Singapore was dumped out of the competition-formerly-known-as-the-Tiger-Cup. I went to the Kallang stadium thinking that I would watch what I suspected to be the last match at the Kallang stadium featuring the Singapore national football team. This is probably the last match, at least until the next time.
Singapore had played against Indonesia, played not so well and they won thanks to 2 free kicks. In the match against Vietnam at Hanoi, they played not so well too but held them to a goalless draw, which was sorda a good result. Except that not scoring in Vietnam meant no away goals.
Now in the match at Kallang against Vietnam Singapore dominated but kept on firing blanks. I got a bad feeling when they keep on whacking the ball forward but couldn't score after 25 minutes. Vietnam broke away and scored, and that was the end, because the away goals rule means Singapore had to score 2.
No big deal because Singapore would have lost against Thailand if it had gotten to the final. Some people were muttering that maybe this was payback for that match in Vietnam 10 years ago where Vietnam dominated, and Singapore won by a lucky goal, and won its first ASEAN cup. I think people saw that Singapore played properly after having scraped a goalless draw in Hanoi, and was not that sad.
There was crowd trouble at the match. There was the away stand, and the security guards who manned the stand adamantly refused to admit Singaporeans, and just as well. During the match, the viets were falling over like bowling pins, especially when it seemed that Singapore had a good attack going. We weren’t very impressed, and there was a lot of booing of the Vietnamese side. Lots of booing when somebody fell over, because it meant that he was faking it. Lots of booing when one of our guys fell over, because it meant that the Viet cheats were fouling him. Lots of booing when they went in or out of the dressing room, when they were substituted. When, after they had scored the goal, the Vietnamese made the most of a time wasting substitution by strolling off the pitch.
The Viets had a confrontation with the home stand on their right, I found out later that there were bottles thrown at them over the fence that separated them from the Singaporean side. After 5 minutes, they had a confrontation with the fans on the left. I thought at that time: you fight the French, then you fight the Americans, you fight the Chinese, the Cambodians. With all due respect to Fiji, if you were in a desert island in the middle of nowhere you would be fighting yourself. (Actually the American Vietnam war was also a civil war too.)
The Viets are in this match by dint of their having beaten the Malaysians. I sometimes wonder what a Singapore vs Malaysia semi-final would have been like. It would be like the Malaysia Cup once again, although I dare say that the Malaysia Cup has lost quite a bit of its sparkle when Singapore’s not around. I once compared Singapore to Barcelona in La Liga. There’s no more “el classico”. People don’t care about the Malaysia Cup anymore. People probably don’t even care that in the more than 10 years since Singapore left the competition Brunei won it once (!), Perlis twice (!!) and Terranganu once. What is the world coming to…
There’s always been problems in this competition. First was the fiasco of Thailand and Malaysia both in the position of wanting to lose a match against each other, so that they would play Singapore instead of Vietnam. That was 1998, and as it turned out, both got dumped out of the semis after all.
Then there was the tempestuous knock out matches in 2004, which I started following because I sensed that Singapore had a real chance of winning that match. (I was right). It was a terrible semi-final against Myanmar because they kept on fouling Singapore like nobody’s business, and Myanmar ended the match with 8 men (!). The third Myanmese who got sent off got sent off because he kicked mud into the referee for sending off the 2nd Myanmese player. That’s great.
And there was also crowd trouble after the match: there was fighting with the Myanmese workers who turned up at Kallang stadium to watch. But that time it was the Myanmese who were the hooligans.
The victories in 2005 and 2007 were legendary. After 2007 the incredible record is that Singapore and Thailand were the only people who won this competition since it started in 1996, with 3 each. The fact that we are one of two all time great teams in this competition is simply staggering. People don’t mention this because it’s almost embarrassing, almost disrespectful to all the other countries who have populations 10 or 50 times of us. The first win was a shock, but the other two were less so. It’s understandable that people get upset that we won it for the last 2 times, as can be seen from how Thailand walked off the pitch in protest 2 years ago when Singapore won a penalty (which in fairness was a dubious one).
But I liked how in 2005 and 2007 Singapore played 4 different opponents in the knockout phase: Myanmar and Indonesia in 2005, and then Malaysia and Thailand in 2007. There’s a bit more legitimacy to your winning if you knock everybody out.
In this match against Vietnam, Singaporeans were the hooligans too, both sides were to blame. Other than the obvious mistakes in not keeping the Singaporeans in while the Vietnamese left the stadium, there is tension. First was the obvious injustice of the match. Singapore finally lost for the first time in this competition in a long while: never mind that we had been lucky to not lose in Hanoi. I would say that based on both legs, both teams deserved to qualify, but the fact is that only one of them can.
There is also the obvious tension with the migrant workers. Vietnamese people are your fast food servers, hawker centre attendants, bargirls, uni students. There is always tension between the foreigners and the host country, I know because I’ve been a foreign student before. Singaporeans think that the Viets play dirty. The Viets think that Singaporeans are minnows who win too much, that putting Englishmen, Nigerians, Bosnians and PRCs in your team is not completely fair.
But I think that part of the problem is that not a lot of matches get staged in the Kallang Stadium, so there is quite a lot of pent up aggression in the Singaporean audience. When I walked towards Kallang I didn’t see myself as anything other than a Roman going to a gladiator match. People who watch live football in a stadium are always bloodthirsty to some extent.
I would want Vietnam to beat Thailand, for the reason that I don’t want Thailand having more Tiger cups than Singapore. It was easy to suppose that Thailand would just win this competition every year, until Singapore started their amazing winning streak. Let Vietnam win it this time because we once took a Tiger cup that should have been theirs if not for Sasikumar’s legendary shoulder blade. I thought that Thailand was unbeatable, because they have Peter Reid who came very close to leading Sunderland into Europe. As it turns out, Vietnam have just beaten Thailand in Bangkok, and all they have to do is protect this lead in Hanoi and they can win. Yess!!
Update: Vietnam have won the title for the first time.
Saturday, 27 December 2008
Saturday, 20 December 2008
Why the long face
Somebody came up to me and asked me “why the long face?”. Yes I have a gruff disposition. But that line came from a comedy where somebody asked a horse that question. Of course the horse can’t help having a long face. I suppose the assumption is that it would have been the same for me.
Actually it’s not true. When I was a teenager, I had 2 very miserable years where my life was crashing down all around me. Before that I was still relatively well adjusted, probably didn’t have too many friends and didn’t care for them. But I was the genius in the class and that probably made up for everything else. Then one day, came a large crisis in confidence, and that made my schoolwork go down. People around me thought that I was being my usual cocky self, so they decided to “bring me down to earth”. Needless to say, the effect was disastrous, it just made everything worse and started a vicious cycle. I spent 2 years being miserable.
I read somebody’s description of Princess Diana: when you see her up close, you find that her head is a little big in proportion to her body, as you might expect from somebody who’s been in the spotlight constantly for the better part of more than 10 years. I suppose external circumstances happen to shape the way you turn out. So for me, 2 of my formative years were completely miserable. At the beginning of those 2 years, I had a more squarish face. Not as long as now. At the end, I had a longer face. Thank goodness there were better days to come, but I’ve always believed that those 2 tough years in my early teenagehood were the cause of my long face.
Likewise I always had plenty of white hair. I think it came from studying, thinking and worrying too much. I still study and think a lot, but worry much less. There’s a lot that I worried about when I was younger, that I don’t really give a shit about anymore. The peak of my white hair was at the end of the first year in the uni. I think something changed in that second year of uni, and after that my hair slowly turned black again.
Actually it’s not true. When I was a teenager, I had 2 very miserable years where my life was crashing down all around me. Before that I was still relatively well adjusted, probably didn’t have too many friends and didn’t care for them. But I was the genius in the class and that probably made up for everything else. Then one day, came a large crisis in confidence, and that made my schoolwork go down. People around me thought that I was being my usual cocky self, so they decided to “bring me down to earth”. Needless to say, the effect was disastrous, it just made everything worse and started a vicious cycle. I spent 2 years being miserable.
I read somebody’s description of Princess Diana: when you see her up close, you find that her head is a little big in proportion to her body, as you might expect from somebody who’s been in the spotlight constantly for the better part of more than 10 years. I suppose external circumstances happen to shape the way you turn out. So for me, 2 of my formative years were completely miserable. At the beginning of those 2 years, I had a more squarish face. Not as long as now. At the end, I had a longer face. Thank goodness there were better days to come, but I’ve always believed that those 2 tough years in my early teenagehood were the cause of my long face.
Likewise I always had plenty of white hair. I think it came from studying, thinking and worrying too much. I still study and think a lot, but worry much less. There’s a lot that I worried about when I was younger, that I don’t really give a shit about anymore. The peak of my white hair was at the end of the first year in the uni. I think something changed in that second year of uni, and after that my hair slowly turned black again.
