow. I smell even fishier than a salmon farm now. I've ingested so much omega-3 oils that I'm leaking it from every pore; my sweat has enough of the stuff to save a hundred coronary patients.

7. "Study - longer needles needed for fatter buttocks" Unbelievable.

Off I go to make use of my freshly laundered bedsheets.

Mooning

2005-11-18T01:13:00.000+08:00

The moon has been amazingly bright and beautiful over here these couple of days. I've never seen the moon lighting everything so clearly before. Makes me feel like getting down on all fours, scratching my ears with my foot, arching my back and howling 月亮代表我的心 at the moon.

Cambridge Nuggets

2005-11-17T03:30:00.000+08:00

1. HSBC is the best, most efficient bank in the United Kingdom, period. They ought to get some kind of award for the quality of their personnel. Sending my chequebook and miscellanous paperwork all the way to Singapore after I took the trouble to fly over to the UK to open a student account, now that's going way above and beyond the call of duty. Now I would be able to use my spanking new chequebook in Singapore, all for just the price of a return air ticket! Fantabulous! Service with an idiot, drooling smile.

Screw you, HSBC. I managed to open another bank account in a third of the bloody time I have been messing around with you. I would dearly love to meet your manager and crush his naughty bits personally with a rolling pin.

2. One of my roommates has the balls to drink up my milk, all 1.5 litres of it. Bastard. If I ever find out who he is, I'll stuff the empty milk bottle down his puny throat and shove until it comes out the other end. Probably the result of loutish behaviour born of too much alcohol, but damned if that is a valid excuse in my book.

3. Unilateral membrane proteins don't exist. At least, none have been found yet. Why on earth did we learn about them at all at A levels? No reason exists at all to retain material referencing such entities, they're not even oversimplifications that make concepts easier to grasp. Yet another vagary of the education system.

4. We're supposed to learn mathematical formulas so well that even at the height of sexual pleasure, we'll be yelling out some differential equations as opposed to, i don't know, the name of the wrong person? Hmm. Doing it with a math student ought to be very interesting, educational and time-consuming, then. It'll probably be a fantastic means of revision just before the math tripos exams, if you have two well-versed mathmos going at it. "Hey pretty baby - see my exponential growth? Wanna do a bit of integration?" Certainly makes for better all-nighters than mere mugging.

Observations

2005-11-04T22:28:00.000+08:00

1. Chatlog from internal Cambridge, er, network, discussing a certain person who got fined a ridiculous amount for exceeding bandwith to the tune of 10 GB per day.

[01:49] (JE) what the fuck is he downloading, anyway?
[01:50] (plong) according to http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/netdiv/usagecharge.html the uni only gets charged 44p per gigabyte
[01:50] (Woohoo) oh man
[01:50] (Woohoo) they're rippin us off
[01:50] (JE) you would think that after a while he'd just run out of things to download...
[01:51] (Woohoo) porn?
[01:51] (Woohoo) who has the biggest porn collection in cambridge anyways?
[01:52] (plong) Stephen Hawking?

Guess the Lucasian (wheel)Chair of Mathematics is truly an expert when it comes to gazing at heavenly bodies and investigating whether black holes are hairy.

2. At first glance, much of the reading I should be doing for evolution and behaviour would be dismissed as erotica. Not that I know what real erotica looks like of course, not even when glanced at, oh no.

3. A can of tuna has very little satiety value. Three cans of tuna still have very little satiety value. Six sounds about right. Think my brain's loaded enough methylmercury-cysteine to kill any small furry animal you'll care to name.

4. Tumble drying a microfiber singlet and shorts generates about enough static to bring my hair halfway to a full afro.

5. Everytime I go for physio supervision, in addition to feeling all Shakespearean for a couple of days, I get an urge to blog about my supervisor. He's so full of clinical physio info that a huge amount leaks out like an uncontained magnetic field - if I ever manage to catch half of it I might as well double degree in medicine.

Snippets

2005-10-30T10:57:00.000+08:00

1. The most Cambridge of my academic experiences has to be my Physiology of Organisms (PoO) supervisions. My partners and I will be sipping red wine, reclining in armchairs and eating bread with cheese the proper way while talking about the electrical conductivity of nerve cells with my supervisor. I always feel like some cultured, educated, well-bred English peer after coming off one of these sessions. For a couple of days afterwards, I will have almost irresistable urges to open doors for ladies, stand up when women leave tables, make sweeping elegant bows to professors, tip imaginary hats to everyone I meet on the streets and use words like "prithee", "thy", "thou" and so on.

It helps a lot that my supervisor is a bona fide academic freak. He has more textbooks than I have books back home. He knows the current status of research and has qualified opionions of what seems to be every grey area in physiology. Mutant.

2. From my physio notes: "ACh at NMJ, DHPR in TT to RyR in SR". Yep, clarity of expression is one of the more famous Cambridge traits.

3. When people tell you they're gay/lesbian, they're not kidding.

4. One or more of my roommates are inconsiderate pricks. Someone smashed a glass not long ago, and all he did was to leave a note ("Sharp! Pls b Careful") on top of the glass fragments before going off for some tea party. I wake up every morning to dishes and pans caked with unidentifiable sauces and burnt crunchy bits. Occassionally, I see pasta, meat and so on overgrown with so much microbial life that they got up and squelched away on millions of tiny flagella when I approached.

Worse, I opened the kitchen dustbin this morning to be confronted with enough food to last out the Siege of Leningrad, all thrown away for no apparent reason. They don't look or smell bad in the least, and when I checked none of it had expired. Alright, I suppose UK schools don't teach the saying 粒粒皆辛苦.

5. The British have a fucked up attitude towards drinking and smoking. It's still considered cool and socially acceptable to smoke. Yep, it's cool to buy organic, pesticide-free foods religiously, make a lot of noise about MNCs putting potentially carcinogenic chemicals into products, pontificate about how ozone depletion will eventually give us all skin cancer, while sucking the stuff used to pave roads into your lungs just to get off.

Worse, the more wine you drink, the more drunk you can get, the stupider the things you do while drunk, the more popular you are and the friendlier people are going to be towards you. A few nights ago, one of the college people I know managed to get herself more drunk than a bunch of monkeys swimming in an ether vat. For the next few days, she proudly hobbled to lessons on crutches, sent off with fanfare and applause by all who witnessed whatever it was she did.

Worst, trying to get into a fight while drunk is considered funny, a source of mirth for all. Quite a few times, a drunk will lunge at me, restrained at the last moment by his laughing friends, breathing enough alcohol into my face to cirrhose my liver and implode my endocrine system.

Terrible.

Academics

2005-10-22T23:32:00.000+08:00

I had a supervision on what was, to all intents and purposes, a farm on Thursday. There we were, my supervision partner, the good doctor and I, sitting on a wooden bench in the middle of a wide open, painfully green pasture, the skies blue as sapphire and the sun bright but soft. There were even horses trotting by and neighing in the background as we slogged through differentiation and graphs, complete with the occasional cow munching on cud. Would have made a fantastic postcard picture, that.

I doubt there was any serious learning going on, though. It was extraordinarily cold and windy - my fingers were too numb to write anything but "~"s, and my supervision partner kept running around to retrieve her worksheets after particularly spirited gusts of wind. Only the doctor, in true doctorial fashion, seemed oblivious to it all.

Gymming

2005-10-19T03:22:00.000+08:00

My college free-weights gym has one of those swiss ball thingies, big plastic balls that people use for situps and I use for sitting. This morning, I sat on it and the damn thing exploded along a seam, causing me to teach everybody around some new, uniquely Singaporean swear words and scrape my elbow against the wall.

Written on side of ball: "-Brand censored- burstproof to 500lbs!!!"

Well, now I can see how effective beef and ham are in piling on weight.

Clubbing

2005-10-17T22:39:00.000+08:00

Went clubbing yesterday. I have been to discos before, but never went through the entire experience from beginning to end, somehow always hitting the dance floor swinging (actually, spasming) without ever having to go through all the mucking about leading up to that. Basically, this time at least, the prelude to clubbing involved sitting around in dark lounges bobbing my head to whatever music the DJs were playing, being asked by girls to buy them drinks (I'm sure I got the sequence wrong somewhere), squinting about in dim lighting for people I know.

