catharsis of a virgin undergraduate

我吃得起苦.

2008-06-09T03:25:00.003+08:00

“现实有咒诅，梦里有祝福不能再让懦弱困住
..日子多坎坷，命运有变数只盼久旱逢甘露”

我知道我吃得起苦，但我能衣锦还乡吗？If the monotonically sedentary lifestyle and eating patterns which i'm forced to adopt this semester is anything to go by, 即使不能衣锦还乡，我也多半会‘衣紧’还乡....

GP3 - the pits of despair where legends are made.

我吃得起苦

走出去就有路, 尋見了就有福
擁有的一切都進了包袱
思念是帶不走的
天空疑雲密佈, 心中翻騰起伏
隨江飄搖前途仍模糊
此地會是我, 衣錦還鄉處
漂洋過海我吃得起苦
相信天無絕人之路
現實有咒詛, 夢裡有祝福
有緣同舟風雨共度
頂著烈日當空也定要彌補
不能再讓懦弱困住
日子多坎坷, 命運有變數只盼久旱逢甘露

‘此地會是我衣錦還鄉處’

2008-02-14T20:55:00.003+08:00

舉頭望無盡灰云, 那季節叫做寂寞.
背包塞滿了家用, 路就這樣開始走.

不得不選擇寒冷的開始
留下只擁有遺憾

遠离家鄉不甚唏噓幻化成秋夜
而我卻像落葉歸根墜在你心間
几分憂郁几分孤單都心甘情愿
我的愛像落葉歸根家唯獨在你身邊

肉骨妹 rocks!

2008-01-29T00:27:00.001+08:00

everyone loves a comeback kid fairy tale. and this, other than her acting is probably what makes her such an enduring character.

not everyone is lucky enough to come through a beauty pageant, go into acting and still stay on the payroll despite massacring every role one's played. for every person out there who has ever tried and failed in any endeavour, 肉骨妹 shines a beacon of hope proving that even in an industry as frivolous as this, substance actually counts for something over pure fluff. and that hardwork sometimes do come to fruition.

肉骨妹﹗ 我永遠支持你﹗﹗

老毒物的心声

2008-01-02T21:47:00.000+08:00

江湖上人人都想当萧峰，又有谁愿当游坦之？

而想当杨过的，最终也只配做尹志平。

多谢，李圣杰。

2007-12-31T16:51:00.000+08:00

你们要快乐要天长地久
你们没有错爱是自由
走出这扇门后至少我还有辽阔
你们要快乐要紧紧牵手
你们不幸福我会难过

i can never be a jedi...

2007-10-22T22:54:00.000+08:00

"I could be wholesome
I could be loathsome
I guess Im a little bit shy
Why dont you like me?
Why dont you like me without making me try? "

was it just my irrational exuberance..?

2007-10-08T23:41:00.000+08:00

Time passes frighteningly fast in the absence of any reality checks in the form of exams which are tormenting the hell outta my brethren (or whoever’s left of the pack) back in perth right now. I’m now into the third month of my entrapment in

Singapore

’s biggest rat maze. I guess this routine life, bereft of any milestones or time-markers typifies the monotony of working life. And I suspect that the one thing that’s really keeping me enthusiastic about my work (apart from my misplaced faith that I can actually meet that special someone in the maze) is the fact that I see the finitude in my time in the rat maze, for now at least. Against the sweet temptation of procrastination, I’ve finally lodged my official honours application a good month before the deadline and if all goes well, I should be back in perth by feb.

************************

just last Thursday, I followed a senior to a client meeting to take minutes for an information session to draft the pitchbook for this subsidiary which we were going to sell. The parent company was looking to divest the subsidiary and the management of the subsi was understandably rather apprehensive especially since it’s a rather tightly knitted industry, and interested acquirers will in much-likelihood be a local competitor who is also likely to be a former employer of most of the managers at the subsi - although that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case either. And so the good o’ folks at the subsi who painstakingly built up the business from scratch, naturally became a little emotional about the whole process and the information session gradually side-tracked to an exercise into nostalgia.

My colleague tried to explain to them that a divestment isn’t necessarily a bad thing especially since a strategic buyer from a complementing industry may create new synergies. That didn’t seem to stick. The managers of the subsi were all middle-aged, traditional Chinese uncles. So in an effort to placate their fears, I tried to draw an analogy which had been going through my mind for the past couple of days.

I tried telling them that selling a subsidiary off, is like ‘marrying (betrothing would probably be a more appropriate word) off a daughter’. And that every parent would wish to find the only the best for a husband to their daughter, and likewise, the board (of the parent) will not hang the subsi out to dry and sell them off to a competitor only to see their ‘daughter’ cannibalized. ‘We (my colleague and i), are the matchmakers’, and if they wish to find a good match and ‘maximise the dowry so as to speak’, we need to have more information regard their future strategic plans such that we need not limit the potential buyers to players in the same industry and market. So implicitly, to help themselves from the prospect to getting acquired by a competitor who is likely to discontinue their competing line of product, they should provide more quality information. Well, I’m not too sure if most of them got what I was trying to get at, and I didn’t exactly get the ‘orh…ah…’ response that I would have wanted, but the meeting did proceed reasonably well after that.

*******************

The longer I work, the more parallels I seem to draw between romance and financial advisory and appreciate the uncanny similarities in the machinations of the two.

Pitching
Courtship is like the pitching phase in every engagement. One prepares and sends teasers (how aptly named) on a massive scale in a desperate attempt to source out interested parties, sending vibes to girls who may show only the remotest of interest. Most of them probably can’t be fucked about responding, and if you’re like me, there probably won’t even be any interested parties to speak of. But as a wise-friend once said, ‘dating is a game of statistics, the more indiscriminate you are, eventually you’re gonna find someone somehow’. The same probably goes for the teaser circulation where the number of interested parties would be a direct function of the length of the circulation list.

Once there’re interested parties, you make them sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and then u prepare the pitchbook. This pitchbook drafting phase would probably be akin to a casual dating phase where the NDA represents some form of obligations between parties and the pitchbook itself as a feeble attempt to justify why you one should necessarily be accorded with exclusive dating or mating rights. A corollary of this would of course be the ubiquitous league-tables attached to most, if not all pitchbooks - yet another desperate attempt to tweak chicks into believing that you are the Alpha Male of the pack. You sell yourself to the chicks, and at times, packaging your dignity away too.

Valuations

Just as how there are many who’ve had the luxury to venture beyond dating nor expressions of interest, some will just never secure any mandates for any engagements. For those lucky ones who do, there comes the valuations phase. It’s a mutual thing I guess. Some guys would value girls on their multiples and see how they fare in comparison to the girlfriends of their mates, the metaphorical ‘transactions multiples’, probably better known as ‘the word around the locker room’. While some girls will probably perform a Discounted Cashflow valuation taking into the account the present value of all future income streams from the poor bloke.

It is however, only the truly astute ones will see beyond the surface and make reasonable estimates about the future growth in the value of the individual, decide on whether there will be returns that will exceed the return on equity that one has invested into his/her better half, as well as the unquantified synergies that will be accrued from a blissful union of the two. Unfortunately, astute men & women alike, are probably as few and far between as truly fundamental investors, and we are probably all guilty of this to some degree.

Due Dilligence

For the truly blessed who found themselves a suitable target who is also palatable to the idea of being acquired, or more politically correct, a supposed ‘merger of equals’, there comes the due diligence (due d) phase. This would probably be the prelude to marital commitments just before a couple takes the leap of faith. It’s there, but not quite there yet. Assertions will be challenged, lies will be exposed. Each will be (or rather, should be) granted unfettered access to data room in search of potential alarms and glitches that would nullify the entire deal. That porsche 911 turbo which he claimed to have parked neatly in his garage just happened to be at the workshop when u dropped by for a surprise visit, or that suspicious bulge at her bikini bottom which you never really noticed until you found oestrogen supplements tucked in a discrete corner of 'her' cabinet. Time to call off the deal. Sad but true, important as it is, due d is probably not on the agenda of most couples.

Transaction Integration/ Corporate Restructuring

Statistically, marriages can hardly be considered the final phase of romance. Ditto, mergers & acquisitions. Measures must be undertaken to facilitate the union merger and changes have to be made. Should things stuff up eventually, more changes have to be made, and financial advisors would turn out to be the proverbial marriage consultants trying to make good of a distressed relationship. Some eventually succeed, but for those who don’t, the private equity firms carved an entire industry out of painting themselves as the white knights in shining armour saving desperate/embittered/unfulfilled housewives from a life of misery.

If a married individual can be described as a security delisted from the stock exchange of courtship, then a key lesson would be, always always, maintain a decent book value and fundamentals, cos' you never know when you'll have to be floated again.

*************************************

Most pure financial advisors pride themselves in offering neutral, unconflicted, independent opinion, perhaps to the extent that of being somewhat detached from the scenario. And just like these less sexy stalwarts in corporate courship, many of us will be destined for a life of living vicariously through the mega deals & dalliances of others, always the agent, but never the principal .

We can only dream of being the proprietor of our own courtship, the fundamental-focused counterweights to the frenzied exuberance of this mad rush for love. It won't be a bubble And if only she knew that.

such is the self-delusion of the Virgin Unemployed

2007-07-10T09:26:00.000+08:00

江湖风云出我辈,

一入江湖岁月催,

煌途霸业谈笑中,

不胜人生一场醉'

- 令狐冲

I'm officially part of the unemployment statistic now.

The ambivalence of graduation is probably not unlike getting 逐出师门-ed. That loss of an self-identity as a student which you have defined yourself with since as long as you can remember, the fear of the exploring great unknown, the metaphoric 江湖 where every mis-step could spell the end of your career, the treachery of 武林败类s and hypocrisy of the 岳不群s who would are just waiting to finish you up.

There’s probably more to life than just the rat race and there is certainly an alternative to that, like those middle-aged Korean and Japanese boho backpackers met on the farm who were the absolute antitheses to the East Asian Salariman stereotype. But the more pertinent question is, do we have the courage to head down that uncharted path? Certainly not me...for now..at least...i hope...argh...
Ok, I probably can’t see myself doing that. I’m a just closet, fantasising bohemian with a rat’s brain. Sigh...有多少人能真正的笑傲江湖呢？

It's bad enough that I've failed in finding my 任盈盈, but when can I learn my 独孤九剑 and start pwning?

我的风清扬，你到底在哪里！

Baby steps for now, for life is just an RPG game with no save and load function...

Why Thierry, Why?

2007-06-24T01:39:00.000+08:00

It's a sad sad day for Arsenal FC...

if there's anyone who should be heading out of the Emirates Stadium it's gotta be Peter Hill-Wood, fucking dumb cunt... even if he had to leave, 16 million pounds is wayyy too low. For fuck's sake, it's not like AFC's getting a tax deductible from selling Henry at a discount below his fair value.

Dodgy depreciation or otherwise, Henry tenure will be certainly be appreciated. We can only pray that Arsene won't be next....

I guess this video sums it all

Thanks for the all good times, Thierry. You are truly a legend.

AND FUCK YOU, MOTHERFUCKING INBRED SUBJUGATED SLAVES OF CATALONIA

video killed the radio star

2007-05-20T14:55:00.000+08:00

i was never really a fan of vlogs and i dun think that i've ever really seen any (not even the lonely girl videos) until i stumbled upon this vlog series today while performing my daily obligatory procrastination routine.

well i am not sure if it's just me but i actually have problems navigating my way through myspace blogs (dun they have an archive or something?). as far as i can gather from her blog, the vlogger's natalie, an infinitely cute 20 y/o aussie asian chick from sydney

now that's one good reason why vlogs are to blogs as television is to radio and it probably helps that she does some pretty neat video editing

here's a video of her response to someone dissing about vegemite - a breadspread which sorta like the bovril or marmite we find in singapore

then this redneck comes along and disses her about 'not being aussie' cos' she's asian, to which natalie responses with a sob story about her childhood (well not exactly...)

the risk of sounding p-ado, here's a video of her wearing a cute sch girl uniform ala hit-me-baby-one-more-time

and this is a one about ID photographs

somehow i found natalie's face looking rather familiar and it was then that i realised that she's quite the splitting image of this other singapore blogger - although natalie's considerably cuter i think.

doppelgangers?

enjoy

Gong Jiao OEI! Gong Jiao OEI! Gong Jiao EH BAH!!!

2007-04-28T18:40:00.000+08:00

Tze Kai aka Kristiano Ang delivering Opp Reply

The concept of providence is perhaps the cruellest thing mankind has ever come up with. It tempts us with the belief that there is a destiny awaiting us to fulfil, and crushes us when we are within a whisker of achieving it.

And so it happened. For the third time in 9 years, Cat High reached the grand final of JGs. And also for the third time, we are denied from getting our hands on that elusive shield. It’s a hat-trick that earns no envy from anyone - we are sadly perhaps one of only 3 teams ever to make at least 3 JG finals and the only one with nothing to show for.

It was a rather exciting final and it is probably the first grand final in quite a few years not to feature an incumbent champion on either side. It is precisely this competitive nature of secondary school debating that makes it so exciting to follow as compared perhaps the JCDCs which is essentially a race amongst the top 4 debating colleges.

Congratulations to SCGS for winning their first championship and even though several seniors and I are still firmly unconvinced by the decision, I’m sure nothing I say can take away the value of their win. After all regardless of how objective I can try to sound, I am still a partisan. A championship win is a championship win no matter what people say. So kudos to the champions.

For the record, the motion of the grand final was THBT the war on terrorism has been counter-productive, proposed by SC and opposed by CH. With all due respect to their 3^rd speaker, I was personally, very convinced that we nicked it at 3rd Opp.

I wasn’t tracking the debate but [I must confess fatigue and alcohol aren’t the best of concoctions] from memory, the key contention on the prop side was that

1) The war on terror (WOT) has unnecessarily stigmatised Muslims [racial profiling and Guantanamo Bay]

2) The WOT fed further radicalisation of the Islamic world with its militaristic stance which in turn feeds recruits for the next generation of terrorists

3) People are still dying as a result of WOT (essentially that)

4) The word ‘has been’ connotes that we can only value judge the success and failures of the WOT on the basis of what has happened up till the present. Future benefits accrued are not in the scope.

To which CH responded with

1) How the WOT has shifted its focus from militarism to engagement on the part of the Western world

2) How ever society has its share of radicals/moderates and why there is now an incentive for the moderates to condemn the actions of radicals who give Islam a bad press. And this is together with 1) = mutual engagement.

3) Reduction of the operational capability of terrorists:

i) The destruction of training facilities in terror havens like Afghanistan has reduced the operational capability of terrorist organisations

ii) Concerted global corporation in intelligence sharing and financial monitoring has reduced the capacity and the funding of splinter cells for mayhem.

4) Lives may have been lost, but the institutions in place in the WOT will achieve a more sustainable peace in the long run. ‘Maybe not now, but in the future’.

It appeared to me that the first 2 points of contention were essentially moot and neither team really won it. But the 3^rd and 4^th issues are in my opinion the ones that swung the debate although I didn’t actually heard from the adjudicators what their take on the debate was.

The extent of prop’s analysis to issue #3 could essentially be summed by this fragment from the 2^nd prop’s speech which I quote:

‘I can easily find out how to make a bomb from the internet, buy some detergent and blow myself up in the London MRT (sic). So tell me how likely is this reduction of operational capability going to be successful’

For the record, the 2^nd prop went on not only to the championship, the best speaker of the final, as well as best speaker of series. She’s certainly a stylish speaker and it is a marvellous achievement no less, although personally I was rather surprised that she actually pipped the MGS ~~3^rd~~ 2^{nd [thanks for spotting the mistake, anonymous]}– a much stronger content debater to the top speaker of the series position. It is no certainly mean feat to train someone in debating from scratch. Sometimes in our youth indiscretions, we dismiss what our coaches tell us as being overly critical. But really, at the end of the day, it is the coaches who have our best intentions in mind.

I feel that the issue #3 would have been won by the Opp side. This leaves us with issue #4. CH pointed out how the SC’s stance is placing an unfair burden on the Opp although they didn’t explain clearly why collateral damage is an unavoidable cost in any war. Ben was very right in pointing that it was perhaps an unnecessary burden of proof on our part when we could have done a simpler analysis of what would happen had the WOT reduced the magnitude of terrorist activity.

I could tell you that the SC 3^rd’s analysis to that never extended beyond a statistic bombardment on the number of deaths in the WOT and a huge string of ‘what about this, what about that’ red-herring rebuttals but you would say that I’m biased. So for those who actually watched the grand final, you decide for yourself.

At the end of the day, apparently according to the juniors who spoke to the adjudicators, the decision boiled down to ‘clarity’, whatever that meant, I really have no idea. Unless the decision was made on a strategic evaluation on the inability of Opp to clash with the prop’s substantive, I really cannot see how the proposition could have won the debate on the strength of the analysis of their arguments.

Nevertheless, at a 4-1 split, I guess we can have no complaints although I am still unconvinced by that decision, much less the panel vote. The most attractive and harshest thing about debating is the subjectivity of it all. Who should win a debate? That is a question that often warrants a debate itself.

**************************************************

inside the tunnel

Nine years, Nine motherfucking years. If you stuck around that long only to see the team you support getting thwarted time and again, you would probably understand why I’m sounding like the grouch that I am. I can’t say that I am not disappointed or perhaps embittered. But having said that, it was a phenomenal experience just being able to support gong jiao in a grand final again. It’s been an unbelievable journey for Team 2007. To be able witness your intellectual growth not only as debaters but as young individuals culminating your glorious achievement by reaching the grand final that in itself, is worth every single bit of my trip home, even if I should fail my exam on Monday.

The strength of Cat High debates lies in the strong support of our alumni. I simply cannot name any other debating school that has a support contingent with ex-debaters spanning across 9 generations like ours. We are more than just a debate society. We are a fraternity. It is not just the commonality of vindicated unfulfilled aspirations that binds us, but also the friendship and brotherhood that we’ve developed over the years. That truly, as I was telling Xander, is the best thing that has ever happened to me in joining debating. I hope Team 2007 can truly appreciate that above all trophies, it is the life-long friendships that you make along the way, that is the true prize at the end of this journey.

the 9 generation army

gong jiao supporters

It was heartening to see a very enthusiastic Principal supporting the boys together with the other teachers. Like they all say, if you stick around long enough, you’re eventually gonna catch something. With continued support from the school and the seniors, someday, against another team and with another panel, we will certainly capture that final missing piece of silverware. We may have lost, but we are never defeated. And we will be back.

Dear dictators, you’ll probably have no idea how inspired I am from supporting you guys. The rediscovery of this sense of zeal and passion, the convictions you have towards your aspirations. As we get older, sometimes the cynicism of adulthood really numbs you down, but it was you guys who taught me how to dream again.

Team 2007, VJC invitationals champions. 1st final clash with SCGS. circa Nov 2006

Team 2007, Julia Gabriel Debating Championships A Div 1st Runners-up. Gong Jiao's dominating streak has been ended by Big Blue. [+150 gold]

Thank you so much, Kang An, Arianto, Tze kai , Junhui, Manfred and most of all Kevin for training such a brilliant team. You have made my trip home an exceptionally memorable one. You guys are champions to me in every sense.

公教！(OEI!)

公教！(EH BAH!)

友谊之光

2006-11-20T19:37:00.000+08:00

a dear friend of mine has left perth for good. farewells are perhaps the 2nd shittest things international students have to endure - the no. 1 shittest being the packing and unpacking regime every fucking semester.

i know that she's ambivalent about returning to do her honours year here, and much as we all would love to see her stay, we all know that there are bigger better dreams beyond the academia awaiting her. And for that, i sincerely wish that she can have the courage to just step beyond the unknown and work towards her dreams. That journey may be lonely, perhaps intimidating but it has to be made. For it is that destination and the joy of eventually getting that will be hers, and hers alone.

Anway, with considerations about the state of my pockets over the summer, i will be working on the farms in mt barker from tomorrow till early dec. we're apparantly gonna pluck strawberries which is strange, cos' the only thing that i know about mt barker is that they have chickens which roam the fields, and the city (or at least that's what it's depicted on the famous mt barker freerang chickens commercial) . Somehow i'm concerned about whether the presence of chickens roaming in the fields will turn on our collective lust for DoTA (check out the Roshan vs Chickens video below, it's fucking unbelievable)

Till we pwn again, people in perth, relish in the knowledge that you might well be tasting my sweat the next time u eat a strawberry.

说有万里山，隔着两地遥
不需见面，心中也知晓
友谊改不了。。

Roshan Vs Chickens

end of the exam

2006-11-17T17:39:00.000+08:00

it's finally all over. the greatest tribulation i ever had to face. i'm done with the exams and it's time to enjoy summer! god, was it a tough paper. it's a paper would you would go in knowing that you won't be scoring, but still had to sit for it anyway. regardless of results, or the outcome, i can at least look back at those endless nights of toiling away in GP3, and proudly tell myself, that i've emerged out of it a better man, and it was all worth it in the end.

as the cliche goes, 'it's never about the outcome but the process'. despite all its detractors who dismiss it as nothing more than a loser's self-consolation, i can proudly declare, that i AM now a better man.

gonna miss those rollin' good times back at GP3 now...

DotA 's Meaning of Life

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

and so there it was, another weekend spent defending the frozen throne. at risk of sounding misogynistic, here's a public apology to my dear dictators who introduced me to the dark arts of DotA last summer....your senior here disgraced the lineage of dictators , the entire male gender by getting owned by 2 girls...3 games in a row and ended up selling me, my team mate, and another hapless fren (who cluelessly became the stakes of the grudge match) into slavery.
owning has taken a whole new meaning since...

well anyway, here's how it went: i was using Pudge for the first 2 games and farmed for a Heart of Tarresque and 2 cranium bashers while danny (my teammate) used Bone Clinkz. (danny the xxx, with bone...anyone who knows his nickname should appreciate the irony *hint: jet lee's 2nd last action flick*)

perhaps i overestimated my ability in hooking and always ended up wasting my hook. nair mind. But what was even worse was that i happily went 1 v 1 with the other heroes (slayer and atropos) thinking that i can hook, dismember and rot them in one combo. there was only one problem, i never knew that Black King Bar existed until the end of the game.... and so even for those few time that i succeeded in hooking, and i enthusiastically turned on rot only to end up hurting and killing myself! that has to be the most fucking stupid mistake in the history of DotA ever!

The fourth game was a little better when i reverted back to using a ranged hero Drow and danny used rikimaru. I farmed for an Eye of Skadi. I was told by the guy at the lan shop (whose advice was arguably the critical factor that allowed us to pwn this time, much to the dislike of our female adversaries) that Eye of Skadi's Frost attack does not stack with Drow's Frost Arrows. DoTA experts out there, is this true? cos' from what i read on DoTA portal, it appears that ranged Eye of Skadi CAN stack, so i'm pretty confused in this department.

The Meaning of Life

Well, it may seem that there's barely anything philosophical about DotA (not unless you consider using Zeus the Lord of Olympia as a way of showing your devotion to a higher power).
Yet if you really look at the entire game play, the metaphysicality of it all, the entire game is one big allegory of life. At the risk of sounding like Deepak Chopra, here's my take on life and DoTA.

Lesson 1: Life is IMBA

Protest made about a particular DotA game being IMBA is akin to the oft heard lamentations about 'life being unfair'. Well, life really isn't fair unfortunately. Life is like an -ar game. we can never choose to the circumstance which we are born into. If you are born into a family where your father and grandfather have a penchant for wearing all white on the 9th of August every year in the Lion City, then congratulations, your life is made. Providence has chosen you to be a powerful hero like Lion. You are destined to be an owner - in game and in life, heroes or prime district properties alike...

However if say you're born in a third world country, and your dad's a former drug dealer serving 3 consecutive life sentences without parole and your mom left you in the care of your feeble grandmother while she eloped with the leader of the local militia, then sorry to say, the programmers of life have dealt you a lousy early game hero like say Abaddon. But that is not to say that you're done for for the rest of the game. It's just that you'll have a harder time farming for gold earlier in the game and metaphorically, earlier on in life. For every leaver there is in a game where they've been dealt with a bad hand, there are those like Roland G Fryer Jr. who turned made good with what they have and went on to gain a BEYOND GODLIKE streak in life.

