Anecdotal Anecdotes

2007-03-15T17:40:00.000+08:00

Thank You.
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This Blog has seen it's last post now. There won't be any more updates from here on.
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Thank you for finding your way to this site and catching a glimpse of Normal Life for the past year or so - and a good one too. Thank you for all the nicest quotes and remarks. Thank you for your continual faceless attention. Thank you for the time you imparted to soak up yet another social commentary on this space.
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Thank you for the memories.
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That said, thank you and good night.

2007-02-21T00:05:00.000+08:00

Holiday Tip : Beware - Bangkok Cicaks are Commando-trained!

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Travellers take note:

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When dining in a third-class tomyam joint, be wary of the ceiling.

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If you see anything that resembles a normal cicak, it is NOT.

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These are a different breed.

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They are commando-trained, ready to assault your fishballs at the slightest opportunity you present them.

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During your pleasant evening dining experience, they will suddenly undergo a tactical airborne exercise and literally fall from the sky (ok, ceiling) onto your table, scampering a mad dash across it immediately, leaving diners caught in a frenzied panic attack, which will, inevitably, lead to the bowling of, er, bowls of hot soup over one another in a state of delirious pandemonium, and drenching nearby patrons with an aftertaste of tomyam cologne and garlic perfume.

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They always work in pairs. And they are DANGEROUS. God help us all.

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Useless Caution : Using your chopsticks to catch their tails is a total waste of time.

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2007-02-20T23:32:00.000+08:00

Escapism is a Four-Day Adventure.

The keywords in Bangkok are: Sanuk and Len.

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Because if it isn’t "sanuk" then why do it?

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Sanuk means to have a good time and enjoy oneself.

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It is almost a rule of living for Thai people that whatever they do have to be "sanuk".

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The concept of "sanuk" goes beyond the moments of a good laugh or a good time at a dance or a performance. Rather it's the pumped-up adrenaline and sustained bouyant feeling you need all the time to keep on going in Life in a manner devoid of worry. I think it is an inherent sociological trait that allows the poorer Thais to wade through everyday of their inadequate lives trying not to think excessively of their miserable existence - a subtle escapism from reality.

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Some examples of "sanuk" activities :

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Thamngan sanuk - enjoying work.

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Khui sanuk - enjoying a good chat / being a good chatter.

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Daa sanuk - taking pleasure in scolding your friends ( and enjoying it ).

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Thuuk daa sanuk - enjoying people scolding you ( and not even near masochistic ).

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If you want to meet the real locals it’s actually dead easy.

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Show you are enjoying yourself, lob the biggest grin on your face, and look approachable. Who cares how old, how large, how smelly (well they do mind the smelly bit) you are, you will find Thais coming up and wanting to be part of your “sanuk”.

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The same concept of deriving enjoyment from whatever one does is reflected also in the use of the word "len".

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Poot len - you’re having a laugh / talking cock.

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Len pool mister? - Do you fancy a game of pool?

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Maybe Sanuk and Len (and tomyam) may actually help us all understand the priority of these tumultous Thais.

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So every once in a while a bit of “sanuk” is certainly a good “len” - like the calling of Chatuchak and other shopping places for the crazy bargain-hunters in all of us (take a cue from the land of a thousand smiles, stressed people out there).

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However personal experience tells me you can never have your 300THB back for not wearing a crash helmet on your rented motorbike, because Sanuk can only go so far.

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2007-02-15T15:32:00.000+08:00

Almost Indian.
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A group of students went on a school exchange programme in India recently, and came back to share these insightful photos.
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This is the entrance to the Biology lab of the school.
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The external facade looked rather spunky, inspired possibly by some Petra-esque architecture.
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This is what the inside looks like :
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I imagined some top Indian doctors and scientists spending countless days perpetually hunched over these lab tables experimenting on some curry powder during their younger days as students. Heck, for all you know, one of the tables could be the bed for Rabindranath Tagore.
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Check out the 'vintage' feel of the apparatus. Any ol-skool physician would be inspired by this set-up. You can wear Victorian-era get-ups and stand anywhere inside the lab and be mistaken for Alexander Fleming - with curly sideburns, of course.
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Check out this classic learning aid.
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I kinda dig how they portrayed the eyelids as 'hook-like' appendages - like in-built coathangers. Cool but very rigid-looking, evil eyelids that looked like they were casted in some kind of L-shaped mold and then superglued to the eyeball.
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BUT the real reason why they wanted me to see their photographs was because of this :
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Damn. I didn't know I had a market share in India's convenience stores.

2007-02-14T10:55:00.000+08:00

You've Got VD?

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On a side note, everyone knows that Valentine's Day is a soulless abomination of a holiday invented by an evil consortium of wealthy gardeners and greeting card designers in a desperate attempt to make us buy more flowers and cards. Their nefarious ploy worked, as every year men are forced to buy cards and gifts or face scorn and ridicule.

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Let me show you Love in the way of the Force. Below.

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2007-02-13T21:11:00.000+08:00

Back Side Issue.
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Another astute colleague came to me in the morning yesterday and asked me whether I knew the approximate direct length from the mouth to the rectum.

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I was like - what the??? - of course I couldn't give an answer to that question (duh), and I have no idea why he's interested in that measurement. Still I thought of asking him to measure his personal dimensions first, then letting me know the answer, but somehow I didn't dare to. The last person you'd want to upset is someone who's caught up in this anal-retentive mood trying to measure his ass, and is persistently adamant about knowing the rear truth behind it.

2007-02-12T23:52:00.000+08:00

Tele-Phony

I think this aggressive telemarketing thingy is getting too much.

I don't know how these companies get hold of normal folk's personal contact numbers - like maybe they have some ninja network that can hacked through private databases or something like that. Your handphone number is really not a private thing anymore - just mere digits ready for commercial exploitation.

And yesterday alone I received four calls from perfect strangers with nice voices telling me that (a) I've won a complimentary four-day spa retreat at some spastic place ( with a catch at the end, of course ), (b) an opportunity to renew my car insurance at very competitive rates (when I had insured mine just only), and (c) having to listen to two female customer service officers from two local banks here pestering me to sign up for their new platinum cards.

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I wish some bigshot would put a law out to stop this excessively-damning way of doing business. Spam SMS is already bad enough, but this brings Creative Marketing 101 to a new low altogether, and reeks only of sheer desperation.

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It's probably a matter of time when I'll receive a call someday that wants me to book my own funeral package, and to make it more attractive the offer includes a complimentary trio of professional mourners for twelve hours to do their thang.

Now that's business for you.

2007-02-10T06:18:00.000+08:00

I Thought This Was Really Funny.

A sort-of thank you note from one student during yesterday's O level results:

Haha! Thank you, Steffi, for that vote of confidence. Now I need to rehearse levitating human organs in class soon.

2007-02-09T23:46:00.000+08:00

The Release of The 'O' Levels Results.

From the inner-thoughts of a student-candidate:

Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.Will I make it will I make it or not? Please please God I worked so hard for this please give me the distinctions cos I need it to continue staying in [insert name of college]. Please please. I promise to do all my homework from now on and skip out on all those stoopid times lazing around doing nothing. Please please.

(Taking a deep breath) Ok. I'm ready now to take my results.

Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!!! I made it! I made it! Ahhhhhhhh!!!!! Five distinctions!!!! Ahhhhh!!!!! Can die!!!!!!!!!!!! Ahhhhhh!!!! Can't believe it!!!!! My future is saved!!!!!!!!!! Yahooooo!!!!!!!!!!

From the inner-thoughts of a teacher teaching student-candidates:

Ohmygodohmygodohmygod. Will they make it will they make it or not? Please please God I think they worked hard for this, even if some didn't, please please give them the distinctions cos I need them to continue staying in [insert name of current teaching school]. Please please. I promise to give more homework from now on and skip out on all those stoopid times lazing around doing nothing. Please please.

(Taking a deep breath as the first student collects her result slip)Ok. I'm ready now.

Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!!! They made it! They made it! Ahhhhhhh!!!! MSG 1.28!!!! Ahhhhhh!!! Can die!!!!!!!! Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!! Can't believe it!!!!!!! My neck is safe!!!!!!! Yahooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!

2007-02-07T20:23:00.000+08:00

Eulogy

A family friend passed away yesterday.

His death was no less tragic; while retrofitting some fuel lines inside the belly of a cruiser, he inhaled some noxious fumes which caused an irreversible binding to some blood vessels leading to the brain, which apparently caused him to collapse without so much an anaphylactic shock that some colleagues thought he was snoozing on the job.

I think it took a whole hour for them to realise that his puffed-up body was actually the result of the accumulation of the toxic vapour in his lungs, and that he really wasn't prostrating at the chimney stack just for the heck for it for sixty minutes.

At the wake yesterday night, the only thing for me to do was to diligently recite some Quranic verses - alms that hopefully will buoy him to the next peaceful plane of existence. I made a strong mental note reminding myself that death is just a transition in one's ethereal journey to Somewhere, because I noticed most of the visitors were not the least perturbed by this passing on, albeit the sanguine atmosphere.

It is as if everyone has resigned to this penultimate fate of destiny, and no amount of tears or blood will hold back the inevitable claim - a waiting game with the grain of time as the rolling dice.

In spite of a momentous feeling of sudden insignificance in front of The Almighty, I could not help but notice the young boy crying at the corner of the room, now fatherless and orphaned for the last 38 hours, and I too cannot hold back a tear.

2007-02-06T20:18:00.000+08:00

What Stare-Stare?

Got problem is it?

Yup, we do. Our people like to stare. A lot.

Case in point - you came down with fever and a really bad runny nose and lost your voice at the end - so you went to the doctor for a check-up, and there you were given a mask to cover your facial orifices.

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Not like it's an abnormal thing or what, and especially not uncommon in hospitals, right?

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Wrong.

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While you're sitting down on the couch and humming to Justin Timberlake's What Goes Around, you suddenly realised that everyone who passes by was staring AT you, like they were sheepishly antagonising some leashed, muffled canine or mentally mocking your poor imitation of Hannibal Lecter.

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Either way, they think you're worse off than phlegm.

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You suddenly became paranoid of the mask, and wondered whether the nurse with the hairy legs has sabo-ed you by giving a mask with a pink-coloured outside with pretty little yellow sunflowers on it - and therefore you really looked that screwed.

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Anyway, phobias aside, it's really rude to stare, and we all know it.

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Sheesh.

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Because if I wanted attention I would have worn this.

2007-02-04T06:50:00.000+08:00

So it all boils down to this.

I think we are all materialistic in some sense.

During the first introductory lesson with my new batch of Biology students this year, I asked each and every one of them to introduce themselves to the class, state a few lines about their hobbies and family and stuffs, and lastly to share with the rest their aspirations and ambitions for at least ten years down the road.

Not surprisingly, most of them mentioned the urgent need ( or could it be desire? ) to become rich and have lots of money.

One or two came up with an honest ( or rather cliche ) forecast of spending their future in some third-world country slums and villages as medical doctors.

A quirky one wanted to open her own bread shop.

It's not a surprise, really - about those who prefer the company of manna than men. Everything in the world revolves around the greenback.

But when it hit the present minds of fifteen year old teens that above everything else comes money - now that is shuddering thought to bear, for I can remember vividly what our replies were when our Form Teacher way back in secondary school asked us that same question - none of us could say that we wanted to be rich at that time. Yeah well, we wanted to, of course, but it would be that we rather have richness by wanting to fill the stereotypical roles of doctors, lawyers and engineers.

Then we'd be rich with a purpose, see?

Now, being rich is simply an enforced attitude.

I dare say possessions are careless means of swaying our orientation towards the quality of life, because then we'll never see the other full spectrum of Dr Jekyll - for good and bad times, till moral bankruptcy do mankind part.

Seriously.

2007-02-01T14:46:00.000+08:00

The Most $#%&^*@ Guy in The World!
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So there I was, being introduced to perfect strangers around the dinner table by a friend when this buttmonkey ( apparently a sorry excuse for a boyfriend of one of the ladies ) suddenly came up beside me, and with his index finger pointing at my face, ASKED ALOUD to the whole bunch "WHO THE HELL IS THIS?!?!?" in the most obnoxious way ever deemed possible to come out from the human buccal cavity.

What an inconsiderate, unethical socially-uncouth baboon !!!(and a real baboon has better butt-wiping manners!!!). That was ^%#^%$@*& rude and uncalled for, you pathetic excuse for a neanderthal!!! Acting like a fake-Crocs-wearing pai-kia with a dash of megamoron tendencies in front of your woman is soooooo NOT cool, you dumb ass.

Losing my cool, I quickly decapitated his head using the chopsticks on the table, and in the next instance, the ugly blob of pimply-skin and hair fell to the group in a silent thud.

Or I wished I did. But then knowing me, I just walked away.

I'll leave the jerk for the Crazy Horse girls to do their one last scintillating death-kick at him.

2007-01-31T15:58:00.000+08:00

Ten Happy Thoughts to Live By.

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1. Be contented with what you have. Gripe, but not in excess.

2. Stop daydreaming of your wants and be realistic with your needs. Proceed from that point onwards.

3. Take one day at a time, but plan for the future.

4. Never mind about the people who don't like you. Remember, it is IMPOSSIBLE trying to please the whole world, so don't bother. If you feel that there is some meaning in what was being said, then try to change yourself for the better. Or else don't bother still.

5. Never mind mistakes and failures. Learn from them. And move on.

6. Say goodbye to anger and jealousy. Because the only one suffering in the end is you.

7. Be confident, never arrogant. You might think the world owes you a living right now, but be prepared for the underbelly of real Life later. Staying positive is an asset you must inculcate.

