It is unimaginable Man can miss out so much on life without communing with nature.
After all, that was where he was born into. The Bible's Garden of Eden and our prehistoric Out of Africa savannahs and highlands
That wonderful yet terrifying naturalistic surrounds must be both a gift and a curse to humankind.
Beginning with the Palaeolithic Age, Man was subjected to all the fury of nature in its climatic elements of thunder, lightning, rainstorms, windstorms and even snowstorms alternating with the scorching searing sun.
Couple all that with cyclical droughts, floods, famines and the seemingly insurmountable physical terrains of mountains, highlands, deserts, glaciation and seas and you can picture how Man bleakly copes amidst this merciless onslaught.
This is when mythology and the early days of paganism rooted. Man cannot explain all of nature's wonders and fury. They could only ascribe this to higher beings living in the cosmos, thus coming to be known as deities and Gods.
They ritualise and sacrifice to appease these Gods. The Egyptians built their pyramids reaching high up to the constellations and prepare themselves for a teletransportational life after death in mummification. So too did the Mayans.
Temples were built with men and women performing the intermediary roles between God and men. That was when paganism (the early form of religion) vaulted.
Back on Earth, early men had to contend with the bigger, stronger and sharper predatory animals and to relentlessly hunt for substenance and life-giving water.
Some of these animals (both predator and prey) were also worshipped as animistic symbols of celestial beings - heathen worship.
Soon however , the savage and barbaric hunters of old learn to agrarise (growing food crops and domesticating animals) and build civilisation and communities near the rivers and seas. All great civilisations begin on fertile ground or near water. Man has tamed and conquered nature to a considerable extent.
Now that we are completely civilised and industrialised, we control food production , work in modern offices to earn our keep and live in modern homes with all the labour-saving conveniences. Nature at best is a leisure pursuit of sorts.
Of course I am only speaking for most parts of the world. There are still pockets of remote places living life as it was in the tribal villages. It is not for us to scorn their way of life.
From them, we should learn the finer craft of living among the rich flora and fauna as we surely must if the life sciences is to proceed on an even keel. After all, there is no micro this or nano that if we do not have a macro-species to begin with, right?
Therefore the microbiologists and geneticists must surely work hand-in-glove with the anthropologists, ecologists and palaeo-anthropologists along with the physicists and biochemists.
When I hike in our reserve, this overwhelming power of a premieval living state failed no end to amaze and astound me.
The olive-backed sunbird chirping as it build its twig-nest. The laughing chest-nut thrush hopping about on the forest floor. The black-naped oriole swooping over the waters. The majestic white-bellied eagle perched atop a stump and soaring magnificiently in the sky. And the antics of a collared kingfisher preening itself upon a tree branch.
The shimmering emerald-green lake teeming with pond skaters, silver-bodied fishes tipped with bright orange fins tinged with black and water hens and jungle fowls pecking away at its fringes.
The fishes' silver-bodied scales remind me of the mirror-reflect tactic in a book I read of using optics to blind its potential predators. And I cannot imagine that the shallow and polluted waters of the reservoir could actually contain such beautiful creatures.
The towering trees, some bearing brightly coloured African-tulip flowers, and many green shrubs just below the forest canopy like the ubiquitous swampy Dillenia, exude greenery and sweet nectar for the birds and bees to feast upon.
Huge carpenter bees buzzed ominously as they flit from flower to flower to succour and feed.
Many of these botanical species hold important lessons for the spice, medicinal, wood-crafting and industrial trades. On an early morning trip, I could smell curry spice and pandan leaves.
Some are our common fruit trees of durians, rambutans, mangoes and jackfruits. The jackfruit tree has all its fruits growing on its trunk, making it a Christmas tree of sort with its fruits hanging layer upon layer of its main stem. And the durian fruit seems so unreachable, mightily aloft the tall branches of its tree while the rambutans hang low among its over-arching arms.
The Shorea, a sub-species of the Meranti, has its wind-dispersed fruit much shaped like the chapteh we heel for play or the shuttlecock of a badminton game. Incidentally the old name for badminton was named battledore and played with a wooden racket.
When I pause to ponder the amazing array of species, I think of Carl Linnaeus, the progenitor of taxonomical classification. However only ten percent of all species has thus been taxonomised.
No wonder a strange insect looking much like the green lace wingfly which crawled up my hand was not be found among the books I consulted. Even the fresh-water fish I mentioned earlier isn't (or so I think).
And it makes sense to learn Greek and Latin as the genus and species in a binomial nomenclature uses those.
The quarry we have in our reserve is the igneous rock of an active volcano which once threw up magma. According to its epigraph, it is filling with rain-water as fast as it can hold till the year 2008 when it will burst its banks. Will Singapore then be another Atlantis? Will it blow up again once its dormant slumber is awakened?
The gigantic Komodo Dragon living on Komodo and Flores Islands Indonesia, is the largest living lizard which can grow up to 3 metres. Flores island , by the way, is also currently abuzz with a recent palaeo-anthropological find of what is believed to be an early hominid - the homo-florensis. And being geographically close to Australia, is it any surprise the scientific discoverers are both Indonesian and Australian?
Here in our reserve, we can have a glimpse of its smaller cousins, the White Water and Clouded Monitor lizards . We can even let our mind run berserk and dream them to be the bigger Komodos by watching them amble on the ground, sticking out their long pitch-forked blue tongue feeling the air. On a hot afternoon, there are many of them basking or slithering away in the waters.
The red-eared sliders in our reserve, unfortunately , are not natives. The reason why they congregate around humans , much like the pair of mute swans at our arboretum along with their companion duck, is the result of conditioning and domestication as animals in captivity. They were waiting to be fed.
I have even been witness to one scene of their ranivorous feeding where they snapped at the neck of a Giant Asian Frog, shredding its body to pieces and dividing this kill among several of them.
Don't forget the reserve we see today is the remnants of a secondary forest with a tiny tract of primary forest only to be found in our central reserve. What this means is that most of what we see are disturbed vegetation and once cultivated for commercial cropping.
If we are ever to see its original masterwork, we probably have to wait several hundred years and I don't think my and my progeny's progenies will live to see this.
Man, heed this. If we care to look carefully around us, some of the flora and fauna abound just right oustide our doorsteps too.
The full glory and fury of Nature. When will Man ever learn?
Saturday, July 30, 2005
Multi-Dimensional Cognition
The Germans have it in their lexicon. A word for a comprehensive, holistic, multi-dimensional world view and philosophy of life - "Weltanschauung".
Cognition together with different disciplines of knowledge, metacognitive thinking, experience, training and phenomenalism (visual, visceral, auditory, olfactory, tactile, kinaethestic, intuition) go hand-in-hand to assist us in laying into a problem or issue.
This is almost uncannily analagous to the multitudinous , individual, self-contained lenses of the compound eyes of an insect which in the end assimilate them all onto a focal point - the next stage of the information processing conveyor belt - initiation and acting upon the information so obtained.
Thus we have sensors and receptors working together bi- and multi-directionally this way.
Think watching a view from above the tree-top and below. Or visiting the reserve at various times of the day and at night. And that multi-faceted sparkling panorama strikes you at once!
Just so you can grasp what I mean, I am going to explain with several illustrations.
The facts of the what and how of the Cambrian explosion are well known. However, why it happened, was never fully understood.
The study of the Cambrian explosion lies surely within the ambits of biology, archaeology and palaeontology. But Professor Andrew Parker, with the aid of optical physics, was able to lay in on the issue with his Light Switch Theory, hence providing another viable scientific explanation for this phenomenon.
Who would , in his rightful and politically correct mind, think Optics has a role to play in of all things, an essentially biological complexity?
George Bernard Shaw was so right when he observes that no one can be a specialist without being an idiot of sorts and further on espouses : "All great truths begin as blasphemies."
We only have to think of poor Copernicus and Galileo to understand this pithy epigram . But just so we have a fair judgement of this papal bungle, the Reformist of that era also did not lend any credence to Galileo's theory. I just want to be really objective here so you can see from all angles.
We can conclude from the above that no science stands alone. But if the late Professor Stephen Jay Gould had his way in his book "Rocks of Ages", the magisteria of Science and Religion cannot intertwine.
But now in the age of the genome, reproductive and stem cell cloning experiments with chimera , many moral , religious and ethical implications beckon and inevitably this sees some crossing over of the two.
In fact, in his other much later book on "Crossing Over - Art and Science", Professor Stephen Jay Gould acknowledges how these two divergent disciplines converge.
Thus even Science has bio-ethical considerations with legalesse thrown in as well and that makes for multi-dimensional thinking through problems.
A science student of today similarly when he learns of lenticel should immediately be able to interconnect this to a uni-cellular nuclear membrane and the corneal membrane. Or the concept of mutualism to a prophage, lichen and Nemo in his marine coral habitat.
By the way all three concepts are neatly categorized into the Prostita, Plant and Animal kingdoms.
When we think Linnaeus, we think taxonomy. But there is another side to him. He was also the founder of the racial classification system we inherited - whites, yellows and blacks as he calls them. So too Montessori. She was an educationalist but an elitist one at that - a firm supporter of the eugenics movement sweeping modern Europe.
Chairmao Mao of the CCP certainly earned kudos with the peasants of his day when he lived among them in the rural villages and tried garnering their support. He realised this could be a potent way of besieging the city from the fringes and thus overpowering the Kuomintang.
However his congenial rapport with the proletariat only serve to mask the hideous crimes he was to commit later in his cultural revolutionary trials and agricultural reforms.
If we thought that with the now discredited science of phrenology that nothing good came out of it, we are absolutely wrong. It sparked the study of the brain with our present ever-growing database of how it works.
The eugenics movement with its argument for differentiating between born and occasional criminals led to enlightened determinate sentencing later on. So with just as many debacles so too we had as much enlightenment and amelioration.
But we must always remember how all writings or academia expresses only a unilateral view, usually that of the author. He may pick on one aspect of the subject to discuss or his own personal preferences or prejudices. Thus to round up our world-view, we may have to read several texts on the same subject.
Don't forget subsequent revisions or reprints and new developments in that particular field and we can appreciate the dynamic versus static nature of cognition. Change is the only constant with exceptions if I may add.
Francis Crick, a bio-physicist and James Watson, a bio-ornithologist, both from very different fields of science , built the helical structure of the DNA from scratch. But was it any surprise that Crick with his engineering insights and Watson, his attuned observational acuity, should eventually solve this bio-morphological mystery?
If you think linguistics has no place in the scheme of all the sciences here, think again. Many of the older scientific literature were written in the vernacular languages of their times.
That means Latin ,Greek and a host of other ancient languages - Sanscript, Hebrew , Medieval and even Anglo Saxon English.
To clue in on the medical and scientific writings, maybe sometimes even in hieroglyphics, a linguist and polyglot of sorts must be on hand to decipher the as good as encrypted scripts.
Leonardo Da Vinci strikes me as one fine example of a multi-disciplinarian. Artist, engineer and inventor. Sir Issac Newton and his Principia Motion was at once a scientist and cosmologist. Sir Thomas More and his "Utopia" was a statesman, humanist and philosopher.
The Bible has a final word on multi-dimensionality with this observation : That an adult studying the Bible will take on matured thought and serious reflection compared to the childish notions learned long ago in bygone catechism lessons.
This then sums up how experience is a great leveller and eye-opener. The young may not see as far or deep.
"Nothing is real until it is experienced".
It should just be a matter of time when our own scientific and linguistics boffins start combining their knowledge bases in the Sciences (which include the social sciences) , Mathematics and Languages (plus the humanities) to unravel the many scientific, medical , cosmic , linguistic , social, political , historical and archaeological mysteries and puzzles of the world.
Cognition together with different disciplines of knowledge, metacognitive thinking, experience, training and phenomenalism (visual, visceral, auditory, olfactory, tactile, kinaethestic, intuition) go hand-in-hand to assist us in laying into a problem or issue.
This is almost uncannily analagous to the multitudinous , individual, self-contained lenses of the compound eyes of an insect which in the end assimilate them all onto a focal point - the next stage of the information processing conveyor belt - initiation and acting upon the information so obtained.
Thus we have sensors and receptors working together bi- and multi-directionally this way.
Think watching a view from above the tree-top and below. Or visiting the reserve at various times of the day and at night. And that multi-faceted sparkling panorama strikes you at once!
Just so you can grasp what I mean, I am going to explain with several illustrations.
The facts of the what and how of the Cambrian explosion are well known. However, why it happened, was never fully understood.
The study of the Cambrian explosion lies surely within the ambits of biology, archaeology and palaeontology. But Professor Andrew Parker, with the aid of optical physics, was able to lay in on the issue with his Light Switch Theory, hence providing another viable scientific explanation for this phenomenon.
Who would , in his rightful and politically correct mind, think Optics has a role to play in of all things, an essentially biological complexity?
George Bernard Shaw was so right when he observes that no one can be a specialist without being an idiot of sorts and further on espouses : "All great truths begin as blasphemies."
We only have to think of poor Copernicus and Galileo to understand this pithy epigram . But just so we have a fair judgement of this papal bungle, the Reformist of that era also did not lend any credence to Galileo's theory. I just want to be really objective here so you can see from all angles.
We can conclude from the above that no science stands alone. But if the late Professor Stephen Jay Gould had his way in his book "Rocks of Ages", the magisteria of Science and Religion cannot intertwine.
But now in the age of the genome, reproductive and stem cell cloning experiments with chimera , many moral , religious and ethical implications beckon and inevitably this sees some crossing over of the two.
In fact, in his other much later book on "Crossing Over - Art and Science", Professor Stephen Jay Gould acknowledges how these two divergent disciplines converge.
Thus even Science has bio-ethical considerations with legalesse thrown in as well and that makes for multi-dimensional thinking through problems.
A science student of today similarly when he learns of lenticel should immediately be able to interconnect this to a uni-cellular nuclear membrane and the corneal membrane. Or the concept of mutualism to a prophage, lichen and Nemo in his marine coral habitat.
By the way all three concepts are neatly categorized into the Prostita, Plant and Animal kingdoms.
When we think Linnaeus, we think taxonomy. But there is another side to him. He was also the founder of the racial classification system we inherited - whites, yellows and blacks as he calls them. So too Montessori. She was an educationalist but an elitist one at that - a firm supporter of the eugenics movement sweeping modern Europe.
Chairmao Mao of the CCP certainly earned kudos with the peasants of his day when he lived among them in the rural villages and tried garnering their support. He realised this could be a potent way of besieging the city from the fringes and thus overpowering the Kuomintang.
However his congenial rapport with the proletariat only serve to mask the hideous crimes he was to commit later in his cultural revolutionary trials and agricultural reforms.
If we thought that with the now discredited science of phrenology that nothing good came out of it, we are absolutely wrong. It sparked the study of the brain with our present ever-growing database of how it works.
The eugenics movement with its argument for differentiating between born and occasional criminals led to enlightened determinate sentencing later on. So with just as many debacles so too we had as much enlightenment and amelioration.
But we must always remember how all writings or academia expresses only a unilateral view, usually that of the author. He may pick on one aspect of the subject to discuss or his own personal preferences or prejudices. Thus to round up our world-view, we may have to read several texts on the same subject.
Don't forget subsequent revisions or reprints and new developments in that particular field and we can appreciate the dynamic versus static nature of cognition. Change is the only constant with exceptions if I may add.
Francis Crick, a bio-physicist and James Watson, a bio-ornithologist, both from very different fields of science , built the helical structure of the DNA from scratch. But was it any surprise that Crick with his engineering insights and Watson, his attuned observational acuity, should eventually solve this bio-morphological mystery?
If you think linguistics has no place in the scheme of all the sciences here, think again. Many of the older scientific literature were written in the vernacular languages of their times.
That means Latin ,Greek and a host of other ancient languages - Sanscript, Hebrew , Medieval and even Anglo Saxon English.
To clue in on the medical and scientific writings, maybe sometimes even in hieroglyphics, a linguist and polyglot of sorts must be on hand to decipher the as good as encrypted scripts.
Leonardo Da Vinci strikes me as one fine example of a multi-disciplinarian. Artist, engineer and inventor. Sir Issac Newton and his Principia Motion was at once a scientist and cosmologist. Sir Thomas More and his "Utopia" was a statesman, humanist and philosopher.
