Saturday Night Live - A Nonpartisan Message

(shamelessly koped from your blog, char) Zomg. Priceless! Go look up urbandictionary if you don't know what cankles are heh.

back to school

I'm on leave these couple of days (Mon & Tues) cos of some careful strategising that resulted in a respectable 5-day weekend (with the Hari Raya hol on Wed)... been stoning around, resurrecting and reinstalling stuff on my comp, owning my piano with Brahms' piano quintet (good stuff), that kinda thing. Boring.

So I traipsed back into RJC yesterday to collect my A-level cert, get a couple of double bass scores back from one of my juniors, and say hi to people. It was strange to be back, walking through the familiar yet different corridors, and seeing the same types of people hanging out in the same places (just with different faces)... feeling the exam vibe... harrassing my illustrious juniors - what's this, Dom, dean's list for math and physics only? - Adriel, play that last bar again?

Nice to drop by RI too... I'm amazed they still remember me... flattered that they want me back to teach haha. Warm fuzzy feeling went through the roof. I spent over an hour with Ms Johnson and Miss Tang, laughing over memories of our crazy madcap class, and the geppers in general. Zomg. I think we're forever etched in their memories rofl. Pity I couldn't get Ms Kuang.

It was really, really good to be back, feeling the school vibe, laughing at memories of us young boisterous jokers.

Now to find the teachers on facebook lol

I have dreamed of you so much

I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real.
Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make
your dear voice come alive again?

I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my 
chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.
For faced with the real form of what has haunted me and governed me for so many 
days and years, I would surely become a shadow.

O scales of feeling.

I have dreamed of you so much that surely there is no more time for me to wake up. 
I sleep on my feet prey to all the forms of life and love, and you, the only one who 
counts for me today, I can no more touch your face and lips than touch the lips and 
face of some passerby.

I have dreamed of you so much, have walked so much, talked so much, slept so much 
with your phantom, that perhaps the only thing left for me is to become a phantom 
among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadow than the shadow that
moves and goes on moving, brightly, over the sundial of your life.

- Robert Desnos

Saw this in The Guardian's Books Blog here. (Yes I do go read those things -.- gawd... I just wasn't made for these times.)

There's a thing about poetry that seems to reach an arm into the deepest recesses of your soul and drags something of it into the light of day, to be examined, exulted, execrated as the case might be. It's like putting your beating heart and trembling brain under the microscope (to say nothing of your ethereal soul). This is one of those poems that particularly struck me; it's why I'm still into poetry.

I actually think that's not a very good translation of the original poem in French; but since I can't read French I'm afraid that'll have to do for now. Here's the original (source here)

J’ai tant rêvé de toi
J’ai tant rêvé de toi que tu perds ta réalité.

Est-il encore temps d’atteindre ce corps vivant
et de baiser sur cette bouche la naissance
de la voix qui m’est chère?

J’ai tant rêvé de toi que mes bras habitués en étreignant ton ombre
à se croiser sur ma poitrine ne se plieraient pas
au contour de ton corps, peut-être.

Et que, devant l’apparence réelle de ce qui me hante
et me gouverne depuis des jours et des années
je deviendrais une ombre sans doute,

Ô balances sentimentales.

J’ai tant rêvé de toi qu’il n'est plus temps sans doute que je m’éveille.
Je dors debout, le corps exposé à toutes les apparences de la vie
et de l’amour et toi, la seule qui compte aujourd'hui pour moi,
je pourrais moins toucher ton front et tes lèvres que les premières lèvres
et le premier front venu.

J’ai tant rêvé de toi, tant marché, parlé, couché avec ton fantôme
qu’il ne me reste plus peut-être, et pourtant,
qu’a être fantôme parmi les fantômes et plus ombre cent fois
que l’ombre qui se promène et se promènera allègrement
sur le cadran solaire de ta vie.

Maid abuse.