8. Always have high spirits. Not the liquor, please. Don't be a lazy bum and wait for things to come for you.

9. Enjoy everything. Your work, your school, your workplace, your present state of existence. Everything. Soak it up.

10. Keep a clean and free mind. A mind free of fears, tensions, obsessions and cravings ( Exception: Ben & Jerry's) is a pure mind. A pure and clean mind means a steady character.

2007-01-30T23:41:00.000+08:00

Auto Photo.
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Yesterday's quirky encounters:
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Number One - A Car With No Butt.
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Damn! No Rear Bumper!
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Number Two - A Spectrum of Wheels.
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Wah! A colourful coincidence of Picantos!

2007-01-29T23:29:00.000+08:00

Typical Movie Cliches

If staying in a haunted house, women should investigate any strange noises wearing their most revealing underwear.

All beds have special L-shaped top sheets that reach up to armpit level on a woman but only waist level on the man lying beside her.

All grocery shopping bags contain at least one stick of French bread.

It's easy for anyone to land a plane, provided there is someone in the control tower to talk you down.

Once applied, lipstick will never rub off - even while scuba diving.

The ventilation system of any building is a perfect hiding place. No one will ever think of looking for you in there and you can travel to any other part of the building without difficulty.

Should you wish to pass yourself off as a German officer, it will not be necessary to speak the language. A German accent will do.

The Eiffel Tower can be seen from any window of any building in Paris.

People on TV never finish their drinks.

The chief of police is always black.

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When paying for a taxi, never look at your wallet as you take out a note - just grab one at random and hand it over. It will always be the exact fare.

Kitchens don't have light switches. When entering a kitchen at night, you should open the fridge door and use that light instead.

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Cars and trucks that crash will almost always burst into flames.

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If a killer is lurking in your house, it's easy to find him. Just relax and run a bath - even if it's the middle of the afternoon.

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Any person waking from a nightmare will sit bolt upright and pant.

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Even when driving down a perfectly straight road, it is necessary to turn the steering wheel vigorously from left to right every few moments.

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Creepy music coming from a graveyard should always be closely investigated.

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If a phone line is broken, communication can be restored by frantically beating the cradle and saying, "Hello?, Hello?"

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Most people keep a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings - especially if any of their family or friends has died in a strange boating accident.

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It does not matter if you are heavily outnumbered in a fight involved martial arts - your enemies will wait patiently to attack you one by one by dancing around in a threatening manner until you have knocked out their predecessor.

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When you turn out the light to go to bed, everything in your room will still be clearly visible, just slightly bluish.

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Dogs always know who's bad and will naturally bark at them.

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Action heroes never face charges for manslaughter or criminal damage despite laying entire cities to waste.

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No matter how badly a spaceship is attacked, its internal gravity system is never damaged.

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If there is a deranged killer on the loose, this will coincide with a thunderstorm that has brought down all the power and phone lines in the vicinity.

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You can always find a chain saw whenever you're likely to need one.

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Rather than wasting bullets, megalomaniacs prefer to kill their arch-enemies using complicated machinery involving fuses, pulley systems, deadly gases, lasers and man eating sharks that will allow their captives at least 20 minutes to escape.

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All bombs are fitted with electronic timing devices with large red readouts so you know exactly when they're going to go off.

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It is always possible to park directly outside the building you are visiting.

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Guns are like disposable razors - if you run out of bullets, just throw the gun away. You can always buy a new one.

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Make-up can safely be worn to bed without smudging.

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A detective can only solve a case once he has been suspended from duty.

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If you decide to start dancing in the street, everyone you bump into will know all the steps.

2007-01-27T08:30:00.000+08:00

Five Guys and A Woman In White.

There is this strange attraction towards horror movies that depict the supernatural elements closely associating with our Eastern mysticism. So it was only natural that almost everyone I know was talking about this latest Indonesian horror flick featuring the legendary lady in white, featuring yet back again on the silver screen.

I don't know if this is true, but after hearing countless tales of supposed encounters from all corners of society, I have come to believe that this legendary lady of the night has haunted every child's sleep at least once in his / her lifetime, and especially so if you were once a malay kid.

More if you served NS.

Or are serving NS now. Gulp.

Blame it on the deeply-rooted discrete laws of 'pantang-larang' and the lore of superstitions deeply embedded in a kampung lifestyle of yore, and voila! a juxtaposed conundrum of illicit and unfounded fears gushed forth from a spring of concocted alternate realities.

It also didn't help that relatives would hurled stupendous exclamations of 'tido! Nanti ada momok!momok!' at the sight of a kid sleeping late past bedtime to warn the child of an impending finality, or the third cousin who'd coaxed you into accompanying him to the toilet late at night because he swore there was 'something' lurking inside.

The only something, I believe, that was lurking inside was the putrid excrement of our bowels, hopefully flushing down our unsubstantiated fears of the unknown as well.

Because if we fear the unknown then surely we fear ourselves.

Which is exactly why we always tempt our fate; to see its incantations on celluloid and see if it fits our description the way we want it to be.

As far as I know, way before Sadako came out from the TV in The Ring, the Indonesian Film Industry had another horror starlet grazing its movies. Her name was Suzanna and she was, in the literal sense, a killer in the box-office.

An epitome of the genre she famously sucked dry after waves and waves of potraying the Lady in White coming back to life to seek revenge and redemption, Suzanna had no qualms playing the lone lady at the cemetery waiting to hitch a ride from an accidental motorist late at night.

And boy was she scary.

It wasn't her make-up that was so horrifyingly horrific; rather I thought it was her pair of eyes, they seemed to throb on their own, like having a pair of frickin' laser beams that could crack the bravest of us and reduce the fearless to a fragile state of child-like permeability.

I caught some of the films back then on VHS, and I made sure I was with somebody when I was watching them. Usually grandma came in handy because old people would dismiss them as 'mengarut' or hocus-pocus when they watched these freaky shows, so I kinda felt safer with them and their guarded principles.

The last person I want to watch with, is my youngest auntie, who till now, still screams like a banshee with diarrhoea at the mere sight of a ridiculous actor in hantu make-up that looks like the mask came from a Toys R Us cheap sale.

Anyway, the movie was a let-down, and the actress was no Suzanna.

We left the theatre unrepented of our ghoulish aspirations, but if there was ever one consolation, it would be that we did not scare ourselves silly after that.

Or at least I tried not to. Which was why I sped at 120 km/h on my way home, alone in my car, with the clock striking two past the witching hour.

Scare myself silly? You can say that again.

2007-01-25T20:51:00.000+08:00

Daniel is One With The Force. Well actually, he's just crazy.

It is no big secret that most Star Wars toy collectors are all grown-ups. They are neither ashamed to reveal this passion, nor do they feel the need to share them compulsively.

Therefore I had to chronicle the pleasure of meeting up with Daniel this week, a long-time friend and one who is strong in the ways of the Force, who invited us over to see his new rebel base.

If I thought I was crazy about my stuffs, Dan is worse.

His whole goddamn place reeks of 'em! Not a single space was NOT occupied by plastics made in China.

Whoah! A customised glass display cabinet!

The Battle of Hoth and Endor reenacted on the lower glass levels. Sweet.

The AT-ATs looked damn cool. Must be the lighting or something. Check out the Hoth Turret with the trooper. Awesome.

Whoah! Jedi! And loads of them! A busy and bloody reenactment (above) of Jedi knights haggling over the price of fish with them Federal Droids at Tekka Market.

Seriously, it's a mockup of the Battle of Geonosis.

Whoah! Republic gunships to the rescue!!! Jedi are not good with bargaining, eh?

The arrival of Sith Lord Palpatine with his entourage from the shuttle Tydirium. Vader is kneeling down, not as a sign of respect but most probably a consequence of bowel disorder from yesterday's Annual Force Vomit Competition.

Seriously, this is a setup uncannily similar in Return of The Jedi. Even the troopers are in the correct sequence of formation. Whoa.

"Yo, Palpy, I'm not feeling too good below. And I think I can't get up".

"The Dark Side in you stirs, methinks".

There was literally so much stuffs everywhere, I just didn't know what to shoot at. Imagine a house with every single element an influence of the Force, and you'll get the idea of a big-ass residential toy gallery masquerading as a home. What an incredible collection.

Dan is one of the millions of collectors worldwide who painstakingly collects these figures and displays them out for showcase. I understand that Dan spends at least a four digit sum each month scouring the galaxy for new stuffs, and is a keen buyer from auction sites Yahoo and Ebay.

It's pretty amazing how Star Wars has garnered a relentless, undying obsession among it's rabid fans here. They don't give a rat's ass what people think of them all these years, kinda like the weird looks they get from people when they're hovering in the toy section of Takashimaya and Metro, carefully examining every figure on the hooks.

I'm guessing it will stay for at least another decade or two, before some new phenomenon ( not Blossoms, Buttercup and Bubbles - please) takes over a new surge of collecting to a new height. Even then, I don't think Star Wars wil fade just like that in a whimper. Except maybe when Hasbro gets blown up in a nuclear accident or whatever - now that'll be an explosive way to go.

And as the Dark Lord would say: "Impressive. Most impressive".

2007-01-24T22:06:00.000+08:00

Ad-venture.

I was pondering about the recent MOE commercial which showed a geography teacher freezing her classroom to sub-zero temperatures, a physics teacher levitating zero-G moments in his tutorial class and an art teacher provoking a stegosaurus to take a hike outside the school's windows, among other things.

I wonder what sort of practical magic the geniuses in the ministry would come up for an inspiring biology teacher.

I was thinking of gigantic kidneys with trails of bloodied ureters magically magnified out from the insides of a volunteer student for a real-time dissection practical in class, and the teacher continues to pull out all the other organs and somehow enlarging them for others to touch and examine them, all these without anaesthesia. Cool.

Although somehow I seriously doubt they will ever air it. I think the gory bloody fest is fine, but the sight of an enlarged prostate gland is just so wrong.

2007-01-23T23:06:00.000+08:00

Redoxon Ruckus.

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The morning sinus strucked again with great fury this time.
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Apart from the chronic nose-twitching and nose-running and tsunami-level sneezing inside a freezing staff room, I was fine. Really.
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The persistent atchoo-ing must have alarmed my nice co-form teacher, who was seating just in the next cubicle.
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Without any warning, she suddenly got up and thrusted a orange bottle of pills in my face, and not without saying 'Jo, you don't look so well. I think you need this Vitamin C tablets'.
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I felt really thankful for her concerned kindness, and immediately after whimpering a weak 'thank you' with my nose still buried in Kleenex, I popped one capsule instantly.
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I didn't know what I did, but my kind colleague suddenly stared in me in horror, her gaze transfixed onto my oral orifice, waiting for some implosion to happen.
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I was feeling funny too, but not from her stare.
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There was some vigorous bubbling on my tongue, and then it got so intense I was suddenly foaming at the mouth. I thought I was going to die from some Plutonium radiation causing excessive salivation or something that will eventually drown me in a messy pool of amylase.
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Needless to say, I was a mess. The colleague was still standing rooted to the spot and hadn't budged an inch. I think she didn't know whether to laugh or react in shock. All I know was that she gave me this 'Eeeee...' look that thinly disguised the fact that she was pledging an oath not to come an inch closer to me anymore for the rest of her life.
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I didn't die that day, but during my recovery I learned a hard lesson though - that I must learn to believe that not all Vitamin C tablets are chewable, and that there is such a thing as a Vitamin C tablet that you need to dissolve in water to make it into an instant isotonic-like drink, or risk getting severe effervescence in your mouth with an innocent pop of that one killer capsule.
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2007-01-21T23:20:00.000+08:00

The Case of The Incidental Glycogen Depletion at Pengerang
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One wonders why anyone would want to give up a nice clear Sunday morning to agree to a treacherous 160-km cycling round trip to JB via Pengerang from Changi Point.
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You'd kick yourself if you had said 'yes' without even thinking about the terrain - miles and miles of undulating hills and valleys on a typical two lane Malaysian asphalt that grinds the rubber tires of seasoned motorists for all its worth.
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Our peloton didn't halt at all throughout the journey (save for a flat tire belonging to one of the riders), even though we were mercilessly basked by the morning sun and the endless hills of terror that seemed to traverse throughout the whole distance like a super-long anaconda humped over acres and acres of red earth.
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It took us a good eight hours to reach the Causeway, which by then left all of us completely drained and wasted. I was lucky enough to escape with a butt-ache. Seriously.
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I'm reminiscing about this quote I read sometime back from the biography of Lance Armstrong.
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Its says that only through riding can you appreciate the contours of the surroundings, unlike an automobile. The hard upsteep pedalling and the acceleration of downhill frenzy will be etched in your photo-brain for a long, long time to come.
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Yup. A long, long time. Especially with the butt-ache.
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2007-01-19T22:55:00.000+08:00

The Real Clone Army
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It is interesting to note that, during all my Star Wars transactions with perfect strangers on Yahoo auction sites, none of the sellers seemed to be below twenty one years old.
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Which proves a point that when Star Wars first came out in our galaxy in 1977, it spawned a new devoted army of star-strucked kids who grew up along the lines of five other chapters of the saga throughout a span of nearly thirty years - by the end of which the army would have homogenously morphed into a battalion of adults, daddies and boy-men, and with greater ammo in their wallets.
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This ammo would thus provide the catalyst for Hasbro, the toy-wizard moneyspinner who continually churn out endless versions of Han Solo and Boba Fett on various cards like the bloodsucking bloodsuckers they are.
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And of course, the endeared, obedient clone army loyal to Lucasfilm would keep on buying them. Like me, of course. Wave after wave with panache. With no end in sight - for the figures, at least - but alas alack for the credit limit in the Mastercard, we would nonetheless continue to uphold the sacred testament of all things Star Wars, and remain true to the Power of the Force.
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I regretted the day I ripped apart the first vintage Star Wars figure-card Dad got for us way back at Plaza Singapura a century ago. Those days saw a basic figure for only $3.90.
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Nowadays, a mint 1980 Star Wars vintage card would fetch at least a hundred times more. I would have retired in the Bahamas if I didn't succumb to the Dark Side and opened up all my vintage carded figures.
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Yup. All 80 of 'em.
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Well, whateva. You win some, you lose some.
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Which is why I'm still gonna buy a pair of the following figures from the next wave below; one to play with, and the other as a potential investment for the next thirty years. I'm hoping its value will be at least double, but I'd be crazy enough to believe it so. Especially when everyone else I know has a pair as well.
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Oh well.
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2007-01-18T20:44:00.000+08:00

You Know Things Have Changed When...