The Bible has a final word on multi-dimensionality with this observation : That an adult studying the Bible will take on matured thought and serious reflection compared to the childish notions learned long ago in bygone catechism lessons.
This then sums up how experience is a great leveller and eye-opener. The young may not see as far or deep.
"Nothing is real until it is experienced".
It should just be a matter of time when our own scientific and linguistics boffins start combining their knowledge bases in the Sciences (which include the social sciences) , Mathematics and Languages (plus the humanities) to unravel the many scientific, medical , cosmic , linguistic , social, political , historical and archaeological mysteries and puzzles of the world.
Biblical Revelations
I read the bible not as any devout Christian would imagine. Matter of fact, it seems that the bible is not as much the cornerstone of any Quaker any more, even more so the old belief that it will unite mankind.
There are enough myriad intepretations of its text interspersed with many contradictions that no two Christians of different sects, let us say Presbyterian and Catholic, can totally agree on its literal meaning.
I read the Bible mostly with scholarly eyes, much like philosophy, history, literature and occasionally for the divine messages and mythology. It is after all a text filled with many literary forms such as prose, poetry, hymns of praise, parables (story-telling) and my favourites, skewedly, fall under the deuterocanonicals (the deemed hidden, secret or subsidiary books).
Here the books of wisdom impart nuggets of truth while the books of prophets continue to fascinate me with their wildest of wild imagination of Armageddon. Not unlike Genesis, with both history and mythology rolled into one.
The Old Testament "Ecclesiastes" is philosophical musings while Deuterocanonicals "Sirach" (Ecclesiasticus) speaks of religious and moral tenets.
Some favourite quotes from the two books include these :
"It is better to have wise people reprimand you than to have stupid people sing your praises."
"I found something more bitter than death - woman. No troubles are as serious as the troubles that women cause."
"Stupid people are given postions of authority. Slaves ride on horsebacks while noblemen go on foot."
"People deserving praise - a person who doesn't have to work for someone less competent than himself."
The book of Genesis describes the mythological creation of the world in six days. The period of six days, according to scientists, may not be the 24-hour days we are now acclimatised to. And I think this holds water.
The Garden of Eden and the tree of knowledge, with biblical Eve, on the urging of the serpent, taking the first bite and then nudging Adam into Sin with the next bite, are in line with Catholics' vows of celibacy for the priests and observations of the wicked, mindless and sexed-up rituals of the high priestesses in the temples at the time (much like brothels for the pagans and heathens) . This is how I read this.
Now , of course, a contextual approach is urged upon reading the Bible. And this is definitely a must in the light of the era they were written, the social and religious microcosm then, the writers/translators themselves and the original language (Hebrew, then Greek) it is written in before being translated into Latin, English and German (Martin Luther transposed his in German) which may have lost its flavour in both meaning and nuances of words then and now.
Remember my earlier blogs on linguistics on words like "degenerate", "counterfeit" and "apocryphal" and you get to fathom the semantics progression over time.
Erich von Daniken wrote about some biblical D-day as well in his book "Chariots of Gods". This is further vouched by the Books of the prophets like Ezekiel, the Old Testament of the Exodus and Genesis and that of the New Testament.
The walls of Jericho (also one of the earliest model of city living some 11 000 BC ago) come tumbling down (a result of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and wars), the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (the pillar of salt Lot's wife turned into could be a nuclear fall-out) and the Tower of Babylon , Gods riding on chariots and heavenly apparitions appearing across the skies (Books of relevation and most books of the prophets) are all signature tunes of Judgement Day and the return of the Messiah.
The prophetic books include female prophetesses like Ruth, Esther and Susanna. Ezekiel warns of false prophets and prophetesses of our times. So too did Jesus in the New testament. I think this clearly signals the cults we have come to know in our period.
In a particular passage of the Book of Revelation on the day of the coming of the Kingdom of God, it says that standing on Mount Zion were 144000 men who "are the only ones who have been redeemed" and "they are the men who have kept themselves pure by not having sexual relations with women; they are virgins. They have never been known to tell lies; they are faultless."
The bible traces history quite well, juxtaposing the lives of the early Jews with that of Egyptian civilisation 2000 BC ago , first with Joseph, son of Jacob, being sold into slavery and later, Moses leading God's Chosen people to the promised land.
The Song of Songs and Psalms are all well-written prose and poetry, the latter mainly hymns of praises by King David. The book of Job is similarly penned albeit as lamentations.
Don't forget Jesus' parables and you have a compendium of such diverse literary forms and history that surely the Bible counts its rightful place among the books of knowledge of all times.
Jesus' parables. Ah yes! Simple, short but wise. They contain Jesus' philosophy on living and loving. He preaches on love, anger, poverty, riches, charity and hypocrisy.
Jesus himself has come to be known in the Bible to have a shrewd understanding of human nature and he puts the need for parables thus:
"They may look, yet not see. They may listen, yet not understand. Their minds are dull, having stopped up their ears and closed their eyes" This reminds me of adopting a phenomenalistic approach to education besides cognition.
Homosexuality exists in bliblical times. So too do incest, rape, divorce and murder.
On divorce, he says "Man must not separate then what God has joined together." But this was an obvious affront to Moses' earlier decree that this was possible and even in some of the other books of wisdom (Sirach: "Don't let a bad wife have her way,if she won't do as you tell her, divorce her") .
Thus the contradictions in the bible.
From the divorce laws and on the temptatious testing of the pharisees, Jesus observes that the law does not apply to certain men : "There are different reasons why men cannot marry. Some, because they are born that way, others because men made them that way and still others for the sake of the kingdom of heaven." This is open to many interpretations but one of which must be homosexuality (my take anyway and surely the last must be the vows of celibacy for religiousness).
And that soft spot for children when he blessed them as the inheritors of the Kingdom of God by virtue of their humility, innocence and purity.
Which is something I can sincerely believe in. Children are "blank slates" in some sort of way, far removed from the prejudices and many of the phobias of us as adults. It is we, the adults, who pump ideas into them on racism, prejudices, skewed values, beliefs, fears and stereotyping.
Remember our age-old threats of the men in blue, the bogeymen, the odorous Indians, the danger of strangers, fatsos and falling off the precipice of the cliffs when we attempt adventure and you can see how contention germinates and grows.
Left on their own, I think they may pick dolls for play , pink as a color of choice, arts as a career, sports for life or live a life away from home , without our selective pressures and societal demands. Or they miscegenate, love other men and live as naturists or naturalists.
Of course cultural and social influences chip just as badly at their psyche too.
Finally, the Bible is also a source of support for the Glory of God in Nature and History. The Glory of God in nature will form another musing of mine in another blog anytime soon. The gift of nature to mankind.
There are enough myriad intepretations of its text interspersed with many contradictions that no two Christians of different sects, let us say Presbyterian and Catholic, can totally agree on its literal meaning.
I read the Bible mostly with scholarly eyes, much like philosophy, history, literature and occasionally for the divine messages and mythology. It is after all a text filled with many literary forms such as prose, poetry, hymns of praise, parables (story-telling) and my favourites, skewedly, fall under the deuterocanonicals (the deemed hidden, secret or subsidiary books).
Here the books of wisdom impart nuggets of truth while the books of prophets continue to fascinate me with their wildest of wild imagination of Armageddon. Not unlike Genesis, with both history and mythology rolled into one.
The Old Testament "Ecclesiastes" is philosophical musings while Deuterocanonicals "Sirach" (Ecclesiasticus) speaks of religious and moral tenets.
Some favourite quotes from the two books include these :
"It is better to have wise people reprimand you than to have stupid people sing your praises."
"I found something more bitter than death - woman. No troubles are as serious as the troubles that women cause."
"Stupid people are given postions of authority. Slaves ride on horsebacks while noblemen go on foot."
"People deserving praise - a person who doesn't have to work for someone less competent than himself."
The book of Genesis describes the mythological creation of the world in six days. The period of six days, according to scientists, may not be the 24-hour days we are now acclimatised to. And I think this holds water.
The Garden of Eden and the tree of knowledge, with biblical Eve, on the urging of the serpent, taking the first bite and then nudging Adam into Sin with the next bite, are in line with Catholics' vows of celibacy for the priests and observations of the wicked, mindless and sexed-up rituals of the high priestesses in the temples at the time (much like brothels for the pagans and heathens) . This is how I read this.
Now , of course, a contextual approach is urged upon reading the Bible. And this is definitely a must in the light of the era they were written, the social and religious microcosm then, the writers/translators themselves and the original language (Hebrew, then Greek) it is written in before being translated into Latin, English and German (Martin Luther transposed his in German) which may have lost its flavour in both meaning and nuances of words then and now.
Remember my earlier blogs on linguistics on words like "degenerate", "counterfeit" and "apocryphal" and you get to fathom the semantics progression over time.
Erich von Daniken wrote about some biblical D-day as well in his book "Chariots of Gods". This is further vouched by the Books of the prophets like Ezekiel, the Old Testament of the Exodus and Genesis and that of the New Testament.
The walls of Jericho (also one of the earliest model of city living some 11 000 BC ago) come tumbling down (a result of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and wars), the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (the pillar of salt Lot's wife turned into could be a nuclear fall-out) and the Tower of Babylon , Gods riding on chariots and heavenly apparitions appearing across the skies (Books of relevation and most books of the prophets) are all signature tunes of Judgement Day and the return of the Messiah.
The prophetic books include female prophetesses like Ruth, Esther and Susanna. Ezekiel warns of false prophets and prophetesses of our times. So too did Jesus in the New testament. I think this clearly signals the cults we have come to know in our period.
In a particular passage of the Book of Revelation on the day of the coming of the Kingdom of God, it says that standing on Mount Zion were 144000 men who "are the only ones who have been redeemed" and "they are the men who have kept themselves pure by not having sexual relations with women; they are virgins. They have never been known to tell lies; they are faultless."
The bible traces history quite well, juxtaposing the lives of the early Jews with that of Egyptian civilisation 2000 BC ago , first with Joseph, son of Jacob, being sold into slavery and later, Moses leading God's Chosen people to the promised land.
The Song of Songs and Psalms are all well-written prose and poetry, the latter mainly hymns of praises by King David. The book of Job is similarly penned albeit as lamentations.
Don't forget Jesus' parables and you have a compendium of such diverse literary forms and history that surely the Bible counts its rightful place among the books of knowledge of all times.
Jesus' parables. Ah yes! Simple, short but wise. They contain Jesus' philosophy on living and loving. He preaches on love, anger, poverty, riches, charity and hypocrisy.
Jesus himself has come to be known in the Bible to have a shrewd understanding of human nature and he puts the need for parables thus:
"They may look, yet not see. They may listen, yet not understand. Their minds are dull, having stopped up their ears and closed their eyes" This reminds me of adopting a phenomenalistic approach to education besides cognition.
Homosexuality exists in bliblical times. So too do incest, rape, divorce and murder.
On divorce, he says "Man must not separate then what God has joined together." But this was an obvious affront to Moses' earlier decree that this was possible and even in some of the other books of wisdom (Sirach: "Don't let a bad wife have her way,if she won't do as you tell her, divorce her") .
Thus the contradictions in the bible.
From the divorce laws and on the temptatious testing of the pharisees, Jesus observes that the law does not apply to certain men : "There are different reasons why men cannot marry. Some, because they are born that way, others because men made them that way and still others for the sake of the kingdom of heaven." This is open to many interpretations but one of which must be homosexuality (my take anyway and surely the last must be the vows of celibacy for religiousness).
And that soft spot for children when he blessed them as the inheritors of the Kingdom of God by virtue of their humility, innocence and purity.
Which is something I can sincerely believe in. Children are "blank slates" in some sort of way, far removed from the prejudices and many of the phobias of us as adults. It is we, the adults, who pump ideas into them on racism, prejudices, skewed values, beliefs, fears and stereotyping.
Remember our age-old threats of the men in blue, the bogeymen, the odorous Indians, the danger of strangers, fatsos and falling off the precipice of the cliffs when we attempt adventure and you can see how contention germinates and grows.
Left on their own, I think they may pick dolls for play , pink as a color of choice, arts as a career, sports for life or live a life away from home , without our selective pressures and societal demands. Or they miscegenate, love other men and live as naturists or naturalists.
Of course cultural and social influences chip just as badly at their psyche too.
Finally, the Bible is also a source of support for the Glory of God in Nature and History. The Glory of God in nature will form another musing of mine in another blog anytime soon. The gift of nature to mankind.
Linguistics Yet Again
This blog is the continuation of my first. There is just so much to elucidate on linguistics.
As I mentioned earlier, many words have come to mean differently from their original ones. Another word that immediately comes to my mind is "apocryphal" which meant secret or hidden at first but has now come to mean " often told but probably false".
We have also taken the word "angst" to mean teenage anxieties. However this word means just that on its own - anxieties ,sometimes ill-defined ones, and thus not necessarily adolescent worries only.
"Man" (excuse the sexism here, but you can always take it to mean the feminine or even neutered - some of you may at this point think that this word is "neutral" but herein lies the subtlety - gender if you wish), being that paragon of intelligence at the top of the primates' pyramid, has creatively learnt language to communicate. So much so, he has invented a slew of new words to suit his purposes.
The two most distinguishing traits, in my opinion, that singles Man out to be so different from all the other chordates in his phylum, must surely be his language and thinking facilities.
Add a third of being able to feel, love and be compassionate (visceral) and I think we just about have a well-rounded and justifiable right to say that we are humans.
And let not the sometimes ruthlessness of the dog-eat-dog Animal kingdom be a parallel we draw in justifying our own doings to our homo-sapien species. We have that extra rationalityand restraint in us, I suppose.
Man also has that singular ability to monopolise the entire Animal and Plant Kingdom for his own use.
Communication in verbal and artistic form must surely have preceded writing (earliest evidence of this is the Sumerian writing of a few millenia Before Christ ) and you can understand how important words must be from our progenitive Stone Age "grunts and puffs" to our present day language.
StoneMan 1 : Grunt (5th tone) grunt (4th tone), aiyo (1st tone) wakau (3rd tone) - translated "How are you today?"
StoneMan 2: Puff (6th tone) Hoot (2nd tone) Kun (2nd tone) Duh (4th tone) - translated "I am feeling fine."
Man first started with words imitating sounds he hears from the surroundings. He hears "moo moo" and hey presto, a cow moos. He hears a duck "quack" and a sheep "baa" (which somehow I think our Singaporean version of "meh" sounds closer) and a rooster "cock-a-doodle-doo" (not sure how this sound came about though, for me it should sound more like "kor-kor-ku-ku" -a hem , no reference to our dialectical male anatomical structure). If you must know, these are examples of onomatopoeia.
I can even add to that list with Man's flatulating "put put" instead of farted or power drills going "tut tut tut".
Man even invented portmanteau words like "motel", "brunch" , "chortle", "exmosion" (explosion of emotions) and "ludin"(lunch and dinner).
He decided that some words must collocate like spick and span, hoity toity, jiggery pokery or "fucking fucker". So it is like ying-yang or action-reaction physical and metaphysical forces. Like if you have emission spectra so too you must have absorption spectra. They come in pairs, so to speak, sometimes opposable, sometimes complementary.
Speaking which we must not forget oxymoronic phrases like "pretty ugly" or "Old New World" and even "euphonic cacophony".
And tautology. School of learning? So what else do you do in a school? Defecate? Pairing off in twos? Duh, please. Intimate intimacy. Humongously large. Snivelling snivelard. The list goes on and I am sure you get the idea.
When you examine the English words of old especially from Anglo-Saxon "Beowulf" to Medieval "Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer (the Father of Modern Literature) , you will notice many words spelt incorrectly in today's context. So educators of the world cringe!
Our "your" is "yer" and "forth" is "foorth. Who are we then to decide what correct orthography is? Fer all yer know, wat I write here may juz be the nex New Age orthography?
As I mentioned earlier, many words have come to mean differently from their original ones. Another word that immediately comes to my mind is "apocryphal" which meant secret or hidden at first but has now come to mean " often told but probably false".