Saturday, 13 December 2008
4 roads
This was the year I travelled 4 roads, or rather came to the end of 4 long roads.
First road was one that I had not intended to travel at the start of the year. At Chinese New Year my sis, towards the end of her final year as a med student, asked me to go along with her, over land, across the USA. The road trip did not encompass the East Coast. We did transit in Philadelphia, but that was away from the Atlantic, I think. We started in Durham NC which is a few hundred miles from the Atlantic, went to DC, so it wasn’t coast to coast, strictly speaking. I didn’t go to the Pacific either, even though I went up to the San Fran Bay. But it doesn’t matter, a trip across the US is still a trip across the US.
We used to measure our successes and failure against each other. It was inevitable that we would take each other as a point of reference. Other than my sister I renewed my links with the “cultural learnings of USA” for make benefit glorious person of numbernine. I told my sister that I had grown up in the USA more than I had in Singapore. She said, how? What did you do? It wasn’t anything concrete. But being in the US marked the beginning of my judging and analysing of people. I had always been considered a drifter up till my NS. After that I became a zealous, if not exactly keen student of human nature. I also began to read anything I could lay my hands on.
I didn’t get along with my sister as well as I had hoped. Years of having to scrape and fight in a foreign country had hardened her. I tell ppl: it’s tough being a medical student, right? Yeh. It’s also tough being a foreigner in a profession as protected as medical school, right? Yeh. It’s also tough being a foreign student who has basically to do everything herself, right? Yeh. (But you must remember that almost all US college students are also de facto “foreign students” because home and college are usually hundreds of miles away.) OK, imagine that my sister has to deal with all 3.
My father had wanted to go along and was quite disappointed that my sis hadn’t asked him along. There were practical reasons, like how there was only room for 2 people in the car. He did tell me that he would hold me responsible for anything that went wrong on our trip. It made me more apprehensive about the trip that I should have been. Most of the time you’d just go to the same boring type of motel over and over again. Don’t visit sleazy large cities. I wanted to check out the Kansas City barbeques but my sis refused to drive into that place. I had even thought of going to visit Indian reservations but on hindsight, we shouldn’t do a lot of crazy things when most of my sister’s possessions are in that Honda Civic of hers.
During the trip we talked about a few things. Not as many things as I had hoped for - I was hoping for that trip to get some clarity on my outlook but I didn’t get it. But we did talk about our future. Actually more of her future, since I didn’t have any plans.
This trip may have been some kind of a rehash of a trip to New Zealand we had when we were still teenagers. We talked a lot on that trip, it was a long road trip, and plenty of scenery, like this one. But that one was more interesting. We had more “interesting conversations”. When I say “interesting conversations”, I mean that afterwards, most of the things I had to talk to my sis about revolved around the stuff we talked about at that time, like a rehashed version of those “interesting conversations”. I still remember an episode when I had an argument with her in New Zealand, which started when I remarked that I preferred that she was a brother instead. After we had finished quarrelling, I looked up, and ominously I was at the bank of a river, there were cranes on a dock, and a warehouse behind it. Well if there are omens in this trip, I visited 4 universities: Berkeley, Duke, Washington - St Louis and Stanford.
But it was better than our trip in Spain and Portugal in 2000. We quarrelled a lot. We were both in unsuccessful relationships at that point in time.
I remember the last day of the road trip - we were in Yosemite Park, which was in Cali, but near the border with Nevada. My sister had driven through most of the park. We had some fun in the morning, taking pictures of a squirrel that ended up as roadkill, taking pictures of the super long line for the toilet at the base of the waterfall. I was thinking of letting her do most of the driving during the day, and I took over at night. We were walking through the redwoods when she felt unwell and she berated me for not taking over sooner. So I drove. I drove through almost the entirety of California (it's not very far east to west) but handed the wheel back to her so that she could drive it into the Bay Area home. The trip took less than 2 weeks, but there was the incredible feeling that it was over.
The big regret was that there were no pictures of the interior of the fully laden car. We were in such a hurry to unpack that we just forgot. It was crazy stupid.
Around a week later we got up at 4 in the morning and she drove me to the airport, 1 hour away. I said, well this is it. Probably another 4 years of not seeing your sister. Then she said, "you got the chocolates, right?" I said, oh shit, I left the bloody chocolates in the fridge!" So she drive me back to her house, I had to stuff the chocolates into my bag somehow or another, and then it was on the plane back to Singapore.
I don’t travel a lot. I did a lot of travelling as a student because it’s always easier to visit the West when you’re nearer there. Travelling involves travelling companions, and I’ve been a tag-alonger more than a leader. It involves fulfilling objectives I’ve never fully understood. I don’t look very kindly upon enjoying a luxury. You should be on business, or learning something, or visiting friends, or having a nice place to fuck your wife. I counted this trip as “visiting friends” and “learning something”.
Road 2:
It was 27th December 2004, I remember the exact date because this is the day after the terrible tsunami. My friend who had been a BMT platoon mate came back from the US and took us to run around McRitchie reservoir. He had been training in a marathon team while he was in the USA, and suffered the ignominy of running alongside 50 year old women who were more fit than him. It was 1 lap, 10 km, and I felt like dying after that. Not much happened immediately after that. It was Mr Apple (my BMT platoon mate), Mr B and myself, the beginning of a jogging gang.
Around the start of 2007, for some reason we met up weekly and did that route. By that time I also found out that 5 of my colleagues had finished marathons and 2 more were interested in it. That was the beginning of my 2 year plan to conquer the marathon, and weekly bouts of distance running. Mr B and I were involved. Mr Apple didn’t really join. He decided that extreme sports were out for him and anyway he’s happily married and a devoted husband. At the end of the year Mr B and I did a half marathon.
Things go wrong, they inevitably do. 1 month before my half marathon, I slid down a particularly treacherous patch near the SICC golf course, and my knee was bleeding. I was pissed off to find that I had to stop training for 2 weeks while my knee patched up. But that didn’t stop me from finishing the half marathon.
While preparing for the full marathon, we thought it would be enough to run 2 or even 3 laps around the McRitchie reservoir. I lined up a half marathon to prepare for the full marathon. I had a bout of flu before the half marathon, and 1 week before the half marathon I was startled to find that I had problems running 7 km. In midweek I went for a night jog at Bishan park. That was how we discovered a new running route. The half marathon was spent in a slow jog and walking for much of the second half, as opposed to the one in 2007 when I managed to run all the way. It was bad, but I completed it.
There were new routes that I found. We explored the Kallang Park connector which ran from Bishan Park to Nicoll Highway. We also tried to jog from McRitchie to Rifle Range road, although the route there was more suitable for hiking rather than for jogging. I soon discovered that my ankle would start hurting if I were to run on McRitchie’s bumpy terrain for more than 1 lap. So I do my running more on Bishan park / Kallang River these days, where it may be a bit hotter (fewer trees), and the scenery a bit more dreary (concrete jungles / industrial parks) but at least the ground is flatter.
Seems that Kallang park has been taken over by construction workers.
There was the problem of pushing the endurance all the way to 42 km. It was hard enough getting to the 20km mark. But I decided to break my endurance tests in 2, like having a 20 km session in the morning and a 10 km session at night. I’ve never tried 2 20km sessions in the same weekend before but I might have to try that at least once before the big day. And then after that, dinner, or a pint of beer, or vegetating in a kopitiam in front of an EPL match and reading a book if the match gets too boring.
Owing to the problems that we encountered during the preparation for the marathon Mr B and I both agreed that we were in this thing for the male ego thing rather than because we really enjoy long distance running. This is too much of a pain in the ass for me and unless I fuck up and do not complete my marathon in December, this will be our first and last marathons.
Edit: marathon report is here
Road 3:
My mother is a passionate advocate for my education. This is a euphemism for saying she is a pushy parent. Starting from when I was 6, she had this system where every time I completed a book she would write it up on a cardboard and paste it on a wall. I did better than my sister who is almost 2 years younger.
I didn’t really read all of those books. Sometimes I would just read the blurb on the back of the book. When my mother tried to make sure that I had read the book, I just summarised the blurb. She would then check this against the blurb at the back of the book and conclude that I had indeed read the book.
This reminds me of a story that my aunts and uncles related once during their talk cock sessions. My grandmother would stash a lot of money in this biscuit tin that she kept hidden away in the corner of the kitchen. She would take a lot of security measure to find out that the children never found out. But she were not successful, and my aunts found out. They would pilfer a little bit here and there and never get caught. Only when they desperately needed it. (They were a poor family at that time.) In time to come some of them would be put in charge of huge sums of money at work so I prefer not to think of them as thieves. Then my aunts would be extremely amused that my grandmother would still be sneakily stashing away money in that biscuit tin, unaware that the cat was already out of the bag, sometimes even spying on her as she did so just for kicks. OK, diversion over.
