I hate it, the test got it spot on. If you ever read the Japanese manga Naruto, I probably resemble Sakura. Yes, a psychotic secret killer is hidden beneath the harmless shell you have come to known. Pika!
Haha!
Mezzo has illustrated beautifully the Forum on 2006 Singapore General Elections held in NUS yesterday - I really wished I was there to catch some action. The attention to the elections is well and good: people are raising questions, but when the elections end, just like over 5 years ago, the buzz will die down as abruptly as it was, just like how the media planned it. Slaves to the media, we are. (Via Tomorrow) Yahoo (via Reuters) - Singapore’s ruling party warns voters against opposition
I don’t know about the rest of you, but this looks like a veiled threat to voters in Potong Pasir, that if they were to support Mr Chiam, their estate wouldn’t be upgraded. May I remind the PAP that the money with which they are holding Potong Pasir residents hostage is paid for by the taxpayers, and this includes the residents of Potong Pasir. Upgrading an estate should be based upon objective criterias made by professional engineers whom are non-politically affiliated parties, who plan the upgrades for the betterment of the people, and not be dangled like a carrot in front of voters during elections by PAP politicians, just because they control the budget with their majority in the parliament. It demeans the voters, treating them like dogs by rewarding ones who obediently follow the commands of the PAP, and depriving voters whom choose the opposition. In addition, this approach is illegal in many countries, as this is a blatant bribery of the electoral. Naturally, the local media conveniently forgot to highlight this point. It casts undue influence upon the results of the election, so that instead of the election being a choice of doctrine and representative, it is now a simple choice of whether residents want upgrading, or not. To Mr Goh: If you really have the heart to care for the residents of Potong Pasir, you should immediately push for the estates’ upgrading regardless of their status as an opposition ward. Read more at Sg_Review, along with some responses. Update 1: I find it disturbing that people accept being treated like mindless mules - i.e. bartering for upgrading with their votes, instead of looking at the election as a genuine examination of a representative in parliament. There is a lot of mis-education to undo indeed. Oh well, at least everyone is starting to write about local politics in their blogs. Hopefully, as time goes by, there will come to rise a generation of Singaporeans whom are not purely regurgitating the puke of the state-controlled media. Update 2: Bing De has written verbosely about this issue. It is extremely ironic that the monotheist religions themselves demean other religions in their preachings, yet themselves cannot tolerate criticisms and caricature. A law student writes about this double-standard with more alacrity than I did. [tags]islam, muis, caricature[/tags] National service is like a phase in our lives, one where we drop everything, stop being a student and start being a soldier. 2 years for those newbies, longer for those who enlisted before 2004. But for the regulars in service, national service is nothing but a cycle that begins with raw diamonds, whom they will attempt to turn into cast-molded soldiers, then send them out when ORD comes around. After that, it is a lull period where those trapped in the system get their bearings before the next cycle comes again. Wash, rinse, dry, repeat. Pardon me, but it sounds really monotonous work. Their only chance of a break from this cycle is to get a good enough review to push them upwards - into a different cycle. There, they are still trapped, doing the new things over and over again. It is kind of like a doctor who keeps getting patients with the exact same problems for 10 years in a row: don’t really think he will last that long in practice. I went for my mandatory dental checkup at Kranji on the 27th, and met with Yong Ji, Jun Yuan, Ponnifer, and the few other guys whom were condemned to leave service in April. To say the least, we are all in the same boat, and we had fun nursing our jealousy of those who got their civilian I/C in March, and generally looking really good in front of the other NSFs still in service. I guess the t-shirt and jeans did help rub it in, because the stench of jealousy hung in the air. Perhaps that is why the medical centre decided to place the two waiting areas facing away from each other. Very soon, a person dressed in scrubs over his uniform came out of the dental room, and walked around the medical centre. With his gloved hands, he touched the monitor screen, some pieces of paper, the door-knob, and a pen that was lying on the counter-top of the dispensary. I hoped that he would not stuff the same pair of gloves in my mouth. The actual check-up turned out to be very quick. You would lie down on the dentist chair, which is already reclined flatter than the sleeping beds on most airlines, and the dentist (not the same guy) dressed in scrubs will look at the nether corners of your mouth for wisdom teeth. 15 seconds was all it took, and I found myself on my way out. I had to finish my physical check-up on the same day, so Yong Ji kindly drove us back to camp. The MO (medical officer) was busy doing the check-up for a newly enlisted recruit whom was going to be sent into detention, so we had some free time, for which we went to our old bunks to take some photographs.
