that red container used to contain 50 pineapple tarts. USED to 

the aftermath of the mugger....well minus the huge mound of clothes that my mom forced me to pack up 

and surely the joy comes in the morning

Well ok my last exam ended at 1100 yesterday so technically the joy did come in the morning. So finally, an end to the gruelling days cooped up in the library getting fat on chocolate, jellybeans, mints and assorted other Willy Wonka thingys.

After some miscommunication, which somehow the girls managed to reason was MY fault, met up with CBD for lunch at, get this...Sun with Moon. Like smlj...what kinda name is that? Haha, when B msged me where they were I was almost convinced it was some kinda code, or at least one of those really bad HK movie literal English translations of the Chinese. It turns out there really is some place in Wheelock called Sun meet Moon. Sun like Moon. Sun date Moon. Sun do funny things with Moon and take video with Nokia N70. Moon become damn famous. Moon from NYP...

Anyway, lunch was pretty good and Mirrormask later was just awesome!!! The visuals are just astounding! Its not so much the storyline or the acting or anything else, but the visuals just gave you so much room to imagine. Its like taking a walk through Neil Gaiman's, perhaps your own mind, where nothing has to make sense. It just has to....be.

i'll see ya in a bit baby

WOO!! Tonight's ride was just sooooooooooooooooooooooooo friggin elevating!!! Having to cut back on rides because of exams has definitely affected my fitness but thank goodness it doesn't seem to have done anything to my desire to push myself. Like wow!! I haven't managed to pull the high 40s for such a long time before!! Made it all the way down to the Raffles Marina turnoff before got hit by cramps and had to cut short the ride. Stupid cramps are the bane of my sporting life. But still managed to push it to bout 39km/h most of the way back to the kopitiam for milo peng. Oh this is a must mention. This place on South Buona Vista road where the long windy road meets West Coast highway has the most AWESOME milo peng in Singapore. Without a doubt!! Its so friggin thick you'll think they shoved a whole can of milo down your throat!! Absolutely nothing like it after a long hard ride.

But somehow I still felt a little unfulfilled on the way home from the kopitiam so on the spur of the moment decided to turn into NUS and started hitting the slopes like a man possessed. I think I must have forced myself up and down lke 4 times in a row, by which time the lovely milo peng was threatening to make a not so lovely appearance once again. Like WOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
God its been so long since I've pushed myself to breaking point. Like since army or something and man I'd forgotten how good it felt. haha I'm so friggin high now.

Last time I'm gonna be riding Patience for the next three plus months. Guess I couldn't have asked for a better farewell ride. Well maybe not farewell. See-ya-later ride.

Oh and Justin all the best for the race in Thailand man!! 600 km in 4 days. Woah, hats off dude. Rock em with the red Specialized!!!

i'm in over my head

Oh for a set of guitar strings....

hoo-yah!!!!!

I know its almost a year ago already but this still sends shivers of delight down my spine. I do so love Liverpool. They're prime testaments to the fact that the odds were only made so you could beat them.

Financial accounting in 7 hours. So help me God I'm going to try.

aw man, get your friggin act together will ya?

Its mere days before I get on a plane down to the States and honestly the Americans aren't exactly giving me very high hopes on what to expect from them when I finaly get there. They seem to be hell bent on pissing off the rest of the world just by their sheer buffoonery. I'm not sure if such a word actually exists but you get what I mean.

A few weeks ago I thought American idiocy couldn't get any worse after I found out about the proposed launch of PLAYBOY magazine in INDONESIA!!! Like wth. As if their reputation as the Great Satan within the Islamic world wasn't enough, they had to go and exacerbate the situation? Their excuse? The Indonesian edition of Playboy has no nudity. Err..then what was the whole point of having an Indonesian Playboy in the first place? Now there are clerics calling for protests and burning of any copy of Playboy on the streets.

Real smart right?