...even the random auntie who sells a packet of tissue paper to you at hawker centres while you're in the middle of your yong tau foo is refusing the twenty cents you offered and demands a dollar instead.

Wah lao.

2007-01-16T11:04:00.000+08:00

One Of A Kind

After I finished pumping petrol at Esso, I headed straight into the station's store for the cashier counter.

Now we all know the entrance to these stores are all swing glass doors - this particular one had labels indicating 'push' from the outside and 'pull' from the inside. The entrance is actually big enough for two people to go through side by side at the same time.

At the same time I was pushing the door to go in, a pudgy uncle from the inside was pushing the same panel to go out.

Realising his action, I played the gentleman and released the door, so he could make his way out.

I was lucky too because his brute force used on the door nearly bowled my nose, which I avoided in time by side-stepping to the right immediately.

The pudgy uncle shoved the door wide-open now, and immediately after blurted out to me in the most condescending tone I've never heard in a long, long time.

"Can't you see I'm coming out?" he exclaimed arrogantly, even as the other motorists stood rooted staring at his outburst.

I'm not the type to initiate a Bruce Lee Kick Of Death at a petrol station just yet, but this cockroach deserves a piece of me, and I wasn't letting go of his anal action so easily.

Quickly I rebutted "Can't you see the label put 'push' on myside and 'pull' on your side?"

Like a blur sotong, he stared at the small signage on the doors, but not before muttering something softly, saying, "put so small who can see..." .

As I stood triumphant on the steps of the small kiosk feeling like Superman, the cashier auntie suddenly hollered on the mic, her nasal tone blearing across the whole station telling me to hurry up and pay $23.50 for Pump Number 5.

2007-01-15T23:56:00.000+08:00

An Impression No Longer Foreign.

I lost my handphone tonight.

And I got it back again later.

I must have left it on the table after we finished our dinner at Queenstown. Upon realising that it was no longer in my pants' pockets, we made our way back to scout for it.

I was prepared to not get it back, but the real pain was losing all the contacts inside. You'd have to start all over again filling up your address book, a Herculean task I wouldn't want to be caught in for months to come.

I was looking under one of the table when a Bangladeshi worker came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder.

"Sir, this your handphone?" he chirped in croaked Singlish.

In his hands was the ancient Nokia I had in my possession for years.

I quickly nodded with aplomp, but not forgetting to thank him profusely.

"No problem, sir".

I had every intention to stash whatever amount I had in my wallet to reward him, but the kind samaritan declined, his bodily gestures reclining away with every bit a genuine sense of modesty expecting nothing back in return.

I asked him for his name.

"My name Shah, sir".

Words could not express how much I was in gratitude towards him. For Mr Shah proved to me, that once and for all, a simple act of wanton selflessness did not have to come from someone richer, more influential or more established in life.

All the simple man did was just being honest.

Mr Shah is a hero among men.

2007-01-14T07:18:00.000+08:00

Canadian Quirks

1. Almost all local tourist shops in town are run by non-locals - mostly enterprising sikhs, vietnamese and hongkongers.

2. When a police car or ambulance drives on the road, all vehicles on the both side of a dual carriageway automatically come to a halt beside the kerb. In Singapore, we follow behind the ambulance for traffic-free speedway.

3. There is no central mount in a dual carriageway. This is to facilitate safety measures during winter when snow will cover roads and vehicles might whack into raised kerbs accidentally.

4. Everybody says hello to everybody here. This guy said hello to me in the toilet. While we were pissing. I played cool, contracted my bladder and left the loo halway through the osmoregulatory process.

5. The only self-professed 24-hour shop in Delta, Surrey closes every 11 pm.

6. It is true that Canadians don't think much about the Americans. And vice-versa.

7. Contrary to popular belief, there are people jogging in 2 degrees Celsius. Most just walk.

8. The maple tree is not found everywhere.

9. You cannot squeeze maple juice from a maple leaf.

10. The equivalent of Carrefour is The Canadian Superstore, a big-ass hypermart which kicks the butt of every hypermart-wannabe here.

11. Star Wars figures here are cheap. Period. On good pre-Christmas sales, you can get three basic figures off the rack for ten Canadian bucks at Zellers.

12. The downside : Most of the figures are Senator Jar-Jar Binks and Emperor Palpatine.

13. People here drive miles for hours to visit friends everyday. Here, we swear quietly when we need to drive a relative back home to Woodlands, a mere 25 km away.

14. Garage sales are bigger than the Great Robinson's Sale. You can get a fridge for ten bucks if you haggle right.

15. Prata cost seven bucks. And the meat in the curry looks like artifical protein carved out from Fusarium.

16. Bathing is optional here. Heaters are a must.

17. Normal shoes don't work while walking in snow.

18. Women here play soccer too in a domestic league. And Ice-hockey. And Bryan Adams perform at half-time.

19. You eat more at night than in the day. Maybe this has something to do with very little daylight in winter.

20. Vancouver is one heaven on earth where the escape is just perfect; so perfect even some bloggers can lose touch on blogging for more than a month.

2007-01-13T07:44:00.000+08:00

High Altitude Quirks. And Other Miscellaneous Apnoea.

Well, one wonders what kind of innate force would make anyone stay airborne and get stuck in an economy seat for 21 hours straight on a transit flight to Vancouver every year.

Like many people, traveling always puts me in that Mood. The urgency and expected delays aside, there’s just something about being in such close proximity to masses of people that really (and literally) rubs one's face into another human's anatomy. Some observations on a recent flight :

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When boarding a plane, the idea is to get everyone inside as quickly as possible. Therefore, you need to stow your carry-on baggage as fast as you can and get the hell of the aisle so others can pass. I don’t care if you absolutely need to get your neck pillow, your bottle of water, your Winnie the Pooh bear and your favorite paperback out of your bag before you can sit down; the reason that the people standing behind you waiting to get to their seats are giving you looks that suggest that they hate you is because they do.

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Despite the fact that you get to stay up late and watch movies, an overnight flight is really not a sleepover party. There’s no excuse for grown adults to go about in public in pajamas and stocking feet.

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If you need to get up to go the lavatory right before the meal service begins, don’t come back and force the flight attendants to move their cart 10 feet back so you can get to your seat and then demand your meal. It’s not their fault that the aisles are so narrow; maybe if your ass wasn’t so damn fat, you might be able to squeeze past them.

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Don’t be the asshat who opens his window shade in the middle of the flight while everyone else in the darkened cabin is trying to sleep. I don’t care how pretty the cloud are, if you do it again, you will get hurt.

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To the people who jump up out of their seats the moment the plane touches down on the tarmac, I have one question: What the hell is your hurry? You know damn well that it’s going to be at least another 15 minutes before they even open the doors, and besides, us poor folks in the back aren’t going anywhere for a long time. Jeez.

To the people that laugh loud as hell when there’s a 3rd rate comedy shown when it’s also sleepy time. Jeez.

To the people who grab your seatback from behind as leverage to heave their fat asses out of their seats. Jeez.

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I trust you've met the next-seat guy who can sleep in all types of conditions, even when the airplane's going through a typhoon from Hell. If his nonchalance didn't bother you, his snores will. For 16 hours of listening to audible sedentary rolicking of air column passing through his nose hairs, I bet you that sound will traumatize your existence for at least the next few weeks you go to sleep.

And I hate crossing time zones. They cause jet lags.

Jeez.

2007-01-10T11:15:00.000+08:00

To Steffi, Pau, Hajar, Aisyah, Reks, Deb and all other people who actually bother to want me to update.

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I will. Soon enough. :)
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Stay tuned.

2006-12-11T13:31:00.000+08:00

This is Your Captain Speaking. Never Mind.

I still find it appalling that even before the plane skied comfortably on the tarmac upon a successful, bumpy-less landing, this father of two toddlers were already up in arms at the door - the infants lugged around his belly like extra masses of living luggages, his equally blur-looking wife ready to stomp out like a zealous quarterback in a badly-fomed scrum.

Even the stewardess, who was still anchored in her emergency seat by the door looked pretty uncomfortable and anxious at the family - hello? the plane's still moving, and my angmoh captain had yet to formally announce that we have landed, okay? I think in her mind she must have wondered if they were competitors in some Amazing Race 'Parents with Bundled Kids Along' Competition or something like that, trying to hook on to the next connecting flight to Halifax or Timbuctoo in a record terminal run of less than three minutes.

I don't think the parents view the children's safety as a paramount issue here. And I don't think they cared to wait for the captain's announcement.

Even though I saw a glimpse of a red-covered passport with a recognisable emblem - ah! Singaporeans! - I think they overdid the kiasu syndrome here.

And I hate to admit the ugly side of our people has gone on the flight of international status.

2006-12-02T07:16:00.000+08:00

The Beach
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Away from Patong, Karon and Kata, Ya Nui Beach has a special place in our hearts.
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The beach and its' surrounding pockets of bungalows were completely wiped out by the tsunami back then. It's not far from Ao Sane and Naiharn, in the same south-westernly corner of Phuket - a very scenic area to drive around with several quaint beaches, spectacular sights and desolate roads. There are some bungalows again now at Ya Nui, and it's usually quiet, even during the peak holiday season.

The last time we were here, there were just a few people around and we watched a great sunset. If Alex Garland had missed Phi Phi as his inspiration, Ya Nui will definitely come a close second in his vision of the perfect beach.

2006-12-01T11:23:00.000+08:00

"What happens if a great white shark comes along?"

Blame it on Steven Spielberg and Jaws.

Actually, there are few diving areas in the world where sharks that big enough and aggressive enough are willing to seek out humans, and Phuket is definitely not one of them. However, I've seen one of the gentle leopard sharks that roam these waters before, though they are more likely to make a fast exit when they see divers coming.

Diving, to put it in a nutshell, is simply a profound celestial experience.

The weightlessness of watery space and the various corals and anemones sashaying in uniform motion set precedence for the ethereal sense of awe one gets when confronted by other incoming elements of blue heaven - suddenly revealed in front of your Oakley goggles with all its' enchanting visions of underwater paradise.

A vision so sublime and chaste it's like an extended form of escapism from a Neil Gaiman dream - positively surreal and alluring.

You remember everything - right down to the small red crab on your glove.

Diving gives you pleasure you never imagined possible, and as you drift through this aquatic heaven you will understand why the troubled world above is easily forgotten.

2006-11-28T14:47:00.000+08:00

Spectator Spot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She wasn't a street beggar.

There were no scattered coins around her.

No cups and overturned caps.

She is not looking for money.

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

2006-11-26T05:12:00.000+08:00

A Current Issue

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

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.

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.

2006-11-24T17:55:00.000+08:00

Nose

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Goddamnit. The nose is itching again.

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

Plug the leaky hole dammit.

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

Phew. Anticlimax.

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

Houston, Gale Force Ten has been recorded.

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

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.

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!!!

2006-11-22T23:46:00.000+08:00

Receipt

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In a bolt.

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.

What he left, though, was his receipt.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

2006-11-20T16:43:00.000+08:00

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.

2006-11-19T07:37:00.000+08:00

Shareware.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

2006-11-16T14:56:00.000+08:00

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!

2006-11-13T15:03:00.000+08:00

Trailer Tailer.

I saw her tailing me.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

2006-11-12T23:43:00.000+08:00

Why LOST has lost me as a viewer.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

2006-11-11T11:12:00.000+08:00

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!

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'.

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.

Damn you Klingons!

2006-11-10T15:50:00.000+08:00

Obituaries

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.

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.

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

Four.

2006-11-09T00:30:00.000+08:00

Go Green Auntie Go!

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

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

Time : 5.45 pm

Report of Momentous Event :

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.

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.

What she curtly said still resonates till this moment.

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

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

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.

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

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.

2006-11-08T22:33:00.000+08:00

Ur @NUS.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Frankly, I think it's because

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

2006-11-06T09:58:00.000+08:00

Flummery

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

He says this modus operandi always works.

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

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

Flattery-operated! Haha!

2006-11-05T06:14:00.000+08:00

Genotype Stereo.

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

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

"Er, ya".

"So, you're teaching Malay issit?"

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

"Oh, PE teacher is it?"

(what the?) "Er, no".

"Relief teaching, issit?"

(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".

".."

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?

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.

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.

Gila punya orang.

2006-11-03T15:05:00.000+08:00

Lucky.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

2006-11-02T09:31:00.000+08:00

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

Trivial, I know, but worth pondering a thought.

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.

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.

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?

I don't know.

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.

2006-11-01T23:09:00.000+08:00

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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2006-10-31T23:28:00.000+08:00

Top Ten Scary Halloween Costumes One Doesn't Expect to See Queuing Outside Zouk - But Did.

