Beyond economy...

...Lies luxury...Ladies and Gentlemen, the aforementioned airport premier lounge.



Wah...free food. And drinks. The Singaporean in me quivers in anticipation of much eating. But I'm beat and I've officially been awake for just a smidgen less than 24 hours. Ugh.

It's weird seeing the airport this empty. Usually when I fly out, the airport bustles like an anthill. It breathes and buzzes with activity. This morning, it was totally empty. It wasn't a ghost town sort of empty. It was peaceful. Like a patch of calm as the building rested for the day ahead. There was one magazine store open but like the airport, it was empty. It was nice walking around knowing that we were alone in a place that regularly sees hundreds of people at a time. It was a sense of space that was sleeping or just beginning to wake up. It was alive but not busy. In Singapore, it was a rarity. But something that I treasured greatly.

More to come.

Well...I'm off to Melbourne...

...The cab'll be picking us up at 3:30am for a 6am flight on Austrian Air. But before, I go, a photo from a short-lived shoot that I've been thinking of since my brother got me the Diamondback Plasma edition for my birthday:



*Twitch*

I will be trying more of this when I get to Melly or when I get back from the holiday. I find it rather Jedi/Sith and I think I'll play around with that idea.

O well...Till I next post (hopefully from Melly...) Later!

Argh...

Am nursing a runny nose (Thank you Dimetapp) and an itchy throat (sponsored by Robitussen). A couple of things to blog about today:

Firstly: Childproof caps: 2, Packrat: 0. And here I was talking about stupid childproof caps being of no problems to anyone but children. Arrgh. It's frustrating when you're sick and despite all the pushing down and turning, the bottle won't open.

Secondly: 160GBs of storage comes in VERY useful for a Packrat. I've already cleared 21 gbs on Clover. Yay! I got space!

Thirdly: Sitex this year was a bust. Nothing much to report. The deals were run of the mill. None of the big brand camera people were there. Sad.

Fourthly: I am now the proud owner of a Diamondback Plasma Edition mouse. Coolness!

Lastly: Cranberries = Very sour. Cranberry pie = tons of fun for the whole family during birthday dinners. It's especially funny when the muscles in the back of your jaw seize up because of the tartness.

From one geek thing to the next.

The Superman trailer is online. Truly nice.

Once, twice, thrice.

First score:

Chin-ups: 5
Sit ups: 40
Standing Broad Jump: 216
Shuttle Run: 10.0
2.4: 13:56

= Fail.

Second Score:

Chin-ups: 5
Sit ups: 40
Standing Broad Jump: 216
Shuttle Run: 9.8
2.4: 12:45

= Fail.

Third Score:

Chin-ups: 6
Sit ups: 36 (6 bloody no counts...stupid PTI)
Standing Broad Jump: 216
Shuttle Run: 9.8
2.4: 12:22

= Pass with incentive.

Yay!

Now I can lay down and die. Tonight I sleep the sleep of the dead and tomorrow my body starts claiming all the overdrawn cheques I made out to my personal demon called the Maju 2.4 route.

But at least I'm clear for another year.

Where do I begin...

...to tell a story of a firefly class ship (Class code 03-k64, midbulk transport with a standard radion accelerator core)?

Let's just put it this way. This had to be the first movie this year that drew me in so much so that I didn't even realise that I'd eaten 7/8s of my popcorn through the first 40 minutes. (Usually a tragedy for popcorn flicks but I really didn't care) The pacing was perfect. The characters, built up from their TV series personnas, were like old friends on the big screen. The effects were awe inspiring. The battle scenes, perfectly choreographed.

What was wrong with it?

It ended. And the ending left a pit in my stomach. It left me craving a second movie (and powers-that-be willing, a third) and possibly a TV series that would pick up where Serenity left off. (Which in turn picked up where Firefly left off...)

Meanwhile, I'm way too incoherent to finish off this post. More tomorrow perhaps. Maybe even a comparison between this and my previous trip to le cinema.

Gorram.

Post Serenity post. Expect no coherence.

OMG.

*Jaw Drops*

I believe we have a winner for the movie experience of the year.

Woot! 1 day more.

Serenity.

Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don't care, I'm still free
You can't take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain't comin' back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me
There's no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
But you can't take the sky from me...

Serenity Now

Yay! Booked tickets for what may probably be the ONLY screening of Serenity in Singapore.