I saw another depressing case of maid abuse in the papers today. Allegedly this woman Loke Phooi Ling (yeah true she isn't convicted yet, but I still feel it's justifiable to drag her name in mud, try her in the court of public opinion a bit) faces 32 charges of abuse - including rubbing her domestic helper's lips with toilet brushes and steel wool, kicking her genitals and hitting her head against walls.

It's so routine that it's ceased to produce outrage (if it ever did). And these aren't the dregs of Singapore society; her husband was a bank executive. Besides if they were rich enough to afford to hire a maid they can't have been that dumb: the only possibilities I can countenance to explain their behaviour are insanity and inhumanity. In the former case they should be treated, in the latter they should be given a punishment befitting their crime.

And this is why I would like to make the case for maid abusers - even women - to be caned.

The official case against caning women, as far as I'm aware, is that women are especially fragile, specifically their ability to bear children. But this is a humane consideration, and Singapore has historically not given a fig about humane considerations - witness our country's stand on hangings and whippings. So why start now? And anyway, if the female genitals are fragile, how about the males? Us guys are, as House puts it (Season 4), "danglers", after all...

True, some would argue caning is "cruel and unusual punishment" and wrong in any context. I personally would agree with them but since Singapore isn't likely to revise its stand on it I don't see how standing on principles would help. Moreover I think caning is actually comparatively humane compared to what some of their maids had to go through - that's cruel and unusual punishment for you, inflicted through the caprices of twisted (and often female) minds. I'm not suggesting impalement, not even the ducking chair, just plain ol' caning.

Besides, convicts who get caned reportedly have to strip naked (it helps aiming, I guess!), so it works in their favour right? Women caned by women, considerations of modesty? If Singaporean lawmakers are really that soft-hearted they could reduce the number of strokes women are liable to be sentenced to, or specify a lighter kind of cane, or cane them on their thighs or other less sensitive area; but I don't think it's necessary. That would just send out the wrong signals.

Alright, the case for caning. One of the justifications for caning is its ability to get to the most hardened criminals. And these maid abusers are certainly hardened, and very often unrepentant; they perpetrate acts of senseless brutality, they use acid and bleach on their employees, they physically abuse them, often with implements - in other words, torture.

Another of the justifications is the deterrent effect that caning has. This fits the profile of many maid abusers too; certainly these people need deterring, since maid abuse is a prominent fixture in our legal news. It's a systemic vice in our society that needs weeding out. They can cane loan sharks, why can't they cane maid abusers?

Think of it as protecting the victims too. Most maids are heavily indebted to their agents when they reach here; they have very little legal protection, often no social network, and they're clueless about how things work here; they have no power; they're often expected to be subservient, a demeaning practice which says something about the egotistical superiority cult that many Singaporeans feel the need to keep up, just so they can feel secure; and relatively many are abused, some quite shockingly. It's common to see cars being washed at ungodly hours - that in itself is a mild but systematic form of abuse too.

Furthermore, this would extend caning to a huge swathe of the population that's hitherto been exempt: women. To some extent this is reflective of a caveman, male chauvinist attitude in Singapore - women stay at home to clean, cook and sew, never mind work, NS - or caning. But this is an attitude that needs changing; our modern times, our dehumanised natures demand it. Besides, maid abusers are often female - particularly the most vicious ones. You hear of vigorous beatings, slappings, pinchings, disfigurement even; surely if these women are strong enough to inflict these on their maids, they can stand a lashing or 24 of their own?

These maid abusers are some of the most virulent, recalcitrant, heinous villainesses that walk the streets of Singapore. Are we to overlook their twisted, violent nature and deny them the punishment they deserve, just because they walk the streets in high-heels? It seems that fines and jail terms aren't enough to deter them, and certainly death's too good for them. Why spare maid abusers the cane just because they happen to be female?

They've got their rights; time to pay their dues...

thoughts.

I remember, there was something... just... Never mind.

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Eoin Colfer's writing a new Hitchhiker's book. That's almost like asking Rushdie to do a new translation of the Koran, IMHO. ^^

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My comp's working okay now but my dvd player's spoilt. Technical failure's a disease, I swear.

