timoland

2009-03-30T21:33:00.003+08:00

Wow.

Been a while. Things have been moving forward. 4th year med. No more playing around. No more fooling around. You need to know your stuff, have your wits about you. No more procrastinating and sleeping late. Gotta get up at 6.30 to make it to the hospital by 7.30am for grand rounds. Yes, I drive.

Okay i have a rant here. I think I've been spoilt by Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson, Captain Slow etc, and their beautiful car reviews. I just read the Life newspaper review of my 2009 Ford fiesta, and I feel very... annoyed, to say the least. I guess I understand, I was speaking with KL, that's how newspapers are run. You can't use big words, like humongous, splendiferous, you know, easy stuff. You can't write about the spirit and dynamism of a car, you've just got to cut to the chase. It's more than a bit annoying to see your car described as sluggish. Although that's not wrong, at 1.4L it's not going to win any races, it's not that much of a slouch either. You can really feel all 100 horses in that engine working to bring you to where you want to go, and the engine note has a really nice sporty timbre, a really cute growl. It's like seeing a fierce baby tiger that's never going to grow up. it's got the instinct but not the tools. That's how the ford fiesta feels like to me. But the handling, oh the handling. It's got that new hydro-electric power steering that lets your car turn on a dime when you're practically stationary, yet feel heavy at high speeds. It's got a nice stiff suspension that tricks you into believing you're in a large continental car when the truth is you're just in a little tiddling 1.4L. And you've got that sporty tip-tronic-like semi-automatic gearbox that lets you have the best of both worlds. As borat would say, very nice. You've got a car with an NCAP rating of 5, yet small enough to park in the shadow of an SUV, yet feel spacious and large enough to fool your senses. It's got all the electronic gadgetry you need, input jacks for your ipod, phone charger, that sort of thing. It's got a spoiler. It looks absolutely gorgeous next to the honda jazz, the mazda2, the hyundai getz, the toyota yaris, the small cars of its class. Fantastic noise reduction and although the tyre roar is a bit too much, but I put it down to the crappy australian roads. For a little car, it doesn't feel like a tin can or a little girly plaything. It's very much a drivers' car. Not for the economic buyer or for the uneducated consumer looking for the cheapest buy.

All in all, the fiesta isn't going to win any drag races with it's 11sec 0-100km performance, but it'll handily win the slalom, the beauty pageant and the driver's heart.

Anyway, rant over. Tutoring starts tomorrow. Yay?

2009-01-27T18:53:00.003+08:00

The End of Dogs

Dogs used to be wolves, you know. They had dignity once. They had an aura once, a presence. They used to be tough, wiry, vicious animals, with a healthy dose of heart - they were bred for hunting, for companionship. For protection. For tracking. They were manly dogs, doing manly things. In their dreams, they still dream of those days in the wild - hunting in a pack, terrorizing the country-side. In their dreams, they are the hunters, the thundering of hooves behind them, the warm cloying scent of blood teasing them just ahead. Dogs are meant to be dogs. In their dreams, they eat meat, and drink from the river. They piss where they want, marking their territory. They snap at each other. They obey an order to maim, to kill. They were dogs.

The dogs these days - they aren't dogs. They're toys. Little, inbred toys with genetic defects. You like your little toy pomeranians, shih tzus, your poodles. You think they're cute. A few years down the road when they throw a fit, when they go blind, when they get paralyzed... you'll be crying and putting them down. Minutes later, you'll want a new one. And for every cute dog you buy... for every cuddly, beautiful, cute looking dog... at least a couple in the litter had to be killed because of their hideous deformities. Oh yeah, the price of cuteness. Sure. you get a totally emasculated, tiny... midget of a dog who'd be eaten up by rats.... has no function at all except to look cute... you dress the dog up, you humanize him. Can't stop you.

Stop the inbreeding. Stop the genetic horrors, the good genes being lost for all time... stop the recessive genes from being expressed. Wake up and smell the awful truth about inbreeding. Look. I have nothing against dressing dogs up - i mean, if you buy a toy, you would want accessories, right? But i have everything against treating dogs like toys. Mass producing them, customizing them, making them weaker, sicker, lesser creatures... just so they can look cute. And the dog clothing culture stems from that. It's all a package.

Yeah, "true dog lover." Sure. You wouldn't love dogs if they were actually dogs still. Wolves. Animals. Not toys. Not accessories. But proper dogs.

Sigh. As ever, the pleas will fall on deaf ears.

2008-11-21T01:52:00.002+08:00

Wow.

After the torrid affair with Ladymelissa, i'm tempted to jump into another one with the Great high priestess of blogging herself, as she likes to call herself the morning star (lucifer anyone), miss wendy cheng. but because i know all the shit i'll get into if i do... i'll just do it in the relative privacy of my blog. because no one ever reads this anyway.

i've got a few points to make and I'll be brief.

1. wendy cheng THINKS she's smart. she's not as smart as she thinks she is. connecting my opinion about ladymelissa, i don't really like her either. call me conservative, but she's loud and rude and arrogant and brash. very much like ladymelissa but without the supposed cambridge education. just because you read something somewhere that sounded vaguely smart makes you smart too? for example, she recently bashed obama on her blog. okay, no qualms with that if you make smart comments, like, I disagree with obama's economic policies, he's too idealistic, i think he's not experienced, he's not qualified, mccain deserves it more, etc etc. But too quote from other blogs like she did? hold on a second. i have a feeling that those aren't really her own opinions but opinions that she's aping and copying just to be all "counter-culture" etc. you know me. I love to go against the grain. everyone raved about the dark knight, i was sort of cool towards it. everyone raved about quantum of solace, i went ho-hum. No, i'm not influenced by popular opinion. but everyone is raving about barack? yeah, i have to give it to him to. he had me at "yes we can". it's not the popular opinion, but it's that feeling, that vibe i get from him. watching his speeches and his interaction with people - it's the feeling. like i complain about books and movies, yes, technically perfect, technically excellent. but where's the heart? where's the feeling? you know?

Anyway i'm digressing and it's still my first point. Basically she linked to this site called the American thinker, which basically said that obama divided the nation like never before. Hello. the nation was already divided in the first place. imho, it was palin's hardcore hate words. and mccain's strategy of fear. obama never harped on the fact that he was black, he merely pointed it out like, once or twice? to say that he nursed greivances against white is natural and honest. how is that divisive? i think all he did was to illustrate, yes, there's a divide and we must bridge it! how is that divisive? basically, the blog author said that barack's divisive, because his worshippers and zealots don't permit other people to bash him. hello? that's normal? mccain supporters would stop other people from bashing him. what if i said, hey, so what if mccain was a war hero. no biggie. the internet mccain supporters would stomp me too. so ARGUMENT fail!

2. Wendy, if you want the fame and adoration, prepare to get some hate. i thought you were doing so well dealing with it. Why suddenly so petty?

3. wendy, you're not that hot. get over it.

4. i think people know my feelings about SPGs. She's sooooo one. unrepentant and unabashedly.

5. I find her blog entertaining... in a sense that i'm laughing all the time not because of her humour, but when she tries to act smart. not saying that i'm smart, because i'm not, i'm stupid, it's just that she's stupider than I are. :P and that's all on purpose - you know.

2008-11-15T02:36:00.002+08:00

I shamelessly stole this questionnaire of Crystal's blog. But put my own answers in.

1. Have you ever been awake at dawn?

Yes. More often than any reasonable person should have been.

2. Would you be different if you’d been given a different name?

Yes. Imagine if I were called... Jennifer. Or Angelica. Or John. John is just as bad.

3. If a nut falls to the ground in the middle of a dark wood when no one is there, does it make a sound?

What kind of nut is it and is it edible? If it's a very soft and fluffy nut, then perhaps it wouldn't make much sound at all.

4. What is the meaning of a flower?

Transient beauty that soon bears fruit.

5. Why do people like the sea so much?

Because we can swim but we can't fly.

6. Have you been taught how to sew?

Not yet, but I will learn how to suture eventually.

7. Is the sound that the wind makes in the trees a kind of talking?

Yes, and the voices, they speak to me. They whisper all sorts of secret things to me.

8. What sort of bird can fly in the air, walk on land and swim underwater?

A penguin with a jet-pack.

9. What does the smell of cinnamon do to you?

It reminds me of homely little cafes and well-brewed coffee.

10. What happens at the bottom of the sea?

You eventually get crushed by the incredible pressure.

11. What sort of treasure could you fit into a very small box?

A very small treasure?

12. For whom does the bell toll?

I want to say Hemingway as well, but in the spirit of originality I will say Robert Jordan.

13. Why is gold valuable?

Because the amount of gold is finite. And it comes from the exploding hearts of stars light-years away. You and I are stardust as well.

14. Do you like storms?

Yes, when I'm indoors.

15. How many seconds of music can you hold in your head at one time?

I'm not sure if you would call it "music".

2008-11-12T23:07:00.001+08:00

Somehow, I will find a way to procrastinate.

I've got a rant. Why are there so many famous female bloggers out there and not male bloggers? Cuz we're more boring? We don't cam-whore? We don't natter on about our hair and make up?

Hmmm.

Anyway.

Bimbos are shallow. another awesome timolosophy.

2008-11-06T23:06:00.001+08:00

OBAMA! EPIC WIN! :P woooot.

2008-10-31T12:30:00.002+08:00

Thanks! I'm going to try get published again. 3rd time lucky. :P Renaissance publishing house. But more than a little worried. I found this on their website.

"Work with a distinct local flavor; with lingo, settings, storylines, satires, or references that will only tickle or make sense to the local market are not what we are interested in."

I got this quote off the Renaissance websites "Author's wanted" section, and I have a quibble with it. Hwee Hwee's Mammon Inc was a best seller, and Daren's Heartland is now required reading for Literature students. Those novels are chock-full of local flavour.

However, there has since been a dearth of good Singaporean literature. I feel it's precisely because of this sort of attitude from publishing houses, and not just Renaissance.

If you look at other great authors and books, such as the Indian authors - Naipul, Rushdie, Desai, Roy - all their books were about India. It's all Indian references. Look at the latest winner of the Man-Booker Prize. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga - it's all about India. The Pulitzer Prize winner? The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz? All about the Dominican Republic. In fact, it's written in spanglish. History of the Ned Kelly Gang? Australia. Look at the success of Tash Au, a Malaysian writer who wrote the Harmony Silk Factory, a story set in WWII Malaya. His book reached the Long List of the Man-Booker prize. Why can't, why shouldn't a Singaporean book about Singaporeans achieve such prestige?

The point I'm trying to make is that as Singaporean writers, we SHOULD champion local literature, we SHOULD write with a distinctly local flavour, and we should write it well enough so that it can have a world-wide appeal. However, what we gain in authenticity, we lose out in commercial value. After all, who's going to pick up a book about short stories set in Singapore? Or a novel set in Singapore? That's what people and publishers perceive.

The ordinary consumer would much rather buy a self-help book or the latest thriller/fantasy novel. But honestly, although I believe there is a place for the thriller and the fantasy novel in high art, discerning readers will smell contrivance and artifice a mile away. The problem is that thrillers and fantasy have been done to death. Eragon? Harry Potter? Dan Brown? If this is the sort of Literature that we are encouraging Singaporeans to aspire to achieve, I can only shake my head in futility.

2008-10-31T12:30:00.001+08:00

"Work with a distinct local flavor; with lingo, settings, storylines, satires, or references that will only tickle or make sense to the local market are not what we are interested in."

I got this quote off the Renaissance websites "Author's wanted" section, and I have a quibble with it. Hwee Hwee's Mammon Inc was a best seller, and Daren's Heartland is now required reading for Literature students. Those novels are chock-full of local flavour.

However, there has since been a dearth of good Singaporean literature. I feel it's precisely because of this sort of attitude from publishing houses, and not just Renaissance.

If you look at other great authors and books, such as the Indian authors - Naipul, Rushdie, Desai, Roy - all their books were about India. It's all Indian references. Look at the latest winner of the Man-Booker Prize. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga - it's all about India. The Pulitzer Prize winner? The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz? All about the Dominican Republic. In fact, it's written in spanglish. History of the Ned Kelly Gang? Australia. Look at the success of Tash Au, a Malaysian writer who wrote the Harmony Silk Factory, a story set in WWII Malaya. His book reached the Long List of the Man-Booker prize. Why can't, why shouldn't a Singaporean book about Singaporeans achieve such prestige?

The point I'm trying to make is that as Singaporean writers, we SHOULD champion local literature, we SHOULD write with a distinctly local flavour, and we should write it well enough so that it can have a world-wide appeal. However, what we gain in authenticity, we lose out in commercial value. After all, who's going to pick up a book about short stories set in Singapore? Or a novel set in Singapore? That's what people and publishers perceive.

The ordinary consumer would much rather buy a self-help book or the latest thriller/fantasy novel. But honestly, although I believe there is a place for the thriller and the fantasy novel in high art, discerning readers will smell contrivance and artifice a mile away. The problem is that thrillers and fantasy have been done to death. Eragon? Harry Potter? Dan Brown? If this is the sort of Literature that we are encouraging Singaporeans to aspire to achieve, I can only shake my head in futility.

2008-10-29T14:09:00.002+08:00

I must tell everyone of three amazing webcomics that SMASH pvp AND penny-arcade -

Sinfest, XKCD and the perry bible fellowship. Best comics ever. esp XKCD.

2008-10-28T18:36:00.001+08:00

I'm cringing because Sarah Palin is an idiot. I'm watching all her gaffes. How can people actually really actually want her in the White House? I'm cringing. She is so terribly educated - she doesn't know what Roe v Wade is, she doesn't know the Bush Doctrine, she can't name a news paper or magazine she reads. GGGGAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Rage.