I feel like such a fanboy.

Phone Spam, the Commercialism of Christmas and something unexpected.

Firstly, I'm getting spammed by Singtel. Today, I have received 3 messages (so far) on my work phone stating that I could pay my ERP violations through some online channels, prompting paranoia that I'd somehow or another inadvertently violated some ERP gantry by not inserting my cashcard into the slot...(...something wrong with the second part of that sentence.) And here I thought that phones weren't exactly spammable since SMS's cost money and no one's got that much money to spam people on their phones...uhm...OK. Well, Singtel has all the peanuts to throw around I guess. Aah well, the wonders of modern technology.

Speaking of which...


...Santa Claus is rapping at a Watson's near you. If you really want to annoy the long suffering Watson's staff by melting their brains and causing blood to run out of their ears, pop on down to your local Watson's and squeeze Santa's hand and watch him get bizay in the hizouse. He raps a version of Will Smith's Getting Jiggy with It in his geriatric way about how he's now a hip dude while going all west coast with his hands and grinding to the beat. It's enough to make the most diamond hearted consumerist cry in pain.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, Chri$tma$ is around the corner again and Ti$ th€ $€a$on to b€ $p€nding. (Word of advice to anyone who's thinking about getting 50-Cent Santa, recall that singing bass that you bought...that was at least funny for 2 minutes. Then it got annoying. This one lasts 30 seconds before you want to take a power drill to hop Santa's hip...)

And yes, standing beside Santa is Frosty "Ice Cube" the Snowman.

Lastly, this was interesting.



We saw these two men playing chess in Burger King by I.R.C gaming center before our Friday night game. Thought it was rather apt that we were watching a couple of friends get together on a Friday night to game. I had a mental image of The Weekend Widowmakers getting together in our geriatric years to frag in Burger King. Funny, but nice.

Of teachers and moral virtues.

The Local Shitecan New Paper is at it again. This time it's a teacher who's been a little brazen about her sexuality and random thoughts about non-school stuff. Do I condone her for what she did? Not quite. It wasn't exactly the smartest thing in the world to do, posting her pictures of her Primary School students on the same page that she talks about sex, dildos and (*gasp*) lesbian tendencies.

But then again, when I first heard from le grapevine about the incident and how the village bicycle times New Paper had printed the story, I said to Ondine that they're not paying us enough to be paragons of moral virtues.

And sure nuff, I had a new blog post to put up.

Firstly, let's just say that The Pondscum sucking bottom dwellers New Paper really knows how to fuck upjazz up a story to the point that even fiction cannot compare to the putrid reporting that it squeezes out of its colon of truth. (Can't you just feel the love for our local tabloid...[I mean of course The Pool of Crap New Paper and not our national tabloid The Straits Times])

Secondly, it reports that some people were aghast when a group of teachers while overseas on vacation ordered a jug of beer to share. Implication being that teachers were supposed to behave themselves at all times and be saints. (Read it, it's there.) Anyways, on this, a few facts to share:

• Teachers: Ranked 2nd in professions in incidents of alcoholism.
• You do not need to go overseas to see teachers drinking. We do a lot of it locally. Heck...sometimes, the jug of beer is not to share.

Anyone who's wondering why teachers drink so much need only take a look at what we have to deal with in the education profession.

1. Students who are now not only stupid, but openly defiant and our only means of dealing with said students* has effectively been removed leaving teachers less than eunuchs.
   
2. Parents who think that said students are angels and therefore the problem lies with the teachers. Otherwise known as they who do not realise that the problem with these students are often internal.
   
3. School administrations that do not support them, instead piling on the problems by siding with said miscreants (both 1 and 2)...which are birthed in unholy and unnatural means by:
   
4. An upper management that is so far removed from the actual groundwork of actually teaching that the concept is alien to them...yes, teaching actually already is a 20 hour a day job thankyewverymuch.
   

(Of course, I'm lucky that I don't have any of the aforementioned gripes to worry about because I've been blessed to be where I am but I know that there are many WAY worse off than I.)

Thirdly, perhaps the idea of a teacher who is actually not repressing her sexuality and instead embracing it might mean that she will not end up sleeping with her students. Meaning that we can avoid fiascos such as math teachers boning secondary 2 students etc...

Fourthly, irony much?