Lesson 2: Farming - Nothing without labour

Regardless of how powerful or crappy your inherent ultimates are, everyone - Lion, Abaddon or Treeant Protector all have to farm. That is the immutable fact of life and game. Not even Paris Hilton can possibly escape this bounding condition (hey, do u seriously think it's easy clubbing every night and living life pretending as if everyone adores you?). The most talented among us have metaphoric ultimates that allow them to farm really quickly to gain the experience for level ups. But even for the also-rans like me and you, there's the alternative of buildling up the right items that will enhance whatever inherent ultimates providence bestowed upon us - however useless it may seem to be. That for you, is education.

Given the myriad of career choices and similarly items to buy, we are more often than not overwhelmed by the sheer magnitute of decision making to do. The last thing we would like to find ourselves doing is to spend our entire live learning one skill and one job, only to be made obsolete due to industry changes and eventually structurally unemployed late on in life. The DotA equivalent would perhaps be farming for a big-ticket item only to find out that your orb effects do not stack =(

Life and games alike, we need to mug to know what sorta education is suited for us, and what items build up to an Aegis of the Immortal. Of course, there too are the selected few like Richard Branson who went Beyond BEYOND GODLIKE in life even without having much of an education. While it may be true education may not be the only way, but it sure its the safest lower bound for the mere mortals like us. It takes a certain element of skill and experience (and some say luck) to make it big without an education. For most others who mistakenly believe that they have it, they end up like my Pudge who was a little too confident about my hooking ability for my own good.

So for those who are bestowed with talents, the next time you are tempted to procrastinate and log on to Battlenet, just remember: even the nukiest of nukers need to farm for an Aganhim Scepter.

Lesson 3: Life is not just about the frozen throne

The relentless aim to destroy the next tower with the eventual desire to land the coupe de grace to the frozen throne is not unlike the rat race in life. Many of us get so enthralled by the rat race that we often forget what life is about. If only we can just take a step back an enjoy the finer things in life, and in the game. What good is life when you cannot have the capacity to enjoy the fruits of your labour? and What good is a game, if you can destroy the throne yet not get to use that Divine Rapier that you've so painstakingly farmed for to embark on a Beyond Godlike pwning streak?

Lesson 4: Nothing Gold Can Stay

The true beauty of DotA unlike say WoW lies in its finite gameplay. It is an excellent representation of nihilistic nature of life. At the end of the day, there are just that many golden taps that you can install in your toilets, and there are just that many items that you can hold in your inventory. So the next time that you're thinking of buying your third Divine Rapier or adding another Phatom to your 304 strong fleet of Rolls Royces, why not spread the love and buy your struggling team mate the Crystalis which he has been farming for all game or sponsor an underprevillaged kid through college?

In the final reckoning, no matter how much gold you have, someday, the game's gonna end anyway. So why not make it a good game for everyone else?

Learning about life, that's DotA for you!

The Market Microstructure of a Love Market

2006-09-28T23:34:00.000+08:00

Market Microstructure of Love Market

by Undergrad, V.

Abstract:

In light of the phenomena of aging demographics and a growing population of overage virgin males across developed nations, there appears to be policy gap between the efforts made by governments in inducing couples to fall in love and the lack of success accrued. Thus, this paper aims to analyse the market place of love in the absence of any governmental intervention. Specifically, it seeks to illustrate the market microstructure whereupon individuals meet members of the opposite sex in a laissez-faire setting.

Underlying assumptions and definitions

Heterosexuality among market participants

It should be apparent from the last line that the framework which this paper is predicated on, assumes heterosexuality among love market participants. i.e. the simplified model of the love market is based upon males seeking females in a love market.

With apologies to homosexual love market participants, given the lack of the expertise on the part of the author on this niche marketplace, as well as the rather volatile nature of the essentially unregulated nature of this over-the-counter (OTC) love market as seen by their allegedly ‘promiscuous and reckless lifestyle’ (Balaji circa 2004), we shall be excluding the homosexual love market structure from this discussion, which will perhaps be of future research interest to individuals with the necessary expertise.

For simplicity, in the initial analysis, we shall assume that a trade can only be conducted bilaterally (monogamous relationships) between one male and one female. Later on, we shall relax this assumption and analyse the impact of block trades which can be conducted multilaterally (other names for this form of trading include two-timing, cheating, polygamy and gangbang).

Bid and Ask ‘prices’

As with conventional market microstructures such as equity exchanges, a trade can only take place when the best bid (highest price which a buyer is willing to buy at) and best asking (lowest price which a seller is willing to sell at). Analogously, we shall be using the relative attractiveness of each individual as a proxy for his or her market price (referred to as ‘price’ hereafter). It is important to note that the love market place represents a double auction in which both buyers and sellers are essentially underlying assets themselves and thus are subject to a valuation place upon them. This point shall be further illustrated in the examples below.

Given the myriad of determinants of attractiveness as well as the endless permutations of weird fetishes which appeal to various segments on love market participants, for simplicity this paper will use an arbitrary measure of generic attractiveness based common denominators of attractiveness to the opposite sex as proxy to price. Such common denominators include physical attractiveness (looks, body shapes etc), sexual attractiveness (e.g., well-endowed crotches in males, and breasts in females), materiality (e.g. 5Cs) as well as personality. While there are possibly endless determinants for the attractiveness of individuals, it has been hypothesised that there may be some commonality in these determinants across markets which can potentially be estimated using existing ‘Attractivness Pricing Models’ such as the conventional CAPM (Carnal Attractiveness and Promiscuity Measure) as well as the various arbitrage pricing models such as the commonly used 3-factor model ( which are: penis-length-to-circumference ratio, bank-balance to estimated-years-to-mortality-ratio, and vital-statistics to IQ-score-ratio), which goes beyond the scope of this paper.

What constitutes a trade?

The characteristics of a ‘trade’ completed is also contingent on the individual motivations to trade on the part of individual participants who use the love market to solve various problems which may or may not originate from the love market place itself. The various motivations to trade and desired end of trading are plenty. They may include (but not limited to) factors such as amelioration of loneliness, venting of sexual frustration, finding a marriage partner, finding an activity partner/domestic partnership, desire to replicate the on-screen romance depicted in the latest Korean drama etc, etc. It would be therefore conceivable say that a ‘trade’ in the love market may not necessarily be analogous to a ‘coincidence of wants’ as illustrated in conventional economics when supply and demand coincide. For example, it is very possible that a male market participant who aims to use the love market to seek a female counterpart to act out his wildest sexual fantasy may eventually end up ‘trading’ and finding a female who simply wants to ‘talk, hug and cuddle’. Given the inexhaustible extenuating circumstance underlying the motivations for each individual market participant, the only meaningful inference that a trade simply the metaphoric equivalent of the oh-so-ambiguous ‘getting together’. What exactly underlies this, is probably best left to the imagination of you, the reader of this paper…

How Trade is conducted

Let us first assume that in a love market where market participants are only motivated by materiality. For example, Ah Beng who drove, Ah Lian out on a date in his midnight blue Supra complete with full body kit, will experience a surge in his attractiveness relative to other competing male participants as valued by Ah Lian. Consequently this is Ah Beng’s ‘bid-price’ in the love market representing his intention to go into a trade with Ah Lian’s underlying assets. Whether or not a trade will occur depends on the reservation price or ‘ask-price’ which is the minimum terms that is sufficient to persuade Ah Lian into willing to be the counter-party to Ah Beng’s trade. Should Ah Lian’s asking price be just a Honda Civic, Ah Beng’s trade would be more than sufficient to compensate Ah Lian’s ask price. Therefore, a trade will occur. However, should Ah Lian’s ask price be a BMW 7 series, then a trade will not occur and Ah Beng’s bid will be placed behind the market.

We shall also assume that leveraging is possible thus there can be temporal displacement of prices away from the ‘fundamental values’ of individual market participants which represents their intrinsic worth as an individual. Thus using the previous example, suppose that Ah Beng had in fact borrowed the Supra from his loan-sharking colleague, and fooled Ah Lian into believing that he owned the car. Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) tells us that all information pertaining to an asset will be reflected in its price. Therefore, despite his lie, Ah Beng would experience a temporarily surge in his stock value (price). However, as predicted by the Information Cascading argument in the EMH, eventually, through her gossip network, Ah Lian will soon find out that Ah Beng did not own the Supra but in fact rides a Super4, then Ah Beng will experience a mean-reversal of his stock price equivalent to all similar male participants who rides a Super4, which is also the true fundamental value/price of Ah Beng..

Double Auction and simplifying assumption of unilateral auction

That was a simplistic illustration of a unilateral transaction in which Ah Beng was solely the buyer-side of the transaction while Ah Lian was solely the seller-side of the transaction. In actuality, trades are a bilateral and represent a two-sided auction in which both market participants are valued as assets. Hence, not only is Ah Lian valuated as an asset by Ah Beng (as illustrated in the example above), Ah Beng too, is valuated as an asset by Ah Lian on his worthiness to entice her into being the counter-party to the trade he initiated. Therefore, in this respect, Ah Beng’s bid price also represents the stock price/value of himself. Using the same example, let’s say that the only determinant of the price of female participants is the size of their cleavage, and Ah Lian has a pair of bona fide size 36D tits. Let’s further assume that the market consensus is that a pair of size 36 D tits has the equivalent value to a midnight blue Supra with full-body kit. Therefore as buyer, Ah Lian would have thought that her bid price (of size 36D tits) has matched the ask price of Ah Beng (in his capacity as a seller) of a Supra, and thus completing a trade with him.

In this case, Ah Lian who traded with Ah Beng believing that he is worth a Supra but has in fact a fundamental value of a Super4, is said to have ‘lost money’ in the marketplace since she entered into a trade receiving less than what she had expected to receive to compensate her for selling. Ah Beng on the other hand, is said to have profited from the trade as a buyer, but experienced mean-reversal in his stock price as an asset holder. Ah Lian is thus said to have suffered from Ex-Post regret, which will be discussed subsequently.

However, to facilitate the ease of discussion, with apologies to female readers, I shall hereafter limit our discussion to a unilateral auction with the simplifying assumption that all male participants represent buyers while female market participants represent sellers. The motivation of doing so apart from the obvious laziness on the part of the author, is also to facilitate a more basal modelling of courtship in the mammalian kingdom where more often than not, the male species are the initiators of courtship.

Conclusion:

The issues discussed above set ups a pseudo-scientific framework to conduct an analogical analysis of love in a laissez faire environment. Further illustration will probably be contingent on the level of interest generated by this entry which -stemmed out of sheer boredom- and whether this author is able to overcome his procrastination over the final six weeks of his disastrous semester. And finally, to conclude this pretentious exercise in finals revision, and only if you happen to be blog-surfing instead of doing your assignment, HAPPY 23^rd BIRTHDAY, PUNDEH!!!!

all i want for christmas is....

2006-09-22T04:53:00.000+08:00

i don't mind the fact that i do not have a beautiful body, and nor do i mind the fact that i do not have a beautiful face...but WHY COULDN'T I FUCKING HAVE A BEAUTFIUL MIND!!!

FUCK YOU, Ito
FUCK YOU, Markov
FUCK YOU, Wiener the Wiener
FUCK YOU, Orstein
FUCK YOU, Uhlenbeck
FUCK YOU, fucking pricks with undescipherable names to go with your undescripherable equations
And FUCK YOU, every motherfucking one of you who invented weird ass mathematics

...
sigh...书到用时方恨少...

if only i didn't skip all those maths lessons back in college....

virgin undergrad, fool's courage under fire.

rest in peace o' crocodile hunter

2006-09-04T18:38:00.000+08:00

Aussie icon Steve Irwin , better known as the crocodile hunter, was killed earlier today in a freak accident after being stung by a stingray in his chest.

It was a pretty ironic way to die considering how he was actually built his fame on frolicking with crocodiles. Apparantly, he died while filming a segment for his eight year old daughter's tv series.

Well, there goes yet another TV icon from the collective childhood of we gen y-ers. And i thought i wasn't that old. May he find eternal glory in TV heaven alongside the likes of the yokuzuna, owen hart and eddie guerrero, and remembered in the fondest of memories of anyone who was a kid of the early nineties.

Rest in peace, o' crocodile hunter

GABRIEL BATISTUTA!!!!!

2006-08-13T23:22:00.000+08:00

HOLY SHIT! I never knew Gabriel Batistuta lives in PERTH!!!! Fuck, apparantly I'm like the last to find out!

THE player to buy wayyy back in all the incarnations of the Fifas/CMs up till 2002, residing in close proximity to a mere mortal like me??? Apparantly the word on the street is that he lives in East Perth.

For the Gen Z kids who are probably more acquainted to the Ronaldinhos and Rooneys now, Batigol was the Hernan Crespo of his day...oh hangon, he actually played alongside Batigol. Well anyway, he's those player who in his prime could have easily make a world record transfer fee to some of the more glamourous club sides every other season. Yet it wasn't his technical abilities, nor his predatory instincts that truly distinguished himself from the also-rans. Batigol could have faded into obscurity like Christian Vieri had he gone the other way, transfering to a different club every other season. But it was the loyalty that truly made him a great. Through it all, he stuck with Fiorentina even when they got relegated to Serie B, and it was arguably his presence that inspired the rest of the squad and averting a mass exodus of players - a reality which Juventus now has to come to terms to. In this era of the beautiful game, tainted by commerical interests, and bankrupted by underhanded means (which even his former club wasn't innocent of), Batistua is indeed an exceptional footballer who deserves so much more than that sole Scudetto he won with Roma. They even have a statue erected in Florence in his honour for goodness sake!!

Joel and Jeremy made an awesome suggestion of inviting him to join their team for the next SSS soccer tournament. Unlikely as it is, IF that ever happens, now THAT would be a damn Jose+10 moment. I can just imagine this one James oval...

Jose : Joel Aligirisamy
Pedro : Jeremy Pelaya
Jose :GABRIEL BATISTUTA
Pedro: Batistuta? *ROFL*
(Batistuta walks onto pitch)
Pedro: HUH! ????

Disrespectful as it sounds, and despite my atrocious level of stamina and non-existent footballing skills, i would probably get the biggest kick of my life (the consequence of 'kick' becoming a pun is too horrific to imagine...) if i get to shout, ' Tu, al banquillo!' to Batistuta...

Someday someday...that might just happen. For 'IMPOSSIBLE IS NOTHING'.

神!!!

i heart SG

2006-08-08T23:59:00.000+08:00

You.

Who lubricate our lands with your monsoon moisture.

The humidity, unsheltered by the shaven tropical rainforests.

Which made way for the throbbing skyscrappers, erected all around your twin mounds of steel and glass in your honour.

Sitting upon that old ditch, that mermaid who only spits and not swallow. Made in your maiden image. Bearing testament to those decadent youthful days, where so many came through -the river of life, they call it. which gave birth to an entire nation.

You are beautiful.
You are the uber MILF.

HAPPY 41st BIRTHDAY, SINGAPORE!!!!!!

(motiff ripped from moldiefeet)

unfair? fair dinkum!

2006-06-27T03:06:00.000+08:00

and so it happened. the eastern hemisphere's final represenative in the 2006 FIFA world cup has been eliminated in the dodgiest of circumstances. it doesn't get any worse than this, going 1 man up, dominating possesion through-out the entire match, only to be eliminated by a dubious penalty decision 30 secs from time. Italy 1-0 Australia. fuck.

but wat was more disgusting was the manner in which the Italians celebrated the penalty decision. it may be true that Grosso probably wasn't looking for a penalty decision when he went down under (pun unavoidable) a rather innocuous challenge from Lucas Neill in the box (he did touch the ball, and there really wasn't much contact with Grosso). yet just fucking look at the way Grosso kneels down and kisses the pitch while Totti and gang hugs him giving him a pat on the back.

it was as if they were celebrating a goal. i mean, come on lor, even if u were really fucking diving like Shevchenko in the Tunisia match, u fucking better just tiam tiam and take the penalty, and dun action behdeh so much.

fucking cheebye. sportsmanship is thrown to the dogs. that was in my opinion the lowest point in the world cup. celebrating a dive. PUI! KNN! absolutely disgusting. 有没有更恶的!

for all the shit about those 4 reds and 16 yellows, at least the portugeuse played with real passion, fighting the dutch looking at them in the eye while the dutch reciprocated with the occassion elbow to the eye.

to be fair, the socceroos paid for their lack of any sense of urgency. how often do u see a team strolling in counter attack. it was arguably one of their better performances, though u can't help but to feel that it was their gameplan to play into ET.

Oh well, there goes the remainder of any tinge of any quasi-partisanship i have towards any team in the world cup finals. i really dun think it's gonna be anything more than that in any time soon, if Goal 2010 is any credible yardstick to go by... haiz...

a cold day in hell

2006-06-17T06:30:00.000+08:00

this is just bizarre.

if the accuracy of Real's weather forecast or the Perth Weather Centre is anything to go by, Perth has just hit -0.1 degrees celsius! it might possibly be the coldest day in perth ever recorded.

Just the kind of stuff that i need feeds my enthusiasism in my impending triple consecutive whammy...

all nighters + self-imposed world cup deprivation = ?

2006-06-07T23:33:00.000+08:00

= exams

Fixture congestion (3 papers on 3 consecutive days) + undone tutorials = PANIC

Panic X 5 Subjects = HYSTERIA

HYSTERIA -> infinity: tempts procrastination

procrastination = not giving a fuck

not giving a fuck = fucked

FUCKED X 5 Major requirements = ROYALLY FUCKED

I feel the fire...Do you?

gutted

2006-05-18T05:05:00.000+08:00

.. .

Victoria Concordia Crescit

2006-05-17T17:07:00.000+08:00

You know how somewhere throughout our lives, there're one of those moments that you'll find yourself remembering every minute detail, every little tingling emotion you felt, and it's almost as if everything's frozen in time when u reminsce years and years from now.

This could be one of those special nights in my life. And there's just one itzy bitzy determinant variable the separates defines this threshold between a night that i will remember for years to come and a night that would otherwise (hopefully) fall into the abyss of selective amnesia.

Nope, it isn't sex nor my virginity that's at on the line. It's far more important than that. It's Arsenal's virginity at stake -the inaugral chance to pop the proverbial European Cup cherry.

For far too long has the holy grail of European football eluded the only premier European football club. This is true, especially when u consider that Arsenal is the only one of 4 clubs in the G14 that has never won the European cup.

The same is however, true for true for the-only-other-team-that-i-feverently-support. That only-other-team, is without a doubt the only premier debating institution that has never strike gold.

I've probably mentioned it somewhere here before, that i've always personally associated that-only-other-team with Arsenal and perceived it to be its non-football equivalent (albeit with less silverware to show for). It was back in 1999 when i found the path to my spiritual development by adopting Highbury as my football mecca. It was also that year when i was part of that very only-other-team. Back then, despite riding on a double success in the 97/98 season, Arsenal found themselves playing the perennial bridesmate to the uglier bride (read: Manchester United) for several consecutive seasons. The same happened for that-only-other-team, reaching the national finals both 99' and 00', and the semis in 2003, but never winning it.

So 2004 came, and while Arsenal was blazing a trail of invincibility in the EPL while the-only-other-team achieved unprecendented success in winning our first silverwares in other competitions, the bid to attain for their respective holy grails (European Cup and JGs) ended to no avail. Nevermind the fact that both teams were by far the most stylish and competitive teams in their respective arenas.

So then came 2006. Against all odds, both teams made unprecedented progress in their renewed crusade for the holy grail. Arsenal making past the quarter-finals of the Champions League, and the-only-other-team-that-i-feverently-support breaking through the JG preliminary rounds undefeated and as the top ranked team of the tab.

Yet, as providence dictates it wasn't to be for the dictators.

By some outrageous abdomination-of-an-adjudication, the only-other-team was eliminated while Arsenal found themselves going on to take a place in their first the European Cup final tonight.

For all the parallels i draw, this was one significantly amomaly in my hopelessly unfounded hypothesis. I can't help but to wonder what it would have been for that-only-other-team had the adjudicating abdomination not presided over that fateful quarter-finals match. But of course, being the hoplessly irrational trend charter that i am, there's the potential David Gabriel's football equivalent in the form of the linesman who posed a picture in a Barcelona shirt who would have presided over tonight's European Cup final if not for UEFA's intervention.

If there were three Arsenal players whom i could use to describe the-only-other-team-of-2006, they would have been Jens Lehmann, Cesc Fabregas and Thierry Henry. Who are they respectively? Well go figure it out yourselfs my intelligent dictators.

If there was indeed any tenable parallel between my two favourite teams in the greater scheme of things, for tonight at least, let there be a divergence of fate and allow Arsenal achieve what it has so belatedly deserved to achieve. Perhaps it is only when the independent variable ends a century of heartbreaks, can the dependent variable truly end 8 generations of disappointment. And perhaps football success, is afterall, a leading indicator of debating success.

Victoria Concordia Crescit
With Harmony Comes Victory

'Good O' Arsenal, we're proud to say that name, While we sing this song we'll win the game!'

PARIS! HERE WE COME!!!!

2006-04-26T04:42:00.000+08:00

YES!!! YES!!!! OMG!!!!!! FINALLY, ARSENAL HAS MADE IT TO EUROPEAN CUP FINAL!!!!

MAN!....wooh....

Shit, this is way more ecstatic than sex...not that i've had any..but definitely. OMG.

It was almost one way traffic tonight, and Villareal probably had like 10+ shots on goal while arsenal had none, save for a chance by Henry at the last minute or something.

While i have huge respect for Villareal, i mean u just gotta have respect for a club who was playing in the 2nd division a couple of seasons ago, and debuting in a Champions League semi-final now, but seriously, it simply wouldn't be fair if they jumped ahead of the queue and go on to the Final at Arsenal's expense. Especially when Jose Mari went down WAYyy too easily under Clichy's challenge..wait or was it Toure...well anyway, man... what a match.

At like 88th minute or something, Villareal won a penalty thanks to Jose Mari (that faggot looking guy with long hair who wears some pseudo-hippy string-bandana). Man, what a diver. He's probably hoping to get targetted by Jose Mourinho or something. That cheating bastard. Well anyway, Riquelme was the one who took the penalty, and i swear, i've never felt so fucking intense while watching a match. Man, i felt like a teenager all over again, i couldn't even bring myself to curse, it was like, man...seeing every whatever you've hoped for hanging on a thread. I just couldn't help punching the ground screaming 'IT ISN'T FAIR!'And it truly isn't, had Riqulme put it at the back of the net. And had he scored, it would have been a huge psychological boast for Villareal, and given the broadside they unleashed in the match, they might well have won the ET. That would have been like like JGs all over again. Seeing the only other team that i feverently support crash out on a penalty through a dive, can only be analagous to crashing out of a competition on a split decision by David 'Fucktard' Gabriel.

But he din. And THANK GOD HE DIDN'T. Lehmann pulled off a superb save to deny Riquelme the goal. You really have to feel for someone like Riquelme. He is the heart of the Villareal team, and if i wasn't an Arsenal fan, that expression of his, that indescribable WTF sorta feeling...your heart really would go out for him. Missing a crucial penalty, it's probably one of those things that will haunt you for the rest of your life. Bless him, i truly wish him peace.

And it happened, the inaugural Champions league final in the history of Arsenal Football Club.

PLEASE... Supreme Divine Being, Glorious Monothestic Creator, Alien Intelligence, Xenu....Please Let it Be..LET IT BE!!!! OH LET IT BE ARSENAL'S SEASON OF GLORY!!!!!I've waited 8 years as a gooner for this chance to see Arsenal's etched in the eternal glory of the European Cup, and i'm sure many many many other gooners throughout the world have waited for this moment ALL THEIR LIVES! Just, let it be.

Shit, i'm way too delirious...i really need some sleep...still got BE!!! Business FUCKING Econometrics!!! ARGGGHHhhh.. BUT I SHALL AND I WILL SURVIVE BE! just as how Arsenal survived Villareal. YES!

Heil!!!Heil!!!

What is the path of the righteous man?

2006-04-15T14:40:00.000+08:00

I've been having this pented-up angst building in me over the past 2 weeks. For as far back as the functionality of my memory serves me, i've never mugged so fucking hard before. It's not the sleep deprivation, nor the fucked up body clock that i've clocked up.

It is the sad realisation that the 4 week mugga-thon is just the beginning of a lifetime of repetitive monotony. Be it mugging or working. It's the same treadmill in a different form.

My life as i know thereafter, will be an perpetually compounding accrual of sunken costs until it is effectively beyond any autonomous choice.