We have also taken the word "angst" to mean teenage anxieties. However this word means just that on its own - anxieties ,sometimes ill-defined ones, and thus not necessarily adolescent worries only.
"Man" (excuse the sexism here, but you can always take it to mean the feminine or even neutered - some of you may at this point think that this word is "neutral" but herein lies the subtlety - gender if you wish), being that paragon of intelligence at the top of the primates' pyramid, has creatively learnt language to communicate. So much so, he has invented a slew of new words to suit his purposes.
The two most distinguishing traits, in my opinion, that singles Man out to be so different from all the other chordates in his phylum, must surely be his language and thinking facilities.
Add a third of being able to feel, love and be compassionate (visceral) and I think we just about have a well-rounded and justifiable right to say that we are humans.
And let not the sometimes ruthlessness of the dog-eat-dog Animal kingdom be a parallel we draw in justifying our own doings to our homo-sapien species. We have that extra rationalityand restraint in us, I suppose.
Man also has that singular ability to monopolise the entire Animal and Plant Kingdom for his own use.
Communication in verbal and artistic form must surely have preceded writing (earliest evidence of this is the Sumerian writing of a few millenia Before Christ ) and you can understand how important words must be from our progenitive Stone Age "grunts and puffs" to our present day language.
StoneMan 1 : Grunt (5th tone) grunt (4th tone), aiyo (1st tone) wakau (3rd tone) - translated "How are you today?"
StoneMan 2: Puff (6th tone) Hoot (2nd tone) Kun (2nd tone) Duh (4th tone) - translated "I am feeling fine."
Man first started with words imitating sounds he hears from the surroundings. He hears "moo moo" and hey presto, a cow moos. He hears a duck "quack" and a sheep "baa" (which somehow I think our Singaporean version of "meh" sounds closer) and a rooster "cock-a-doodle-doo" (not sure how this sound came about though, for me it should sound more like "kor-kor-ku-ku" -a hem , no reference to our dialectical male anatomical structure). If you must know, these are examples of onomatopoeia.
I can even add to that list with Man's flatulating "put put" instead of farted or power drills going "tut tut tut".
Man even invented portmanteau words like "motel", "brunch" , "chortle", "exmosion" (explosion of emotions) and "ludin"(lunch and dinner).
He decided that some words must collocate like spick and span, hoity toity, jiggery pokery or "fucking fucker". So it is like ying-yang or action-reaction physical and metaphysical forces. Like if you have emission spectra so too you must have absorption spectra. They come in pairs, so to speak, sometimes opposable, sometimes complementary.
Speaking which we must not forget oxymoronic phrases like "pretty ugly" or "Old New World" and even "euphonic cacophony".
And tautology. School of learning? So what else do you do in a school? Defecate? Pairing off in twos? Duh, please. Intimate intimacy. Humongously large. Snivelling snivelard. The list goes on and I am sure you get the idea.
When you examine the English words of old especially from Anglo-Saxon "Beowulf" to Medieval "Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer (the Father of Modern Literature) , you will notice many words spelt incorrectly in today's context. So educators of the world cringe!
Our "your" is "yer" and "forth" is "foorth. Who are we then to decide what correct orthography is? Fer all yer know, wat I write here may juz be the nex New Age orthography?
Friday, July 29, 2005
On the Linguistics Trail
Language can mean so much if you write what you really mean and know what you really want to say.
So with my title, it is "linguistics" trail as in a noun form and not "linguistic" as an adjective. This is extremely important because if I had said linguistic trail, it would mean that I would be writing this piece linguistically.Which I really am. But here I am trying to write more on the scientific study of the language and so therefore it is "linguistics".
Thus I am really being a linguistician and not so much a linguist.
If you ask me, I will prefer the word "lingusitician" to "linguist" anytime, reason being that the first succinctly shows that I am studying one language while the second somehow connotes studying several languages at the same time.
Forms of words are the most linguistically challenging. In one sentence, I could actually highlight the subtle differences among them : Let me present (verb) you with the presentation (adjective) slides for presentation (noun).
Thus we have Administration Managers or Technician Managers and never the adjectival forms of Administrative or Technical. This would mean , in the very unlikely event, that the people so employed are administrative or technical, implying some sort of robotic, mechanical or systemic processes within the person himself.
It is like saying I have a wormy (adjective) manager rather than a Worm (noun) Manager. The former denotes someone snivelling and squirmy while the latter will be appropriate use for a company who specifically employs someone to take care of "worms" (either in the computer or agrarian sense).
Quantifying or pluralising words with the "s" must be judiciously done as in some countables or uncountables. Water and salt are almost invariably never pluralised but we can have chairs or tables, these being quantifiable objects.
Hyphenation and spacing somehow have gone out the window with much of the writing I have witnessed nowadays. Instead of hyphenation, we could write it as one word too.
So if I say he was knocked out, this is an action phrase much like space out while knockout and space-out are nouns. Two pairs of sentences will illustrate this clearly: The welterweight was knocked out early in the first round. It was a complete knock-out the moment the welterweight stepped onto the ring. Dick has a hard-on. Dick is usually hard on himself.
And then there is that perennial problem of spacing or not spacing out words. He baths every day. His bath is an everyday affair. One shows habit of action while the other is a descriptive one.
Americans and Britons will probably be at loggerheads with what I have just enunciated above. This is because the two have very divergent cultural biases and thus the use of the English language. As it is, the way the words are spelt can be as colorful as my use of the word here.
Don't expect the Americans to say "storm in a teacup" but "tempest in a teapot" instead. To the Britons, it is "two/ten a penny" while for the Americans, it is "dime a dozen".
But the line of demarcation must surely have dimmed somewhat over time. Because we are having American vacations on British holidays sometimes and taking the elevator or the lift always. Our British resumes are just as good as the American curricula vitae.
If you can catch my drift just from the discussion above, "congratulations" or should I say "jolly good fella"!
Finally many confusible words are used interchangeably when their meanings are not what they are intended for. The colonists settled down in America as opposed to the colonialists colonised America. Or even this ubiquitous surprise trap: "felicitate" and "facilitate".
In the old days, words were sometimes even more subtly nuanced like an "idiot" is a notch below an "imbecile" or "inoculate" had a very different meaning from "immunise". Somehow over the years, they were assimilated as one and became synonymous.
In fact some words are very contrary to what they mean in the past. Something known as catachresis. Counterfeit used to mean a copy of and degenerate meant branching off from an original copy and not the deterioration we have come to associate it with these days.
Then there are words we just cannot seem to identify with because they somehow seem incredible or absurd. Just in case you want to know, we do have "prettify" and "decorous" in the English language, verb and adjectival forms of "pretty" and "decorum" and even "pandemoniac" for pandemonium.
Even in Science, the myriad of confusible words abound : meiosis vs mitosis, centrifugal vs centripetal and genotype vs phenotype. This is ever the more important in Science. That crucial subtle difference means scientific research or investigation can take a turn for the worse or maybe even leading to failure.
Once we can cleanse ourselves of such obfuscation, we will certainly pave the way for clearer and better communication and to really mean what we say and know what we want to say.
So with my title, it is "linguistics" trail as in a noun form and not "linguistic" as an adjective. This is extremely important because if I had said linguistic trail, it would mean that I would be writing this piece linguistically.Which I really am. But here I am trying to write more on the scientific study of the language and so therefore it is "linguistics".
Thus I am really being a linguistician and not so much a linguist.
If you ask me, I will prefer the word "lingusitician" to "linguist" anytime, reason being that the first succinctly shows that I am studying one language while the second somehow connotes studying several languages at the same time.
Forms of words are the most linguistically challenging. In one sentence, I could actually highlight the subtle differences among them : Let me present (verb) you with the presentation (adjective) slides for presentation (noun).
Thus we have Administration Managers or Technician Managers and never the adjectival forms of Administrative or Technical. This would mean , in the very unlikely event, that the people so employed are administrative or technical, implying some sort of robotic, mechanical or systemic processes within the person himself.
It is like saying I have a wormy (adjective) manager rather than a Worm (noun) Manager. The former denotes someone snivelling and squirmy while the latter will be appropriate use for a company who specifically employs someone to take care of "worms" (either in the computer or agrarian sense).
Quantifying or pluralising words with the "s" must be judiciously done as in some countables or uncountables. Water and salt are almost invariably never pluralised but we can have chairs or tables, these being quantifiable objects.
Hyphenation and spacing somehow have gone out the window with much of the writing I have witnessed nowadays. Instead of hyphenation, we could write it as one word too.
So if I say he was knocked out, this is an action phrase much like space out while knockout and space-out are nouns. Two pairs of sentences will illustrate this clearly: The welterweight was knocked out early in the first round. It was a complete knock-out the moment the welterweight stepped onto the ring. Dick has a hard-on. Dick is usually hard on himself.
And then there is that perennial problem of spacing or not spacing out words. He baths every day. His bath is an everyday affair. One shows habit of action while the other is a descriptive one.
Americans and Britons will probably be at loggerheads with what I have just enunciated above. This is because the two have very divergent cultural biases and thus the use of the English language. As it is, the way the words are spelt can be as colorful as my use of the word here.
Don't expect the Americans to say "storm in a teacup" but "tempest in a teapot" instead. To the Britons, it is "two/ten a penny" while for the Americans, it is "dime a dozen".
But the line of demarcation must surely have dimmed somewhat over time. Because we are having American vacations on British holidays sometimes and taking the elevator or the lift always. Our British resumes are just as good as the American curricula vitae.
If you can catch my drift just from the discussion above, "congratulations" or should I say "jolly good fella"!
Finally many confusible words are used interchangeably when their meanings are not what they are intended for. The colonists settled down in America as opposed to the colonialists colonised America. Or even this ubiquitous surprise trap: "felicitate" and "facilitate".
In the old days, words were sometimes even more subtly nuanced like an "idiot" is a notch below an "imbecile" or "inoculate" had a very different meaning from "immunise". Somehow over the years, they were assimilated as one and became synonymous.
In fact some words are very contrary to what they mean in the past. Something known as catachresis. Counterfeit used to mean a copy of and degenerate meant branching off from an original copy and not the deterioration we have come to associate it with these days.
Then there are words we just cannot seem to identify with because they somehow seem incredible or absurd. Just in case you want to know, we do have "prettify" and "decorous" in the English language, verb and adjectival forms of "pretty" and "decorum" and even "pandemoniac" for pandemonium.
Even in Science, the myriad of confusible words abound : meiosis vs mitosis, centrifugal vs centripetal and genotype vs phenotype. This is ever the more important in Science. That crucial subtle difference means scientific research or investigation can take a turn for the worse or maybe even leading to failure.
Once we can cleanse ourselves of such obfuscation, we will certainly pave the way for clearer and better communication and to really mean what we say and know what we want to say.
Eponym and Toponym
Yes. Many places take their names from people or from their own topograhical uniquess and even from its very origins.
Other inventions in language, tangibles and what-have-you also took their cue from their inventors' names or their peculiar cultural origination, sometimes unwittingly.
The Vikings swung onto the Northern Hemisphere like a thunderbolt from the sky (much like Thor, the Thunder God). They founded Newfoundland and not long after the French and English tussle had New England on the map as well.
So is it any surprise we have so many duplicates, even triplicates or quadriplicates, of street names shared between Australia, the British Isles , the United States of America and some of its former colonial strongholds. Manchester, Porstmouth and Cambridge just to name a few.
When I speak to a Caucasian (incidentally this name stems from Caucasus, a region in Russia) I have to be really attentive to the places he says he hails from. Such is the intricacy of the name of a place, region or street.
The Rocky Mountains speaks for itself what we can expect of its geological terrain. And in Singapore we have so many streets, buildings and places named after prominent British rulers or indigenous founders , merchants or pioneers.
Kandang Kerbau (buffalo market) and Eunos are so named after the place of trade and the native merchant in his communal abode.
So China's Nanjing which was once the old capital is also affectionately known as gucheng. So too are some other former capitals of the country like Xian and Peking (yes that famous Peking duck we are all too familiar with even though I have never tasted one because I simply HATE ducks - that terrible stench - yucks!) .
The same goes for botanical species , scientific inventions and pioneering corporations. The Dillenia is named after famed German botanist JJ Dillenia. The Dell computer company is likewise nicknamed after its founder and so is the Geiger-Muller tube.
And linguistically, spoonerism is named after Reverend A William Spooner, malapropism after the character Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan's play "The Rivals", pickwickian after the character Mr Pickwick in Charles Dickens' "The Pickwickian Papers".
Just so if you wanna know, Dickens' "Mr Pickwick" was the English equivalent of Cervantes' Spanish "Don Quixote". That poor bumbling self-proclaimed knight trying to save humanity from the brink of certain death.
Add on some origins of words which were cultural inventions as well. Kowtow which is distinctly Chinese, Khakis Arabic/Persian and typhoon Greek (Sorry if you thought this was an Asian word because it really isn't)
And for Nirvana or Enlightenment we have the German"Aufklarung" and world view has "Weltanschauung" as its substitute.
We only have to pause and ponder at the infinite places and inventions around us to appreciate the pioneering spirit of the people behind their origins and history.
So the next time you pick something up or visit any place anywhere, stop to think of the people and meaning behind them. You will be so much the richer for it.
Other inventions in language, tangibles and what-have-you also took their cue from their inventors' names or their peculiar cultural origination, sometimes unwittingly.
The Vikings swung onto the Northern Hemisphere like a thunderbolt from the sky (much like Thor, the Thunder God). They founded Newfoundland and not long after the French and English tussle had New England on the map as well.
So is it any surprise we have so many duplicates, even triplicates or quadriplicates, of street names shared between Australia, the British Isles , the United States of America and some of its former colonial strongholds. Manchester, Porstmouth and Cambridge just to name a few.
When I speak to a Caucasian (incidentally this name stems from Caucasus, a region in Russia) I have to be really attentive to the places he says he hails from. Such is the intricacy of the name of a place, region or street.
The Rocky Mountains speaks for itself what we can expect of its geological terrain. And in Singapore we have so many streets, buildings and places named after prominent British rulers or indigenous founders , merchants or pioneers.
Kandang Kerbau (buffalo market) and Eunos are so named after the place of trade and the native merchant in his communal abode.
So China's Nanjing which was once the old capital is also affectionately known as gucheng. So too are some other former capitals of the country like Xian and Peking (yes that famous Peking duck we are all too familiar with even though I have never tasted one because I simply HATE ducks - that terrible stench - yucks!) .
The same goes for botanical species , scientific inventions and pioneering corporations. The Dillenia is named after famed German botanist JJ Dillenia. The Dell computer company is likewise nicknamed after its founder and so is the Geiger-Muller tube.
And linguistically, spoonerism is named after Reverend A William Spooner, malapropism after the character Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan's play "The Rivals", pickwickian after the character Mr Pickwick in Charles Dickens' "The Pickwickian Papers".
Just so if you wanna know, Dickens' "Mr Pickwick" was the English equivalent of Cervantes' Spanish "Don Quixote". That poor bumbling self-proclaimed knight trying to save humanity from the brink of certain death.
Add on some origins of words which were cultural inventions as well. Kowtow which is distinctly Chinese, Khakis Arabic/Persian and typhoon Greek (Sorry if you thought this was an Asian word because it really isn't)
And for Nirvana or Enlightenment we have the German"Aufklarung" and world view has "Weltanschauung" as its substitute.
We only have to pause and ponder at the infinite places and inventions around us to appreciate the pioneering spirit of the people behind their origins and history.
So the next time you pick something up or visit any place anywhere, stop to think of the people and meaning behind them. You will be so much the richer for it.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Celebrating Our Pioneers and other Singaporean Quirks
The word is officially out. Instead of a bevy of scantily clad beauties atop a 155mm Howitzer turret, this year's National Day Parade will feature our old pioneering spirited "samsui" construction women in their trademark red boxed headgear and samfoo.
Now that is a lot better than a meat rack show I reckon by a 20-to-1 vote .
But alas! The PA actually got their headgear and samfoo collaring all wrong on the humongous cardboard cut-out depicting this particular first national species. I have no comment on the head-dress but the collar!
Any young child with heightened acuity could have easily spotted the fiasco. It was a mandarin collar for christ's sake. Why would a sun-toiler, brow-beaten and back-broken, want to attire herself in a samfoo buttoned up to her chin.