Then people got down to the dance floor, and started dancing. From above, it looks like a rather messy and very colourful experiment investigating brownian motion. Down on the floor, the impression of being an atom diffusing rapidly about was reinforced even further. I came face to face with certain people on a cyclic basis - I could almost predict when somebody would be rotated into my line of sight. I have all the dancing ability of the average amoeba, which meant that my arms, legs, hips and trunk sort of move about by random thermal motion, vaguely in time to the beat - my style is significantly more epileptic than eclectic. I suppose I was very lucky last night, since I didn't actually hit anyone hard enough to elicit more than mild cursing. Certainly left nothing more than bruises that would definitely heal over the next few days, anyway.

Somehow, despite the rather negative description, the whole thing turned out to be pretty enjoyable.

Sups

2005-10-14T03:55:00.000+08:00

The supervision system over here is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. It is amazing how much you can learn when you plop down with two-three compatriots and a postgrad/prof to talk shop for one solid hour.

Some of my supervisions happen at very wierd times and places - my latest is scheduled for 7-8 pm, and I have to run like Roger Bannister for ~10 minutes to get between two of my supervisions that are chronologically consecutive but geographically remote. I've even heard fearful whispers about math B (the hard option) students soldiering on through 10-11 pm (!!!) supervisions.

Yet I've suddenly realised that I really wouldn't mind making that sort of sacrifice for the sheer magic of a good supervision. Of course, it helps that just about all my supervision partners are female.

I've also realised that I usually understand concepts by grinding through the associated ideas like I'm trying to pull a truck across a river of treacle. There's got to be a better way.

Physical activity

2005-10-10T04:11:00.000+08:00

Finally got a little less conversation, a little more action. Fired up the old muscles, pulled the arm back and let loose with the javelin after a hiatus of almost an entire year.

Result - I was aiming to hit the horizon, but instead merely took some skin off my big toe.

Verdict - strength gone, power lost, technique nonexistent.

Observation - the Cambridge throwers are in very bad shape, especially the javelin side. I knew that the moment the javelin captain observed my throw and said to me: "We could use a guy like you." I was the only bloody fresher who threw the javelin exclusively in the whole place, or at least the only one who bothered to turn up.

Bliss is having a free gym in your very own college, equipped with a decent selection of free weights. Started deadlifting again at an almost mortally embarrasing 70 kg, but if there ever was an activity to start slow in, it's picking heavy stuff off of the floor.

O, School!

2005-10-05T15:57:00.000+08:00

School is starting so soon... I donch wannawannawanna start school! Been having so much fun playing the tourist around this place. My physiology supervisor called me in for my very first session of academia yesterday, loading me and my supervision partner up with wine, cheese and chocolate while dropping our first essay question. Bugger.

My supervisor's (he's still a post grad student) room looks like a study in some medieval castle. He's got candles, paintings and wine bottles everywhere, and the way he lays out his dinner table is something straight out of a arthurian legend. I half-expect him to uncontrollably start spouting latin or at least Shakespearian english every other sentence, which luckily failed to occur.

One thing that strikes me is that the people over here (read: ang mohs) generally aren't modest in the least bit. If they think they're good, they will tell you so in all seriousness. I was talking with one of the men on my landing, complaining about how far his lecture sites are from each other.

Me: "No bike for you? Well, at least you'll get really fit walking all that distance =)"

Him (casually): "Nah, I'm already very fit. Think I might get a bike then."

The body of the person in question looks like a stick figure drawing even when draped in loose clothing. And he has a triple chin.

Me: "You? Fit? You can't even lift a pencil off a table if I rigged up a pulley system for you! You look like a walking case of juvenile diabetes, coronary heart disease, egotitis and delusionis! I doubt you can run to the bathroom without triggering a stroke or herniating a couple of spine discs! I bet you're so inflexible you need a telescoping pole to scratch your toes!"

Well, I didn't actually say it. But I really, really felt like squishing an itty bitty ego. Mean, aren't I?

On the flip side, they're really friendly, and not averse to making conversation with strangers.

Livin' it up

2005-10-03T22:30:00.000+08:00

It's amazing what you can learn in a foreign country, a land that is totally alien to you. A few observations:

1. Here, when you oogle pretty girls, they look back at you and smile. My goodness, I can openly stare all I want now. They don't slap you, threaten to splash acid on your face and then call the heavy weapons crew in.

2. When trying to eat desserts without the use of your hands at all, the main limiting factor to how much you can consume is the length of your tongue. I have a tongue of above average length and dexterity, apparently.

3. Photos taken of people kis- ki- er, er, I mean, passing sugar cubes! from mouth to mouth, alternating gender, that's what, look amazingly scandalous. Should such photos of me turn up on the net, please disregard.

4. Army change parades do have a functional carry-over to real life. We had 15 minutes to run back to our rooms, change to formal wear, and then run to the hall for our first formal dinner. I was the only person in the whole damn college who managed the full monty, turning up in suit, tie, dress shirt and pants and everything. The closest anyone else came was suit, dress shirt, no tie and jeans.

5. I look good in suits.

6. I need to fake the ang moh accent better.

7. I've been living with three others on the same landing for three days, and I've yet to bump into any one of them using the toilet, pantry or shower. Interesting.

8. Apparently, the people in 03S78 think that I fantasise about all eleven girls in class in my free time. Yes, all ELEVEN. I'm sure there's a moral in there somewhere. Why ah? Ning Qi? Anybody?

To 78: thanks for everything, guys =)

To those who came to send me off: muchly appreciated!

3

2005-09-25T18:29:00.000+08:00

Only three days left to go
Everything but the clock runs slow
No more common heinous crime
Than the unrelenting theft of time

News!

2005-09-24T11:00:00.000+08:00

Reading the news can be a boundless source of entertainment and blog fodder when you fail to shoplift from Kino or steal from the local library.

According to that really big and colourful diagram confusing students about the many ways they can now waste the most vibrant years of their lives, people in the special and express streams can only take the O levels and promote to JC/poly if they cross over to normal academic first. OK.

And according to the chinese news, our government will allow demonstrations next year in Singapore when the IMF and the World Bank come to town.

Wow. Singapore? Demonstrations? Weebleweeblesclup...

When the whole world is watching, Singapore will show her munificent graciousness and benevolent tolerance of free speech by allowing anarchists, Greenpeace, PETA and other assorted people with too much time on their hands to make noise about stupid crap like, I don't know, farming subsidies, debt repayment, loans to third-world countries, lousy weather, indigestion, dry skin, facial wash and haemorrhoids. Nevermind that the decisions made by the eggheads matter not one whit to these people. Those whose livelihood really depends on the policies made by the professor-types are too busy and too poor to fly in to Singapore and protest, so someone's gotta demonstrate on their behalf, right?

Meanwhile, a totally silent protest about a MRT station that has everything to do with the daily life of local residents warrants an emergency response and thorough investigation by the police. I mean, these are Singaporeans, mere locals, so fvck them and their feedback. Who's looking, anyway?

Tsk, tsk. I think this sort of behaviour is known, when exhibited by bodies other than the government, by the technical term of "holding double standards".

My Two Thing

2005-09-23T13:17:00.000+08:00

I can't believe I have this much time on my hands. After digging about on the internet for a while, I actually managed to find the original, root song for the hit single "My Two Thing". I don't usually post song lyrics, but WTH, enjoy =)

My Ding-a-Ling
Chuck Berry, 1972

When I was a little bitty boy
my grandmother bought me a cute little toy
Silver bells hangin' on a string
she told me it was my ding a ling

My ding a ling, my ding a ling
I want to play with my ding a ling
My ding a ling, my ding a ling
I want to play with my ding a ling

And then mother took me to Grammer School
But I stopped all in the vestibule
Every time that bell would ring
catched me playin' with my ding a ling

Once I was climbing the garden wall
I slipped and had a terrible fall
I fell so hard I heard bells ring
but held on to my ding a ling

Once I was swimming cross Turtle creek
many snappers all around my feet
Shure was hard swimming cross that thing
with both hands holdin' my ding a ling

This here song it ain't so sad
the cutest little song you ever had
those of you who will not sing
You must be playin' with your own ding a ling
My ding a ling Your ding a ling, your ding a ling
We saw you playin' with your ding a ling
My ding a ling everybody sing
I want to play with my ding a ling

Musing

2005-09-22T12:48:00.000+08:00

Couple of news articles I couldn't resist making inane comments about.

1. Opting for a paper airline ticket instead of an e-ticket costs you a $30 surchage. The cost to the airline of processing each ticket runs to $16, suggesting a profit of more than $10 for every IT-unsavvy traveller who feels better holding real paper rather than a bunch of charged particles. Yet the article says that getting rid of paper tickets altogether will save airlines everwhere $3-5 billion per year in paper-pushing costs. Errr. I don't know, the maths just doesn't quite compute.