Everything just seems to be an infinite uphill climb. It's like watching Mercer climb the hill on the TV screen of the empathy machine, but only to roll down all over again when he's about to reach the peak. This sporadic jaded pessimism it seems, is the true common demnominator among all of humankind, and it is perhaps no suprise that the relinquishment on any self-belief to autonomy, and submission before providence is the basis of virtually any religion. If you are wondering wtf mercer is and where that ang moh blogger got his nick from, it's from this book. At least i can feel some solidarity in the knowledge that someone else in this world is feeling as shitty as i do now...

All that crap we mug about Efficient Markets Hypotheses that statistically bombards any delusions we have about of beating the market. Life it seems, is the epitome of the efficient market. For we are all price-takers in this market, powerless in the determination of the path of our fluctuations.

There can be no information assymetry in the Efficient Market of Lives, for no one knows for sure what the fuck will happen, and perhaps i could find cold comfort in a -possibly false- assumption that everyone else my age is as ambivalent as i do about our futures. Perhaps more than the Famas or Modiglianis of our time, no one elucidates the EMH of life more eloquently than Forest Gump's mother herself. For 'life is like a box of chocolates, you'll never know what you're gonna get' .

Well, all that we can do, is to continue the mercer-esque struggle hoping that we can be the few lucky ones who are arbitrarily assigned by providence to beat the market.

The SAF provides us with many useful mantras in life. "Don't think, just do."
I say hell, yeah. And that is why i MUST continue mugging despite this obvious deliriity from sleep deprivation.

For because we can (remote possibility nonetheless), we must..

**************************************************************************************

Ok, so perhaps this isn't exactly the most appropriate thing to post on Holy Saturday..but really, watching desensitising violence is an awesome why to deal with pent up frustration. And watching, and re-watching, and re-re-watching Pulp Fiction, is a sure way to feel refreshed and movitated all again.

Did you know that when asked the obligatory question about my ambition on my 5th (or was it 6th) birthday, i told my parents and extended family that i wanted to be a mob chief when i grew up? Sigh..the frivolities of youth

Jules: Do you ever read the bible, Brett?

Brett: Ye..ss..

Jules: There's a passage i got memorised, seems appropriate for the occasion.
" The path of the righteous man, is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish, and the tryanny of evil man. Blessed is he, who out of charity and goodwill, shepards the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brothers' keeper and the finder of lost children.

And I will STRIKE DOWN UPON THEE, with GREAT VENGEANCE and FURIOUS ANGER ON THOSE WHO ATTEMPT to POISON and DESTROY MY BROTHERS. And you will know, that MY NAME IS THE LORD, WHEN I LAY MY VENGEANCE UPON THEE!'

Brett: I just want you to know how sorry we are about how fucked up things got between us and Mr. Wallace. When we entered into this thing, we only had the best intentions...

(Jules turns to guy on couch and shoots him)
Jules: Oh, i'm sorry, did i just break your concentration? Sorry, i din mean to do that. Please continue. I believe you were saying something about 'best intentions'.
(Brett is scared shitless)
Jules: Whatsamatter? Oh, you were through anyway. Oh Well, allow me to retort. What Marsellus Wallace looks like?

Jules and Vic - Ezekiel 25:17, Southpark style in some foreign language.

An ABSOLUTE gem, Ezekiel 25:17 in CANTONESE!

'Chink' Jules: 他象不象一个八婆阿?

'Chink' Brett: 么阿?

(Jules shoots Brett in the shoulders)

'Chink' Jules: 他象不象一个八婆阿?!!!

'Chink' Brett: 呜象

'Chink' Jules:那你点解'朴'他好象个八婆那呢?

'Chink' Brett:我毋阿...

'Chink' Jules:你有阿. 你有'朴'过他. Marcellus Wallace 呜钟意被人'朴', 除非是他的老婆.

Alright, so i guess it's back to mugging for me. Mid sems: 2 down, 3 to go..

Happy Easter Holidays to all of you.

Have you trodden on the path of the righteous man lately?

Go Gunners!!

2006-04-06T16:29:00.000+08:00

finally there's something to cheer about, after the pre-mature conclusion to the season of the only other team that i feverently support.

For the first fucking time in Arsenal's 120 year history, the Gunners have finally reached their first European Cup semi-final after defeating Juve over two legs.

The only European final which i've ever watched in my 8 years as a gooner was that disappointing UEFA cup final defeat against Galatasaray back in 00'. Those fucking cheats. They pushed their way to the top through pure psychological intimidation, and it was that year where a couple of Leeds fans were stabbed (one fatally) by those crazy Turkish fans and i think a couple of Gooners got stabbed too. It's stuff like that, that really fucks up the team morale, and it was probably no surprise that the final was eventually settled in a penalty shoot-out.

Now, if Arsenal go through the semis against Villareal (which seems to be the more probable outcome on paper at least), chances are it would be a Barca-Arsenal showdown. There's every reason for Gooners to relish in that showdown, beside the prospects of mouth-watering football.

I hated Barca back in 00' when they were effectively acting like the Chelski of the Primera Liga before that dubious honour went to Real Madrid when Florentino Perez took over as chairman and started his madness 'Championship-Manager-like' fantasy purchases.

I hated Barca becos' they bought Marc Overmars and Emmanuel Petit. It was a huge heartbreak since it was my adolation for Overmars that made me follow Arsenal in the first place.

I hated Barca cos' Ronaldinho pipped Henry to become the World Player of the Year.

But i also kinda liked Barca cos:

i. if not for the sale of Overmars and Petit, Henry and Pires would never have gone to Highbury

ii. Barca is the symbol of Catalan pride and is perhaps one of those few heavy-weight football clubs that remain truth to the community spirit that they're founded on cos' it's apparantly not a PLC and the it's is almost exclusively owned by the community in Catalonia. ie. equity is held by thousands, if not millions of small shareholders.

iii. They're a fucking good team to use in Winning Eleven 8.

Grudge match aside, this is probably Denis Bergkamp's final season at Highbury and if Arsenal do indeed make it to the final, that match would most probably be his swansong for Arsenal. For someone who has devoted 11 years of his professional career to Arsenal, he really deserves a glorious curtain call.

Pragmatically, that long await piece of silverware is probably what it takes to convince Thierry Henry to commit his future to Arsenal. We lost one captain last season, and we're staring up at Spurs' butts on the league table. I hate to imagine how life will be like withou Henry.

'Victoria Concordia Crescit'.
'Victory grows out of harmony.'"

'Good O' Arsenal, we're proud to say that name.
While we sing this song we'll win the game!
While we sing this song we'll win the game!'

我们的歌在哪里

2006-03-30T00:42:00.000+08:00

我刚从蔡淳佳的网页上得知, <<水草三重唱>>中的黄元成北京因为高血压，心脏病爆
发，往生了. 享年才43岁.

记得小时候, 总爱乱抄父母亲的卡带. 当时(80 年代末)风靡新谣的他们收藏了不少
梁文福的卡带. 那些卡带内除了有梁文福本人演唱的歌曲之外, 也有许多像洪邵轩
, 颜黎明, 水草三重唱, 黄惠祯等新谣前辈们的歌. 而当时除了梁文福的歌曲之外
令我映象最深刻的, 便是水草三重唱所演唱的<<阿ben阿ben>>.

说真的, 水草三重唱的<<阿ben阿ben>>其是并不是特别好听, 但也能称得上嚷嚷上
口. 只不过我老妈曾对我说过<<阿ben阿ben>>这首歌被所有的本地广播电台禁播,
那才引起了我的好奇心.

也许那就是所谓的'禁果心态' (Forbidden Fruit Syndrome)
吧. 政府禁止的玩意儿, 肯定是好料! 所以当时的我一遍又咿遍的在我阿姨出国前
留下的二手Walkman 上重播着<<阿ben阿ben>>. 但似乎总听不出那首歌究竟是'错'在
哪里.

它歌词既没有粗话, 又不'涵湿'. 我始终还是搞不明白到底是什么要让政府
禁播<<阿ben阿ben>>. 一直到老妈告诉我说政府是因为怕新加坡人听了<<阿ben阿ben>>的
歌词会变得懒散才禁播这首歌, 我才'Chey...' 的放弃追问究底.

之后到了90年代, 新谣疯刮过了, 水草三重唱解散了. 三位成员也似乎消声匿.一
直到大约94年吧,那时小五的我开始听中文流行歌曲. 在那孙燕姿还 '不知道躲在那
里'的年代, 陈洁仪可说是第一位红透亚洲的新加坡歌手(严格上来说, 巫启贤应该
算是马来西亚人吧). 而随着陈洁仪一起频频曝光的幕后制作人, 便是水草三重唱
里的许环良. 之后, 许南盛也好像转行上电视当"早安您好'的主持人. 唯独没有黄
元成的消息.

我记得大约是在2003年吧, 我好象在Esplanade 举办的华艺节新谣演
唱会上看到黄元成与其他俩位水草三重唱的成员在台上一起演唱. 我当时也不知道
他竟然是海蝶唱片公司创办人, 直到我读到他死讯的报导.

一位执着于广新加坡中文乐坛的新谣前辈, 就这样的去了.

有人说新谣嘛, 其实并没有消失过, 只不过为了让它'国际化',打入亚洲市场, 不得
不把新谣那独特的民谣曲风流行化. 金钱, 似乎变成了文化进化的前提.

十多年后的今天, 新加坡乐坛确实是有着骄人的成级. 从陈洁仪, 许美静到孙燕姿
,阿杜或林俊杰, 无论是歌手或是音乐人, 个个都让我们这颗'小红点'在中文歌坛占
有一席之位.

但既使你仔细的听, 你能分辨得出林俊杰与周杰伦的曲风吗? 你能不
能在一听之下便能听得出或雀跃的说 '那是首本地创作!' 中文音乐同性化, 未必是
一种好事.

英文乐坛也有曲风之分, 像 'hip-hop, R&B, Jazz, Folk-songs, Pop, Rock, or even
sub-genres like Punk Rock'. 难道真正的新谣, 果真无法在中文流行音乐领域内
占有自己的一片天空? 林俊杰能当新加坡的周杰伦, 水草三重唱或梁文福就不能
成为新加坡的Peter Paul and Mary, 或 Bob Dylan 吗?

或许把一切文化遗产商业化, 以金钱来衡量, 本身便是一种新加坡独有的文化.
牛车水要翻新是为了让游客参观. 当业余的民歌歌手? 没出息. 一定要成为流行歌
曲的制作人, 或转行当大学教授才算有出息!

或许再过二十年后, 新加坡也许会变成中文歌坛的命脉. 但到时的新加坡年轻人又
是否会问起他们前辈在40年前所问的同样一句话 - <<我们的歌在哪里?>>.

先驱, 您安息吧.

sometimes, the true chamipions don't always win / 天下谁的第一又如何

2006-03-28T01:32:00.000+08:00

seven years on, the same old story...desite breaking as the top ranked team for the Julia Gabriel preliminaries, the dictators were denied a win in the quarter finals against NYGH and the journey to the frozen throne ended.

i said 'denied a win' rather than 'lost', cos' by every credible account -dictator seniors, a national debater who was the split-adjudicator, and even the coach and teacher of Nanyang (who actually went up to Andre telling him how she felt we should have won) - even though it was a close debate, no one could actually fathom how cat high could have lost. and perhaps it is no surprise that the chief pannelist is none other than our good o' mr. david gabriel yet again, by giving an adjudication debrief which mentioned nothing about the analysis of the issues, but rather dropping the thermo-nuclear bit about how the debate was lost solely on style and - wait for this- decorum cos' he didn't liked the way the dictators flagged the NY speakers down when they rejected points-of-information and thus deducted a fucking 0.5 points per flag.

Now, a debate cannot possibly be lost SOLELY on style becos' there by every adjudication guideline be it WSDC or WUDC or Australs, style is not a measure of how stylish or flamboyant a speaker is, but rather the diction, the clarity of the speaker's enunciation. As such, a speaker with a poor style would definitely have his/her content marks severely dogged for the simple reason that the lack of clarity in expressing a point makes it impossible for the adjudicator to understand the logic behind the argument he/she is verbalising. A poor style mark goes hand in hand with a poor content mark. So to say that a debate is lost solely on style while both teams are tied on content is utter bollocks. Moreover, especially when u consider two of the dictators - Bryan and Tze Kai were ranked Best Speaker of Tournament in the VJC Invitationals and NUS Challenge Shield respectively, i really cannot understand how a team of such composite could have conceivably lost 'solely on style'.

Next, flagging. All i can say is that it is the modus operandi of many teams in singapore, and no less, the national team itself since 2000. That i can recall, becos' i was told off by Ben who coached VJC then for refusing to sit down after my POI was flagged. The rationale behind flagging is that while there is no real detriment to a speaker who's being flagged, a speaker on the floor when constantly badgered by a team who offers too many POIs would be at the significant disadvantage that could most likely break down the flow of the speaker's speech.
A failure to understand this, further questions mr gabriel's capacity to handle secondary school debate adjudication at the top division.

essentially i really don't know which is more ridiculous. the fact that he made an issue out of a non-issue while ignoring the real issues, or the fact that he ACTUALLY bothered to count the number of flags made....

seven years...SEVEN FUCKING YEARS...and when we are finally getting close to that elusive frozen throne, we're denied by a self-important bona fide noob who passes himself off as a qualified adjudicator. would it surprise you that mr gabriel is in fact the husband of the tournament sponsor, mrs julia gabriel. that probably puts everything into perspective and answers one of the most oft asked question in secondary school debates 'why on earth is he still adjudicating???' i recall better times back in 99' when mr G was the chairperson and not an adjudicator of our grand final. now wouldn't that be nice...

and if YOU, David Gabriel are reading this, i hope it makes you happy to know that your perrenial desire to get a kick outta ur self-funded an ego trip has destroyed the collective dream of 7 fucking generations of dictators. you on you mate, good on ya..

Initially I wanted to put Linkin Park's 'In The End' up the blog cos' apart from the opening line 'It starts with one thing I don't know why It doesn't even matter how hard you try'
there's this line in the bridge that goes

' I’ve put my trust in you
Pushed as far as I can go
And for all this
There's only one thing you should know '

which would be the perfect song for Mr Gabriel. He betrayed the trust debaters had in the competancy of presiding adjudicators. and the 'one thing which he should know' was what i wrote a couple of paragraphs up.

But then i realised, no, even In the End, It DOES MATTER.

Victory or otherwise aside. It was truly the journey that bought back the fondest of memories i had during my debating days. The late night case preps in the orchestra rooms, climbing over the fence to get out of school, fighting around with the drama props we found the store room when we should be prepping the cases, speculating whereabouts in school were the Teos making out when they left us to do our 'more-than-one-hour' case preps. It's shit like this more than the silverware that etched the memories of what i would consider to be the happiest time of my life thus far.

Likewise, i truly hope that the dictators can see the silving lining of it all. the camaraderie you shared, the many rounds of DoTA you played as a team, the intellectual growth you had since you began debating. To say that this is the true prize, is no cliche at all.

Andre, you're intelligent, you know that. Yet it was a pity that your cavalier attitude towards debating previously probably compromised on your technique. Don't make the same mistake in life, treasure every chance that comes along, be it debating or not.

Bryan, you have everything it takes to be a national debater and you certainly have the capacity to be the best debater Cat High has ever produced. Be proud of what you have achieved, and move on from there. A disappointment can only feed your desire to succeed later on in life, not your embitterment. You're stronger than that, i know it.

'Kristiano' Tze Kai, you are an absolute sensation. Don't feel bad just becos' David G told you that your flagging made that you lost the debate for the team. If there's any adjudicator NOT to believe, it's gotta be him. I told you before, you are certainly the most precocious talent Cat High has ever had. You are truly a savant, so please do not let it go to waste. All it takes is that little tinge of cynicism, disillusionment and complacency to take that all away. You will be the core of the team next year, and it's up to fulfilled the unfulfilled dream of 8 generations of Cat High debaters next year.

Thomas, Arianto and Wee Seng, the same goes for you guys. You'll have to take on the unenviable task of fulfilling that elusive dream.

It has been an absolute pleasure being the temp coach for you guys. Playing LAN and trash-talking. You guys made me feel young all over again. And it was an immense honour for me, xander, shawn and all of the seniors accompanying you guys to what's the conclusion of this journey.

sometimes, the true chamipions don't always win.

PS: In case you were wondering about the random chinese name of the post, it's from the lyrics of the Jay Chou's theme song for the Jet Li movie 'Fearless'. 天下谁的第一又如何 roughly tranlates into 'it really doesn't matter who wins eventually'.

in light of cat high's cheena/poor man school stereotype probably didn't play to our advantages in a tournament dominated by preppy indie schools (especially in a round with a clueless adjudicator). hence, it was probably approriate that i indulge in a little cheena-cisation here..which was also why i'm loading the Jay Chou song -my current infatuation - on my blog. an infinitely more inspiring song than the defeatist 'In the End'. Becos' in the end, it really matters.

"
天下谁的第一又如何止干戈我辈尚武德
我的拳脚了得却奈何徒增虚名一个 "

" ....洗涤过的回忆
我记得你骄傲的活下去 "

- <<霍元甲>>, 周杰伦

think without a box

2006-03-22T23:34:00.000+08:00

If only i was as half conscientious when it comes to tutes...

procrastinating since 2 hours ago.

Stuck at level 7 27 32

the bride and a lonely driver

2006-03-12T17:37:00.000+08:00

my bitch

and so it happened. the marriage was consumated. a love that transcends nationality, a romance without the blessings of my parents.

it was really quite an uncanny conincidence that led to me choose her as my bride. during my bride search, i was looking mostly at magnas and lancers which despite their dodgier performance reputations, are (most importantly to me) cheaper cars. Civics while reliable, are relatively pricier. to put things into perspective, a 2000 Lancer goes at about 8k-9k+. A '97/98 civic could easily cost more than 10k which was why i didn't consider a civic to be a viable option initially. then after several failed negotiations with Lancer owners, i decided take a shot at Civics and so i responded to an ad from some guy called Belson who was selling his '94 Civic GLI at $7500. Given his name, his accent (distinctively either Malaysian or Singaporean), and the place which he was staying (which was popular among Curtin students), i could be excused for thinking of him as the stereotypical young undergraduate civic beng owners who did every possible mod to his car. I wasn't expecting a deal initially, quite frankly, and i probably wouldn't have made the trip all the way there if not for the fact that it was very near to the place where i was viewed another Lancer.

And so me and daniel (who is also a fellow civic-owner-to-be) went down to this Belson's place in Canning Vale. The garage was open and so we actually saw the car even before we knocked on the door. Daniel's first impression was like 'Eh, this car looks damn familiar...it looks like my sister's car'. True enough, when Belson came out, Daniel confirmed that he was the person whom he sold the car to about a year ago (since his sister has left perth then). Unbelievably, we were actually talking about Daniel's sister's civic on our way there, and Daniel was commenting how the person who bought his sister's car got a damn good deal cos' she was desperate to sell and so the car was sold at $6500 way below the market price of about $8000+ a year ago.

that broke the information asymmetry and that was perhaps the defining reason that eventually shaped the deal. Even Belson himself was quite surprised at the coincidence and was telling me how that i'm actually fated to buy the car. He did some modifications to the car, most notably, the change of tires and the sports exhaust and eventually a deal was made at $6700. It wasn't a fantastic deal, but well at least it was significantly lower than what i would have gotten elsewhere or from a dealer. I swear, those dealers are fucking bloodsuckers. i saw a similar Civic selling for about 7-K and it was at like 280,000 Kms. mine's around 150, 000Kms. It never makes economic sense to buy from dealers unless you're looking at the newer, sportier pre-owned cars.

the interesting thing about Belson (who turns out to be singaporean) was how he and his wife were so passionate about evanglising to us about why we should get a PR here cos' somehow Singapore is destined for economic ruin in the long run and we hope on board. Belson, not unlike the singapore serf was in the IT line back in singapore and (according to his wife at least) was getting a 10K salary. well, in the process of their pontification they kinda pissed my housemates off when they came over to my place to settle the payment especially when his wife told my housemates how 'this time next year, we'll do away with our singapore passport' or something to that effect in a pompous tone. did i mention that Belson's wife works as a migration planner here in Perth? Apparantly last year, about 2500 singaporeans got Australian PR in perth alone.

for some reason, they seem to display an absolute disdain and it came across as though they were utterly disgraced by the fact that they were born in singapore. i have nothing against economic migrants who leave their homeland in search for a better life. it was after all, the very foundation which singapore was founded on in the first place. yet i've always believed that you can never leave the nation you identified as 'home' without losing any part of you. it was certainly the place, the environment that moulded you into what you are, positive or otherwise. seeking greener pastures is fine, but was it totally neccessary to disparage your former homeland in a desperate effort to justify to other people and consequently yourself that yours', and yours decision alone is the RIGHT way to plan out your life?

well anyway, i finally got the car registered on friday, and i was still alittle peeved about how the stamp duty costed me $230 rather than the $50+ which Belson told me. I was toying with the idea of personalising my license plate until reality hit in. an 9 lettered word (without your name) would cost around $450 for a polycarbonate plate. The aluminium ones (which have a word limit of 8 letters) cost around $320. Paying a month's worth of rent on a fleeting fancy just din make sense, though if i did strike lotto, i would be very tempted to do one that spells WINDWALK or DIVINERAPIER....

my bride after her baptism shower

Daniel and Joel. The inagural Civic Gang meeting.

As you can probably tell, despite the marriage, it's unlikely that i'll end my virgin hood anytime soon, though i probably can't say the same for my civic, especially if i find any suspicious white stains on the back seat cushions, which in most likelihood would have been the remants of the romance between *ahem* daniel's sister and her ex.

I'm no rockson 'takumi' tan, but i can probably christen myself as the virgin 'itsuki' undergraduate.

hence my blog shall be aptly renamed:Catharsis of a Lonely Driver.....

just married

2006-03-07T15:52:00.000+08:00

i'm getting married later tonight.

It was a whirlwind courtship which i suspect is founded more upon functionality than pure romance.

Bride-shopping is such a torture i tell you. Squinting through the rows upon rows of personal ads, going through the photos those sexy young nubile maidens whose sleek curves, big headlights and alluring rears, feeding your every deepest desire, only snap back to reality reading the fine print displaying their exorbitant demands for dowry.

Like pornstars with unbelievable figure, they seem to feed every man's fantasy sashaying in their virginal exterior, a thinly veiled facade to conceal the beast within them, if only to taunt the average joe with the realisation that you will never hook them up. It's masturbation, at in cruelest form.

It is an obsession, searching for the perfect bride. Some men never reach sobriety. It's that insane compulsion to reach for the stars, to break the bank just to send their wives for comestic reconstruction if only to enhance the superficiality of their pursuit.

It's a dangerous liason that has bankrupted so many men. Especially those European brides. They're unbelievably high maintenance.

I'm marrying a Japanese one. Confucian values have did some good after all. They're family oriented, low maintenance and desire nothing more than the occasional tender loving care.

My bride is quite an older lady really. At least thrice divorced. She has bad skin, and a ravaged rear end. But well she has decent clevage and quite a sizable hole and she screams quite loudly when she's getting it on. As for whether she's smooth with the stick when it comes to a handjob, i'll tell you when i consumate my marriage tonight...

M..MMMONSTER KILL!

2006-02-25T11:42:00.000+08:00

Double kill. Going for the next tower. Gongjiao Dictators = Sacred Relic + Demon Edge + Claymore = DIVINE RAPIER.

Becos we can, so we must OWNZ!!

catharsis of a virgin intern

2006-02-06T17:34:00.000+08:00

Awesome, must first ever entry from my work place.

While I dun exactly like the sneaky feeling of malingering on my job while pretending as if I’m actually doing something constructive complete with you know, the upright posture and slightly-perturbed-at-work face, I must say, there’s some gratification in the getting into the cheap thrill of simply doing something and not get caught. And of course, it probably helps that I’m still ahead of schedule for my project – barely though.

There’s great wisdom to be learnt surviving in the office, as I’ve appreciated in the past 2 weeks or so. In fact, they could and certainly should weave it into a compulsory module for all final year students and soon-to-be ‘salary-men/salary-women’.

For posterity’s sake, here’re some of the Intern’s Office Survival Tips that I’ve found out.

1) “That drinking - however little- on night before a workday that isn’t a very good idea. “

The same goes for DVD watching, DoTA or any random activity that extends beyond 2am.