The tragic aspect of education in Singapore is that even as it drills you well in the core syllabus, you don’t read a lot of books on your own. It is a zero sum game. The more material there is in the official syllabus, the less independent learning Singaporean students will get. Imagine you are married to a porn star, and he comes back from a *hard* day at work. You tell him you’re feeling in the mood and you just gotta have it. Should you be surprised that he tells you to fuck off? Similarly, Singaporean students, after a lot of compulsory study are rather disinclined to relax with a good book.
I’m not a particularly motivated student. I think that exams are odious. They are undignified and they treat students as little more than trained seals. Of course I am smart enough to do well in them if it’s very important. It’s just a shame that we have a system which thinks so highly of exams. But being an above average student does get me in the habit for knowledge. I like knowledge but I hate exams.
I thought that NS had given me a great opportunity to read a lot. But I tried reading a lot of literature and I was a poor reader. I always was a poor reader because I was a science student and never had much practice reading a lot. I only became better at it after 1 or 2 years in the uni. Being in a relatively liberal uni fuelled my lust for knowledge. I didn’t think that knowledge had any boundaries. Subconsciously I knew that I was supposed to do business studies, which is just as well because business studies has no boundaries either. I cooked up some excuse about reading maths and political science but this was just an excuse for me to study whatever happened to catch my fancy. I make no apologies for this. Even in the uni, people want to draw a box around you and frame up the limits of your intellectual endeavours but I resisted that.
I wasn’t done with studying when I graduated. I studied widely, but that was just to lay down a foundation in most of the stuff that’s out there, to learn the basic ideas of each discipline so as to make it easier to further study stuff that’s related. They had book warehouse sales in the Singapore Expo and I just went in and bought books indiscriminately, sometimes boxes at a time.
There were many categories but my books usually belong to these categories:
History
Business
Politics
Science
Complexity theory / evolution
Religion
Pop culture
Philosophy (but this is a little rare)
Some of these books were great bargains, but that’s besides the point. The books were crowding out my living space, so 2 years ago, I began a campaign to get rid of them. Some of them I would sell outright. Others, I would plough through them before selling them. I must have tried to plough through hundreds of books. I would read them in trains, buses, kopitiams, airplanes (rarely), airports, gourmet coffee joints, libraries, fast food restaurants. People tease me about this habit all the time. I’m down to what should be my last 40 books. I have stopped buying books already.
After this my bedroom should be a more livable place.
Road 4:
I have also come to the end of my fourth road. I have mentioned this in passing .
First road was one that I had not intended to travel at the start of the year. At Chinese New Year my sis, towards the end of her final year as a med student, asked me to go along with her, over land, across the USA. The road trip did not encompass the East Coast. We did transit in Philadelphia, but that was away from the Atlantic, I think. We started in Durham NC which is a few hundred miles from the Atlantic, went to DC, so it wasn’t coast to coast, strictly speaking. I didn’t go to the Pacific either, even though I went up to the San Fran Bay. But it doesn’t matter, a trip across the US is still a trip across the US.
We used to measure our successes and failure against each other. It was inevitable that we would take each other as a point of reference. Other than my sister I renewed my links with the “cultural learnings of USA” for make benefit glorious person of numbernine. I told my sister that I had grown up in the USA more than I had in Singapore. She said, how? What did you do? It wasn’t anything concrete. But being in the US marked the beginning of my judging and analysing of people. I had always been considered a drifter up till my NS. After that I became a zealous, if not exactly keen student of human nature. I also began to read anything I could lay my hands on.
I didn’t get along with my sister as well as I had hoped. Years of having to scrape and fight in a foreign country had hardened her. I tell ppl: it’s tough being a medical student, right? Yeh. It’s also tough being a foreigner in a profession as protected as medical school, right? Yeh. It’s also tough being a foreign student who has basically to do everything herself, right? Yeh. (But you must remember that almost all US college students are also de facto “foreign students” because home and college are usually hundreds of miles away.) OK, imagine that my sister has to deal with all 3.
My father had wanted to go along and was quite disappointed that my sis hadn’t asked him along. There were practical reasons, like how there was only room for 2 people in the car. He did tell me that he would hold me responsible for anything that went wrong on our trip. It made me more apprehensive about the trip that I should have been. Most of the time you’d just go to the same boring type of motel over and over again. Don’t visit sleazy large cities. I wanted to check out the Kansas City barbeques but my sis refused to drive into that place. I had even thought of going to visit Indian reservations but on hindsight, we shouldn’t do a lot of crazy things when most of my sister’s possessions are in that Honda Civic of hers.
During the trip we talked about a few things. Not as many things as I had hoped for - I was hoping for that trip to get some clarity on my outlook but I didn’t get it. But we did talk about our future. Actually more of her future, since I didn’t have any plans.
This trip may have been some kind of a rehash of a trip to New Zealand we had when we were still teenagers. We talked a lot on that trip, it was a long road trip, and plenty of scenery, like this one. But that one was more interesting. We had more “interesting conversations”. When I say “interesting conversations”, I mean that afterwards, most of the things I had to talk to my sis about revolved around the stuff we talked about at that time, like a rehashed version of those “interesting conversations”. I still remember an episode when I had an argument with her in New Zealand, which started when I remarked that I preferred that she was a brother instead. After we had finished quarrelling, I looked up, and ominously I was at the bank of a river, there were cranes on a dock, and a warehouse behind it. Well if there are omens in this trip, I visited 4 universities: Berkeley, Duke, Washington - St Louis and Stanford.
But it was better than our trip in Spain and Portugal in 2000. We quarrelled a lot. We were both in unsuccessful relationships at that point in time.
I remember the last day of the road trip - we were in Yosemite Park, which was in Cali, but near the border with Nevada. My sister had driven through most of the park. We had some fun in the morning, taking pictures of a squirrel that ended up as roadkill, taking pictures of the super long line for the toilet at the base of the waterfall. I was thinking of letting her do most of the driving during the day, and I took over at night. We were walking through the redwoods when she felt unwell and she berated me for not taking over sooner. So I drove. I drove through almost the entirety of California (it's not very far east to west) but handed the wheel back to her so that she could drive it into the Bay Area home. The trip took less than 2 weeks, but there was the incredible feeling that it was over.
The big regret was that there were no pictures of the interior of the fully laden car. We were in such a hurry to unpack that we just forgot. It was crazy stupid.
Around a week later we got up at 4 in the morning and she drove me to the airport, 1 hour away. I said, well this is it. Probably another 4 years of not seeing your sister. Then she said, "you got the chocolates, right?" I said, oh shit, I left the bloody chocolates in the fridge!" So she drive me back to her house, I had to stuff the chocolates into my bag somehow or another, and then it was on the plane back to Singapore.
I don’t travel a lot. I did a lot of travelling as a student because it’s always easier to visit the West when you’re nearer there. Travelling involves travelling companions, and I’ve been a tag-alonger more than a leader. It involves fulfilling objectives I’ve never fully understood. I don’t look very kindly upon enjoying a luxury. You should be on business, or learning something, or visiting friends, or having a nice place to fuck your wife. I counted this trip as “visiting friends” and “learning something”.
Road 2:
It was 27th December 2004, I remember the exact date because this is the day after the terrible tsunami. My friend who had been a BMT platoon mate came back from the US and took us to run around McRitchie reservoir. He had been training in a marathon team while he was in the USA, and suffered the ignominy of running alongside 50 year old women who were more fit than him. It was 1 lap, 10 km, and I felt like dying after that. Not much happened immediately after that. It was Mr Apple (my BMT platoon mate), Mr B and myself, the beginning of a jogging gang.
Around the start of 2007, for some reason we met up weekly and did that route. By that time I also found out that 5 of my colleagues had finished marathons and 2 more were interested in it. That was the beginning of my 2 year plan to conquer the marathon, and weekly bouts of distance running. Mr B and I were involved. Mr Apple didn’t really join. He decided that extreme sports were out for him and anyway he’s happily married and a devoted husband. At the end of the year Mr B and I did a half marathon.
Things go wrong, they inevitably do. 1 month before my half marathon, I slid down a particularly treacherous patch near the SICC golf course, and my knee was bleeding. I was pissed off to find that I had to stop training for 2 weeks while my knee patched up. But that didn’t stop me from finishing the half marathon.
While preparing for the full marathon, we thought it would be enough to run 2 or even 3 laps around the McRitchie reservoir. I lined up a half marathon to prepare for the full marathon. I had a bout of flu before the half marathon, and 1 week before the half marathon I was startled to find that I had problems running 7 km. In midweek I went for a night jog at Bishan park. That was how we discovered a new running route. The half marathon was spent in a slow jog and walking for much of the second half, as opposed to the one in 2007 when I managed to run all the way. It was bad, but I completed it.