It gets better. Check out the front page of the World section in the Straits Times today. As if their relations with the Chinese in general weren't bad enough, these bumbling Yanks went and humiliated Hu Jintao (PRC leader; refuse to call him president because he's still a frikkin commie) on public tv with an endless stream of cock-ups. First the band announced the playing of the ROC (Taiwan) anthem rather than the PRC's. Then when Hu proceeded to make his speech, he was rather rudely interrupted by a Falungong supporter within the press crew hollering at the top of her voice and making a scene. The American excuse for letting her slip through the checks? She was a fully certified journalist. Yes she was. A fully certified journalist with a FALUGONG newspaper and who had actually been arrested before for doing something similar to the Hu's predecessor, Jiang Zemin, on another occasion. What was that about sparing no effort again?

There was a whole bunch of other stuff so you can go read it yourself, but the worst part about this is that even though most of us realise this is just a result of the usual American "you can speak English!?!?!?!" attitude, most of the 1 billion Chinese are overly serious and unforgiving arses. These Yanks have just given the PRC government another grievance to shed crocodile tears over and stoke the fires of anti-American sentiment again.

And I just hate it when those arrogant Chinese sons of bitches start whining to the newpapers about how the world owes them a living again. Makes for a really bad read.

chio until want to die 

errr...can la can la. at least last time my hair dun look so screwy 

chio bu also 

post picture of chio bu to make me happy. no denise its not freaky to keep pictures of pretty girls you don't know 

call me mr grumps

Its official. As of today I am officially a grumpy old man. Now it just remains to be seen if I'm destined to be a grumpy old man who dies alone in a one room flat in choa chu kang and nobody notices until one of the neighbours realises his dogs can't possibly smell that bad.

Within the space of 14 hours I have managed to:

-Spew vulgarities at the top of my voice in the library for 10 minutes straight at 0800 in the morning.

-Plonk myself uninvited into the discussion room grabbed by some chinaman and refused to leave just to piss him off.

-Be called a closet meanie

-Tear my hair out from the roots

-Be totally unproductive

-And generally be pissed off for most of the day.

Plus I missed my ride because somehow I just didn't feel like it. So damn tired. Girls are damn pro at making you bad. They give those puppy dog eyes and all of a sudden you feel like an arse. Ugh.

For some reason I just really feel like jamming and doing Masterplan by Oasis. Frikkin rockin song even though I have no idea what the hell they're talking about. What's a wonderwallchampagnesupernovawhatsthestorymorning glorysundaymorningcall anyway?

dance dance

Took an unofficial break yesterday night and went out for a bit with Mark and JH after disciple group at my place. Boy that really hit the spot. Its been so long since I've been able to just get rid of the niggling feeling that I'm not doing enough. Going down the highway with the windows down, the stereo blasting and hollering all sorts of friggin nonsense like madmen.....haha straight out of Thelma and Louise. I know its impossible here but I'm still of the opinion that everybody should have the opportunity to have a car when they're young. There's a freedom there that I think we all desperately need sometimes. Our lives here are so scripted sometimes. I know we don't feel it but most of us don't realise we just read like a bad Channel 8 script. Oh wait, let me rephrase that. We just read like a Chanel 8 script. A good Channel 8 script is like El Dorado. Everybody says its there, just that no one's ever found it yet.

So anyway ok, enough existentialist rumbling. Went down to Holland V from my place where I finally got to see the infamous GL!! Hers is a name that I've been hearing around since my ACS(I) days. I think at that time almost every other guy I knew was raving about her. I just had no idea who the hell that was. But I guess the reality didn't really live up to the mythical proportions. Hmmm frankly her friend M wasn't too bad. Law somemore. Just next door only. Shite la. When law buggers off to Bukit Timah campus next sem we'll lose a good sources of babes. Not that Arts doesn't have but still......darn it.