10. SIA cabin stewardess

9. Parking Summons Auntie

8. 1.89 m tall Yoda

7. Freddie Krueger with a Rastafarian do

6. Sadako - with a moustache and goatee

5. Sith Lord in Sarong

4. An orange-coloured Barney

3. A ridiculous-looking Transformer made from Bata shoeboxes

2. A friendly giant condom having protected handshakes with everyone

1. Man in all-white gahmen outfit waving to curious onlookers

2006-10-29T23:21:00.000+08:00

In Retrospect : Ten Things About Hari Raya Jalan-Jalan

1. The bigger the group, the more merrier it will be.

No doubt a large company contributes a higher noise pollution, but it sure beats trying to stir up a decent conversation with the occasional sombre-looking hosts who served you kuih and coke and then just stare into your nose, awaiting your further instructions. Sheer empty banter revolves around the English Premiership, The 101 Elitist Ways to Say Sorry and whether that floating debris in the lontong gravy was an offspring of the residential musca domestica.

2. Hari Raya is a good time to visit relatives you don't know existed, and who don't know you exist.

Although there is that phylogenetic shock you have to contend with when you're introduced to the unknown fourth cousin/third nephew/great-grand auncle, you still don't believe you're related to them. Because they're angmohs, godammit.

3. You know there is too many people in your hari raya group because there isn't a space left on the floor of a four-room flat in Bukit Batok. Every square tile is occupied by the resting of partial human anatomy - the rear end, butt of course.

4. Uncles make dry jokes only their spouses would laugh at. It therefore becomes very easy to identify the marital bonds when these jokes are told at night in the car - the slightest giggle from some corner of the MPV indicates matrimonial loyalty.

5. Green-coloured packets seemingly mutes the contents - so you really can't see what's inside when you hold it against the light. The current economy dictates that the average content of a green packet in Singapore is about S$2. Johor relatives with kids throng houses here for the good market exchange rate.

6. Priority of visits: Senior and elderly relatives' homes first, followed by aunties / uncles', then random relatives according to the GRC you happen to be in.

7. You swear all the pineapple tarts in every home you go to are imported from Batam - The clue is the butter-encrusted imprint under random tarts that says 'Repablik Indonesia'.

8. (F&N drinks + peanuts + mee goreng + assorted kuihs with chocolates on them) x seven houses = traumatic stomach implosion.

9. Leaving each house with a different set of footwear every time - and magically getting back your chapal during the last house visit.

10. Low PSI.That's clear enough.

2006-10-26T22:13:00.000+08:00

Remember To Stay Humble.

I wonder what was going on in the mind of that RJC girl when she was expunging that fiery diatribe of hers - the one post that launched a thousand email replies to her rant.

I don't think she has a tiny clue of how the world works.

Can't blame her though; if you were surrounded by sugar-coated cotton candies every day of your life, you'd think the road ahead of you out there is just as sweet as well, like a cogent yellow brick road that seemingly leads to your Ivory Tower, and everything else a great desert of Insignificance.

Although it could be forgiven for an eighteen year old to make such carthartic remarks for the lack of acute judgment, it is of greater significance to note that the writer is no ordinary offspring; she is a perennial top-scorer in our national exams, a scholar in a prestigious junior college and a daughter to a prominent member of our political environment. Considering her overachieving ability, which is seeming made to be a mere conscripted shadow, her failure to restraint immature zealousness in her words speaks volumes of her puerile tendencies and thereafter send shockwaves reducing any notions of the existence of intelligentsia with high EQ into urban legend.

Based on a learning psychological pattern where children above the age of seven learn from their environment and not stay egocentric, it is therefore assumed that an eighteen year old who remains constricted in her views is possibly an idiot savant.

To say that she exercised discretion in writing down her angst on her so-called 'private' blog is atrociously ridiculous, seemingly because the word 'private' and 'blog' does not correlate together in existence, and a 'humane' humanities scholar should know better than to expunge anti-establishment tendencies in them without careful thought to the world. Surely she is not as constricted in her mentality towards the hidden dysfunctionalities of blogs as well, is she?

I know there are similarly others like her in mindset out there - a person who has never tasted the vulnerabilities of being a disadvantaged in society and has no qualms whatever in being condescending towards others of lower socially-perceived strata. I fear the day when the Hydra Syndrome comes in effect, where you cut off one head and two will replace it for sake of dominance, and empathy will no longer be the measure of one's wealth.

Another ridiculous aftermath occurred when her father made several comments concerning his daughter's remarks in the local papers. Among them was the fact that while her 'basic point' was correct, her delivery was insensitive.

It seemed to me like the father was still trying to justify her daughter's comments despite being seriously condemned by the general netizen community and public. While he was not obliged to offer an apology on her behalf, there was no need to continue to impose on the issue. Furthermore, his follow-up comments over people who cannot take 'blunt' criticism was belligerent to say the least. It was literally implying that the comments she made were RIGHT, and then people who 'can't take the heat' should 'stay out of the kitchen'.

Instead of taking a leaf out from diplomacy, his remarks merely escalate the belief that those ruling elite will forever be entrenched in their 'elitist' mindset, incapable of experiencing the difficulties of the average norm. Not only will the lesson be lost, it will inculcate a continued arrogance and 'infallible' streak that has plagued the ruling elite, and their children will be no better off. Indirectly, he is seen to have failed this facet of responsibility in bringing up his daughter by the proper norms of civility towards other. You cannot argue that upbringing has no effects whatsoever; she is the product of her father's values.

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Those who are successful and secure tend to take any complaints/"whining" by others as evidence of the latter's lack of strength, intelligence, initiative and ambition. One cannot think that one has a rosy future solely because of one's natural intelligence and hard work.

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This is the elitist mode of thinking. And that is wrong. Her misreading/simplification betrays her narrow elitist world view.

That said, I've a good mind to remind myself and my students to always exercise great humility.

There's really nothing grand or altruistic about it, not even coming from a teacher, however noble it may sound.

Rather, we have to thank these so-called perpetrators of 'elitist thinking'; without their narrow views of life, we will never see the boundless opportunities for us to share and give back what we have to the needy, poor and disadvantaged. And whatever little we have we can still give in this world-not-created-equal.

And that alone is a trait of a quality life worth reminiscing during the yonder side of age.

2006-10-25T23:20:00.000+08:00

Of Ketupats and Rendang.
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I figured out Hari Raya will never be complete without these :
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and

You indulge in them like possessed gamers high on Warcraft crack – obediently ravaging the dishes and diligently wiping out all remnants of beef and gravy on the plate like possessed food connoisseurs – you’ll only appreciate them once they're secured in your stomach, and none left on the table.

In spite of the gravy being so thick and oil-laden that you’d be better off drinking from a bottle of vegetable oil, you still indulge sinfully in it – slurping it even, and wiping the whole slate clean and completely juice-free that scrap-pillaging bacteria will hate you for the complimentary empty plate.
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The only thing that gets to me is this :
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Yup. Wearing the kain samping. I could never get it right. It always looked like a bad metallic crepe around the waist.
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I could never understand how some people wear it so smartly without it getting loose like a fashion impediment.

A chinese lady we met in the lift had this to say to us when she saw us in our traditional regalia of songket, samping, songkok and other cultural paraphernalia :

"The malays really light up the streets during hari raya. Everyone is so colourful, and everyone seems very unified - from just now till this moment, it was really a wonderful sight to see all of them splendidly dressed up for this occasion. Fantastic".

I couldn't agree with her more.

2006-10-23T10:16:00.000+08:00

Aidilfitri is really tonight.

Right after the azan beckons the call to break fast for the last time, the melancholic takbir will be playing over the radio, serenading the new month of Syawal.

The first cadence of takbir alone defines, and truly makes up, what Aidilfitri is all about - a reminiscing of the past - and it inexplicably hits the hearts of millions of Muslims all around the world straight-on when they hear it, causing a solemn flooding of many a lingering poignant memories to gush back.

The takbir is, undeniably, Hari Raya.

Salam Aidilfitri everyone.

2006-10-22T02:55:00.000+08:00

Cards, No Such.

If there's one thing sorely missing during the coming of Hari Raya these days, it would be the Hari Raya greeting cards.

I remember receiving loads of these cards by snail mail when I was a kid. We would wait anxiously behind Dad when he opened the letterbox and seemingly fondled the insides - and taking out some square white envelopes with our names written on them only much later - Aha! Hari Raya cards from members!

I replied back, of course, with similar fashion. And I sent out loads more to other friends. And I got more back. It was a cool thing back then to lick stamps.

I would then consolidated all the cards I received for the whole month, and proudly hanged them up as a train of cards on the wall next to our dining table using a thin nylon thread I ransacked from Mak's sewing box.

I always catch our Hari Raya visitors sneakily peeking through them, and trying to decipher the greetings inside. I guess it kinda gave them a thrill to read someone's else private mails.

Nowadays, the only Hari Raya cards we receive are those from property agents ( with at least a dozen of their business cards stapled onto it ), the agent from the maid agency and THAT NTUC Income guy who's been pestering me to buy a life insurance from him ( he seriously needs to get a life ).

It seems that the Hari Raya card, like the floppy diskette, is a sure victim marked for extinction, and will definitely go the way of the dodo soon enough.

Replacing that tradition will be the plethora of convenient SMSes that trawled similar greetings from Jurong Island to Changi Point on the night before Hari Raya.

Ironically, somehow I feel that the thumbing to one's keypads on his / her handphone is a sure sign that the spirit of conveying Hari Raya greetings in the coming years is going to be conveniently revamped - by technology, no less.

Which is why I'm looking forward to the day I receive an electronic ketupat on my Nokia, bordered with pixellated satay gravy on a five megapixel screen, and telling me to enjoy the virtual gastronomic delight.

Edible phones will flood the market soon enough.

2006-10-21T09:15:00.000+08:00

This is Pretty Disturbing.

The recent online brouhaha about this RJC girl who unfeelingly stomps down her supercilious reply in her blog with much high-class innuendo to a forum discussion simply reeks of crass elitism.

Sure everyone is entitled to his or her own opinions, but the way she delivered it across is horrifyingly straight-from-the-heart angst, brutally lacking in social tact and downright pompous and condescending, especially considering that a GEP student from an illustrious JC would be presumed to adopt a more analytical mature stance in dealing with the spectrum of Life.

The scary thing is that I can somewhat feel her resentment of the disadvantaged through her annihilistic prose.

It shakes the very foundation of how a smart eighteen-year old perceives the world and it's reality from the comforts of her ivory tower.

You can read it here and here. And maybe cringe a little. If you're human, that is.

For a person who seems to have it all (gahmen scholar, MP dad etc), I think she's sorely missing humility. Yup.

And I'm very, very sure not all RJC people are like that.

2006-10-19T18:30:00.000+08:00

To My Kim Geks of 2006
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ChristieChenMinGloriaCharmaineDawnClareDeborahTrangEllen

XueWenEvelynPoetriEvelynTFengpingYengYieYingBinHanny

KimberlyZhaoLingAmandaYuChuanChristabelJenniferBinBin

ShondaEileenNicoleEunicePueyYeeLingxiaoSherminSophia

SteffiLarissaYuanKhengHanLinCaraMinKyeongYuYangBeverly

CalistaShanshanJiayunPatriciaLiChooLiShaanMeiYiChiaWen

VanessaJeanJasmineJessicaKatherineAlyssaKellyAlinaQian

LorraineMarciaMeganMelissaNatashaXiangLingSarahLesley

LuangPohCherieSamanthaJaniceMajellaJoanRachel

HuijiaRekhaCharleneAletheaEdith.
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Farewell, and best wishes.

2006-10-18T15:22:00.000+08:00

Those Darned Lingering Parkers.

I don’t understand why some drivers purposely linger in their cars and make other drivers wait for them to move out from their parking slots, especially in perpetually-crowded underground carparks like Tampines Mall.

Ok I would understand if he takes a minute or two to warm up the engine and had to adhere to some superstitious practices like listening to zen-inducing churchbells symphony to avoid bad karma on the roads or something like that – but taking ten freaking minutes is ridiculous.
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I think it’s another one of those eccentric, anti-social traits of drivers here who completely refused to be rushed by anyone at all, inspite of all the cars ‘queuing up’ in front of his headlights to take over the precious parking space when he leaves. It’s like he’s playing out the primitive caveman character who is bound to protect his territorial rights till he migrates his goddamn car from the slot, and wouldn't think of cooperating with his neighbours.
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Yesterday, this obnoxious lardbutt takes the cake. The bladdy chicken mcnugget KNEW we were waiting for his parking slot because :
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(a) I signaled my intention.
(b) I stopped my car IN FRONT of his.
(c) I used my fingers and face to explain in a non-verbal expression of wanting to dominate the space after he leaves. I need to rush to break fast pretty soon - I had about seven minutes left before I can fill my stomach, and I didn't want to wait a second longer - I was that famished.
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The jackass didn’t seem to take notice of my theatrics, or rather, he didn’t want to be seen noticing my wild gesticulations. He just act brur sia.

The jibroni went inside his Hyundai, fiddled with his moustache and goatee for some time while looking at the rear-view mirror, and then combed his follicles in an exquisite stroke of the brush. The proud Narcissist then went out of his car again and pretended to scan the whole damn exterior to see if his car paint suddenly peeled off or something like that. Satisfied, he then sauntered back inside, and repeat the same facial therapy again for a couple of minutes, before he started his car engine.

I was surprised the mirror didn’t crack under duress this time because the jackass has a face only a mother would love.
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If he had intentionally wanted to irritate me, he had succeeded, the goddamn idiot. I wished the mirror had grew hands and pulled out his nosehairs while he was grooming his facial hair, and maybe plucked out his ego as well. He later engaged into first gear and zoomed out from the slot some three minutes later at a breakneck speed of 5km/h without the slightest nod of civility to the waiting, exhausted driver aka yours truly.
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In all honesty, I think he was certainly the biggest irritant I've ever encountered since the haze came about.

