Spectator Spot

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There is this elderly malay grandmother sitting alongside the steps leading to Tekka Market Food Centre.

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I have seen them many times over, sometimes inside the hawker centre, but always around the main staircase fronting Serangoon Road.

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She is there every afternoon, sometimes alone, sometimes with a little boy.

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People walked past her and many don't even noticed her small frame etching the wall.

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Nobody even stops for a second. Everyone is busy minding their own little private worlds.

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She watches the people go by. There are endless varieties of them for her to see.

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Sometimes she looks hungry. I can only see a mineral water bottle with her by her side.

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So I walked up to her this morning, and wanted to give some money I had in my pocket.

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When I realised that things aren't what they seemed to be.

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She wasn't a street beggar.

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There were no scattered coins around her.

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No cups and overturned caps.

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She is not looking for money.

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She is just a tired old grandmother who is watching the world go by - a careless purveyor waiting for hope to come around.

A Current Issue

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Every once in a while I see people who are so incredibly and audaciously opportunistic.

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Outside the library at Ngee Ann City, these two guys were sucking off free electricity from a nearby electrical outlet to power up their laptops and recharge their handphones, while lazing around on the tiled floor like nobody's business.

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I don't know what the authorities will do to them if they were caught red-handed, but whatever it is one thing's for sure the two smart-alecks will find the outcome electrifying.

Nose

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Damn this itch. It looks like I'm going to sneeze any time soon. Damn this sinus and wet hair in the mornings.

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Figured I took the nearest seat to the bus door exit. That way I can make my exit graciously without leaving a trail of imminent hostile vapour.

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Alamak. This auntie boarded up the bus and immediately spotted her seat beside me - her acute, military-trained visual cue obviously used to scan the parameters of the bus' contents to good use.

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Too late for me to shift to the outside of the seat. Damn. My escape plan was compromised. No less by an auntie with ninja reflexes.

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She sauntered over, and not before placing her 'very tiny' backside on the space beside mine in a split-second, I swore I felt a tremor of magnitude size five on the Richter scale.

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Goddamnit. The nose is itching again.

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A-A-A-A-A....

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Plug the leaky hole dammit.

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A-A-A-A-A....

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Phew. Anticlimax.

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-T-C-H-O-O-O-O-O-O!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Houston, Gale Force Ten has been recorded.

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'Excuse me', I mumbled with the tissue around my facial orifices.

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The auntie looked at me, quickly covered her mouth with her fingers, and muttered something under her breath. Feeling suspicious that she was going to be exposed by the Ebola virus around her, she quickly stood up - and changed her seat, a few rows back, still giving me that piercing Stare of Death.

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Cheeken macnugget!!!! How insensitive can you be, Tremor Auntie?!? Why, you never see people sneeze before issit??? I'm contagious, issit? I'm infectious, issit? Cheeken macnugget!!! I was damn paisey man!!!

Receipt

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The indignant-looking man was taking too long at the POSB ATM at Novena MRT station.

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Waiting behind him was a middle-aged auntie with her Primary Two son in tow, her foot tapping incessantly as if to remind the man to hurry up with his transactions.

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I was next in line, and was only queueing out of sheer desperation to inflate my wallet with ten dollar bills for random wanton purchases.

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Ten minutes had passed. Ten long minutes. Some of the queueing crowds blurt out barely-audible Hokkien expletives, but the truncated truth was visible; we have low tolerance for people who hogged ATMs to do their other stuffs besides cashing out.

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Not surprisingly, the man did little to pacify the anxious motley queue behind him; his deliberate nonchalance and sheer denial of the impending fracas at his rear was effectively dismissed by his self-occupied stance of egocentricity - he didn't care less about them, not a bit.

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Things started getting pretty out of hand when this Sikh guy suddenly went out of his queue and decided to confront the man. Just as our turbaned friend was about to walk up to the front and give him a piece of his mind, the man, well, left.

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In a bolt.

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He didn't even give a cursory apologetic glance to the auntie, whose grimaced face looked like she could have burst her bladder and experienced incontinence just standing there waiting.