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Has anyone heard The Velvet Underground? I quite like Sunday Morning.

econs link

Behavioural Economics: Is it such a big deal?

A link from ZH again; nice one, you got me interested. I tend to side with Tim Harford, and in my own defence would just like to point out: economics is, broadly speaking, the study of human responses to incentives, choices - in a word, behaviour. And seen in that light, "behavioural" economics is a mere tautology; a linguistic soufflé. True, a very nifty one, but a soufflé nonetheless.

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - Too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell one's name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!

- Emily Dickinson

This is a little gem, and having come across it I just had to post it. I love the tone; at once bold, forthright, yet timid, shy, even confidential - "Don't tell!", "How dreary!" - it's beautiful. I have no idea whether it was purposely crafted or just spontaneous but it certainly looks like one burst of inspiration.

wankst (2).

Trundling wearily down Isetan at Parkway Parade earlier this afternoon (trundling cos it's a nice quaint word that should be used more often, even though I've used it earlier today already, who's complaining, who cares?; wearily cos twas guard duty yesterday and I only caught mites of sleep; Isetan cos my mom dragged me there, needing to get a bag - pffft!) I couldn't help noticing the clothes. Orange t-shirt with cool print. Pretty cool print. Orange too. Had no idea what it said, as usual, but who gives a flying fox?

But nah, something in me holds back. I hate getting clothes, they never seem to hang on me quite the right way. It's amazing how clothes are never how I want them to be. I want them to be me, contradictory and insecure, trying to look average but failing miserably on closer inspection in most of the wrong and obvious places. I swear, designers must have something against me.

And it's amazing how neatly other people can fit their clothes. Their characters become their clothes. E.g. Daniel Ong, beach bum; Daniel Peck, bum... Clothes speak volumes about the person, who s/he is and what s/he's attempting to be. They project a facade; yet it's not a fake facade because very often you are what you wear. I feel great in long sleeves and that's probably why I manage feats like performing music or pissing the PSC board off in my interview, in long sleeves. But wearing shirts in this kinda climate is suicidal, you end up with wet patches in bad places that reek of manliness gone sour. Uck. [Not that there's much manliness emanating from me, I flatter myelf ^^]

Same thing with hair; I hate my hair. The only 2 things worse than having my hair is having Zhaohan's hair xP and having no hair at all. I just had a haircut and it doesn't look like a visible improvement.

Fuck I'm wanksting. Aargh time to stfu.

wankst

Is there a patron saint of computers? I just hope that my comp can trundle wearily along till the 27th 'cos that's when my long weekend starts (I took leave woohoo) and I can finally reformat the lil fucker. I'll be pissed, these few weeks. It's been crashing regularly doing the most mundane shitty operations like moving files, downloading stuff, and opening My Heroes Ability on Facebook. 

I can't find my Sibelius 3 cd; need to borrow Rome: Total War and Alpha Centauri again; need to download all the audio codecs and nifty little tools that each irritatingly perform one tiny audio-processing maneouvre but can't, apparently, be combined by some genius into a monster program that can actually do all I want (for free - fine I'm demanding, so?); need to move all my precious data and message logs and saved games and music and make sure it's safely stashed away somewhere where I can't accidentally delete it; need to dig out the drivers for the 2 printers and 1 scanner that I have, plus all the software on this piece of shit. This piece of shit crashed while I was TYPING this blog entry, for fuckssake, TYPING, in NOTEPAD, for fuckssake, NOTEPAD. I'm pissed, massively. 

If anyone pisses me off over the next couple of weeks THERE WILL BE BLOOD. And it won't be mine. Be warned.

appeal.

My blood group is coffee.
Get me a transfusion.

problem

Bye Daniel. xP Another PSC bastard going off, this time to Stanford...