The mandarin collar as its very moniker suggests is meant for the mandarins starting from Han Wu Di's reign . This was when the Han dynasty officially declared itself a Confucian state, taking after the ideology of the heaven-designated "king without a throne" wise state-craftsman Confucius.
The high-browed sort.
What would our samsui jie jie and a po want to do with a suffocating, stifling, hot and stiffened high collar? I also like the Chinese saying they mouthed in Cantonese at the end of the interview. It went something like " Gao shang peng nghoh hoe kor yang shang chou sey".
This year too will see a retinue of armoured armament threading their way round the island in a magnificent display of fire power and military might. I remember when I was no younger than an elementary school-goer when that same float display caught my attention in the same neighbourhood where I now reside.
Back then it was a contingent of the Chinese zodiac animals and I think that year was the ferocious tiger and they had this huge animal caricature of the same cruising down the streets.
And yes I have a 1980 Oxford University Press cartography of our island and when you compare that with a 2005 Phillips' version, our green areas have shrunk to half.
I have always thought that our last tiger in the 1930s should have been left free to roam our reserve. It would have been our pioneer of sorts too, the marauding attraction that it could have been.
Speaking of which I understand some new infrastructure is being planned to cut across some of our reserve yet again. When that happens if it ever, I will be the first to personally lead an army of fellow like-minded conservationists, marching all the way to Parliament House holding aloft placards declaring : "Preserve our only natural heritage or face Dooms Day"
The reserve as it is now is already cut into two by the Bukit Timah Highway. So you can imagine the flora and fauna being separated into two halves, with one not being able to migrate to the other. Sometimes my imagination gets the better of me and I start thinking of all those heartrending scenes of these poor animal species missing out on their relatives because of this Berlin Wall.
Son Red eared terrapin : OMG OMG! Mommy is on the other side of the wall. Boo hoo! Boo hoo!
Mommy terrapin: Oh Dear!My only child! When will I ever see you again!
And looks like Mendelian cross-breeding experiments will not very likely take place here either.
Which also brings me to my favourite theory that there are indeed crocodiles in our reserve. Because when I examine that 1980 map with an 1800 one, many of our coastlines were mangrove swamps and thus highly brackish. Anyway the estuarian crocodile still exists in Sungei Buloh!
I have actually chanced upon this deep and low bellow which must surely belong to a much larger animal than our common frog when I jogged in the reserve once.
But I think the mystery has probably been solved as I heard a long-tailed macaque bellowed the same way only as recently.
As for the Chinese crocodile's travail, it must have swum from the South China Sea up our Whampoa River, stopping on the way to gaze at one of the "1001 places to see before you die" attractions, our very own Singapore icon "The Raffles Hotel". And that is when it landed up in our reserve.
Incidentally the infrastructure developers have bungled far enough. Think. White elephant electronic message billboards and razor-thin, sloping bus stop seats which can only sit anorexically and anatomically slanted buttocks.
And yes, our galls in their pinafores. That pinny must surely have been our pioneers' dream suit and which is now in some schools hung up in a museum.
The history must have gone thus: our pioneer pin-up girls wore aprons during their cooking classes as school then had all these girly education: sewing, housekeeping, Latin and art. One day they got so tired of always putting on and taking off their aprons, they decided to sew up a permanent one and that is when history was made.
Ah Mui :Aiyo, the flame beri hot leh. And this apron got to take off and put on again. Beri troublesome.
Ah Tang: (head bulb lighting up) I know! Let us sew a permanent one. That way we don't have to keep doing that and our cakes wont get all burned out (smiles wickedly)
Suddenly a flame bursts high up, flaming their cakes and food into one charred and gooey admixture.
NB: By a stroke of genius, their combined names actually read "Mui Tang" which means "servant" in Cantonese. Lol. No coincidence meant.
So much for the history of the pinafore. I hope the old tradition continues. Cooking, sewing , housekeeping, Latin and art. Otherwise a lot of the guys are going to do this themselves and if they can do it, why will they ever need galls?
Now that is a lot better than a meat rack show I reckon by a 20-to-1 vote .
But alas! The PA actually got their headgear and samfoo collaring all wrong on the humongous cardboard cut-out depicting this particular first national species. I have no comment on the head-dress but the collar!
Any young child with heightened acuity could have easily spotted the fiasco. It was a mandarin collar for christ's sake. Why would a sun-toiler, brow-beaten and back-broken, want to attire herself in a samfoo buttoned up to her chin.
The mandarin collar as its very moniker suggests is meant for the mandarins starting from Han Wu Di's reign . This was when the Han dynasty officially declared itself a Confucian state, taking after the ideology of the heaven-designated "king without a throne" wise state-craftsman Confucius.
The high-browed sort.
What would our samsui jie jie and a po want to do with a suffocating, stifling, hot and stiffened high collar? I also like the Chinese saying they mouthed in Cantonese at the end of the interview. It went something like " Gao shang peng nghoh hoe kor yang shang chou sey".
This year too will see a retinue of armoured armament threading their way round the island in a magnificent display of fire power and military might. I remember when I was no younger than an elementary school-goer when that same float display caught my attention in the same neighbourhood where I now reside.
Back then it was a contingent of the Chinese zodiac animals and I think that year was the ferocious tiger and they had this huge animal caricature of the same cruising down the streets.
And yes I have a 1980 Oxford University Press cartography of our island and when you compare that with a 2005 Phillips' version, our green areas have shrunk to half.
I have always thought that our last tiger in the 1930s should have been left free to roam our reserve. It would have been our pioneer of sorts too, the marauding attraction that it could have been.
Speaking of which I understand some new infrastructure is being planned to cut across some of our reserve yet again. When that happens if it ever, I will be the first to personally lead an army of fellow like-minded conservationists, marching all the way to Parliament House holding aloft placards declaring : "Preserve our only natural heritage or face Dooms Day"
The reserve as it is now is already cut into two by the Bukit Timah Highway. So you can imagine the flora and fauna being separated into two halves, with one not being able to migrate to the other. Sometimes my imagination gets the better of me and I start thinking of all those heartrending scenes of these poor animal species missing out on their relatives because of this Berlin Wall.
Son Red eared terrapin : OMG OMG! Mommy is on the other side of the wall. Boo hoo! Boo hoo!
Mommy terrapin: Oh Dear!My only child! When will I ever see you again!
And looks like Mendelian cross-breeding experiments will not very likely take place here either.
Which also brings me to my favourite theory that there are indeed crocodiles in our reserve. Because when I examine that 1980 map with an 1800 one, many of our coastlines were mangrove swamps and thus highly brackish. Anyway the estuarian crocodile still exists in Sungei Buloh!
I have actually chanced upon this deep and low bellow which must surely belong to a much larger animal than our common frog when I jogged in the reserve once.
But I think the mystery has probably been solved as I heard a long-tailed macaque bellowed the same way only as recently.
As for the Chinese crocodile's travail, it must have swum from the South China Sea up our Whampoa River, stopping on the way to gaze at one of the "1001 places to see before you die" attractions, our very own Singapore icon "The Raffles Hotel". And that is when it landed up in our reserve.
Incidentally the infrastructure developers have bungled far enough. Think. White elephant electronic message billboards and razor-thin, sloping bus stop seats which can only sit anorexically and anatomically slanted buttocks.
And yes, our galls in their pinafores. That pinny must surely have been our pioneers' dream suit and which is now in some schools hung up in a museum.
The history must have gone thus: our pioneer pin-up girls wore aprons during their cooking classes as school then had all these girly education: sewing, housekeeping, Latin and art. One day they got so tired of always putting on and taking off their aprons, they decided to sew up a permanent one and that is when history was made.
Ah Mui :Aiyo, the flame beri hot leh. And this apron got to take off and put on again. Beri troublesome.
Ah Tang: (head bulb lighting up) I know! Let us sew a permanent one. That way we don't have to keep doing that and our cakes wont get all burned out (smiles wickedly)
Suddenly a flame bursts high up, flaming their cakes and food into one charred and gooey admixture.
NB: By a stroke of genius, their combined names actually read "Mui Tang" which means "servant" in Cantonese. Lol. No coincidence meant.
So much for the history of the pinafore. I hope the old tradition continues. Cooking, sewing , housekeeping, Latin and art. Otherwise a lot of the guys are going to do this themselves and if they can do it, why will they ever need galls?
Atheism, Agnosticism, Religion and Ideologies
When I read about the life of Jesus, the Christ (meaning the Messiah or chosen one and if any of us think that was like his last name as in John Smith, think again, buster), I wept.
His philosophy of life and living and his parablic teachings were simple, wise and full of love, compassion and antidotes for healing in everyday living.
As a man, he must surely count among one of the great philosophers of his time, one who died on the cross for the sake of his sorrowful passion.
The same goes for all great religions of the world. None teaches about doing evil and immoral acts. All preach on divinity, salvation and love for mankind.
Therefore, it is not the doctrine or philosophy that I am turned against. But the institutions and the beholders of the Scriptures who being mere mortals that I cannot have full faith and trust in.
Ever more so his flock. The Pharisees or the Philistines as quoted in the Bible. The sanctimousness and "so-there" bible toting and finger pointing highty-tighty better-than-thou false prophets. These are the "men" whom I fear and loathe.
I remember a woman I met some time back. She was a nun-to-be eons ago but broke her vows. She was a secretary turned hair-dresser and now care-giver to children in the community. Sometimes I really wonder at the state of our centres for learning at their various milestonic benchmarks.
They are staffed with many, in my opinion, caregivers who don't really care two hoots except themselves. She was taking her nephew along on what I suspect to be her "guinea pig" as proof of "ar there, you see, this corresponds so well with what the book says". She was doing her training on child-care education at the same time.
It was certainly a case of sticking to the textbook and a priori bias. Can you imagine our centres of learning being staffed with people like that? A child on her urging will probably turn out to be exactly what she expects him to be. Call this self-fulfilling prophecy if you must.
Charles Darwin when writing in one of his books, observes the same. He wrote against the people of religion who swore at him for his evolutionary beliefs, people who probably cussed him to hell. And to this end, they had a handle to their cuss. Darwin's favourite daughter did die on him. According to Darwin, these same "god-fearing" "men" were at the same time beating their moor slaves to death. He was personally witness to this gory thrashing .
Therein lies the paradox. Isn't it? Like the beam in your eyes and the wood in someone else's? Cast a stone from a glass house? A case of setting a thief to catch another thief?
In fact many of the ideologies and thinking were sound, benevolent and well-intentioned. But it was "men" who screwed them up, misconstrued them and used them for their own self-interested purposes.
Alfred Binet invented the IQ test to help academically weak children. The eugenicists turn it into a general intelligence test for all. Karl Marx's Marxism or commonly known as communisim similarly got turned on its head by Stalin and Mao. Remember Animal Farm by George Orwell and you know what I mean. Darwin to this day is being discredited for his Science versus Religion stance. But he never ever had such intentions. His belief was evolutionary biology not deterministic and therefore immutable biology.
So I think the cavemen had it easier. All they needed was to fill their stomachs, have sex and sleep. Don't forget they club their women and drag them into caves for slumber as well.
Or is this just my re-construction? Duh.
His philosophy of life and living and his parablic teachings were simple, wise and full of love, compassion and antidotes for healing in everyday living.
As a man, he must surely count among one of the great philosophers of his time, one who died on the cross for the sake of his sorrowful passion.
The same goes for all great religions of the world. None teaches about doing evil and immoral acts. All preach on divinity, salvation and love for mankind.
Therefore, it is not the doctrine or philosophy that I am turned against. But the institutions and the beholders of the Scriptures who being mere mortals that I cannot have full faith and trust in.
Ever more so his flock. The Pharisees or the Philistines as quoted in the Bible. The sanctimousness and "so-there" bible toting and finger pointing highty-tighty better-than-thou false prophets. These are the "men" whom I fear and loathe.
I remember a woman I met some time back. She was a nun-to-be eons ago but broke her vows. She was a secretary turned hair-dresser and now care-giver to children in the community. Sometimes I really wonder at the state of our centres for learning at their various milestonic benchmarks.
They are staffed with many, in my opinion, caregivers who don't really care two hoots except themselves. She was taking her nephew along on what I suspect to be her "guinea pig" as proof of "ar there, you see, this corresponds so well with what the book says". She was doing her training on child-care education at the same time.
It was certainly a case of sticking to the textbook and a priori bias. Can you imagine our centres of learning being staffed with people like that? A child on her urging will probably turn out to be exactly what she expects him to be. Call this self-fulfilling prophecy if you must.
Charles Darwin when writing in one of his books, observes the same. He wrote against the people of religion who swore at him for his evolutionary beliefs, people who probably cussed him to hell. And to this end, they had a handle to their cuss. Darwin's favourite daughter did die on him. According to Darwin, these same "god-fearing" "men" were at the same time beating their moor slaves to death. He was personally witness to this gory thrashing .
Therein lies the paradox. Isn't it? Like the beam in your eyes and the wood in someone else's? Cast a stone from a glass house? A case of setting a thief to catch another thief?
In fact many of the ideologies and thinking were sound, benevolent and well-intentioned. But it was "men" who screwed them up, misconstrued them and used them for their own self-interested purposes.
Alfred Binet invented the IQ test to help academically weak children. The eugenicists turn it into a general intelligence test for all. Karl Marx's Marxism or commonly known as communisim similarly got turned on its head by Stalin and Mao. Remember Animal Farm by George Orwell and you know what I mean. Darwin to this day is being discredited for his Science versus Religion stance. But he never ever had such intentions. His belief was evolutionary biology not deterministic and therefore immutable biology.
So I think the cavemen had it easier. All they needed was to fill their stomachs, have sex and sleep. Don't forget they club their women and drag them into caves for slumber as well.
Or is this just my re-construction? Duh.
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Natural Vs Man-made
When the universe was stirring into its own back like 14 milliards ago, it was governed only by its own set of laws of natural evolution and formation. So too when the sun and earth came into being at about 4.6 billion years.
From the single-celled bacterium to a multi-celled organism right up through the various eras (Pre-cambrian till the Mesozoic), life on earth has only seen natural laws governing its species in survival, adaptation and changes.
When the dinosaurs died out, mammals took over and the most intelligent of this, the primates went from strength to strength, first as the smaller-brained hominids then as the big-brained bipedal homo-erectus.
The environment dictated the species' evolution for hunting, gathering and living. But there were also selective cultural pressures for evolution. There were physical terrestrial obstacles to surmount, natural cycles of climatic catastrophes and bigger and stronger prey to contend with.
This was the natural order of things back then.
In our new technologically advanced (this remains debatable in the light of archaeological finds of earlier and more sophisticated civilisations) society, however, many of our laws and living system are man-made.
Right from the governance at the top all the way to corporate and social demands at the microcosm.
Of course if the laws were made for good, civil ,savoir vivre reasons, I have no objections whatsoever.
But some of these man-made laws are as good as the natural ones of creating disasters, dysfunction and frustration. I mean these laws were absolutely not necessary in the first place.
Especially at the corporate and educational level, I think we have failed miserably. Nowhere have we seen ourselves imposed so much complexities and un-naturalness at the work place or in the school.
Someone (ok so it was Michel Foucault, the gay dude philosopher and not the scientific physicist, pendulum swinging one, Jean Foucault, but both are Frenchmen and you know what they say about the French - :) ) once commented on the remarkable uncanniness and similarities between three institutions of our time : the penitentiary , the hospital and the school. They were in many ways, centres for control hierarchy and experiments.
I am further supported by the advocates of the DaoDeJing by the proponents of the philosophy of Taoism who strongly believe in the natural as opposed to the artifical order of things.
Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi espouse the theory of non-competitiveness and harmonising with the natural order of things.
We may have freed ourselves from many chains of human bondage of long ago but we have however imposed a new set of equal if not greater chains of human misery and slavery.
It has become a maze of minefields and traps that only we as humans can do to unlock and unchain this again for ourselves and posterity.
From the single-celled bacterium to a multi-celled organism right up through the various eras (Pre-cambrian till the Mesozoic), life on earth has only seen natural laws governing its species in survival, adaptation and changes.