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What he left, though, was his receipt.

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In his hurry, the man had forgotten to collect the slip, which was now in the hands of the eager son of the Auntie.

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What came next, though, was but a small anecdote that briefly accounts for everything our society has now become - a great divide, in more ways than one.

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"Wah! Ma, that uncle just now has lot of money you know! See, seven-jilo-jilo-three-seven-eight-dot-three-five! Wah rich!"

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$700,378.35. In the man's savings account.

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The auntie looked at the receipt and momentarily stared in disbelief before snatching the slip from her son's grip and tearing it up into shreds.

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In an uncaring world like this, I swore I read the auntie's mind loudly proclaiming that all the dollars and cents in the world will not make someone a better person than her, a factory operator in her work uniform, being a better mother to her young son.

I.C. I See.

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While checking a particular exam candidate's IC during invigilation some time back, I came across this word on the reverse side.
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Annamite.
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It was her race.
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Annamite?
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At the back of my mind, I began to visualise a colony of people living somewhere in a secluded part of Bukit Timah Nature Reserve whose daily rituals include making molotov cocktails, DDTs and other explosives as a way of life.
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Or either that, a group of humans that physically looked like ants and liked to eat trees and other woody alternatives for supper.
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I could have sworn it sounded like that gross stuff Mum gave to us when we were young. Wait, that's Marmite.
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Annamite. Ah.
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The Mon-Khmer language spoken in Vietnam.
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Wikipedia also says that a certain type of rabbit called the Annamite Rabbit inhabits the Laos-Vietnam border. The rabbits are striped, red and very, very rare.
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ICs are proving to be very valuable source of enlightenment for the dull regimentation of invigilation.

Shareware.

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I've no qualms about sharing our table with other people at foodcourts and those circular tables at those old-fashioned foodstalls at wet markets.

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However, I cannot understand why, in spite of ALL the empty tables there were at Holland Close Food Centre on a lazy Saturday morning, this weird guy had to thrust his plate of lontong on the same table I was sitting at. Right beside me.

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And proceeded to whack his breakfast - like nobody's business.

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I was just too curiously stunned to say anything for a minute - and the first thing that came to my mind was that I was secretly being filmed for Gotcha's next season or some idiot's gag prank project.

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It could be his jackass way of spending his school holidays constructively, I guess - by secretly videotaping and frightening random people who were casually waiting for their packed lontong for breakfast, and editing them professionally for his crazed friends to admire his Punk'd skills later on.

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In retaliation, I quickly took off from the table without giving him the slightest pleasure of making me his latest goofball on Youtube. Dammit, you Ashton Kutcher-wannabe, you already make me feel paranoid of waiting for lontong.

Casino Loyal
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Overheard at yesternight's premier of James Bond's latest flick :
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"Not enough spice - the new Bond girl should be Kumar lah".
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Haha!

Trailer Tailer.

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I saw her tailing me.

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I didn't have time to evade, but I kept my cool, even though she had locked her sight on me, and was always within inches.

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Occasionally she would try to reach out to me, but I would tactically shy away from her, and float along.

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I couldn't focus on what I was doing anymore, because it was getting really uneasy.

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Her eyes will peer from every corner whenever I looked out, as if to establish mutual eye contact, and I felt freaky about it.

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I tell myself repeatedly I was going to survive this ordeal, but her lingering presence overpowered my ability to make careful analysis of my surroundings, and muted my senses to go in for the kill. The creeping vibes was too much for any man to take.

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Declaring failure, I left the G2000 branch in a flash, because the presence of a super-trailing, zealous-to-please salesgirl was way too scary to be a part of a retail experience just to find a pair of black pants.

Why LOST has lost me as a viewer.

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After disagreeing with a couple of friends for some time now, I have come to the conclusion that somehow the inevitable truth is imminent - that despite my refusal to believe that this was an otherwise crappy show playing with viewers, it proved eventually so.

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I'm guessing giving up the series now is the only way to prevent the inevitable disappointment that awaits in the future.