2008-09-06T01:15:00.001+08:00

I recently engaged in a little argument with some famous blogger, from http://theladymelissa.blogspot.com ... anyway, I've got nothing against her except her obvious bigotry. Basically she thinks most heartlanders are peasants etc etc... well, at least anyone who disagrees with her or is less educated etc. Now in a previous blog she wrote that she loves standing up for the underdog, who in this case, was Dawn Yang, who was getting attacked by xiaxue and basically the rest of the world. I understand that. I don't mind dawn, too. Now, later on, she wrote in another post that the mob had tried to take on the establishment and they had failed miserably, because you can't beat the establishment. I'm paraphrasing here, but this is the main gist. Anyway, this really galled me a little bit, because I was feeling all revolutionary and inspired by Barack Obama - YES WE CAN! and I just felt that, you know, the establishment MUST be taken on, I mean, isn't that what the french did in the french revolution? They pulled down the aristocracy? And the Americans did in the american war for independence? And Gandhi's sacrifices? And Martin Luthor King Jr?

So, being in the mood for a good "discussion", I commented on her post. Here is the exact replication of what later took place over a few days. Anyway, read on, and prepare to be entertained. I think I sounded quite dumb at some points, but I think she are much dumberer than I is. (read:humour here) :P

I mean, who here reading this won't understand that when I say oxford and cambridge are essentially the same things I'm actually making a generalization? Goodness.

Anonymous said...
"In fact, the Lady Melissa loves fighting for underdogs, the oppressed and the trampled-upon." - yourself.

Hold on a sec. First you perpetuate elitism and claim to be royalty. And you say the mob must not be allowed to rule.

You come from a position of strength, you talk about belonging to the establishment - how does that make you or dawn an underdog?

I've got nothing against either of you, just your pride-blinded prejudice and blimp-sized ego. Pedigree? Royalty? Never seen royalty so eager to jump into a pile of shit, honestly.

- Tim
August 25, 2008 11:55 PM

emm said...
Tim, I believe the term underdog refers to someone who is expected to lose. Royalty or Peasantry has no bearing on it.

Sometimes someone who is royalty gets dragged into the proverbial shit, and regardless of position, I have no doubt a true friend will do what they can to help this person, even if it means that they have to step off their diamond encrusted pedestal and walk on dung.

Anonymous said...
Hey em,

Underdog does refer to someone who is expected to lose. But Mel was talking about the mob taking on the establishment, and the establishment would be expected to win. And she refers to herself as part of the establishment. So who's the underdog here?

And you're right in saying that "royalty" can be dragged into shit, but honestly, I think with proper etiquette, respect and decency, that said "royal" could come away smelling like roses.

And what's this presumptuous "royalty" b.s about? Honestly. It's unbelievably childish to assume that mere status and wealth can afford someone the right to call themselves royalty. And don't tell me it's a joke, because it certainly doesn't seem to me to be one. Diamond encrusted pedestal my aunt fanny.

-Tim
August 27, 2008 6:26 PM

emm said...
Hi Tim,

I think there have been many instances in history where the establishment was the underdog. Likewise there are other instances where the mob was the underdog. I don't think position or stature affects who the underdog is. It is simply whoever is expected to lose.

I also don't quite know how royalty is supposed to smell like roses when they are still being pelted with poo. Maybe when the saga ends, we shall find out.

For your last question, I can't answer for melissa, but why are you getting all riled up about the royalty bit? By her standards I'm a peasant too, but it doesn't matter to me. It's just a label on a container. It's the ingredients that count!

Anonymous said...
Emm,

Look, you really should start thinking for yourself for a change. Eloquence doesn't mean she's right. Anyway, I shan't belabour that pt about underdogs further if you can't grasp a simple concept.

Also, if you don't understand what a metaphor is, I can't really help you on that one. Poo. lolz.

I think I have a right to get riled up about any opinion I give two shits about. Why am I getting riled up? It's the presumptuousness of it all. Why must there be a differentiation between royalty and peasant? Are you gladly throwing away the sacrifices of so many lives in the different revolutions over the years to restore a monarchy/theocracy? People have laid down their lives in civil rights movements, fighting for freedom, and here you are, trampling upon their history with your happy return to prejudice and discrimination. How would you feel if mel were blogging just as articulately and eloquently about how one race is superior to another race? This is the same thing! Think about it.

Look, I think everyone should be able to express their opinion, however dim-witted they are. Call me idealistic, but I think people should all be treated equally and fairly, and not be euthanized, as mel puts it. So Mel has the right to express herself, I have the right to disagree with her, and you have the right to suck up to her, no problem. I'm not here to say I'm right, I'm here to express myself.

Honestly, you're coming off as some sycophant who should really grow a spine. Don't be dazzled by flowery words or mere articulateness. You say you're a peasant, according to mel, but you secretly think you aren't, you want to join the royalty too, dontcha. Anyway, your pandering to the public opinion simply betrays your peasantry - so... keep trying babe.

And this is my opinion that I have the right to express, even if it hurts. Sorry. Didn't mean to offend. Not really.

-Tim

The Lady Melissa said...
Tim,

It is not a why. It is an IS.

There is a distinction. It is obvious. Better to live with it, deal with it than to gloss over it with PC idealism.
Anonymous said...
... and that just sums it up. The capital IS. Accept it for what it is, said the white man, said the catholic church, said the Nazi, said the Man. We are superior, and let's not get PC about it, let's celebrate it, said the royal, said the dictator, said the Empire. Our ways are higher than your ways, our thoughts are greater than your thoughts, said Saul before Damascus, said the Pharisee, said the Inquisitor.

Call me melodramatic, if you will. It fits the mood of this blog perfectly.

The true royalty of the earth, the great men and women of the age are not great because of their wealth, power or money, honey, but because of their great works and deeds borne out of their humility.

-Tim
August 29, 2008 3:31 PM

The Lady Melissa said...
Bad analogy. Whether one race is superior to another is a matter of debate - it is not a matter of fact.

That there are distinctions in the material well-being, educational levels, mentality of human beings is not a matter of debate, but a matter of fact.

By recognising there are class differences, one can help the downtrodden.

Incidentally, I also think there are racial differences. White people for example are more susceptible to skin cancer because of the smaller amount of melanin in their skins. If we say there are no genetic racial differences and ignore this, it is to our detriment. Similarly, sub-saharan africans are more vulnerable to sickle cell anaemia. We know this, recognise this and treat it.

So let's recognise the real differences and not gloss over it.

Do not be simple minded and confuse this with bigotry.
August 29, 2008 4:33 PM

Anonymous said...
How is it a bad analogy? Please read more carefully. I don't fully understand your response because it doesn't really respond to what I wrote. I never said one race is superior to another.

I do agree that there are distinctions in wealth, education and intellect - it is a fact. But I'm asking if those factors make a human being more valuable, more important than another? A statement that you strongly espouse. Your writing reveals that you think your life as a so-called royal is worth more than a life of a mere peasant. This is bigotry, plain and simple.

I do recognise class differences, but you celebrate them. How does one help the downtrodden by constantly demeaning their existence?

And yes, I'm a medical student, so you don't have to explain the genetics of different races to me. I never said that there are NO differences in race, I said, despite their differences, they should be treated equally. That was a pretty redundant point you made there.

I'm not glossing over any differences here. You can think I'm simple-minded, but ultimately, you've been indulging in bigotry, plain and simple. I suggest strongly you spend some time with these so-called peasants. You may have to hold your nose at times, get a little dirty at times, but you should learn to appreciate these lives you want to euthanize. Ultimately, you should really engage in some serious soul-searching and make good on your desire of creating a better society, instead of engaging in an inane conflict with netizens.

I believe in you, mel - you seem like a smart girl who honestly desires change, but change always comes from within first.

-Tim
August 30, 2008 12:59 AM

The Lady Melissa said...
Go read my post Peasants and peasants. You clearly have failed to understand my point.
August 30, 2008 2:14 AM

Anonymous said...
I love it how we always say the other has clearly failed to understand our point in an argument, while we clearly have, but choose to ignore it.

Bring out the caps again - a simple change of case exonerates you from all accusations of bigotry, eh? I read it, I agree with you on that issue, but I think the matter still goes deeper than that.

When you write about Peasants and peasants, you can't expect everyone to understand your simple change of case changes the context - it's like talking about a black man and a Black man, you know? I can mean a different thing, but people aren't going to realize that. And in the end I still propagate the same prejudices and the same discrimination.

-Tim
August 30, 2008 9:56 AM

The Lady Melissa said...
Ah. So you DO think the difference between Peasant and peasant is simply a change in case. At least I confirmed that. From now on, I won't have too high expectations of your understanding then.
August 30, 2008 12:20 PM

Anonymous said...
Oh dear.

If that's what you think, I really can't help you. I had such high expectations of you, Cambridge girl. I don't see how my reply led you to believe that I think the difference between Peasant and peasant is simply a change of case. Didn't I say I understood your context but some don't, and you still encourage the same sort of discrimination when you use such a similar word?

It's beyond baffling how you reach your conclusions.

How disappointing! What a profound exercise in futility trying to engage you in an intelligent discussion when you probably couldn't pass a comprehension test. Did you even study PPE? Because you definitely didn't read law or literature.

By the way, "From now on, I won't have too high expectations of your understanding then." - Understanding is a singular noun in this case. It should be "I won't have too high an expectation of your understanding, then."

-Tim
August 30, 2008 8:06 PM

The Lady Melissa said...
1. Why would I care whether people understand me? If they don't understand me, they are fools like you, and shouldn't be on my blog.

2. You can't do PPE at Cambridge. Only at Oxford. I read SPS. Ignoramus u are.

3. Understanding is a group noun.

Just like team. I say Manchester United ARE a good team. I bet you say is ;)

Is there an understandingS?

Have you ever heard the "your undertstandingS of this matter". LOL. Fool.

4. And yes, I encourage discrimination. You are a Peasant and a Fool. As opposed to me, a
Noblewoman and a Genius.
August 30, 2008 8:58 PM

The Lady Melissa said...
Now worship me.

Anonymous said...
you know what i mean about SPS and PPE. oxford and cambridge are basically the same things. And oxford>>>cambridge. whatever. Understandings, schmunderstanding, Manchester United IS a SHIT team. Grammar is debatable. I'm obliged to say that as an Arsenal fan, and I don't care how many trophies they won. but I digress.

anyone who disagrees with you is a fool, eh?

meh. I rather be a fool than agree with some of the utter shit you spew on your blog. Man. It's like looking at a really big dump you took - you can't take your eyes off it.

geez. This is turning into a dirty gutter-brawl. royalty my ass, babe. ya ain't no royal, ya jus' sum slum 'ho who wears princess hot-pants and likes pink, an' talks with fancy airs.

rawr.

-Tim
August 31, 2008 12:30 AM

Anonymous said...
meh. you can have the final say. I may be disappointed at how this turned out but I must say I was extremely entertained and amused by our discourse. Ciao.

-Tim
August 31, 2008 12:52 AM

The Lady Melissa said...
LOL. I point out that you are wrong and you say grammar is debatable? Grammar is NOT debatable - your lack of a proper education is.

Cambridge and Oxford are NOT the same thing. Maybe to peasants like you who have no chance of stepping into their hallowed halls it may be, for both are as mystical and out of reach to you. But we are two very distinct universities with 800 years of fierce rivalry.

And SPS and PPE could not be more different. SPS is Social and Political Sciences, whereas PPE os Philosophy, Politics and Economics. The only similarity is the politics part.

Uneducated, ill-informed peasant you are.
August 31, 2008 12:54 AM

The Lady Melissa said...
I don't think you are a fool cos you disagree with me. Lots of people disagree with me intelligently. I think you are a fool because you are unintelligent and badly educated.
August 31, 2008 12:55 AM

Anonymous said...
I wasn't going to post but... ZOMG. ffs, you're impossible. You're that sort of little girl in school who covers her ears and throws a tantrum. The Cambridge education must be as crappy as their rowing team nowadays if their graduates can't pick up simple sarcasm or irony in writing.

Unlike yours, my education is an asset to be hidden, not a frickin' crutch to boast about. Hallowed halls my ass... you really do take this too seriously. Oh well.

yeah, yeah. Unintelligent and uneducated peasant. How cliche. How passe. More originality please. Why so serious? Why so literal? (hint hint: this is irony.)

I have a good idea of the limited extent of your education (which is not as impressive as you would like to think, honestly), you have no idea how unintelligent and uneducated I am.

-Tim

August 31, 2008 2:07 AM
The Lady Melissa said...
Go get yourself educated on irony.

Trying to correct someone else's grammar and getting it wrong is not irony.

Saying "PPE at Cambridge" is not irony.

Saying Oxford an Cambridge is not irony.

These are ignorant mistakes pure and simple.

August 31, 2008 1:24 PM
Anonymous said...
Irony is wasted on the stupid.

-Tim
August 31, 2008 11:29 PM

The Lady Melissa said...
Yes because the stupid don't understand irony :)
September 2, 2008 12:58 AM

K said...
well, i'm on team Tim. he makes more sense, argues more coherently, understands irony, has humor, poetic rhetoric, and most importantly, humanity.

Tim, i think i have a crush on you. omg. email me at thelady.mondegreen@gmail.c

om if you please :)
September 4, 2008 1:40 AM

2008-08-25T18:48:00.002+08:00

http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/news/story?id=2631338

Wow. I rarely embed videos but this is a must watch. Man... you know how I hate weepy emotional videos. but this... pretty amazing.

Anyway, yeah, read the above line. Father son team, runs marathons, completed ironmans together. A father's love, alright.