2) “That potties make the best beds”

However, should you do indulge in #1, DO NOT attempt to steal forty winks at your work desk. For a 15 mins nap on top of a covered potty inside a toilet cubicle makes a far cozier and safer choice as a cure for sleep derivation/boredom/sheer lethargy. Unless of course, a fellow co-worker decides to take a bona fide dump in the cubicle beside you….

3) ‘That the best time to go for lunch is at 12.30 pm’.

This probably needs some explanation. Assuming you’re working in an office where lunch breaks are scheduled over 2 separate 1 hour slots, the first one from 12 to 1, and the other one from 1 to 2. From a pragmatic POV, going for lunch at 12.30 would allow you to avoid the brunt of the 1200 lunch crowd at the food courts since majority of them would have finished lunch and are either shopping or limming kopi elsewhere, while at the same time letting you get a headstart over the 1pm lunch crowd. But most importantly, is the elasticity of lunch break that this strategy affords you. Here’s the logic: theoretically speaking, most people tend to choose the 12pm slot to break for lunch, which is at least the case in my office. But while there’s a consensus that lunch breaks should be limited to 1 hour, there exists some ambiguity as to whether what time you can choose to break for lunch. As such, one can reasonably claim to break for lunch at 12.30pm and return at 1.30 pm without appearing to violate the rules. Here’s the beauty of it all. When you break for lunch at 12.30pm, the first wave of co-workers naturally assume that you’re in for the 1pm slot since they would have left the office way before 12.30pm. At the same time, with a little finesse, you can enjoy a 1hr 20 mins lunch break as long as you return to the office before 2pm, and before those who left at 1pm.

For maximum effect, theoretically, one could attempt a lunch break that spans between 12.15pm till 1.50pm, though I’ve never dared to test the system that far. However if you happen to be interning at one of the accounting firms like some of my luckier lunch kahkis, feel free to enjoy 2 hour lunch breaks. You’re an auditor, 2 hour lunch breaks are your entitlement. What you suffer in job scope monotony, you make it up for longer lunches. The world seems fair after all…

Ok, that’s all I have to share for now, if you have any little discoveries yourself, feel free to share it with me, the struggling, virgin intern.

blast from the past

2006-01-28T15:55:00.000+08:00

WOO HOO! there's nothing i hate more than to pack up my room, but it's moments like this, when a discovery of a gem from the days of yore makes the wretched task seem less like a chore than like an archaelogical expedition. if you would just take a closer look at the deepest recesses of your codwebbed drawers, you'll actually find that somewhere inside every room lies a miniture time capsule of a part of you that you've left behind a long long time ago.

so anyway, while i was packing my room i came across a printed copy of my PESA speech back in 2001 when i was in JC2. well the PESA or Plain English Speaking Award is simply one of those random toastmastering competitions held by YMCA where each representative from a JC/CI has to deliver a prepared speech on any topic and an impromptu speech on a randomly prescribed topic. I remember blogging about this a couple of months ago when i blogged about star wars episode III, and the reason for the unlikely link between the two was that the subject matter of my prepared speech was in fact about star wars. I thought i lost the speech for good when my old comp died on me, and to find the hard copy is indeed a very pleasant surprise.

because i've become so adept at typing after spending two mind-numbing weeks sitting in front of a comp for 9 1/2 hrs a day 5 days a week; and also becos' i fucking hate packing up my room and would gladly procrastinate on the task at every slightest excuse, i'm gonna type out the entire speech in this post.

here it goes:

“
From the East to the West, from Bollywood to Hollywood, there has never been a more captivating movie series than the Star Wars Saga, which can only be surpassed by its own sequel or perhaps prequel in this case. Unlike many other blockbusters like the Titanic or simply any Leonardo DiCaprio movie for that matter, whose very existence only underlines its claim as a multi-million dollar franchise, the Star Wars saga certainly has much more to offer than just that. From romance to betrayal, from the birth of a prodigy to the death of a tragic hero, Star Wars is indeed the greatest epic the world has ever produced since India came up with the Ramayana.

Any self-respecting movie critic would have to agree that Star Wars has a collation of the styles inherent in many great writers of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. From the portrayal of the angelically innocent young Anakin Skywalker, to the raunchy debaucheries of Jabba the Hutt together with Leia clad only in leather and chains. Star Wars is indeed packed with themes ranging from the likes of the insipid Dr Seuss to the outrageous DH Lawrence. In short, like what they all say, there’s something for everybody.

A proper Star Wars commentary will never be complete without mentioning Master Yoda – the epitome of the light side of the force. At this point of time ladies and gentlemen, there is something that I need to clarify. In case you are thinking that I’m trailing down the dark side by going on to extol on the 1001 suggestive uses of Yoda’s gimmer stick which is also inextricably linked to Yoda’s 1001 methods of self-entertainment on the lonely wetlands of Dagobah. I can assure all you parents out there in the audience that what started off as a Star Wars commentary will stay that way. After all, unlike Yoda, I’m no deviant of any sort!

Now back to the old Jedi master. Yoda may well be the very reason why Star Wars was one of the few Hollywood movies that thrived in the Asian market during the late seventies, most eminently in Japan. A snooty disposition packaged with bad grammar made Yoda an instant household icon in the Far East. The Japanese audience can empathise with the portrayal of Yoda as a venerable ninjatsu master. The Chinese audience sympathise with Yoda’s character, reminiscent of a retired Kung Fu exponent, disillusioned by the lust of power and fame, one who has ultimately chose to live in seclusion. And to most of us Asian males out there, Yoda serves as a beacon of hope [raises hand up sticking-up the forefinger pointing upwards], sending a clear message that proclaims resonantly: THAT SIZE, [looking down at crouch and then at erect forefinger which gradually curls downwards] MATTERS NOT!

Star Wars’ affinity with the Asian culture does not end here. Besides the accented Englished eternalised by Yoda, various references to colloquial terms in Asian languages can be readily found through out the scripts. For example, in the epic duel between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back, Vader’s proclamation of his fatherhood to Luke immediately transformed the tension build-up in the scene to that of a dysfunctional family reunion. ‘I’m your father’ were those exact words that did the trick. However, like the various suggestive equivocations mentioned earlier on, many Singaporean linguists believe that those words were in fact intended to serve as a challenge in to Luke Skywalker in order to escalate the tension build-up. To the average Singaporean layman, ‘I’m your father’ is widely perceived as a direct English translation of a proverbial Hokkien phrase that is often used in a derogatory and condescending way often to provoke a party into a confrontation. It is a phrase, which for propriety’s sake that I shan’t mention.

Much as I adore the Star Wars saga, its detractors are equally adamant in their convictions. The biggest criticism they have is that the saga is latent with neo-nazi connotations. Reluctant as I may be, I would have to agree with them. The portrayal of the Empire smacks of the chic of Nazi Germany. The very name of the ‘Stormtroppers’ in the movie, is a blatant reference to the elite force of Hitler’s personal guards bearing the same name. Even Emperor Palpatine is widely believed to be a caricature of Hitler. Like Hitler, he made himself the supreme leader after usurping power. Like Hitler, the Emperor also committed genocide as portrayed in the massacre of the Ewoks. After all, since when have you seen a non-white officer of the Empire?

I could go on and on about this magnificent epic, if not for the red light shining ominously there. If there’s any movie deserving of a place in a time capsule for the next millennium, it definitely belongs to the Star Wars series.
"

well as it turned out, for some reason, the humour didn't work out, and most of the audience didn't exactly found my speech very funny save for a few fellow JC students while the judges from the various community centre toastmasters clubs kinda gave the stoned look, plus the fact that i gave a totally fucked up impromptu speech on topic about 'whether china should host the olympics games', it was no surprise that i din make it to the next round. as it turns out, i think it was Lydia, Sow Chen's old scandal from VJC who emerged champion eventually.

ok, to spare my ears from nagging, really must clean the room now. nabeh.

A Happy Lunar New Year to everyone.

of blood and bones

2006-01-16T00:00:00.000+08:00

i received some rather bad news today.

i started the afternoon planning spend what's left of my effective vacation watching Blood and Bones before i start work tomorrow. and on my way to cineleisure, i received an SMS from someone's who's apparantly not on my phonebook informing me that his/her father passed away this morning and provided the details for the wake arrangements. now u see, the number shown on my handphone was +659300XXXX so the person texting me could conceivably still be on my phonebook with his/her no being entered without the +65. So i scanned through my entire phonebook looking for people bearing that number but to no avail, so i replied to the message with sending my condolences and asking who it was. strangely, the number was not in use. so i went to cineleisure to collect my pre-booked tics. it wasn't until just before i entered the cinema did it hit upon me that the person who sent the SMS might in fact have used someone else's HP to inform his friends of the bereavement. so i decided to drop a call to Apocalips, a close friend of mine whose dad was terminally ill with colon cancer to check.

as it turns out, it was indeed him who sent the SMS. now this is the really weird part: Apocalips' number is 9388XXXX, but the sms showed the sender's number to be 9300XXXX. and it certainly wasn't a display error cos' i used the details from the SMS to call the sender which was indeed 9300XXXX. An error on the part of the service provider was perhaps the most likely explanation though it certainly feels kinda freaky given the nature of the message. Over the phone, Apocalips' sounded like he was trying overly hard to downplay the entire event by trying to sound indifferent while he related to me that his father committed suicide at home. it does was quite a shock for me, cos' i've actually met his father a couple of times when i went to his place. i wanted to give up the movie to meet him immediately but he was reluctant and tried to reassure me that he's fine and insisted that he wanted to be alone. and so i went on with the movie, feeling rather guilty about not rushing to meet him immediately and thus failing as a friend. there couldn't have been a better emotional build-up to that movie, which was coincidentally about an estranged family relationship centrering around Takeshi Kitano who plays an ultra-abusive father. I probably shouldn't describe too much on the movie, but all i can say is that it came across as a somewhat misogynistic flick depicting the typical Kitano-esque violence being inflicted on the various women who crossed paths with his character.

It was almost an allegory of Apocalips' relationship with his father. From what i knew, Apocalips had a rather estranged relationship with his dad as well, and it all started when his dad had a relationship with his maid when he was younger, and being the favourite son, Apocalips bore the brunt of the resentment his elder sister held against his father who took it out on Apocalips (A), verbally and even physically abusing him at times. And as he grew up, A too felt a sense of resentment towards his father to which his father retaliated with a whole barrage of condescension such as telling him to forget about a university education which will be wasted on him even when he clearly had the grades to qualify into a decent university.

After the movie, i called up A and insisted that i must pay him a visit and so i dropped by his place. A greeted me at the door and he seemed as though he was putting up a strong front speaking with a tinge of jaded indifference. I met his mother and his brother -who was playing DoTA in his room- and offered my condolences. I really didn't know what to say, except to tell him that his father is finally alleviated from his mortal suffering and that was at least something he should be happy about for his dad who was plagued by the immense pain from his cancer which spreaded to his liver and bladder. According to A, it wasn't the demise per se, as much as the manner which his father chose to end that was really traumatising. Apparantly, his father's condition had deterioriated significantly over the past few weeks and that he spoke sporadically about thoughts to end his life and alleviate the family from the burden of caring for him before becoming bedridden, which would have been an eventuality had he not committed suicide. A and family were rather concerned and so they actually took precaution by hiding the toxic stuff and locking up the doors and windows to prevent him from attempting suicide. But who would have guessed that he chose to hang himself off the vent at the store room instead. It must have been terribly traumatising for A's mom who was the first to discover the body when she woke up in the morning. As A describes, more than the demise itself, it was the terrible sight of seeing his father hanging there, that sense of helplessness that really saddened him.

If there was any consolation, A did somewhat reconcile with his father in the months preceding his death. He told me how they actually bonded by betting on EPL matches or how his father was on a roll winning money for the past few matches when he placed bets for his dad on Live Betting. He then jokingly related how just the previous night, his father wanted to place his bet on Man Utd for the Manchester derby and how fortunate it was that he didn't place the bet for his dad. In his own words ' 幸亏没帮他买.要不然连生命的最后一场赌注也输了...' It was perhaps a reference to his dad's previous investment losses which forced them to sell off their old apartment before it could go en bloc to settle his debts and medical expenses. A tried to steer the conversation into a more light hearted one, relating the cute aspects of his father such as when he insisted on drinking bottled bird's nest, or unagi soup even when he couldn't finish them all or how his family wanted to celebrate his birthday which was lamentedly tomorrow by buying him him red eggs and mee sua for breakfast. A laughed at himself relating these little mundane facts about his dad. And for the first time, i've saw someone, weeping in laughter. 笑着流泪.

it was an extremely heartwrenching sight.

it must have been a huge relief for him to pour out his tears instead of putting up the strong front which he must have felt pressured to upkeep in light of the indifference of his brother and mother.

so after that we went down the block to go to the coffeeshop. as we were walking around the estate, there's this fucking bitch who apparantly lives in A's block who walked towards our direction. Apparantly, according to A, that bitch saw the coroners going up the lift to the 12th storey and kinda knew what happened and she made no effort to disguise her intention of shielding her son and avoiding A as though he's some pariah while staring at him as though he's cursed or something. A reckons that the news probably would have spread around the block since the uncles whom he plays chess with downstairs were staring at him too.

Fucking brainless bitches. It's this sorta village kaypohs that make community living such a chore. and it's these gossip leaches that created institutions like Lianhe Wanbao or Xinmin Daily which make a living out off feeding the collective curiosities of these kaypoh cunts and providing a job for half-fucked dregs of the journalism circuit who would have otherwise have difficulty finding employment if not for their knack at becoming parparrazzi and drawing news -not outta celebrities mind you- from the next random person who flashes at his neighbour at home, or the next vegetable wholesaler cum paedophille who claims to have had consesual bondage with kids and din murder them. Good lord! Those conniving bastards actually created a whole FUCKING INDUSTRY outta gossipping.

ok. anyway, i really gotta stop here. first day at work tomorrow, mustn't be late. and i'll be going for the wake tomorrow too. and i just have to find out someway to inform the other bitch who changed her HP number and teaches at North Vista sec. i'll call her staff room if i have to.....

before that interview

2006-01-11T10:56:00.000+08:00

i've finally overcome my inertia to update this blog. why? cos' i would consider today to be a minor milestone in my life. for i'll be having my first formal job interview later today. either i get the job, which will give me ample reason not to sit on my lazy ass all day long, or i would simply spend what remains of my vacation procrastinating in wasteful abandonment of time. neither seems too bad an alternative to spend the next month or so, which is why i'm not awfully concerned about getting that job except the fact that i really need something to bolster the atrocious academic section on my CV if i bear any desire to get a quasi-decent job. Arggh, i would hate to imagine how life would be like after graduation.

met up with LMD on monday for a couple of drinks @ the alleybar. having not met her for almost 6 months, she does indeed look alot better after her operation and even her complexion seems pretty good now - a fact which she proudly attributes to her quitting smoking. you know, it really isn't very convincing when they have someone like xiaxue who's probably never had the habit before to be the anti-smoking ambassador. the LMD now, (which i suspect would be soon be a more apt acroynm for Little Miss Drinkalittle) would be the perfect poster girl, the prodigal daughter who should front all the anti-smoking, anti-alcoholism or just about any other random anti-vice campaigns. all cos' she's da street-credibility.

anway, LMD was gracious enough to invite me over to her friend's place for what was supposed to be 'quiet drinks'. who would have guessed that we ended up finishing the entire 1 litre bottle of vodka between the 6 of us by the end of the night. it was probably my first time hanging around a group of yuppies and i must say it was a highly informative and enjoyble experience. it's amazing how alcohol seems to trigger a zeal for learning for it was that night, that we all learnt that a 'goat' could also mean 'a very lecherous man', or the differences that stem between mutton, lamb and sheep. yet another shining example of how primary education in singapore has failed us. it wasn't that intimidating as i would have imagined yuppie gatherings to be. no esoteric discussions on some obscure stock or what not, no, except perhaps if you consider add a commentary to what's on tv while putting it on mute to be an extradinarily act. more than anything, i has shown me how we don't really lose our sense of humour even when we start work. and it certain makes what lie beyond graduation look alot less intimidating.

and so, thanks to glenfiddich and the grey goose, i woke up at 2 yesterday, which inexplicably pissed off my grandmother who gave me a barrage of cantonese curses all scolding me for being the sloth that i am. then it was the family stuff, attending my niece, ashley's 5th birthday celebration. for some reason, whenever it's one kid's birthday, there seems to be a unspoken code in which the other kids will also share the limelight and cut the cake together with the birthday kid which i suspect is an ingenious ploy conceived by parents to avoid pangs jealousy from the non-birthday kids. yet it's far from a perfect solution, as a fight almost broke up between ashley and her feisty little cousin, and my favourite niece, claudia who's just four this year. apparantly, claudia was standing beside ashley when she was cutting her cake and ashley started shouting and accused claudia of blowing her candles when she's the birthday girl, to which claudia screamed and protested her innonence and started banging the table. and god knows what happened, moments later, they're all friends again, hugging together, taking photos. kids are weird. they fight and they forget. incidently, a similar event happened last CNY at my place where much to the horror of Tom who was there too, Claudia tried to push Ashley down the stairs. This whole cousin rivalry thing is really funny considering that it's somewhat an extension of the sibling rivalry between Cassandra (my godsister/cousin and Claudia's mum) who used to bully her elder sister Sharon (who's Ashley's mum). anyway, violent tendencies and上一代的恩恩怨怨 aside, they're really really cute, and i think i'm going post some of their recent photos on my blog. here's one from sometime ago.

from left: Ashley, Me and Claudia.

I probably don't have time to blog about the rest of the evening cos' i gotta get shaved and prepared for that interview. Yeah, i have to get shaved. i just look so wrong in that photo.....
till next time. tata.

The ghost of christmas past / that last crush of yesteryears

2005-12-26T02:56:00.000+08:00

Christ·mas (krsms) n. :
1. an excuse to break free from the reeling monotony of mundane placidity
2. the level of excitment and degree of happenings are inversely proportional to age
3. is just another day

Playing DotA on AI is perhaps not the best way to spend christmas, but what the hell. The Warcraft Battlechest set was the only Christmas present i received....from myself. Well it's after all the season of magic, and if there's any consolation, i've managed to purchase my first Divine Rapier ever while playing DotA on AI. (cheap thrill, yes i know, come take your shot)

The christmas spirit just seems to diminish with age and i can't help but to feel that everyone i know who're around my age has become so jaded by all the jostling and no one seems to have anything planned for Xmas eve at all. Let's see, sow chen played majong all night, xander was with gill i think, trev was entertaining his relatives at home, tom slept early cos' he had to go to church in the morning, mutu and bodyguard slept cos' they worked all day, David Gan was with his ex cos' his gf had a curfew - a love story worthy of a taiwanese soap drama by itself. it wasn't until 2am when Chris picked me up, bought a bottle of cheap wine from 7-11 and hopped over to Alvin's place for a half-hearted salvation of what was otherwise a shitlessly boring christmas eve.

Happenings on xmas eve, has been on a downward slope as far as i can recall. the last time i went clubbing on xmas eve was probably 3 years back when i went liquid room with robin for some random christmas party. and i probably remembered this only for the wrong reasons. we chanced upon some random jc acquaintence called kim leng who was alittle tipsy. liquid room was rather small, so we ended up standing on the pool table with a couple of other strangers. then kim leng started taking off his sweaty shirt and hugged us, pointing at us and started shouting out to everyone '这是我的朋友!!' it was muthafuckingly embarrassing. he continued with his weird antics until some other guy came up to me and complained about kim leng's behaviour in these exact words, 'erm, ur friend is kinda sweaty and naked, can u ask him to put on some clothes'. to which i most gladly acceded and relayed the message to kim leng. and somehow, kim leng grew agitated and started shouting 'who?! who the fuck wants me to wear my shirt?!', and to pacify that mad fuck i went like 'no one lah, it's me'. to which kim leng went 'orh' and put on his shirt. i eventually learnt from chris that kim leng was a mad fuck even during his secondary sch days back in marist where he would carry a knife in his school bag and which he would proudly show everyone and brag to people telling them that 'eh, 有 dai ji 的话找我'

fast forward to xmas night two years ago. me, sow chen and ks were riding in xander's car aimlessly until we decided to settle for some adventure by climbing into a supposedly haunted house in sixth avenue which despite its shady facade, was anti-climatically laden with construction materials and not abandoned as what we initially thought. and xmas eve a year ago, was equally uneventful, which i suspect was just spent with the marlboro gang lehpak-ing in robin's house. at the rate things go, i would dread to imagine how xmas eve's gonna be like by the time i'm 32.

i remember better times, when xmas still had a quasi-magical feeling to me. when i would wake up on christmas day to find a present beside my pillow, unwrap it and be totally elated to find a Police Academy action figure of Sgt Tackleberry complete with his motorcycle.

Or perhaps back in the christmas of '94, which i spent on a tour in china where i met my last serious crush. we were on the same tour group touring several cities in southern china. i was 11 and she was 13. she had a dark complexion, had long straight hair and really beautiful round eyes. if my memory doesn't fail me, i think she's called liling. i guess even back then, i had a thing for older girls. she had 2 other sisters, one of them who was affectionately nicknamed Xiaobaitu (little rabbit) by some other guys in the tour group was the same age as me. the journey between the various cities was long and sometimes we travelled by coach and other times by train. during the journey, the group of teenagers who were on the tour group would gather together to play 'heart attack' or blackjack just to kill them. i did try to start a conversation with liling but it all came to naught when some of the older guys started to pair me up with Xiaobaitu and started teasing us. it appears that some of them caught me stealing glances at the sisters on the bus and just assumed that i was looking at Xiaobaitu when i was in fact trying to look at her sister who was sitting beside her. well anyway, eventually even liling was so convinced that i was trying to hit on her sister that she also tried to direct my conversation towards her sister. that was probably as close as it every got for me when it comes to feeling lovelorn. and the fact that they kept on showing the music video for Wham's 'Last Christmas' on Channel V in the hotel TVs probably made things worse. that was also the first time i've ever heard the song which was why i wasn't entirely convinced when that the moustachioed george michael was the same bloke who sang the song in the music video.

back in those days, the internet was unheard of, and there was certainly no MSN, ICQ, friendster or even email. there's no avenue to contact a girl u've met other than to ask for her phone number. and in those days, it was a rather touchy thing to ask for phone numbers then i guess...especially so when her mother's always around her. even throughout the flight home from Hangzhou, i never mustered the courage to tell her how i felt, nor to ask for her phone number. i knew that was the probably the only chance i have of hoping to ever meet her again and it was an internal turmoil trying to decided whether or not to tell her how i felt. well, eventually rationality ruled the day, and i just took it for granted that her dad exchanged business cards with my dad and somehow that could possibly give me another chance of meeting her after the trip.

it was a huge mistake.

as it turns out, my dad's correspondence to her dad did not extend beyond that of a few new year cards and i've never met her again ever since we left the airport that night after christmas. throughout that flight, those final moments which we spent returning to the teeming masses of anonynmity, i tried as hard as i could to hold on to whatever memories i had of her. her voice, her looks, or even her disposition. it's funny how perception ages with time as well, and even now, a decade after meeting her, the mental image i have of her appears to be that of a girl around my age now. i do remember her singing along to a 裘海正 song while listening to the Silkair inflight entertainment radio on the earpiece while we were playing 'Heart Attack', and the very last thing we talked about was about the weather. in a pathetic last ditch attempt to strike up a conversation, i causally remarked why was it so cold when the stewardess made an announcement saying it's about 29 degrees in Singapore, to which she curtly replied 'Cos' it's at night what!' it wasn't even a proper farewell, my family left the airport much faster cos' there were only the 3 of us and consequently less baggage and her family was probably still at the customs even after we collected our check-in luggage and left the airport.

years later, i met an army fren who's her age and attended the same secondary school as her. apparantly she was the school belle of the school, and that was probably as close as it gets to ever meeting her again. the crush is long over, it's really silly in hindsight, but well haha, i can't believe i genuinely felt kinda heartbroken back then. Even if i had the chance, i would probably not wanna meet her again. it's kinda beautiful keeping a memory of someone in our own special way where we are bestowed with the ability to manipulate our thoughts in whatever way we desire. reality is always overrated i reckon. my memories of her mannerisms, and those few photos we took, it's more than enough to dream the dream.

that night after christmas, after i returned home from the airport, i just couldn't take my mind off her. listening to my discman, i wallowed and indulged in a little of the usual pseudo lovesick symptoms, kicking myself for just letting 'the one' slip by. and that was the first, and the last time, i've ever lost sleep over a girl.