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Besides, I can no longer bear to watch one of television’s best casts and most intriguing concepts be destroyed by this half-baked mystery machine stupidity.

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With its debut a mere two years ago, “Lost” excited the broadcast television viewing world by presenting an incredibly well-produced drama underscored by a mystery: Where in the world were these plane crash survivors, and, more significantly, who are they, really?

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Instead of keeping viewers on those two paths, “Lost” has instead followed the Path of Network TV Shows Doomed to Slip into Absurdity and Alienate The Audience. Mostly, that’s happened thanks to the monster, and the polar bear, and any number of other all-consuming but then-forgotten oddities on the island.

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The writers’ obsessive compulsion with making the story even more convoluted and mysterious every episode is obvious, as they’re all too consumed with giving viewers something else to wonder about. Like small children playing with toys, they drop each mystery after a few minutes and then run to the next one, hoping viewers will follow.

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The monster goes up in smoke, literally.

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In the very first episode, the survivors heard a violent, machine-like noise coming from the jungle. Despite playing such a significant role early on, that monster has now essentially disappeared from the show’s stories. First, though, after a long stretch of time, the monster was revealed to be a thin cloud of black smoke that can tear down trees, and which drags people into holes, eats them, or just reads their minds and reflects their past in its smoky brain. Perhaps the monster’s disappearance is better than giving it even more powers, such as the ability to make an entire meal in just one pot, like the TurboCooker.

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When answers are finally revealed on “Lost,” they’re usually complete let-downs, in part because they make little sense, and in part because all those revelations usually do is give way to more mysteries. They serve little purpose but to fuel online chatter.

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In the second-season finale, viewers finally learned why the castaways' plane crashed: Hatch-tender Desmond didn’t type in the stupid, ubiquitous numbers, a giant magnet clicked on, and the plane fell from the sky. How anticlimactic is that? And all that information did, really, was offer new questions.

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If the numbers really do have a purpose and aren’t some kind of psychological experiment, why would whoever wrote the computer program require someone to enter a bunch of numbers to stop it, instead of just pressing a button? More significantly, why wouldn’t the computer just keep the magnet off automatically? Why would someone put a gigantic electromagnet on an island anyway, or why would no one else in the world notice this?

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See, this is the real problem with “Lost”: its absurdity is frustratingly addictive. It’s difficult not to tune in next week, always hoping for an answer but getting excited when something random and new pops up instead.

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Most frustrating, however, is the producers’ and writers’ insistence upon throwing in some magical “what the...?” moment rather than focus on what really powers their series: the characters.

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The backstories also illustrate how all human beings are sometimes accidentally connected, such as those that showed the passengers interacting in the airport before boarding their flight. Increasingly, though, those flashbacks overreach, tying some of the survivors together in ridiculously far-fetched knots.

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“Lost” drew high ratings and critical attention because of this smart storytelling and highly engaging premise, which, yes, included a few mysteries (such as the polar bear). Themes of redemption, faith, and trust ran through these elements.

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Instead of subtly supporting the story, however, the writers have insisted upon illustrating these themes with ridiculously grandiose symbols and events, as if viewers are too dense to comprehend the effects of faith or belief unless some miraculous, impossible thing occurs.

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This will not end well. “Lost” will undoubtedly turn into an “X-Files” mess, perhaps losing original cast members and replacing them with brand-new, previously unseen survivors (the Cargoholdies?). It may also hemorrhage viewers until one day as it falls further and further into the hole it’s digging for itself, until someone finally cancels the show.

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The real problem is that giving up a series like “Lost” is not easy. There’s always one baby step forward that is enough to keep viewers hooked until the introduction of the next deus ex machina.

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Ultimately, though, “Lost” has become one of those papier-mâché volcanoes that erupt when vinegar is poured over baking soda in the crater. The volcano fizzes impressively for a few seconds, but then it dies. More baking soda and vinegar will keep up the eruptions, but eventually all that’s left is a big, sloppy mess.