2008-08-25T00:19:00.002+08:00

"There will be no pictures in this blog - only words. Some say a picture is worth a thousand words - if you are a retard, illiterate or a chimpanzee. If you are any of these, this blog is not for you. If you prefer Newsweek to The Economist, this blog is not for you. If you prefer Marvel Comics to Thomas Hardy, this blog is not for you. If you did not understand this paragraph, this blog is also not for you."

quoted from http://theladymelissa.blogspot.com/
-

you know, i think being elitist is very in vogue now. Well, elitism has always been in vogue. Why, who would want to see themselves as part of a rabble, a common man? Except for a politician of course, and we all know they are the biggest elitist hypocrites of them all. But I digress. The above paragraph is taken from the blog above. She was educated in Cambridge, of course.

what's with british school and all that elitism, hey? all that snootiness. She is positively frothing with snootiness. You know, I rarely criticize people. (It's true I tell you.) I rarely have negative things to say about other people, and I'm generally amazingly tolerant of other people's bullshit. But one thing I can't stand is someone trodding all over another person - and that's what elitism is. Intellectually trampling over people. The uneducated and the poorly-educated. FFS, can you please pick your battles with worthy opponents? I'm not presuming to be one, you know, but honestly -

i think my biggest problem is the legions of sycophantic fans she has. It's ridiculous, when you read the comments left on her blog. It's as if people have just allowed her to think for themselves - i'm sure they go around spouting clever quotes and ideas taken from her blog. Oh goodness. She's just perpetuating the cycle of idiocy which I'm currently getting into as well, but only for this post. I have to rage. As H so succinctly puts it, i'm raging.

and i'm raging because she's dissing marvel comics, because she's dissing newsweek, and she's dissing art and pictures.

How can a picture not be worth a thousand words? Of course, not inane, ridiculous pictures, but thoughtful, artistic pictures are certainly worth more than a thousand. I wrote "the tattoo" and that was two thousand words and it was based on a picture. And although I know marvel is one of the weaker publishers, despite being the most commercially successful one, I've been a comics zombie for 10 years now, so you don't ever diss comics. She's obviously never read the watchmen, or sandman, or the dark knight etc etc. Thomas hardy my aunt fannie. And although newsweek is not my fav, economist is definitely not either.

from all this intellectual posturing, I can safely declare this wannabe princess an intellectual poseur with poor taste, and too much pride to admit she's just as normal as anyone else.

honestly. Why do people keep insisting they're so much more special than other people?

and her fans should get a life because they're the ones she's dissing on a regular basis. Retarded masochists.

2008-08-06T02:29:00.003+08:00

After watching The Dark Knight, I slumped back in the comfortable movie seat chair. I was stunned. I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what to think. Batty-goodness was oozing out of my ears, Heath Ledger's (may God rest his soul) Joker's maniacal laughter ringing in my head. It would have been more poignant if he had his joker say to batman, I don't know how to quit you!

As usual, after the movie, the fantastic four - G, JR, BK and me went down for some sweet eats and the post movie discussion. JR, having watched the movie twice, then asked a very important question. Which was better? Iron man, or Batman? Now, G and BK immediately said of course, Batman, it was so much more adult, much smarter, the acting better - why, heath ledger's joker!

But i contemplated the question. I looked JR in the eye. he knew my dilemma. He told me he had stayed awake all night thinking how to answer that question... Iron man was new and shiny, and batman, a rehash, a sequel.

I said, Iron Man is better. Of course, that lead to a frantic debate and argument. But no matter what, I say Iron Man is better. Because no matter how good the Dark Knight was, I found so many flaws and weak points with it, while I couldn't think of a wrong move that Iron Man made. Iron Man was a simple origin story, well-executed, well-filmed. Well-acted. There was no fat on the movie. After the movie ended, you pumped your fist and said, yes! what an awesome movie! Batman was like a very big meal, very good, very nice, but too much. You came out feeling bloated. Zhong. I said. full. A little sick, even. I thought it could have done a lot better with the editing work, and the two-face story was a little rushed. Too much, too late. And what's up with that boat dilemma? that's just stupid. Very uncharacteristic of the Joker.

Anyway. Not everyone feels this way. Most of you will like the Dark knight a lot more to iron man. just because it's "Smarter" and "darker". But not everything that is smarter and darker and grittier is better. There's a lot to be said for being shiny and new. For being tight. For editing, for cutting. And for having your main character as the main character. The film should have been called "The Joker". honestly.

I read a very, very well-written and fantastic article that smashes the Dark Knight, written by Brendon Connelly on Comic book resources.com. I reproduce it here, in all it's critical glory. Be warned, Dark Knight fans. It doesn't spare any punches.

-

THE DARK KNIGHT REGURGITATES

Brendon Connelly, good friend of the column and founder of Film Ick disagrees with the entire world and didn’t like “The Dark Knight." He tells us why. Nervous souls should look away now;

I’m not really in the mood for writing film reviews at the moment, and this one didn’t even get started until today, the day of publication, yet, simply put, I felt that I really should write it. You see, not only did I find The Dark Knight to fall somewhat short of its hyped up reputation, I recognized it for what it truly was -- an honest to goodness piece of trash. Junk. Bilge. Garbage. Drivel. Hogwash. Indeed, it’s not entirely unlike Batman Begins, just even more over-extended.

This is probably going to be read as a kill piece, so l might as well just go for it and make with the knife wounds in quick succession. Here is a heap of bullet points, each of them a serious fault in this godforsaken mess of a film -- but even in total only serving as an introduction to my criticisms. As I said, I don’t want to spend all day on this, I just think there needs to be some sense spoken about this ridiculous film. I’ll keep each flavour criticism to a single example.

The dialogue is excruciating, pretty much top to bottom. For one thing, it is laden with countless slabs of pointless exposition -- for example: a shot of a mobile phone inside a man’s skin is effectively titled by the line “It’s a mobile phone". And it keeps happening. This film spells out so many of it’s images it often feels more like an episode of Dick Barton than, say, a good Batman film (you know -- like the one from the 60s, or the two Burton made).
Great wedges of this dialogue are heaped into tiresome “refresher scenes" -- for example, the press conference -- in which the would-be subtext is spelled out for us, effectively rendered text. Sub, sure -- but not subtext. Just sub-par.
And the clichés in the dialogue and delivery were sometimes beyond insulting -- listen to the entire bank robbery sequence for a microcosm of how tin eared the Nolan brothers have proven to be.
Nolan doesn’t have the first idea how to film cinematic space. The action scenes are jumbled in the extreme and there’s any number of problems in even the dialogue sequences. Watch the interrogation room sequence with Big Ears and the clown -- hideous. Even worse is the dangling Joker scene, in which he’s been flipped the right way up. Thinking for a moment about the processes by which we read and interpret images on the screen, this sequence is so disconcerting for the mind of the viewer, and to no useful end, that I have no idea how or why Nolan and his cronies came up with it.
The whole IMAX scenes farrago is fuel for a dozen bullet points in itself but, suffice to say, Nolan is not up to the task of composing images in multiple aspect ratios simultaneously. Why this has gone unreported, I have no idea but I’ll kick in. Nolan pretends to have composed images in IMAX that work perfectly for the purpose of the shot needed at that moment -- and then, that a scope-shaped slice can be taken out and that will work just as well. More stupidly still, the image is to be recomposed again for the eventual Blu-Ray release. Masterful image composition is not about point-and-shoot, nor is it about making pretty pictures -- it is about balancing the elements of the frame to create the desired relationships between them and the most effective emotional or psychological effect on the viewer. If you reckon Nolan can do this thrice in a single shot set-up then you’re either incredibly gullible or don’t understand the issue in the slightest.
And that’s saying nothing of the sideshow gimmick of the IMAX version cutting to a different aspect ratio anyway. Not the choice of a filmmaker looking to immerse his audience in a hermetic and fully dimensional diegesis.
The plot makes little sense for most of the time, and no sense at all at several junctures. The Joker seems capable of accomplishing incredible feats in incredibly short spaces of time, for one thing -- though I can swing with that, to a degree - but there are any number of holes, Batman leaving a penthouse full of innocents with the Joker and his cronies being one particularly disturbing example.
The technology is somewhat reminiscent of CSI, from the bullet reconstruction to the city-wide Sonar scanner. And that is, I think, about the harshest damnation I can pour on any scene revolving around scientific principles without evoking Heroes.
The anti-Chinese drive is head-shakingly pathetic if not outright offensive (the mention of buying American in the courtroom scene pushes it beyond an incidental factor of the Hong Kong gangster plotline).
This film does not take place in any kind of universe where dressing up as a Bat and putting on a hilariously silly voice makes even a drop of sense (unless as an adolescent power fantasy, which for many viewers I suppose it is). Indeed, much of the film does not belong in the world Nolan seems desperate to ground it in, particularly the biological details of Two Face’s disfigurement. All of this could have seemed at home in a universe that played by these rules -- another lesson to be learnt from the Burton films.
The “tension inducing" soundtrack is crassly simplistic.

Essentially, what I’m saying is that The Dark Knight is, almost without exception, a series of incredibly bad filmmaking choices strung together over an unbearable running time. About as far from a masterpiece as I’ve seen in the cinemas in a couple of years at least. On the other hand, I think Gary Oldman was incredible and Eckhart, Ledger and just Gyllenhaal fine. I look forward to their next projects -- Ledger’s in particular -- with keen anticipation.

And you’re back in the room.

-- I personally feel the Heath Ledger comment was very unwarranted and very unnecessary. How very disrespectful and distasteful. Don't speak badly of the dead.

2008-05-19T16:08:00.001+08:00

WOOOOT!!!!!

praise GOD!!!!!! for everything! esp the grades and the advanced creative writing!!!! :)

2008-05-14T02:08:00.003+08:00

HALLELUJAH!!!!!!!!!

it's over! it's over it's over!!!

and i'm done for. hahahah.

but it's okay.

Osces:

first station was musculoskeletal history and hand examination. I looked for everything except scarring and i forgot to do a practical functionality test.

second was cardiovascular history and examination of the praecordium. He cut me off halfway into the history... and then asked me to go straight into examination. then he told me i missed out a very important risk factor for MI... and i was like what???.... and when i was leaving he told me, "smoking!" COME ON!!!! how was i supposed to cover smoking if you didn't let me finish my history???

3rd station was a routine check up, blood pressure temperature and pulse... the sphygnomometer cuff didn't have velcro or markings. first time i've seen this type of cuff. So i looked like an idiot trying to put it on.... took two tries to get the blood pressure it was actually pretty low... 100/65. Everyone else said they couldn't get it, so they said 110/70... HMPH!!!!

4th station was Otitis media/sore throat history and pediatric history and ear exam.... when i reported back i realized i didn't ask her AGE!!!! and didn't ask about functionality of her ear!!!!!!!! I wanted to die right there and then. GRAAAHHHHH

5th station was respi hx and teaching patient how to use peak flow... was pretty okay and uneventful.

6th station was headache hx... WOW it was a long and complex past med hx...in 1994, blah blah blah, 1998, blah blah.... so on and so forth forever.... i was regretting not writing anything down. hahah. but pretty uneventful. when reporting back i just said patient has rich history of cerebrovascular disorders and psychiatric disturbances.

GARRRRRRR

okay. Pracs.

1) Physiology. First question about the rat's menstrual/reproductive cycle!!!! 2nd question about reading and interpreting ECGs... 3rd question about EMG.... muscle. ballistic or feedback? 50/50. 4th question was about the protonation of acid/basic drugs in stomach/intestines and kidneys... GARRR... 5th question was about drug response and drawing a log graph which i just bombed.

2) anatomy. first one was the femur... 2nd was forearm. 3rd was GIT. 4th and 5th were neuro. 6th was head and neck. 7th was heart... 8th was heart. can't remember 9th and 10th.

3) Histology/histopathology. GIT of large colon, blood vessels, one more i forgot. pathology was MI, asthma, and another I can't remember....

4) Microbiology. First up was neisseria gonorrhoea... 2nd was microbiology diagnosis. 3rd was DNA testing and genetic lineage family tree. 4th was titration, cholesterol readings and levels. 5th was necrotizing fascilitis... which i got WRONG.

I think that was it....

For the MCQs... had one careless mistake... another 2 or 3 which i think i was wrong... another 5/6 unsure.... so dunno lah.

Otherwise.

EXAM IS OVERRRRRRRRRRRRR

woot. Anyway. I woke up AGAIN at 3pm. after a luxurious shower the phone promptly rang... and my friends demanded i play dota. so i did! and then after that i watched a movie... then halfway the phone rang and my friends said lets have dinner! so they came to fetch me and we went up to have dinner at their place... steamboat and hot pot! Shiok lorrrrr.... then play taiti. and loser have to do pushups... did like 130 push ups... but BS had to do 200 plus... hahaha. and i won with shit cards most of the time so not bad lah. then after that planned an impromptu road trip for thursday. SO FUN!!!!! probably to kiarma and jervis bay. Going with R, BS and M.

then popped by IH. shot pool and played table tennis with the other guys.

wed is dinner with the guys, then L's Bday party and then EOP party at king's cross. Then thurs is road trip. Friday is church and relax. Sat is CMDFA dinner.

Okay. That's all for now. Going to the gym tomorrow and swimming. borrowing some books. then doing some writing. School starts monday.

I'm applying for my extra fac. Gen eds i'm doing drawing. Extra facs i'll probably do chinese... in worse case... applying for english see if i can do it... and if worse come to worse i'll do movie criticism... hahaha

ok later.

2008-05-01T15:33:00.001+08:00

i want to know how to stop wanting things.
i want to stop wanting things.

2008-04-17T23:18:00.001+08:00

here's a list of things i want.

I want to get published again.
I want to write a book AND get it published.
I want the book to be a novel.
And I want my collection of short stories to get published too.

I want inspiration.

I want to do well for my exams.
I want to study hard and know all my stuff and more, and better than my colleagues.
I want to take the USMLE.
I want to train in the States.

I want to be a good doctor.

I want to play the bass well.
I want to be able to play crazy riffs and solos.
I want to support and belong to a great band.
I want to play the keyboard well.

I want to have music in my life.

I want to dance well.
I want to be able to take the follow on a journey they won't forget.
I want to have my own unique style and look good.
I want to know the music and dance to it.

I want to move.

I want someone to dance with.
I want someone to share my writing with.
I want someone who will understand a doctor.
I want someone who will want me.

I want someone to inspire me.

2008-04-13T00:34:00.000+08:00

STUDY STUDY STUDY!!!! RAWWWWRRRRRR!