p3wned...twice on the same day

2005-12-04T04:04:00.000+08:00

we lost. it's bad enough to lose in a semi-final match-up. and to find out how Arsenal crashed to yet another away defeat just puts the icing on the cake. fate has a sardonic sense of humour hasn't it?

all that i can give

2005-12-03T01:08:00.000+08:00

tomorrow's gonna be my curtain call to my foray into debate coaching. two debates and 84 minutes worth of speeches, are all that stands between the gong jiao dictators and that desired VJC shield.
hanging around the dictators has been perhaps the most rewarding aspect of taking up this temp job. no, it's more than just a job, it's an obligation and responsibility that i feel towards the dictators to help them achieve their fullest potential. and in return, the kids have helped me rediscovered that inner child in me. never did i expect to find myself playing LAN after each competition, playing soccer after training, or simply talking cock to a bunch of 14-15 year olds at my grand old age of 22.

come tomorrow, it all culminates to those last two cruial debates that will determine whether or not the gong jiao dictators can once again etch its name onto the eternity glory. in the words of Bono as eternalised by Tze Kai who has an uncanny knack at quoting pop artistes: 'Because we can, we must.' We have a very talented team, and it's well within their abilities to win this tournament. It's all about justifying to themselves and the rest of Singapore by winning both crucial match-ups. Victory or otherwise, all that really matters is the fact that we've shared this wonderful two weeks together, and as i retire from coaching thereafter, i shall always be proud of the fact that i've once steered this talented team towards fulfilling their fullest potential. A talented team, that will go on to attain greater glory far greater than what i can ever hope to achieve. And that's all that i can give to you, my dear dictators.

why age and maturity isn't a neccessary for good company

2005-11-28T00:03:00.000+08:00

just came home from meeting Eugene and BQ for a round of drinks @ Ice Cold Beer. it's always a weird feeling meeting up old army friends and doing the proverbial 'catching-up' after not keeping in contact for a significant period of time'. such gatherings always start with the customary phrases asking 'how you're doing?', 'hows your job?' and more often than not that just opens up a floodgate of unnecessary information bombardment from your overzealous platoon mates who're dying to impress upon you about how well they're doing. before you realise, an aura of unfamiliarity just premeates into the conversations and what seemingly was intended as a celebrate of the camaraderie of yesteryears just degenerates into a socialising agony entertaining every little annecdote with mock interest while your friend happily masturbates his ego in front of you.

i really didn't need to know how u spent $8000 on clubbing as u claimed ever since u broke up with that girl whom u were supposed to get married to, or how u well-connected you are such that you could walk into whatever club in bermudas without paying cover charge. neither did you have to insidiously insert random details about your schedule next week in between unrelated talk, bitching about how busy you are having to entertain clients at so-and-so bar cos' somehow ALL the foodcourts/hawker centres buys plastic bags from your father's company even if all you wanted was to fish some compliments for yourself. and you certainly didn't have to reply and given a pseudo indepth analysis of what you would have done to the manchester utd lineup if you were alex ferguson in english when i clearly talked to you in hokkien and mandarin as i always did in the good o' days. cos' the Eugene that i knew, was the most reliable indian chief in our hokkien peng platoon, the one who had to balls to call 2SG Crouching Balls a Poo Boh Kia in front of his face. i hope it really isn't that breakup that changed u. so what if she was an SMU grad who couldn't reconcile herself with the prospect of marrying an N level holder like you? so what if your plan of opening a joint savings account failed to keep her? u have nothing to prove to us, brudder. it was her loss. Bros over Ho's, brudder. Bros over Ho's.
************************************************************************************

In comparison, it's seems so much more fun just hanging around kids two thirds my age dispensing with the diplomatic niceties. i spent the entire saturday together with the dictators watching them in the VJ Shield preliminaries before heading off to douby ghaut for an entire evening of gaming. the generation gap is apparantly when i played DoTA with them, especially when i totally clueless about what spells or items to buy and only managing basic ham ji way of attacking the randoms while Windwalking away whenever an enemy hero is in sight, but it's was awesome fun. especially when you have like 4 persons screaming together calling for team mates to go 'zham!! zham!!! rape them!!' . it's just so much fun hanging around the dictators talking the wrongest things speculating things like questioning the plausibility of Andre's claim to have grown some LJM or Andre's need to farm testosterone which will aid his LJM growth. Here's a picture of which epitimises why training at gong jiao is so fun...which unfortunately is at the expense of poor Andre at time...

andre, the cutest human action figure

apparantly despite his dimminutive stature Andre's quite the cassonova claiming to have dated 14 girlfriends before, and there's apparantly some truth in that especially when two Big Blue debaters actually came all the way to Douby Ghaut just to meet up Andre when we were LANing. And of course, they too left when Andre joined us for dinner. Being the vernacular seniors that we are, me and Kenneth Kang promptly sought to instill some chivalry in Andre by telling him to at least go and talk to the girls (which was the least he could do) and that he'll be forgiven even if he chose to hang out with the two girls while we go dine without him. Besides, Andre needs whatever female interaction he can get to hasten his testosterone farming which will consequently hasten his slightly belated puberty growth hahhaha.

the kids did themselve proud breaking into the semifinals defeating RI and St Nicks along the way before succumbing to loss to ACSi in the last preliminary match. We're gonna face RI again in the semifinal next saturday who along with ACSi and Big Blue being the other 3 who will be competing along Cat High for a chance of etching their names for posterity on the VJ Shield. The dictators have everything to prove for themselves next saturday and i can't underline how important a win is to the Cat High team. The kids deserve a victory to end an entire year of heartbreaks ranging from 3 consecutive semi-final exits and failing to qualify to the JGs knockout rounds on the a break that went right down to speaker scores last year. They're an exceptional team who have been pouring their guts out training week after week. Even Andre, the reformed slacker has made quantum leaps in both his debating prowess as well as committment towards training. i'm exceptionally proud of him. The youngest speaker on the team, Tze Kai was phenomenal throughout all three preliminary rounds. At sec 2, he's definitely the one of the most precociously developed debating talent i've ever saw. At his age, is already able to hold his ground against debaters a year older than him. It's his immense industry in case research that really impressed me more than his raw talents and it's amazing how he manages to juggle all this together with his editorial duties at this online magazine which he started. (Yes, he started a magazine when we was barely 13 years old!). Yet at the same time, my biggest concern for him and Bryan Chan - who's exceptionally talented too - is that there is a tendency for many precociously developed debaters to get complacent about improving themselves and end up stagnating their development. Debating is never about pure talent, it's all about hardwork. If Tze Kai could keep up his hardwork and avoid the potential complacency trap which plagued so many debaters before him, we'll be looking at a future WSDC debater along with Bryan Chan. In fact, the litmus test might not be that far. There's gonna be an international competition for secondary school debaters sometime next year, and with hardwork and focus, i Tze Kai and Bryan should be able to make the DEP international team.

it's all about the kids. as their temp coach, i feel a huge sense of responsibility to the dictators and Xander. to the dictators, i feel obliged to help them achieve their fullest potential in this tournament in whatever way possible. I feel their passion and desire for victory and i really believe that a championship victory for VJCs and beyond is well within the reach of this team which is why i simply cannot entertain any possibility of letting them down as a result of slackness on my part. and as for xander, despite enduring all the bureaucratic shit he's stuck with gong jiao for all these years and it might well be the final year that he's coaching gong jiao. it's probably time for the dictators to give xander and themselves what they truly deserve -that final missing piece in the trophy cabinet - the JGs championship. winning the VJ shield is would be a significant step towards the holy grail.

"When you really want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to
achieve it. "
--- Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

propping up a dictatorship / dun you want a blue burqa?

2005-11-25T02:28:00.000+08:00

i'm finally home! It's been a almost a week back, the and hiatus from mugging
lasted barely more than 2 weeks. for the second consecutive year, i'm am now
coaching the 公教 dictators for the VJC invitationals shield since xander's still launching his own crusade against the procrastination demons over @ NUS. i can't believe i actually spent the entire week mugging and trying to
fathom exactly wtf does cultural assimilation entails. Case prep week is really a bitch. Doubly so when u have to prep both for the prop AND the opp side for the same fucking motion. in chinese this is probably called 自相矛盾 or 'turning one's spear upon one's shield and see which koyak first'. every argument which you conjure for one side, only adds on to your paranoia regarding the cogency of ur arguments on the other side. and as if that wasn't enough, after all this shitload of work, only ONE of the three preliminary round debates is on the prepared motion, the other 2 are impromptu. KNNBPCB....

there're somethings which just never change with the gong jiao dictators. and if anything at all, it's that each batch just gets more and more wrong. ok, last year, there's kk who swallows his own fist, fengyao who sends the wrong vibes to pre-teen girls, and shaun who lied down in the middle of the road ostensibly to impress some girls after last year's VJC invitationals. not willing to bite the dust by their predecessors, the 2006 dictators are showing great potential of usurping their seniors' claim to being the wrongest batch in cat high's debate team history. first there's tze kai who seems to have a knack at sexually harrassing 14 year old girls over MSN, then there's the ever impish andre (who's 16 next year btw) who despite his proud declaration of that he finally grew some LJM (go figure) still hasn't shown any signs of physical nor mental maturity, and finally there's bryan chan who would randomly start speaking mandarin in a super husky voice in the middle of debrief and pursues a passion in scribbling LJM all over Andre's trackbook. every training session will somehow end up as an indoor soccer game with andre kua running around half-naked doing all his weird stunts, and with the rest using him as a life-size action figure.. haiz... why...why like that one???

oh, and as if that wasn't enough, we've got a resident team retard ho wee seng who appears to have a very warped concept of mating rituals. ok, u see, IJ TP came down to our place for a friendly spar earlier today, and for like the first time ever, wee seng seemed unusually enthu about doing the timekeeping for the girls, and started sprouting random nonsense throughout the course of the debate, and even started pointing middle finger at Tze Kai why he was doing his speech. i understand 14 year old boys are inherently hormonally charged and would go to great extent just to get the attention of girls, but wee seng.... haiz...

speaking about the friendly debate, the whole session just seemed to be missing something. and it only hit upon me after the friendly that during my time, whenever we go down to someone else's place for friendlies, the hosts will always provide some refreshments for the vistors. which was probably why the IJ TP team seemed rather surprised that the friendly just ended at that. in hindsight, we were totally atrocious hosts, and when i questioned Andre about the protocol for friendlies now, he just gave a nonchalent 'yah, got drinks. but so? we boh chup one lah' social dysfunctionality - the dictators just upped their wrongness

and tomorrow we're gonna have another friendly spar with St Nicks. the original plan for us was that we wanted SN to come down for a friendly so it would save us the trouble of travelling all the way to the ulu ulu realms yio chu kang since we've travelled away for the last few times we sparred them. but NO! the SN ppl die die dun wanna come down to bishan. and the reason only became clear after i called up Bryan just now to confirm the venue for tmr's friendly. it appears that the SN liason told bryan that the parents of the SN debaters were reluctant to 'let their daughters step inside an all-boys school'. WTF?? it's either that SN is experiencing a change in their school philosophy towards religious fundamentalism, OR Cat High has recently established some notoriety as a institution that consistently produces sex fiends. u know it's yet another tragedy for gong jiao when even a sister school has lost faith in the morality of its brother school. why am i not surprised if SN decides to don the habit or the burqa together with their blazers for the debates on saturday *tsk tsk* hmm, a blue burqa with pinafore... hahaha that would certainly be the defining fashion statement of the year.

speaking of which, i actually found a photo i took way back when i was in 1st 3 months in JC. Long before Blinkymummy or King Meng's sartorial tribute to the blue pinafore, i already paid homage to the revered deep blue in my own little way hehe.

circa 2000. the virgin undergrad then. the quinessential Big Blue

now i wished i had wore another pinafore over my head as a habit or used it as a burqa.....

'Come on Aussies Comeon!! ' Off to Germany, Socceroos!!

2005-11-17T00:04:00.000+08:00

For the first time in 32 years, and only just the second time in Australian history, the socceroos finally made it into the World Cup finals after overcoming Uruguay in the second leg of the Oceania-South America World Cup qualifier playoff in a match that went right down to the penalty shoot-out.

For us, 2 Singaporeans and 2 Malaysians, it was well worth our time and money heading down to the Champions Bar at Burswood Casino to catch a piece of action cheering for our adopted host nation. When it comes to the soccer, cheering for Australia is sadly probably as close as it gets to feeling any affinity or partisanship towards any team in a World Cup match. I just can't see how Singapore or Malaysia can qualify for the world cup anytime soon. So much for Goal 2010. FAS should just blow the entire Goal 2010 budget on hiring Guus Hiddink as the national coach. He's almost become synonymous to underdog overachievement. If only Fandi was less of a wuss during his younger days, he could have went on to achieve great things with Ajax instead of returning back to Singapore, homesick and ending up playing for Pahang or some other random obscure team. We could have had someone with decent football coaching credentials in Singapore, but no...someone just had to miss the Singaporean food. Ok, then again, if it was really all about the food, it's probably fair enough. Cos' i can't stop thinking about cheap hawker food back home now.

Anyway, back to Aussie-Uruguay match.

The match started with Socceroos 1-0 down from the away fixture at Uruguay a week ago. The first 15 minutes was really jittery for the Socceroos who almost conceded an early goal if not for Schwarzer's reflexes. It was interesting that Hiddink didn't choose to start with Kewell, and it wasn't until the 30+ minute that Kewell was substituted onto the pitch. Boy did that make a difference! At around the 38th minute Kewell ran rampant deep into the Uruguayan defence, did a cheeky backpass and went for a one two, and dribbled into the penalty box to set up a pass for Macro Bresciano (some guy who i've never heard before this match but played really well, managing a good couple of shots on target) to drive it to the back of the net. GOAL!!!
The whole bar went absolutely delirious.

I wouldn't say it was a really redneck crowd down at Champions bar, and they seemed pretty well dressed -which kinda made us feel outta place-, but boy the things that come out of their mouth were absolutely hilarious! It's really funny when you find yourself in the unlikely scenario of being on the same side as the rednecks. Like when a Uruguayan player goes down regardless of whether he was diving (which actually happened pretty often) or really brought down by an Aussie challenge, the whole crowd will start to shout 'U R Gay' as a spoof to the name 'URUGUAY'. And if that wasn't enough, when a certain black and bald Uruguayan player fell down after taking an seemingly innocuous challenge, the cameras focused on him who covered his face in mock pain, only to be caught by the camera peeking at the referee's reaction through his finger slits. That was soooo silly and everyone in the bar was actually more amused by his unaccomplishedl playacting abilities more than the unprofessional act of diving in itself. and so the the 'U- R- GAY' chanting eventually became a full song will the entire bar singing to some impromptu tune composed by one certain smart guy sitting in the front of the screen going 'U-R-Gay, U-R-Gay....U...R...GAyyyy......U-ARE-G-A-Y!!!!!!'

Australia had a couple more chances but simply couldn't find the finishing touch. By the end of the second half, the bedrock of the Uruguay attacking flair and defence, Alvaro Recoba and Pablo Montero respectively were subsituted for some inexplicable reasons. Mark Viduka who captained the Socceroos remained rather tame throughout the entire game. In the end, the match went down to penalties and the Socceroos found the back of the net in all but the fourth penalty shot which was taken by none other than Viduka himself. What a disappointment. Well anyway, the Socceroos won, and the crowd went mad again.

If Guus Hiddink could transform a South Korean team of inexperienced players into World Cup semi-finalists, just imagine what he could achieve with a team consisting of talents like Viduka, Kewell, Emerton, Omerod and Schwarzer who ply their trade week and and week out in the English Premier League or some other European teams. Good on'ya Socceroos!!!! Germany 06, we shall see.

done and done for

2005-11-15T14:33:00.000+08:00

exams are finished. so am i. should have seen it coming.

whatever the result may be, i'm just gonna fuck it all. i dun intend to spend the entire summer wallowing in self pity. balik kampong lor!!

On the stereo
Listen as we go
Nothing’s gonna stop me now
Singapura here we come
Right back where we started from
Pedal to the floor
Thinkin’ of the roar
Gotta get us to the show
Singapura here we come
Right back where we started from

Singapura!!!! Singapura!!! SINGAPURA!!!
HERE WE COME!!!

random indulgence in nostalgia

2005-11-10T19:27:00.000+08:00

if you're a guy in your early twenties with a lingering nostalgia for the times when TCS/SBC wuxia dramas were so much better, then you're probably gonna love this.

I present to you that elusive theme song from that classic channel 8 serial 最后一个大侠 which recedes in the deepest recesses of the minds of every singaporean boy who grew up in the early nineties. That is the absolute coolest SBC/TCS theme song EVER. (you'll probably have to wait for a while for the music to stream)

In memory of those less complicated times, where playtime with friends simply meant exercising one's imagination playing out roles from each wuxia serial and bashing each other up instead of playing multi-player RPG in front of the computer.

maybe that's why kids these days have so many issues. they'll probably need more positive influence from old school SBC wuxia dramas like 最后一个大侠 which constantly bombarded their predessors with a healthy dosage of unequivocal moral righteousness. 正邪不两立.

i would hate to imagine how this generation of kids who grew up watching cartoons like Cow and Chicken or that stupid 美人鱼 channel 8 show would turn out....

PS: Purple Killer (紫镙刹) has to be the COOLEST villian EVER in the history of singaporean telly-land.

sideblog/2 down 2 to go

2005-11-09T14:33:00.000+08:00

it's an amazing feeling strolling back home while listening to my dear ipod mini. buoyed by the realisation that the mid-way check point is reached, the music and the stroll just makes it feel like i'm in MTV.

anyway, if you haven't realised, i justed added music and a sideblog at the sidebar to serve as an archives for the song's that i'm gonna post. i apologise in advance if that irritates the fuck outta you.

the skirmish is over, but the battle is still on. two down, two to go.

D minus 1, H minus 16 hrs

2005-11-04T17:23:00.000+08:00

Preliminary recce has been completed. At D-Day 0900 hours tomorrow, a new wave of assault shall be launched on the Procrastination Armed Forces (PAF) . It will be the third battle since war broke out almost a year ago and it shall be expected to persist for at least another 1.5 years. Background information regarding what let to the outbreak of war, the declaration of war can be found in the Warning Orders and Ops Orders here which were issued a year ago.

The battle must be won. Freedom -and my entire summer- is at stake. For defeat will spell the enslavement of my people under the yoke of academic oppression, wallowing in mugging for the supplementary paper while our victorious brethren shall be enjoying their summer break. Field updates shall be limited, subjected to battle conditions. RTB expected at D+ 10 1400 hours. We must and we will CRUSH THE PAF.

'WHAT WE DO IN LIFE, ECHOES IN ETERNITY'

Mix - Feeding poor, hungry students since...erm..since (?)

2005-11-03T13:16:00.000+08:00

it's official. i've sampled the entire $5.00 menu from Mix restaurant @ hampden road after subsisting on a Mix diet for lunch for the past 1.5 weeks. For the past week at least, i've tried the Sze Chuan Chicken rice, the Black Pepper Beef rice, the Tom Yum Noodle, the Satay Beef rice and my absolute favourite - the Nasi Bryani. See, Towkay Mooiness. i'm your loyal customer k, when gonna give me VIP card ah? heh heh.

I'm fucking sick of eating Chu Qian Yi Ding Noodles already. Even though it's the brand that me and my housemates swears by, the only ones which we buy are just the original flavour, the Tonkatsu flavour and the Shoyu flavour. even so, it tastes pretty disgusting after sometime especially when u have it consecutively for every meal (excluding breakfast cos' i never ever wake up for it) for a week. If the mugging didn't kill me, the MSG from a CQYD diet will certainly finish the job.

As i type, i'm happily masticating away in front of the computer on the Hainanese Chicken Rice bought from Mix while my box of Nonya Fried Rice is downstairs await for its demise during dinner time whahaha! The best thing about Mix dishes is that they bother to separate the gravy from the noodles/rice so it tends not to get soggy. The Hainanese Chicken Rice for one, is so much better than that in Student Cafe - their competitor down the road. Of course lah, Mix is slightly more expensive than Student Cafe which sells Chicken Rice for $3.50 only. But i confirm guarantee Mix chicken rice taste so much better. i think in economics they it can be described as higher marginal utility per dollar spent (argh, fuck economics. it's the root of my misery now). anyway, the difference lies in the rice cos' the rice @ Mix really got the Asian hawker centre standard, can taste chicken stock but the rice @ Student Cafe is just plain white rice only.

man, i dunno why i'm typing all this, it's like a culinary review or something. it has gotta stop, have to head to the library to resume my hermit regime again. sian...

失败谅解备忘录

2005-10-27T03:44:00.000+08:00

前几天, 不知为什么,一阵心血来潮, 开始写出一份履历表.
原本是想用它来向一某间公司应征暑假internship的
但每写完一页, 我便感到越心灰意冷. 最后, 还是索性放弃了.

一份履历表, 对外看来, 表面上平平无起.
但对我而言, 这里头却包含了我一辈子所有的辍折, 遗憾, 与成就.
22年来的人生历程, 就总结成这几页密密嘛嘛的文字.
成就, 寥寥无几. 辍折, 却一大把.
一页又一页的离校成绩, 简直是惨不忍睹.
面对这份对我人生的批判,唯一能感觉到的, 便是一阵阵的遗憾.

记得小时候, 从不曾被任何事困扰过.
也许是因为不知天高地厚吧. 总是怀着一份打也打不倒的自信心.
坚决相信只要自己用心地去做, 天下根本没有任何事能难得倒我.
虽全是虚想, 但那令我仿佛'天下无敌, 战无不胜'的感觉确实是挺爽的.
成绩也还算得心应手. 那是十二岁的我.

升上中学后, 我渐渐的体会到现实与童年的虚想确实是相隔好一段距离.
'雄霸天下, 天下无敌' 的白日梦也烟消云散.
尤其是在会考成绩放榜时, 我名落孙山.
霸王虽当不成, 却也来到了乌江.
对于当时的我,成绩是衡量自我价值的唯一标准.
一夜间, 我放弃了对自己人生的一切憧憬.
那是十六岁的我.

到了初院, 班上有好多同学与我保有同样的思想.
也不知为什么, 别人比成绩是为了表现自己的优越感.
咱们比成绩, 却是在比谁比谁烂.
'赢'了, 还能耍酷沾沾自喜的说 'I'm slacker than you!'

当时的我们, 字号为教育界的败类, 其他初院的垫脚石.
所谓'败类', 具体上在英文称为scum.
但若直接从文字上翻译的话, 那便是failed species.
从达尔文进化论的角度来说,只有强者才能生存.
因此 failed species 应该算是那些在生化进化当中淘汰,绝种的生物.
所以用'败类'来形容我们自己, 更恰当不过了.
因为我们相信自己是社会进化中所被淘汰的弱者
教育制度下濒临绝种的低等生物.

也许希望越低, 失望也就越小.
已做好心里准备留级的我竟然没在会考中不及格.
成绩单虽满目疮痍, 但还奇迹般地考上南洋理工大学.
当时穿着军服的我, 除了稍微庆幸也没什么感觉.
毕竟连BMT都还未 pass out 的我根本不敢对未来保有任何指望.
那年我十八岁.

退伍后的我, 来到了澳洲就读大学.
经过两年半的军训, 视野也扩大了许多.
终于明白学业虽重要, 但并不是人命的一切.
下定决心一雪前耻的我, 似乎寻找到久违的恒心.
那是去年二十一岁的我.

一年后, 恒心似乎又用完了.
以为已重获到的冲刺也灰飞烟灭.
我真的不明白, 好不容易找回的上进心怎么这样容易失去.
面对一个礼拜后的大考, 我完全不知所措.
这个学期, 太糟糕了. 既使及格, 成绩也不会光采到哪里去.
记得Missy Jurisfiction 曾劝过我:"If nothing is enough to shock you out of
procrastination, the prospect of sheer unemployment should".

从当年十二岁的我, 到如今二十二岁的我.
十年了. 原来我还是没什么长进.
少年的我, 已学业做为人生价值观.
如今成年的我, 茫然的徘回在为未来奋斗与享受最后一线青春之间.
不知中年的我, 价值观又是如何?