When the dinosaurs died out, mammals took over and the most intelligent of this, the primates went from strength to strength, first as the smaller-brained hominids then as the big-brained bipedal homo-erectus.
The environment dictated the species' evolution for hunting, gathering and living. But there were also selective cultural pressures for evolution. There were physical terrestrial obstacles to surmount, natural cycles of climatic catastrophes and bigger and stronger prey to contend with.
This was the natural order of things back then.
In our new technologically advanced (this remains debatable in the light of archaeological finds of earlier and more sophisticated civilisations) society, however, many of our laws and living system are man-made.
Right from the governance at the top all the way to corporate and social demands at the microcosm.
Of course if the laws were made for good, civil ,savoir vivre reasons, I have no objections whatsoever.
But some of these man-made laws are as good as the natural ones of creating disasters, dysfunction and frustration. I mean these laws were absolutely not necessary in the first place.
Especially at the corporate and educational level, I think we have failed miserably. Nowhere have we seen ourselves imposed so much complexities and un-naturalness at the work place or in the school.
Someone (ok so it was Michel Foucault, the gay dude philosopher and not the scientific physicist, pendulum swinging one, Jean Foucault, but both are Frenchmen and you know what they say about the French - :) ) once commented on the remarkable uncanniness and similarities between three institutions of our time : the penitentiary , the hospital and the school. They were in many ways, centres for control hierarchy and experiments.
I am further supported by the advocates of the DaoDeJing by the proponents of the philosophy of Taoism who strongly believe in the natural as opposed to the artifical order of things.
Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi espouse the theory of non-competitiveness and harmonising with the natural order of things.
We may have freed ourselves from many chains of human bondage of long ago but we have however imposed a new set of equal if not greater chains of human misery and slavery.
It has become a maze of minefields and traps that only we as humans can do to unlock and unchain this again for ourselves and posterity.
Biomimetics and Archaeological Repeats
Many people I speak to think that studying the past on historiography and archaeology is a sheer waste of time. And ecology is like so passe and backward as compared to the spick and span pristineness of city living.
I have BIG news for you. You cannot be any wronger than Ptolemy and his geocentric thesis. Or even Spearman's tome on IQ testing. And even George Bush's declaration of war. On himself that is.
I mean we are bio-mimicking nature, history and archaeological finds all the time. I mean look. When we write a biography (sometimes this degenerates into a hagiography), aint we spinning a web like a spider does?
The Wright Brothers must have got their inspiration off the birds in the sky or the bees in a bonnet?
What about modern paintings? Surely we took a leaf off our ancestral ones of bisons and hunts in the caves.
Axes and stone implements just got better now with our screw-drivers and hammers.
Or when we pitch those nice little tents for camp-outs (or so the school thinks) ain't we mimicking the Mohawks' tepee?
Arrrr. And I know some naughty boys adopt the Mohawks' hair (or hairless) style too. That run in the centre of the skinheads.
And the tube of today ( I mean the fashion, not the subway) is like a rag off the Kadazan's women tribe.
Eyeliners - strictly Egyptian. Cosmetics - Egyptian too.
And if you think our Gregorian calendar has it all, wait till you see the Mayan one - it has everything right down to the last pinpoint decimal accuracy.
What about the mud dauber wasp? Didn't it inspire the potters of today and yesterday? It must have, otherwise how do you explain the chararacteristic dabbing?
What about some of our eyes structure? Bulbous ones I mean. Didn't that like look a lot like the stalked eyes of the crustaceans?
Are we not repeating Galton's eugenics and Hitler's Holocaust all over again or even the now discredited craniometry or phrenology with our IQ tests and exams in general?
IS man ever gonna learn from history or are mistakes gonna keep repeating themselves. Like they are in all my paragraphs on my blog. Tee Hee Hee.
Take the cue man, it is now or never (think this is also an Elvis Presley ballad of yonks ago too)
So there. Proof enough? Good. Historiography, archeaology and ecology are all gonna have their day soon, anytime now.
Any butt heads who think otherwise better have their brains examined by some brainologists or they could donate theirs to the brain museum. Which I am sure will spark another scientological research of sorts - into our fine convoluted neuron structure.
I have BIG news for you. You cannot be any wronger than Ptolemy and his geocentric thesis. Or even Spearman's tome on IQ testing. And even George Bush's declaration of war. On himself that is.
I mean we are bio-mimicking nature, history and archaeological finds all the time. I mean look. When we write a biography (sometimes this degenerates into a hagiography), aint we spinning a web like a spider does?
The Wright Brothers must have got their inspiration off the birds in the sky or the bees in a bonnet?
What about modern paintings? Surely we took a leaf off our ancestral ones of bisons and hunts in the caves.
Axes and stone implements just got better now with our screw-drivers and hammers.
Or when we pitch those nice little tents for camp-outs (or so the school thinks) ain't we mimicking the Mohawks' tepee?
Arrrr. And I know some naughty boys adopt the Mohawks' hair (or hairless) style too. That run in the centre of the skinheads.
And the tube of today ( I mean the fashion, not the subway) is like a rag off the Kadazan's women tribe.
Eyeliners - strictly Egyptian. Cosmetics - Egyptian too.
And if you think our Gregorian calendar has it all, wait till you see the Mayan one - it has everything right down to the last pinpoint decimal accuracy.
What about the mud dauber wasp? Didn't it inspire the potters of today and yesterday? It must have, otherwise how do you explain the chararacteristic dabbing?
What about some of our eyes structure? Bulbous ones I mean. Didn't that like look a lot like the stalked eyes of the crustaceans?
Are we not repeating Galton's eugenics and Hitler's Holocaust all over again or even the now discredited craniometry or phrenology with our IQ tests and exams in general?
IS man ever gonna learn from history or are mistakes gonna keep repeating themselves. Like they are in all my paragraphs on my blog. Tee Hee Hee.
Take the cue man, it is now or never (think this is also an Elvis Presley ballad of yonks ago too)
So there. Proof enough? Good. Historiography, archeaology and ecology are all gonna have their day soon, anytime now.
Any butt heads who think otherwise better have their brains examined by some brainologists or they could donate theirs to the brain museum. Which I am sure will spark another scientological research of sorts - into our fine convoluted neuron structure.
This Contraption called the PC
You can't live with it. Yet you can't live without it.
Man or rather starting with Charles Babbage (Father of Computer) went on a rampage and came up with this invention called the computer.
Ever since its inception as a garbled, gigantic and awesome-looking crank of a machine crunching massive figures and calculations (then aptly named a supercomputer), it has shrunk in both size and look to become the desktop personal computer that it is today. It has even gone on to be reduced to a pocket personal computer in some instances.
Just in case any of you smart alecks want to know, it has also engendered a by-product: the pacemaker .
In fact the whole computer technology spun off space travel and military research, leading even to as far as medical applications and the Internet.
I remember my first purchase of an Apple Mac back in the mid 80s, a black and green screen, blinkering square cursors, antennaes sticking out of its monitor just like a regular TV set and manuals galore for memorising horrendous sequential key strokes to carry out commands.
It was literally a pain in the eyes to use one. Such disingenuity and unimaginativeness!
Before I could say "Stinking Stinkard", what do you know? Times have flown and we have all these graphical and user-friendly "click me" icons in several multi-tasking windows. It just went on and on till we have the almost surrealistic 3-D icons we have today replete with multi-media capabilities at the flip of a button.
But seriously admit this. This contraption we call a Personal Computer can be both a boon or a bane. Right? Right.
In twenty years I have had like only four computers. But my recent experience with my last computer left me totally devastated in spirit and kindred. I mean I always thought I had a long-standing relationship with this impersonal, cold and stiff box of a hunk?
I mean after all, I had many many relationships coming my way via this little telecommunicative tool, which reaches beyond the reaches of every nook and cranny of our island. That includes roaches and dung beetles that came right along with it.
3 Information Technology personnel and 14 home visits later, my computer is just barely lugging along. All in the space of half a year
The first attempted to continually repair my Pentium II but always to no avail. I have this really really sickening feeling that he was thinking that I was a cash-dispensing jackpot machine whom he could milk continually. So I told him on the last visit that the buck stops here, literally.
The second, some nuthead I suddenly decided to cull because of his incessant neonic blaring and advertising on the World Wide Web and because also of sudden work-related exigencies, was an obvious cheat the moment I set my eyes on his little dweeb of a prick in the pants.
First he overcharged me and then he gave me the lowest of lowest in configurational specifications , so much less that I had to call in my third Messiah (which by the way was the ultimate saviour of end, I hope - so far so good up till now - I think I should just keep me fingers crossed).
Not only that, that stink of a stinkard, tugged along a CPU without a power button and no front USB ports. And it was certainly a beaten-up one, some box fit for the junk or rags-and-bone man.
If you are wondering why I even let him in when I knew instinctively that something was wrong, well he dragged me up to this in the wee hours of the night under the cloak of dark, dreamy-dazed-still-sleeping state and blurred night vision.
In the end, this Information Technology Consultant who was supposed to be doing the thinking and providing me a Total Solution, made me pay more to totally overhaul my entire system - new wireless optical mouse, USB hub and something I have to seriously contemplate now - a new printer. All this just because of compatibility issues which he was supposed to know beforehand.
I really want to kill you and eat you up if ever I should see you on the streets! First to go will be your clothes and next you will be lying on the streets naked, maimed and mutilated, you fcukhead.
It was an ordeal all its own.
Brainless manufacturers actually have 50cm wired optical mouse. I think the Zulus of South Africa prolly have longer penal sheaths than this back in their villages.
It is not even enough to wind the mouse from the back to the front round the CPU or even from the front to the keyboard for that matter, especially since I think they assumed (have you ever noticed how presumptuous we all are - if a child fails an exam, he must be stupid, if it is a gall , she must also be a goody-two-shoes, so by logical supposition, if you cannot shit, you must have haemorrhoids! ) that the CPU is just gonna be right next to your keyboard.
And the same too with the USB hub (or at least the one I bought which for cartographical reasons I did) . And take note people. You think you have 2 + 4 extra ports right? Wrong. It is actually 5 ports after you take away one for plugging your USB hub.
All those bugs in the software and I had like so many prompts for a whole range of oddities which include asking "have you installed blah blah blah..." and so on.
And the wireless optical and thus sensored mouse had to be nautically near its sensored sensor component plugged into the USB port. It is like the pin-socket thingy or the ying-yang stuffy. Each had to be "fucked in"to each other. Excuse my coarseness here and my wicked wicked tongue! So if one was plugged behind, guess what anal intercourse is not allowed. It is the penal code thingy again, no pickwickian meant.
Aiyo and my CPU is so slow and my virtual memory is still not enough, everytime I multi task, a dialogue box prompts me for more space (it is like asking me for blowjobs which I can't refuse but what can I do if it is the penal cody thingy again? Suk your balls? Lick your ass? Or juz rim it? In case you are getting naughty ideas, these are purely allegorical... hee hee hee ) and at one time, my whole screen freezes and I cannot even open up my files or windows. And I am supposed to be on broadband and to be on the go-go-go. Not like start-stop-dead, then start-stop-dead again with the connection.
It has left me with a wicked legacy now. I can't print, I can't fax out but I can receive. People who deal with me must be thinking I am dealing them a cock-and-bull tall tale. This is like the ABO blood grouping exercise for transfusion. I am like the AB who can receive from that 100% but can only give out that 5%. So is it my fault people? I don't think so. Blame the hereditarians. They are the ones who deal you with the short end of the straw ok, not good old me!
So where do all these lead me to right now? As I said, it is just only plodding along and only just. I am really looking up to those guys around me who are bragging about their latest and fastest specifications zooming them off to space.
Just you wait. You will have your just deserts some day. When that day comes, I am just gonna stand back and laugh at you too when your old cranky computer starts to spit and founder. Ha ha ha!
PS: DUDE wherever you are, I wil be waiting for you, crowbar in hand and swiss knife on hand. Be sure you have a bullet proof vest not only on your body but everywhere else. Because I dont think you are going to look very nice riddled with pockmarks all over and lumps on your skull, even the phrenologist will whoop with great whoops of joy at their miraculous find!
Man or rather starting with Charles Babbage (Father of Computer) went on a rampage and came up with this invention called the computer.
Ever since its inception as a garbled, gigantic and awesome-looking crank of a machine crunching massive figures and calculations (then aptly named a supercomputer), it has shrunk in both size and look to become the desktop personal computer that it is today. It has even gone on to be reduced to a pocket personal computer in some instances.
Just in case any of you smart alecks want to know, it has also engendered a by-product: the pacemaker .
In fact the whole computer technology spun off space travel and military research, leading even to as far as medical applications and the Internet.
I remember my first purchase of an Apple Mac back in the mid 80s, a black and green screen, blinkering square cursors, antennaes sticking out of its monitor just like a regular TV set and manuals galore for memorising horrendous sequential key strokes to carry out commands.
It was literally a pain in the eyes to use one. Such disingenuity and unimaginativeness!
Before I could say "Stinking Stinkard", what do you know? Times have flown and we have all these graphical and user-friendly "click me" icons in several multi-tasking windows. It just went on and on till we have the almost surrealistic 3-D icons we have today replete with multi-media capabilities at the flip of a button.
But seriously admit this. This contraption we call a Personal Computer can be both a boon or a bane. Right? Right.
In twenty years I have had like only four computers. But my recent experience with my last computer left me totally devastated in spirit and kindred. I mean I always thought I had a long-standing relationship with this impersonal, cold and stiff box of a hunk?
I mean after all, I had many many relationships coming my way via this little telecommunicative tool, which reaches beyond the reaches of every nook and cranny of our island. That includes roaches and dung beetles that came right along with it.
3 Information Technology personnel and 14 home visits later, my computer is just barely lugging along. All in the space of half a year
The first attempted to continually repair my Pentium II but always to no avail. I have this really really sickening feeling that he was thinking that I was a cash-dispensing jackpot machine whom he could milk continually. So I told him on the last visit that the buck stops here, literally.
The second, some nuthead I suddenly decided to cull because of his incessant neonic blaring and advertising on the World Wide Web and because also of sudden work-related exigencies, was an obvious cheat the moment I set my eyes on his little dweeb of a prick in the pants.
First he overcharged me and then he gave me the lowest of lowest in configurational specifications , so much less that I had to call in my third Messiah (which by the way was the ultimate saviour of end, I hope - so far so good up till now - I think I should just keep me fingers crossed).
Not only that, that stink of a stinkard, tugged along a CPU without a power button and no front USB ports. And it was certainly a beaten-up one, some box fit for the junk or rags-and-bone man.
If you are wondering why I even let him in when I knew instinctively that something was wrong, well he dragged me up to this in the wee hours of the night under the cloak of dark, dreamy-dazed-still-sleeping state and blurred night vision.
In the end, this Information Technology Consultant who was supposed to be doing the thinking and providing me a Total Solution, made me pay more to totally overhaul my entire system - new wireless optical mouse, USB hub and something I have to seriously contemplate now - a new printer. All this just because of compatibility issues which he was supposed to know beforehand.
I really want to kill you and eat you up if ever I should see you on the streets! First to go will be your clothes and next you will be lying on the streets naked, maimed and mutilated, you fcukhead.
It was an ordeal all its own.
Brainless manufacturers actually have 50cm wired optical mouse. I think the Zulus of South Africa prolly have longer penal sheaths than this back in their villages.
It is not even enough to wind the mouse from the back to the front round the CPU or even from the front to the keyboard for that matter, especially since I think they assumed (have you ever noticed how presumptuous we all are - if a child fails an exam, he must be stupid, if it is a gall , she must also be a goody-two-shoes, so by logical supposition, if you cannot shit, you must have haemorrhoids! ) that the CPU is just gonna be right next to your keyboard.
And the same too with the USB hub (or at least the one I bought which for cartographical reasons I did) . And take note people. You think you have 2 + 4 extra ports right? Wrong. It is actually 5 ports after you take away one for plugging your USB hub.
All those bugs in the software and I had like so many prompts for a whole range of oddities which include asking "have you installed blah blah blah..." and so on.