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I've been trying to write a piano quartet for some time, with hardly any progress. It sounds nice and complicated, but there's no real direction and it's going to peter out soon. I can't find room for the melodic fragments to develop. And as a bassist I pay special attention to the bass with the result that the piano part is heavily left-handed and sounds horribly thick (though that's nothing too serious; I'll just have to play it through, do some rewrites here and there).

More importantly perhaps, I'm not inspired by my life and things that are happening to me right now; my life lacks the sense of the "lofty and beautiful" (as derided by Dostoevsky). There's no epic tragedy or drama unfolding, and I'm just living a fairly normal life with slightly more than the average anxiety and angst, nothing to be too worked up about. And thus creativity eludes me.

I hope it's done by next year, though. I'd like to get an obliging pianist, violinist, violist and cellist to whack through the thing and utterly demolish my musical visions - I mean pretensions.

geog guys.

Another weekend, another geog guys outing. (That's wally, xy, peck, ann liang - back from the horrors of brunei - and me.) Fun, fun, fun haha. Ok dinner kinda sucked cos it was on my recommendation ^^ I'll prob won't be going to another "authentic French cafe" in a hurry. Crikey. Highlights: the quiche was sold out so all they had was tartines - sounds dubious but turns out its just a pate of random meat/stuff on some bread; and AL got scandalised by peck ordering tiramisu ("it contains alcohol!") haha.

After that, we hung around and talked 2 hours till we missed the last train and had to get back by taxi. Geog guys' banter is amazingly wide-ranging, but mostly we just diss each other. Awfully mindnumbingly entertaining. It's the male equivalent of gossip but ×100 better, duh. 

Good old 13A days.

life now

Ok life's a pretty relaxing prospect. As I've said, nothing much to do and all the time to do it. Sodded my brains on Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Well, most Beach Boys tracks are an embodiment of the beach bum lifestyle (cf Kokomo, Catch a Wave, Surfer Girl...) but Pet Sounds is something other. It's youth, and a happy careless gushing torrent of good feeling and love that can't be fulfilled because so much of it lies in the future. The instrumentation is extremely effective everywhere - I've never found music where a drumset was that indispensable - and God Only Knows has possibly one of the best melodies ever in pop music. And at the same time there's a thread of melancholy running through it. All of this suits my mood perfectly.

Otherwise... I can't help but feel that David's facebook profile is finely calculated to kill me with envy. Damn I can't wait to be at Yale!

I had my first guard duty (as guard 2IC) on wed night - quite an exciting night, actually. A Landrover (with signal set antenna mounted on) tore through a tentage and wrecked the roof, and a 5-tonner flattened our sentry platform haha. Well luckily the shit didn't flow to me (I'm only 2IC phew) but the security warrant officer was hopping mad, berating everyone around the place. Crikey.

1/4 done with Gravity's Rainbow now. It's going to be a hard slog...

crying out loud.

I'm into the second hour of the long dark tea-time of the soul now (Douglas Adams again). The Boss's not around, neither is his secretary (i.e. my superior). There's absolutely nothing to do and all the time to do it with. At the rate I'm going I could write a novel with the free time I have. Or an absurdist play. A sequel to the V- Monologues: the P- and V- Dialogues maybe. (I've prudishly blocked out the word, gawd, who'm I kidding anyway?) But it'll be shit; I know it in my bones, don't try to persuade me otherwise...

Pity the content blockers locked out youtube. I mean, welfare? Care for soldiers? SAF 7 Core Values? Although good news is they've reinstated access to facebook and zip archives, so I've downloaded Liero. And I have Gravity's Rainbow to get through. Bugger that book, it's fat and terribly complicated. I was lost by the second page.

ZOMG SAVE ME FROM CHEWING MY BRAINS OUT IN BOREDOM.

I should think up synonyms from boredom; calques from Latin and Greek maybe. It's interesting that the first recorded use of the term boredom is in Dickens' Bleak House, 1852. Wow. But technically it's not boredom, it's the complete lack of stuff to do that gets me.

I shall sit around, flip my lips, and say "brrrrr..." for a minute.