我曾读过一篇科学趣闻. 活着的时后, 人的细胞会不断的在不同时段更生.
要全身所有的细胞更新, 大约要等三年.
因此每三年, 每个人都可算得上是已'脱胎换骨'了.
我总爱把过去, 现在与未来的自己相想象是身在不同时空, 不同的人.
想想看, 若是想电影Memento 里失去保有长久记忆能力(long term memory)的男主角,

只有短暂记忆的我们, 睡醒后便记不起作日的一切.
基本上, 每一天都在以截然不同的生分过着新一个人生.
如此便不会被往事困扰, 或为未来担忧. 好不自在呀!

只可惜现实中, 无论一个人有多洒脱, 既使能放开一切的想受现在,
将来难免也会被过去所拖累.
让现在的自己放纵, 就会让身在未来的自己悔恨, 受委屈.
一心的为未来的自己塑造完美的人生, 却又亏待了现在的自己.
中庸之道, 却似乎高不成低不就.
但最糟的应该是我的现状, 一条平庸之道.
既每有好好读书, 又没有尽情享乐.
每天只坐在电脑前发愣.
最后亏待了现在与未来的自己.

也许根本没办法摆脱过去失败的纠缠.
现在的我, 最终还是不能解开六年前的心结
不知六年后的我, 又会如何看待现在的我.
若六年后的我正在阅读这篇日记的话, 希望你早已成功.
能够以怀旧的心情观看自己的过去, 真正的体会成功得来不易.
并再接再励, 再创高峰.
但若你是满怀怨恨的阅读着的话, 真的真的对不起.
请原谅自己当年的愚昧. 请别灰心. 人生的路还长呢.
千万别再象六年前的这个孬种自暴自弃.
也许我永远也体会不了您的痛处. 劝, 也只不过是虚伪只举.
唯一能做的, 是恳求您原谅我.
而唯一能见证的, 便是这份<<失败谅解备忘录>>.

blog-off

2005-10-25T05:59:00.000+08:00

woah, it appears that the toilet-gate controversy is far from over. the cyber feud has certainly went well beyond the realms of the blogosphere, and the flames have started to burn the pockets of individual involved. there appears to be an increasing incidence of blog-feuds in the singaporean blogosphere nowadays, ranging from the comments board heckling, to the ephraim-esque mass barrage, and even to police reports made against racist bloggers. it probably wouldn't be too long before we see the first blog-fuelled civil suit. for all we know, it might well have happened already.

anyway, as with any sorts of communities, be it an hip-hop circuti, a pugillist fraternity yada yada, there're rules governing how feuds are to be resolved. In war time, guidelines which govern the conduct of warfare between combatants are spelt out in the Rules of Engagement (ROE) or Law Of Armed Conflict (LOAC) as any lecture-weary NSF can tell u.

In the pugilist fraternity in ancient china or 武林 , there're also informal rules governing what can or cannot be done in a duel. For example, in a swords duel, the use of hidden darts(暗器), or poison is considered unhonourable and any party who employs such despicable tactics will be chastised by the entire 武林, and will forever be deemed a 江湖败类 and end up getting his/her ass kicked by the 6 biggest sects or forever be incarcerated in a dungeon built beneath the West Lake in China.

these rules/agreements are set not for the sole purpose of ensuring equity between the feuding parties. more importantly, it's the premise for a fair fight to the metaphoric or literal death, depending on the level of ur animosity. with all the nitty gritty in place, a stage is set for feuds to be resolved in the most spectacular ways. confrontation is in our blood. and making the whole process a spectacle just compounds the fun.

a feud-resolving duels can come in a various permutations limited only by the imagination the parties involved. it can range from a death-flirting a gum-tape death match to settle who's the fastest driver on Mt Akina, to a circle jerk competition where first guy to ejaculate has to give up the girl in a love triangle...

it can even be a simple case of a 'Walk-Off' betwenmodels, like what happened between Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson in this scene from the Zoolander.

or it could be like a 'Whore-Off' between Mr Slave and Paris Hilton in South Park by doing this.

are prolly a gazillion different ways for a duel in a gazillion different context. and in light of the increasing feuding antagonism in our blogosphere, here's my little contribution in advancing the utopian ideal of attaining blogospheric peace. instead of the usual uncontrolled mudslinging and 'extra-blogicia' methods employed to drive one's point across, feuding bloggers could challenge each other to not a 'walk-off', nor a 'whore-off', but a 'BLOG-OFF'.

So here's how a blog-off works: somewhere along the line, someone makes a statement on his/her blog and someone else takes offensive to it and a tada! a 'beef' occurs. to resolve the beef, the offended party will then throw the gauntlet and challenge the other party to a 'blog-off'.

then it would be up to the parties involved to decide what methology for a blog-off which they wanna apply. it could be a case of simply delivering, responding with arguments posted on his/ her blog, daring each other to post revealing photos until one party chickens out, or posting photos to compare genitalia size so on and so forth.

then the blog-off shall continue for a stipulated time period. and within this time period, the yardstick for determining the victor of the blog-off will determined by comparing the number of trackbacks posted to their blogs from other blogders. needless to say, the one with the greater number wins. As with most swords/guns duels, it's fun only becos' there's something at stake, then depending on the level of animosity, it would be up to the bloggers involved to decided what the stakes are, if the hatred is not that great, maybe it could be an agreement for the loser to restrain from blogging for a certain period of time, or if there's really deeply entrenched hatred, they might wanna make it such that the loser will delete off his/her blog. the latter case would be the cyber equivalent of a real-life death match and probably shouldn't be taken lightly and should only be reserved for really deep-seated animosities.

and of course, in the event it is a matter of one vs the whole blogosphere, it is then up to the plural side to decided which a blogger from their camp would represent them in the subsequent blog-off. this selection of candidate would be conducted in a way similar to the 'primary elections' and bloggers who identify themselves with this camp will vote on their preferred via trackbacks until one representative emerges. yet it is rather plausible that this in itself might actually lead to even more mudslinging since real life primaries can be pretty ugly too.

then it should be a code of honour that all controversy should end together with the conclusion of the blog-off. no more mudslinging, and the whole blogosphere shall return into the universal embrace as one happy family.

so there you have it. a more systematic way of resolving beefs. the next time u see any blogger buay song, you'll know what to do.remember, be a lover, not a hater.

dr faust of the singaporean blogosphere

2005-10-18T17:31:00.000+08:00

it appears that a certain full-time singaporean blogger has just posted a podcast ostensibly as an explanation and public apology in response to some controversial remarks she made about the physically handicapped on her blog a couple of days back.

this is actually very intersting considering that this isn't the first time (and certainly not the last) she received flak for posting controversial remarks on her blog. and through it all, never once had she departed from her usual defiant stance at defending her own freedom of expression like this time and much less, to issue a public apology. nevermind the fact that by discussing what 'i-think-people-should-do' or delving into the intricate details on 'how-many-years-i-had-spent-using-public-toilets-without-seeing-a-handicapped-person-using a-handicapped-cubicle', her explanation was at best weak, if not downright incoherent. Even she admitted on her podcast saying that:

'...i dun like to account to anyone, and the age old argument of this is my blog and i write what i want kinda thing. but i know that my blog has reached that kind of extent where i cannot afford to do that anymore cos' of the amount of reach it has and the amount of influence it can have over other people so i would like to apologise...'

It just leaves us wondering what could conceivably render the feisty maverick blogger to be unable to 'afford to do that anymore'.

Considering how the formerly-feisty-blogger could 'afford' to blog full-time largely becos' she actually earns her sole income from the various commercial endorsements she does on her blog, it is not difficult to put two and two together that the public apology was in most likelihood made in order to placate the advertisers who see feisty blogger's increasing unpopularity as a bane to their products which are under her endorsement. it's not even about the nebulous ideal of 'protecting my own freedom of expression' anyone. it's about corporate realism. in exchange for her income, feisty blogger has consequently relinquished the 'freedom of expression' which she previously held so dear.

i remember reading this rather insightful comment somewhere in the wake of the 'seditious blogger' incident. In discussing about the differences between the conventional media and blogs, the writer states that the greatest comparative advantage bloggers have over journalists in gandering mass appeal lies in the fact that bloggers are not shackled by the obsession with commercial interests which journalists faces and is thus more predisposed in writing creatively. if what a blogger writes is boring or offensive (but within the limits of law), all he/she faces is just a dearth of readership. big deal. but if what a journalist writes is either too boring or remotely offensive, he/she faces the possibility of losing his/her job. the media business is after all, a business first and foremost. the writer then argues that it is precisely this constraint that prevents journalists from writing more creatively and instead prompting them to choose the pragmatic way of churning out pages of 'tested-and-proven' job-security-safe' articles.

it appears that feisty blogger has committed herself to that very faux pas. those who followed her blog long enough could certainly remember the good old days when her entries were more interesting and had a greater personal touch when she wrote about stuff like 'how she screwed up her life' or exposing the picture and email of a guy who try solicit sex from her.

yet, boring or offensive or what not, a blog in its purest form is nothing but a diary hosted online and a decision to read someone else's thoughts online is quite simply an informed choice the reader makes. caveat lector. no one stumples on a particular blog 'accidentally' without really making a concerted effort to search for it. if some blogders could just go easy on in their witchhunt for errant bloggers. it is even more ridiculous when you actually see people setting up hate blogs churning out unorignal posts with the sole aim of disparaging certain bloggers.

but then again, isn't that mudslinging and controversy that makes our blogosphere so much more interesting than our placcid mandatory daily read? on second thoughts, i would probably rather stick to watching the showdowns =)

The Malaysian Dilemma

2005-10-17T18:37:00.000+08:00

" I got out on the 26th of September 2005 afternoon on bail. I was driving past the Kuala Lumpur Twin Towers on at night and I thought to myself, it does not mean anything anymore. I used to be proud to be Malaysian, the twin towers used to be a source of pride. But now, all my nationalistic pride is gone, I had just been treated like a criminal by my very own country. A country which I loved… Used to love. I used to think that this country was beautiful. But now all I see is a country so currupted [sic] and so dirty. No amount of washing will clean away this feeling. "

-- abettermalaysia

abettermalaysia, a malaysian blogger was recently arrested in a drug bust in nightclub in KL after preliminary test identifited him as a suspected drug user. ABM was put into lockup for almost 2 days and was only released when more comprehensive blood tests proved that he was drug-free . Through his blog, ABM documents his harrowing experience in lock-up and exposes the overt police corruption he and his fellow detainees saw while in custody.

beyond the alleged atrocities of the entire incident, the most telling aspect of the blog was how ABM -who claims to be very proud malaysian before the entire incident- relates his feelings in the aftermath of his arrests, and more pertinently his disillusionment at the state of corruption in the police. and judging from the comments on his blog, it is a point of view that found solidarity amongst other malaysian blogders.

i remember having a chat with a couple of my malaysian frens here in uni and all of them remarked that they had experienced demands for petty bribes at one point or another, either from the traffic police or from their driving test invigilators. they even went as far to say that it had become a 'neccessary cost' to incur just to dispense with the various inconveniences associated with not-resorting to bribing. According to Jerm n Chris, not bribing the tester is virtually means that you're doomed to failing your driving test. It's rather lamentable to know that such a vice has actually become something that is to be tolerated rather than curbed.

It is not my intention to disparage malaysia or nor to condescend the malaysian bureaucracy by comparing it to that of singapore's, for the simple reason i do not have any first hand experiences with bribery in malaysia so it would be uninformed and unfair of me to draw such a conclusion. (In fact bribery might actually be still pretty prevalent in singapore too albeit in less conspicuous form, considering how certain popular primary schools insidiously request donations to the school building fund from desperate parents who seek to enroll their kids into such primary schools.) Rather it is my belief that an exposé should deserve a wider audience and that those who are unfortunate enough to face the brunt of the scourge of such sytemic injustices shouldn never be afraid to speak out for fear of any backlash.

"I have also gotten a letter from a fellow detainee who's girlfriend was one of the 8-9 girls. She was proven innocent too, but I was denied the permission to post the letter. I will try to meet up with her and guess we'll take thing from there. From the letter, it could be seen that some of the girls were guilty and that they were jailed and that they were caught for drugs abuse before.

The letter was not written by the girl itself but by a friend of hers because she was too traumatised to write. Not many of us are as strong and as bold as some of the people that were listed on the comments of this blog. I'm not, Jack's a little stronger, and most of the rest just really want to get back to their lives and I don't blame them. Because so do I."

I did try to recommend this blog to tomorrow.sg about 3 days ago (since it has a tag on malaysia and has a fairly large malaysian readership), but it appears that the editors over at tomorrow.sg seem to have a greater penchant for more innocuous articles like knowing 'what malaysians think about shopping centres in singapore' or 'reasons why MRT rides are not boring'. Well i guess I can't fault that for that. After all, the recommendation disclaimer on tomorrow.sg did say that it seeks '...Internet content about Singapore or by Singaporeans' and being singaporeans, it would be inappropriate to post anything remotely critical about our northern brethrens ala Zoolander. Censorship is perhaps one of our defining traits as Singaporeans haha.

Sadly, abettermalaysia's blog isn't gonna be up for long. as ABM mentioned in his latest entry:

" But for reasons I do not believe many would understand, I may be shutting down this blog on Wednesday. Though I would like to see justice and to continue telling my story, my family cannot suffer because of me. I won't let that happen. "

Self-censorship motivated by the fear of ~~persecution~~ prosecution .... perhaps our malaysian brethren really aren't so different from us after all.

It should be noted that it was never the intention for abettermalaysia to demand or exact any form of retribution on the corrupted individuals. all he sought was to tell his story, and ultimately seek closure after the whole shebang.

" So I will be making a lot of noise. And hopefully the news would travel to somebody with the power to change things and justice can prevail. How many were there before me and how many will there be after me I will never know.

But a better

Malaysia

begins with me. And with my friends and fellow blogger’s help, hopefully this country would just be that little bit better. Do forward this link to everybody you know, as everybody deserves to know. "

Let us give him the recognition he deserves before the demise of his blog....

Gunners kenna I.A

2005-10-16T00:53:00.000+08:00

no not again... first it was Chelsea, then Boro, but losing to West Brom??! and to have a former Gunner to score against his old club just rubs salt into the wound.

it's not even about the lack of financial muscle now, it's the pure lack of self-belief. or have we really used up all the karma during the unbeatable 03/04 season?

it sux not having cable, and it sux even more not being able to watch EPL reruns on SBS cos' our TV reception is fucked.

and if having a cheesy name like 'Emirates' for a new stadium name and breaking the bank in the process wasn't bad enough, the possiblity of seeing the inferior half of North London getting a 70,000 capacity stadium for next to nothing just adds further proof to Murphy's Law.

Great. That just fucking made my day.

迎接最后的战役

2005-10-13T22:23:00.000+08:00

妈, 请别再以父之名来压我

因为无论如何我一定会读书.

就算你不告诉我, 我也开始懂了文凭的价值.

我明白对我捞捞叨叨是你的关怀方式 ,

但请你试着了解, 忠言逆耳,

越捞叨的话, 我越会装做听不到.

虽然我最近经常旷课, 但这全是情非得以.

年中考试时我夜夜开夜车,

以至如今日夜颠倒, 仿佛白天不懂夜的黑.

每次醒来后才发现早已睡过头. 嗨....

记得拿回中四会考成绩那天,

你愤怒的得哭着对我说"我为你伤心".

后来我才终于领悟到为何, 男人不该让女人流泪.

也许是天意, 我今生注定当一个笨小孩.

但无论结果如何, 我一定坚持到底, 并鼓起勇气来面对.

放心吧, 我一定不再保有任何借口,

搁浅着贪玩的心情, 安静的读好书,

准备面对这一个月后, 最后的战役.

就算得从黄昏读到清晨五点, 也无所谓.

因为我相信我吃得起苦

不知在新加坡的朋友最近好吗.

纵然好久不见,

但我相信友谊历久一样浓

若没有了他们,

家乡也不过是孤单北半球里的一个小红点而已.

恨不得能赶紧考完, 立刻回国.

踏入家门, 放下行李

亲亲的对父亲说一句"爸我回来了"

now, perth ain't no hill-billy country no more

2005-10-12T02:46:00.000+08:00

it's rather incredible. For the first time in its 90 odd year history, the University of Western Australia has produced a nobel laureate. Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, medical researchers at UWA the 2005 medicine award for proving a bacterium, not stress, caused stomach ulcers and gastritis. it's rather amazing how some of the simplest ideas sometimes require the most convoluted proofs, like the idea the John Nash's nobel winning work on game theory which seems rather simple to understand, but would probably probably require a whole lotta grey matter to prove or apply it, though in Barry Marshall's case, he actually went the extra mile to swallow the stomach ulcer causing bacterium just to prove his point.

now that UWA is a university which produced nobel laureates, it's interesting considering the weird antics of some of our medical students. the med sch students here in UWA, are without a doubt among the brightest in WA, with like a entry cutoff to med sch of like 99th percentile or something. yet some of the annecdotes we hear of med students seem to run contrary to that empirical proof haha. simon, our ex-UDU pres and soon-to-be med grad once jumped into a pool during Worlds 2005 at MMU with nothing but his leopard print underwear only to get up and start grooving to the movin'. Hsien, a soon to be psych grad as well, during the river cruise party at Westers, took off his shoes and was all ready to jump into the water and swim back to the shore if not for some timely intervention. and the best i've heard so far, was the one alex told me, though it seems too bizarre to be true. as the 'campus legend' goes, a couple of years back, there was this med sch student. during one of his lab sessions which involves dealing with cadavers, he suddenly decided to have some fun while he's at it, so he went on to amputate the cadaver's penis and sneak it out of the lab. Our young castrator then decided to go down to the Guild Tavern for a drink and as the legend goes, after a couple of drinks, an inspiration hit as he planned a gag worthy of MTV's Jackass. Here's what he did, he took the penis to the toilet, went into the cubicles to do the neccessary arrangements (as u will soon understand) and waited for a couple more people to enter. When there were like two other people at the urinals, he went out to the urinals, and nonchalently took out the amputated penis and pretended to pee. After a while, he dropped the penis onto the floor and started screaming out in pseudo-pain. That freaked the hell out of the other two guys who ran straight out of the toilets. The castrator probably did it for a few more times, cos' eventually, someone who din see the humour and was disgusted by what he was doing (understandably so), reported him to the school authority and the castrator was expelled from Uni. Then again, considering the weird antics Barry Marshall does himself, the uni probably shouldn't have sacked that undergrad 'castrator'. Who knows, he could have been another nobel laureate someday, or at the very least, a really creative comedian.

Both laureates are perth residents and in fact their research labs at the Royal Perth Hospital are just across the road from the place i'm staying. That's one up over the eastern states, suckers! hehe. yet considering how despite accounting more than 1/3 of Australia's land area, and being just one of the two states (the other being NSW) that contributes more money to the Federal system than it draws, culturally and economically speaking, WA seems to have a disproportionately small impact on Australia. The stereotypes of WA from the eastern state ppl it seems are probably that of a 'rural, agricultural-based economy with next to nothing happening'. And in terms of the hip-factor, i would say, the general perception (from foreigners like me at least) are that perth (WA's capital) is probably not exactly a very vibrant meteropolis like Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, though it is probably more fun than Adelaide and certainly much more happening than Hobart, Canberra or Darwin. Especially Canberra, i all i recall from my visit there back in 2000 was that apart from the really empty streets, the huge parliament building, and the fact that they have got really bad chinese food. Well anyway, for perth, there isn't even a HMV, or Starbucks, or Borders anywhere in sight. It's probably not a negative thing i guess, since it offers quite a respite from the globalised commercial homogenity served on a dish back home in singapore. Besides, the cafe with the moving rattan fans in the city serves much better lattes than coffee bean or starbucks. Well to be fair, for a city with a little more than half the population of singapore, comparably Perth probably has a rather decent nightlife with probably at a higher bars/clubs per capita than singapore. for a place which hosts gigs like the recently concluded Godskitchen, the upcoming MOS annual tour, Black-Eye Peas etc, Perth really isn't doing too bad after all.

Well the metropolitan lethargy aside, the tranquility is perhaps the biggest niche Perth has, and personally, i feel Perth is far more deserving of being dubbed the 'Garden City' than Singapore. And ironically, Perth is sometimes referred to as the City of Lights - a title which is somewhat incongruent given the lack of street lighting. It's amazing how during spring now, even those on grass patches on the road dividers have nice little yellow flowers all in bloom. it never fails to brighten my day as i drag my sleepy body to uni, jaywalking across stirling highway and stopping at the divider to admire its beauty. Strolling along Swan River can be quite an enjoyable experience too. And the houses here, boy are they gorgeous, especially those in East Perth. While real estate prices remain bullish, comparably, housing costs still remain very much more affordable than cities like Sydney or Melbourne. All these are probably reasons while Perth is considered argubly an ideal choice for middle-aged or retired folks from either south east asia or the prohibitively expensive eastern states to settle down, while youngsters who fail to see beyond the facade of 'lethargy' shun away from.

Either way, when it's time to go after i graduate, i am certain that i will miss Perth, my adopted home away from home.

'我看呀看着电视, 拥抱未来往事, 痴心陪我一辈子'

2005-10-06T23:25:00.000+08:00

i was watching the highly addictive House on aussie TV, when i inexplicably developed a craving to watch channel 8 drama serials. no, i'm not exactly thrilled by the prospect of watching the new channel 8 serials this coming summer cos' the last time i watched channel 8 dramas when i went home in june, the quality of their serials are woefully pathetic, with crappy shows like 同心园 being aired. what i am really craving for are the old channel 8 serials produced during the good o' 'pre-mediacock' days.

much as you may hate to admit, most of us who are born in the '80s grew up on a healthy dosage of SBC/TCS/Mediacorp channel 8 drama serials. even my non-chinese friends in primary school would duitifully watch each episode, squinting to read the subtitles and discuss the plot with the rest of the class. it is perhaps one of the defining things that makes us singaporeans. channel 8 with all the nationalistic propaganda insidiously slotted into the plots of its dramas like 出路 and 和平的代价 has clearly entrenched itself as THE social-engineering institution. and yes, that title doesn't belong to the straits times, cos' the ST is the political-engineering institution.
when i was back home in june, i bought two albums which featured some of the themes songs from the old TCS dramas. and listening to it really brought back lotsa good memories. you'll be surprised how after all these years, after listening to the song, you can actually remember the lyrics and sing to the theme song of 早安老师 !

anyway, here's my personal list of favourite SBC/TCS drama that brings out the greatest nostalgia from the deepest trenches of memory:

15 Superb Drama Serials

15. 神雕侠侣:

i was never really a fan of fann wong, but this has to be my favourite fann wong serial. many people feel that the serial didn't do justice to Jin Yong's novel but it was certainly certainly one of the best 古装片 TCS has ever produced in my opinion. the scenes were well co-ordinated, the cast wasn't too bad either although the 照型 of 金轮法王 and 李莫愁 was quite buang cos' the 金轮法王 not only had hair, but it was also bright red, while 李莫愁 just looks like she's pregnant and wearing a rabbi cap. the character that i fondly remember was 黄蓉 played by 何永芳. 何永芳 if you remember was an actress from china and back then i felt she was super lao chio dressing up as 黄蓉 . i think the serial aired when i was in sec 3 and back then the entire school was Jin Yong siao cos' just about everyone was playing this chinese RPG game 金庸群侠传 and we were all reading comic version of 神雕侠侣 which drawn by a singaporean cartoonist. watching the characters you play in games or read in comics fight it out on TV was really quite fun.

14. 法医故事

before the CSI induced frenzy into forensics, there was 法医故事 which starred 陈丽贞 as a forensic pathologist. The serial was apparently based on true crimes encountered by the late Prof Chao Tze Seng, Singapore’s top forensic expert. I remember it fondly cos’ just before the serial aired, I read ‘Murder is my business’ a very interesting book which described the bizarre cases which Prof Chao encountered throughout his career.

13. 阳光列车

This was a cult classic that established 陈汉伟’s heartthrob status in which he starred as a maverick teacher. I think the show also starred Fann Wong and Ann Kok. It definitely was original cos’ the show aired way before GTO was made into a Jap drama. I remember the mtv of the 插曲 which sung by 陈汉伟 was rather funny with him pressing his face against the walls and it was parodied by me and my classmates for quite sometime, hehe.

12. 家人有约

This was a super heart –warming serial starring 黄碧仁 and 谢韶光. 谢韶光 was a rather cheebye surgeon who mean to his family and was cheating on his wife played by 黄碧仁, until he met with an accident that made him semi-retarded. The story then slowly describes how the misfortune eventually transforms the family for the better and how 谢韶光 eventually became a less wretched person and how 黄碧仁 stood by him through out all the trial and tribulations. 谢韶光’s acting in this show was perhaps unsurpassed by TCS standards and if I’m not wrong, the serial earned him and 黄碧仁 the best actor and best actress awards in that year’s 红星大奖.