All in all, despite the fact that I think the teacher should have kept work and her personal life separate on her blog (especially when mixing sex and little kids' pictures...that's SO wrong), I don't think that the teacher did anything wrong. Did she spend class time preaching perversions to her students? No. Did she prosyletise? Definitely not. Was her sexuality getting in the way of her teaching? Don't think so. So what exactly is the problem here?

Let's see if I can put a finger on it:

Parents don't have time to be paragons of morality for their children so they need teachers to step into that role.

Hmmm...How about that for a theory? Isn't that the major basis for any complaint in todays society?

Too much violence on TV = I don't have enough time to teach my child that violence is not the way to solve problems. Censor the violence please so that I never have to do that...

Too much sex on the internet = I can't spare the time to tell my kids that pornography objectifies women and in itself is disgusting. I also can't tell my kids that sex comes with responsibilities and pornography does not reflect that responsibility.

Teachers behaving badly = Damn. Looks like I'll need to be the role model for my kids because the values they may learn from teachers are not good enough. Also, my kids don't have a value system of their own so their teachers might twist their young minds with perversion and immorality.

I know that it's a simplification of the problems that parents face and I can only hope that I can live up to the high expectations of parenting when I become a parent myself but I think that this is where all the expectations are coming from. Did I ever believe that my own teachers were the moral giants that we expect of our teachers today? No. They were fallible, even the ones who were good. But then my teachers did their jobs and that was all that was expected of them. What changed? Perhaps we've gotten too busy as a society to worry about the young. And that's why teachers are now observed through the filthy lens of the national/local tabloids.

As for me? I'm just going to get myself a beer. Kick back on my couch with fat laden foods and watch some uncensored violence or perhaps a film with some extremely bad language in it.

Thorugh the pain of defeat...

...The wise man looks inwards to see what went wrong. The foolish man looks outwards to see who he can blame. But it takes a truly enlightened man to look both inwards and outwards to find a solution to the problem.

I was thinking of that in the shower in an attempt to blog about something that I've been trying to blog about for months now. It started festering during Katrina and it came to a head just this week. 3 words:

George. Walker. Bush.

Yeesh. Where to start with this one? Katrina was screwed up. Iraq's still a warzone that has not been cleaned up and restored to sovereignty. The environment's been ignored on his watch and he's managed to throw a spanner in the works for environmental conservation. He's failed miserably in trying to set up free trade agreements in Argentina, where he was publicly snubbed by his Argentinian counterpart. Dubya's seen a whole lot of support from his landslide victory in 2004 evaporate in the face of scandal, screw-ups and plain incompetence.

And all through this wave after wave of defeats, Dubya constantly takes the foolish road. He looks outward, constantly looking for answers outside when he makes bad decisions while everything that is wrong is working in the white house. He somehow either doesn't get that he's surrounded himself with dangerous morons (more dangerous than he is) or he realises this and the whole thing takes a whole new sinister twist. But in all this time, has he ever looked inwards? Perhaps questioned the practice of surrounding himself with cronies instead of able minded men and women. Nope. In fact, he was so oblivious to insight that after the Fema f***-up, he went ahead and tried to nominate his biggest fan to the supreme court. I believe this calls for an Oy Vey!

One half of the world sees him as a joke, the other sees him as a threat. Americans are finally beginning to view him in a similar light. It's funny how it's taken them about 5 years to see it, but at least more people are coming around to the idea that a stupid president is not a good thing.

Amazingly enough, despite his shortcomings, he's going to have his 3 more years. There isn't going to be a firing. There isn't going to be (much of) an inquiry. Heck, he'd probably be thrown an amazing party at the end of his term.

Ondine said that the American people were very forgiving. We saw a whole lot of that when Reagan died last year. The American people whitewashed their own memories of a president who was as cracked up as he was charming. The televisions spewed montages of the man and America lapped it all up. It was morbidly fascinating. And the same thing happens with Dubya. It's amazing. My theory is that America, producer of the 10 second byte has truly become the Mtv nation. It watches with interest until the next good bit comes up whereupon it promptly forgets the immediate past 10 seconds after it's seen it. It's an interesting theory that many have gone very in-depth into but here's the thing...like all things American, it's spreading.

Something to think about.

So I flunked my IPPT again...

...I think it's Maju camp. The 2.4 route is just really daunting and I do not have the mental mettle to get past the 2nd round without really feeling like crap. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here at home with a head that feels like it's splitting open.