There were new routes that I found. We explored the Kallang Park connector which ran from Bishan Park to Nicoll Highway. We also tried to jog from McRitchie to Rifle Range road, although the route there was more suitable for hiking rather than for jogging. I soon discovered that my ankle would start hurting if I were to run on McRitchie’s bumpy terrain for more than 1 lap. So I do my running more on Bishan park / Kallang River these days, where it may be a bit hotter (fewer trees), and the scenery a bit more dreary (concrete jungles / industrial parks) but at least the ground is flatter.
Seems that Kallang park has been taken over by construction workers.
There was the problem of pushing the endurance all the way to 42 km. It was hard enough getting to the 20km mark. But I decided to break my endurance tests in 2, like having a 20 km session in the morning and a 10 km session at night. I’ve never tried 2 20km sessions in the same weekend before but I might have to try that at least once before the big day. And then after that, dinner, or a pint of beer, or vegetating in a kopitiam in front of an EPL match and reading a book if the match gets too boring.
Owing to the problems that we encountered during the preparation for the marathon Mr B and I both agreed that we were in this thing for the male ego thing rather than because we really enjoy long distance running. This is too much of a pain in the ass for me and unless I fuck up and do not complete my marathon in December, this will be our first and last marathons.
Edit: marathon report is here
Road 3:
My mother is a passionate advocate for my education. This is a euphemism for saying she is a pushy parent. Starting from when I was 6, she had this system where every time I completed a book she would write it up on a cardboard and paste it on a wall. I did better than my sister who is almost 2 years younger.
I didn’t really read all of those books. Sometimes I would just read the blurb on the back of the book. When my mother tried to make sure that I had read the book, I just summarised the blurb. She would then check this against the blurb at the back of the book and conclude that I had indeed read the book.
This reminds me of a story that my aunts and uncles related once during their talk cock sessions. My grandmother would stash a lot of money in this biscuit tin that she kept hidden away in the corner of the kitchen. She would take a lot of security measure to find out that the children never found out. But she were not successful, and my aunts found out. They would pilfer a little bit here and there and never get caught. Only when they desperately needed it. (They were a poor family at that time.) In time to come some of them would be put in charge of huge sums of money at work so I prefer not to think of them as thieves. Then my aunts would be extremely amused that my grandmother would still be sneakily stashing away money in that biscuit tin, unaware that the cat was already out of the bag, sometimes even spying on her as she did so just for kicks. OK, diversion over.
The tragic aspect of education in Singapore is that even as it drills you well in the core syllabus, you don’t read a lot of books on your own. It is a zero sum game. The more material there is in the official syllabus, the less independent learning Singaporean students will get. Imagine you are married to a porn star, and he comes back from a *hard* day at work. You tell him you’re feeling in the mood and you just gotta have it. Should you be surprised that he tells you to fuck off? Similarly, Singaporean students, after a lot of compulsory study are rather disinclined to relax with a good book.
I’m not a particularly motivated student. I think that exams are odious. They are undignified and they treat students as little more than trained seals. Of course I am smart enough to do well in them if it’s very important. It’s just a shame that we have a system which thinks so highly of exams. But being an above average student does get me in the habit for knowledge. I like knowledge but I hate exams.
I thought that NS had given me a great opportunity to read a lot. But I tried reading a lot of literature and I was a poor reader. I always was a poor reader because I was a science student and never had much practice reading a lot. I only became better at it after 1 or 2 years in the uni. Being in a relatively liberal uni fuelled my lust for knowledge. I didn’t think that knowledge had any boundaries. Subconsciously I knew that I was supposed to do business studies, which is just as well because business studies has no boundaries either. I cooked up some excuse about reading maths and political science but this was just an excuse for me to study whatever happened to catch my fancy. I make no apologies for this. Even in the uni, people want to draw a box around you and frame up the limits of your intellectual endeavours but I resisted that.
I wasn’t done with studying when I graduated. I studied widely, but that was just to lay down a foundation in most of the stuff that’s out there, to learn the basic ideas of each discipline so as to make it easier to further study stuff that’s related. They had book warehouse sales in the Singapore Expo and I just went in and bought books indiscriminately, sometimes boxes at a time.
There were many categories but my books usually belong to these categories:
History
Business
Politics
Science
Complexity theory / evolution
Religion
Pop culture
Philosophy (but this is a little rare)
Some of these books were great bargains, but that’s besides the point. The books were crowding out my living space, so 2 years ago, I began a campaign to get rid of them. Some of them I would sell outright. Others, I would plough through them before selling them. I must have tried to plough through hundreds of books. I would read them in trains, buses, kopitiams, airplanes (rarely), airports, gourmet coffee joints, libraries, fast food restaurants. People tease me about this habit all the time. I’m down to what should be my last 40 books. I have stopped buying books already.
After this my bedroom should be a more livable place.
Road 4:
I have also come to the end of my fourth road. I have mentioned this in passing .
Monday, 8 December 2008
Marathon 08
I think it has to be the t shirt. It must be the fucking tshirt because it surely wasn't for anything else.
I have to admit the mistakes on my part. I could have been too cavalier with my preparation. I think I should have been running every day instead of just going for long distances every weekend. I should not have taken my foot off the pedal so completely over the last 2 weeks that I even didn't feel that hyped up for the marathon. Most of all, I should not have been carbo loading the previous day with donuts (!) and nasi lemak (!) and lek tau suang (!).
It started off OK. I was never going to make a spectacular timing, and we calculated that the best we could hope for was 6 hours. Along the way I was even exuberent enough to make rude remarks while running past the building that used to be Lehman brothers, heckle back an angmoh who was heckling us, and cheer for the front leading Africans by going "OWWW!" like Michael Jackson. My usual obnoxious self, in other words.
Even when we slowed down, it was according to schedule. Things started going wobbly around the 25 km mark, and by the 28km mark, I had to start walking.
Then it happened. I couldn't help noticing that even walking was painful. At first I thought that my calf was tight. Then I realised: shit! I was cramping with 14 km to go!
My eventual timing was a little less than 7:30. I think, if I didn't have the cramp, but had to slow down, my timing would be 7:00. But to fully take into account what the last 14 km was like, hobbling through it took me more than 3 hours. Yes, I screwed up my timing big time, not that I really care about the timing because I'm just in this to complete. But when I am limping around (OK, not limping around but every step hurts) for 14 km. I have the right to claim that finishing this marathon was an achievement in itself.
Not that the organisers were particularly helpful. All the drink stations in the last 10 km had run out of 100 plus: quite naturally because we were the stragglers with cramps. Which means those people who need their salt were just not getting it. I was getting really hot under the collar at not getting my 100 plus and finally I had to run - limp, actually - to the nearest petrol kiosk to get it.
3 hours of saying to myself, "you're the man. You can get through this." I looked at all the people lying by the roadside, stretching their leg muscles and told myself, "you're doing something that these people can't do." Hardly fair, because if your cramps are serious enough you just have to stop. There's no way you can continue. But this was going to be my shining moment, I would walk 14 km through agony to reach the end. There were tears - I hadn't gone through as much physical agony since NS. But I knew that it was possible - barely possible for me to complete. I just had to endure the pain.
The fucking MC at the end was saying to us, "this is the end. Why don't you run instead of walking? Walk some more!" Fleeting thoughts of grabbing the mike and offering an expletive ridden explanation of my condition crossed my mind but I thought the better of it. Anyway nobody could accuse me of not having a sense of humour - I could always retort that grabbing the mike was situationist humour.
I suppose my helpful father in the end helped me brainstorm for things that had gone wrong. Today just reinforced my earlier decision that this will be the last time I will ever run a marathon in my life. I just don't have running technique, I'm liable to get myself injured, and I'm rather lucky I ever managed to cross the finishing line. Thank goodness for that.
I thought I would be struggling with my legs after the marathon. It wasn't the worst of my problems. My stomach was bloated from the energy bars I had dumped into it for the marathon. So I decided not to drink water after the thing. I went straight to sleep, and I think I probably got a heat stroke while sleeping. Then I woke up to have dinner, and then my head was spinning and I was shivering all over. I had to pop 2 panadols and sleep the damn thing off. I was constipated for 24 hours after the end of the marathon and couldn't eat much after that.
I have always thought of myself as an old man and I think I just sounded like one.
On another note, I had compared the marathon to the haj so it's suitable that both take place within 1 day of each other. I'm reading a book now, "The Siege of Mecca" by Yaroslav Trofimov, about the haj of 1979 when some Muslim terrorists took over the mosque.
I'm rereading this again after nearly 5 years. I haven't had as great an achievement as this one but I'm on the verge of another achievement. I just want to make a note: shingot said that I did this alone. I didn't do this alone. I had a running partner who trained with me and put up with my shit on an almost weekly basis for almost 2 years, in 2007, leading up to the half marathon. In 2008, leading up to the marathon. We ran the marathon together until the 28km mark, when I realised that I was unable to carry on running. That was when I signalled him to carry on, own time own target. He finished maybe half an hour ahead of me. That partner of mine does not know the existence of this blog but I want to extend my appreciation to him. I couldn't have done it without him.