11. 七月俏佳人

This was a telemovie who starred 陈汉伟 as a terminally ill rich boy from the US who was trying to meet his longtime penpal sweetheart (played by hongkie actress, Athena Chu) before he dies. The plot in itself was not too bad but the acting by the supporting cast like Robin Goh, the bimbotic Ziozio Lim and some other random guy diminished the show. The best thing to come out of the show is definitely the theme song 关怀方式 which for many subsequent years was a staple on the airwaves of 933FM. The song was so popular that even my malay platoon mates in BMT were able to play the song on guitar and we just sang it together, yet another example of the pervasiveness of channel 8.

10. 奇缘

I dun exactly remember much of the plot details from the serial other than the fact that it was a 古装片 with several independent story segments. I was probably very young when I first watched the show and I watched several episodes of it from the afternoon reruns when I came back from school. But the sets, the stories were very intricate indeed. It's a huge pity that Mediacorp dun produce 古装片 like this anymore, and even when they do, they're those sorta crappy collaborations with some random china TV station kind. The theme song really suited the show and it just stuck on my mind for many years. I was fucking happy when I found the mtv of the song on the net. You can view the mtv from here.

9. 迷离夜

It was a serial in the same vein as 奇缘, except the fact that it had a contemporary setting. The show was really very very creepy and its theme song made it worse with its mystical, creepy feeling. The defining scary scene from the show is probably the scene with the ghost of an old auntie dressed up in those super old shamfoo with those sorta head band with a jade on it waving at you. Eee.. The only plot details which I can recall is that it starred 朱乐玲 in 2 of the segments, one which she recalls and is confronted by memories from her previous life, and eventually finds some ornament embedded in her body cos’ she was cremated in her previous life and her lover left the ornament inside the urn with her ashes. The other segment was about butterflies who would swamp her all the time. It is definitely the best horror show SBC ever made.

8. 再战封神榜

This one superb 古装片starring 周初明 as the Deity of Fire who fell in love with another fairy and ended up being re-incarnated as a mortal named 华光. I was told by my grandmother who was a former opera actress that 华光 was also the deity which the opera troupe prays to so I guess 华光 was eventually reinstated as a deity. I can’t really remember much of the plot but I do recall that the costumes and 照型 of the actors and actresses was super cool. The Deity of Fire, for one had long red hair and wears a warrior’s armor. I think it was 周初明 first serious role cos’ he was usually cast into comedies before that and so his acting was a little too idiosyncratic for a serious drama. But anyway, it was a superb show with a really good theme song as well. I think it was sung by a random duo group from Singapore but I can’t for the life of me remember what the name of the song is! Arggg. Oh! But guess what, while googling for pictures of the serial, I stumbled upon a website that offers rmvb downloads for the entire serial! Guess I’ll know where my bandwidth will be going for the rest of the month.

7. 出路

This is one of the all time blockbuster serials ever made by TCS. Of course, being a national education propaganda flick that describes the life of our pioneering forefathers probably helped as well. It has a rather strong cast featuring 许美珍, 谢韶光, Ivy Lee, Tay Ping Hui and Terence Cao. From what I can recall, 许美珍 was a reluctant bride who shaved her head to get out of the marriage and eventually ran away from China to Singapore to meet her beau played by Terrence Cao, only to fall in love with the local gangster played by Tay Ping Hui. 谢韶光 on the other hand was a rich good for nothing brat who detested his virtuous wife played by Ivy Lee. Plot aside, the 2 biggest things that stands out was the aesthetics of the cinematography as well as its theme song ‘我吃得起苦’ which was performed by 动力火车. That was a super inspiring song and considering the fact that I followed the drama which aired somewhere after my woeful O level prelims, and just before my upcoming O levels, I adopted the song as my mugging theme even till today.

6. 迷情专访

This is in my opinion the best telemovie ever produced by TCS which starred Zoe Tay as investigative journalist who was relentless in exposing corporate scandals. 谢韶光 stars alongside her as an embittered corporate highflier whose company was under Zoe Tay’s investigation. The script was awesome, laden with imageries and metaphors like those likening a maverick journalist Prometheus who in defiance of Zeus, chose to give light and warmth to the mortals. I know this probably don’t sound very convincing by really it is one good movie. I can’t wait to get my hands on its VCD release from here.

5. 豆腐街

The shows stars 许美珍 as the main protagonist who was forced into marrying to a young little boy called 镙头 as a wife cum nanny according to old Chinese customs or what is termed as a 童养媳. While she initially detests this, she eventually resigns herself to her fate playing the unconsummated wife to 镙头 who refers to her as 姐姐. The most heart wrenching portion of the plot is occurs when 镙头 grew up to be a rather handsome and well-learned young man who fell in love with a young girl his age played by the singer Mavis Hee. Now a middle-aged woman, 许美珍 does not lament her fate nor stops 镙头 from marrying Mavis Hee, but rather offers them her best wishes at her own sacrifice while quietly receding into solidarity, contented at fulfilling her role as just a 姐姐 to 镙头.

Another notable member of the cast is 郑国平 who plays a brutish boar hunter nicknamed 山猪雄, who has a mentally ill and disfigured younger brother played by 陈文聪 as a result of torturing by the Japanese during WW2. 山猪雄 then fell in love with the reluctant bride (played by lo and behold! lao chio bu 何永芳) who was conned into marrying 陈文聪. Much as 山猪雄 struggled to suppress his love for 何永芳, he soon found himself torn between his love for her and his love for his younger brother. The ending was a rather sad one when 何永芳 was accused of adultery or wrongly murdering 陈文聪 I think. and if I’m not wrong, in order to protect 何永芳 as well as to preserve his loyalty to his brother, 山猪雄 chose to confront the police and crowd demanding to get a piece of 何永芳 and eventually getting himself shot dead in the process. It is worth noting that both 郑国平 and 陈文聪 had a superb performance in this serial and it is a huge pity that neither of them found fame nor recognition for their acting prowess. 郑国平 for one is probably one of the most underrated actors in TCS. The theme song ‘城里的月光‘ which was sang by Mavis Hee was really superb as well.

4. 锦绣前程

This was one of those 7pm serials which starred 周初明 as a vocational institute student or VI – the predecessor to the ITE – who had no passion in life other than to get a cheong bike and to play water polo. It also starred Terence Cao as his nemesis who was a rich JC student, and a friend to 周初明 ’s neighbour, a JC girl played by 林璃宾. 周初明 ’s widowed father who was played by 陈树成 was very a really funky cab driver who himself was rather supportive of his son and trying to put off the love interest from his mamasan admirer played by 刘秋莲. There was a very funny scene when Terrence Cao challenged 周初明 to a bike race. At the scene of the race, 周初明 was waiting for a bike which his father promised to buy for him. It turns out that his father bought him a scooter. Other members of the cast include 周崇庆 -who plays the friend of 周初明 who lacks confidence and wanted to commit suicide when he realizes that he was going to VI but eventually goes on to poly after graduating -, 关德辉 who plays ‘cool man’ a classmate of 周初明 who went blind after an accident, and the then very cute Michelle Chia who plays the love interest of 周初明 a westernized friend of 林璃宾. There was one scene where 周初明 was supposed to attend the prom with Michelle Chia but was turned down at the door cos’ he was underdressed. Michelle Chia innovated by removing her scarf or something and made it into a bow tie for 周初明 and somehow they eventually made it in.

The theme of the show was ostensibly an attempt to demolish education-based snobbery by portraying VI students as hardworking and motivated youths, given the right influences given its title. The theme song was brilliant too. It was performed by all of the actors in the serial I think and it starts like this '有谁不曾在生活中受了伤?有谁不曾在期待中迷失方向?' Awesome song, awesome serial. In fact, it had such a huge impact on me and my friends then that we started imitating 周初明 by referring to our pri 3 English teacher by calling ‘ello!’, much to her dislike, heh.

3. 双天至尊

This is without a doubt a TCS classic featuring the 2^nd generation golden couple of Caldecott hill, Li Nan Xing and Zoe Tay. (the original was perhaps 黄文永 and 向云) . For some inexplicable reasons, 双天至尊 II was enacted into the all time top 50 serials on the mediacorp website instead of its predecessor. In my opinion, the 2 subsequent installments was crap, especially 双天至尊 III. Needless to say, the characters are now eternalized as part of TCS folklore. Li Nan Xing plays the gambling prodigy 言飞 who’s being coached by his father played by 陈树成 who wants him to avenge his defeat in the hands of his mortal nemesis 龙庭光 played by 朱厚任 whose daughter, 龙嘉嘉 (played by Zoe Tay) is the love interest of 言飞.

I think the serial aired when I was in pri 4 and that really sparked a gambling craze in my class when we imitated 言飞 by trying to guess the dice roll by moving our ears (I could still do the ear moving thingy now) and trying to throw the cards across the air like the way how 陈树成 coaches 言飞 by flipping to random chapters of the 三国演义 book and asking his son to throw a card specifically to that chapter. The theme song ‘沉默的羔羊’ sang by 赵传 was a sleeper hit which although wasn’t famous, is probably still residing in the deep recesses of the minds of every one who’s a kid in 1993.

2. 最后一个大侠

I simply cannot understand why this serial wasn’t enacted into the all-time top 50 list. Throughout primary sch, sec sch and even JC, I just cannot find a guy my age who do not like this serial or anyone who cannot sing its theme song. Go ahead, just try and ask any Chinese guys who’s about 22 years old if they can sing the song from 最后一个大侠 and chances are that they will start singing ‘为什么武林高手都要做天下第一, 为什么人在江湖都要说身不由己….’

If it isn’t obvious by now, i was quite a 周初明 fan when I was young. The serial stars 周初明 as wild jungle-book-like child named 英武 who was brought up in the forest and has hair all over his body like a monkey who is yet again the long lost son of 陈树成 who plays a top martial arts exponent named 骆传风 I think (quite similar to the names of one of 黄药师’s disciples I think). When 英武 grew up, he was treated by a 神医 and coached by this highly skilled Taoist priest who was able to stretch his hands. The priest was the mortal enemy to this 江湖恶人 named 紫逻刹 or purple killer. The interesting thing about 紫逻刹 was that he is an ah-gua with purple eye-shadows and purple long nails who leads a double life as a some well respected person when he isn’t 紫逻刹. He was apparently the friend of 骆传风 and the reason why he became ah-gua was cos’ 骆传风 passed him his martial arts manual which are lacking in some pages, and so when 紫逻刹 tried to practice the kung fu on the manual, he 走火入魔 and have yin-yang imbalance and hence become ah gua. Then I think both the priest and 骆传风 got killed by 紫逻刹 and 英武 wanted to seek revenge and somehow managed to kill 紫逻刹. But then, 紫逻刹’s son who is also 英武’s friend also mastered his father’s skills and also became ah-gua and so wanted to avenge his father by fighting 英武. I think in the end, the new ah-gua got killed and 英武退出江湖 to live happily ever after with his love interest the神医 ‘s daughter played by Zoe Tay leaving a unsurpassable kung fu accomplishment, hence becoming 最后一个大侠.

Man, this really brings back lotsa fond memories. There’s this guy in our class called Cai Zi Cong who always fantasied himself as 杨过 cos’ whenever we play fighting during recess, he would fight with only one hand and tucking in the other behind his back…nevermind the fact that he always kenna zham big time cos’ everyone will be fighting him at the same time. So when we started playing 最后一个大侠 and designating roles, we always bullied him and make him 紫逻刹 cos’ his face was pale and had dark rings around his eyes resembling 紫逻刹’s eye shadows whahahaha! His protests din help, so he was 紫逻刹 everytime. But unfortunately for us, he remained just as enthu about his role and so zealous was he that we all kenna scratched by his fingernails when he imitated 紫逻刹’s killer moves. Poetic justice eh.

1. 早安老师



tada!! Is it any surprise that 早安老师 is my all time favourite? I guess it is probably the all-time favourite of most gen-y guys or gals my age. If every guy can sing the最后一个大侠 song, then CONFIRM every guy AND girl can all sing the theme song from 早安老师 that goes ‘老师早, 同学们好. 我们开始上课了!’ If you can’t get enough of the song, you can view the MTV here.

The serial stars 陈莉萍 as the ‘Aiyoyo’ 老师 who’s a rich girl who was sent to teach in a kampong primary school called 立仁小校, i remember this cos’ I’ve got a pri school classmate called Yang Li Ren who always prides himself sharing the same name as that primary school. There she met many students like this two damn funny and cute fat twins called 旺财 and 发财. Their father was a widowed fisherman who fell in love with the principal of 立仁小校, 张校长 played by 洪慧芳. At the kampong, Aiyoyo met 四眼周 played by Li Nan Xing whom she eventually married, much to the dismay of 四眼周’s father, a medical hall owner who disapproved of Aiyoyo’s westernized behaviour.

There was also a paikia student who would always play truant and ran away from home to the city and joined gangs there. It was Aiyoyo who eventually brought him back and reformed him. 朱厚任 also acted in this show where he played a poor but upright teacher. His wife played by 陈丽贞 was a go-getter who couldn’t stand sharing poverty with her husband and hence left him. Then there was this overage female student played by 朱乐玲 who had a crush on 朱厚任

but her love was unrequited by 朱厚任. Then I think one night when 朱厚任 was getting all upset over his wife’s departure and getting drunk or something

朱乐玲 went over to his place to console him and 朱厚任 mistook her for his wife and gave her a kiss (they probably din shag, cos’ the serial is very G one not PG). The next day, 朱厚任 realised his mistake and told 朱乐玲 that he din like her, thus prompting her to run away from home. Her mother complained, made a big fuss and 朱厚任 was forced to resign.

There is also this really obnoxious teacher played by 王昌梨 who was a relative of one of the directors of the school who always tortured students who misbehaved. Then somehow, the board of directors decided to sack 张校长 for some damn stupid reason I think by making her responsible for 朱乐玲’s 离家出走 and the obnoxious teacher was then made principle in her place. This new principal made things very difficult for the rest of the school and eventually accidentally burnt the school down when he one of his unstubbed cigarettes set fire to the school. I can’t really remember the ending but I think they managed to rebuild the school and the cheebye principal was sacked and 张校长 was reinstated. During her hiatus, 张校长 served as a home tutor to this mentally disturbed rich girl. Apparently the young girl became mentally disturbed when she resulted in the death of her grandma cos’ she willfully insisted that her grandma retrieve her doll which fell into the river thus resulting in her grandma’s drowning. 张校长 somehow managed to open her up and cured her I think. That was I think the only disturbing aspect of who was a rather light-hearted and cheerful serial.

The popularity of 陈莉萍 itself is testament to the success of the serial. For like 10 years after the show, 陈莉萍 always found herself among the 十大 of the star awards even when she appeared in little or no drama serials. Her Aiyoyo character also created a huge number of spin off education programmes that features her speaking in her clichéd ‘Ai yo yo ‘ punctuations. I just cannot think of any other serial that can surpass this in terms of popularity and nostalgia factor.

On the other hand, there are quite a few ‘buang’ cases throughout the history of TCS. Here are a few:

Buang Cases:

- 敢敢做个开心人-

The show is not even funny at all. The fact that the stupid sitcom survived for like 4 seasons and created spin offs featuring its characters like Lobang King only makes it worse. The theme song is fucking irritating somemore the one that goes dunno what dunno what ‘made in singapore’. It’s those sorta pathetic brand humor that really destroys whatever little sense of humour we Singaporeans have left.

-不老传说-

Sad to say, this is yet another buang case that features周初明. I never really watched the serial cos’ I was damn put off by the first few episodes I watched and it was obviously a rip off from the more successful Hongkong serial about vampires : ‘我和僵尸有个约会’. To think medicorp has the cheek to hail it as one of the top 50 all time serials.

-金枕头-

Hongkong accents aside, just seeing the far too overaged and overweight 万梓良 acting as a heartthrob who wins the hearts of not only Zoe Tay and Fann Wong is just too much to take. If that isn’t bad enough, the fucking serial actually drags on for like 40 episodes with one pseudo arty farty ambiguous ending with Zoe Tay, Fann Wong and 万梓良 pressing their ears against that oversized gold nugget while asking ‘你听的到吗? 我听到了’. No wonder this scene is always parodied in the old 搞笑行动. And believe it or not, this was also enacted into the all-time top 50 list! PUI!

-卫斯里传奇-

For some reason, TCS simply cannot produce sci-fi flicks for nuts. The plot setting was just too over convoluted for its setting, and the details of the progression of the plot just too flippantly dealt with. Acting was crap, action was too random. I think they even got their story wrong cos’ in one of their story segments ‘蓝血人’ the 蓝血人 was portrayed to be a villain when in 倪匡 novel he was supposed to be a good alien who’s marooned on earth. Pathetic.

-莲花争霸-

This comes as a close second for the all time buang case, If not for the fact that it was a swordfighting serial so the action probably mitigates the damage. There is little to no originality to the plot. First the shows stars 刘秋莲 as a sultry proprietress of a tavern who in secrets has a team of assassins placed under her charge. She fell in love with the younger handsome, cool assassin played by Li Nan Xing. Come on lor, this is obviously a rip off from the plot of 流星蝴蝶剑. And if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s this owner of a castle played by 朱厚任 who adopted this sidekick as his foster son played by…..female actress 塔灵托雅!! And the best part, this foster son eventually castrates himself to learn the some 神功 from a 武林密集 which is named –wait for this- 莲花宝典 and eventually becomes feminine and sultry!This is CONFIRM guarantee plus chop a plagiarizing of the storyline from movie version 笑傲江湖之东方不败, and not even from the novel version cos’ it is in the movie version that 东方不败 was portrayed as young, pretty and sultry. In the novel, 东方不败 is just a lao bapok. Super duper jialat. The worst part, when I was googling for pictures from this serial, I actually found out that some vcd company in china is ACTUALLY SELLING THIS CRAP to the china market. I hope the china viewers dun go blind after watching this shit.

All time buang case -错爱今生 –

The show is so buang that I dun really recall much despite being forced to watch it cos’ it airs at 7pm and my grandma and auntie would watch it while we have dinner. I do remember that it stars Christopher Lee, Jaclyn Tay, Irin Gan and one other random actor. Together, they form 2 couples and the two guys were good friends. Then for some weird ass reasons, the couples broke up and they ended up switching partners! Wah lan eh, might as well all go and have a good foursome together! I remember my grandma cursing at the immorality which the show preaches and the serial did draw a lot of flak from the media. The acting was damn bad also. Plus the fact that the plot was super incoherent as to why they ended up breaking up. So that has to be the worst serial ever. The only mitigating factor which I can think of is that we get to see Irin Gan strut around in the show, and even so, she isn’t exactly super chio.

There’re probably tons of worse serials out there, and when I last checked, that irritating show with Pierre Png acting as a retard who kept repeating ‘美人渔’ is probably a strong contender for the top spot if not for the fact that I only got to watch one or two episodes. Also there're a couple from Channel 5 as well, such as Masters of the Sea and the serial with unsurpassable tacky names 'VR MAN' featured erm, the VR Man and professor click click.

And of course, there're probably many more good serials that i haven't mentioned. Gosh, this could even be a meme in itself.

So what are your favourite old channel 8 serials?

no money no cry

2005-10-06T22:59:00.000+08:00

at the advice of my housemates, i did not sing the hokkien song which i wanted to sing for the Multicultural week talent time contest. cos' it appears that most of the people there were either from malaysia or hong kong and would be unable to understand the song anyway. so i opted to sing 'One Night in Beijing' which ostensibly had something to do with multiculturalism since the female portion was sang in Pekinese opera way. it was so fucking embarrassing having to stand in front of a crowd singing the female portion of the song, especially when there're so many familiar faces around! to make things worse, there was a pretty long interlude between the verses and i was standing there no knowing what to do, grinning and giggling in embarassment, just wishing for the song to start again. they must have thought i was crazy or something. well in the end i din win anything and the first prize went to two African girls who deservably won with their performance of the African Rhumba dance while the runners-up went to the Malaysian Students' Union who interestingly did a hip-hop dance. Sigh, .there goes my source of finance for tomorrow's Godskitchen rave party...

少年英雄

2005-10-02T22:50:00.000+08:00

"一根草, 一点露
为了要有人照顾
明明知道是没前途
偏偏走上坏仔路

请你别跟我讲道理
三句话就要令伯醒
我也不知是为什么
有人说这是为兄弟

少年按作你中内伤?
是不是你要做英雄
为什么你按昵款憨
你明明知道是行不通

你的brother 叫你兄弟
为兄弟你该不怕死
哪是说你来中大事
你家的父母谁来饲 "

- <<少年英雄>>

when i was about 8 years old, my youngest auntie once asked me what i wanted to be when i grew up. without hesitation, i replied to her saying '我要当黑社会老大'. and even till today, my auntie never fails to poke fun at me for that rather unusual declaration of wanting to pursue a career in the triad. it was one of those passing phases, probably the result of being fed with an unhealthy dosage 英雄本色 and 上海滩 reruns, just as how i wanted to be a lawyer after watching 法外情 which starred the young Andy Lau.

gradually, i've grown up realising that there's neither a cause for me to champion for unlike those righteous gangsters you see in hong kong movies nor any impetus considering most of my friends back in school weren't involved in any of these. fleeting ambitions come and go, and 14 years on, i've still got no clue as to what exactly i wanna do with my life. yet some part within me is within me is still intrigued by the culture of the triads. the predecessor or the original triad, the Heaven and Earth Society (天地会) for one, was actually founded on rather noble nationalistic sentiments back in the Qing (Manchu) Dynasty in which sought to restore equity and overthrow the Manchu regime in China. It is arguably a socio-political movement with an ethos based on loyalty, brotherhood and chivalry. in fact, the original triad 三合会 (the subsequent contemporary incarnation of the 天地会 was hugely instrumental in raising funds for the Sun Yat-Sen's democratic revolution which eventually succeed in overthrowing the Manchus.

while most of the contemporary triads/gangs now bear little or no semblance to the original triad, nevertheless it is still rather interesting to know about the life in the underbelly of each society. Sugarbf offers a rather interesting personal account about his time in a gang in this entry. kudos to him for baring all. he is the true blue reformed paikia blogger. confirm qie toh rockson.

the lyrics in the start of the entry is from a song sung by Mark Lee and Jack Neo which was featured in the 粱婆婆重出江湖 OST. It was a wretched movie, and i would consider the song to be the only saving grace for the movie. The song was also featured at the end of Royston Tan's 15, a brilliant movie about the downtrodden youths in the underbelly of the singaporean society.
it's an awesome song which can be downloaded from kazza/ares/(insert random P2p software) by just searching for 'Shao Nian Ying Xiong' or 'Hokkien Paikia Song by Some Lame Idiot' for the other version of the song.

on a sidenote, i will be helping out a friend who is one of the organisers for the talent-time for the multi-cultural week this wed. apparantly there're not enough contestants for the talent-time so i was asked to join. if there's any consolation in the prospects of embarrassing myself in front of a crowd, it has to be the fact that there'll only be 7 contestents vying for the 300 bucks offered to the winner and 200 bucks to the runners-up. i've checked it out and apparantly hokkien songs are allowed so i guess i'm gonna sing 少年英雄. prize money aside, i just hope i'm not gonna embarrass myself big time. i'ma gonna need a paperbag over my head....

the aristocrats (WARNING: extremely crude content)

2005-09-27T16:55:00.000+08:00

the aristocrats has been referred to as "the world's funniest joke" and "the world's most vulgar joke." It may be either depending on who's telling it, who's listening and the innumerable variations upon the theme. It is rarely told the same way twice. it is a joke incomparable in terms of shock value, slapstickness or even pure grotesquery depending on the way you see it.

either way, one thing for sure, it's definitely a very popular joke with an entire website dedicated in collecting all known variations of the aristocrat joke. perhaps one of the most popular version might be the southpark version told by eric cartman. you can see the vid clip of the joke being told by cartman here. there's even a documentary dedicated entirely to featuring a 100 variations of this joke. and believe it or not, this film was actually premiered in the 2005 sundance film festival.

the most amazing thing about the joke is that it is a joke with an anti-punchline. so dun worry if you can't get the punchline, cos' i din either. which is why the essence of the humor in the joke lies in the ability for each individual teller to adapt the story. it is perhaps the anti-climatic ending which makes it so different and malleable. the punchline is nothing more than an excuse to embellish the joke with any gross details, limited only by the imagination of the teller.

the ability to appreciate humor is perhaps one of the definining traits that sets humans apart from animals who are non-sentient beings (though one may argue that the line between human and animals is blurred given the grotesque context of this joke at least!). anyway, jokes are a very integral part of every culture and seeing how details from a same joke on a redneck is transformed into one about an ah-beng is perfect example of how beyond the differences in culture, humour is the universal language that binds all of us together. it is probably also why beyond every culturally relative gesture, a smile is always perceived to be a friendly, non-antangonistic gesture.

so without further ado, allow me to present to you, the singapore variation of the aristocrats:
(ahem.)