2008-03-30T20:31:00.002+08:00

busy week. just studying, tennis, music practice and church. tired. need to study.

oh oh oh.

story time. i went to my friends party on sat night, becky's, the salsa girl... her 28th b'day... really tall beautiful etc. anyway it's at this place called the eastern. the theme was sleek and stylish.

so i was wearing my freshly dry-cleaned dinner jacket, a black round-neck polo.... like a t-shirt with buttons. nice energie jeans with a button fly and a superman belt.... and a newboy hat.

got to the line, with my other friends. the bouncer asks for my id. i was with some pretty girls, right?... and porshee... anyway he asks for my id. i show it. no problem. then he says, i'm going to have to ask you to leave, mate. i'm not allowing you in with that hair cut. i'm like. what???? my hair cut?

btw my hair cut is EXACTLY the same as it was b4 i left. short in the front, with a small small rat's tail behind. like, to my collar. but if you look at me from the front, it's like super short and clean. anyway. you can check my recent photos on facebook.

He says, we have a policy against mullets here, we don't allow mullets in the club. I said, you're joking. You're having me on, in my best aussie accent. and he says, no mate, i'm being dead serious here, you can't go in with that hair style.

Immediately, i square up to him. he's a big, muscular bloke, the bouncer. I square up and say, are you being racist here? is there something discriminatory going on here? Because I think my hairstyle is definitely not a mullet, it's a rats tail at best.

He comes in close to me and stares me down. Don't you accuse me of being discriminatory or racist, but this is door policy. Do you want me to call my manager down to explain it to you?

I said, yes please, please ask your manager down. I'd like to hear it from him.

So my friends get in, easy no problem. the guys hair is all spiked up, some with longer hair than me, no problem. they get in. And i wait for the manager. He comes. Hi, my name is Liam, he tells me. I shake his hand, Hi Liam, your man tells me that you don't allow mullets in the club. First he says, I want to make things clear with you, we aren't racist or discriminatory. I said, I'm very glad to hear that. He says, but we have a door policy of not allowing mullets in. I said, does this look like a mullet to you?

This is NOT a mullet.

(picture removed)
THIS is a mullet.

Anyway. I said, why do you have this policy? he says, we don't want to promote gangsterism, and we don't want gangsters in the club. I said, do i look like i'm a gangster? I'm a medical student, and I wear this hairstyle to the hospital without any problem, I've worn this hairstyle to the Establishment, to the opera bar... etc. (obviously i haven't because i haven't gone out in ages.) but yeah. He looked a little nervous. And then he said, well, you seem like a nice guy and you ARE well dressed. so i'm going to make an exception and let you in.

And i said, thank you very much. So he told the bouncer, he seems like a nice guy and he's well dressed, so let him in.

I said thank you. the bouncer refused to make eye contact. whatever. I hope he gets his bonus that night and that he will have a great night. Anyway, i get up to the counter. Timothy, I tell them. I'm on the guest list. Sorry, the door bitch says, no Timothy on the guest list. I say, you're kidding me. she says, just pay me 20 bucks.

I say no way.

just then becky makes her entrance, after being called on by Liz, she's all togged up in a tiny backless dress with 5 inch stilletos which make her even taller. She says, he's with me, and she hugs me, and she says, i gave you a new list, look there. And lo and behold there's a new list! And i'm on it.

So we go up and we party happily ever after.

The end.

2008-03-26T16:29:00.001+08:00

The View outside my window

Makes it all a little worth it huh.

2008-03-26T09:44:00.002+08:00

HAHAHAHAHHA look what I GOT!!!! I HAS GOTS LIGHTTTTTT!!!!

and the Lord said, "Let there be light" and there was light. And the Lord said it was GOOOOOD!!!!!

WOOOTTT!!!

Now compare to the picture of the old dim room. Sweet.

And look what I've got! An awesome lamp! courtesy of FMS fund (father-mother scholarship fund)

2008-03-26T09:07:00.005+08:00

The singaporean bunch at the beach! whooo!

Got back from camp on monday afternoon.... here's some pics to keep you'all entertained!

Sublime lookout. We came here by accident. Really beautiful. Always is. Would have burst into song and poetry if not surrounded by the public.

Some of the guys. Truth be told, I only knew 3 of them.

My best koala impersonation. Welcome to australia, mate!

The beach. This girl was my batch in RJ... but studying for her PhD. Probably going to get married by end of next year. Tsk.

Photo-whoring at the beach.

More photo-whoring. Don't we ever get sick of it?

The cave we went to explore at the beaches. Disappointed it wasn't a cave. But it was an adventure getting there.

Planning some inane group game as usual... i could've been studying!

Mucking around in the audi.

This is ivan's baby Sophia. I'm her god-father. No, just kidding.

This was the beach. I want to get a house near here next time... just kidding. I probably could afford a single outhouse.

2008-03-17T22:25:00.002+08:00

SIGH. STUDY STUDY STUDY!!!!!!!!

sitting at the books swotting away
sitting til my bum is rotting away
and giving me
DVT
So i eat maggie mee
and fruit bars
and dream of the girls and nice cars
that will come if i succeed
and if i pass the exam indeed
i will be very very happy
and it would have been worth getting DVT
as long as it doesn't become a pulmonary embolus.
and thus
this poem is getting out of hand
and i wanna just play in a band

i guess this has to end.

2008-03-08T12:11:00.002+08:00

wow look what i have look what i got!

this is my new chair, courtesy of J. thanks man. I think it's going to ruin me because it's so comfortable. I was thinking of getting a standing lamp to put next to it so i can sit in it and read. hmmmm but standing lamps are outrageously overpriced... at least $100 plus for one.

see how lah.

2008-03-03T22:35:00.004+08:00

in 2006, I first arrived in Sydney and they made me go buy stuff to cross-dress in and go for the harbour cruise because I'm a little newbie fresher. 2008... let's just say that thank God for the power of choice and promotion! But yeah. Exams to study for.

2008-03-03T22:03:00.005+08:00

Finally finished setting up the room, excepts for J's dismantled rocking chair that I have to get from the box room. Looking forward to setting that up! Crazy shopping day today. Had about 25 kgs worth of stuff... used a massive china bag that I bought at the reject shop to carry everything. Got a coat stand. Now I can very coolly toss my hat across the room onto the coat stand. it also doubles up as a bag stand. Needs some hand bags to complete the look. Also got my new four-tier shoe rack after throwing away the old two-tier wooden one. It's a steel world, baby! It nicely accommodates all my shoes. Finally. And I have a personal handicapped toilet across my room. How sweet is that?

But i have a few complaints about the room - it's west facing, so I get the full force of the noon sun in my face. Ouchy. Thank God for thick curtains. But then when you draw the curtains, it's too dark! The lighting in this room is pretty dim, i must say. It's a single, weak, white light. I need MORE! More light! Probably need to head to Kmart to get a standing lamp or a table lamp.... Maybe get a bean bag on the way as well.

Anyway. Enough rambling. You want to see pictures.

This is the common room. So much nicer and cleaner than all my previous common rooms. Also a lot less noisy and a lot less populated. And a lot more lacking in character and spirit... gee.

The shining! The shining! You half-expect a flood of blood to come rushing down... The corridor. leading to my room. the open room is Jared's room. Probably one of the bravest guys i know. The sort that you want to feel sorry for but can't, cuz his life is so full that it puts some of us to shame.

What did I tell you about dim???? DIMMMMMM!!!! I need to photosynthesize, man!

And here's the desk. Nope. Still not brighter.

Ahhhhh the fabulous four tier shoe-rack! look! there's even some more space on top! i could fit one and a half more pairs of shoes there!

The view from my window. That's the foundation school across the road where all the jailbait go to. I don't know why it's lit up at night.

My room is so big it has TWO windows! joy. But what's the point when you're either blinded by the sun, or blinded because it's just so dim. But it's overlooking a lovely construction site.

Here's the work(play)station.

And the closet. There are many skeletons in it... actually not literally for mine, but that's the case for H. She's got a REAL skeleton in it, as in half a dead person. Like seriously. It was a live person and now it's just a skeleton in the closet.

And ta-daaa. That's the room!

2008-03-02T23:39:00.001+08:00

Back in Sydney.

whew. busy busy busy week ahead, even busier two months ahead. stress. hit the panic button, already!... Somehow, it seems a lot more bearable than i thought it would be.

2008-01-29T01:01:00.000+08:00

And on the other hand,

I never really congratulated Grace and Kei on their marriage!!! Happy Marriage!!! and to you know who.... well.... :) :) :) Never been happier.

weddings and funerals. Talk about drama.

2008-01-29T00:58:00.000+08:00

Ning, I remember that first day I met you in Lecture, I was struck by your sassiness and spunk and sexiness. Over the year, salsa, medshow, lectures - it's been an honour and a pleasure to know you and be counted among your friends... Ning, you will always be in our hearts and minds.

This is a little poem for you, by WH Auden.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and the muffled drum,
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
scribbling on the sky the message She is dead,
put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

2008-01-29T00:57:00.000+08:00

Dear Ning,

The world grows strangely dark,
with the passing of the day,
and the reality becomes so stark,
now that you've gone away.
You leave us all alone,
feeling frail and small,
hear the cry and moan,
as our hearts sink and fall.
Why did you have to go soon?
Snatched away by the jaws of fate,
when the sky was high at the noon
of your life, regrets come too late.

We rant and grieve and we want you here,
though we had to part,
you were absolutely without a peer,
and you live on in my heart.

-Timothy, 2008

2007-12-31T21:33:00.000+08:00

happy new year everybody!!!

2007-12-25T12:38:00.000+08:00

Merry Christmas!!!! photos coming soon.

2007-12-18T20:25:00.000+08:00

Shout out from Japan, Hokkaido, Niseko. the snow here is good. Alternately snowboarding and skiing thanks to Ash who has the same foot size as mine. Anyway. Pigging out on Jap food, which is never a bad thing. The ski pants got tighter and tighter, and the inevitable happened when my skis crossed as I descended down a pretty tricky run - anyway, Ash told me later the skis were loose when he tried them on so he had them fixed up. No wonder I kept wiping out for no reason! A good workman ALWAYS blames his tools, remember that children.

Thanks to the unlimited and impossibly fast and free lan here...the ski-less evenings are filled with fun and excitement thanks to mahjong sets and card sets and youtube!

Will be back on sunday. Catch you then.

Timothy, over and out.

2007-12-14T22:14:00.000+08:00

New Distractions.

This is my new baby, shall we think of a name for her?... invariably guitars and guns must always be women. I was thinking of a classy name for her... maybe something like Ah Ng, with the emPHaSIS on the N-G.... or Ah Ling, cuz she goes ling-a-ling-a-ling.

It's a Yamaha BB414 - 21 frets, rosewood fretboard, alder body, black pearl "Pearlescent Black" finish in BB style body and pickups. Passive electronics with a volume, tone and 3-way pickup selector. Scored a 9.3 at harmony central. The action is still a little high but that can be fixed. Am a little amped about playing it.... now all i have to do is actually learn how to play... hahaha... cuz I'm still pretty crap. But it's worth it.

No seriously. Need a good name. Can't call it a white elephant, and I can't simply call it... bass. It's like a baby. A baby isn't fully a human until it has a name. In fact, the great James Watson (the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and Nobel Prize winner) said that babies shouldn't be considered alive until 3 days after birth, so that parents could decide what to do with them. Toss them down 20 stories, down a garbage chute, abandon them in a dumpster, or try to flush them down a toilet bowl.... all true stories and they wouldn't have gotten into trouble at all if the gah-men had just listened to the esteemed James Watson (whose name sounds like a singer's name... like James Blunt or Russell Watson...) Anyway.

I'll be going to Japan on Sat morning. Coming back on the 23rd. Will be trying to update the blog though.

2007-11-26T14:29:00.000+08:00

Back in Singapore. Exams are over! Let the good times begin...

Right. That's not really true. Lots of things need to be done:

1) SGH attachment
2) GP attachment
3) Study for End of Phase exam next april
4) Portfolio needs to be submitted end of January
5) Finalize the publication
6) Help out with Christmas@Katong
7) Maybe East Timor in January... tsk.

So it's a busy busy 3 months. But call me anyway.

2007-11-14T12:28:00.000+08:00

gosh gosh golly golly.

Fanboy-dom ahead. younger sister especially pay attention!!!!

U2 is re-releasing the joshua tree with cool new songs... heres bono singing one of them and explaining it.

cool huh! :)

2007-11-01T15:05:00.001+08:00

Various parties.

2007-11-01T14:59:00.001+08:00

Pics from medshow 2007

2007-10-31T00:02:00.000+08:00

The drama of life.

Life is a story. You can see why i'm on this spiel. But i believe in the dramatic qualities of stories, that make them as good as they are -

it all started in melbourne, when AC Milan beat Man Utd in the second leg of the Champion's League Semi-finals. I then made the bold prediction that Liverpool was going to beat Chelsea in the other semis, because that was the dramatic nature of the fact. If AC milan was going to be in the finals, then Liverpool would have to be there because it's a rematch. If Man Utd won, then Chelsea would have beaten liverpool because Chelsea was breathing down Man Utd's neck in the EPL. there would have been no drama to see a liverpool-man utd champs league finals.

So therefore, my new theory is that life will progress in a way that the best story is told, regardless of the outcome, tragic or happy. The only crap stories are those we create.

For example, a friend who recently crashed into a road divider, severely injuring his neck and putting his fiancee in a coma... they both remain in ICU, and I'm really upset and sorry for them. However, the writer in me looks dispassionately on, and I find the irony in it - it was not a random accident that happened to a random couple. How ironic that the couple happens to be a pair of amazing dancers - who wanted to compete in the World Salsa Championships together? who claimed to be at the pinnacle of their career? There was even a foreshadowing of the crash - it was a drink-speeding accident. The great dancer liked his alcohol, and recently had his license revoked for speeding.

I don't know. I feel sort of upset at myself for being so dispassionate, but man... it makes a good story.