I have to admit the mistakes on my part. I could have been too cavalier with my preparation. I think I should have been running every day instead of just going for long distances every weekend. I should not have taken my foot off the pedal so completely over the last 2 weeks that I even didn't feel that hyped up for the marathon. Most of all, I should not have been carbo loading the previous day with donuts (!) and nasi lemak (!) and lek tau suang (!).
It started off OK. I was never going to make a spectacular timing, and we calculated that the best we could hope for was 6 hours. Along the way I was even exuberent enough to make rude remarks while running past the building that used to be Lehman brothers, heckle back an angmoh who was heckling us, and cheer for the front leading Africans by going "OWWW!" like Michael Jackson. My usual obnoxious self, in other words.
Even when we slowed down, it was according to schedule. Things started going wobbly around the 25 km mark, and by the 28km mark, I had to start walking.
Then it happened. I couldn't help noticing that even walking was painful. At first I thought that my calf was tight. Then I realised: shit! I was cramping with 14 km to go!
My eventual timing was a little less than 7:30. I think, if I didn't have the cramp, but had to slow down, my timing would be 7:00. But to fully take into account what the last 14 km was like, hobbling through it took me more than 3 hours. Yes, I screwed up my timing big time, not that I really care about the timing because I'm just in this to complete. But when I am limping around (OK, not limping around but every step hurts) for 14 km. I have the right to claim that finishing this marathon was an achievement in itself.
Not that the organisers were particularly helpful. All the drink stations in the last 10 km had run out of 100 plus: quite naturally because we were the stragglers with cramps. Which means those people who need their salt were just not getting it. I was getting really hot under the collar at not getting my 100 plus and finally I had to run - limp, actually - to the nearest petrol kiosk to get it.
3 hours of saying to myself, "you're the man. You can get through this." I looked at all the people lying by the roadside, stretching their leg muscles and told myself, "you're doing something that these people can't do." Hardly fair, because if your cramps are serious enough you just have to stop. There's no way you can continue. But this was going to be my shining moment, I would walk 14 km through agony to reach the end. There were tears - I hadn't gone through as much physical agony since NS. But I knew that it was possible - barely possible for me to complete. I just had to endure the pain.
The fucking MC at the end was saying to us, "this is the end. Why don't you run instead of walking? Walk some more!" Fleeting thoughts of grabbing the mike and offering an expletive ridden explanation of my condition crossed my mind but I thought the better of it. Anyway nobody could accuse me of not having a sense of humour - I could always retort that grabbing the mike was situationist humour.
I suppose my helpful father in the end helped me brainstorm for things that had gone wrong. Today just reinforced my earlier decision that this will be the last time I will ever run a marathon in my life. I just don't have running technique, I'm liable to get myself injured, and I'm rather lucky I ever managed to cross the finishing line. Thank goodness for that.
I thought I would be struggling with my legs after the marathon. It wasn't the worst of my problems. My stomach was bloated from the energy bars I had dumped into it for the marathon. So I decided not to drink water after the thing. I went straight to sleep, and I think I probably got a heat stroke while sleeping. Then I woke up to have dinner, and then my head was spinning and I was shivering all over. I had to pop 2 panadols and sleep the damn thing off. I was constipated for 24 hours after the end of the marathon and couldn't eat much after that.
I have always thought of myself as an old man and I think I just sounded like one.
On another note, I had compared the marathon to the haj so it's suitable that both take place within 1 day of each other. I'm reading a book now, "The Siege of Mecca" by Yaroslav Trofimov, about the haj of 1979 when some Muslim terrorists took over the mosque.
I'm rereading this again after nearly 5 years. I haven't had as great an achievement as this one but I'm on the verge of another achievement. I just want to make a note: shingot said that I did this alone. I didn't do this alone. I had a running partner who trained with me and put up with my shit on an almost weekly basis for almost 2 years, in 2007, leading up to the half marathon. In 2008, leading up to the marathon. We ran the marathon together until the 28km mark, when I realised that I was unable to carry on running. That was when I signalled him to carry on, own time own target. He finished maybe half an hour ahead of me. That partner of mine does not know the existence of this blog but I want to extend my appreciation to him. I couldn't have done it without him.
Saturday, 6 December 2008
3 historical epochs
Interestingly enough, during my first 2 trips to the US, important events took place which changed the world.
I was in the US in winter of 89/90. The Cold War was still going on when I left for the US. By the time I came back, East Germany fell. Poland fell. Czechoslovakia fell. Hungary fell. Yugoslavia fell. Bulgaria and Romania would soon follow. It was a crazy time. History is already judging this to be an epoch, which is to generally say, before this takes place, the world operates on one set of rules. After this even takes place, a lot of the rules have changed. Cold war is over, globalisation is in full gear.
During my first semester in the US, Al Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Security procedures in the embassy in Singapore was upgraded from anal to super anal. At the start of my last year in the US, 9/11 took place. The age of terror had begun.
During my third trip to the US, there was not much that was new, except that Obama clinched the nomination. I guess what is going on in the USA right now is pretty earth shattering, except that all your sub prime problems only blew up while I was back in Singapore. It seems almost certain that Obama will be the next president. I guess that's historical enough - he will be the first US president who is not a white man. (He's half white but I guess the one drop rule means that he's black.)
In the years to come, Americans will look at 2008 the way that they looked at 1973 - the end of the good times. Or the way we looked at 1997.
1973 was a very bad year for the US - Richard Nixon about to be impeached. The Arabs ganged up to drive the oil prices through the roof (but nothing like US$100 a barrel). US was losing in Vietnam. It was the start of a few more bad years - the economy would recover only 10 years later.
2008 was the year sub prime castrated the credit system and caused a few bank failures. US is about to lose Afghanistan (although things are finally looking up in Iraq). Will the US have a few more bad years for the economy? I suspect so. The size of the US debt will kill it. Their social security systems are going bankrupt just at the point when the baby boomers are growing old. When the dust settles, the US will not be the only superpower in the world - there will be another 2, in China and the EU. Possibly India will be another superpower. It will stop being an exceptional country.
I have heard it being said a few times by different people: we are living in very interesting times. But the phrase - "may you live in interesting times" is meant to be a curse.
Do you know something? The show is not over yet. This is hardly the tip of the iceberg. There are more interesting things lined up for us in the coming decades.
1. Inflation is caused by the number of middle class people in the world expanding by a large number over the last 10 years. People in the former third world countries who are for the first time beginning to enjoy a decent standard of living are bidding up all the prices of raw materials / commodities. This will place a strain on the economy like never before. It is possible that sometime during this century, a famine on the same scale as the "great leap forward" famine will take place.
2. All the shit that we've done to the environment over the last 50-100 years will come and bite us in the back. There will be climate change, sea levels rising, plenty of natural disasters to worry about. You will probably never be able to get yourself insured at a decent price anymore.
3. A lot of the world will be more middle class than ever before. Which is nice in a way and not so nice in others (see point 1).
Hot, flat and crowded. A more exciting world. A more messy world.
I was in the US in winter of 89/90. The Cold War was still going on when I left for the US. By the time I came back, East Germany fell. Poland fell. Czechoslovakia fell. Hungary fell. Yugoslavia fell. Bulgaria and Romania would soon follow. It was a crazy time. History is already judging this to be an epoch, which is to generally say, before this takes place, the world operates on one set of rules. After this even takes place, a lot of the rules have changed. Cold war is over, globalisation is in full gear.
During my first semester in the US, Al Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Security procedures in the embassy in Singapore was upgraded from anal to super anal. At the start of my last year in the US, 9/11 took place. The age of terror had begun.
During my third trip to the US, there was not much that was new, except that Obama clinched the nomination. I guess what is going on in the USA right now is pretty earth shattering, except that all your sub prime problems only blew up while I was back in Singapore. It seems almost certain that Obama will be the next president. I guess that's historical enough - he will be the first US president who is not a white man. (He's half white but I guess the one drop rule means that he's black.)
In the years to come, Americans will look at 2008 the way that they looked at 1973 - the end of the good times. Or the way we looked at 1997.
1973 was a very bad year for the US - Richard Nixon about to be impeached. The Arabs ganged up to drive the oil prices through the roof (but nothing like US$100 a barrel). US was losing in Vietnam. It was the start of a few more bad years - the economy would recover only 10 years later.
2008 was the year sub prime castrated the credit system and caused a few bank failures. US is about to lose Afghanistan (although things are finally looking up in Iraq). Will the US have a few more bad years for the economy? I suspect so. The size of the US debt will kill it. Their social security systems are going bankrupt just at the point when the baby boomers are growing old. When the dust settles, the US will not be the only superpower in the world - there will be another 2, in China and the EU. Possibly India will be another superpower. It will stop being an exceptional country.