2006-10-17T14:04:00.000+08:00

Ten Mispronounced English Words At Some Points In My Life.
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1. Fa-card
2. Ran-dess-voos
3. Vo-giu
4. Non-care-learn
5. Mer-carp
6. Dey-boot
7. Noh-air
8. Discothe-queue
9. Boor-je-o-is
10. Eww-noosh

And the corrected version :

1. Facade

2. Rendezvous

3. Vogue

4. Nonchalant

5. Macabre

6. Debut

7. Noir

8. Discotheque

9. Bourgeois

10. Eunuch

2006-10-16T15:44:00.000+08:00

An Arresting Pet Peeve.

It seems that my greatest irk of seeing a person talking on his handphone while driving on the roads has reached a new high (or new low, to be more politically-correct).

While driving past Yishun Ring Road yesterday, I passed by this rather slow-moving NPP patrol car bearing the Yishun North insignia on its doors, on my left.

Imagine my surprise when I saw the driver-officer yakking on his Sony Ericsson walkman handphone like nobody's business.

I immediately slowed down to take another look to confirm what I've just seen. And I was like, appalled. And angry. And fed-up.

The police officer saw me as I raised my index finger at him, a visual cue to warn him that an incoming formal complaint was imminent.

I knew he panicked, because he immediately dropped his phone away (a sign that it wasn't an emergency call after all) and swerved a left at the T-junction ahead, his obligingly nerdy partner beside him looking uninterested with what was happening.

I see morons yakking without their Bluetooths everytime in their big cars along the SLE. I see uncouth construction contractors talking on their handphones all the time in their pick-ups along the PIE every evening. However, I don't see any traffic policemen stopping any one of them when these idiots flout the law, and most importantly, the safety consideration towards other road users.

And when I do see the men in blue, one has to be caught breaking the law without the slightest regards for professionalism, authority and work ethics.

I shudder to think who is going to protect us road users if some protectors of the law is clearly breaching infractions in broad daylight. Justice isn't very bright-looking in this case.

2006-10-15T23:55:00.000+08:00

The Last Week.

It’s the last stretch of Ramadan.
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The final week of the month-long marathon.
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For twenty-one consecutive nights now, I, like many other Muslims around the world, have been occupying a particular prayer spot at the mosque, prostrating before The Almighty for divine alms, forgiveness and inspiration.
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It has been years since I remembered etching out that personal, favourite space of prayer at the mosque – a small nook on the fourth rank from the Imam on the right-hand side of the main prayer hall – a reminder of how miniscule I am among the assemblage of mortal men facing The Creator. Throughout the whole continuum of time as far as I can remember, I too noticed a cluster of individuals who are always similarly converging, likewise, to their own personal spaces around me.
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To the immediate front will always be this young chap, no more than eighteen years old, and looking completely immortalized in that stage of life all these years. He’s always wearing that khaki Arabic ghamis, with a small Quran tucked into the left pocket, as he used it to concatenate the sacrosanct phrases in a verbatim fashion when the Imam seraphically recites the Arabic verses. A small turf of hair will sprout unfashionably at the sides of his shrinking stressed-out songkok at the end of the prayer session, a weary sign of prolonged prostration on the humble carpeted floor.
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To the left of me will be this middle-aged pakcik, a bespectacled man with a no-nonsense army-RSM look which would have surely caused chao-recruits to piss in their pants during parades. His thin frame undoubtedly masked his fiery demeanour, but the solace he purposefully embraced every night was such a resolute token of silent warrior-like bravado that seemed to amplify his greatest desires to gain every single penance from God in this sanctified month.
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To the immediate right of me will be this aged grandfather, a frail-looking old man who looked like a first-class graduate from the University of Life. His wrinkled countenance, coupled with an innate furrowed expression that hints of an unaccomplished form of personal redemption, did not falter throughout the night; rather it intensified as the ebb of prayer plateau-ed towards the end. The curious beads of perspiration on his forehead has always mortified me initially, but I decided to help him overcome his inquietude when I provided him a ply or two of tissue paper at hand from that point onwards.
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It’s the last stretch of Ramadan, and we all do what we can to help ourselves.

2006-10-14T09:51:00.000+08:00

Balls.

When people know you’re a football fan, they seem to have this compulsive urge to update you on the scores of the team you follow.

I really don’t get how these people seemed to think I need a second, or third, or nth reinforcement of results from the midweek game.

I mean, do people actually go up to doctors and say, ‘hey doc, you know, they just discovered this new medicine for flu; you might want to look in to it’ or to bankers and say 'hey big-timer, do you want this new this fiscal management of assets computation I've just drawn out from Wall Street Journal.com?'

No, they don’t, because if some jibroni spent enough of their time studying medicine and finance banking, you’d expect them to know what bloody new stuff is out on the market, right?

Somehow, though, everyone with a copy of the New Paper seems to think it’s their god-given duty to update me on Arsenal scores.

“Hey man…your team lost.”

“Not sure if you watched the match, but Arsenal lost.”

“Hey dude! Long time no see! Arsenal lost.”

"So how? Arsenal lost".

I bloody well know Arsenal lost, you buttmonkeys. What do you think I was doing up till 2.30 last night? Inspecting my rectum?

I was watching the bloody game, and yes, it was miserable, and yes, I bloody hated every goddamn minute of it. I’m a football fan, alright? I bloody well know when my team loses, and the last goddamn thing I need is to be reminded of it.

Then again, I suppose that’s just how guys relate to each other, and few things give me greater pleasure than stuffing every Anfield defeat in the face of Liverpool fans (well I did support Ian Rush and Co way back then, and I dig the way John Barnes and Peter Beardsley glided past through defenders, but now I'm not so sure).

In retrospect, I think sports is an excuse for otherwise civilized men to metaphorically kick each other in the balls once again, because, in all honesty, we never really grow out of it.

You see, this is why nobody likes a chelski fan nowadays. You just can’t like a guy with armor plated balls, because, damn it, nobody likes those invincible types.

Every now and again, you want to know your mates are human, that they’ll hurt when their team loses. You have to be able to rub in an occasional 5-0 whipping at the hands of Bolton or some other equally crap team.

That’s why everyone loves those Charlton fans, or Watford fans, or Wigan fans - you have to respect a man who loves a crap team.

For that same reason, I find it real hard to relate to guys who don’t watch spectator sports.

Granted, not everyone loves football, but it seems essential to me that a guy, in order to be a true man’s man, has to blindly devote himself to following the fate of some team pitting their skills against some other team, in a contest that doesn’t really have any bearing on the real world at all.

Love for a sports team is a peculiar brand of irrationality that proves that, in the end, we’re all human, and therefore, a little crazy on the inside, that your passion for life and instinct for male bonding is great enough that it can spill over into uncompromising support for a group of men who don’t even know you’re alive, that’s what a freaking great guy you are.

When I meet a soccer fan, and talk about football, no matter what country, what league, what language we’re speaking, there’s a telepathic understanding.

We were in Spain a couple of years back watching a live Euro Cup match, and Germany scored a goal. Some Italian yuppies in the pub turn to us and gives us a knowing grin, and suddenly, we’re no longer German-Italian-Japanese-Singaporean-Thai-Retarded-Whatever, we’re just a bunch of guys watching a bloody game, and it’s beautiful.

2006-10-13T17:26:00.000+08:00

Superstitions.

So the story for today : I brought up some mirrors from the lab for a lecture session. The topic was about the functions of the mammalian eye and I wanted my students to sketch their beautiful left orbs and examine closely the change in size of their pupils when light is shone through them.

Of course I told everyone to be careful with the mirrors and not break them by any chance - an intuitive precognitive notion that comes bundled with asian values regarding superstitions. Even seven years of bad luck down the road is going to be a distinct economic drawback to live by - not least for an unheeded quasi-cultural spook-belief.

No sooner after I finished saying that, a gigantic periplaneta orientalis ( or common oriental goddammit cockroach ) suddenly scampered out between the stack of mirrors to take centrestage, which shocked me into dropping one of the mirrors, which, by the action of earth's gravitational pull, smashed itself onto the cold hard concrete floor into tiny shards of glass smithereens.

After reaffirming my hatred for all cockroaches in the world and having to endure the fatalistic act of smashing a mirror after reminding my students NOT to do so, I am further burdened by the fact that today is Friday the Thirteenth, which by no small measure, is considered a holy and blessed day in any earth calendar.

What a really a bad day to break a mirror sia.

2006-10-13T08:04:00.000+08:00

Binary Sunset.
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The haze is creating surreal hallucinations.
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There was this uncanny sensation when I caught this tableau along misty Benjamin Sheares bridge one late evening - something familiar about the way the sun was setting.
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Hah! Now I remember. The twin suns setting over the horizon of Tatooine, and Luke Skywalker standing ceremoniously over a dune crater witnessing the alluring spectacle of grandeur.
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I swear I could hear echoes of John William's haunting Binary Sunset serenading my ears just then.

Yup. Seeing things is a hazy issue now - for sure.

2006-10-12T23:57:00.000+08:00

Ten Reasons Why Being An Evil Super Villain is Cooler.

1. You will have a nice little, discreet base of evil-dom at the top of a mountain, or volcano, or some underground lair, or perhaps even under Kallang River.Whatever it is, you'll do good in property if the evil villain thingy doesn't work out for you.

2. You will have the latest gizmos at your hands. That means you don't need to call mum to tell her you're coming back late for dinner - you already have a clone of her at the office.

3. You will have more friends. Just look at Clarke Kent and Bruce Wayne - they are social outcasts. See the pattern here?

4. You get to laugh that evil, maniacal muaha-ha-ha! laugh.Good guys don’t get to do this. No one has ever heard Superman or Batman laughing like a maniac and no one ever will. Trust me, this is something everyone wants to do. It is strangely liberating. While you may pass chances to do this every once in a while during your civilian life, you will never get the quantity of opportunities that come with a career in villainy.

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5. All of a sudden, you will have the budget of a first world country for all kinds of toys. Super bad guys are never broke. Not only are they never broke but they always have more resources than the hero could ever hope for. Apparently the villain racket pays very well. It also seems to be recession-proof. I hear the tax breaks are good too.

6. Hot chicks dig evil guys. You never see an evil villain with a busted ass woman. Sure, they may be dirty, rotten, and out to steal your empire, but you can always kill them if they get out of hand.

7. You will be safe from everyday accidents. Evil villains are never killed in car accidents. It just doesn’t happen. You won’t slip in the shower, get smashed by a falling piano, or die of food poisoning. The only way you can be killed is in an explosion created by the hero by exposing the one flaw in your plan that no one could ever possibly foresee. But you'll ALWAYS have a Plan B.

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8. You don’t have to worry about anyone killing you. Evil Villains simply can not be killed. People may think you are dead but you will secretly be lounging in an easy chair on your secret desert island hideout planning your next caper. The only way you can be taken out is by another villain eviler than yourself who will subsequently take over your identity and continue upon your path of world domination.

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9. You can kill anyone you want and you won’t go to jail. For some strange reason, the police never come to bust Evil villains at their homes even when the evidence is overwhelming. You could kill Superman on a live video feed in front of the entire planet and not one cop would try to arrest you. They can’t even arrest you for the stash of plutonium you have in your shed. It is in the charter when you join the union.

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10. You get to dress how you want. You never have to wear a suit and tie again. You can even dress in the most outrageous outfits and commit fashion faux pas everyday while demanding the world bow to your demands and no one will even make the slightest of snide comment. This could have something to do with the fact that you can kill anyone you want and can’t be killed back. Remember, no one ever made fun of Magneto's helmet or the Joker's Marilyn Manson-inspired make-up and bad fashion sense.

2006-10-09T23:08:00.000+08:00

You Watch Your Language!
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I'm beginning to think that humour is really the solution to all the world’s health problems.
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Because when you laugh so much that your stomach stitches and unstitches itself many times over and your rectum starts to convulse in similar fashion, it does look like the body is self-ridding the intoxicating little stuffs that made you agitated, anal-retentive and epileptic during the whole day you were cooped up in the office.

The calm before the storm.

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Russell Peters’s ability to connect to everyone with his stage antics proved a simple point : that, inspite of all the seemingly-racist banter he eructated, it is really a rudimentary exercise in being able to laugh at your own expense.
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And especially if you’re Indian, that is. Most of his expletives-laden jokes revolve around his ancestral heritage and the copious stereotypes surrounding, literally, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean.
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His uncanny timing and campy predilection for spontaneous zany humour is priceless, and he regularly uses the audience as cannon fodder.
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The LA-based Canadian doesn’t waste seconds on dissociating the jocular truth from the harsh innuendo of life – his comic relief transcends stuffs that range from the facile Beijing way of pronouncing ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken’ to the supremely inane Indian-style phone sex hotline ( no sir, we don’t do leather -that’s sacred for us ), and he gets everyone involved in his acts; after a group of people roared back in response when asked whether there were any Gujeratis in da house, he subliminally quipped back to tell them to put away their swords.

Haha!

Why, even the nice lady getting up to go to the toilet during his performance wasn’t spared the maniacal moment either when Russell spitefully (albeit hilariously) announced to the audience, “All lesbians, please report to the Ladies Room now”.
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Comic genius, indeed.
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You all better queue to take my funny face okay, or somebody gonna get hurt real bad. Somebody.

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Blame it on the proliferation of Youtube and whatnots on the web, but Russell’s acts are world-class banter, and something asian-flavoured that we can easily identify with.
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I guess that’s what we need in a crazy world after all – the paradox of laughing at ourselves silly for a while in an auditorium, while the madness rages on outside still.

Authentic ticket stubs signed by the Mad Bombayman himself. You can have it though. For $34.50.