The Imperial Outpost.
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A detour to Colbar brought us to this stretch of road off Portsdown Road.
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Nothing quirky worth mentioning, until I saw IT.
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There, on that generator-power-grid-whatever-the-hell-it-is box :
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A Stormtrooper mask! Aha! An Empire Outpost!

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A friend theorise that 'a nearby random Bangla worker had probably some extra black spray paint and a trooper template and then goes around spraying those icons on random public properties on a whim'.

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Personally, I think there could be more of this around - some bad Trekkie idiot's idea to create mishap by distracting all those strong in the Force from concentrating on the road while driving just to scan for hidden Imperial symbols.

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Damn you Klingons!

Obituaries

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When I occasionally cast a second glance at the photographs in the obituaries section of the Straits Times, I noticed some of them are not represented the way a typical photograph of an obituary notice might looked - a crisp, formal shot of a face touched up for that posterity stance of an eternity.

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Instead, some of the photographs were actual candid shots, taken most probably from the family album - a cheery face that provides a temporary solace, hinting of a life possibly being snatched away suddenly or tragically from loved ones.

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There were four such photographs that personify that awkward sense of thought in the Obituaries column today.

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Four.

Go Green Auntie Go!

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I never thought the day will come, but it did.

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Place of Momentous Event : carpark infront of Somerset MRT station.

Time : 5.45 pm

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Report of Momentous Event :

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While waiting in the car ( and finishing up the last few pages of The Time Traveller's Wife - again ), I was jolted by an unexpected knock (three knocks actually) on my window from the knuckles of a diminutive, middle-age auntie.

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Curiously I unwind my window, an unpleasant thought suddenly running through my mind wondering if I had accidentally flattened her husband under the wheel or something like that.

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What she curtly said still resonates till this moment.

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She peered over her glasses and calmly uttered this in my petrified face :

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"Please shut off your engine because you are polluting the environment".

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She was righteously right, and I was of course the petrified moron, to say the least. Quickly I said thanks and like a dork I fumbled an easy task to merely twist the key to turn off the engine in about 7.2 seconds later.

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Acknowledging my action, she then hovered elsewhere to educate other awaiting victim-drivers staying cool in their cars - just yet.

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I suddenly felt safe, knowing that we have a local green superhero in our midst, and that I need to tell everyone that Captain Planet is really a Singaporean Auntie in Disguise.

Ur @NUS.

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An ex-junior college friend just came back from the University of California in Berkeley with her master's degree. We arranged to meet her up at the arrival terminal and helped her to load her stuffs in our cars.

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The first thing she quickly unpacked when we reached her home was her souvenir bag - and to my surprise, she handed out to us stuffs which was all about UC Berkeley; numerous keychains and caps, mugs, pens, photoframes, notepads, fridge magnets, small flags and other assorted paraphernalia AND not to mention the compulsory, must-buy standard T-shirts with large imprint of CALIFORNIA- BERKELEY emblazoned on them.

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You could say that she was a prouder alumni member of the kappa-beta-lambda-yada-yada-California-whateva fraternity in Berkeley than to her undergraduate days in NUS, which was seemingly reduced into a pale shadow of existence in comparison to her present state of gratification.

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I wonder too why I don't stock up NUS souvenirs when I graduated back then. I don't think the 'local-uni-not-stylo-enough' mentality affected me that much, because I was just relieved to get into one, and following the upstream crowd in securing a place in a local uni was good enough by my standards.

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Then I recalled a couple of friends who earned overseas scholarships to the UK and some Ivy League varsities. They came back with a prouder sense of belonging to their prestigious alma maters, and adorned their cars, wardrobe doors and foreheads with stickers and emblems of their uni logos, and made curiously yearly pilgrimage to visit their lecturers, hostels and campus grounds.

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I didn't think NUS was that great, but it wasn't that bad either, but there wasn't any lasting impressions about it.

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Frankly, I think it's because

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(a) the history of NUS wasn't made colourful enough (like not having an annual Quidditch Cup or something), or

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(b) it wasn't long and ancient enough (unlike those stereotypical angmohs' varsities that dated back to the Cretaceous Period)

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(c) or either that, it would take someone to solve great scientific riddles (like whether the egg or chicken comes first), or

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(d) win a Nobel prize or something of that magnitude to earn its 'sense of attachment' to all its' alumni.