I hate running my 2.4.

Sliced, diced and put on ice.

2 dessert places...

As un-alike in menu as well as service staff. One superior, the other sadly lacking. The former, Dessert House in Liang Seah Street. The latter, the dessert house (the name escapes me now) at the base of International Building where Delifrance used to be.

Dessert house is a small, new establishment with a friendly service staff and a quaint little menu. The iced milk tea is not as much "tea" as it is "milk with a hint of tea".

The other is not a new place. It's at the base of International Building and aside from the blase attitude of the staff, almost every other dessert is bathed in coconut milk. So take a note that when it says coconut juice, it's coconut milk.

Both don't really have fantastic desserts but the staff make a difference. For the former, the service made it special. For the latter, the lack of service enhanced the mediocrity. (That and the really high prices...) I guess that's the difference between good and bad/mediocre service. Sadly enough, the latter is what we get a whole lot of here in sunny Singapore. Then again, I suspect that it's because Singaproeans just suck when it comes down to being nice to service staff. Despite the niceties attempted at the latter dessert place, it was still crappy...but nothing compared to the service at NYDC at Wheelock.

Note that when you're working as a waiter, you should NOT dump spoons, forks and napkins on the table en masse. In a restaurant, you place a napkin, spoon etc by the people you're serving. Also you should also place orders in front of the people that ordered said dishes, NOT dump plates on one side of the table in no particular order.

All that said, the Iced Earl Cool J. in NYDC's still one of my favourite iced teas in Singapore. Which shows that if you don't have good service, you'd better have good products.

*Note, the author has no idea where this post was going and apologizes for the incoherent nature of this post. This was done in front of the TV while Married to the Kellys was on.

Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?

Stormtrooper in the city, along with his clone daddy, Jango. Short but really authentic. Amazingly in full garb in the heat of the Singapore afternoon. Nice bright spark in an otherwise boring city.

It's v. irritating.

Last night, A & L were discussing irritating radio ads with Ondine and I and all three (who weren't me) decided that the Starhub ads were pretty irritating. I didn't have any idea what they were talking about until I heard it this morning. Needless to say, it was V. annoying.

"Description for all who either tune out to radio commercials or actually have better tunes in their CD changers or MP3s to listen to*

This (V. wishy washy) lady calls her v. patient friend v. many times to change venues where she will meet him. (V. inconsiderate if you ask me. Dump her, patient dude...) On her 4th call, the guy waxes lyrical on how he's really lucky that Starhub has per second billing for its calls and therefore, he's not v. irritated. (I swear, he goes on for a good 10 seconds or so...)

How v. blatent.

Sadly, that's the problem with radio commercials. They're either gems that crack you up (whereupon they play it ad nauseum until you get v. tired of it...) or they're downright bad (whereupon they play it ad nauseum until you want to stick a v. big pen in your eye to make the pain stop). Either way, there's simply no subtlety to radio ads.

V. sad.

I mean there's only so many times you can listen to a beng-ish guy incredulously yell out "Feet?" and then proceed to try to sell "Dolphins, manta rays and killer whales" before you want to reach through the radio and strangle the programming directors. (*BTW, one of the funniest ads on radio now...but they're killing it through endless replays...Funny thing is that I can't remember what it is that ad is selling...)

V. tragic.

O well, I shall end this post right here because I'm v. sleepy and I've got a v. early morning tomorrow. I'll try my v. best to consistently post.

I've got writers block.

Sadly, despite the lengthy wait to actually have time to sit down to blog, I find my well dry. I've been thinking of things to blog about but I really don't have anything. So I'll just settle for a bit of static at the moment.

*static*

*Fade to black*

(The blogger apologises for the lack of quality programming. Regular service will resume promptly)

A crisis of faith.

It's sometimes difficult to see that God really cares. There's pain in the world and it comes in bucketloads and it's difficult to see where His hand comes in to soothe, protect or heal. You see the suffering around and you know that in the bible it says that He cares like a father would but then you wait for respite and it never comes.

And then you wonder if He really cares that much.
Because it seems like He doesn't.

I know that as far as my life's concerned, He's been faithful. I can attest to that. I guess that like in all relationships, we struggle with the other party and a relationship with God's no different. I can't really rant too much about this because I know that with all trials that I've been through, I've become a better person because of it. It's just hard to see while you're being put through the gauntlet.

*igh.