2006-10-08T10:43:00.000+08:00

Sleepyhead.

On the train towards town last week, I saw this rather quizzical episode of a young man desperately trying to stay awake and keeping his head from landing on the auntie's shoulder beside him.

It was rather funny because :

(a) the auntie was a diminutive woman who would have totally collapsed under the weight of the idiot's big head if she did not continually retard the retard's head on her scapula.

(b) the auntie, in the poise of an inanimate kungfu master, would occasionally flick her middle finger to exorcise the sinking human head from crashing onto her shoulders every few seconds or so.

(c) the slumbering bozo was tenaciously trying to keep awake at times, but immediately after succumbed back into the evil clutches of the ZZZ-monster once again, his bodily oscillation reminiscent of a hippie-junkie during the slow encore of Woodstock's last love ballad.

(d) At one time, the tipsy moron's head was at a complete state of equilibrium with the auntie's shoulder for a second or two, before the auntie came up with her deft crouching tiger, hidden finger move yet once again, and the bobblehead quickly reached the vertical in a rather apologetic and stymied act of profused confusion.

I bet nobody minds if a delectable member of the opposite sex does that to us in the Mert (the sleepy stance, not the finger prod). But not a revenge-exacting, diminutive auntie with an evil, middle finger.

That is too scary an MRT encounter to sleep upon.

2006-10-07T05:28:00.000+08:00

X marks the hidden spot.

During an ice-breaking moment in a Biology teachers' course recently, every teacher had to introduce himself and the school he is currently teaching to the mass of educators.

One of the teachers stood up and introduced himself as Mr X, and gave the name of a weird-sounding school as his current institution.

Everybody looked appalled and curious when he mentioned his school's name, because, as far as I can tell from their looks, nobody, and not even I have heard of this school before - until this day.

He seemed calm about the whole thing, before he casually pursed his lower lip and sombrely dropped this punchline,

"Oh, it's okay. Even GoogleEarth cannot see it".

Haha!

2006-10-06T17:30:00.000+08:00

Es.Em.Mess.

I think creative people are really those people that can churn out funny one-liners in their sms.

I mean, you really must have a quirky sense of humour to wax spontaneous lyricals and make the most mundane of sending messages extraordinarily laughable, or at the very least, putting a smile on someone's face. Boring smses ( the dorky ones you wished your phone would have a autodetect function to immediately delete them ) are a complete turn-off.

And I'm not talking about those forwarded, unoriginal SMS that goes something like this either :

Actually I wanted to mail you something

(further down)

it's so cute

(further down)

confirm will make u smile..

(the final nail on the coffin)

BUT the stupid postman asked ME to get out of the mailbox :p

Ok fine, it's cute and all, but it doesn't actually reflect the humour quotient of the sender. For all you know the message has been circulated around the world at least three thousand times since sms technology first started.

What I mean is something along these lines, which happened recently :

I was late for an appointment, and while waiting for yours truly to arrive, creative woman A smsed this :

Hey. Where art thou? Arriving sooneth?

Well ok, the bard's vernacular isn't exactly normal lingo for most of us when the average local Beng can ingeniously inscribed 'K$#$@^, where e *&%^ r you sia?' on his N90 to deliver the same point across, and much more potent in effect at that, but then it does provoke you to think that the sender does have her witty moments, you know.

I replied back, of course, saying that I was on the way, in the same mauled-up Shakespearean lexicon.

The reply back was in the same intellectual vein as the first, and much more amusing:

Quicken pace. Time is gold or thou might just see me in deep stupor waiting thy arrival.

Haha!

THAT, in my opinion as a professional handphone user, is much more enthralling, engaging, riveting and pulsating than receiving a similar message that irritatingly goes :

faster la, can?

2006-10-06T05:22:00.000+08:00

A World apart.On the same Planet.
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Look at these editorials.
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With all the local references, they do hit a bit too close to home, don't they?
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That's because these slides were presented during the recently-concluded IMF meetings here.
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An astute colleague pointed out this contrasting stark reality slideshow to me just only - she even had one of the brutally-honest slides adorning her desktop.
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I guess every now and then, we need to be reminded to realise just how fortunate we are, time and again, to exist in a perpetual state of material abundance and physical adequacies.
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Would anyone here give up his place and trade his existence for a slice of life anywhere devoid of any succinct level of comfort?

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Would anyone even consider the senseless dying from malaria as a befitting end to his existence - heck - to any life at all?

Probably not. Lucky us.

2006-10-05T08:37:00.000+08:00

Berry berry good.
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And they say an apple a day keeps the doc away.
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The top five healthiest fruits ( measured in terms of the amount of disease-fighting antioxidants ), seemingly come from the family of berries, which, in all hypothetical sense, could probably keep a doctor away from you for months and years.

Tip : Whack on the strawberries at a buffet table first, then proceed to ravage the apples and pears later. Stow away the avocado for the nightly facial rejuvenation session.

It is interesting to note that the voluptuous pear is number 10 on the list - which goes to show that anything well-proportioned isn't exactly well-laden with good insides.

2006-10-04T10:45:00.000+08:00

Another (Great) Literary Heist.

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Moral of The Story : Go to neighbourhood malls to get great book bargains - a known conspiracy theory.

My latest coup (above) - three for $10. Damn cheap okay.

2006-10-03T16:18:00.000+08:00

Now we know how Dinosaurs died.

Seeing how misty the air around our island has recently become, like some foggy scene straight out from Silent Hill, a friend began to theorise how the Cretaceous Period may have ended.

He said that 'it wasn't a dino-killing comet that impacted earth, but rather it was the freakin' forest fires in freakin' Sumatra that continued to burn until daylight is totally obscured by the thickening blanket of emphysema-inducing haze, thereby causing all dinosaurs to lose track of day and night, and consequently, their way of life'.

'The prolonged darkness got so bad that it made all the dinosaurs so disoriented, and they then start to do silly things like drinking another dino's urine and clawing another megalodon to death for fun, all in the name of Perserve Disorientation'.

'By then also, since the sudden environmental cataclysm did not accord them sufficient time for their vision to adapt to prolonged darkness, they'll just lumbered blindly in the dark until most of them simply fall off a ravine, cliff or a trecherous ledge to a bottomless pit, and then they all die. Even the flying ones crashed into a coconut tree or something like that. Two days after the last dinosaur met his doom, the fires in Sumatra stopped'.

How convenient.

2006-10-03T08:43:00.000+08:00

This Arabic Song has been around for ages.
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Right after the azan, or prayer call to break fast, this song on the radio will serenade us while we tucked in our food.
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For as long as I can remember, the melancholic tune has been around since time immemorial.
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Listening to it brings back a lot of poignant Ramadan pleasantries at the dinner table.

2006-10-02T13:36:00.000+08:00

College Collage

Maybe it's just a guy's thing.

I swear there's a silent war going on between these two factions of JC guys everytime I go to this mosque for Friday prayers. It's quite hilarious, these restrained vendetta - clearly showing the intangible imperfections of the reticent human psyche.

I hesitantly concluded that these two groups from two different JCs just couldn't see eye to eye to each other.

Noted observations :

1. They exhibit territoriality.

Each group never mix with the other group. Ever.

2. They become anti-social creatures in a holy place of worship.

Even in a mosque, where everyone greets one another with salaams, the only thing they exchanged between themselves are icy glances or stares of death permeating even the thickest cholesterol-laden dermis of the skin.

3. The Elitist Syndrome.

The first group came from a supposedly higher-ranked JC, while the second were from a not-so-champion college.

Here we see the alpha-male exhibiting its typical primal consciousness - that coming from a better institution, the first group don't have to feel obligated to talk and chit-chat with the lesser mortals of the lowly-ranked JC. Similarly, the other group don't have to mingle with the first group because the words 'nerds' and 'rocket scientists' doesn't exist in their dictionaries.

Maybe it's the uniform. You know, some JC students proudly flashed their uniforms like its' their second skin or something like that along Orchard Road all the time.

The funny thing is that I realised this phenomenon doesn't happen among secondary school boys. It's only college guys who suddenly get neanderthal over simple stuffs like these.

I guess when you're growing up, you begin to see everything around you as a competition field, and the guy you classified as a friend four years ago is now your fellow competitor. That's the brutal truth for a reality check that has seemingly kapowed you hard - suddenly.

Which is quite true, because I realised it was the same thing way back then too. Everytime we went for Friday prayers during JC time, we found it hard to interact with this particular group of people from another college, and they, with us.

It's that hovering non-verbal stigma that seemed to echo "so what if you're in a better JC than us? - slash - I'm in a better JC than you are.Period." when you're in a 'highly-ranked JC' uniform. It's like an unseen tension caused by the perception of envy.

I mean, it's just a school uniform what.

It's not like your intrinsic qualities are shown like badges - like what those scouts wear on their sleeves.

(Although a corporal would beg to differ when he is talking to a colonel, because probably the colonel's badges ARE his intrinsic qualities. But that's another issue altogether).

It's really funny how these JC guys perceived the mere uniforms as quintessential loculi in the overall piechart of a person's worth.

Envy should never be accorded on the outer fabric.

But like I said; it's a guy's thing - so it's okay if you don't get it.

2006-10-01T23:15:00.000+08:00

A Cranial Issue.
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Just another mish-mass pile of fabric, eh?

Actually, it's a part of something more...cerebral. Like this.
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Brain art. Yup.

The cerebellum behind this, and other artistic brainy ideas, belongs to an artist called Marjorie Taylor. With unique pieces like this, I'll say she's definitely ahead of her competitors, that's for sure.

2006-09-30T18:09:00.000+08:00

Staff Room’s Stuffs
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Overheard a chemistry teacher telling this to another chemistry teacher :
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“Some of the students were asking me if I knew of this molecule which is always so excitable... I don’t know the answer, so I asked them back.”
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“Well, what is it?”
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“N2 (enthu)”.
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…………………………………………………………………….
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A senior teacher was alarmed when she thought she heard a PE teacher hollering ‘communist!’ to another PE teacher across the staff-room.
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Curiously, she went up to the PE teacher, and discreetly asked her why the need for such anti-establishment lingo.
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The PE teacher looked stunned, and immediately thereafter realised the confusion.
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“Oh! I was just asking her whether she’s ready to go back home, so I said ‘come, Eunice!’”

kwang kwang kwang.

2006-09-29T08:39:00.000+08:00

The pavements along Orchard Road could do with this.
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World art. On the common pavement.
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It's actually an anamorphic illusion drawn in a special distortion in order to create a 3D impression when seen from a particular viewpoint.
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Here's some other stylo pavement art.
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The genius behind all these is the guy above, in a quirky self-portrait, called Julian Beever.

The STPB should seriously consider his expertise to beautify our bland concrete walkways.

This will teach us to look down more often. In more ways than one can think of, hopefully.

2006-09-28T15:41:00.000+08:00

The Cauldron of Fissures

It suddenly occurred to me while I was presiding over this morning’s exam in the hall that I was literally caught in a war of sorts; a nonchalant observer in a silent battlefield of the minds - an assaulting, frenzied cauldron of invisible thoughts emanating from the masses of at least a hundred and ninety anxious cerebral cortexes, their owners stoicly hunched over the question papers, desperately trying to decipher the distinction between medulla and medulla oblongata.
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I can actually feel the charged mental-electricity in the air.

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I was imagining random wisps of thoughts floating around in the air above their heads, the surreal comet-tailed sparks of conflagrant ideas whistfully soaring across the stratosphere of the school hall, and wondered aloud – with no pun intended - whether it would be possible to audibly amplify thoughts in the near future.
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A SONY Thoughts AmplifierTM in the works, perhaps?
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Scary it will be if everyone who is standing at a two metre radius around you can hear what’s going on in your mind with that thing - a much delectable aural pleasure than radio, I presume.

And gone too, will be the last bastion of personal freedom - an unsolicited mind.

2006-09-27T07:58:00.000+08:00

Be Sarcastic For All You Want, Uncle.

Almost every mosque in Singapore hands out complimentary packed bubur to fellow Muslims in the whole month of Ramadan.

This is of course, in tandem with the spirit of sharing and giving through the providence of alms and charitable deeds.

The mosque near our place is no different. They had ready-packed bubur for everyone to take home for breaking fast. And the nice people that distributed these never limit the amount you want to take home.

So it was yesterday that I came to the mosque to do my late afternoon prayers, and after doing so, proceeded to the bubur collection line, where among all other congregates, we indulged in our local favourite pastime - queuing - and waited for the mosque officials to start distributing the porridge.

I had every intention to ask for two packs; one for myself and the other for the solitary grandfather living on his own on the sixth floor.

So when it was my turn, I showed the guy the 'peace' sign - two, please, thank you very much.

The kind gentleman instead packed four packets - two, in each plastic bag - and gently told me, " it's alright. No problem. God is Great".

It didn't feel right to refuse his kindness, so I said my thanks and proceeded to exit from the booth to the main gate of the mosque. I told myself I'll give the two packs to the grandpa instead of one, and the other extra pack will go to the generous chinese auntie who lived beside our unit.

It was then that my gaze fell upon this particular odd-looking uncle who was staring at my plastic bags near the gate. I suddenly felt uneasy because his face spoke a thousand, skewed thoughts that seemed to amplify themselves into your cerebrum - you know, the type of face who looked at you like you just cleared a bank's vault as if it's a normal thing to do.

I didn't know what his intentions were, and I was very sure I was the only one heading in his direction out of the mosque at that time, so I was particularly flabbergasted when I heard him said this aloud to his friend :

"See? Look at that. Somebody even can take FOUR packs of bubur. FOUR, you know. F-O-U-R".