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Either way, I believe one decides what one wants. If anyone was looking for an excellent tertiary experience in Kent Ridge, one don't have to look far beyond the shores of East Coast or Changi.

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I guess we simply have to be proactive and immerse ourselves in the pervading culture of each university, school or college in order to grow and maximise our potential and contributions to it. Which is, of course, easier said than done, because everyone has different priorities during university time - some play and pray, some play and play, and some just pray.

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Which is the reason why people who stay in hostels around campus says Uni is the best time of their lives, whereas people who dig their noses while walking past hostels around campus says there isn't much to it - Uni life, not the nose fillings.

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Which is also an interesting debate because the recent article in the papers about NUS alumni not contributing enough to NUS donation funds is a crystal reflection of how much attachment there is among the thousands of graduates every year that gets churned out through the convocation doors. Of course there are many statistical factors that determine this fact, but since this is not a GP essay, I won't bother.

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I will bother, though, about the nice souvenir Berkeley T-shirt that I got, because it's too damn big, even for a size L.

Flummery

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A friend admits he isn't very good at saying sorry to his gf everytime he messed up somethings.

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So he tells us that the next best way to do that is to mask that apology amidst waxing lyricals, ie. he'll say 'I'm sorry' for the first nanosecond and afterwards adds on stuffs which has absolutely nothing to do with him feeling contrite and penitent ie. he'll add niceties about her being forgiving and that he is truly blessed to have her by his side.

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Not that he's not sincere about it though - except that he finds it very difficult to spout neverendings guilt-ridden dramas and doesn't believe in just saying 'I'm sorry-fullstop' abrupt stance either.

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So he lavishes praises on her instead as a distractor ( genuine or otherwise, that's another issue altogether ) and says the nicest things about her James Bond would have taken lessons from him - a skill perfected into an artform, right down to a T.

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He couldn't be bothered to have a cold war raging between them, because he says it affects his saturday nights adventure with the English Premier League. So to get things moving on, he'll always be the first to say sorry and then promise a weekend retreat at Phi Phi Island next month to make up for being an idiot that he was.

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He says this modus operandi always works.

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Ok, smart guy, so why does it always work?

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Because - he clears his throat first - he firmly believes in this simple philosophy - "that some people in this world are flattery-operated".

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Flattery-operated! Haha!

Genotype Stereo.

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A fellow teacher-invigilator from another school came up to me and started to make small talk :

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"So, you're teaching in [insert name of school here] ah? Good school, good school, you know".

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"Er, ya".

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"So, you're teaching Malay issit?"

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(somewhat surprised) "Er.......no".

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"Oh, PE teacher is it?"

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(what the?) "Er, no".

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"Relief teaching, issit?"

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(Taking a deep breath) "Actually, I'm teaching - the crucial component of our Life Science Industry advocated by the Government of Singapore to produce a significant pillar of economic strength in our nation's annual GDP quotient, which is - Biology".

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".."

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Ok fine I didn't actually said that rubbish but felt that I should. I don't understand why he had to conveniently stereotype me as any other subject teacher, which in my opinion, is perceived as less-challenging tasks by him as compared to the harrowing syllabus of Biology. This guy needs his brain checked - I mean, why is he still subscribing to the ancient belief that all malay teachers must seemingly be teaching malay?

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I hate to admit that my command of the malay language is, unabashedly, as excellent as holding a wet-market conservation with the average fishmonger over the price of ikan merah ( red snapper ), and no more academically stellar than a mediocre A level grade, although I'm quite sure I'll fit in as the average mat who indulges in contemporary-lingo banter peppered with 'geng, dol and jack' as second-person references very well.

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However, if there's one thing I don't get it till now, it is the decadent attitude of stereotyping and generic labelling of people to any form of references and innuendos, and not giving them their credit even when credit is due. Not to say that I deserve any by the way, but it'd be a good thing to start with, especially after being identified as a malay language teacher by every other member of the teaching fraternity for the nth time all the time.