So hung out at Coffee Club for a while and grabbed their friggin nice and fattening and heaty and phelgm causing muddy mud pie but what the hell. I'm not sure when we decided to go say hi to the SMUggers at Zouk but hey when you have a car, you own Singapore (Shaun's words not mine). FWAH...I haven't seen so many pretty girls in one place in a long long long time. Oh wait..no...maybe never! Shite la. Its too bad I hate clubbing. Oh well.

12 days to the states and I don't give a damn.

dead calm

Somewhere along the way to 22 years of life I think I've lost the ability to worry. Its 7 days to exams and I only just finished my Marketing project this morning at 0430 which essentially means, I have 7 days to revise what I'm supposed to have learnt in 4 months. And the fact that I spent all day today trying to figure out how to reconcile net profit to net cash balance (still am actually) isn't exactly a very encouraging sign.

Erm..ok.

Isaiah 53

Who has believed out message
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smittemn by him and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before her sheareres is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
By oppression and judgement he was taken away.
And who can speak of his descendants?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was stricken.
He was assigned a grave with the wicked,
and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence,
nor was any deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and through the Lord makes his ife a guilt offering,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days.
and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.
After the suffering of his soul,
h will see the light of life and be satisfied;
by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,
and he will bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,
and he will divide the spoils with the strong.
becahse he poured out his life unto death,
and he was numbered with the transgressors.
For he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors.


I can't read this without bursting into tears.

disasterpiece

Exams are in 10 days and I still have a massive marketing plan to hand up, haven't so much as opened my Singapore Military History, Marketing or Management Textbooks and I can't seem to get a single Financial Accounting question right!!!! I just spent 6 hours doing FA tutorial questions and I got ALL of them wrong!!! Like no matter how I try I just can't even understand what the hell the question is asking!!!

Add to that the fact that I currently have no flight arrangements to Cedar Point and am still desperately trying to find one I can afford and you have a picture of abject disaster. Last resort is a 12 hour train ride that'll leave me having to spend a few hours in the morning curled up somewhere in a Sandusky train station before the Cedar Point shuttle bus starts running.

I'm trying so hard but everything just seems to be going wrong.

flipside

Might as well jump on the YouTube bandwagon. This was the teaser commercial for my marketing project. Thanks a bunch Andrew!!

one more in the bag

So the big Singapore Military History project presentation was today and I'm actually pretty happy with the way it turned out. Ex-friggin-hausted but this was definitely something to remember. Unsurprising frankly when you have:

Beer
4 pseudo drunk pseudo Aussies
8 pseudo drunk pseudo Brits
8 pseudo drunk pseudo Yanks
8 cranky pseudo Japs
1 rather large bar fight
1 cardiac arrest and subsequent death
1 stabbing in the bathroom
And an Arsenal, Man U, Chelski and Liverpool fan in the same room.
Oh and seppuku suicide too.


Did I mention beer?

My lecturerer hates over-the-top artificial and scripted stuff so this presentation was essentially one humongous debate. Ok think moots if you're a lawyer. We were given a case and then different groups in the class had to take up the roles of the factions involved and I have to admit there ain't no better way of learning history than actually BEING part of it. Or at least pretending to be.

1 down

The culmination of a weeks worth of pure slogging is sitting in front of me on the table and honestly it doesn't look like much. 9 pages. 1200 words. 1 cover page, 6 pages of narrative and 2 pages of bibliography. Doesn't look the least bit like something I've spent the past week sniffing around library shelves, reading till my eyes get sore, using up 3/4 of a pad of post-its for notes and staring at my computer screen in the middle of the night desperately trying to unlock my vocabulary.

Were the electric guitar and its rise to celebrity status products of technological innovation?

Honestly I'm not all that sure. I just hope my prof never realises that.

don't believe everything you see on tv

Call me a chauvanist but as of now I am just utterly disgusted with Oprah. And no, the fact that my sis just loves to piss me off watching Oprah whenever there's an important match on has nothing to do with it.