* DO NOT proceed if gross jokes offend you

____________________________________________________________________
The Singaporean Aristocrats

The NDP organising committee is selecting participants to perform for the next NDP parade. Presiding over the selection commitee is an SAF Colonel. An old 2nd warrant officer walks into the committee hearing with his young pregnant wife, his teenage son and daughter and his maid. The 2WO (2nd warrant officer) salutes the Colonel and says: "Sur! Purmission to take part in the show segment for NDP, SUR!".

The Colonel was rather surprised, and replied: 'Oei! wake up your idea understand! You're an SAF personnel, if you want, you get yourself involved in the parade segment. Where got SAF personnel do show segment one, you tell me?'

The 2WO replied: "Pleaaase, Sur! i old alreadi, going to retire liao. i always wanted to the parade RSM but never every get selected cos' my rank too low and my voice too high, cannot give proper commands. this is my last year in service, so can i perform in the show segment with my family?"

The Colonel thought about it for a while and replied: "Sorry, still cannot, given the sensitive political climate now with a new change in PM, the last thing we need is for one family to run an entire show segement for the NDP. You want us to kenna accused us of being nepotistic issit!!".

The young Thai wife of the 2WO whom the 2WO met when he was posted to the SAF's training base in Thailand (like many other Warrant Officers) pleaded in her Thai-accented English:
"Pleassse Sirrr! My husbond work in SAF long long no chance to perform. He going to retire, so no more monney. we got so many kids. no monney cannot feed. If we get chance perform, and perform well, can get performing contract so no need scared no monney...pleaassee sirrr..."

The Colonel and the 2WO go back a long time ago when they first met went the Colonel was still a PC in the same camp as 2WO. The Colonel suddenly remembered how he was indebted to the 2WO when one night, while he was 'having his way' with one of the recruits in his platoon and got found out by the 2WO who was on BOS duty. It was the 2WO who covered the whole thing up and prevented the Colonel from being charged for 302.

The nostalgia and gratitude overwhelmed the Colonel and he finally relented, and says: 'Ok, you show me your act first, if good enough then can.'

The 2WO was overjoyed, spinned back immediately and did a double clap to signal to his family to get ready to perform. And with lightning speed, stripped his No.4 uniform and underwear down to just his boots and beret. In his shrill voice, he started shouting drill commands at the top of his voice 'Hormat, Senja Ta!'. And amazingly, in a split second after giving that command, he got an erection - one that's at 90 degrees parallel to his body, not unlike a rifle at an arms salute, ostensibly as a salute to the Colonel.

The wife also promptly stripped down and in an amazing feat managed to squeeze the baby out of her womb using the sheer strength of her cheebye in one solid fluid motion. The baby then went flying out and dangled out of the womb with only a umbilical cord holding it and preventing it from flying any further. The 2WO went on the explain the significance of the action in surprisingly perfect english: 'this is the metaphoric display signifying that of the birth of our nation and the attainment of self-governance after 1959 election'.

At this point of time, the daughter started licking the asshole of the 2WO while the son stripped down as well with the 2WO's parade pace stick stuck up his ass the 2WO then went on to push the pace stick in and out of his son's butthole using his right hand while using his left hand, proceed to push the baby in and out of his wife's cheebye.

The 2WO explained it saying "I'm a military man, this is a surrealistic tribute to my life in the SAF, having had to kiss the ass of my superiors as protrayed in the ass licking, and getting fucked up the ass for my mistakes as with the pace stick, and the baby is symbolic of the featherlight used to pull through rifle barrels as symbolised by my wife's birth cannal - one of the most fundamental thing every soldier has to learn".

And after a while, the 2WO started to penetrate the baby's asshole using the pace stick while the son when on to shit all over his mother, and smearing it all over her body, and the baby while moving in and out of the mother's cheebye bit off the umbilical cord and flew out of the mother's cheebye and in an amazing display of strength pushed the pace stick out of his ass. The 2WO then turned back to the Colonel and went to explain: "This bitting off of the umbilical cord symbolises how the decision by our enlightened leaders to break away from the Federation of Malaysia after discovering that our future will be full of shit if didn't."

Then the 2WO went on to swing his wife around and shouted another drill command 'Utuk Depressant Datang Senja Ta!' With arms drill precision, the son and the 2WO went to double penetrate the wife's cheebye doggy style while the daughter went on to give the baby son a blowjob while fisting the asshole of her mother. All these steps done in perfect timing with the 2WO giving signals of '1 check, 1 check, 1 check 1 check 1! And while penetrating and being penetrated, the whole family (except the baby of course) started singing 'Stand up, for Singapore, do it with a smile' with a happy expression on their faces. After finish their rendition of Stand Up for Singapore, the 2WO went on to explain saying "This symbolises the period of rapid industrialisation of the Singapore economy during the 70s to the 80s, as seen with everyone, young and old working hard to get a piece of action."

At this point of time the maid who has been standing away from the action all this while suddenly started stripping and started putting on a strap-on dildo. The son and the 2WO, now visibly tired, stopped penetrating the wife and the maid took over. In an unbeliveable contortionist posture, the maid started to penetrate the wife's cheebye in a reverse missionary style while arching herself 180 degrees backwards to french kiss the wife. While despite being gagged by the maid's tongue, the wife was desperately to shouting and squirming "I'm a stayer! I'm a stayer, not a quitter!!"

Upon doing getting fucked by the strap-on, the wife's cheebye got even wetter and started pouring out torrentially. The daugther then took out a pail to collect her mother's cheebye zup and started bathing herself, the baby and the rest of the family in her mother's 'essence'. While the 2WO and son could only watch on and masturbate themselves.

The 2WO, now clearly trying to fulfill his dual role as both the performer and narrator went on to explain saying "After the golden period of Singapore's industrialisation ended, our esteemed leaders saw the need to bring in foreign talent and we responded to their call. With the expertise from our foreign talent, we are now able to enjoy the riches of our new economy...nevermind the fact that we can only sit back and not join in the action.'

Then, the son and the 2WO went out of the room briefly and returned with one of those huge industrial generators and a gianormous 3 feet long, 20 cm in diameter vibrator which is connected to the generator as its power source. The logo on the industrial generator and vibrator clearly shows that it is being manufactured by Singapore Technologies. The daughter then went on to smear her cheebye with an entire bottle of NTUC brand kaya, seemingly like what people do with Vaseline and started slowly putting the gianormous vibrator into her cheebye. The 2WO then turned on the power source and the torque on the vibrator was so huge that the daugther started rotating round and round with the vibrator still inside her cheebye squirming in pleasure. And with that the entire family started another rendition singing yet another NDP song going 'Deep in my heart, i just know, right from the start, we'll grow, look where we are, we've cum so far, there's still a long long way to go...' while vibrator's loud buzzing in the background clouded their voices.

The 2WO then went to explain saying: "Now that we're into the 21st Century, our esteemed leaders have forsee a need for Singapore to diversify into a new economy based on tertiary industries. My daughter is symbolises the new-economy while the ST manufactured vibrator shows how the GLC led Singaporean economy is able to diversify itself into tertiary industries. Notice how it's a high-tech vibrator not the usual dildo which is a relic from the old economy. The NTUC kaya which bears a distinct local flavour, symbolises how despite efforts to go international with our new-economy, we need a distinctively Singaporean brand to hold us all back to the Singaporean Heartland".

After like a million rounds round the vibrator, the 2WO disconnected the generator and his giddy daughter dismounted the vibrator and just slumped to the ground. At this point, the 2WO his wife, his son and the maid started to climb onto a table placed strategically above his young daughter. The 2WO then said: "And now for a metaphoric display of the recent NKF fiasco involving TT Durai and his golden tap". And with that, the whole family started to pee onto the young daughter below, who seemed to be relishing her bath in the golden shower. Then after the pee subsided, in his shrill voice, the 2WO gave yet another drill command "Lepaskan SPRING!" and with that cue, he and his son went counting '1 check, 1 check, 1 check, 1 check, 1" while pulling at their penises while the maid and the mother went below the table to join the daughter. At the last 'check', both the son and the 2WO came all over the maid, the mother, the daughter and the baby. Upon finishing his ejaculation, the 2WO went to a drill command shouting "Turun Senja Ta!!" And with that, both his and his son's penises went flaccid and dangled down.

With that, the entire family jumped up and ran towards the entire NDP committee and shouted 'Ta-DA!!!' and then gave a bow and skirtsy before going back into Senang Diri position, as if waiting for the affirmation nod from the committee.

The entire NDP organising committee was shell-shocked and they just sat there for the longest time with their jaws wide open but words just couldn't come out. Complete silence engulfing the entire room.

Finally, the Colonel recovers from his shock and managed to say: "Wah lan eh....that's one hell of an act. What do you call that?"

Then the entire family ran forward almost into the face of the Colonel with each posing in a cutsey V-Sign and shouting in glee and in unision: "WE ARE THE ANG MO KIO ARISTOCRATS"

yet another meme

2005-09-23T04:03:00.000+08:00

the irony of the study break or holidays is that with more time on my hands, yet still i tend to blog lesser than i would during exam time. blogging was my only catharsis in between exams, now i've got billards and ktv to keep me occupied, heh.

anyway, here's something to fill the space from hiaoauntie.

List three random facts about yourself that your friends might not know.
1) that i had a negative initial impression of them (some army buddies) when i first met them
2) that they're the next most important thing to me after my family
3) that i am less cheerful and optimistic that what i appear to be

7 Things That Scare Me
1) digital clocks/timing (the anticipation of the change of digits rattles me off)
2) the thought of drinking the pink anti-biotic syrup (a fear i had since childhood)
3) not waking up on time for exams/important presentation (my frens pull that prank on me by changing the time on my clock and that freaked me out)
4) fucking up my studies (too much is at stake)
5) not coming up with anything in an impromptu debate
6) public speaking (i can only mitigate but never really eliminate this phobia after all these years)
7) dying lonely and embittered

7 Things I Like The Most
1) my dvd collection
2) travelling to unfamiliar places (be it another country/city/or even suburb)
3) debating/the gong jiao dictators
4) my mp3 collection (took me years to collate what i have now that)
5) playing billards
6) singing karaoke
7) my blog (like i said, it's my catharsis)

7 Important Things In My Room
(by that i would refer to my room here in perth)
1) my queen-sized bed (i could never fit that into my room in singapore)
2) my quilt/quilt cover (love the design)
3) my laptop (my conduit to the outside world and singapore)
4) my couch (makes reading so much more enjoyable)
5) my standing lamp with japanese shades (got it at an awesome bargain from ikea)
6) my 2 pirated LMF figurines
7) my balcony (it's an indescribable feeling just sitting there, smoking and watch the world go by)

7 Random Facts About Me
1) am very ambivalent about my future
2) really am a virgin, unfortunately
3) has never dated nor fallen in love before
4) has no concrete ambition in life other than one that is simply rather unattainable
5) almost got involved in a 3 car pile-up today when my fren leading the 3 car convoy jammed his brakes making me jam mine as well, skidding in the process and fortunately not hitting anything.
6) am saving up for a car
7) can't wait to go home for summer

7 Things I Plan To Do Before I Die
1) find my ess muss sein in life
2) fulfill this ess muss sein
3) make sure that my family is well-taken care of after i'm gone
4) visit europe
5) fall in love at least once
6) watch gong jiao win the JG debating championships
7) having no regrets and retrospecting my life in fondness

7 Celeb Crushes

1) Michelle Yim, 米雪 (super duper lao-chio.)

2) Lin Ching Hsia, 林青霞 (super chio when she was young, plus her charimatic protrayal in various swordfighting movies)

3) Chan Wai 陈炜 (simply cos' she's 瑶池圣母)

4) Wan Yi Wen 万绮雯 ( she's 马小玲, need i say more?)

5) Jane Seymour (doctor quinn and an impeccable MILF, she's 50+ for god's sake!)

6) Celeste Chong (ok, before her current lian-y phase at least. when she was the good o' social worker starring in 如何对你说)

7) Natalie Portman (cos' she's very intelligent, highly charismatic and prolly cos' she's Padme Amidala. but i liked her way back since i first watched The Professional when i was like 13 anyway)

7 Bloggers Whom I Wanna Pass This Thingy to
1) little miss drink(recovering)alot
2) missy jurisfiction
3) c
4) mooiness
5) vamptress
6) blinkymummy
7) knight of pentacles

sinful escapisms

2005-09-17T14:45:00.000+08:00

escapism has never felt so good.

it's been a brilliant week since the end of the wretched mid semester exams. and after all the hard mugging, surely there's no harm indulging in a little sinful procrastination does it? not even when i've got a 2000 word law assignment due in 2 weeks or 3 weeks worth of missed lectures to catch up with online. neither would the fact that i'm the only idiot who will be turning up tml to set up the stall for what was 'supposed' to be our club's display for the University Expo open day after the other 2 who supposed to turn up dropped the bombshell on me saying that they have work committments. not even the fact that i have no posters, banners, photos or any paraphernalia to put on display for the open day spoil my holiday mood. and if even the realisation that i barely passed my marcoeconomics exams (keynes failed to answer my prayer) isn't enough to dampen my spirts, i dun see why anything else should! lalalalalalah

spent a smashing wednesday night going to black betty's for the first time. it has to be the most happening club in perth that i've ever been to. in fact, it's probably the only club i've been to here that plays rock. it was backpackers' nite on wednesday so beers were going at $8 per jug. it's tons better than the metro's with its overplayed R&B, hip-hop repertoire. it's such that empathetic atmosphere with everyone in the club jumping in sync, singing to Smells like Teen Spirit that can never be replicated in any R&B club, not even metro. the sense of rock empathy was probably a reason why there was hardly any trouble in a club like black betty's which was just so fucking crowded, apart from one minor catfight. the only other time that night where there any inkling of dai ji ironically happened when we all left the club.

after leaving black betty's, we were just hanging at the exit taking a smoke when we heard some shouting coming from J's car in the carpark. u see, J has a history of being a rather agro drunk having gotten himself thrown out of black betty's the previous week and paramount earlier this sem so adrian and shiwei were there to take care of him. the fact that J is of a considerably small build probably made things worse. from where we were, which was about 50 m from J, we couldn't really figure out what was happening other than the fact that J seemed to be in trouble. so me and J's housemate daniel ran towards them preparing for what could be a rough scenario. so while running towards J, we soon realised that the shouting actually came from adrian who was shouting for J to cool down and stop. it seems J was already in his supra and was driving really fast and it almost seems as though he was trying to run down this other drunk asian guy. the drunk was pretty shocked and jumped out of J's way and started running away, and J barely swerved outta the drunk guy's way within a whisker and drove off. we were fucking shocked lah.

we were told later that apparantly the drunk guy -who's viet by the way- was caught pissing on J's supra when J and gang were on their way to the carpark and that really pissed of J big time. Shiwei tried to calm J down but to no avail so J decided to play punk and try to run down the viet. we were probably quite lucky that the viet was alone. common street sense dictates that one should never fuck around with a vietnamese guy in perth, especially so in northbridge at night. oh well, that ended as that and apart from the piss on his rims, the only other damage of the night it seemed was probably J's carpet after his housemate joel told us how J puked all over his bedroom floor when he got home. it's probably understandable for J to get furious. the supra like is a work of art and to defile it is simply blasphemous. here's a photo of J's supra i ripped from his friendster. it's a beauty.

for the past days or two, i've been watching totally hooked on the Initial D anime. ah, the perils of having friends in college who will provide you with all huge array of videos posted on the college intranet. with the huge shitload of catching up to do during the 2 weeks break, getting hooked on yet another drama/anime series isn't exactly the smartest thing to do. i can't believe i finished almost 25 episodes of initial d stage 1 in about a day. but it's really fucking addictive.

i watched the movie version back in singapore but i'm such a techno idiot when it comes to cars that i couldn't really appreciate what the fuck was going on for the drifting and shit. that's why i really prefer the anime which at least attempts to explain some of the dynamics of racing. at least the one thing which i leart from watching the anime is that the experts drift with 4 wheels while the also-rans can only manage a powerslide with the rear wheels. not that i understand how it is done though...

my favourite race thus far has to be the gumtape deathmatch between takumi's AE 86 and the night kids random's Civic EG6. that was totally out of this world. while initial d seems to be based on real-life street racing, i seriously wonder if anyone's crazy enough to actually take part in a gumtape deathmatch, and even more so on a mountain course.

it's amazing how much publicity initial d did to the cars featured in its story. while the anime ostensibly glorifies the usual japanese sports carmakers like the 2 Madza RX 7 driven by the takahashi brothers or the various Nissan S13, Skyline Silvia driven by iketani and the other randoms, i think it is probably Toyota who's smiling widely considering how the glorification of Takumi's AE 86 has also consequently rendered the car a cult status and implicitly lavishing praises on Toyota's engineering prowess. It's amazing how the popularity of the AE 86 generated from Initidal D has allowed car dealers to charge unbelievable prices for a Toyota Sprinter Trueno (as they call it here down under it seems). i was googling for 2nd hand cars when i realised that some Truenos are priced as much as AUD$10, 000 for an '85 model! to put things in perspective, a 94 Honda Civic VTEC can be bought at about AUD$8000 and a 95 Toyota Corolla CSi which is half as old, costs almost half as much at about AUD$5000-6000. i'll take a Civic or Corolla anyday over the Trueno.

it seems the fever caught on the other cars as well. i've got a fren T who bought this 89 RX-7 sometime ago, ostenisbly imitating the style of Takahashi Ryosuke. even though it wasn't totally the RX-7 FC driven by Ryosuke, he claims it was fully mod for racing with '480 horses' as he claims in his friendster captions. this is interesting cos' just before Ryosuke's race with Takumi, Ryosuke said how his car was just only 350 HP downtuned to 250 HP. nevertheless, here's yet some other pictures which i ripped from T's friendster.

poor T has had rather bad luck with cars. the previous 180 sx which he bought ended up with a overhauled engine in less than a semester. i last heard, T is having some problems with the clutch of his RX-7 as well. Aparantly the clutch has become too sensitive that it's really hard to find the biting point. Rumour has it that there's a challenge at the college T resides in where the challenge is for anyone can try to drive T's RX-7 onto the main road without stalling. apparantly 8 person has tried and none of them could successfully drive out his car without si qia-ing - not even T himself. even if the clutch is fixed, it seems that T's RX-7 consumes petrol like a monster. T said how it took him 1/2 a fuel tank just to go to and forth to the airport. i guess that's probably one factor which most people overlook when purchasing cars - the hidden variable costs in terms of petrol consumption, and in light of soaring petrol prices, this is no joke at all.

despite of the glorification of street racing in initial d, i guess one thing which wasn't really clearly illustrated in the anime was that 'it is actually very possible to crash and die while street racing'. i have never seen a street race in real life, but me and my friends did have a close shave on a roadtrip to margaret river last year. all of us rented 3 vehicles in all, a lancer, a hyundai trajet MPV and a hyundai sonata. somewhere on our way back, the lancer decided to fuck around and overtake the MPV which i was sitting in. robin who was driving our MPV decided to play along and tailgate the lancer in front. u see, the roads between magaret river and bunbury (a mid point stop) are two-laned on each direction with a centre lane in place of a centre divider that allows vehicles on both sides to use it to overtake. so the lancer went into this third overtaking lane on and our MPV followed. soon we found the lancer swerving sharply back into the 2nd lane. we then realised that there was a gianormous trailer truck heading in our opposite direction on the overtaking lane as well. fortunately, robin had time to swerve back in to the 2nd lane a good 5-8 seconds before the trailer truck passed us. that was one hell of a ball-shrinking experience.

for T's sake, i really hope he won't take his imitation of ryosuke that far. i know the hill on king's park across the road is rather tempting for some initial d-ing. but trying to race downhill at kings park is probably a sure way to kill yourself or someone else considering that there's virtually no streelighting at all. not even putting tofu or a cup of water insider your car is likely to help navigate such a treacherous course in this case.

an anthology on swear words beyond hokkien expletives

2005-09-14T13:38:00.000+08:00

limegreenspyda made an interesting point:

and *just* sometimes, greetings of cheebye or munjen or pundeh become terms of endearment in themselves. wonderful how we evolve, eh

now considering all the controversy surrounding the blogsphere since the indictment of the 2 alleged cyber-racists and the ephraim episode which raised concerns about the prevalent use of hokkien expletives throughout the singpore blogsphere. the last thing the singapore blogsphere needs is more negative publicity stereotyping it as vulgar websites whose monolinguistical use of hokkien expletives serving to advance some cultural imperialistic, chinese chauvinistic agenda.

so while we probably can change the vulgar bit, (which is perhaps the very thing that makes reading blogs so interesting), perhaps we can at least change the language in which we cyber-curse in. considering our diverse cultural heritage, there's no reason why we shouldn't swear in other languages since there a a gadzillion more interesting way to swear other than the cliched KNNBCCB seen on most blogs.

so here's my little contribution by posting some of the Tamil expletives i learnt during army, courtesy of my 2 awesome bunkmates, Gaya and Murali. hopefully the next time someone else complain about blogs being vulgar, it won't be simply that of the usual hokkien expletives. u'll come to realise that Tamil is an infinitely more colourful language than hokkien with far more sophisticated modes of swearing.

The Basics:

' per-sar-veh ' = crazy/mad

' pan-dee ' = pig/swine

' soo-ter ' = ass

' pu-re-ker ' = asshole

' pun-deh ' = cunt/cheebye

' kun-ji ' = dickhead

' mo-leh ' = tits

'my-ree' = hair

'e-leh' = without/dun have

Nouns and words used to embellish long curses

' na-yee ' = dog

' ama ' = mother

' apa ' = father

' tan-ge-chi ' = sister

'ni' = you

'unn' = your

'nan' = me/mine

Verbs

' or-va-yee-leh ' = inside one's mouth

' or ' = to put inside

and so putting it all together, we get the

swear phrases used in cursing

'ni kunji myree eleh' = you, who is without pubic hair (ie. wuss)

'ni pureker eleh' = you, who is without an asshole

'sooter pandee' = swine ass

and

the thermonuclear swear phrases ala KNNBCCB

'unn tangechi moleh, orvayeeleh' = Your sister's tits are in your mouth

'nayee kunji or ni ama pundeh leh' = A dog's dick is in your mother's cheebye

'nan apa kunji or ama pundeh leh'
= My father's dick is in your mother's cheebye (dun ask me why that is even a curse, but that's what i learnt)

'nayee kunji or unn pureker leh' = A dog's dick is in your asshole

'unn apa kuji or nayee pureker leh' = Your father's dick is in a dog's asshole

just which the verbs and nouns around and you'll get a new swear phrase. you should get the idea.

here comes the really humorous and long swear phrases which i guess can be used either tongue-in-cheek or as a friendly jab at a fren, no unlike the 'cheebye lah' as opposed to the considerably more antagonistic KNNBCCB

humorous long swear phrases

' yee-woo-de-pee, ser-gu-re-ke, e-dom' = You are a toilet bowl.

'yen-va-yee-leh, yee-re-krae. pah-leh-ku-chee ya-wee-leh. wong ko-tek sin-ne-dei '
= Your dick is smaller than the toothpick i have in my mouth

and my personal favourite!

'unn apa soon-ni nan-de, kar-di-chi-chee'
= May your father's balls be pinched by a crab.

I've been told that the most vulgar Tamil word is a certain word that begans with 'T-' which means prostitute and it is a phrase which one should NEVER EVER under any circumstances use without wanting to get beaten up big time, so i'm not putting it up. For that matter, most of the phrases under the thermonuclear swear phrases section should NEVER be used in real life either unless u have a death wish. other than that, revel in your new found multi-lingual ability to curse!

have u had your dosage of cathartic swearing today?