And the wireless optical and thus sensored mouse had to be nautically near its sensored sensor component plugged into the USB port. It is like the pin-socket thingy or the ying-yang stuffy. Each had to be "fucked in"to each other. Excuse my coarseness here and my wicked wicked tongue! So if one was plugged behind, guess what anal intercourse is not allowed. It is the penal code thingy again, no pickwickian meant.
Aiyo and my CPU is so slow and my virtual memory is still not enough, everytime I multi task, a dialogue box prompts me for more space (it is like asking me for blowjobs which I can't refuse but what can I do if it is the penal cody thingy again? Suk your balls? Lick your ass? Or juz rim it? In case you are getting naughty ideas, these are purely allegorical... hee hee hee ) and at one time, my whole screen freezes and I cannot even open up my files or windows. And I am supposed to be on broadband and to be on the go-go-go. Not like start-stop-dead, then start-stop-dead again with the connection.
It has left me with a wicked legacy now. I can't print, I can't fax out but I can receive. People who deal with me must be thinking I am dealing them a cock-and-bull tall tale. This is like the ABO blood grouping exercise for transfusion. I am like the AB who can receive from that 100% but can only give out that 5%. So is it my fault people? I don't think so. Blame the hereditarians. They are the ones who deal you with the short end of the straw ok, not good old me!
So where do all these lead me to right now? As I said, it is just only plodding along and only just. I am really looking up to those guys around me who are bragging about their latest and fastest specifications zooming them off to space.
Just you wait. You will have your just deserts some day. When that day comes, I am just gonna stand back and laugh at you too when your old cranky computer starts to spit and founder. Ha ha ha!
PS: DUDE wherever you are, I wil be waiting for you, crowbar in hand and swiss knife on hand. Be sure you have a bullet proof vest not only on your body but everywhere else. Because I dont think you are going to look very nice riddled with pockmarks all over and lumps on your skull, even the phrenologist will whoop with great whoops of joy at their miraculous find!
Monday, July 25, 2005
Misogynist or Misogamist?
By now after all the blog entries I had written, people may begin to wonder if I am any of the above. Maybe you are right. I am both or either.
If the labels must stick, then they must be seen in the context of what I experienced with this handful of people. It was a small but representative sample, a cluster of people who made me think deep and hard.
Unfortunately they tilt towards one gender and this gender was once the downtrodden and belittled. I had thought that with all the fight for equality in occupation and status that they will turn out to be better leaders and advocate for good values.
Instead they were as strident and combative in their quest for power, greed, materialism and money at the expense of love, compassion, universality and understanding.No better than the gender they had fought against.
They did not exactly strike me as enlightened or progressive despite our First World status.
Most of them impressed me as people living in their own worlds of fear, repression, prejudices, beliefs, values , hate and suspicion. Something which is shaped by our environmental culture of materialism, possession and obsession. Which in turn is shaped by our national psyche and governance, Asian roots, school system, corporatism, public and civil contact, family , globalisation and even religious tenets.
I am too of course the product of the same influences albeit having my own unique experiences within the context of my own selective pressures of family, religion, Chineseness, education, personal encounters with people, public and civil contact and sexual identity.
But the recurring trait is really one of a kind. It shatters myths of being nurturing and exuding maternalism when I have a boss, a mother herself, explicate that since the charges are not her own flesh and blood, she is not so directly responsible for their well-being.
These are charges young enough to be hers, on their own here alone far away from their homes.
Imagine someone said the same of hers when they are abroad! How would you feel if you leave your very own in the hands of someone who has no feelings for a fellow human being? Be it yours or not. Do we all not share a commonality as a human? Or is she differentiating along the lines of yours or mine, master or servant and rich or poor.
Which really brings me to the question of why in damnation is she ever in the knowledge economy? Isn't her vocation to open up minds, new vistas, share love, compassion and teach universality and help? Or is it she to breed hatred, turn one against another, instigate and malign? Look for grades, top brains and technical expertise. But surely for someone who is a specialist in one trade can only be an idiot of sort who cannot see a holistic view or understand the human condition.
So what makes Imelda Marcos of the Phillipines, Empress Cixi of the Qin dynasty, Empress Wu of the Tang dynasty, Cleopatra of the Ptolemy dynasty or Nerfiti, Queen of Egypt or Qiang Qing of China any different from Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong or Idi Amin of Africa?
So did a different gender do any better than what they fought against?
Are we just merely putting a gender on the pedestal of power just to show that we have progressed? Or should the people on the pedestal be solely based on what they can do and out of true conviction for beliefs and value system?
So a woman minister will then symbolise progress and equality of the sexes and not because she has true convictions to do her work based on her true calling and value system? So numbers in the cabinet will count as progress of the sexes and filling quotas and not be based on true calling and true worth to do good work?
Example : I want to start a curriculum. I will examine the subjects to teach based on what I think will be worth teaching (the interconnectivity , multi-dimensional and thus unifying theme ) and not because I want to call it a Liberal Arts College. I start out with that premise first and not the other way around.
At the end of the day, it is surely not the gender but the value system and convictions articulated by the leader that will win the followers and the respect. Coercion, threat and intimidation can only work so well.
If the labels must stick, then they must be seen in the context of what I experienced with this handful of people. It was a small but representative sample, a cluster of people who made me think deep and hard.
Unfortunately they tilt towards one gender and this gender was once the downtrodden and belittled. I had thought that with all the fight for equality in occupation and status that they will turn out to be better leaders and advocate for good values.
Instead they were as strident and combative in their quest for power, greed, materialism and money at the expense of love, compassion, universality and understanding.No better than the gender they had fought against.
They did not exactly strike me as enlightened or progressive despite our First World status.
Most of them impressed me as people living in their own worlds of fear, repression, prejudices, beliefs, values , hate and suspicion. Something which is shaped by our environmental culture of materialism, possession and obsession. Which in turn is shaped by our national psyche and governance, Asian roots, school system, corporatism, public and civil contact, family , globalisation and even religious tenets.
I am too of course the product of the same influences albeit having my own unique experiences within the context of my own selective pressures of family, religion, Chineseness, education, personal encounters with people, public and civil contact and sexual identity.
But the recurring trait is really one of a kind. It shatters myths of being nurturing and exuding maternalism when I have a boss, a mother herself, explicate that since the charges are not her own flesh and blood, she is not so directly responsible for their well-being.
These are charges young enough to be hers, on their own here alone far away from their homes.
Imagine someone said the same of hers when they are abroad! How would you feel if you leave your very own in the hands of someone who has no feelings for a fellow human being? Be it yours or not. Do we all not share a commonality as a human? Or is she differentiating along the lines of yours or mine, master or servant and rich or poor.
Which really brings me to the question of why in damnation is she ever in the knowledge economy? Isn't her vocation to open up minds, new vistas, share love, compassion and teach universality and help? Or is it she to breed hatred, turn one against another, instigate and malign? Look for grades, top brains and technical expertise. But surely for someone who is a specialist in one trade can only be an idiot of sort who cannot see a holistic view or understand the human condition.
So what makes Imelda Marcos of the Phillipines, Empress Cixi of the Qin dynasty, Empress Wu of the Tang dynasty, Cleopatra of the Ptolemy dynasty or Nerfiti, Queen of Egypt or Qiang Qing of China any different from Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong or Idi Amin of Africa?
So did a different gender do any better than what they fought against?
Are we just merely putting a gender on the pedestal of power just to show that we have progressed? Or should the people on the pedestal be solely based on what they can do and out of true conviction for beliefs and value system?
So a woman minister will then symbolise progress and equality of the sexes and not because she has true convictions to do her work based on her true calling and value system? So numbers in the cabinet will count as progress of the sexes and filling quotas and not be based on true calling and true worth to do good work?
Example : I want to start a curriculum. I will examine the subjects to teach based on what I think will be worth teaching (the interconnectivity , multi-dimensional and thus unifying theme ) and not because I want to call it a Liberal Arts College. I start out with that premise first and not the other way around.
At the end of the day, it is surely not the gender but the value system and convictions articulated by the leader that will win the followers and the respect. Coercion, threat and intimidation can only work so well.
Futher Musings on CEOs and their little serfdoms
Have you ever sat there trying to complete your work and M/s Cleopatra beside you shouts into the telephone at her husband about some craggy smoking/not smoking habit. Or your boss is having a tiff with his first wife on the telephone, practically raising his voice several decibels above the norm while his second looks on?
Well this is the kind of stuff what working in corporatism is all about. Imagine for a moment in an open-concept office where all this takes place and there is no running away from it.
The delivery man is not really a delivery man but the chauffeur for the kept one. You have to do stocks , delivery and administration all yourself. M/s Kept stints on everything about you - your reimbursements, your transport, your commission but lavishes on her weekend trysts at clubs, pubs and the shopping malls which include herself - her make-up, dresses and spas.
Ms She-Ape drones on about everything except about how huge her fussocks had grown to obliterate humanity from the real truth while M/s Accident-In-My-Face raises temperature several degrees with her shrill and sharp comments ( mostly unfounded folklores , old wives tales and false truths)
One particularly obnoxious old bulldog I work for actually owns a swanky branded condominium down east and drives his employees like Egyptian slaves at the sweat shops. His only recollection of his illustrious career is that of his time in a huge multi-national where he rules with an iron hand and I am sure where many must have suffered and died at his hardened, wicked and monied paws.
He thinks too highly of his DOS versioned "Accounting" software which he thinks will be a multi-million dollar sell-out. By the time he churns it out, Microsoft Windows was already replacing all these stupid black and green blinking prompts on the computer screen and learn-by-rote keystrokes with user-friendly click me icons.
The running axiom I learnt is that when the bosses are nice, the drones are usually not.
Again they are usually teeming with women. Talking, complaining, conniving and full of issues and themselves. A hump-backed midget turns out to be the little Poltergeist seance herself. Some bitch no end about their everything. They also love talking loudly and screaming. Not to mention tale-bearing and gossiping.
It really amazes me as I sit and look at the flurry of idiocy going on around me, a scene they call "work" which by the way is a seriously man-made flaw-in-the-universe blight.
I can only hark back to the Stone Age to reminisce where men back then only had to hunt , gather and multiply. That was work. They only needed food and shelter.
But what did Man do ? They created science, technology and industry. Once that kick-started, a can of worms is opened.
I can now see how examinations came about. Confucius never had or sat for any examinations himself. However during the Han dynasty, they started the imperial examinations copying his statecraft ideologies as the seedbed for education and imperial rule. This was refined during the Soong dynasty.
Then at the turn of the last century, Darwin and his equally famed (or infamous) cousin Galton went on a line about evolution, eugenics and then intelligence testing. With intelligence testing, came examinations.
When you read about the debacle in the speckled history of intelligence and testing in general, you seriously wonder why we are allowing that shit to repeat itself again.
Examinations are no proof of intelligence. Intelligence is an abstract not a physical reality that can be quantified. I mean people are good at different things in their own special sort of way.
You have examinations and testing and this only tests academic, memory and shit. This is not really innate intelligence but more physiological. If examinations are to prove anything, I really wonder how all the philosophers of Old will fare - Aristotle or Plato.
What about Gregor Mendel? He failed every conceivable exam but he could do all those beautiful and earth-shattering experiments on genetic inheritance. What of Darwin? He didnt exactly get a glowing testimonial but look what a Beagles voyage to Galapagos did for him?
Which is what I think is the crux too. Formal education can only do so much. Informalism in the way of adventure, trips, discovery, exploration and experimentation can do so much more.
Seeing for yourself, touching and experiencing . That phenomenalistic sense can do miraculous wonders for any's self-serendipity.
Those educationally subnormalies are only intellectually incapacitated. But they look , sound and behave the same . They can feel, touch, see and observe as well. Perhaps even with a keener acuity.
All those other people of ancient civilisation never had examinations up till the Han did in China and the 20th century invention of America and Europe. I think we had more invent
ors, thinkers and scientists then than we ever had now.
Well this is the kind of stuff what working in corporatism is all about. Imagine for a moment in an open-concept office where all this takes place and there is no running away from it.
The delivery man is not really a delivery man but the chauffeur for the kept one. You have to do stocks , delivery and administration all yourself. M/s Kept stints on everything about you - your reimbursements, your transport, your commission but lavishes on her weekend trysts at clubs, pubs and the shopping malls which include herself - her make-up, dresses and spas.
Ms She-Ape drones on about everything except about how huge her fussocks had grown to obliterate humanity from the real truth while M/s Accident-In-My-Face raises temperature several degrees with her shrill and sharp comments ( mostly unfounded folklores , old wives tales and false truths)
One particularly obnoxious old bulldog I work for actually owns a swanky branded condominium down east and drives his employees like Egyptian slaves at the sweat shops. His only recollection of his illustrious career is that of his time in a huge multi-national where he rules with an iron hand and I am sure where many must have suffered and died at his hardened, wicked and monied paws.
He thinks too highly of his DOS versioned "Accounting" software which he thinks will be a multi-million dollar sell-out. By the time he churns it out, Microsoft Windows was already replacing all these stupid black and green blinking prompts on the computer screen and learn-by-rote keystrokes with user-friendly click me icons.
The running axiom I learnt is that when the bosses are nice, the drones are usually not.
Again they are usually teeming with women. Talking, complaining, conniving and full of issues and themselves. A hump-backed midget turns out to be the little Poltergeist seance herself. Some bitch no end about their everything. They also love talking loudly and screaming. Not to mention tale-bearing and gossiping.
It really amazes me as I sit and look at the flurry of idiocy going on around me, a scene they call "work" which by the way is a seriously man-made flaw-in-the-universe blight.
I can only hark back to the Stone Age to reminisce where men back then only had to hunt , gather and multiply. That was work. They only needed food and shelter.
But what did Man do ? They created science, technology and industry. Once that kick-started, a can of worms is opened.
I can now see how examinations came about. Confucius never had or sat for any examinations himself. However during the Han dynasty, they started the imperial examinations copying his statecraft ideologies as the seedbed for education and imperial rule. This was refined during the Soong dynasty.
Then at the turn of the last century, Darwin and his equally famed (or infamous) cousin Galton went on a line about evolution, eugenics and then intelligence testing. With intelligence testing, came examinations.
When you read about the debacle in the speckled history of intelligence and testing in general, you seriously wonder why we are allowing that shit to repeat itself again.
Examinations are no proof of intelligence. Intelligence is an abstract not a physical reality that can be quantified. I mean people are good at different things in their own special sort of way.
You have examinations and testing and this only tests academic, memory and shit. This is not really innate intelligence but more physiological. If examinations are to prove anything, I really wonder how all the philosophers of Old will fare - Aristotle or Plato.
What about Gregor Mendel? He failed every conceivable exam but he could do all those beautiful and earth-shattering experiments on genetic inheritance. What of Darwin? He didnt exactly get a glowing testimonial but look what a Beagles voyage to Galapagos did for him?
Which is what I think is the crux too. Formal education can only do so much. Informalism in the way of adventure, trips, discovery, exploration and experimentation can do so much more.
Seeing for yourself, touching and experiencing . That phenomenalistic sense can do miraculous wonders for any's self-serendipity.
Those educationally subnormalies are only intellectually incapacitated. But they look , sound and behave the same . They can feel, touch, see and observe as well. Perhaps even with a keener acuity.
All those other people of ancient civilisation never had examinations up till the Han did in China and the 20th century invention of America and Europe. I think we had more invent
ors, thinkers and scientists then than we ever had now.
Sunday, July 24, 2005
To All the Women and Men in My Life - Get the Hell out
This brought on memories of all those bitches and male vamps in my life. They are everywhere. Well it is really really going to take a lot of time to just get this off my chest. So be sure you tighten your seat belt and I am going to take you on a spin, back to my life. The land of the sulky bitches and vampish vampires.
I remember quite a few of them. There was this "knowledge economy" gall (not exactly a gall but well she works in the knowledge economy and I am not sure if she has that much knowledge, the shallow bitch that she is, and no prizes too for guessing what knowledge economy she is sloughing in).
She made me do a "knowledge" session for her and then wanted me to take a few more on, after paying her for my edification. Wait. If she opens her mouth and I know that knowledge was really really flowing out, I may contemplate subjectng myself to being knowledgified.