I have heard it being said a few times by different people: we are living in very interesting times. But the phrase - "may you live in interesting times" is meant to be a curse.
Do you know something? The show is not over yet. This is hardly the tip of the iceberg. There are more interesting things lined up for us in the coming decades.
1. Inflation is caused by the number of middle class people in the world expanding by a large number over the last 10 years. People in the former third world countries who are for the first time beginning to enjoy a decent standard of living are bidding up all the prices of raw materials / commodities. This will place a strain on the economy like never before. It is possible that sometime during this century, a famine on the same scale as the "great leap forward" famine will take place.
2. All the shit that we've done to the environment over the last 50-100 years will come and bite us in the back. There will be climate change, sea levels rising, plenty of natural disasters to worry about. You will probably never be able to get yourself insured at a decent price anymore.
3. A lot of the world will be more middle class than ever before. Which is nice in a way and not so nice in others (see point 1).
Hot, flat and crowded. A more exciting world. A more messy world.
Sunday, 30 November 2008
Stalker
Some longtime readers of my blog will remember when I used to stalk this chick who was living in my block. It was hard work. I didn't want to loiter around the void deck waiting for her to appear, but I had to time my arrival down the path which leads down to the MRT, and hope to bump into her along the way. I seldom made it on time, and I almost never got to see her. In the evenings I had to be there before 8. In the mornings I had to be downstairs between 7 and 8. I never made the morning hours: I guess I loved my one hour more of sleep more than I loved her.
Even when I was actively stalking her, and this was over a 6 month period, I bumped into her no fewer than 10 times. After 1 or 2 dates she decided I wasn't right for her, I suspect it had to do with her religious tendencies (holier than thou?) among other reasons but looking back now it's impossible for me to be with somebody who cannot tolerate my flippant attitude towards religion.
Why am I bringing this up? Well there is an ex-colleague of mine who used to join us for Wednesday games. He stopped joining us because he's got to take care of his kid but that's not the only reason. He's since left the company but less than 2 weeks ago I bumped into him. I bumped into him a few times: I guess we have mutual friends: at weddings and at shopping malls, but this time it was my void deck. So I asked him what are you doing on my turf? Guess what, he's now my neighbour. And guess what, I've bumped into him 4 times in the space of 10 days.
OK, I enter and leave my apartment at times that are more compatible with his but I wish I bumped into that chick as often as I bump into him. I have nothing against him but he's just not somebody with great legs, beautiful eyes and a saintly aura.
Even when I was actively stalking her, and this was over a 6 month period, I bumped into her no fewer than 10 times. After 1 or 2 dates she decided I wasn't right for her, I suspect it had to do with her religious tendencies (holier than thou?) among other reasons but looking back now it's impossible for me to be with somebody who cannot tolerate my flippant attitude towards religion.
Why am I bringing this up? Well there is an ex-colleague of mine who used to join us for Wednesday games. He stopped joining us because he's got to take care of his kid but that's not the only reason. He's since left the company but less than 2 weeks ago I bumped into him. I bumped into him a few times: I guess we have mutual friends: at weddings and at shopping malls, but this time it was my void deck. So I asked him what are you doing on my turf? Guess what, he's now my neighbour. And guess what, I've bumped into him 4 times in the space of 10 days.
OK, I enter and leave my apartment at times that are more compatible with his but I wish I bumped into that chick as often as I bump into him. I have nothing against him but he's just not somebody with great legs, beautiful eyes and a saintly aura.
Wednesday, 26 November 2008
Dead Mathematicians
There was a time when a lot of jazz musicians I got acquainted with in college died, and another time when a lot of movie directors I found out about died. Now it seems that a few mathematicians whose work I had studied had died.
First off is the father of chaos theory, Edward Lorenz. I attended a course on chaos theory and I came to realize that it is not simply a scientific fad that has made its way into popular culture, but it is a very important way to study systems. One of the important implications of chaos theory is that it is very futile to predict the behaviour of sufficiently complicated systems.
Unfortunately some of the people that I work with don’t really understand this, in spite of the fact that one of them holds an advanced degree from Lorenz’s university. They have an exaggerated belief in their ability to predict events that take place in the future, or their ability to make sense out of it, rather than to do the more sensible thing and just plan for contingencies. They’re also too smart to listen to what I have to say.
I may have blogged about chaos theory at length before. There’s too much to explain over here. People who are interested can just go read this nice book that my professor recommended, “Chaos” by James Gleick
Another person who died was Kiyoshi Ito. I had heard that it was possible, 10 years ago, to earn shit loads of money as a maths geek by studying a maths technique called stochastic differential equations. In the 1970s, a few people – Myron Scholes and Fisher Black came up with a way to use sexy fancy mathematics to make rapid investment decisions on complex financial instruments called derivatives. One of their discoveries was the Black Scholes option pricing model, which calculates the probable value of stock options. To do this they had to build upon a lot of important and cheem work that Ito laid down for stochastic differential equations.
Scholes and Merton, another one of their maths buddies, joined a hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management. Both of them were awarded the Economics Nobel Prize for their “contribution” in 1997. In 1998, LTCM blew up and went bust. Oops.
What went wrong? Apparently one of the central assumptions – that you can use a lot of teeny weeny normal distributions to model the movement of stock markets. But that assumption does not square very well with reality. Benoit Mandelbrot, who is a very important figure in chaos theory (and who also likes to tell a lot of old farts in academia that their ideas are wrong) developed some ideas about a better and more accurate way to assess risk. Unfortunately the maths in his system is much more difficult to work with and he does not have something with the theoretical elegance of the Black Scholes model.
In the meantime, a lot of fingers have been pointed at hedge funds for their role in exacerbating the current financial crisis. This will be debated for a long time yet. This is not to point fingers at Ito, since he only did the maths part and said nothing about applications for finance. Ito’s work has a lot of other applications which make more sense, in electrical engineering, for instance.
The last person is Henri Cartan. I am not that familiar with Henri Cartan’s work. But there was once I wanted to learn about complex analysis, and I ended up picking up a book about it. It is probably the same textbook as the one mentioned in his obituary. Cartan was a member of the Bourbaki group that helped develop the concept of a proof to be something that is completely rigorous, and not leave anything to the imagination. A bit like asking a sexy woman in front of you to please remove the bikini because after all you are almost naked anyway. On one hand this was intensely irritating because my professors would be nitpicking every part of every maths proof I ever did as homework. But it was great for the development of maths because when you are so rigorous with everything, all the ideas behind the proof are shown clearly, and then you can sometimes derive some more connections between ideas, and at the same time drive more maths research.
First off is the father of chaos theory, Edward Lorenz. I attended a course on chaos theory and I came to realize that it is not simply a scientific fad that has made its way into popular culture, but it is a very important way to study systems. One of the important implications of chaos theory is that it is very futile to predict the behaviour of sufficiently complicated systems.
Unfortunately some of the people that I work with don’t really understand this, in spite of the fact that one of them holds an advanced degree from Lorenz’s university. They have an exaggerated belief in their ability to predict events that take place in the future, or their ability to make sense out of it, rather than to do the more sensible thing and just plan for contingencies. They’re also too smart to listen to what I have to say.
I may have blogged about chaos theory at length before. There’s too much to explain over here. People who are interested can just go read this nice book that my professor recommended, “Chaos” by James Gleick
Another person who died was Kiyoshi Ito. I had heard that it was possible, 10 years ago, to earn shit loads of money as a maths geek by studying a maths technique called stochastic differential equations. In the 1970s, a few people – Myron Scholes and Fisher Black came up with a way to use sexy fancy mathematics to make rapid investment decisions on complex financial instruments called derivatives. One of their discoveries was the Black Scholes option pricing model, which calculates the probable value of stock options. To do this they had to build upon a lot of important and cheem work that Ito laid down for stochastic differential equations.
Scholes and Merton, another one of their maths buddies, joined a hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management. Both of them were awarded the Economics Nobel Prize for their “contribution” in 1997. In 1998, LTCM blew up and went bust. Oops.
What went wrong? Apparently one of the central assumptions – that you can use a lot of teeny weeny normal distributions to model the movement of stock markets. But that assumption does not square very well with reality. Benoit Mandelbrot, who is a very important figure in chaos theory (and who also likes to tell a lot of old farts in academia that their ideas are wrong) developed some ideas about a better and more accurate way to assess risk. Unfortunately the maths in his system is much more difficult to work with and he does not have something with the theoretical elegance of the Black Scholes model.
In the meantime, a lot of fingers have been pointed at hedge funds for their role in exacerbating the current financial crisis. This will be debated for a long time yet. This is not to point fingers at Ito, since he only did the maths part and said nothing about applications for finance. Ito’s work has a lot of other applications which make more sense, in electrical engineering, for instance.