2007-10-30T23:54:00.001+08:00

Imagine this:

The greatest story ever told, is the story of the universe. With all the different stars, different suns and planets - down to the smallest asteroid - their intertwining paths, their intersections, their origins, their formations, their characters, the way they pull at each other, the way they soar through the cosmos - that's the greatest story ever told. The drama, the beauty of the night sky, those pin-pricks of light that have inspired man to dream of their gods and their stories. But those are gods of men, created by men. What of the nameless god, the one who is behind the scenes, not created by man, but the creator of man? The painter of the sky, the placer of stars, the artist of the heavens? the architect of the earth? Earth is but a small fraction of the amazing story of the universe, but even so all of us have our own stories, intertwining in that massive plot that contains every single story thread that ever started, those that went only minutes, some that went more than centuries. Every single person who ever was born - even those unborn - their stories are there in that novel.

God is an author. We are characters in his book. Are we heroes or villains? Only time will tell.

2007-10-21T05:52:00.000+08:00

It's 7.53am in the morning, and I woke up abruptly from my nap, realizing that I didn't watch the rugby world cup finals. A deep, pervading sense of relief came over me, because I wasn't there. In the same vein, I wasn't there during the nuremburg rallies, I wasn't there when Stalin took over, I wasn't there when George Bush Jr was voted into the government, when Darth Vader froze Han Solo and sliced off Luke Skywalker's distal forearm and hand, I wasn't there when the bad guys won.

I'm a good guy. I believe in Good triumphing over evil, and to me, the springboks have always been the bad guys, with their dirty tricks and foul play, and their generally being from south africa. No disrespect, but the last time they won the world cup was after the all black team mysteriously fell ill with a stomach virus... So I don't know. Who cares anyway. England was always the bastion of peace and justice, flying the union jack proudly. So why would I want to watch them get destroyed?...

Heh. They tried, yeah? Can't say they didn't. But yeah. It was never going to happen.

ANYWAY! I'm glad this DISASTROUS world cup is over. WHEW! finally.

2007-10-15T17:47:00.000+08:00

hey everybody! thanks for the awesome birthday stuff... notable mention goes to the salsa ppl with their amazing gifts, and pancakes, the church group with their failed surprise... and the SG ppl with the lunch treat (thwarted me, dammit), lin and leon with the great cookies... and various other well-wishers. Whee! consolation prize goes to the church group back home with the awesome card!
Thanks guys! You didn't have to, but did anyway. Didn't really deserve it for all the times i've been less than a friend, and it was very muchly appreciated.

Thank God for friends.

Ode to friends

Good friends do not grow on trees,
nor come in packs of ten,
They are valiant companions on high seas,
not ordinary, craven men.

Good friends are hard to find,
they are a very rare stem,
But they are foremost on our mind,
a precious, expensive, impossible gem.

Good friends need love and sunlight,
just like a blossoming tree,
They are a tree
planted by, and watered by - you and me,

2007-10-07T04:50:00.000+08:00

I'm glad i didn't listen to the sirens of the sea. It was really quite incredible. I have never seen anything like it... both the wallabies AND the all blacks are out of the world cup - it's a Northern Hemisphere showdown between England and France. Should be interesting, except i won't be watching it. What's the point of watching rugby when the all blacks aren't playing?...

sigh... sigh.... sigh..... it'sn't a dream, wake up. Smell the flowers and find that they're distinctly.... french.

sighhhh.....

2007-10-06T22:46:00.000+08:00

nyeh nyeh nyeh gotta do my happy dance. Johnny Wilkinson 12-10 Wallabies. Complacent, arrogant gold-shirted players... Whereas the English, with their raw forward power... rugby at its ugliest but most intense. Can't wait for the All blacks and France game. Should promise to be slightly more beautiful... i think the french are going in the wrong direction. Big kickers? kicking back to Rokocoko, Sivivatu, Muliaina, Howlett... They'll be destroyed in broken field play. keep it tight and structured I say. Oh well.

Went to the beach today with the focus peeps. After some coaxing, I got into the water. It was cold, initially, but then I plunged in, and you don't really feel the cold anymore, you sort of feel - feel the water. The ocean's alive, and it had something to say. So i stood there, neck deep in the water, looking at the oncoming waves, letting them crash over me as I strained my ears and eyes, trying to hear and see what the ocean was saying. The noise of the crowd, with their sunblock and their tans and their bikinis and frisbees and posing and lounging and laughing and shouting - the noise of the crowd slowly faded out, drowned out by the sound of the ocean. Then I heard it, coming from far away, from the yachts on the horizon, from the painted skies, dressed in Van Gogh clouds, from the unflinching gaze of the sun - and it also came from near me, around me, surrounding me - the waves, the foam, the surf. My toes lost their grip and I came unanchored. I panicked a bit, slightly, but then the ocean caught me and said, in its siren's call,

"The All Blacks will win tonight. Put $150 on them..."

HAHAHAHA... ran out of poetry - that's where you get comedy, i guess, when you run out of poetry and scrape the bottom of the barrel of creativity.

2007-10-01T20:14:00.000+08:00

1 hour left.

Dreams are life-times lived in seconds in our heads and hearts. I'm dreaming, and it's a life-time to go. I'm dreaming of a feeling.

the feeling you get, just before you leave, before you let go. Some people say it's just in your mind but I can feel it in my chest too, a cavernous, empty space that shouldn't be there. It's the feeling of loss, of realizing that you've left something behind and you can't go back to get it anymore. It's a feeling that the sun gets, at the end of the sunset, just before it dips below the horizon, as the night suddenly fills the sky with the absence of the sun. It's a little cold, and more than a little dark, and all we have are brave little pin pricks of star light that try to hold back the endless black, obscured by the cruel clouds at times. I shiver and try to smile, but it's lost in the darkness.

Then the moon rises, and we watch with a little awe, because the moon reminds us of the coming sun again. Did you see that? That inch of star fall (Stolen from the esteemed mrs elliot because she put it the best) - transient, temporal, but etched forever in our memory for its rarity. But if it isn't shared, did it even happen at all? Another shiver, and I force myself to think of that there is no such thing as coldness - merely the absence of heat. Is this what I'm feeling? The absence of you?

I'm still shivering, and the smile has quivered and died with a plaintive sigh. I let the moon into that space in my chest, and it rushes to my head and I can see every tranquil crater and rock and peaceful detail on its cold, lonely surface, so visited by man, and I can't help compare it to the roiling, tumultuously scorching surface of the sun, foreign and tempestuous and scary. So I just look at the moon, and dream of the sun beyond the horizon, dreaming of the time we will meet again.

2007-09-28T16:10:00.001+08:00

time's running out...

2007-09-18T03:12:00.000+08:00

1. The starry Universe. A challenge or an encouragement to religious faith?

He (God) determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name. - Psalm 147:4

The Starry Universe – What it is, and how it came to be.

The constellations, the zodiacs, the Aborigines, the Chinese, the Greeks – human society has always weaved their stories and myths into those celestial bodies floating in space. The Greeks Libra, Scorpio, Cancer, the Chinese Rabbit, the Bull, the Dragon, the Aboriginal Seven Sisters, Tagai, the Emu – these are just some of the stories that have been told over thousands of years. In the past, they were unfathomable, inscrutable, winking pinpricks in the sky, but modern science has changed all that. We now know stars are nothing but massive, luminous balls of superheated gas, powered by fusion and the collision of atoms, hanging in the cold vastness of space. (Schwarzschild, 1967)

Filtered through layers of atmosphere, in the glare of street lights, the city’s light pollution, look up into the sky and we’re still able to see thousands of stars with our naked eye. With an amateur telescope, we can see millions more. Imagine observing the universe from a figurative “God’s-eye-view”; if there is such a being. Unfettered by kilometres of atmospheric air and water, we would see so much more – galaxies, nebulae, pulsars, black holes, – amazing creatures that throb, expand and glow with a certain life of their own. Counting the stars in the universe is sort of like trying to count the grains of sand on a beach – first we have to measure the visible surface area of the universe, and then determine the visible depth, and then obtain a representative volume of space and count the number of stars in that. Next, by multiplication, astronomers have estimated at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and there are hundreds of billions of other galaxies out there as well. (ESA, 2004)

Continue imagining, and imagine 13.7 billion years back, (Lemonick, 2003) when the universe was nothing but super-hot matter and an enormous explosion – one which we can still measure the effects of today, through the cosmic microwave background radiation. (Hawking, 1988) This explosion, popularly known as the big bang, created the expanding universe as we know it. Eventually, as the universe expanded, it cooled, electrons and nuclei coming together to form atoms, and from atoms, other particles came together, forming stars and planets. According to the anthropic principle, planets like earth, perfectly placed at a safe yet reasonably close distance to the Sun with perfect conditions, (Barrow, 1988) gave rise to life through abiogenesis, as described by the Urey-Miller experiments. Simulating hypothetical conditions present on the early earth, Harold Urey and Stanley Miller proved the occurrence of chemical evolution, synthesizing organic compounds from inorganic compounds. (Ulmschneider, 2003)

What does this all mean?

From all this, there are two ways to go. We can choose to believe that God created it, and we can choose to believe that it all just came to be, and there was no God involved.

A Christian Point of View

In Genesis, it reads, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” (Holy Bible, NIV) In the bible, it took God seven days to create everything, but the popular truth is that it took many billions of years. Does this mean the Bible is false? There are several different ways of interpreting Genesis – one can do it literally, which is what several fundamentalists and creation scientists do. Noel Weeks states that men cannot agree over interpretation methods, not because they differ at the level of the method but at the fundamental level of their religious beliefs. (Weeks, 1979) John Dickson goes on to say that the purpose of Genesis is not to be a scientific truth, but to challenge one on a philosophical and existential level, and establish the authority of God. The writer of Genesis was not answering the question how the world came to be, but who caused it to be, why he did so, and what place do people have to play in that world. (Dickson, 2004) The mechanism that God used to create the world is unknown, and it might be what the scientists say. It is analogous to a painter who refuses to disclose his method or the tools he used to paint a picture – we can postulate all we want, but we will never be able to fully replicate it or be certain about it. As it is, as Christians view the starry universe, they can be encouraged by the beauty we can see, and the grandiosity of it all – feeling truly humble and unable to fully comprehend the starry Universe or its Creator.

In the Book of Job, God spoke to Job about the wondrous things in the world he could never know about, only God knew (Holy Bible, NIV) – this can similarly be applied to the starry Universe. We might be able to theorize and calculate and have the knowledge of the existence of different celestial bodies, but we’ve never walked on the event horizon of a black hole, we’ve never plunged head-first through a nebula. The very thing that connects us with God in this aspect is our ability to imagine. As a viewer trying to understand a painting, all we can hope is to imagine how and why he painted it – it is the painter’s prerogative to know for himself. In this case, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, we’re only lacking the ‘how’ bit.

An Atheist’s Point of View

In their search for the answer to the ‘how’, some atheists take this very starry universe and hold it as proof that God does not exist. (Smith, 1996) They believe the Universe came into existence uncaused, a belief developed from theories about the wave function of the universe, worked on by Stephen Hawking and Jim Hartle. Before continuing, a brief introduction to wave function is required at this point.

Scientific Interlude

A wave function describes all possible states of a particle. For example, a large, irregularly shaped thundercloud fills up the sky. The darker the cloud at an area, the greater the concentration of water vapour and dust at that point. Like an electron’s wave function, the greater it’s value at a point, the higher the probability of discovering an electron there. Take a man sitting in a chair at home in Sydney for example. He has a SchrÖdinger probability wave function as well, something that resembles a cloud in the shape of his body. Some of this cloud would be spread out all over space, and far beyond the Solar System. So thus, even though part of this man’s wave function has spread beyond the Milky Way galaxy, that part is vanishingly small and there is a very high probability that he is actually sitting there in the chair at home in Sydney, and not on the moon. (Griffiths, 2004)

Using quantum cosmology, the Hawking-Hartle model treats the Universe as such a particle, with its own wave function, describing a Universe that has no boundaries in space-time, and establishes an infinite set of parallel universes. (Hawking and Hartle, 1983) Several atheists have taken this as proof that God could not have created the Universe, as if he created the universe, there is a 100% chance it would have come into existence, but with the Hawking-Hartle model, there is a slightly less than 100% chance of that happening – negating the existence of God. (Smith, 1996)

However, all these examples are just theoretical and possible explanations, none claim to be certain and 100% accurate – therefore, it requires as much faith in science to believe these explanations as it does to believe in a Creator God. The starry Universe challenges and encourages this scientific faith just as it does to religious faith.

Challenges and Encouragements

A challenge implies an objection and exception, and an encouragement implies approval and support. When a man looks up into the sky and views the glorious splendour – he might think simply: there is a God who lovingly created all this, a consummate artist. If he knew all the scientific theory – the big bang and cosmic background radiation, the wave function of the Universe – should this cause him to exclude God from the picture? If one saw a painting and knew it was painted, but then saw the tools the painter used – would that detract from the beauty of the painting? Perhaps that’s a flawed analogy. With the Big Bang and the Hawking-Hartle model and the Urey-Miller experiments, man, especially atheists, has been trying to prove the painting painted itself, and there’s no painter involved. Obviously, in that case, the scientific view of the starry universe would be a challenge to religious faith.

However, on a personal level, challenges and encouragements can both be constructive to religious faith. A challenge could set oneself thinking about other possibilities, and perhaps lead to a deeper insight, or an examining of oneself, or studying one’s faith more intensely; perhaps delving into apologetics if one was a Christian. That sort of challenge may well lead to an increase in religious faith. Richard Dawkins had this to say about faith. “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” (Dawkins, 2007)

Faith and Imagination

If faith is the ability to believe in the unseen, it is coupled with imagination, the ability to create the mental picture of the unseen.

Dawkin’s previous statement displays a tremendous lack of imagination and an oversimplification of the human soul. Humans make decisions everyday based on instinct, even with the total lack of evidence, and not just religiously. Perhaps imagination and faith is what differentiates humans from what Richard Dawkins claims to be, a self-reproducing robot dedicated to ensuring the survival of his DNA. (Dawkins, 1998) Unbeknownst to himself, in his abolition of God, Richard Dawkins has established himself as sort of a God, and in so doing, created a personal religion wrapped around him. It is ironic in the fact that it requires some stretch of the imagination to accept the Hawking-Hartle model of the Universe, the Urey-Miller simulation of primordial earth, and SchrÖdinger probability wave function.