2. There are probably almost no females I wouldn't mind seeing in a bikini. I'm willing to make an exception for female bodybuilders, however. I wonder how many of them actually remember the "female" part of their sport? Cover their faces and you can't tell the difference between them and Arnold. Bugger, there I go being a chauvinist.

用心良苦

2005-09-20T18:56:00.000+08:00

There is this person I know. JC 2 student, currently grinding it out through the prelims, temporarily suspending the need to eat or sleep, reading notes like every page contains a winning lottery number. She has problems with chemistry. Not too unusual, everybody has trouble with studies. More specifically, she can't understand food chemistry. Okay, believable, the topic's not for everyone.

What really, really astounds me is that she actually let herself get talked into not understanding food chemistry.

Her friends dislike food chemistry, complaining and whining incessantly whenever they get together to study about not being able to understand what the teacher was talking about.

She, to my everlasting amazement, suddenly started failing to understand anything the teacher taught. Her JC provided notes, similar in quality and content to any top 5 JC you care to name. She can't register a single word of what the notes have to teach. Her common sense and logic, normally present, inexplicably vanishes when faced with questions that her mother, armed with her cooking experience, could answer at once.

Some idiot in her class suggested that environmental chem could be a viable option, given that most of them had studied geog before. The whole bloody class adopted environmental chem as their preferred option within attoseconds. The person in question, of course, instantly fell in line with this new revelation. A leap of faith weighted down with chains, over the Grand Canyon, the inevitable fall cushioned with a couple pieces of O level geog notes.

Doesn't need much thinking, does it? A choice between an option you have been taught and studied about, generously supplied with notes, versus an option you have learnt zilch about.

Her mum asked me for a bit of help. The daughter wanted my chem notes, claiming (verbatim from her peers) in essence that HC notes contained ancient scripture unearthed from the ruins of Atlantis from which one can learn magic spells to correctly answer any chem question and clear acne. Okay, you can have them, but I told her mum that the A level syllabus is the same for every school, that my notes are at best identical to hers, at worst totally covered by the doodlings of irritated friends of mine. I offered to help with anything her daughter couldn't get her mind around.

This person's reluctance to ask, to clarify matters is beyond baffling. Her friends are no help when it comes to food chem. She asked her chem teacher something once, at the start of J1, and unfortunately couldn't comprehend the answer. From then on, she refuses to ask that teacher anything, complaining that the teacher never answered questions sensibly. She refuses to ask me anything, saying that she wouldn't be able to understand anything I say anyway. Her mum pressed her, forcing a new excuse out of her - she would only be able to know what she doesn't know after knowing how her prelims went, so asking me the time of the day before she got her prelims back was bound to be futile.

In short she doesn't know something, thinks asking somebody will only get an answer she cannot comprehend, that her own notes are written in martian, that her teacher is useless, that what her friends do are always right. So the solution is to continue being ignorant! Wonderful!

This same person pays to attend seminars on time management, study skills and exam tactics, no doubt hoping to learn the secret rituals you have to perform build up the requisite exam qi. With her friends. She studies at libraries, fast food restaurants, coffee outlets, bubble tea places. With her friends. Now she has decided to not study food chem altogether, being unable to understand the page numbers in her notes. With her friends.

I don't know what exactly about this situation is the most noteworthy. Is it her sudden loss of 80 points of IQ? Is it the fact that she is as pliable as fresh, wet playdough? If one of her friends heard some expert expounding on how intravenously injecting arsenic dissolved in Dettol would allow one to generate a force field irresistable attracting every eligible male within 100km, her whole jean gang would empty NTUCs and Sheng Siongs everywhere of rat poison and disinfectant.

Surely a bit of critical thinking can't be that hard?

I'll tell you the secret: read a bit extra. Study. Ask. Ask 10 different sources if you have to.

Please send 12 monthly payments of $19.99 to me. Surely that can't be too much for the secret to academic success?

Cleanin' Out My Closet

2005-09-16T12:53:00.000+08:00

Now I'm well and truly bored. I've finally finished off both the assessment book deal as well as the last scrap of fiction lying around the house. As usual, plenty of useful and productive things left to do, plenty of fun to be had putting them off.

At least I'm helping more with the housework. I'll walk around the house until I'm three metres taller and unable to balance anymore, whereupon I will proceed to the toilet and sandpaper the accrued stuff off my soles. A few more rounds, and the house is as clean as a picked bone.

Toothing

2005-09-15T16:39:00.000+08:00

Went to the dentist and barber yesterday, came back with a completely new head.

My teeth were in a horrible state of disrepair, having been thoroughly neglected and inhumanly abused ever since enlistment last year. All the uneaten sugar I had left in my mouth over the months piled upon itself, subjecting the bottom layers to immense heat and pressure exceeding that found at the centre of the earth, transforming sugar into something like crystalline rock. My mouth was sweet enough to attract ants (alas, not girls, but I suppose you've got to start small). Worse, my breath was sufficiently foul to kill those ants, and my saliva laden with so much bacterial acid as to dissolve their remains. Topping off this acrimonious cesspit was enough tartar to plate the Sentosa merlion and make it bulletproof.

My teeth gave the impression of shagged soldiers on parade - vaguely in line, many of them leaning forward or backwards, overwhelmingly green, brown and smelly. It came as a relief to me that after removing a lawn of blue-green algae and torching other organic detritus, the dentist pronounced my teeth generally healthy. She also muttered something about that being a miracle, which I choose to take as a compliment. She was really competent, though. Although my teeth are still far from pearly-white, at least they're not quite phone-book yellow.

My hair, now... I got bored, and was playing with my hair using one of those fancy new G2s. After a while, I became distracted, stopped playing with my hair and went off to get some food. A few hours later, the pen fell out of my hair when I was about to take a shower, after which I resolved to get a haircut. I seriously don't know how girls manage their sort of hair, it looks like there's enough weight tied up in their hair to cause disk herniation in some of them.

Roast

2005-09-11T14:21:00.000+08:00

Lunch was fantastic today. Roast duck, roast pork, honeyed roast pork, deep fried chicken, rice, pineapple, lychee, grapes. I think I ate enough meat to feed North Korea, enough fat to insulate the whole Scandinavian population and enough calories to thaw out Siberia. I look like the Michelin Man now. I couldn't back up far enough to see my entire belly in the mirror, there wasn't sufficient space in my room.

Text

2005-09-10T14:14:00.000+08:00

I can't believe it. MS Word crashed a total of 12 times in a row on me while I was trying to edit text boxes. Productivity software, my fat, heavy, rounded ass. Even paying $10 for a pirated copy of MS Office is a rip off, in my opinion (not that I bought pirated software, of course).

I'm pissed enough to chew through a suspension bridge.

Moneymoneymoney

2005-09-09T16:01:00.000+08:00

I've received my very first, very own Nigerian scam email!

Yayness! I so happynessded!

The amount promised was only about US$2,000,000, the spelling and grammar were truly atrocious. Must have been one of the earlier, more primitive versions.

Comments

2005-09-08T14:35:00.000+08:00

Are these comments some wierd form of advertising, or what?

Education

2005-09-08T12:50:00.000+08:00

You truly learn something new everyday.

Lesson learnt #1:

Putting up cute white elephant cutouts on road dividers on the day of a ministerial visit constitutes a police emergency. Some kotek actually called 999 for that, asking the police to investigate the matter.

I can't believe the officer on the recieving end didn't just laugh till his pancreas burst and fine the bugger for the misuse of an emergency public service. If it is truly police policy to investigate every complaint coming through on 999, I calling the next time I get a pop-up on my com. I can't believe an investigation actually got authorised.

If you see any more cartoon cutouts during ministerial visits, dial 999 and the police will promptly attend to your complaint! No effort, expense or manpower shall be spared! Not even high level PA officials are safe! Nevermind the reports of murders, armed robberies, fights, accidents, arson, assault, rapes and terrorist activities that are trying to come in on those same few telephone lines! Somebody's been a Bad Boy, making Statements, and we're gonna find out if he/she's broken any laws under the Public Entertainment and Meetings Act!

If our police officers are so free, why not send them to New Orleans for a bit of disaster relief?

Totally ridiculous. This can't be just the act of a concerned member of the public.

Lesson learnt #2:

Go easy on those exercise wheel thingies. I played around with one of those yesterday, pushing out a good number of roll-outs trying to fine-tune my form. I even attempted a few standing roll-outs, and flattened my nose some.

This morning, I couldn't even sit up. I settled for rolling off my bed and crocodile walking to the bathroom.