I've never bothered to watch a single episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show, so when I caught about 30 minutes of it today before leaving for school, I have to say I just wished I could reach through the tv and slap that woman as she conspicuously made a profit out of the emotions of her audience. The segment in question was something called Oprah Investigates and the topic of the day was emotional abuse at home. Now I'm not saying that emotional abuse doesn't occur. It does and God knows it should be gotten rid of. But the way that Oprah presented it made it obvious that she didn't care to forward any insights to why this occurs or how. All she wanted was for people to watch her show.

So Oprah had a man and his wife sitting on her sofa and supposedly the wife had had enough of emotional abuse at home and had decided to come out of the closet in the most spectacular of fashions. Now Oprah claimed to have video evidence of this and showed a supposedly damning clip to the world. But the clip turned out to be very heavily edited. Having scenes and dialouge cut and pasted together such that the husband was portrayed to be hurling abuse at his wife every other moment of the day. There was almost no dialouge whatsoever from his wife and thus no insight whatsoever into what could have caused him to be so angry. Or if she happened to be just as angry and abusive. How convenient.

Also, Oprah kept forwarding a claim that an overwhelmingly large proportion of women in relationships were suffering from emotional abuse. However, she never bothered to substantiate exactly where and how she came about her statistics. Even assuming her claims are true, having such a large proportion of males being guilty of emotional abuse hints at something deeper than just your average guy being an arse. It starts to point towards the likelihood that there might be something going on here beyond human ability to control. Is there some sort of trigger for emotional abuse? Were there any similarities between these abusive marriages and how or when this abuse started? I don't know about statistics but I have a feeling most American men marry for far more than the opportunity to hurl vulgarities at their wives whenever they feel like it. If emotional abuse is really happening on such a scale in the US then there is a high chance that there are far more deep-rooted causes than just testosterone.

But of course Oprah didn't bother herself with complications of this order. The whole purpose of her show seemed to be to demonise the husband and boy what a job she's doing. The sobbing, diparate wife, the straight faced and seemingly unrepentant husband and the made-up, big-haired talk show host hurling shallow facts and accusatory questions at the husband. No wonder thousands of women tune in to her everyday.

And I am disgusted.

Makes you thinking where our world is going when some people start to believe eschewing professional help and washing your dirty linen on the Oprah Winfry Show is going to save their marriages.

final curtain

If there's any way to herald the hanging up of my boots for the next four months, then a 4-1 victory against a really hard team must be one of the best. Today was definitely not one of the better matches for us but the team really showed some grit, fighting hard in defense and really making the breaks count. Fwah. And I could've made it 5-1!!!! But darn it my header went straight into the keeper's arms. Actually, while the rest of the guys said I did pretty well today, I kinda feel quite the opposite. Played left back and came up against this really friggin fast winger and it just felt like playing catch up all day. Ugh, my legs are totally screwed. But at least we managed to shut him up. Hell he was hurling insults and vulgarities at his own team mates all day.

On another note, I'm starting to get the feeling that people think NUS people lead really slack and work free lives. Either that or they think the stuff we do isn't worth a damn. I was commenting to a guy in church about how we at NUS have so much project work and yet have a ton of examinations unlike SMU, at which point JH just scoffed and exclaimed 'Talk cock!!'

I have to admit I was pretty miffed.

I mean both my project groupmates and I have been slaving away for the past few weeks to get our stuff right (still are in fact!) and people just diss our work as second class? And when I tried to protest JH just gave me this 'Ok whatever' look that I must say, had me straining to keep my mouth shut.

Ah well call me too sensitive maybe. I don't know. All I do know is I'll just keep sticking with Colossians 3:23-24

'Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. '

octopussy

Say what you like about the plot and acting abilities of the cast, but James Bond shows really do give their fair share of entertainment value. I mean, check it out. Hot babes (at least they were hot in 1980) in just enough clothes to make them legal, uber cool gadgets, car chases and tons of explosions! What better mix could you ask for? And that lucky bastard Roger Moore gets to be stuck on an island full of beautiful girls who seem to have developed such a dislike for fashion they try to wear as little clothes as possible.