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Gila punya orang.

Lucky.

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Why do exam candidates wish each other ‘good luck’, and not some other words?

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It makes the whole wish seems to hinge on the random probability of fortune and chance, thereby terminally resigning your fate to the unexplained cosmic realm and dismissing altogether the hard work and preparation that goes behind the curtain for the actual examinations.

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It's like a chance meeting with this rarity of a molecule called luck, and everybody's dying to have loads of them diffused into their body tissues and feeling rejuvenated with that new aura.

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In this case, it is generally assumed that everyone wants (and probably needs) this thing called luck as that one intangible constituent to increase the probability of doing well for the exams, which, debatably, is a rhetorical point in itself, because when you studied so damn hard for the paper, I’m sure you wouldn't want to boil it all down to luck for the day.

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Unless, of course, by some mysterious imbecilic situation, you just suddenly found out you have a paper the next day, and it's like 11 pm already today, and you realised you gonna need ALL the good luck in the universe you can buy with your parents' platinum card.
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You know what they say about success; it's all about preparation meeting opportunity. That opportunity alone could be loosely referred to as that luck factor, which is all about the cosmic probability of getting straight As even if you don’t study enough, simply because lady luck comes your way.
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How about saying something else to negate the effect of random chances? How about saying ‘inevitable success!!!’ from now on?
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Ok ok it does sound dorky. Imagine hearing every other girl hollering ‘inevitable success!!!’ to one another like it's a normal thing to do moments before the paper. Sounds like they’ve been possessed by the Hillbilly djinn or something like that.
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The surest way to effect the tone of conveying solace in the anticipation of exams would be to let go of every embellished notion and surrender your fate to the higher astral permutations perceived by the greater cosmos.
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That said, I believe people should start wishing one another ‘May The Force be with you’ from now on because it is (a) universal, (b) unbiased of the element of Luck, and (c) perhaps most impactful and resonating.

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Plus, (d) it does sound way cooler than just 'good luck'.

See what 2 hours of Animal Planet can do to you.

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Trivial, I know, but worth pondering a thought.

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I’ve always wondered why really huge things when they move, they seem slow from my perspective. Yet when I knock over a bottle, it happens so fast i can never catch in time to avoid spilling my Coke all over my carpet.

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Also, when I’m watching some sort of animated bug movie, everything to them ( like the scene where those ants get run over by the kid with gum on his shoe) looks extremely slow.

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So, is time somehow related to size? It’s possible. I mean, who would have thought that time has a relation to speed. So, can time also depend on size?

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Might this be a reason why its so freakin hard to swat that damn fly on the kitchen table? Does it see the rolled up newspaper coming towards him at an extremely slow speed? Or is all of this retarded because its all about perspective?

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I don't know.

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All I know is that there is a high probability this has been disproven (but of course), but still nothing beats me more than asking the purpose of the darned cockroach's existence alongside Mankind in the first place.

Cookies
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A friend got really pissed off recently.
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She went on the net to search some stuffs on Firefox 2.0, and got into this spam shitty affair when she clicked on the information bar that came on and asked whether she wants to accept this cookie or not.
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Inadvertently she did click on it, and the next she knew, her pc was going bonkers with intermittent spams appearing on her desktop promoting tigers' penises and avacado oils.
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After some time of her repeated CTR-ALT-DEL efforts to put down this relentless cyber-attacks (which let to indefinite 'pc-hanging' moments), she frustatingly decided to shut down the pc prematurely - by shutting down the mains switch.
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That was the last time she saw her Pentium Dual Core PC alive - it never came back up again, possibly dead in the wired Nirvana of cyberspace.
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Cookies aren't actually a bad thing. They helped to remember where've you been online, kinda like a virtual waiter remembering how you want your aglia oglio to be served.
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The Big Brother fear of you being tracked online is so 1998.
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Either way, my friend got a major badass cookie - the most expensive she'll ever come across, I reckon. Which is really unfortunate, because most cookies are a great help, I'm sure the guy below will agree.
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