Pill Power

2005-09-06T17:15:00.000+08:00

More interesting stuff in the paper today. Yayness.

This is what happens when you have an extraordinary amount of time to spend at home, you read the news even more closely then your A level papers.

Seems like Pfizer is recruiting healthy male volunteers, age 21-55, for a study on some unnamed drug. Maybe Pfizer's rolling out a new drug after having some, er, hard luck, what with, well, stiff competition from the likes of Cialis and Levitra. The ad promises free health screening and reimbursement for travel expenses and time spent. Attractive enough, but offer free, larger pairs of absorbent trousers for participants to wear while on the study and I'll bet you'll be swimming through male volunteers in no time at all. Was about to call the number listed and make enquiries when a craving for chocolate derailed the temptation.

Another consequence of spending the whole day at home and in front of the com is that I'm catching ghost entries on blogs all over the place. Happens surprisingly often - guy/gal feels depressed, pissed or lost in love and posts an excruciatingly honest entry before sobering up and removing it post haste.

Well, I'm surfing certain blogs early morning, morning, mid-morning, noon, afternoon, tea-time, evening, dinner-time, night-time, supper-time, witching-hour and bed-time. This can't be healthy.

Quotables

2005-09-05T14:48:00.000+08:00

Someone asked me what my favourite quote, most treasured saying, dearest pearl of wisdom is. It's got to be this:

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.

Aesthetically, this phrase is up there with the best of them. It's in latin, an ancient language long associated with history, science and scholarship. It sounds suitably portentious, and is pithy enough to mispronounce horribly in one breath without stumbling. It has a good head-nodding, brow-wrinkling, throughtful-grunting aura to it.

Even just mouthing it brings me in mind of some mythical philosopher-king, standing tall on a slab of marble, proclaiming that particular phrase with a deep, sonorous voice and expansive arm sweep.

This phrase is also a good poke at those who love to quote quotes with the intention of making themselves sound sophisticated and refined.

What does it mean?

"What is said in Latin is looked upon highly."

Got to love this qoute.

New Paper

2005-09-04T14:43:00.000+08:00

So much interesting, stimulating content in the news.

The New Paper today has an article about scholars and other academically inclined Singaporeans going bananas while studying in premier overseas unis, tossing studies and obligations into the bin before engaging in a little hedonism. Again. The debauchery described was rather standard of articles of this vein, starring the usual drug addicts, alcohol addicts, gambling addicts, sex addicts and hospital regulars. The "Annabel Chong" phenomenom - proper, vaguely prudish A+++ students shedding both inhibitions and underwear the moment they're past immigration.

To think I am going to the UK planning to study! How boring, yawn. Obviously I'm no longer in keeping with the times; this calls for a change of plans.

The moment I'm out of the airport, I'll cram my mouth with stimulants, stuff my nose with hallucinogens, fill my veins with opiates, dissolve my liver in alcohol, gamble away my entire allowance at the closest casino and collect the name card of every prostitute in Europe. When I come back, I'll magically transform back into the guai kia I currently am.

The New Paper today also features a survey of 100 local uni students - 90 of whom claim they smoke. With such figures, Kent Ridge should be looking something like an erupting volcano from geostationary orbit. If you're going to fake figues, why not come up with more believable ones?

It seems that from time to time, when there is a lack of scandalous local news, the New Paper will dust off that old template ("Scholar screws uni mate while snorting cocaine, playing blackjack and smoking with his butt crack!") and make parents everywhere go "tsk, tsk."

Now I shall just insert a random chinese quote sort of related to the topic: 害人之心不可有，防人之心不可无

Armed to the teeth (Offensive topic, M18)

2005-09-03T18:44:00.000+08:00

The following content has been rated M18.

A lot of rather interesting (to me) news lately. In Lian He Zao Bao today was this South African invention of a barbed femidom, designed to deter rape, finally giving literal meaning to the term "toothed vagina". Male rapists, beware: you'll come out a lot less masculine than you went in. Ouch.

I rather doubt it'll work, though. It's a creative and potentially lethal design, conceived (ahem) with the best of intentions, yet maybe not really properly thought out. What's its impact gonna be? All I think is going to change is that rapists will be doing a lot more finger work before the dirty work. So many rapes are pre-mediated, and in any case quite some preliminary work is involved in immobilising the victim and removing any intervening fabric. I'm sure a little digital probing and a quick pull before the main push would effectively disarm this particular weapon. The female has to be able to remove it herself without too much trouble, so what's going to stop anybody else?

Innovate, our government says. Why not, say, a cervical cap with short spikes? The cervix should be beyond the reach of probing by any but a world class piano player, though I've never done in-depth exploration of this particular area (hehheh). It should be equally lethal to a rapist, who is likely to employ forceful, over-enthusiastic strokes. Voila, spike straight up the urethra. Unlikely to deter more modest specimens of manhood, though. Such a device will probably also be a pain to safely install or remove.

How about a spray device loaded with an extremely potent irritant, with the outlet at the entry point, triggered by a certain level of muscle tension in the nether regions? Rapist leans his face close to inspect, brings his fingers up to investigate or homad his rifle to invade, victim squeezes and dumps a load of watered-down (or not) snake toxin on him. Hmmm, negligent discharge could prove to be a real inconvenience.

Oh well, I'll never make a decent inventor.

Disturbing

2005-09-02T17:20:00.000+08:00

There's something wonderfully compelling and engaging about a song with a thundering guitar riff and screamed lyrics that go something like:

Get get get get, get psycho
Get get get, I wanna get psycho
Get get get get, get psycho
Get get get, I wanna wanna wanna
Get psycho, get get get
I wanna get psycho, get get get get
Get psycho, get get get
I wanna get psycho, wanna wanna wanna wanna

Brainless, mindless, cathartic, shiok to listen to. Could use a bit more creativity, but in its simplicity lies its charm. Who needs high art?

"Straight" Times

2005-09-01T12:20:00.000+08:00

In our premier English newspaper today:

"Berlin's Gay Mayor is Whipping Boy for S&M Fest".

Gosh, can you imagine that particular scene?

"... peace, harmony, tolerance and diversity in this fair city of ours. Citizens of Berlin, I declare the 2005 S&M Fest..."

*Crack!* ("Ow! Harder, sir!") *Crack!*

"...officially open! Let the vhipping begin!"

Give it to me, baby. Uhhuh. Uhhuh.

The article itself was disappointingly prosaic. But the guy who came up with the headline deserves an award, medal and cash prize.

Random Encounters

2005-08-31T14:28:00.000+08:00

Boarded a bus this morning, on the way to school to visit my teachers. After finding a seat, I promptly adopted a heads down, earphones in "Don't mind me, I'm probably asleep" pose. At the next stop, I saw a couple of girls troop past out of the corner of my eye and sensed them plant themselves on the seat behind me, at which point they started oogling me and passing giggly comments about my shoulders.

I know that really stretches the boundaries of belief, but hey, it's only about as improbable as... as... well, a bunch of monkeys producing Hamlet. More unlikely things have happened. Maybe.

Anyway, the conversation behind me went something along these lines (loudly):

"Wah! Look at the guy right in front of us! His shoulders so broad!"

-swooning sound-

"Yah loh, can see the contours somemore! I thought only magazine models then can see!"

Giggle x 5

"He must be doing a lot of work in the gym. His shoulders look really strong!"

"Wah... wonder whether it'll feel like my pillow..."

Really loud giggle x 10

I ahemed and yawned a bit, then turned to face the window, trying to catch the reflection of these two. Then:

"Wah! See the muscles on his neck!"

The following thoughts went through my mind, in chronological order:

1. This better not be some candid camera sort of thing.
2. Is there another guy sitting beside me? (No)
3. Hot damn, I'm sexy!
4. Lucky thing they did not get a good look at my face.
5. They better not be bapoks.
6. They have obviously never seen a quality pair of shoulders.

A gushing sound behind me promptly broke my train of thought. When the girls got off a few stops later, I quickly ducked my head and put on my best brooding alpha male expression, trying very hard to ooze testosterone. No need for them to see my face and suffer forevermore from recurring nightmares.

Girls, girls. Talk is cheap. You've got to have follow-through, to make things happen =)

Circus

2005-08-30T11:10:00.000+08:00

I wanna watch Quidam!

But no funds. Need to look for sponsors and donors.

The Cirque performances are awesome, even the trailers are amazing. Take a bunch of the most talented gymnasts and acrobats in the world, remove the strictures of a scoring system, get rid of safety concerns, add a good dose of creativity and money, allow absolute freedom of artistic expression.