After the advent of quantum cosmology, Quentin Smith, another popular atheist, concluded that "the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing". (Strobel, 2004) Richard Dawkins continues in the same vein about the universe that “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.” (Dawkins, 1995) In a trillion years time, the Universe will die of a heat death when existing stars burn out, and galaxies collapse into black holes that eventually evaporate via Hawking radiation. The starry universe as we know it will enter an entropic state and eventually freeze over, signalling an end of all things. (Hawkins, 1976) It is this very purposelessness of creation, the firm, steadfast belief in that there is no consequence after death that leads atheists to think this way. Then why bother with morals and love? Why appreciate beauty and creativity? Why imagine or dream? With the progression of science, we now know they’re just chemical and electrical processes going on in the brain - they don’t mean a thing.

Perhaps it’s possible, when Quentin Smith and Richard Dawkins look up at a night sky; all they see are merely stars that have been there close to forever. From an atheistic point of view, the starry universe is indeed a challenge to religious faith and an encouragement to their scientific faith.

Conclusion

Despite the great debate surrounding religious faith, people will still look up at a night sky and see the starry Universe, and it is up to an individual’s personal and fundamental beliefs to establish how they will look at it. Some people will even paint it, and indeed, some have in the past. Guy Consolmagno, a Vatican astronomer talks about Van Gogh's work Starry Night. He talks about how we can scientifically discover all sorts of interesting scientific facts about the dabs of paint, the chemicals present, and the way the paint reflects light – the wavelengths of the light. We can know all the facts and science: but it is up to us, humans – up to our intellect to interpret the painting. It isn’t a photograph; in fact, it looks nothing like a real sky. It is purely up to our imagination to complete the picture, and allow it to enter our soul. (Physorg.com, 2006) Just as it is, when we look up into the starry sky, looking at just a tiny portion of the wide Universe out there, it is purely up to our beliefs to interpret it, and wonder not just about the ‘how’, but also the ‘why?’.

I hereby state that this essay is my own work and any material used in its compilation has been properly referenced and attributed.

References:

Barrow, J.D. (1988). The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford University press

David J. Griffiths (2004). Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (2nd ed.). Prentice Hall.

Dawkins, R. (2007). (Quote). Retrieved from http://richarddawkins.net/quotes#20 on May 14, 2007

Dawkins, R. (1995) River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Dawkins, R. (1998). Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder. Houghton Mifflin Books,

Dickson, J.P. (2004). The Genesis of Everything: The Thought World of the Bible's Account of Creation. (Centre for Apologetic Scholarship in Education, 2004. Retrieved from http://www.case.edu.au/fileuploads/2TheGenesisofEverything.pdf on May 14, 2007.

European Space Agency, (ESA). (2004). How many stars are there in the Universe? Retreived from http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEM75BS1VED_extreme_0.html on May 14, 2007.

Hartle, J.B., Hawking, S.W. (1983). Physical Review D 28, 2960 - 2975 Issue 12.

Hawking, S.W. (1976) Physical Review D 13, 191 – 197. Issue 2.

Hawking, S.W. (1988) A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. Bantam.

Lemonick, M.D. (2003). Echo of the Big Bang. Princeton University Press.

Physorg.com. (2006). Universe will end with a bang, or a whimper, says Vatican astronomer. Retrieved from http://www.physorg.com/news10311.html on May 14, 2007.

Schwarzschild, M. (1967). American Journal of Physics, Volume 35, Issue 1, pp. 56-57

Smith, Q., (1996). Two ways to prove atheism. (Speech). [This speech was delivered before the Atheist Alliance convention in Minneapolis, MN on April 6, 1996.] Retrieved from http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/quentin_smith/atheism.html on May 14, 2007.

Strobel, L. (2004) The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God. Zondervan.

Ulmschneider, P. (2003). Intelligent Life in the Universe: From Common Origins to the Future of Humanity. Springer.

Weeks, N. (1972) Problems in interpreting Genesis: Part 1. Ex Nihilo 2(3):27–32, Theology Review vol. 8.

2007-09-18T02:41:00.000+08:00

One of the little reasons I came back for a break this holiday.

Studying about milestones and child development - you can know everything there is to know about a baby, and when you hold one - there's just... you know, babies are engineered to create a paternal/maternal/protective instinct within us - that's why they're 'cute'. It's just an ancient mechanism in your brain that makes you want to instinctively protect babies.

Knowing all this, knowing that when awake, she'll cry and scream and demand to be fed, she'll poop and pee and barf and cause all sorts of trouble, she'll keep you awake all at night. They cost a bomb to maintain - all this - and the conscious knowledge that if you want to keep your opportunity costs down if you want to work overseas, if you want to work in places that need doctors the most - there's no way you could want a baby.

Knowing all this, and yet - just holding her, looking at that little saluting hand - studying her face - suddenly realizing you're at the age at which having a baby is not an entirely unfeasible thing - and maybe sooner than you think - it's a scary, awesome thought. And despite the fear, the knowledge - something wells up in you, and cliched as this sounds - a warm glow - because there's no other way to describe a warm glow that... and i can see why people used to relate the heart to emotions and i still think it does - it's not all just neurons firing and synapses and hormones and neurotransmitters and the like - there's something that just touches your heart - and it's a physiological, physical thing -

Just holding that baby in my arms, and realizing what potential she has, the life that she could live and the people she could touch - I was holding onto dreams, hopes and aspirations, I was cradling fears and expectations, a million intangible, invisible, untouchable, unquantifiable, immeasurable, unscientific things.

That's what life is about. It's not about the things we can see, but the things we can't. It's not just the beauty without, but the beauty that you perceive. It's not what you attain or achieve or gain, it's what you give.

And giving life - now that - that is a one of the greatest things of all.

2007-09-15T13:08:00.000+08:00

airport lounges
free internet
means a quick update
8 hours to go! just for the sake of it.

2007-09-11T02:21:00.001+08:00

busy with exams this thursday! will be back in singapore by sat night.

rugby world cup! soon i shall be able to watch guilt-free!

2007-08-28T01:26:00.000+08:00

Tsk. Can't remember what I wanted to write...

Up late doing projects and assignments.

I love Med.

2007-08-26T20:56:00.000+08:00

Hi world.

2007-08-15T20:56:00.000+08:00

2007-08-09T00:07:00.000+08:00

2007-08-04T01:54:00.000+08:00

hoho!

look who's back!

And gone again. I'm sure you're getting annoyed by this. Here, look at some pictures. That'll make you feel better.

GAAAAAHHHHHH

pictures refuse to load!!!!

ok read a poem then. anything to keep you entertained.

Paris in the Summer time

I now know why the Parisians are so damned arrogant.

They have a great city.

Every building is a sculpture,

beautifully lavished with painstaking detail.

Every monument is a monument,

Extolling the achievements of the French.

Like how they got their asses kicked in World War I and II,

And had to be rescued by the Brits and Americans.

And in gratitude,

They put up with McDonalds and Starbucks,

And learn some English.

And in English I asked:

Why are some painters are better than others?

Why are the Parisans cooped up in museums looking at paintings,

When they could be outside in the terrific sunlight,

Enjoying a magnificent view as well?

Must they enjoy beauty from another point of view?

You can find a lot of points of view in the louvre.

The louvre looks like a familiar scene out of a famous movie.

The Eiffel is where TomKat got hitched.

The arc de triumph is a big, stone arch.

The Versailles looks like it’s a set in a period movie as well.

The French wines taste like Australian wines

To the uncultured non-connoisseur,

who drank along the banks of a river.

The Seine is not very clear or large.

The museum of modern art is full of junk,

Laid out on the floor.

My mother would have said Clean the place up!

I have to say more about that museum

I love it

Performance art is:

People teaching plants the alphabet,

People snipping off their pubic hair,

People sticking thumbtacks into themselves

People shooting themselves in the left arm

People licking themselves and drying themselves

People having gay sex

People catching lead paper

People walking around a square

People demolishing a sculpture

People lecturing the crowd

People opening up a café that sells leaves and rocks to eat

People writing with a fountain pen as water is poured onto them

People moving slowly and saying, “I am making art.”

I guess the Parisans know more about art

Than I do.

The Parisan crepes are crap

Parisan coffee is crap.

The Parisan summer weather is not crap

The weather is hot.

Parisan babes are hot.

Hotter than the weather.

That is why I like Paris.

Subjectivity: A Salute to Modern Art

What is poetry?

There are two kinds,

As shown below:

Bad Poetry

People hate Bad Poetry

This is a bad poem

We hate bad poems.

Good Poetry

People like good Poetry.

This is a good poem

This is a good poem.

People should find this

A good poem.

It should belong

To the museum of modern art.

2007-07-30T00:06:00.000+08:00

this is what distractions are made of.

thanks jonathan, for the loan. hopefully you'll get it back in one piece.

2007-07-28T09:55:00.000+08:00

i know this is getting boring, but one more week of apologies and delays of posting.

soon! soon!

2007-07-21T15:23:00.000+08:00

back in Sydney. back again.

big sigh.

2007-07-17T03:41:00.000+08:00

sorry for the lack of updates.

i've been busy.

busy in singapore. tumultuous times.

i like the sound of that.

exciting times. scary times.

many things are happening, and when they do, i feel like i've been seeing them coming since forever. what's that called?

whew.

there's so much to thank God about, i don't really know where to start. Just want to say that it's been pretty much incredible. it's funny, you never think that you might get something you want so badly, or desire so badly... but you know, "Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart." Psalm 34:7.

we'll wait and see. i can see the prize dangling in front of me. it's scary. i want to grasp it, but it just might slip and fall out of my hands like that glass i broke just yesterday.

clumsy me. how am i expected to be able to drive a speedboat?

maybe i'm behind, being dragged in the water, coughing and spluttering.

2007-07-02T02:42:00.001+08:00

BACK HOME. LET'S CATCH UP. DROP ME A MESSAGE - you know my singapore number. if you don't, you can always get me here.

2007-06-26T00:54:00.000+08:00

oh by the way, back on sunday.

and happy 222nd post!

2007-06-26T00:51:00.000+08:00

exams on thursday! joy!

2007-06-23T23:32:00.000+08:00

.... I always believed this day would come. I knew it in my soul. But i never really thought... it would actually happen... and despite hoping against all hopes... it actually did happen.

I always said, we're bigger than him, and then, as new news comes in.... i've got to ask... are we bigger than him, AND HIM?...

i don't know...

started supporting arsenal in 1997, at 12 years old... arsne wenger's first full season at highbury... bergkamp's second season... henry came in soon after that... bergkamp won writer's choice player that year and we won the league/FA cup double... then soon after that we sold petit and overmars... but we had pires... and wiltord... we had kanu as well then...

then there was that season - undefeated at home... 2001/2002 - won the league at old trafford and won the FA cup...

then there was that season of perfection, undefeated in the league, 2003/2004 - 11 points ahead of 2nd place chelsea...

and then 2004/2005... that was tough... but at least we won the FA cup over Man Utd on penalties...

then 2005/2006... sucky season. discovered cesc fabregas... last season at highbury... got 4th place in the league, thanks to aston villa beating tottenham... but we reached the champs league final - amazingly... but had jens lehmann sent off for fouling eto'o, and then we went ahead on sol campbell's header but then were undone by larsson... and lost 2-1 to barca....

2006/2007.... was another dismal season... getting a little agitated...still played beautiful football, but... henry was sidelined for most of the season...baptista proved to be a flop... reyes made a hit on the last day for real madrid, looks like he's going to stay there... we moved to the Emirates...

and now, 2007/2008....

henry won't be there anymore. Woah.

and why? cuz he said that wenger might be leaving at the end of next season... and he can't take that... so thierry henry will be playing for barca next season.

so barca has ronaldinho, messi, eto'o and henry now. the new real madrid...just for starters... heh... but REAL real madrid has robinho, van nistelrooy, cassano, raul.... and both teams have star-studded back-lines and midfields... man u has rooney, christiano, and now hargreaves, nani, and anderson...not to mention giggs and scholes, who are now old birds.... chelsea has lampard, ballack, drogba, scheva, essien, robben, joe cole... inter have zlatan, viera, adriano, figo, crespo, ac milan have kaka, inzaghi, ronaldo, gilardino.

Bayern munich just got franck ribery... sigh... anyway we don't need him.

and what do arsenal have?... our best player is 18, 19 years old? cesc fabregas?... 2nd team for spain?...what now, rosicky and hleb? adebayor?...the future of english football, theo walcott?...denilson?....all unproven stars...just great potentials, that's it. And that's all that arsenal has, potentials... kudos to wenger for developing youth, but at the senior squad?...sigh...the tight-wads on the board... SIGHHHHHH.... and when wenger leaves, who's going to continue the tradition of flowing, attacking football? are we going back to the graham days, of boring boring arsenal, and 1-0 to the arsenal?... possibly 0-1 now...?

on top of that...

the lakers might be trading kobe bryant... heh...

so that's my two teams.... just... i don't really know... i mean, we're bigger than a single player or a single manager...but... heh... i'll probably be an old man when i next see arsenal get top 4, or hoist a trophy.... or see the lakers getting to a play-off finals, or even the play-offs, or getting another set of rings... i dunno... i really don't know what to feel... i mean, i've always supported arsenal for their flowing attack led by henry, or bergkamp, the lakers for their showtime magic and the black mamba... so without that.... i don't know...

wow. all we need now is for all the all-blacks to go on strike, or... i don't know... heh.

it'll be an interesting year next year... really interesting...

2007-06-23T15:39:00.000+08:00

It's been nearly a year, so i think the furor has died down quite a bit. and i don't think anyone reads this blog to care very much anyway, and that it's sort of a good place to make my opinion public but not that public too, you know what i mean?