You would have imagined with the riches she has amassed ostentatiously being flaunted around her : landed property, car, servant , well-off professional husband and two knowledge workers (one of whom has up and left because she has an irritating lisp I swear) that she could go on living the lifestyle of the rich and famous. But to actually have to stoop to this to finance her lavish lifesytle?
The same too with this bitchwax whom I have the misfortune of working for. Cold calculating miserly but always masking a terrific impish wicked smile, she was one among three Soong sisters of the Mayan dynastic empire they had co-founded thriving on sucking off poor innocent inheritors of the Kingdom of God who know no better except to try to imbibe knowledge because of the stinking education system we have built around examinations, a one-examination approach and grades.
The spectre of her sitting up, counting her takings like a vulture would on its rotting carcass of a meal and that wide-ass-grin of the wicked witch in Cinderella and her umembarassing wear of see-through attire (who is she trying to attract? the ah peks from the kopi-tiam I suppose) really really eats into your guts. The way she puts her nails up for scrutiny and the way she portrays herself as the Mother-O-Bitch, interfering over the smallest things in everyone's lives.
No wonder she had a bad marriage and is a widow. The black widow as I call her. I have this strange feeling she may have poisoned her husband. And I know her butchy daughter has the same genes she has. All bad and mutated. Like mother like daughter. A chip off the old hag.
Her older dizygotic evil twin looking like Empress Wu is not much off the mark either. Hoity toity , nose up in the air facade puts people off the instance they can smell her coming.
You should see the place I worked in once, teeming with several of these bitchwaxes. One was a big-eyed secretary of the company who has such thick lips and big mouth, I think jaws would have been zoilic. Another blinkers like a no-brainer (I think she has a case of electro-convulsive brainworks) and cackles connivingly in synch with being a timeserver, usually in tandem with that of the bosses (but a really smartass skiver).
A younger vain Hatsheput actually brings along her pet doggy to work on a weekend and talks incessantly about laser surgery for her keloids which hangs dewlap-like on her pectorals. The Cleopatra who sits beside me skives all the time and puts up a front of a marriage on the rocks with new-borns on the way which incdientally are all accidents - her second by the way.
If it is such an accident, why doesn't she hospitalise herself for good so that accidents don't happen to her all the time and she can just enjoy her life to the hilt in the wards?
I think she knows who she can shove her workload to while taking leave like what she did to her co-worker one year ago who must have left the company for precisely the same reason.
She yaks a lot too of some squint-eyed local actor and the way she shoots off her mouth in the elevator about everyone else proves she is a Queen Bitch. But when it comes to responsibility, she shirks it and skives.
Another purportedly is sleeping with her boss and is the focal point of a male bitch who finds every opportune moment to discredit her because she seems to be getting away with many things (being late, not doing her work, skiving, having sex on the side with the boss) while he cannot.
And then there is this other old male fart who has been with the company for eons, knows all the juicy gossip about who is who and doing what. He has sparkling eyes with an equally diabolical smile to match and seizes every chance to snipe at people and slime their character and reputation (some of which are brilliantly true by the way but just that it really clouds and colours others' pereception of all these malingers even more).
Bitches galore. Their tones are usually the shrill, high-pitched, crass and irritating siren type. They do sometimes come in extra-large sizes too.
Like this other religiously garbed fat-assed dominant she-ape . And her tall, M/s Shrilly-Ass-Had-An-accident-on-my-Face-Ugly fellow compatriot. Both talk unrelentlessly on a whole range of issues about each other, the management, their work (you mean they actually do work? Christ! If that is work, then shitting is a meal) and themselves. Looks like education didn't get to them early enough or sufficiently for that matter. How could anyone talk like that?
Worse Miss Fat-Ass wants to impose her religious code on her own kind and has issues with administrative duties (which she has been rightly assigned to do at times) , whisperings , noise, other people talking while she generates so much herself. I have never seen ayone yak so much in my life and argue so much just to put across a point (which is a wrong stance anyway)
Above all, I think it is just all their posturing, attitude, thinking, reasoning and talking. Crassy buttheads. Some are all nice on the outside but all bad on the inside. Like a rotting apple at the core or a pitcher plant.
So good luck guys, you must really be lucky if you are ever so blind to not see through their ploys, charms, diabolics and cruelty.
Well I guess this is only one part yeah of a really long story. I could go on, about my previous bosses and all.So there. I hope you will like this musing very much. Ha ha ha.
I remember quite a few of them. There was this "knowledge economy" gall (not exactly a gall but well she works in the knowledge economy and I am not sure if she has that much knowledge, the shallow bitch that she is, and no prizes too for guessing what knowledge economy she is sloughing in).
She made me do a "knowledge" session for her and then wanted me to take a few more on, after paying her for my edification. Wait. If she opens her mouth and I know that knowledge was really really flowing out, I may contemplate subjectng myself to being knowledgified.
You would have imagined with the riches she has amassed ostentatiously being flaunted around her : landed property, car, servant , well-off professional husband and two knowledge workers (one of whom has up and left because she has an irritating lisp I swear) that she could go on living the lifestyle of the rich and famous. But to actually have to stoop to this to finance her lavish lifesytle?
The same too with this bitchwax whom I have the misfortune of working for. Cold calculating miserly but always masking a terrific impish wicked smile, she was one among three Soong sisters of the Mayan dynastic empire they had co-founded thriving on sucking off poor innocent inheritors of the Kingdom of God who know no better except to try to imbibe knowledge because of the stinking education system we have built around examinations, a one-examination approach and grades.
The spectre of her sitting up, counting her takings like a vulture would on its rotting carcass of a meal and that wide-ass-grin of the wicked witch in Cinderella and her umembarassing wear of see-through attire (who is she trying to attract? the ah peks from the kopi-tiam I suppose) really really eats into your guts. The way she puts her nails up for scrutiny and the way she portrays herself as the Mother-O-Bitch, interfering over the smallest things in everyone's lives.
No wonder she had a bad marriage and is a widow. The black widow as I call her. I have this strange feeling she may have poisoned her husband. And I know her butchy daughter has the same genes she has. All bad and mutated. Like mother like daughter. A chip off the old hag.
Her older dizygotic evil twin looking like Empress Wu is not much off the mark either. Hoity toity , nose up in the air facade puts people off the instance they can smell her coming.
You should see the place I worked in once, teeming with several of these bitchwaxes. One was a big-eyed secretary of the company who has such thick lips and big mouth, I think jaws would have been zoilic. Another blinkers like a no-brainer (I think she has a case of electro-convulsive brainworks) and cackles connivingly in synch with being a timeserver, usually in tandem with that of the bosses (but a really smartass skiver).
A younger vain Hatsheput actually brings along her pet doggy to work on a weekend and talks incessantly about laser surgery for her keloids which hangs dewlap-like on her pectorals. The Cleopatra who sits beside me skives all the time and puts up a front of a marriage on the rocks with new-borns on the way which incdientally are all accidents - her second by the way.
If it is such an accident, why doesn't she hospitalise herself for good so that accidents don't happen to her all the time and she can just enjoy her life to the hilt in the wards?
I think she knows who she can shove her workload to while taking leave like what she did to her co-worker one year ago who must have left the company for precisely the same reason.
She yaks a lot too of some squint-eyed local actor and the way she shoots off her mouth in the elevator about everyone else proves she is a Queen Bitch. But when it comes to responsibility, she shirks it and skives.
Another purportedly is sleeping with her boss and is the focal point of a male bitch who finds every opportune moment to discredit her because she seems to be getting away with many things (being late, not doing her work, skiving, having sex on the side with the boss) while he cannot.
And then there is this other old male fart who has been with the company for eons, knows all the juicy gossip about who is who and doing what. He has sparkling eyes with an equally diabolical smile to match and seizes every chance to snipe at people and slime their character and reputation (some of which are brilliantly true by the way but just that it really clouds and colours others' pereception of all these malingers even more).
Bitches galore. Their tones are usually the shrill, high-pitched, crass and irritating siren type. They do sometimes come in extra-large sizes too.
Like this other religiously garbed fat-assed dominant she-ape . And her tall, M/s Shrilly-Ass-Had-An-accident-on-my-Face-Ugly fellow compatriot. Both talk unrelentlessly on a whole range of issues about each other, the management, their work (you mean they actually do work? Christ! If that is work, then shitting is a meal) and themselves. Looks like education didn't get to them early enough or sufficiently for that matter. How could anyone talk like that?
Worse Miss Fat-Ass wants to impose her religious code on her own kind and has issues with administrative duties (which she has been rightly assigned to do at times) , whisperings , noise, other people talking while she generates so much herself. I have never seen ayone yak so much in my life and argue so much just to put across a point (which is a wrong stance anyway)
Above all, I think it is just all their posturing, attitude, thinking, reasoning and talking. Crassy buttheads. Some are all nice on the outside but all bad on the inside. Like a rotting apple at the core or a pitcher plant.
So good luck guys, you must really be lucky if you are ever so blind to not see through their ploys, charms, diabolics and cruelty.
Well I guess this is only one part yeah of a really long story. I could go on, about my previous bosses and all.So there. I hope you will like this musing very much. Ha ha ha.
Saturday, July 23, 2005
Late Night Philosophical Ponderings
Ah yes. It has to come to this. Finally. I was posting some comments here and some comments there and accidentally (all great scientific and philosophical ponderings began as accidents - remember Alexander Fleming and his famed penicillin or Archimedes as he shouts "Eureka") stumbled upon this philosophical word "free will". What exactly is it?
Is it something we possess - the will, strength and power to do what we ought to and not what is and what other people want us to?
Which takes me to my story about the high priestess dwelling among us in our community in the temple of doom precipitating a catastrophic misadventure in personal suffering, personal loss and personal intrusion (much like aliens with almond eyes probing human subjects up their behinds with their protruding middle finger and implanting tracking devices just so they can keep tabs on how we tick and what tickle us - ha ha ha).
If you remember that little calamity, you can at once interconnect to what this musing is about - free will.
I mean you can certainly see for your trueself that sometimes in complying with unreasonable, preposterous and complete balderdash that we may sometimes end up losing ourselves, our own worth, our lives even - putting ourselves in harm's way - to put it mildy and unphilosophically.
That brings to my mind how leaders in every sphere have to heed this. When they speak and lead, they have to know what they are saying and have their people's interest at heart.
Much like a conscript who places his life in the hands of his commanders. It will be assumed that the commanders have sufficiently "tested the waters" and recced the terrain before they put out their troops for deployment in preparation for action or war.
Or a young charge in the hands of his care-giver. That he be sheltered, protected and shielded from harm.
Because if that leader, caregiver and protector does not give reasonable or careful instructions or commands, the recipient cannot comply for he places himself in danger.
Like your manager in the corporation or supervisor in your organisation who tells you to do something which is against what you believe in or is strongly negative or wrong, the employee or attendant cannot follow.
Your manager says: "Climb this stool and take down the ledgers" . You could be placing yourself in grave danger of falling off the stool. Or an electrical part malfunctioned in the air-conditioner. You may electrocute yourself. Or carry away that piece of furniture. You may hurt your back and injure yourself badly.
These are best left to the pertinent people in charge of them, not you as an administrator or whatever vocation you are tasked not related to any of the above.
Remember how I complied and wham - into the doors I went. Besides attributing this to carelessness, clumsiness or an accident, accidents are always waiting to happen.
So free will - never do anything against your better judgement or instinct. That is how I will put it. Otherwise it wil have a consequence. You have the free will to do or not to do anything. But exercise this free will knowing what it entails and its implications.
Is it something we possess - the will, strength and power to do what we ought to and not what is and what other people want us to?
Which takes me to my story about the high priestess dwelling among us in our community in the temple of doom precipitating a catastrophic misadventure in personal suffering, personal loss and personal intrusion (much like aliens with almond eyes probing human subjects up their behinds with their protruding middle finger and implanting tracking devices just so they can keep tabs on how we tick and what tickle us - ha ha ha).
If you remember that little calamity, you can at once interconnect to what this musing is about - free will.
I mean you can certainly see for your trueself that sometimes in complying with unreasonable, preposterous and complete balderdash that we may sometimes end up losing ourselves, our own worth, our lives even - putting ourselves in harm's way - to put it mildy and unphilosophically.
That brings to my mind how leaders in every sphere have to heed this. When they speak and lead, they have to know what they are saying and have their people's interest at heart.
Much like a conscript who places his life in the hands of his commanders. It will be assumed that the commanders have sufficiently "tested the waters" and recced the terrain before they put out their troops for deployment in preparation for action or war.
Or a young charge in the hands of his care-giver. That he be sheltered, protected and shielded from harm.
Because if that leader, caregiver and protector does not give reasonable or careful instructions or commands, the recipient cannot comply for he places himself in danger.
Like your manager in the corporation or supervisor in your organisation who tells you to do something which is against what you believe in or is strongly negative or wrong, the employee or attendant cannot follow.
Your manager says: "Climb this stool and take down the ledgers" . You could be placing yourself in grave danger of falling off the stool. Or an electrical part malfunctioned in the air-conditioner. You may electrocute yourself. Or carry away that piece of furniture. You may hurt your back and injure yourself badly.
These are best left to the pertinent people in charge of them, not you as an administrator or whatever vocation you are tasked not related to any of the above.
Remember how I complied and wham - into the doors I went. Besides attributing this to carelessness, clumsiness or an accident, accidents are always waiting to happen.
So free will - never do anything against your better judgement or instinct. That is how I will put it. Otherwise it wil have a consequence. You have the free will to do or not to do anything. But exercise this free will knowing what it entails and its implications.
On the Road Again
Well well well. If it isn't yet another boring Saturday morning. If I hadn't said it in an earlier posting, let me say it now. I had it with you and all your stuff and stuff.
Remember what I said about the community reservation system. Well let me add another boner - it sucks to the core.
I apparently committed a boo-boo. At least that is what the community governess tries to make me look it and believe it. Notice I am being really oblique here so that the obvious isnt so obvious any more.
I actually reserved a chinese edition of Gavin Menzies' 1421 The Year China conquered the world/America (whoa , hold on here a second, he has two versions to his book - what utter pandemonium!).
So I had a sharp word from the governess there who caustically remarked if I could not read in Chinese.
Look M/s Prissy Community Governess. When I was in school back like in the not-too-near nor not-too-far distant millennium, Chinese was relegated to its second language (read: subsidiary, and therefore subordinate) position. Who remembers the second-place winner of any beauty contest? The beast?
Hence I grew up comfortably with English as my natural and native tongue. So there! You have a big problem with that. In any case, I can certainly read and speak Chinese but not as technically or as in depth as a "navigational" novel will require. Besides , I am reading on "borrowed time" (read again : borrowed literally, catch the joke...ha ha ha?) in addition to a whole long list of my recently acquired reading binge. Aww, you can't put down a Professor Stephen Jay Gould book once you start, can you?
The fact of the matter is : On the system you really can't tell if it is a Chinese or English edition. Some titles have both and so naturally once again being the bilingual nation that we are, this surely cannot come as a surprise. Like typical Singaporeans queueing up for free newspapers or a lucky draw or a snow-balled lottery jackpot? Or mothers hitting their sons for not emptying the trash bags?
All those prissy , prim and sassy community governesses must be carrying out their orders a wee bit too religiously.
I had my cellie ringing suddenly while I was browsing at the community the other day. I was heading for the exit with two books in tow which I intended to borrow. Then along came one such governess who told me in no uncertain terms that that was strictly proscribed.
Imagine books in one hand, cellie in the other (and it was an important business call), I indicated my wish to borrow the books because I could not walk out of the community lest the alarms they so cleverly installed holler like tomorrow never comes. Like a stripper caught in his birthday suit with spotlights whirling around his rumps.
She snatched my books and placed them on the return trolley carts. Imagine the return trolley carts where fellow hungry, book-derpived community users also scavenge for their dead meat. When I stared hard and long at her, better sense returned and she placed them at the library counter. Ah HA! The cat's out of the bag!
I turned and hit the doors, injuring myself in the process, dazed by the turn of events and the callousness of this little dweeb wit of a witch.
Look guardians, high priestesses, safekeepers and gatekeepers of the temple of doom. I know it is your paramount officious duty to execute orders.
But at least can you be situational and use some common sense in the application of the law.