Then watch the magic.

Moooore food?

2005-08-28T17:47:00.000+08:00

My most irritated friend has demanded another entry about her. In her irritating irritance, she has irritatedly decided to irritatingly irritate irritated me with great irritatedness.

Irritant.

When I tried to say that in one breath, I lost my tongue somewhere up my sinuses. Found it sticking out of my left ear a few hours later.

Anyway, I was planning to write something about her act-cuteness. She claims she acts cute because she is... er... lemme just get the word right... cute, which admittedly is a matter highly dependent on personal opinion, so I shall not venture a comment on this controversy. I decided against the act cute topic, fearing that the title "Most Irritating Friend" will soon become "Most Irritating Acquaintence", or worse, "Most Irritating".

So all I'll say is this: should you ever find yourself too happy and well-adjusted, sorely in need of a double-barrelled dose of pure nuisance, you know who to avoid at all costs.

In other news, I ate 2.5 sausage macmuffins with egg for breakfast, including 3 egg yolks, which amounts to an estimated 0.8 grams of cholesterol. For lunch, I went to a buffet restaurant and ate solid, liquid, aqueous, gel and meringue saturated fats continuously from 12 pm to 2.20 pm. Something tells me I should write an applet counting down to my first coronary. I think my bodyfat percentage's in the triple digits.

I figured that the only way I'll get my body fat down to anything resembling healthy levels within geologic timescales is if a comet hits the planet and triggers a "snowball earth".

P.S. My most irritated friend, please take note that I don't mean any offense at all. Seriously. Really. Well, ~~maybe just the part about you thinking you're cute which, come to think of it, is all of it~~ I mean, I don't mean any of it at all. Hunessly.

Moooore werk?

2005-08-24T10:26:00.000+08:00

I burst a few major vessels in my brain trying to draw plants with MS word. All that blood spurted out through my nose, staining my arctic silver laptop a nice, dirty, crusty red. At times, I get this near-irresistable urge to go out and decapitate small, pretty, furry animals, a la A1 "So cute! Squish it!" Gan. Not wanting to invoke the ire of any autistic child, I settled for throwing my laptop through the wall, managing to scalp my neighbour's goldfish.

Damien Rice's songs are good! Beautiful cello, guitar and music - morose, melancholic and sad. Pretty good singing (the female vocalist is at least as good as he is), decent lyrics about love and loss with delightfully acidic stings of cynicism - see the ending lines of "The Blower's Daughter". "Volcano"'s my favourite among his songs. I can listen to it for hours on end =)

My word

2005-08-23T13:37:00.000+08:00

Working on this new assignment has sorely reminded me of why I've ditched MS word and switched to Open Office. Editing of existing documents with MS word is seriously fuc#ed up, and tests my patience with a level of intensity that nothing else in my life has ever quite managed to match. The indenting system, specifically, is what gets my body temperature up high enough to fry rocks.

It has been superbly designed to ensure that there is abolutely no way to align a paragraph of existing text with multiple indents properly, without either retyping an entire page of text or playing the tab key like a piano piece. It goes beyond mere carelessness or stupidity - it takes a lot more brains to make something utterly fail in its assigned functions with such clinical specifity, randomness, and intention to annoy. There is malice, a conscious evil, at work. Drawing diagrams with MS word is also a world-class pain in the posterior; it's easier to perform heart bypass surgery via remote control with a chainsaw.

If I ever have the chance to meet the guy who designed MS word's indenting functions, I will tie him up with steel cable and proceed to indent each and every one of his internal organs. I will rupture every membrane bound entity in his body, and remove his spleen to take home as a souvenior.

Chateu

2005-08-22T10:20:00.000+08:00

Seeing a glut of chalet related entries in my class blogosphere, most of them talking about how great catching up with long-lost classmates was. For me, the most remarkable thing about this chalet was managing to miss the part where most of my classmates turned up, i.e. I missed seeing the girls. Oh well, just my luck.

I never was any good at chalets, anyway. I enjoy them immensely, but I can't claim to be a social animal - more of a bottom feeder or scavenger. Usually, I hover around the greatest concentrations of junk food, vacuuming up what's left over after everyone's done. Actually, I vacuum up everything, regardless of whether anyone's done, or even started. As a result, the conversations I get involved in almost exclusively concern where the chocolate/chips have disappeared to, and terminate once the my name gets brought up. When it comes to those soul-digging, psyche-probing, heart-to-heart, honest-to-goodness talks about who likes who, pretty girls, handsome boys and the mysterious workings of the world, I always fall asleep way before the juicy bits and earth-shattering revelations. When it comes to barbecues, I begin and end at chicken wings, building up a pile of bones that would do a barbarian army justice.

One matter of note over this weekend was being declared someone's most irritating friend.

Gasp! Ohmymymymymymymymygoodness! Thank you! Thank you all! I... don't know what to say! I want to thank every ancestor dating back to the beginnings of the homo genus, and mention that it had taken hours of hard work on my part to achieve such excellence. I also want to acknowledge the patience, dedication and helpful advice of my many, many victims: without them I wouldn't be half as annoying today. Rest assured that I will continue striving to set new industry standards for crapiness, and utilising the most innovative methods, bring cutting edge irritation at affordable prices to those who especially don't want it.

Now that I've seen my wildest dreams come true and achieved my sacred mission in life, I shall stone to pieces until I find another purpose for my existence.

Gaming

2005-08-17T10:16:00.000+08:00

Just finished playing Doom 3. Fantastic, terrifying game! Well worth what it costs, but definitely not for the faint-hearted. Graphics are outstanding, praised to death by every gaming magzine around, and really should be seen to be believed. Playing the game feels just like being the protagonist in a 12 hour long, very gory, very actioned-packed horror movie. 'Exorcist' and 'Scream' x 100. The gameplay was so intense and immersive that when I try to shoot at something behind my charactor, I usually manage to turn my whole desk around.

Gamplay, yes, graphics, yes. Now, the sound...

The soundtrack of the game is out of this world, and inspired my new requirement of having to hide my head under my pillows in order to fall asleep. The ambient sounds are usually a blend of metal, strings and industrial noises. Mixed into this is low chanting, ghostly footsteps, squishy sounds, bubbly sounds, evil laughter, sad laughter, hysterical laughter, gibberish, crying, men asking you to follow or help them, women doing the same, wailing, insectoid buzzing, and the worst - babies laughing or crying or both. The sound team must have sweated bile trying to put all those effects into some semblence of coherency, but they got the effect of hell on Mars down pat.

All of these non-character-related sounds issue from dead behind you, seemingly right on the other side of a spectral window, when you play with headphones on. Unbelievably good complement in a game where every human except you's obviously and very emphatically dead. Never encountered a scarier soundtrack in my life, and I have no desire to do so. I doubt my heart can take it.

The only wonky part of the game was the plot, which was woefully predictable. The way it was executed and revealed was quite satisfactory, nonetheless - the beginning of the game (stereotypical all hell breaking loose) was wonderfully engaging, with much creativity displayed in the way people die.

Cost: $54.99
Side Effects: Stratospheric blood pressure, outstanding pulse rate, sweating like a waterfall, motion sickness, nausea, schizophrenia, darting eyes, paranoia, irrational fear, inexplicable screaming, insomnia, total disregard of other obligations in life

Not Me

2005-08-14T21:11:00.000+08:00

Realised I've been perverse as hell recently, even considering my usual standards. Sometimes, i really wonder what's wrong with me.

Net Scrape

2005-08-14T17:10:00.000+08:00

Did anyone notice two recent posts on New Scientist Online? By the way, New Scientist is a legit, serious and reliable source of science news, not one of those onionesque sites.

Why we all need pornography
10:00 06 August 2005

Followed a little while later by:

Erotic images can turn you blind
18:09 12 August 2005

I suppose a little sacrifice for the good of mankind isn't all that much to ask, is it?

On other, totally unrelated, separate, independent, random thoughts, why is my myopia so bloody bad?

Med (Virtually Non-Factual Account Follows)

2005-08-08T16:28:00.000+08:00

Crashed med today, out of complete and desolate boredom born in spite (or perhaps because) of a million essential little things I have to take care of.

Overcoming a false start due to zealous security with no sense of humour, the late-comers and I managed to sneak in via the back door, ending up after some brownian motion at the very front of the lecture theater. Very exciting and non-traditional position for a crasher, subjecting me to quite a lot of sniggering and sarcastic remarks from those who recognised me. The lectures on cytology were (apologies to the med profs) actually supremely boring, anticlimatic when contrasted against the deliriously high med students.