Nice cap off after a long day of studying. I've been struggling desperately to come up with a question for my Wheel to the Web project. We're supposed to find an item of controversy in the history of technology and argue our opinions and honestly NUS people seem to be a terribly morbid bunch. Almost everybody I know is doing something related to guns and war and things that make big bangs. So of course I wanted to try something less depressing and as a result, now I need to find some sorta technological dispute in the development of the electric guitar. Ah well at least its tons more fun than the all the A+B= End of the World stuff the guys were hurling around today in SMU.

Crap I still wish I'd been able to go for SMM....

this is really starting to get to me

Came back home after cell and started prepping my stuff for SMM in eager anticipation.

Phone, money, keys - Check

Change shades to day lenses - Check

Bring out lovely new bright orange teamabsolut jersey - Check

Replace blown out tyre from Thursday's failed outing - - - KA BOOM.

I really feel like crying.

clear the decks!!

Ok out with all these dumbarsed depressing posts. Got to get this propensity for self pity out of my system.

Lesson from yesterday night: If you see glass on the road from some poor soul who buanged his car (and is probably getting a hiding and a ban from his dad), AVOID!! If got cars blocking.. STOP!!! Don't be like me and end up stuck somewhere near Fong Seng with nothing but the skin tight jersey on your back. Well ok, that and your hp and 2 measley bucks.

Now I'm super gian for SMM. Thats it man, I'm gonna do the 100km route no matter what. Ooh and soccer on Sunday. Looking forward to the prospect of a great pitch (Canberra Sec!) and a tough as nails opponent (at least thats what everyone has been saying; I don't even know who they are). Gosh I haven't exercised for 5 friggin days and I'm starting to feel guilty everytime I eat anything. Shaun's bday part 2 and that lovely Tiong Bahru satay with a layer of pure fat on every stick didn't help much either. Ah but what the hell. When it comes to satay, I make concessions. For prata too. And hokkien mee. And nasi lemak. And especially laksa yong tao foo from the Arts canteeen!!

Shite I'm supposed to be studying and now I've gone and made myself hungry. Where are those oatmeal cookies.........

i doubt thats gonna take off

WAHAAHAHHAHA the Universiti Brunei Darussalam is trying to find NUS ppl to do exchange over there!!!! Wonder who'll be the poor sod who decides to spend a semester in the richest ghost town on earth.

thats odd

When I got home yesterday my dad came up and wanted to know how much the army had paid me during my last few months of service last year. Supposedly, if you earn an income of more than $2000 dollars a year then your dad won't be able to get tax relief. I'm not sure what that is but one that my dad did make clear was that not getting tax relief essentially meant he paid more taxes.

Now here's the thing: even if you're doing national service and the SAF is paying you that pittance that they prefer to call 'allowance', you're still considered as earning income and thus your dad can't claim tax relief. So the way its starting to look, going to serve your country simply means your parents have to pay more taxes for the next two or three years because even a private gets $350 a month.

That is friggin wrong.

So not only do they take 2 plus years of our lives, leave most of us injured in one way or another, send us overseas and refuse to give us overseas allowance and treat us like dogs for the better part of the term, the pittance we get for survival is probably right out of our parents pockets. As in not tax surpluses or what not but additional expenses over and on top of the taxes they already have to pay! I mean what if a family is barely getting by with tax relief and then their son has to go off to serve his nation and now they can't afford the additional tax expense? Why should someone doing national service essentially become an additional burden on his family?

And just so I don't get thrown in jail, I ain't some political rant so you got nothing on me.

progress payout

NB I only get $200 bucks for Growth Dividend............

i love my comics 

v for vendetta as it should be 

cool suit, beams out of his eyes and jean grey to come home too...i'm jealous of cyclops 

Work is killing me. CAP score's gonna drop like a rock with obesity problems.