Anyhow. I just watched this video: the importance of being Elite -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtavgfcZrvs

anyhow... i found it quite funny and creative at first, and very honest and sincere and all that. very homegrown and down to earth.

at first.

the more i watched, the more sick i felt.

not at the girl, poor wee shu min, who got "owned" and her daddy, who got "owned" as well... but at the general state of netizens out there.

just want to tell them all: GET A LIFE.

seriously, everyone is entitled to their own opinions, even MPs and singaporeans. You could find this surprising, and say, but what if their opinion is inherently wrong? like that elitist girl?

I dunno. THere's some truth in EVERYTHING. even in lies, so i don't think she was completely wrong. Yes, that's right. I'm defending her. Not her actions - like, she shouldn't have commented about the guy in the first place! he's entitled to his own opinions too.

But then, she's a debator, so i imagine she can't help it but argue. A pity the less articulate netizen populace took offense to people airing their opinions and subsequently "owned" her. I think that's the problem here. There's no fair play these days. Majority wins - i'm right and you're wrong.

Ever heard of agreeing to disagree? heh. I dunno. Solves a lot of problems. Net trolls, hiding behind their monitors, trolling forums and blogs just to pounce on an opportunity to criticize, deride and mock opinions - heh... don't think they'd really be that vocal in real life. If they were, they'd think about doing something about the thing they don't like - effecting change, maybe doing something constructive. Don't like a video i made? Make a better one. Don't like a post i posted? Post a better one. Don't like a picture i drew? Draw a better one. That sort of thing.

The only sort of opinion you should express publicly would be one of encouragement - you want to criticize, do it privately and politely. No need to loudly embarrass someone... personally - i'd be more embarrassed for you.

ciao. Back to studying, so "get out of my elite uncaring face." hahaha...

2007-06-22T10:39:00.000+08:00

ode to exams

Ohhhhh

i love exams i really do
they make you so happy and blue
studying like freaks
for a couple of weeks
is just the thing to do!

oooohhh

anatomy physiology biochemistry
pathology immunology embryology
microbiology histology pharmacology
and clinical examinations toooooo....
is just the thing to do!

ooooohhhh

now this poem is sucky
you've got to excuse me
but i'm so really happy from all the studying
so let me get back to it
and keep the candle lit
burning from both ends!

oooooohhhh

YMCA!
YMCA....

2007-06-14T02:05:00.000+08:00

new life beckons.

2007-06-13T04:03:00.000+08:00

scenes of devastation in my room when i upended my desk and my chair.

this after i found out what else had been done to me.

no matter. it's now more or less over.... for now.

whoever you are, if you're reading this, and according to some thinking - you might actually be, we never know -

but whatever it is...

I'm not angry at you.

nor do i hate you.

funny. can't seem to bring myself to want to murder you and gouge your eyes out with my thumbs and bash your head against the floor until your skull cracks and your brains leak out - can't bring myself to wish that your whole family dies in a terrible accident and you suffer alone in torment the rest of your life.

not for something that i can always earn more of in the future.

can't seem to bring myself to wish all that upon you, because whatever life you're living in... must be pretty much hell already if you can do what you did to me.

i hope you feel better. I hope you're happy with what you got, what you now have, what once belonged to me. I hope you're satisfied, and full, and don't want anything else. what else do you want? entertainment? go ahead, make my life miserable, if it makes yours any better. Go ahead, do it all. finish what you started, and make some sport out of me.

but i'm not going down without a fight. you can be sure of that.

2007-06-08T23:26:00.000+08:00

yes, yes... i didn't want to post more bad news on the blog.... but you know how life is distinctly similar to the female of the canine species...

but yes the dude who stole my wallet used my driving license to stroll into a few ANZ banks in australia and withdraw copious amounts of moneys from my account. The police and bank are investigating my case, which means i still don't know if i will ever get my cash back. The teller who stupidly gave the guy my money looked at me, and said, yeah, he doesn't look like you, but how was i supposed to know? when i saw your photograph on the driving license and him standing there in front of me, signing your signature and quoting your address and birthday really smoothly and easily, i really believed it was you. The teller shrugged her shoulders then said, I'm sorry,

but all asians look alike to me.

okay. i find it relatively easy to differentiate whites. Don't know why you can't. Oh well. Not your fault as well. At least you ONLY gave the guy MOST of my money and not ALL like he asked for... haha... it was kind of funny when i closed my account and the manager took out her wallet and gave me $0.64 straight away. Nah, she didn't, she went out and got the cash, but i thought it would be funny if she had just gone straight for her wallet.

Try withdrawing cash now, you ******** *********, you ******* *** *****, worthless ***** of ***** *****, ******* **** ******* *****, ***** **** **** **** **** * *** ** * * *!!!!!

bet you're wondering what's all those. Don't bother trying to figure them out. It's all random.

anyway. thanks in advance for all your sympathy and thanks for all your prayers.

I'm sort of feeling okay. feeling fine. I know people are expecting me to get all excited and pissed off about it, but there's nothing much i can do now. Rest is up to the bank and the police. And God of course.

Everything is up to God, eh?

About the dude who stole my money... gee... i think he's a pretty smart guy... obviously knows i'm an international student who needs every cent. I think it shows a complete and utter lack of sympathy and moral values. I feel a little embarrassed for his mom, actually. I was having some fantasies of catching the dude and spearing him through a glass door, then grounding and pounding him, turning his face into pulp. But after that i really regretted those violent fantasies. Like, seriously. And anyone who knows me properly can attest to the fact that i don't usually regret that sort of thing. I usually relish it and replay it in my head in slow motion with different takes. But this time is different. Really weird.

Strangely enough, I don't feel like punching his face or anything, or kicking him in the nuts like some people have suggested. If i ever met the dude, I would probably say, hey, no worries dude. It was sort of an adventure for me. I hope you used that money you stole from me well, like paying your family's grocery bills or for your kid brother's leukemia treatment or for your sister's special school fees, or your dad's heart transplant or something like that. Even if you used it on drugs and sex, I hope you had a great time with it, eh? And that you were safe, wink wink.

I find it kind of ironic, cuz after my wallet got stolen, i was praying that God would forgive the thief, and bless him and prosper him as well. Whooo, well, God sure has a sense of humour cuz the thief certainly has prospered A LOT now. haha... gotta see the funny side in this. then again i think that maybe i shouldn't have prayed that, but what's done is done heh... maybe pray now that God will convict this dude's heart and let him become a Christian or something... and then donate that money to someone who needs it more.

I think becoming a victim is a weird feeling. I'm hardly a victim, or even if i am, i'm a victim of something of my own engineering, hardly ever of some random - well, okay, there was the egging incident as well - when some dudes chucked eggs at me and porshee while we were waiting at a bus-stop, we had to send our coats for dry-cleaning after that. And there's this other time... hahah... well, in Australia you've got to be prepared for a little victimization, huh? But being a victim may not be a bad thing... for one, you'll always feel dead innocent, like, guiltless. Blame-free. Hollow. Empty. Numb. Which is sort of what i'm feeling now.

I'll borrow a line from Alan Moore's V for Vendetta. "I feel like an angel."

I'm sure that feeling will wear off soon and you'll be entertained by my outraged post.... haha...

2007-06-04T18:27:00.000+08:00

AND I'M FEELING SORE ABOUT MY WALLET AND PHONE.

someone stole them from my bag during rugby league. as in, ransacked my stuff. all my stuff was on the floor when i came back and my phone and wallet gone. after i cancelled my debit card and bank card, i called my phone and offered the guy money.

It's actually a long drama but i typed it all once and lost it and i don't feel like doing it again. SO anyway. I offered the guy money, but he demanded more. I said okay, planned to meet and macdonalds. he asked what i looked like. i said i was asian. he said, deal's off, he doesn't trust asians - we're slimy.

he stole my wallet, and he doesn't trust me??? WTH????

anyhow. I went and waited with some hardcore guys, but no dice. he didn't show. my friends told me they tried calling me and this guy pretends to be a friend whom i lent the phone to. oh yeah, i'm peter. Where's timothy? oh yeah, I'm his friend, yeah he lent me his phone. yeah, he lent me his wallet too, i borrowed them from inside his zipped up bag while he was playing rugby, yeah, i asked him, it's all legit. he's asian, you know, slimy, can't trust him much, but yeah. nice enough to lend me stuff.

WTH????

cancelled my phone and got a new sim card. Same number, guys. So anyone who thinks i should have your number do send it to me. Thanks. :) yangxianyi@gmail.com, or by facebook msging or from msn.

2007-06-04T18:23:00.000+08:00

played rugby league on sunday.

quite fun. Different from union. more structured, more rigid. run straight, crash, don't pass. made good meters, i did. and tackled decently. got my lip split open after being tackled by 3 massive aussies. but that's it. feeling a little sore.

2007-05-27T14:47:00.001+08:00

Some photos from the after party of the mid-summer's night dream play thing.

Yes, yes... i'm partying and partying and not studying at all... the life of a med student.

Maybe i should take some pictures of me studying and put them up on the blog. What do you all think? Just to prove that i actually do.

watched pirates of the Caribbean 3.... i haven't watched 2, so i was mildly entertained by trying to figure out what had happened in 2. Otherwise, it was an entertaining movie - you must remember I have ZERO expectations at all. In fact, I thought it was going to be horrendous. However, despite the plot trying to be too smart for its own good, i thought it sort of worked out in the end. So that was fine. And johnny depp as usual, stole the show.

Anyhow.

Some pics from a bbq from the beginning of the year.

2007-05-20T02:10:00.000+08:00

It's been a long, lonely 9 days for all you readers of this blog. Sorry about that. While I can't promise you that it won't happen again, I can tell you that it might.

Anyhow. Reporting in.

1)Arsenal are 4th. Damn goal difference.
2)Lakers didn't even get past the 1st round of play-offs, so no more kobe goodness.
3)Facebook is good. Everyone go do it.
4)We're with the 1st years now.
5)I'm still single. Lucky for all you girls out that(typo) - there. I was talking with a friend recently, and she was complaining about the lack of decent guys and decent gentlemen available. I said, what about me? and she looked at me, and then kept complaining about the lack of decent guys.

Ouch.

6)Salsa is good. Everyone go dance.
7)Playing rugby still. Next thursday is the semis against the favourites warrane.
8)Watching Australia vs Wales test next Sat. Woot.

Ok that's about it.

9)The mom and the sis came. We ate and ate and ate. Nicks on tues night, Kingsleys on wed, Buon Ricardo on Thurs. in the words of borat, very niiiice.

Now.... that's about it.

ciao

2007-05-11T12:12:00.000+08:00

Okay, I'm back in Sydney. Just ended the first week of Uni. Sigh sigh sigh. Back to the grind.

Publish

2007-05-05T00:39:00.000+08:00

still in melbourne. Enjoying myself. Good photographer with me.

Ok, review of Spidey 3, spoilers ahead so be warned.

I came out of that movie feeling angry and disgusted, firstly because I couldn't believe what P was saying. "Tobey Maguire couldn't act for nuts!" He said, "I was totally laughing during that crying scene on the bridge." And it was. THe whole cinema started laughing when he did. "And there was so much love and dying..." he concluded. "All in all, it was ridiculous and childish."

Hello, comic book movie?

"Tobey Maguire can't act... his crying is pathetic. Have you seen Keanu Reeves in Sweet November? Now that's ACTING! When you see him cry...you can also cry."

Hmmm. I've never seen sweet november.

"WHat???? It's so touching and it's such a good movie."

I didn't have the heart to tell him that I didn't see sweet november because 80/94 reviewers called it rotten.

"You just believe in whatever reviewers say, you don't make your own opinion..."

In the case for sweet november, let's just say i'll spare myself the torture. As for Keanu Reeves acting, I've seen enough of it in the Matrix Trilogy...3 movies with Keanu is more than enough Keanu for a life time. Woaaaah. MORE EMOTION! Wooooaaahhh. MORE EMOTION!!!!!! Wooooahhh.

"You're opinion is biased and clouded because you love spider-man..."

uh-huh. Sure. You know me. I most harshly judge the things i love the most. I'm the first to defend them and also the first to criticize, so don't tell me I'm biased.

In conclusion, Spider-man 3 rocked my socks. Not as good as 2, but better than X-men 3, so... go watch it already.

2007-05-02T21:45:00.001+08:00

In melbourne right now! woohoo!

2007-04-28T18:14:00.000+08:00

The Australian salsa classic is upon us in Sydney....

Check out who I caught up with at cruise bar on thursday night.

None other than reigning on2 world champion, oliver pineda and the "prince of Salsa"/Mr Mayan... Johnny Vasquez!!!

Of course David wanted a shot too... they were still pretty obliging...

Jason and Gino... Gino's all the way from NZ. Best male follow I've ever seen. Amazing awe-inspiring quadruple spins and styling that make ladies green with envy.

Partial Salsa peeps! with two not so salsa ppl... in the middle is the runner up for the melbourne freestyle salsa championship thingy...

Just to show how good oliver pineda is... here's a li'l something courtesy of youtube.

And here's him again... he's the guy who comes on a little later... not the first guy. that's ryu from japan. keep in mind this is all purely social, even the first one...the girl has NO idea what he's about to do!

And this is Johnny Vasquez!

2007-04-28T18:08:00.000+08:00

Classmates!

Last clinical session...

don't we all look sad.

Scenario group peeps!

with our french facilitator.

2007-04-15T01:12:00.000+08:00

SALSA!!!!Porshee dancing with li'l Liz! Finally.

Us and Emily Alabi! Woot. Porshee danced with her as well but i had no chance. She only danced like, 4 salsa songs and 1 cha-cha song and then disappeared. Sadness.

Part of Salsapeeps.

The japanese contingent! minus tomomei and hannah and Me.

Porshee dancing with emily alabi. Was trying to be discreet, but wasn't easy. Sigh. oh well. I probably wasn't good enough to dance with her anyway. SIGH....