The lectures hit the brain with all the subtlety and effect of an osmium anvil, though I'm proud to say that my eyes remained open and my head nodded gravely at random intervals even as my brain went offline. If I ever manage to suppress the wibbling noises I make and the cascades of drool flowing out of the corners of my mouth like the Niagara Falls, I'll have perfected the ability to fall asleep while looking as if I'm paying attention. Unlike some other crasher, who placed her backpack in front of her face and happily went into an extended coma, something I could see from diagonally opposite her in the LT. What with my superior stealthiness, only those close enough to hear my bubbly sounds and be splattered with saliva (apologies to half the LT) can see through my subterfuge.

Lunch was another point worthy of note. I put so much cheese on my spaghetti that it had the same effect on my stomach as the lectures had on my brain. After falling the length of the gullet, the sphagetti accelerated enough to smash through the rest of my digestive system in a straight line, bypassing less scenic routes like the stomach and intestines, punching holes in every epithelia and membrane along the way, before finally bouncing off my pelvic floor. Only by dint of much effort did I heroically stop it from going through my pelvic floor and coating the inside of my jea- oops, too much information there.

I was very surprised that my parents objected vehemently to my crashing med. I mean, I'm not hurting anyone, breaking any laws as such or directly taking advantage of anybody. Just because something's wrong in principle shouldn't stop... one from... doing... it... Erm.

Hmm.

Maybe I need to relook my morals and value system.

Anyway, my mom called me just a short while after I arrived at NUS, expecting me to be on my way home. It's almost as if she anticipated that I would be ejected from the LT with such force that I would be halfway home by air when she called. I always feel tremendously guilty whenever going against my parents' wishes, but this was rather... erpsed... of her.

Wash

2005-08-04T13:54:00.000+08:00

Discovery of the week:

Ma Ma Lemon Dishwashing Liquid, with Natural Lemon Fragrance, smells good. Really good. In fact, it smells a damn sight better than any orange or lemon or lime squash I have ever drunk. My latest pastime consists of trying to inhale as much diswashing liquid as possible up my nose. Smokin'.

Somebody help me.

Reflections

2005-07-31T20:14:00.000+08:00

I rather hate being asked to do reflections. I always feel sort of dishonest, sort of wayang writing stuff like that. What's the point? Who on earth is going to read what we write? If the people above us are going to read them all... No way, there must be more important stuff to do, like nation building and strategic planning and talking over the water cooler.

At this point, someone invariably brings up the old argument that reflections are meant more for the author than the audience. Writing such a piece induces the writer to go over the experience again, relive it once more, learn all the lessons that can be learned, etc. etc. But if the person in question thought the event worth learning from, he/she would have done all that without any prodding and probably many times over before the notion of a written piece even comes up. Most likely in far greater detail than can be put to paper, too.

On the other hand, if a person is determined to forget all about the event, or he/she thinks that there is nothing worthwhile to gain, it will take a lot more than asking him/her to write reflections to change anything. Either his/her piece is triple spaced with size 72 font, or repeating the same thing over and over with the help of a thesaurus, or suspiciously similar in all but select adjectives to someone else's.

Claiming that the piece will help someone else learn vicariously is kind of shaky too. My language skills are barely adequete; even when I don't mind doing a reflection it feels like trying to describe an 11-dimensional flower with a stick and some mud on the ground. If anyone can learn anything from my reflections, then he or she's a genius. Maybe someone who writes a crap lot better will have more luck. If you're really hot on learning about the experience, do it yourself if possible.

That was a totally unreasonable exposition, but hell, I'm trying to let off some steam.

Runnin'

2005-07-27T20:14:00.000+08:00

Realising that the fat around my waist was slowly congealing, and petrifying into coal in some of the deeper regions, I resolved to get a bit of aerobic exercise this morning yesterday night. I want to get so fit, I can handle the greatest and most unthinkable exertions with ease! Think about it! Heart rate and blood pressure recovering to safe levels mere minutes after standing up from a chair! Now that's the kind of conditioning I want. Then I'll be ready to break a couple of personal records, like walking a hundred metres without my lungs imploding.

This morning, I rolled out of bed and hit the floor flat, spread-eagled. Should have been warning enough, but I chose to change up and hit the pavement for:

Hill sprint intervals.

Candidate for "Singapore's Brainiest [insert occupation here]", I am not. Within minutes of some pathetic half-running, my lungs felt like they were containing the birth of the universe. My glottis felt like it was covering an industrial sized, seriously overloaded pressure cooker. My heart rate was in the mathematical region more often used for quantifying processor speeds. My blood vessel walls must have been scoured clean of cholesterol, what with blood blasting through them at the speed of sound.

At the end of the last interval, though, I was surprisingly happy. Bloody euphoric, in fact. I was ecstatic to see the pavement sprouting neon pink grass, with stars, planets, angels and turtles falling from the sky. Oh, and the cockroaches with punk hairdos scurrying at my feet. Don't forget the fluffy, metallic green bunnies loaded with bling bling jamming to the Teletubbies theme song (acid mix)!

Then I vomitted about an ocean of bile and a kilometre of intestines, and keeled over.

Why do drugs, man? You can get the hallucinations, spacing out, high, shoik and the withdrawal symptoms all at once with much cheaper means. Just give hill sprints a try.

Bus Encounter

2005-07-24T13:24:00.000+08:00

The other day, saw a couple on the bus engaged in an extremely public display of affection. There was so much affection shown that in all likeness a few laws have been broken.

They had no sense of self-consciousness at all! The two of them could write an encyclopedia about groping between them. Even by my standards, they were going way over board. They kept kissing lip to lip for extended periods of time, passing a wad of chewing gum from one mouth to the other as they did so. The guy's hand was very contentedly nested on the lady's posterior, roaming like a mongolian tribe on the open steppes. I'm no expert on etiquette, but I'm sure that for the sake of public decency the lady's hand probably shouldn't be in the guy's pants pocket, and what that hand is doing almost certainly shouldn't be rythmic.

The guy has iron self control, man. He must be a lot happier than one can tell just by looking at his face.

Coarse

2005-07-21T07:46:00.000+08:00

At long, long last, the course is coming to an end. I don't think I can stand much more of it.

By far the most engaging and interesting speaker was the 2nd Perm Sec of MFA - his little dialogue on foreign affairs and policy was honest, blunt, succint, to the point and graphic. Very graphic.

Tattooed-Ah-beng-squatting-spitting-and-smoking-in-an-alley graphic.

I've always thought romantically of diplomacy as being all about tact, subtlety, bluffing and silent backstabbing, an intriguing art and science to its practitioners. Diplomats go about slashing and thrusting at each other with hidden stilletos, all the while smiling like toothpaste commercials. Some have compared diplomacy to fencing, a refined and elegant sport which keeps score and rarely draws blood.

Not this diplomat, though. The perm sec made foreign affairs seem like American football, complete with all the appropriate hand gestures and locker room language. If he conducted foreign affairs anything like the way he conducted the dialogue, what with Singapore's size and stature, it must have been like a mouse trying to stick its tail up a tiger's nostril. The rest of Singapore would have sunken beneath the seas out of embarrasment on his behalf a long time ago. Or bombed into a soupy smear 5000 km across and 1 atom thick.

He's my kind of civil servant =)

T.T. Durai

2005-07-14T21:13:00.000+08:00

You really have to admire the kind of balls that Durai has. His are the size of melons, steel plated, titanium impregnated, nuclear powered, fireproof, bombproof and require special harnesses to keep from crashing through the floor. I cannot compare; mine are mere dessicated raisins next to his masculine glory.

He has the balls to draw an immodest, obscenely large salary (for a charitable organisation) and a 12 month bonus to boot. He has the balls to allow the gross overstatement of NKF patient numbers and understatement of how long monetary reserves will last. He has the balls to try and install gold-plated taps in his office. He has the balls to travel first class everywhere, on funds donated by people who worry about bus fares. He has the balls to draw public money to maintain a private car, when he already has access to a luxurious company fleet.

He has the balls to call all that an entitlement. F*** you, understand?

Most of all, he has the balls to take on SPH, to sue them for libel over an article that turned out to be not only truthful but exceedingly easily proved as well. The balls to throw all the dirty, questionable processes within the NKF into the public light. Never have I seen anyone shoot himself in the cajones with such spectacular, outstanding flair and stupefying dumbness. He could have made a statement, wait for the outrage to blow over, and quietly set about making changes. No, Durai has to screw himself with his own finger for all Singapore to see.