Everybody was happy that day. Well, not that recruit though. He must have been extremely demoralised that he is going into detention, and he got it rubbed in his face by meeting 5 people wearing civilian and ORDing soon. That’s why so many people have mentioned it before, and I will say it again: stay out of trouble, or you won’t have a peaceful national service! [tags]national service, ns, singapore[/tags] There is this friend of mine who has an incurable (though he tries) habit of writing messily on paper. Be it homework, or application forms, his scrawls easily rival those of a doctor’s. For one, I know that his teachers have worn themselves out trying to get him to write more legibly, not only for dis-ambiguity’s sake, but more often than not the teacher’s sanity. With 30 more scripts to correct (and that is for a class, we haven’t even started on those examination papers), more teachers are going to be getting glasses soon from squinting too much. Now, someone has actually taken the time to analyse all his corrected assignments to test out the theory that fonts do affect grading, and it turns out that Georgia is the best font to use in academia settings. Maybe it gets professors in the universities all homey thinking about their own undergraduate days. Looks like it actually pays to dedicate some effort into the presentation of your essays. University students should find this extremely interesting. [tags]university, essays, assignments, academia, fonts[/tags] Dear Mr You-Ann, I am having some difficulties with my neighbour, Miss Mer Ley-Shir. She seems to be a difficult person to get along with, though she recently claimed in her correspondence that she has tried all methods to deal with me, including “being friendly”. I shudder to think about the other methods she might have used. Vodoo? Hopefully she didn’t cast any death curse on me, just because I refused to tear up the tiles on my side of the corridor to replace it with one that matches her pretty pink pattern. It all started when I first moved in. We used to have a stable friendship, though she likes to take jibes at me, and make crude jokes of turning off the pipe to my water supply if I ever let her down. To make matters worse, some of her family members suggested poisoning the pipe if I ever did anything wrong! I shuddered under the sabre-rattling, but held calm. After all, if I didn’t do anything wrong, I should not be afraid of her, right? Then one day, she put up a sign near my door on her side of the corridor: “Prior permission required to trespass”. I went to knock on her door, but she refused to open the door. Instead, she called the police to have me forcibly removed from her corridor! I had only wanted to request her permission to cross the corridor to get to the lifts! Thus, I had to resort to taking the stairs every day for the past 6 years. Well, till this day she continuous to bug me about tearing up my side of the corridor, but these days a contractor has come to take some measurements. It turned out that she was going to go ahead with the pink floor tiles anyway, even though it doesn’t match the rest of the floor’s tilings! I tried to compromise with her, pleading her to give me access to her corridor so that I may get to the lifts - in return of ripping up my own tiles to match her pink ones! Guess what? She shot back a note that essentially labelled me an “insolent neighbour”, and that I “always wanted more than she was willing to give in return”. “You want to go through my corridor, and also to put a shoe-rack outside your house just to agree to build the pink tiles.. But what do you give me in return… nothing.” Please, Mr You-Ann! What should I do now! Yours sincerely, Ter Mark Sek [tags]causeway, singapore, malaysia[/tags] Back when I was younger, my ears used to get itchy very easily. The kind of itch that always feels like it is perched further inside as I struggle to dig at it with my pinky finger, and gets worse each time you swipe unsuccessfully at the most intense spot. Then, I would have to squirm around just to shake that feeling away. After I told Mom about this, she bought a ear-wax-extracter/digger, and gave me a good ear cleaning every week. I suspect that doing this triggers off some hormones, because getting that itch scratched definitely felt good, as if a nagging plug in your brain has just been dug out. The enormous amount of cerumen dug out (she had a habit of showing it to me after getting the earwax out) made the experience all the more pleasurable. (Yes! You read this right. Pleasurable!) Now that Mom doesn’t have time to give me my weekly ear digging, I’ve resorted to doing it myself. At first, I tried to do it everytime the ear itches, but after a while it tends to make the ear raw, and make the next session slightly painful (though still pleasurable). Since then, I would try to keep the itch in my ear for a few days, then take my time to gently scratch my ear canals. I don’t get much wax out this way, but it definitely still makes my ear tingle! Update 1: I just found out that I am not alone in this. The Japanese are taking this to greater heights with commercial salons. Wikipedia has some very interesting information on ear wax, if you are a medicine student (that’s Mister Inconspicuous), or just a curious anthropologist. Update 2: A doctor has pushed the red button on ear-cleaning on Boing Boing: you could lose your hearing if you don’t do it properly. Ear wax drops out on its own if you leave it well alone. |