He wasn't looking at me when he said that, and I am very sure there isn't another person behind me who was carrying home a similar amount of porridge, so I don't think I appreciate his condescending sarcasm very well. I mean, there isn't anything to stop him taking the whole truckload of bubur home if he wants to be comparatively anal about it, so I really don't see his crappy point.

It is said that fasting isn't merely an exercise in quelling your appetite and dietary wants, but also a lesson in patience and resolute moral steadfastness. When a person seemingly irks another, by tautology or action, all a Muslim gotta do (in order to deter any confrontation and preserving the dignity of Ramadan) is to simply utter the simple phrase below to the instigator and just, well, walk away from the problem :

"In truth, I am fasting".

Yes uncle, be sarcastic all you want. Because in truth, I am fasting.

And because God is Great.

2006-09-26T17:48:00.000+08:00

Slang.

A cousin who's been living in England for many, many years is back here for holidays to spend Ramadan and Hari Raya with us.

The amazing thing is that he doesn't have the slightest Brit accent when he talks - he still sounds like the same, unassuming Mat Rock he was before he departed for Birmingham seven years ago. Not angmohfied at all. Uncanny indeed.

It's really weird because I know of some people who went on vacation to Australia or America for two weeks, and when they come back, they speak with a nasal Aussie twang or a petulant Yankee squeak.

The really funny part is that if you lived in, let's say, India, for seven years, you WILL NEVER find yourself picking up that accent.

Which is damn weird lah dey, because Russell Peters will be so goddamn proud of you lah dey.

2006-09-26T10:51:00.000+08:00

Some Thoughts About Nothings.

1. Smart, intelligent students will only become smarter, more intelligent students.

I know this is very true, especially so in good schools, since the accumulation of this prolific gene pool will only serve to amplify greater learning.

Since keen competitiveness is also an inbred trait in an intelligent person, the need to remain equal to his peers is tantamount to his character, which in turn can only increase the capacity to excite more inquisitive grey matter to contain more data and facts. The sustained inertia allows the smart, intelligent student to pick up stuffs twice ( or thrice ) faster than the average microprocessing learner.

Which of course, in the end, will result in a sad divide among the schools, with the good ones continually churning excellent learners and the not-so-good schools producing only average results - a necessary sieve, however, to filter the brightest amongst us to anchor the country's constitutions in the future.

Now what kind of present would you give to an intelligent someone?

Probably this.

To get your prefrontal cortex going, the Brain Trainer has a series of simple exercises that you do against the clock, and it's highly addictive.

The first and simplest puzzle will keep you occupied - it gives you a hundred simple mathematic calculations to do, and the best record so far is 100% correct in three minutes. Infuriatingly this will only give you a score of average!

So you shall persevere, and in the process, wreck your brain, which is what this wicked little trainer is all about. It sucks you into its little challenges, and you simply have to keep going to better your score. How great to have an addictive game that's actually beneficial for a change, rather than playing solitaire for hours with nothing to show for it.

Who knows, after beating the final stage, you might even have a bigger cerebrum to show off, and lawfully earning the tag 'big-headed'.

2. The rich will only get richer. And vice-versa.

Some of us were talking about a recent article in the Straits Times listing the richest people in America. And they're not even millionaires anymore.

They're BILLIONAIRES now.

Damn.

I wonder what their loose change's like?

A couple of hundred thousands maybe? Or do they even transact with paper money at all? Will we ever dispel the myth of seeing a local billionaire in action at our mamak shops - buying Twisties and Mamee, and handing out a TWO DOLLAR note?

What do you give someone WHO HAS EVERYTHING?

Probably this?

What better present for the person who has everything than a poignant reminder that they want for nothing?

This lovingly crafted vial of emptiness is filled to the brim with unfettered nothingness. Free from the burden of possessions, the weight of responsibility, Nothing is as idiotic as it is brilliant.

Indeed even old Macbeth, though mad as a kipper, realised that life, whilst full of sound and fury (and that was before iPods) is inherently daft and ultimately signifies Nothing. And let us not forget, that 'Nothing' is so important that most of our universe - and the contents of a lot of people's heads - appears to be made up of it.

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It's a statement, an empty gesture if you will, a nod at the futility of ownership, and yet despite 'Nothing' being nothing, it is of course packed with millions of protons, neutrons and what have you, which is pretty good for Nothing.

3. Cat-torturers-cum-killers, beware.

Unless you want to be reincarnated as a cat in your next life and have your vibrissae being plucked out by human sickos, please stop these wanton acts of juvenile idiosyncrasies.

Last warning, ah. Don't let me catch you ok.

2006-09-25T23:14:00.000+08:00

The Magnificient Seven
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There's this unwritten rule about watches - one will find it extremely difficult to downsize his watch once he's used to a 44mm on the wrist, because anything smaller will be considered blasphemous, taboo and puny.
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Not to mention sheer indignance for wrist quality time.
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Therefore, a Panerai can only be aptly substituted with the following honourable line-up below. No less.
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1. Omega RailMaster, 49.2 mm

2. IWC Big Pilot, 47 mm

3. Graham Swordfish, 46 mm

4. Glycine Lagunare, 47 mm

5. Ernst Benz Chronolunar, 47 mm

6. Bell & Ross Instrument Series, 47 mm

7. Panerai Luminor Submersible Chrono, 47 mm

A wall-clock on the wrist soon?

2006-09-24T18:38:00.000+08:00

Ramadan

In a few more minutes, the first day of fasting is going to be over.

(Only twenty-nine more days to go).

I still find it mystifying that during NS times, I can go about doing daily combat routine in this whole month sans food and water - for at least eleven hours a day - and live to tell my experiences.

In essence, the abstainment from food and water is merely a small part in the holistic interpretation of fasting, the other factors being zygomatic tangents of spiritual reflection, practicing a core Islamic jurisprudence, remembering the needy, and shying away, essentially, from the pull of the world's deadliest venoms - gluttony, greed, lust, pride, envy and wrath.

Fasting is, quintessentially put, an exercise of the mind over matter.

That, and the curbing of worldly desires - usually in the form of Ben & Jerry's during the day, in my case.

There is that elusive aura that permeates the spirit of Ramadan into every Muslim each time it arrives.

Mosques are unusually packed with fellow congregates each night - everyone of us subserviently supplicating in front of The Almighty, and reinforcing our dualities as humble servants and dutiful vicegerents of this world.

There is also that unexplainable camaraderie among neighbours in the instant Ramadan heralds forth, one point noted is that food for breaking fast is automatically shared among neighbours, no matter how meagre the portions of murtabak or spaghetti may be.

Which explains why Mum always prepare only one type of meal, because by the time the call of prayer to break fast beckons, we will surely have a gastronomic variety in front of us - multiplied many times over, with at least ten different menus shared between ten different neighbours - on our small IKEA dinner table, proving indeed, that the kampung spirit is still very much alive and thriving in our common HDB receptacles.

Hmm. That roti kirai looks enticing. Plus that bubur cacha. And that spring chicken. Oh, and that mee hongkong too.

2006-09-23T17:18:00.000+08:00

The Crossroads of Crossings

We've all seen those jibroni motorists who zoomed past zebra crossings and completely disregarding those pedestrians standing by the side of the roadkerb waiting for them to stop - as if the road-crossers are mere traffic observers with no better things to do in their life but to eschew carbon monoxide for spiritual contentment.

Luckily however, in general most cars do stop (they better!) and give way to people, and only a few would otherwise consider breaking traffic laws ( and possibly some bones as well, in unfortunate cases ) by speeding past them.

What happened yesterday, though, takes the cake, and by far, will be the most outrageous thing I've ever seen at a zebra-crossing - that, and the socio-political overtones behind it.

A curious lot comprising of :

1. two auntie friends with grocery bags

2. a female jogger

3. a Bangladeshi worker pushing a pathetic old bicycle laden with groceries and stuffs

4. a just booked-out-from-camp NS recruit

5. a middle-age gentleman constantly talking on his handphone

6. and myself,

came to a zebra crossing all at the same time near a major artery towards Tampines Central.

Instinctly, the odd company stopped at the side and we all waited for the first car to stop for us to cross.

And it did.

Or rather, that first car in front, a black BMW 5 series, screeched to a halt - like the driver was testing the brakes for the same time. It wasn't as if he couldn't see us, but rather I think he was finding us as a mere inconvenience of his precious driving experience, hence that sudden jamming.

All of us were taken aback by this intentional act of vehicular sarcasm, because he wasn't exactly speeding to warrant that shock of urgency on us. Even the bangla dropped one of his brinjai.

The aunties looked at him in disgust, gave the driver an icy goddamnit-you-want-to-die-issit? stare and benevolently marched onto the asphalt first with their grocery bags in tow.

We all followed suit, with the Bangla guy the last to cross - his ancient, laden bicycle continually impeding his wobbly progress towards the other side.

The uneven load and weight on the bike eventually proved too much for its scrawny frame to take, so much so that in the middle of the crossing, this had to happen : the Bangla guy suddenly lost grip of one handle, and the next moment, he was on the ground sitting on the bicycle with potatoes, brinjals and onions rolling incessantly on all quarters of the road.

Of course, being good samaritans, most of us backtracked our way to help the poor fella. For the record, I managed to nab a rolling potato and handcuffed three fleeting carrots before they disappeared into the drain.

It was then that we didn't expect this next thing to happen.

The gnarling, seething monster behind the wheel - a fat, obnoxious-looking specimen of the human being - began to honk at us. And he kept honking.

All of us were startled by his incredulous stance, his utter rudeness, and his lack of compassion, inspite of the affluent and state-of-the-art automobile he was in.

We quickly helped the bangla on his feet - quite shaken by now, I believe - and retrieved most of his sundries before we pushed his bike ( now totally road-unworthy, because the chains were dislodged from the wheels ) back to the same side of the road where we started from.

The caveman, sensing that the road was clear for him to take off, immediate sped away without the slightest regard for civility and humane gentility, leaving us with a trail of debris and a deep VROOM from his twelve-cylindered, Autobahn-tested, German-precision machine.

With all the hype about how civilised and cultured we have become in the microcosm of the world, plus the four million smiles we gave to the world in the last week, it seems all had fallen to nought, courtesy of one frigging idiot who simply is too caught-up in his affluent affairs and refuses to see greater things beyond his dense, little world of material comfort.

In that fleeting moment, I was so ashamed to be called a Singaporean.

2006-09-22T17:34:00.000+08:00

A Weighty Introduction.

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We were having dinner last week when one of my friends saw a former acquaintance of hers, someone she hasn't seen in a long while.

At first the friend of hers didn't seem to recognize her, but then he realized who she was and came over.

Now, I was expecting the guy to say something like "Hey, it's been a while, how ya been?" or something to that effect. But what he said totally took me by surprise:

IDIOT: "I'm sorry but I REALLY need to tell you this. You REALLY put on a lot of weight." (Yes he emphasized the word "really").

What the?!? Why the hell do people say stuff like that?

Seriously, here's a tip for people who love to give those kind of comments - people KNOW that they put on weight, they don't need YOU to tell them. We know that our clothes did not shrink. We know that the reason we can no longer walk up the stairs without sighing is not because they have gotten steeper.

To her credit, my friend took it pretty well.

And the insane thing is she looks fine to me, but the way he said it was like she had put on a million pounds. Not that it would be ok for him to say it then. And people wonder why young girls nowadays are starving themselves to the brink of death just to stay stick thin.

If it had been me, I would have probably replied with "Oh really?? Thanks for telling me, I never noticed!" or "You don't look so hot yourself" or " Well true, but I still look better than that girl you went out with last time, the one that looks like a horse?".

Alright fine, I would have probably just stayed silent and cursed him the whole night, simply because there isn't any need to be confrontational and waste your time with licensed idiots.

It's called TACT, you know.

2006-09-20T17:10:00.000+08:00

I'M Fine with IMF.

World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz on Friday called Singapore’s restrictions on the entry of activists for the World Bank/IMF meetings “authoritarian“.

But he said the World Bank and IMF did not plan to postpone their annual gathering here.

“Enormous damage has been done and a lot of that damage is done to Singapore and self-inflicted. This could have been an opportunity for them to showcase to the world their development process,” Wolfowitz said in response to questions from civil society organizations at a town hall meeting recently.

“I would argue whether it has to be as authoritarian as it has been and I would certainly argue that at the stage of success they have reached, they would do much better for themselves with a more visionary approach to the process.”He added that the bar on entry into Singapore for some activists “is a violation of the understanding that we had drawn up” with Singapore.

The news article above sums up this recent debacle in Singapore. Trying to attract the world's talent while at the same time having world headlines read 'authoritarian' does highlight the flaw in the so-called ‘pragmatic approach’.

The pragmatic approach to decision making is founded on a simple idea that you use the option which works best at that particular time, or rather, decisions are to be made without reference to a core set of ‘political values’ or grand plans.

The ‘old’ politics of ‘left and right’ no longer hold sway over those in power, the rhetoric of Confucianism has been abandoned, and ‘Asian values’ is a term that has gone by the way.

Today Singapore is placed at the mercy of globalisation as every other nation is.

Globalisation is referred to as an ‘invisible hand’ that alters the fortunes of men and women on a global scale. When the Singapore economy performs badly - simply place the blame on globalisation. When the Singapore economy does well - accredit the praise by remarking that the Singaporean government has done a good job opening its doors to the world.

To argue that multi national corporations and the financial markets determine the fortunes of the people of Singapore is tantamount to blasphemy. Blasphemy because we all live in societies that have supposedly turned their backs on the old ideologies of politics.

Today we are said to live in a pragmatic world that is without ideology. A greater number of those who had wished to protest on the streets of Singapore are not really anti-capitalist (or communist/Marxist). They are aware of the reality of the situation we find ourselves in - we simply need capitalism to continue for our own survival.