No balls to be accountable to the public, though. No balls to make NKF finances transparent. No balls to own up and admit his own mistakes. Let's see if his balls are strong enough to eat the outrage and public backlash against him and the NKF. I doubt it.

Oh wait, at least he had the balls to step down.

Withdraw donations, by all means; NKF's perfectly capable of surviving a long stoppage of donations, we all know that now. The money's a lot better sent to some other organisation that actually uses more than 50% for stated, charitable aims and pays out less to its directors. I can't believe Mrs Goh CT made the statement she did. Peanuts. The rest of us mere mortals must be surviving on second-hand dust, then.

Still, some pity's due the front-line and counter NKF staff who have to bend over, grab their ankles and have the anger of the public rammed straight up the most convenient conduit. Especially when it's the board and senior management, mostly untouchable, who should really receive all of it. I might have pitied Durai too, had he not been so culpable - the intensely personal media and public bashing he's had to swallow would bring most strong men to their knees.

Brisk Walking

2005-07-10T19:34:00.000+08:00

Woke up at 5.40 am, went to the toilet, had breakfast, took the MRT to Woodlands. When I boarded bus 178 at Woodlands interchange, I realised that I might possibly stop walking into pillars and people if I made the effort to open my eyes. Some mornings, my eyelids just refuse to come apart, glued together as they are with dried lachrymal secretions, laziness, the memory of my bed, and occasionally genuine fatigue.

The brisk walking session itself was rather anticlimatic, with the CDC team motoring along at a pace best described as sedated. Probably with morphine. The warmup was eerily similar to the 5BX warmup Delta did in OCS - there was the exact same hand shaking half-run and "stunned" action. Guess Staff Philip's appeal was more universal than I thought. My ego took a thorough and merciless beating once the walking begin, however. The chest twitching, bicep pumping, lat flaring, ab crunching, testosterone charged male machismo leaked away like helium as one after another grandpa, grandma, ah cek, ah gu, ah sing, ah pek, ah um, aunty, uncle, maid and child went zooming past at light speed. You can sense the pride of the more senior walkers as they sashayed by - "Hey! Look at me! In my 70's and still leaving 19 year olds in my dust and phlegm!"

Sadness. Anyway, kudos to the volunteers who organised and coordinated the whole thing. Someday I'll write more about people like them, once I've found the right words.

I left with a small souvenoir - a nice, spanking new blister right at the site of that old infection. The GP looked at it, prodded, squeezed and pricked it, inserting ear plugs once I began screaming, and pronounced it a minor matter.

CIP

2005-07-07T19:47:00.000+08:00

First full day of CIP today.

"Yayness!" - Xizzy

"Yay." - Ning Qi

Spent most of the time there wondering what exactly me and my partner should be doing after the first hour. Turned out that the CDC staff we were assigned to spent just as much time wondering about the same thing, so it's okay. The schedule overestimated the time required for most of the activities by a fair bit; we had plenty of time to sit around and stone. My partner made fantastic use of the time, asking a lot of incisive, relevant questions, teasing out any number of marvellous insights and frank opinions from our bemused minders. Determined not to be overshadowed by her, I sat, smiled vaguely at a chair and allowed the fluid in my brain to vitrify.

Actually, I did learn a lot about the CDC organisation and how they provide work assistance to those who need it, and enjoyed it in the bargain. No point blogging about how fortunate and blessed I feel compared to those who come to the CDC to look for job and social assistance, how compelled I am to make a difference. Oh wait, I just did. Anyways, I know it's an integral component of any CIP and the driving force behind much social work, but such a thing has to be experienced in person - you have to see and hear and feel in the skin to be able to empathise to any extent. It's definitely not the first time I've been exposed to something like this, but I'm a sucker for it anytime.

The people staffing the assistance units impress me no end. I've always been respectful of those who choose to help others in need for a living, salaried or not - they mix dedication, patience and boundless empathy with the right amount of hard-heartedness when required. Me? I'm a pale shadow of that.

It's being able to serve and make the lives of others better - concretely, directly and in an official manner to boot that attracts me to the civil service. Believe it or not as you will, but I do hold to some ideals no matter how crappy or cynical the things I say.

Luck

2005-07-03T19:33:00.000+08:00

I rather dislike it when people say that I'm lucky, I'm not. I especially hate it when people throw the phrase 不幸中的大幸 at me, expecting that to make my life better, the sky bluer, the grass greener and the world a better place. The contradiction there is pretty damned obvious. How lucky is it to be struck with a frigging mishap or bloody nuisance, and then meet some event that makes it less of a mess in a tiny way? On the balance, the afflicted still weighs out heavily on the unlucky side. Tell a cancer patient: "Oh my, at least the treatment made all your hair fall out, so you no longer have an ugly receding hairline!" and you expect him to feel all good and lucky?

Ok, so that was not in good taste. Crass, even. But it kinda captures what I have to say.

My experience is that I'm not lucky. In fact, I'm extraordinarily unlucky, much to both the worry and morbid fascination of my parents. A huge portion of my mail gets lost in transit, to the extent that I'm actually used to it. I crack my head, walk into objects, step in puddles, fall down, sprain random joints, pull various muscles, mash my big toes, tear off skin and collect cuts with a frequency that is singularly amazing. When it comes to random encounters, both my parents are forced to admit that they've never met anyone near as unlucky. Oh, many peple possess far more rotten luck in life, but as far as I know no one has as incredible a talent for making small, everyday things go banana as me.

Oh my, that was selfish and whiny. But hey, it's a personal blog, what would you expect? Hope future entries won't feature as much self-absorbtion.

Anyway, I observed that the army has completely sapped the oomph out of most generic swear words. It's like opiates - codeine's fine for a small, occassional high, but once you've sampled heroin nothing else will do, not even morphine. There's this almost overpowering urge to swear things like f*ck, n* b*h, k* n* n*, j* b*i or my PS's favourite (f*cking j* b*i!!!!!) when the occassion calls for a curse. Saying anything else feels strangely pathetic and inadequete. Help! I never used to be like this...

11B, Begone!

2005-07-02T13:27:00.000+08:00

Once I had my 11B
Now I have my pink IC
Once I had my 11B
Now I have my pink IC
Heeeeey lo Hey lo ah
Hey hey hey lo ah
Hey hey hey ah

After getting my pink IC back, I checked to see that no one was around, and then did a few rounds of the axe dance with said IC. I'm a civilian once more! Here's to the SAF:

..I..

A Dry Pen

2005-06-30T20:00:00.000+08:00

Quite often I feel the urge to blog, my mind marshalling the proper words and mental pictures into place with an ease that both surprises and satisfies. Yet when seated in front of the keyboard, I realise that I have too many things to blog about, too many insights to pin down with words, too many vexations to let out. Coherent prose disintegrates. At points like this I usually back off and put up something exceedingly banal to somewhat pacify that urge for catharsis, at least until I have the right words in hand. It is amazing, the power of words and language; knowing the right words makes all the difference imaginable. Unease, irritation, frustration and anger become concrete problems with tangible causes and potential solutions. Ideas and inspiration take shape, providing pleasure and comfort in times of need.

Wordsmithing is the king of all academic skills. I just wish I had more talent as a writer.

Did I just write what I did? Must have been high on something decomposed. Now I've lost the sense of what I originally wanted to blog about. Oh well, it'll come in time, things always do. In the meantime, I have to play hunt-the-pink-IC with MINDEF. F**king smart, sending our disruption notices and instructions to OCS email accounts on the SAFTI intranet, which require physical presence at OCS to access. Even smarter doing this after disruption, when everyone's home and snug. All the SAFOS scholars in the world obviously haven't helped the SAF to wake up its own bloody idea.

PDC

2005-06-27T21:24:00.000+08:00

Today was quite the waste of time. Stoned through all the lessons, ascending from the nether depths of my mind only for the occassional meal, and then spacing out again half a minute into the start of the next lesson. It wasn't the fault of the presenters - they exuded enthusiasm and professionalism from every pore they could find, it's just that the enthusiasm wandered off halfway before reaching the audience. The overall feeling fits fantastically with what I've read about the effects of heroin. I also can't click properly with too many of the scholars present, which likely was a problem with my attitude today. I just don't feel any inclination to talk in big groups without significant warming up. Small groups are much better for personal interaction; I can keep up a free-flow of cringing crap and stinging stupidity even on autopilot in such situations.