The last person is Henri Cartan. I am not that familiar with Henri Cartan’s work. But there was once I wanted to learn about complex analysis, and I ended up picking up a book about it. It is probably the same textbook as the one mentioned in his obituary. Cartan was a member of the Bourbaki group that helped develop the concept of a proof to be something that is completely rigorous, and not leave anything to the imagination. A bit like asking a sexy woman in front of you to please remove the bikini because after all you are almost naked anyway. On one hand this was intensely irritating because my professors would be nitpicking every part of every maths proof I ever did as homework. But it was great for the development of maths because when you are so rigorous with everything, all the ideas behind the proof are shown clearly, and then you can sometimes derive some more connections between ideas, and at the same time drive more maths research.
Saturday, 22 November 2008
Who Am I tag
"Who are you? What's your name? Super Brother!"
- Guitar Vader
I am idle enough to respond to a tag.
A. Attached or single?
Single
B. Best friend?
“For the music is your special friend
Dance on fire as it intends
Music is your only friend
Until the end” – Jim Morrison
C. Cake or pie?
Cake. I don’t like syrup.
D. Day of choice?
Every day is your day of choice except the day that you die, and even that is negotiable.
E. Essential item?
A book. The two most important things are your education, and the eradication of cockroaches.
F. Favorite color?
Green. Or gray. I love not seeing the sky so it doesn’t matter if my view is blocked by trees or clouds.
G. Gummy bears or worms?
Gummy bears
H. Hometown?
Singapore.
I. Favorite indulgence?
Masturbation. If you didn’t want to know you didn’t have to ask.
J. January or July?
January. My birthday is in January
K. Kids?
Making kids. Yeah baby.
L. Life isn’t complete without?
Life is never complete. Thank your lucky stars you can wake up in the morning and still find something to do.
M. Marriage date?
Unknown.
N. Number of magazine subscription:
Some of my regular reads: Economist, Guardian, Independent, New York Times. I used to read Rolling Stone, Mojo, Q, NME at bookstores. I like New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs for history stuff. Scientific American for science. Playeur and FHM for porn. But no magazine subscriptions because I like free material.
(nb: if you have to admit being a porn freak it is better to bury it under a whole pile of other magazines.)
O. Oranges or apples?
Apples. They make you burp and feel manly about yourself afterwards.
P. Phobias?
Used hypodermic needles
Q. Quotes?
I’m the man
R. Reasons to smile?
I’m the man
S. Season of choice?
Winter. My zodiac sign is associated with winter. Plus I used to have 4-5 months of it so you might as well like it.
T. Tag 5 people.
See my reply to “B”
U. Unknown fact about me?
I am a musical genius
V. Vegetable?
Primarily vegetarian: veggie bee hoon good. Yong Tao Hoo OK. Double boiled soup so-so. Steak bad.
W. Worst habit?
Watching TV / surfing / reading / using the bathroom / fixing the computer while having dinner
X. X-ray or ultrasound?
When you say ultrasound I think about Sir Alex Ferguson giving me the hairdryer treatment. Therefore X ray.
Y. Your favorite foods?
Eat to live not live to eat.
Z. Zodiac sign?
Half goat half fish.
- Guitar Vader
I am idle enough to respond to a tag.
A. Attached or single?
Single
B. Best friend?
“For the music is your special friend
Dance on fire as it intends
Music is your only friend
Until the end” – Jim Morrison
C. Cake or pie?
Cake. I don’t like syrup.
D. Day of choice?
Every day is your day of choice except the day that you die, and even that is negotiable.
E. Essential item?
A book. The two most important things are your education, and the eradication of cockroaches.
F. Favorite color?
Green. Or gray. I love not seeing the sky so it doesn’t matter if my view is blocked by trees or clouds.
G. Gummy bears or worms?
Gummy bears
H. Hometown?
Singapore.
I. Favorite indulgence?
Masturbation. If you didn’t want to know you didn’t have to ask.
J. January or July?
January. My birthday is in January
K. Kids?
Making kids. Yeah baby.
L. Life isn’t complete without?
Life is never complete. Thank your lucky stars you can wake up in the morning and still find something to do.
M. Marriage date?
Unknown.
N. Number of magazine subscription:
Some of my regular reads: Economist, Guardian, Independent, New York Times. I used to read Rolling Stone, Mojo, Q, NME at bookstores. I like New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs for history stuff. Scientific American for science. Playeur and FHM for porn. But no magazine subscriptions because I like free material.
(nb: if you have to admit being a porn freak it is better to bury it under a whole pile of other magazines.)
O. Oranges or apples?
Apples. They make you burp and feel manly about yourself afterwards.
P. Phobias?
Used hypodermic needles
Q. Quotes?
I’m the man
R. Reasons to smile?
I’m the man
S. Season of choice?
Winter. My zodiac sign is associated with winter. Plus I used to have 4-5 months of it so you might as well like it.
T. Tag 5 people.
See my reply to “B”
U. Unknown fact about me?
I am a musical genius
V. Vegetable?
Primarily vegetarian: veggie bee hoon good. Yong Tao Hoo OK. Double boiled soup so-so. Steak bad.
W. Worst habit?
Watching TV / surfing / reading / using the bathroom / fixing the computer while having dinner
X. X-ray or ultrasound?
When you say ultrasound I think about Sir Alex Ferguson giving me the hairdryer treatment. Therefore X ray.
Y. Your favorite foods?
Eat to live not live to eat.
Z. Zodiac sign?
Half goat half fish.
Saturday, 15 November 2008
My Sassy Girl
I usually have some reservations about adapting movies across cultures. Yes, one of the most successful Hollywood movies of all time was an adaptation of a Japanese film. There was a movie about a bunch of rebels attacking a samurai fortress, called “Hidden Fortress”. It later on got remade into “Star Wars”, although George Lucas did add some stuff of his own.
There have been some remakes of “The Ring”. Now The Ring may be a big hit, and the ending (which I can’t reveal) may have been inspired by the internet which is a western invention, but there are a lot of aspects of “The Ring” which are very Asian. Long haired ghosts, the notion of the supernatural being unhappy people with some axes to grind with the living - these are Asian types of ghosts.
The one adaptation which was never going to work is “My Sassy Girl”. Some things about human nature are just not universal. The original premise of “My Sassy Girl” is not going to work in the western context, because all these people are behaving like Asians, not westerners. Yes, emotional masochism is universal. But the Jeon Ji Hyun character using her violent behaviour on her boyfriend as a mask for her grief over the previous boyfriend is something rather particular to Asian culture.
I can imagine an angmoh doing that, but I can’t imagine an angmoh being so selfless as to hide these problems away. When angmohs have psychological problems, they do not make Korean soap opera out of it. Instead they beat somebody up, shoot up on drugs, go to therapy, blog about it, whatever. But they will tell somebody about it. They will discuss it. Angmohs don’t suffer in silence because they are not Asians.
The guy is also clearly not an angmoh. Angmoh guys are macho people. It is more Asian to be the sensitive new age guy. In fact many of them are. So this SNAG is not a real issue. Asians also tend to be more sentimental than angmohs, who see this as a sign of weakness. But angmohs are not more stoic than Asians, rather they are more stoic about different things. If you make an angmoh stay back longer in the office than he has to, he will either quit his job or badmouth his boss to the rest of the world. The asian will be better at tahaning this. We all know this to be true: angmohs are better at fighting for their rights, and Asians are better at eating shit.
Ang moh women do not bully guys and then fall in love with them afterwards. They do not get touched by his unwavering devotion. What his actions communicate to her is that he has a small dick.
Conversely the whole spectacle of the woman loving the self sacrificing guy, and yet being constrained by both her own reservations and by society’s norms to express it, is something intensely moving to Asians. Angmohs are much more likely to say “what a fucking idiot, she has issues, she should go and seek professional help”.
The issue is that while these 2 people are fairly unusual even in Korea, the rest of their psychological makeup is fairly common. She’s the one who masks her suffering. He’s the one who is a mother’s boy. But these two people will be considered freaks in angmoh society. They would be wimps and losers.
Yes, Shakespeare wrote “Taming of a Shrew”, another romance involving a sassy girl. But in that play, the guy manipulates her and eventually dominates her, instead of winning her over by putting up with her shit. When I found out that the remake was directed by Yann Samuell, who also directed “Love Me if you Dare”, a light turned on in my head. That was a good movie, and there are some similarities, like the fire of being extremely attracted to the other is starkly contrasted with the ice of playing a game where you have to act cool. But that was love as competition, and is in some respects quite macho.
Anyway I read somewhere that the director of the Korean version was brought in as a consultant for the Hollywood version, and when he saw the mess, he threw up his hands and quit. I can imagine why.