All they were trying to ask for was that their voices be heard when they call for a ‘kinder - softer capitalism’.

A capitalism that factors in human beings and the environment into their decisions.

One that encourages corporate responsibility.

To argue that we now live in a world of ‘pragmatic’ decision makers unencumbered by ‘values’ whether they be universal or local, is merely an uncovering of the dominant hegemony of our time. The image of boats rising with the tide of ‘globalisation’ as if it were another force of nature creates the image that there is no alternative.

When a new gahmen came to power a few years ago we were held astounded for the promise of a marvelous future for Singapore - an open society with individuals making their voices heard without fear of suppression. The cameras of the world will show a picture of the passive Singaporean when a better image would have been a dynamic, intelligent and risk-taking society that was progressing and changing, involved in decisions that would effect their own futures and the futures of millions of others.

Often people have been known to ask - “Singapore? Isn’t that part of China?”

This mistake isn’t based on geographic location alone.

Indeed, any host nation to an international summit is destined to be probed for all its protocols and systems, yet being able to be seen balancing the proper stratas of issue managements similar to walking a very fine tight rope. When you have a US statesman of Wolfowitz’s stature commenting on how ‘authoritarian’ the decisions are it seems to indicate just how fragile and sensitive the whole world really is.

And it is really that fragile and sensitive.

Oh, well.

2006-09-20T15:16:00.000+08:00

Frikwds?

Saw this on the road beside the school dance studio. I picked it up to check its' contents - wallet could have fallen out from a Primary One girl's pocket.

It was empty.

Hmm. Thomas & Frikwds? Is that how Thomas the Train calls his loco-buddies now?

On second thought - Thomas & Frikwds... hmm. Sounds like the name of an expensive Scandinavian designer boutique that specialises in diamond-encrusted train playsets and jewel-studded locomotive replicas with human faces.

One thing's for sure : Girl was right not to associate herself with this friky mess of a wallet.

2006-09-19T18:50:00.000+08:00

A Close Encounter.

This creepy incident was told to me by another male colleague just a couple of days back.

It happened to him in one of the sporadic male loos located around the school.

Apparently, he was undergoing major egestion of the bowels at that time in a cubicle and didn't realise there was actually somebody else in the toilet as well - until he heard footsteps outside his cubicle door.

Sensing that it could be another colleague ( which is quite improbable, considerable that the total number of male specimens in the school is only about half a dozen, and that the chance of any two of us osmoregulating at the same time is remotely remote ) while in the midst of his rectal procrastinations, he sombrely muttered;

"Oi. Who outside ah?"

Of course there was no response.

To which our astute protagonist quickly asked again;

"Oi. Who outside ah?"

NO RESPONSE.JUST SOME TIMID SHUFFLING OF SOMEONE'S FEET.

Without wasting a second longer, our gallant hero quickly recovered from his bowel position ( it is not known whether he washed up ) and hastily proceeded to open the cubicle door -

- only to find one of the elderly female toilet cleaners quietly mopping the floor - with a pair of earphones plugged into her - possibly tuning into Cantopop on some local radio station.

I guess in a male-challenged environment such as where I am now, it is sheer loo-nacy not to believe that the female presence is almost everywhere.

2006-09-18T16:33:00.000+08:00

"Did You Hear the One About Hitler?"
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It's about time the Third Reich takes in it's own medicine - a dose of humour, to be precise.
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A new book about humour under the Nazis gives some interesting insights into life in the Third Reich and breaks yet another taboo in Germany's treatment of its history. Jokes told during the era, says the author, Rudolph Herzog, provided the populace with a pressure release.

Like the author, I think that if you laughed about Hitler, you're actually doing good by robbing him of the metaphysical, demonic capabilities that the post-war apologists attributed to him. That makes it all the more astounding that the "hollow fairground magic of the Nazis", which was laid bare in contemporary satire and literary testimony, actually ever, resulted in the Holocaust.

The Germans were by no means powerless victims of their own propaganda. Many saw through the games played by Goebbels and his consorts. This didn't change the fact that the country was sucked down into a whirlpool of crime in the space of just a few years. It's just a piece of reality sinking in too slowly to take effect.

I am no history buff, nor am I eulogizing the greatness of the Nazi era, but its' provocative past can be redeemed through grains of life anecdotes, albeitly taken with a pinch of reality salt. And I think humour provides that apt relief in quantifiable sustenance not amounting to backlashed nausea for past horrific acts that the Fuhrer is well known for.

Herzog's book is just the latest indication of a fundamental shift in Germany's treatment of its Nazi history in recent years. As the wartime generation dies out, the children and grandchildren are taking a more detached view of the past, and a number of taboos have been broken as a result.

Some paradoxical humour worth mentioning :

1. Many found the Heil Hitler salute with its outstretched arm ridiculous.

A circus director in the western city of Paderborn, a confirmed Social Democrat opponent of the Nazis, trained his chimpanzees to raise their right arm whenever they saw a uniform, and they even took to saluting the postman. He was denounced and received an official notice forbidding the chimpanzees from making the salute and threatening to slaughter the chimps even.

2. Hitler - often the butt of jokes - didn't find them funny. At all. Some of them :

Hitler visits a lunatic asylum. The patients give the Hitler salute. As he passes down the line he comes across a man who isn't saluting.

"Why aren't you saluting like the others?" Hitler barks.

"Mein Führer, I'm the nurse," comes the answer. "I'm not crazy!"

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That joke may not be a screamer, but it was told quite openly along with many others about Hitler and his henchmen in the early years of the Third Reich, accordingly in the book.

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But by the end of the war, a joke could get you killed. A Berlin munitions worker, identified only as Marianne Elise K., was convicted of undermining the war effort "through spiteful remarks" and executed in 1944 for telling this one:

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Hitler and Göring are standing on top of Berlin's radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to cheer up the people of Berlin. "Why don't you just jump?" suggests Göring.

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A fellow worker overheard her telling the joke and sabo-ed her to the authorities.

3. As it became clear that Germany was losing the war and Allied bombing started wiping out German cities, the country turned to bitter sarcasm:

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"What will you do after the war?"

"I'll finally go on a holiday and will take a trip round Greater Germany!"

"And what will you do in the afternoon?"

*Das ist, Mann wirklich lustig!!!

*That's really funny, dude!!!

2006-09-15T17:59:00.000+08:00

The Empire has an Imperial Base here. Seriously.
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That's Eastpoint Shopping Mall in Simei taken from GoogleEarth.
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Now's here the Empire logo.
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See? Subliminal, the Dark Side is.

Careful, you shoppers must be. Bargains, they might seem.

Factory rejects, they actually are.
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2006-09-13T15:07:00.000+08:00

The Need For Speed
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It was bound to happen, sooner or later.
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I was getting really fed-up with all those stupid drivers who cut recklessly into other drivers' lanes without the slightest consideration for safety like they're some kind of grand prix circuit champions.
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I wouldn't blame them if my car was in their blind spot, but I'd think they'd be really blind not to notice other cars all the time when they switched lanes.
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Worse, they don't signal their intentions to do so.
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Unable to hold my patience no more yesterday, I decided to get even with the blue souped-up Subaru that looked like a pathetic attempt to masquerade an actual WRX.
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The moron had missed my side view mirror by a milimetre, when he tried to squeeze between my car and another idiot in a roadhogging Toyota on the right lane. Not only was he brushing alloy to alloy on asphalt, he was rudely leaving trails of his lunacy in a whirl of grey exhaust smoke that seemed to condense into a carbon-mist that spelled the words EAT DUST!, leaving the dazed motorists behind him in a sudden void of emptiness that time has just suddenly stood still for them.

He was easily doing at least 140 km/h while zig-zagging like a drunken kongfu master.
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I couldn't take it any further. I had to teach him a lesson.
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So I stepped on the gas. And gave chase.
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I didn't know why I instinctly did so, and I also knew perfectly well that my small car is ever-ready to push the speed limit beyond its' recommended heart-pounding, adrenaline-overflowing 88 km/h, after which, I'm sure the metallic parts will most probably dismantle themselves into aluminium sheets if I cranked it any further.
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However, I was fiercely determined to teach the young punk a lesson.
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My machine quickly zoomed behind him and instantly I put on my high-beam on him, hoping that the glare would somehow :

1. signal my dutiful-citizen intentions, therefore indirectly telling him to cease this frivolous act of grinding rubber, or

2. blind him temporarily and he'll lose control and die.
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He didn't budge, not even showing the slightest indication of braking.
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In fact, the uncivilised monkey seemed to acknowledge that he wasn't ready to give up the right lane just yet, and was ready to give a run for my money, literally, to play catch-up with his oversized exhaust pipe.
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I hold my breath and decided to live out the remaining few minutes of my life in high speed, strongly believing that if anything were to end in the next more moments, my death will not be in vain and the incident would probably occupy at least a Top Ten spot in the annals of the Greatest Expressway Tragedies in Singapore.

I didn't see anything when I reached light-speed. Everything else around me was a whizzing blur reminiscent of a Photoshop manipulation. I was only too intent on tailing the punk till the end.

We zipped in and out of traffic like lightning - I was hell-bent on teaching him who the Master was. I had enough of crappy drivers who exercise indulgence at the expense of everyone else on our roads.

Nearing a bend while doing at least 120 km/h, I managed to steer to an empty lane on his left and proceeded to pummel my pedal in the hope that I'll manage just enough space to nip in front of his bonnet. I was trickling quiet beads of cold perspiration because the timing had to be critical for me to achieve that feat.

As soon as I realised that I was half a car's length further in front of him, I told myself victory was inevitable. That I was King of Komeback. Yeah. All I need to do was to swerve into his lane and then I'll be doing the victory lap. The guy's a goner, man. Hah!

As I was about to clinically finish him off, Mum suddenly came to the X-box console and switched off the power plug, leaving me in a period of sudden death from the greatest anti-climax I ever had in Burnout 3 : Takedown.

2006-09-12T11:04:00.000+08:00

I, Cher.
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I met up with some college / varsity friends yesternight, and the post-dinner banter that ensued somewhat led us to discussing our present occupations.
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Just to reiterate the statistics, the following below is a casual breakdown of our jobs:
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Of the eleven of us,
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3 are medical doctors
2 are system analysts with MNCs
2 are civil engineers
1 lawyer
1 accountant
1 postgraduate with a PhD coming soon
1 teacher
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I guess sometimes I do feel inferior to my peers, at least based on where we are now, and especially coming from where we were during our schooling years. Looking at where some of them are now, perched comfortably at the pinnacle of their working lives clearly provided me with a soulful indication of how small I stand in a certain quadrant of society.
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But the fact still remains that we don't compare salaries ( Eh! Why am I missing another digit in my monthly pay cheque? ), that we don't harp on our daily routine ( Eh! Why am I always marking papers every day? ) and that we don't question our livelihood (Eh! What am I doing???) further resonates the proof that throughout the years of growing up together, we learnt not to query one's life like an open book simply because we respect one another as mature individuals who choose our own quiet destiny and wander the roads less travelled in the pursuit of the 5Cs and spiritual contentment.

Sometimes, amidst the piles of papers around me, I do occasionally succumb to the belief that teaching is a dead-end job, and that most probably I'll die of fatigue while marking a set of Prelim scripts at 3 am by the time I'm 51. Or 41. Or 31.

At times also, I induced myself to believe in the effectiveness of the aerial spraying of Prozac in the classroom to quell the uncontrolled pandemonium when the need arises.

I also strongly subscribed to the belief that caffeine should be taken intravenously during those comatose moments of setting exam papers.

Education has come a long way since.

You know things have changed a lot because students nowadays stamped their names from customised rubber stamps rather than the conventional way of writing on their exam question papers.

It's always a mad dash to change and update everything's around you. And Teaching is centric around that static phenomenon.

It's a personal challenge that no sane person will ever contemplate - the Herculean call to inspire others.

I like to believe that I actually enjoy doing what I'm doing. And I think I do. And probably the doctor friends with their jobs too. And the others as well.

It is times like these that you realised you've changed, but in essence you never really do. Because, in spite of the increasing affluence and status and social standings of your career and high-paying jobs, it is really what you are inside that defines the real you. And not the stethoscope around your neck.

Or, at the very least, the red ballpoint pen that you use to mark scripts.

These things in you never change.

Well, maybe except for an astute colleague, who asked me if I had seen a 'perforator' lying around, which I found out later to be a new term for the common hole-puncher.

2006-09-11T15:16:00.000+08:00

Superhero
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A good student of mine gave me this - a belated teachers' day card, with the following sketch of a superhero ( or rogue Jedi, maybe? ) on the front.
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She is an astonishing artist - a young prodigy masquerading her student life as a gifted talent indulging in artistic graffiti on her friends' notebooks and file covers.
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Anyhow, she left this impressionable sketch in my mailslot.

Her superhero character obviously has a penchant for Ben & Jerry's and Star Wars, judging from the BEN shoulder lapel on the denim black jacket and a eco-friendly green lightsaber to splice kitten murderers' heads. Her character's quite a hunk too, what with the wide latissimus dorsi and muscular arms. And ya man, the chiselled features and the half-Cyclops eyewear really upped her character's superhero quotient, so maybe he'll be eligible to enter the Justice League or an Opposition Party or something like that.
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However, it was the way the character posed that kinda reminded me of these :
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And these.
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Kinda like the all-too-typical, superhero machismo-bravado, quintessential superhumans' pose in a roll of honour coverpage probably inked by famed artist Brian Bolland.
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I'd imagine the Rebel Jedi( RJ, for short) fitting in nicely on the cover as well.
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Yup. Nicely, RJ.