2007-04-14T02:57:00.000+08:00

big day coming up on saturday:

Junior and emily alabi are in sydney, and i'm going to their party. Hopefully i'll get to dance with them. CROSSES FINGERS!!!! i probably won't, but it's still exciting too hope. Anyway, there'll be A LOT of good dancers there, so...check this out!!! That's them there.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=yZ913L-ABeQ

And as for little liz, the sydney champ i danced with: (sorry to toot my own horn, but i wanna share my happiness with you all!) hahaha you can ask jianyang about that...

this is her:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=RGzSpR4fhS8

How cool huh??? I'll try to take some pics and videos for you all!!!

PS: Some other really cool news has come up, but nothing finalized yet...so... crossing fingers and praying hard. wink wink!

2007-04-05T02:27:00.000+08:00

I get chills down my spine.

300 is the BOMB!!!!!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=wZm52UrkDpA

wet my pants watching it. "This is blasphemy! This is MADNESS!!!"

"THIS IS SPPPAAAARTTTAAAAA!!!!!"

going to do lots of push ups and sit ups and stuff right now.

I looked at cheryl's blog (ENDORSEMENT!!!) Saw an article about grammar complexity and idea density. COOOL.

Let's try to write something idea dense.

He sat in front of a flickering screen, his head bowed. When he looked up, he was smiling.

AHA! dense enough or NOT???? si beh zai lorrrr....

(If you couldn't tell, I was being hypertextual. If you still can't tell, don't bother.)

2007-04-01T13:36:00.000+08:00

depressed depressed depressed.

My mood reflects how arsenal is playing. Sloppy and unsharp and with no flamboyance or flair or panache. And the lakers aren't doing well at all as well, so it's a little bit of a bad year for us. Oh well.

2007-03-21T00:28:00.000+08:00

Just to show life IS just one big party here down under.

2007-03-21T00:15:00.000+08:00

The big 200. It's finally come around.

Wow. It's been a long while since the second incarnation of this blog came up. The first timoland, that was taken down after someone plagiarized it, and a post of mine popped up on someone else's blog.

Can't you feel the nostalgia in the air?

I'll celebrate later with a massive photo post, don't worry.

Listen to me first.

The first timoland was taken down also because my parents were pretty against blogging. Gasp! It wasn't a good example for my sister, apparently. And I'm sure they'd take some offense at this statement, but I just want to put it honestly. This isn't a place to air dirty laundry or that sort of thing, no private details, but I want this to be an honest blog.

Not a fake, oh, look at how I party sort of thing, or look, I'm such a photo whore, or look, I'm such an angsty emo dude who perpetually wants to commit suicide. Ha. Some church friends call me timo the emo, just because it rhymes.

But it's gone through all those phases, this blog has. I had started it to give me some discipline in writing a novel. 200 posts later, still no novel. A failed attempt with 40 pages, yes, and a manuscript of short stories, yes, but no great singaporean novel... yet. Come back to you at 2000 posts.

This blog saw me picking up girls. It saw me get my driving license. It saw me play rugby in the army. It saw me ORD. This blog saw me get a serious girlfriend. It saw me come to Sydney and start uni. It saw me take exams. It saw me go back home. It saw me starting to salsa. It saw me making friends. It saw me break up. It saw me go on holidays. It saw me studying.

This blog... it's sort of like your window into my world. If you don't know me that well. If you do, it's sort of like an extra dimension to me, I guess.

What you see ain't always what you get, baby.

Happy 200th.

2007-03-19T10:12:00.000+08:00

Last night was Salsa night at Equilibrium. I was having a pretty good night, dancing well.

There was a chinese girl who rejected my offer of a dance. She was hanging around Fernando, a mayan 2004 competitor. She danced with porshee instead, later on, and he told me she wasn't as good as she thought she was. "Like a rock," he told me. "And she doesn't know any moves." All throughout the dance she stared at him haughtily, down her nose, as if he was doing swing dancing instead.

I was about to leave, then, when I saw Liz sitting down near the exit. Not dancing. My heart started racing and I thought, "Oh no, I'm going to do something stupid." And then I heard myself ask her for a dance. She sized me up. Beginner.

She sort of sighed. "Ok, sure. Go easy on me, though, my shoulder is cramping up."

I smiled, and turned on the charm. "We're big fans of yours, we are." I told her. "You and Jamie are inspirational." A little flattery will get you everywhere.

I couldn't believe myself. I was dancing with Little Liz. I personally thought she was one of the best dancers in the world, not just Australia. She was really something. Porshee told me later he was jealous, and I had danced really well. But I said, "It was all her. She made me look good."

The chinese girl who rejected my dance earlier gave me a strange look later, as she fawned over Liz as we chatted with Jamie. I'm sort of glad I didn't dance with her now. I would have looked like an idiot.

I smiled the rest of the night. Still smiling.

2007-03-13T11:49:00.000+08:00

WORK WORK!

and party of course. It's a nice feeling when you get to do both.

I'll post more and will put up piccies when i have more time.

haven't taken much this year anyway... the thrill has worn off.

2007-02-28T18:28:00.000+08:00

The year is NOT off to a good start...

Arsenal lost the carling cup finals to Chelsea. I watched the match the night before school started and went to school in a bad mood. I didn't even want to read the news. In fact I'm not looking at any football news until.... well until maybe later when Arsenal takes on the Rovers in the FA Cup replay. They had better win.

And they had better beat PSV.

Sigh.

Arsenal was fielding youths... 18-19 year old boys. Fabregas, denilson, Diaby, traore, Eboue, Hoyte, Senderos, aliadiere, walcott.... All less than 23 years old. And they played SO amazingly well. Beautifully taken goal by walcott...

until chelsea equalized through Drogba's goal from a glaringly off-side position. Sunk again, just like Larsson's goal in last year's Champion's League finals. Then when we were on the verge on getting an equalizer, coming back from behind like we ALWAYS do, we were stopped by the dirty play of jon obi mikel... I mean, it was OBVIOUS he wanted to stop the game, waste time by provoking toure, and wayne bridge was rolling about the grass, feigning injury to get adebayor sent off... SIGH SIGH SIGH....

I realize I become pretty incoherent when I get emotional, huh. Hahahah....

2007-02-28T18:26:00.000+08:00

Back in new college.... for a sem at least.

Hermitting this year. Nobody great.

Been busy busy busy.

School's started.

Starting to study.

Sigh.

but....

no buts.

Sigh.

2007-02-19T03:16:00.000+08:00

The irony of it all. I went to a history museum on the 14th of Feb. The singapore one. Everyone go check it out, it's awesome. I liked it muchly, and that's something from someone who's been to the National Museum in Cairo, the Smithsonians in DC, the Louvre in Paris (Okay i know they're not really history museums but come on, eh?!) and... errrr.... the Smithsonians in DC and did I mention the Museum in Cairo?

Anyhow.

I was looking for Singaporean Novels online.

Lo and behold, I stumbled onto a website like a fly into a spider's lair, but this was one with strands of intellect and wit and I immediately fell in love with the author, who was or is a girl who was or is now or maybe not free.

It was an old post, and her opinions echoed mine and I was a lonely fish in the pacific , preferably not a sole because of the words that are about to be spoken, that had bumped merrily into its soul mate. You get it now.

Desperately, I advanced to her most recent post, and a single sentence stood out, a line which formed a chalk outline around my broken heart.

Her voice was husky and effervescent. Smoke bubbles in a jazz bar.

"Director boy got divorced, and proposed to me. I accepted. The wedding's going to be next year."

Solitary tears like the diamonds I would have given her as well dropped onto my laptop keyboard.

My heart was broken long ago; a thought ended, a black cat retreating into the shadows of my mind, padding softly. Its eyes glow luminously for a moment, and then it's gone.

The coroner's report about my heart just came in. It's a 15C. That's police talk for a suicide.

2007-02-14T02:34:00.000+08:00

Another angst-ridden post.

Get it all out here before it surfaces in my work, eh?

It's quite exciting, really. Life. All the endless possibilities, endless permutations. Why, it's enough to make any man go mad with indecision!

But as we all know, all the choices end in death.

It is the prerogative for a struggling artist to be full of angst - chiefly, jealousy, anger and shame. However, once successful, there's no reason to feel those, anymore.

So let's all cross our fingers and hope that I'm successful soon, yeah? or else you can be sure of many, many more angst-ridden posts in the near future.

Or maybe I just wanna hit 200 posts asap.

2007-02-08T01:23:00.000+08:00

A friend called today, asking for help, and I gave it the best I could. I understood. He once asked the same thing, long ago. I told him what I thought then, give it a shot, give it a try.

Today, I told him to give it up.

2007-02-08T01:20:00.000+08:00

Somedays, I wake up with crusted eyes and morning breath and I reach over for my handphone to see if she messaged what time she's going to be done for the day and then....

...I wake up.

2007-02-07T01:31:00.000+08:00

Things I miss, and maybe won't have again.

I think I've lost it.

More ways than one.

No catchy quotes.

2007-01-29T01:59:00.000+08:00

Gabriel Garcia Marquez quotes, told as to form a semi-coherent post.

Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me. Maybe it's because my vocabulary isn't very good. I have to keep looking up words in the dictionary.

It's been more than a week now, just a few days from two.

I've done things which have amazed myself with their audacity and their impulsiveness: amazed myself with my resolution. Many times I thought I would crack, for the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good; and thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burdens of the past.

But unfettered by emotions, or rather, the maelstrom of emotions I am undergoing has a still, calm eye of the storm, and my mind is like a silver fish in a clear brook. But are they my thoughts? My beliefs? The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.

It has been said, a person doesn't die when he should but when he can. Why not a relationship? And always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage (or relationship) is not happiness, but stability.

But what is happiness, indeed? And was it ever stable? A train approaching a cliff is stable. Did I expect to much? He who awaits much can expect little.

I just want to leave a message for someone who needs this, just as much as I do, and according to that person, that beautiful, lovely person, perhaps more. The message is: nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry. For both of us, once again, and maybe this will be my mantra for awhile: What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

2007-01-27T03:50:00.000+08:00

UNSW predeparture seminar, with all of us looking spiffy.

Wasn't by choice though, most of us were coming from work. See, if you go to UNSW, you'd actually end working in a place where you need to dress up!

2007-01-27T03:37:00.000+08:00

The time is up.

The attachment is now consigned to my memory, with good friends made in unexpected circumstances. I've witnessed so much I shouldn't be witnessing, from simple clinics, to ward rounds and clerking endless patients, to 730am Q&As, to scary tutorials with scarier but immensely capable profs. I've witnessed surgeries and surgeries, TOPs, D&Cs, hysterectomies, cystectomies, myomectomies and more stuff with names I can't pronounce or spell yet. Crash C-sections, deliveries both slow and fast, examining neonates... it's all been amazing stuff. I don't expect remember much though, but I'm hoping. I'm hoping. Perhaps one day, in the distant future, when I'm not a guest but an actual student in rotation, I'll recall some hazy memory of my days attached to the hospital...

....and discover that i remembered it wrongly. Darn!

2007-01-22T02:33:00.000+08:00

been a long time since the last blog.

Just wanted to update you on several important facts.

1) After an amazing 1 year and 8-9plus months... the best time of my life up to now, i'm single again.

2) I'm currently on attachment for the next week at NUH, so if you come down, give me a ring! I'll be around the Dept of O&G... now no dirty innuendo please: it's a legitimate sort of thing.

3) Arsenal has beaten both Liverpool AND Man Utd TWICE each this season, and remains undefeated at home.

4) Kobe Bryant is becoming a team player.

5) Ultimates Vol 2. 13 is finally coming out.

2007-01-08T23:02:00.000+08:00

It's funny how some people are inspired by food. I'm not one of them. I don't have the sensitivity or the patience and the genius required for an epicurean, my tongue and roof of my mouth and my throat having been burnt and ruined countless of times by my fire-eating and sword-swallowing.

And hot coffee gulping.

But don't think me a food idiot, because I can recognize a great meal when I eat one, and often, a meal to me is great because of the company not the cutlery ( a wise, wealthy man told me he once got a set of golden cutlery to eat with, to see if the food tasted any better) and it's rare when there's great food and great company. So when we trundled down to J & S's place for a special dinner with special guests, A & S, (which was arranged by my resourceful parents), I must say that the science chefs outdid themselves. And they're barely out of school!

So without further ado, i'll let the menu do the talking.

Cocktails:

Blood and Sand - Scotch, Orange Juice, White vermouth, Cherry Marnier
White Velveteen - Frangelico, White cranberry, Vodka
Georgia Mint Julep - Mint, Cognac, Apricot Liquer

Dinner:

Pate (can't make that little funny mark on top of the e) - chicken and duck livers with roasted butternut squash

Reduction of Salad - Roast parsnip with thyme sauce, roast shallot with parmesan wafer, tomato jam with garlic crouton

Garlic Veloute - Browned garlic soup

Prairie Oyster - Named after the hangover cure, Raw egg with worcestshire glaze.

Deconstructed Pork Belly - Roasted salt pork, pork crackling and G.smith and demerera sugar sorbet

Risotto - Flavoured with black olive and topped with buffalo mozzarella

Lemon - Palate cleansing foam

Lamb - seared loin with pan-fried gnocci and red wine reduction

Beef - Roast tenderloin glazed with marmalade accompanied by roots anna.

Dessert:

Panna Cotta - with candied flower petals

Cannoli - Filled with mascarpone and brandied cherries

Thyme - Thyme ice-cream

Chocolate - Valrhona Araguani Chantilly

-

Goodnesses and Golly gee whizzes! I'm really really proud of the two boys. Very honoured to even know them! Holy smokes, Batman! Dinner started at 7.30pm and ended around 11pm... I would put up photos, but privacy privacy privacy. And the special guests were perfectly charming! Was rather surprised when he told me he was the one who approved my grant to paris. I didn't even know he had a job. Turns out he's a comic buff as well. And has eclectic reading tastes.

Anyhow... if i write any further... well.

That's it.

2007-01-02T03:06:00.000+08:00

back from HK.

happy new year one and all!

Resolutions for this year:

1) Small talk is for those with no greater thoughts to express. On the other hand, greater thoughts are for pompous, arrogant twats who think that talking about the execution of some old irani dude is more important than talking about Arsenal's loss to Sheffield.

2006-12-28T01:32:00.000+08:00