You ugly little bitch! I am sure you are glad now you make me hurt myself like that. Thanks to people like you, the world is a better place to live in and hospitals are all the richer for the takings.
This reminds me incidentally of a scene I observed at an educational institution. A young, mindless and unthinking educator hurrying her charges over their meals even though some were mid-way through.
Has she ever considered the chain reaction of such an event? Some possibilities:
1) Half the population of the institution decides to have their meal breaks at that same time coincidentally
2) They were preening and pruning themselves during half of their meal breaks and so missed out on their meals until their narcisstic pre-occupation ran its course
3) They were let off late by educators who were in turn let off late by their superiors (headmasters and headmistresses respectively)
Confucian Ethics 101: Do unto others what others do unto you. Domino Theory 102: I kick my friend. My friend kicks his friend. His friend kicks his friend. Then that last friend kicks his dog. You poor disgusting heartless SPCA reportees! I am really really gonna report you this time.
You moronic morons, get off me. Please, just leave me alone in my super cryonized state.
P.S: By the way, I m still wondering how Mysterious Skin got its R21 rating. Seriously the scenes were really really tame as compared to what I have seen on some movies with a PG rating or M18 or N16 one. Take the guess out of my guesswork please.
Remember what I said about the community reservation system. Well let me add another boner - it sucks to the core.
I apparently committed a boo-boo. At least that is what the community governess tries to make me look it and believe it. Notice I am being really oblique here so that the obvious isnt so obvious any more.
I actually reserved a chinese edition of Gavin Menzies' 1421 The Year China conquered the world/America (whoa , hold on here a second, he has two versions to his book - what utter pandemonium!).
So I had a sharp word from the governess there who caustically remarked if I could not read in Chinese.
Look M/s Prissy Community Governess. When I was in school back like in the not-too-near nor not-too-far distant millennium, Chinese was relegated to its second language (read: subsidiary, and therefore subordinate) position. Who remembers the second-place winner of any beauty contest? The beast?
Hence I grew up comfortably with English as my natural and native tongue. So there! You have a big problem with that. In any case, I can certainly read and speak Chinese but not as technically or as in depth as a "navigational" novel will require. Besides , I am reading on "borrowed time" (read again : borrowed literally, catch the joke...ha ha ha?) in addition to a whole long list of my recently acquired reading binge. Aww, you can't put down a Professor Stephen Jay Gould book once you start, can you?
The fact of the matter is : On the system you really can't tell if it is a Chinese or English edition. Some titles have both and so naturally once again being the bilingual nation that we are, this surely cannot come as a surprise. Like typical Singaporeans queueing up for free newspapers or a lucky draw or a snow-balled lottery jackpot? Or mothers hitting their sons for not emptying the trash bags?
All those prissy , prim and sassy community governesses must be carrying out their orders a wee bit too religiously.
I had my cellie ringing suddenly while I was browsing at the community the other day. I was heading for the exit with two books in tow which I intended to borrow. Then along came one such governess who told me in no uncertain terms that that was strictly proscribed.
Imagine books in one hand, cellie in the other (and it was an important business call), I indicated my wish to borrow the books because I could not walk out of the community lest the alarms they so cleverly installed holler like tomorrow never comes. Like a stripper caught in his birthday suit with spotlights whirling around his rumps.
She snatched my books and placed them on the return trolley carts. Imagine the return trolley carts where fellow hungry, book-derpived community users also scavenge for their dead meat. When I stared hard and long at her, better sense returned and she placed them at the library counter. Ah HA! The cat's out of the bag!
I turned and hit the doors, injuring myself in the process, dazed by the turn of events and the callousness of this little dweeb wit of a witch.
Look guardians, high priestesses, safekeepers and gatekeepers of the temple of doom. I know it is your paramount officious duty to execute orders.
But at least can you be situational and use some common sense in the application of the law.
You ugly little bitch! I am sure you are glad now you make me hurt myself like that. Thanks to people like you, the world is a better place to live in and hospitals are all the richer for the takings.
This reminds me incidentally of a scene I observed at an educational institution. A young, mindless and unthinking educator hurrying her charges over their meals even though some were mid-way through.
Has she ever considered the chain reaction of such an event? Some possibilities:
1) Half the population of the institution decides to have their meal breaks at that same time coincidentally
2) They were preening and pruning themselves during half of their meal breaks and so missed out on their meals until their narcisstic pre-occupation ran its course
3) They were let off late by educators who were in turn let off late by their superiors (headmasters and headmistresses respectively)
Confucian Ethics 101: Do unto others what others do unto you. Domino Theory 102: I kick my friend. My friend kicks his friend. His friend kicks his friend. Then that last friend kicks his dog. You poor disgusting heartless SPCA reportees! I am really really gonna report you this time.
You moronic morons, get off me. Please, just leave me alone in my super cryonized state.
P.S: By the way, I m still wondering how Mysterious Skin got its R21 rating. Seriously the scenes were really really tame as compared to what I have seen on some movies with a PG rating or M18 or N16 one. Take the guess out of my guesswork please.
Friday, July 22, 2005
Mind Blowing, Memorable and Haunting Scenes from Mysterious Skin
Guess what, the show just grows on you. The more I reflected the more I like the show, its subtleties and nuances.
Scene 1
Sex-omphed swaggers of Joseph Gordon Levitt as he approaches "clients" or in his jacket, jeans or one-piece singlet
Scene 2
The roughed up prancing, shoving prelude to sex of a seemingly "top and bottom" role playing till with an ironic twist, the 'client" asks for a fuck by a hot teen dick
Scene 3
That inimitable limp wif a pikestaff of the alien abductee GALL fren. Where did she pick that up from? Acting school or my grand daddy?
Scene 4
The fisting of the cow's udder amidst missing innards akin to er hem.......fisting for rectal stimulation...only an imagery mind you please....
Scene 5
The touching, sensitive moment of a AIDs-afflicted aging homosexual as he hungers for that elusive ultimate healing touch over his Kaposi-sarcoma ridden body and rotting teeth
Scene 6
The way Joe flickers and lowers his eyes and looks suspiciously at this KS "client"
Scene 7
Straight ahead, expressless look of Brady Corbet before, during and after sex, swoons and sports (the 3 asses) . He has what they call the swooning disease lol (Shakespeare: Julius Caesar)
Scene 8
The gory, bloody sex scene in the bathtub to the resounding slap and admonition of "You slut!" Hey why do I have this feeling this show is so much directed at me? Did someone here in Singapore know the director over there in LA and sold my story for a dime?
Scene 9
The dramatic shove , drop with a thud as the alien-gall gets rejected by her amorous offer of fellatio
Scene 10
The sluttiness of Joe's mother as she takes her son on a baseball trip or at home slumped on the couch exposing her shaven underarm and tat of her son's and his slim but slightly torsoed body
Scene 11
All the older and almost invariably moustachioed "clients" in different shapes and hues.
Scene 12
That unmistakable smirk over the telephone conversation of the word play "crab" and "crap". Makes the Aids epidemic look like a contrivance.
Scene 13
That wicked blue eyed high browed slightly girlish look of a younger Joseph
Scene 14
Beautiful, pearly white naked skin of Joseph , front and back with genitals unexposed and butts squeezed tight
Scene 15
The soul searing eyes of the handmaiden portrait overseeing the sex-bed
Scene 16
The almost business-like air of the sex transactions and all the twists in occupations of the "clients"
Scene 17
The straight-faced bitchy look of Brady's mother as she denounces the alien-abductees' stories and the way she puts off the gall fren of Brady over the telephone
Scene 18
Joseph as he lays and gets blown to smithereen, flushed, spasmic and relishing every single moment of his irrumation.
PS: Just for the record again, I remember someone on the ST desk actually referred to the epoch of the epic "Beowulf" as being Medieval. Just as a geologic time correction, I think it is more Anglo Saxon as this is in the beginning of the AD rather than the middle AD ages. Just so for the record ok.
Scene 1
Sex-omphed swaggers of Joseph Gordon Levitt as he approaches "clients" or in his jacket, jeans or one-piece singlet
Scene 2
The roughed up prancing, shoving prelude to sex of a seemingly "top and bottom" role playing till with an ironic twist, the 'client" asks for a fuck by a hot teen dick
Scene 3
That inimitable limp wif a pikestaff of the alien abductee GALL fren. Where did she pick that up from? Acting school or my grand daddy?
Scene 4
The fisting of the cow's udder amidst missing innards akin to er hem.......fisting for rectal stimulation...only an imagery mind you please....
Scene 5
The touching, sensitive moment of a AIDs-afflicted aging homosexual as he hungers for that elusive ultimate healing touch over his Kaposi-sarcoma ridden body and rotting teeth
Scene 6
The way Joe flickers and lowers his eyes and looks suspiciously at this KS "client"
Scene 7
Straight ahead, expressless look of Brady Corbet before, during and after sex, swoons and sports (the 3 asses) . He has what they call the swooning disease lol (Shakespeare: Julius Caesar)
Scene 8
The gory, bloody sex scene in the bathtub to the resounding slap and admonition of "You slut!" Hey why do I have this feeling this show is so much directed at me? Did someone here in Singapore know the director over there in LA and sold my story for a dime?
Scene 9
The dramatic shove , drop with a thud as the alien-gall gets rejected by her amorous offer of fellatio
Scene 10
The sluttiness of Joe's mother as she takes her son on a baseball trip or at home slumped on the couch exposing her shaven underarm and tat of her son's and his slim but slightly torsoed body
Scene 11
All the older and almost invariably moustachioed "clients" in different shapes and hues.
Scene 12
That unmistakable smirk over the telephone conversation of the word play "crab" and "crap". Makes the Aids epidemic look like a contrivance.
Scene 13
That wicked blue eyed high browed slightly girlish look of a younger Joseph
Scene 14
Beautiful, pearly white naked skin of Joseph , front and back with genitals unexposed and butts squeezed tight
Scene 15
The soul searing eyes of the handmaiden portrait overseeing the sex-bed
Scene 16
The almost business-like air of the sex transactions and all the twists in occupations of the "clients"
Scene 17
The straight-faced bitchy look of Brady's mother as she denounces the alien-abductees' stories and the way she puts off the gall fren of Brady over the telephone
Scene 18
Joseph as he lays and gets blown to smithereen, flushed, spasmic and relishing every single moment of his irrumation.
PS: Just for the record again, I remember someone on the ST desk actually referred to the epoch of the epic "Beowulf" as being Medieval. Just as a geologic time correction, I think it is more Anglo Saxon as this is in the beginning of the AD rather than the middle AD ages. Just so for the record ok.
I have lost my marbles
That is it. I have had it. First I can't find the most recent titles. Case in point : Andrew Parker's "Seven Deadly Colors" and even older titles are not in my community or even the next nearest one.
Then the audacity of it all. We have the largest stock of collection? Largest my foot. I wanna know in wat kinda distribution list is that in? Electronic , kids' genre, skins or wat. Have you tried placing a reservation for one.
Type in search and boxes appear against titles. Check one and you can't reserve it just yet. You must "go into" the title, then reserve? Is this the acme of madness and you have 7 copies for the entire reading population of 1.3 million? I wanna read so much and so badly. I have been deprived enuf oredi. Give this guy a break.
As for my review yesterday, I take some back. I think that dude from 3rd rock from the sun is one swell actor wif a beautiful body and oozing wif sexuality. I have always "suspected" him and the whole entire cast of tat show.
MY GOD. He has all grown up and looks so fantastic. His other specky nerdy counterpart makes acting school fame for his straight stare, straight face before, during and after sex and swoon. I like the last part where he shivers and blood pours through his breathing spiracles.
His sweet adoring alien abducted GALL fren portrays her role so well especially the limp ( if that was faked) and her attempt at fellatio and got pushed away. That drop and thud was "so dramatic". ANd it avoided , by jingo, all robotic reprisal of gays in only one body mold and age - sculpted, toned and young.
I really like the fetish-ridden "foreplay" though - fingers sticking into mouth.
Also had a "complete-the-ending-kinda-ending-on-your-own-accord" coda.
That crap or crab bit made it sound like sth else. Some contrivance, that is how I read it. And makes you wonder if any epidemic ever is.
But could we be spared stereotypical "gay" upbringing and bringing it on? Like an overprotective mother, distant father, geekiness and sports-ineptitude, coach infatuation plus slutty and divorced mothers. Also the invariable predestination : DO THE HUSTLE (a popular song of yonks ago by the way) Look I was never felled by my swimming coach when I was young.
God my fone is ringing off the hook, I must disconnect now.
Then the audacity of it all. We have the largest stock of collection? Largest my foot. I wanna know in wat kinda distribution list is that in? Electronic , kids' genre, skins or wat. Have you tried placing a reservation for one.
Type in search and boxes appear against titles. Check one and you can't reserve it just yet. You must "go into" the title, then reserve? Is this the acme of madness and you have 7 copies for the entire reading population of 1.3 million? I wanna read so much and so badly. I have been deprived enuf oredi. Give this guy a break.
As for my review yesterday, I take some back. I think that dude from 3rd rock from the sun is one swell actor wif a beautiful body and oozing wif sexuality. I have always "suspected" him and the whole entire cast of tat show.
MY GOD. He has all grown up and looks so fantastic. His other specky nerdy counterpart makes acting school fame for his straight stare, straight face before, during and after sex and swoon. I like the last part where he shivers and blood pours through his breathing spiracles.
His sweet adoring alien abducted GALL fren portrays her role so well especially the limp ( if that was faked) and her attempt at fellatio and got pushed away. That drop and thud was "so dramatic". ANd it avoided , by jingo, all robotic reprisal of gays in only one body mold and age - sculpted, toned and young.
I really like the fetish-ridden "foreplay" though - fingers sticking into mouth.
Also had a "complete-the-ending-kinda-ending-on-your-own-accord" coda.
That crap or crab bit made it sound like sth else. Some contrivance, that is how I read it. And makes you wonder if any epidemic ever is.
But could we be spared stereotypical "gay" upbringing and bringing it on? Like an overprotective mother, distant father, geekiness and sports-ineptitude, coach infatuation plus slutty and divorced mothers. Also the invariable predestination : DO THE HUSTLE (a popular song of yonks ago by the way) Look I was never felled by my swimming coach when I was young.
God my fone is ringing off the hook, I must disconnect now.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Mysterious Skin
Some gay flick here. While it has its highs, it wasnt as bedazzling or spectacular. The romps and sex scenes were really quite graphic though, sometimes bloody too (literally).
Storyline nothing much to crow about, average acting but the young actors were cute and it avoided most of the hackneyed gay stud thespians with sculptured torsos and all. It featured a variety of mainly older gay antagonists, many of whom we can relate to in our day to day encounters of all shapes, sizes and personalities.
One particular scene stood out with an aging and AIDS-afflicted male (breaking out in Kaposi sarcoma) in pony tail hungering for that elusive intimate healing touch.
Dont go looking for hard-ons or sexual stimulation. Has a strong theme of child sexual abuse and moralistic coda. Slow-moving but generally satisfying.
Storyline nothing much to crow about, average acting but the young actors were cute and it avoided most of the hackneyed gay stud thespians with sculptured torsos and all. It featured a variety of mainly older gay antagonists, many of whom we can relate to in our day to day encounters of all shapes, sizes and personalities.
One particular scene stood out with an aging and AIDS-afflicted male (breaking out in Kaposi sarcoma) in pony tail hungering for that elusive intimate healing touch.
Dont go looking for hard-ons or sexual stimulation. Has a strong theme of child sexual abuse and moralistic coda. Slow-moving but generally satisfying.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
What in Darnation?
It rained again. As if it matters. Look, as I sit, probably some snails out there are dying of hunger, starvation and deprivation. As I sit, some ants are losing their antennae and losing their way. As I sit, some e.coli bacteria are probably devouring their way through some poor guy's guts. Do all this really matter in the scheme of things? Guess not. Who cares? I do. Do you?
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Oh Man
I woke to the sounds of rain again. It has been like this the past few days. It makes the whole place cold damp and grey.
I wished.
I wished.
Monday, July 18, 2005
Blood Trail
It was certainly a bloody day. The rain kept pelting down and that dampened spirits and made me mope
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