Not that the day was without its highlights: I ate 13 chicken wind middle joints for the morning tea break today! Just 3 off from my all-time record of 16! Yeah, baby, I'm getting my old form back. If today is indicative of all our lessons, though... these coming 3 weeks will probably grind my brain down to lumpy mush. So it better not. Going to sleep, today was far more exhausting than the schedule would suggest... Next 3 days still got OBS...

Senescence

2005-06-24T15:48:00.000+08:00

Sorry about my room, Wei Xin, but I was supposed to leave immediately after handing over my pass! Honest!
See how innocent I am? Cough. Uh, I owe you a chocolate bar, ok? =)

Anyway, it occured to me that I've never truly considered the way I live an unhealthy lifestyle, not deep down, not until now. I have a knack when it comes to fooling myself, seeing as how I don't seem to have a conscience, much less one capable of feeling guilty. Still, self-deception can only hide the obvious for so long. The truth shines through, no matter how much mental muck you heap upon it. You know you're going to die early when little kids in the elevator look at you with bright, soulful eyes, and address you with the most sincere respect imaginable:

"Uncle."

Their parents, smiling genially, will say, "No, this is a goh goh, a brother. Now say sorry to goh goh!" Whereupon the kids turn back to you, bring up contrite expressions and invariably say:

"Solly, uncle."

They say kids see the world as it truly is, while adults choose to see what they believe. I'm inclined to believe the kids: already I'm a pot-bellied uncle in my fifties, with every possible sign of 4 decades of tobacco and alcohol showing. I've heard of unnatural aging, yes, but I don't think many manage to triple their age visibly. Sigh. Alas for my lost childhood, teenagehood, and apparently, adulthood too...

Army

2005-06-22T13:11:00.000+08:00

Was down at SAFTI today to recover all the rest of my equipment, which came to about a ton and half of clothing and miscellaneous items, interspersed with lots and lots of tubes. Discovered, a little to my amusement and mostly to my horror, that my boots and beret were f**king mouldy. My boots were especially colourful, with patches of sickly blue and splotches of vomit green interlinked by greyish white filaments. Not hard to determine how my foot got infected, then - anyone who dares to wear that boot today risks not just cellulitis but systemic blood poisoning. I can hardly see any leather at all, beneath that veneer of fungi and associated protoplasm. At least I'll be untouchable at close combat. One kick will make anyone die slowly, or at least rot the stricken body part off, adding a whole new dimension of terror to the already almighty groin kick.

My beret, now, seems to have accumulated only one variety of fungi, an off-white fluff with black bits. The little bastards are growing sporing bodies, without so much as a by-your-leave! To think that back when I was still capable of charging up and down hill, I had chucked on the beret and boots day after day, vetoing the violent opposition of my nose and skin. One can get used to any smell and texture in the army, after spending enough time being shouted at.

By now, my pink ic's probably swamped with mycoids too. Runny yellow and grungy purple, maybe.

Certificate

2005-06-20T11:42:00.000+08:00

Went to retrieve my A-level certificate today, after a long spell of lurking around at home. I half expected myself to combust and crumple into a pile of dust with a pathetic little whimper upon exposure to direct sunlight, which happily failed to occur. Nevertheless, I kept having this nagging feeling that anytime soon my skin would start to smoke and flake off. Too bad HC was rather empty today, devoid of people I know. Being low maintenance, I took a bus straight home, pondering all the while the inefficiency of spending $2 and an hour to retrieve a piece of laminated paper I don't really have a use for. Wasn't a complete waste of time though - for some reason saw quite a number of pretty girls, more than usual even for one used to keeping a lookout for this sort of thing.

All these vampirish thoughts put me in mind of Stephen King, one of my favourite modern authors and arguably one of the best horror writers ever. His stories are certainly the ones that scare me the most, far more than the works of Stoker, Poe, Lovelace etc. etc. Just read his vampire novel " 'salem's Lot" and, damn, he doesn't muck about when it comes to scaring the crap out of people. King's powers of description are formidable. His books are terrifying, bad enough that certain passages in certain books of his I'd much rather not read at night, even with the lights on in every room and my family hanging around and the TV blaring out some variety show. On the occasions I find myself unable to stop reading after, say, 8pm, I usually end up trying to look in every direction at once, shying away from shadows, avoiding mirrors as best as I can and pulling the blanket over my head. Oh, and the back of my head and my shoulder blades will itch and tingle like mad.

However, King's forte is in squeezing every ounce of fear possible out of the unknown; as such, the middle of his books are by far the best - it's the point at which the plot (and usually the reader) becomes drenched in a sickening miasma of the eldritch, the uncertain and the unkown. The end of his books, when the monsters become a known quantity to some extent, tend to lose sheer horror in exchange for the tragic, the excitement and fear of the chase. "The Shining" 's another good one by King, it managed to retain the scream factor all the way to the end.

I want a credit card and a big bank account! It seems like there must a be a thousand books I want to buy off Amazon.

Haircut

2005-06-18T16:19:00.000+08:00

Woke up this morning, looked in the mirror, and realised I looked like an albino african with freckles. I need a haircut. Hmmm, I wonder how I'll look with a pony tail or shoulder length hair? I hope there will be a chance to experiment with that while I'm off studying.

Sophomore effort

2005-06-17T12:29:00.000+08:00

Driven by supremely intense boredom to post another pointless blog entry. Funny thing, it's not as if I have nothing better to do, oh no, in fact I have tons of better things to do. I have a few books and magazine issues left unread or half read. I have a whole lot of planning to do if I want to arrive in Cambridge with, hopefully, all of my limbs on the same continent. I can read the newspaper from cover to cover. I can watch documentaries and variety shows on TV. I can learn something new, like HTML or cooking or ironing or painting or something. Not only do I have so many things I can choose to do, I also have the time for them, which all in all places me in far better circumstances than my contempararies. I don't have to charge up muddy hills and huddle in flooded trenches, which would be a big plus if I do not have to repeat the whole process 4 years later. I don't have any obligations, no driving lessons to attend or temp jobs to work through. Yet here I am, blogging.

Something about enforced inactivity turns my brain to cheese. I find it hard to concentrate. I can't summon any passion beyond a mildly interested, slightly amused state. I lack energy and feel lethargic. My limbs go numb after 15 minutes of sitting still. How I miss exercise! How long has it been since I possessed the ability to move faster than my current hesitant shamble? I want to move, I want to feel those muscles explode! Ahhh, for the days of javelin throwing. The sensation of power and tension =) Admittedly both did not help all that much, but I enjoyed it anyway. Oh well, for the moment, I'll just sit in my swivel chair and happily watch my brain vaporise.

And while my brain slowly downsizes and retrenches neuron and neuron, I have been reading other people's blogs and messaging around. If this goes on, I'll become catatonic within, say, 3 weeks. Doubt many will notice the difference, though.

In the beginning...

2005-06-16T13:28:00.000+08:00

...there was no blog. There was but a void, mere electronic noise, a web address that led to a 404 page. Then I said, "Let there be a blog!", and lo and behold (many thanks to blogger and blogspot, of course)...

... there was a blog. Thank you for visiting.

In order to relieve the unique sort of boredom that can only come from watching skin grow, one cell at a time, microscopic layer upon layer, I've decided to create my own blog to, in someone's words, "entertain people back". Which brings with it the problem of having nothing to write about, seeing that I have no social life, on-line presence, digital camera, photoshop skills, acerbic wit, laser tongue, deviant sexuality, overt promiscuity, political savvy, satirical knack, humorous bent etc. etc. I don't even have pictures of pretty girls (none, at least, which are... er... satorially adequete). If you're looking for entertainment, I'm sure there are far better venues out there, I can't even entertain myself. Shoo, shoo! Go on!

On to other matters, the reason for the genesis of this blog is currently a patch of raw flesh 2cm across on the ball of my left foot. At least it's now more or less flat, but only because I flattened the crater it used to resemble by accident while attempting to carry heavy loads. Not advisable, but the things I do rarely are. I'm also quite thankful that it has stopped leaking fluids all over the place, which makes for easier cleaning up and less screaming when it comes time to change the dressing. Oh, the times right before and after the surgery! When every visit to the doctor had me grinding another cm off my teeth! My GP is, alas, both very strong and absolutely merciless. I still very clearly remember the sensation of him draining about half my abscess before giving up, though I'd much rather forget. I'd figure another month or so before I can run or jump. I really look forward to the time when I can shower without a plastic bag taped around my foot. I look silly as anything (though no one's there to see) and it's a bugger to take off - you can see that the hair on my left leg is becoming longer than my right.

My foot, please heal faster can?