There have been some remakes of “The Ring”. Now The Ring may be a big hit, and the ending (which I can’t reveal) may have been inspired by the internet which is a western invention, but there are a lot of aspects of “The Ring” which are very Asian. Long haired ghosts, the notion of the supernatural being unhappy people with some axes to grind with the living - these are Asian types of ghosts.
The one adaptation which was never going to work is “My Sassy Girl”. Some things about human nature are just not universal. The original premise of “My Sassy Girl” is not going to work in the western context, because all these people are behaving like Asians, not westerners. Yes, emotional masochism is universal. But the Jeon Ji Hyun character using her violent behaviour on her boyfriend as a mask for her grief over the previous boyfriend is something rather particular to Asian culture.
I can imagine an angmoh doing that, but I can’t imagine an angmoh being so selfless as to hide these problems away. When angmohs have psychological problems, they do not make Korean soap opera out of it. Instead they beat somebody up, shoot up on drugs, go to therapy, blog about it, whatever. But they will tell somebody about it. They will discuss it. Angmohs don’t suffer in silence because they are not Asians.
The guy is also clearly not an angmoh. Angmoh guys are macho people. It is more Asian to be the sensitive new age guy. In fact many of them are. So this SNAG is not a real issue. Asians also tend to be more sentimental than angmohs, who see this as a sign of weakness. But angmohs are not more stoic than Asians, rather they are more stoic about different things. If you make an angmoh stay back longer in the office than he has to, he will either quit his job or badmouth his boss to the rest of the world. The asian will be better at tahaning this. We all know this to be true: angmohs are better at fighting for their rights, and Asians are better at eating shit.
Ang moh women do not bully guys and then fall in love with them afterwards. They do not get touched by his unwavering devotion. What his actions communicate to her is that he has a small dick.
Conversely the whole spectacle of the woman loving the self sacrificing guy, and yet being constrained by both her own reservations and by society’s norms to express it, is something intensely moving to Asians. Angmohs are much more likely to say “what a fucking idiot, she has issues, she should go and seek professional help”.
The issue is that while these 2 people are fairly unusual even in Korea, the rest of their psychological makeup is fairly common. She’s the one who masks her suffering. He’s the one who is a mother’s boy. But these two people will be considered freaks in angmoh society. They would be wimps and losers.
Yes, Shakespeare wrote “Taming of a Shrew”, another romance involving a sassy girl. But in that play, the guy manipulates her and eventually dominates her, instead of winning her over by putting up with her shit. When I found out that the remake was directed by Yann Samuell, who also directed “Love Me if you Dare”, a light turned on in my head. That was a good movie, and there are some similarities, like the fire of being extremely attracted to the other is starkly contrasted with the ice of playing a game where you have to act cool. But that was love as competition, and is in some respects quite macho.
Anyway I read somewhere that the director of the Korean version was brought in as a consultant for the Hollywood version, and when he saw the mess, he threw up his hands and quit. I can imagine why.
Saturday, 8 November 2008
Adventures in the US - Summer 2001
Another thing I’ll never forget. I was going to start my 4th year, after spending 1 summer in Singapore. I had to move out of my place after my housemate, Willow graduated. My new place would be across the street, and I had requested for the new tenant (of the place I was moving out of) to allow me to store the stuff at the old place for the summer.
My flight from Singapore to the US had a stopover in Tokyo. I spent a week there vacationing with a Malay friend of mine. One of the interesting things is that we went into a hot spring and I was able to see for the first time what someone with a circumcision looks like. But of course that’s not the only or main reason why I vacationed with him.
So my flight back was a little bit hectic, to say the least. I would check out of my hotel, go to the airport, board the plane, fly to Chicago, stop over, fly to (small town near my college), have my friend pick me up from Syracuse and drive to college. At this point it would be midnight at my college but 2 in the afternoon Tokyo time. So at this point, at the end of 20+ hours of travelling, I would move house just so that I would have a place to stay at night.
This is the sort of thing you can only imagine yourself pulling off when you’re in your 20s.
I ring the doorbell, and there are these 2 pseudo Latina ppl who say hi, typical American superficial friendliness and all that. I noticed that they have a new sofa set and they said, “yeh I asked for new sofas, asked them to throw out the carpet, yada yada yada and they did it for me. I was like, what?! You mean I lived in a flat for 2 years with crappy furniture and all I had to do was to ask them to change me a new set and I could have been having much better furnishings?
But before I could think too long, one of them said to me, “look, it’s getting late, and we’re not going to be staying up forever, so why don’t you take all your things and put them out here…” I was like, yeh, a bit unfriendly but reasonable.
So I move box 1, and carry it 50 m across the road and up the stairs, no problem. Box 2 and 3, still OK. Box 4, I’m almost about to die. So I park Box 4 on my front lawn. It’s summer, see and there’s no snow. I take 5 inside the house: my room is the one that faces the front lawn. I dig out a rare jazz CD that I bought in Tokyo and play it – it feels good. (Actually that CD has since been re-released with new mastering so I think I should not have bought that CD at that time but nevermind…)
I open 1 box, and it has all my bedsheets. I make my bed, get my blanket out and at least I have somewhere to sleep for the night.
Suddenly I hear some loud noises on the lawn. A bunch of frat boys who have just finished partying and are walking down the street have found my box, and they were opening it. My jaw was on the floor. They were ripping off the cover, taking some of the contents, and splaying them around the lawn. Mind, they didn’t steal anything, just messed everything up like a bunch of hooligans (which they were.) I was thinking about whether to go out confront them, but 4 against 1, I thought it was best not to. That was the one time in my life I was willing to retract everything I had previously said about gun ownership in America.
5 minutes later, they were gone. Cursing under my breath, I packed everything back into the tattered box, and carried it upstairs.
That was August 2001. 1 month later, the WTC would cease to exist.
My flight from Singapore to the US had a stopover in Tokyo. I spent a week there vacationing with a Malay friend of mine. One of the interesting things is that we went into a hot spring and I was able to see for the first time what someone with a circumcision looks like. But of course that’s not the only or main reason why I vacationed with him.
So my flight back was a little bit hectic, to say the least. I would check out of my hotel, go to the airport, board the plane, fly to Chicago, stop over, fly to (small town near my college), have my friend pick me up from Syracuse and drive to college. At this point it would be midnight at my college but 2 in the afternoon Tokyo time. So at this point, at the end of 20+ hours of travelling, I would move house just so that I would have a place to stay at night.
This is the sort of thing you can only imagine yourself pulling off when you’re in your 20s.
I ring the doorbell, and there are these 2 pseudo Latina ppl who say hi, typical American superficial friendliness and all that. I noticed that they have a new sofa set and they said, “yeh I asked for new sofas, asked them to throw out the carpet, yada yada yada and they did it for me. I was like, what?! You mean I lived in a flat for 2 years with crappy furniture and all I had to do was to ask them to change me a new set and I could have been having much better furnishings?
But before I could think too long, one of them said to me, “look, it’s getting late, and we’re not going to be staying up forever, so why don’t you take all your things and put them out here…” I was like, yeh, a bit unfriendly but reasonable.
So I move box 1, and carry it 50 m across the road and up the stairs, no problem. Box 2 and 3, still OK. Box 4, I’m almost about to die. So I park Box 4 on my front lawn. It’s summer, see and there’s no snow. I take 5 inside the house: my room is the one that faces the front lawn. I dig out a rare jazz CD that I bought in Tokyo and play it – it feels good. (Actually that CD has since been re-released with new mastering so I think I should not have bought that CD at that time but nevermind…)
I open 1 box, and it has all my bedsheets. I make my bed, get my blanket out and at least I have somewhere to sleep for the night.
Suddenly I hear some loud noises on the lawn. A bunch of frat boys who have just finished partying and are walking down the street have found my box, and they were opening it. My jaw was on the floor. They were ripping off the cover, taking some of the contents, and splaying them around the lawn. Mind, they didn’t steal anything, just messed everything up like a bunch of hooligans (which they were.) I was thinking about whether to go out confront them, but 4 against 1, I thought it was best not to. That was the one time in my life I was willing to retract everything I had previously said about gun ownership in America.
5 minutes later, they were gone. Cursing under my breath, I packed everything back into the tattered box, and carried it upstairs.
That was August 2001. 1 month later, the WTC would cease to exist.
Saturday, 1 November 2008
Manic Street Preachers
Every morning before I go out, if I’m going on the MRT, I pick a book out before I leave the house. I was about to reach for “the Girl in the Picture” when I changed my mind and took “A History of the End of the World” instead. That book was a book about the book of Revelations in the Bible, apparently the nuttiest part of the Bible and the one that says that the end is at hand.
When I entered the train, almost immediately the angmoh standing next to me said, “hey, that’s a pretty interesting book you got right there.”
Oh shit, I was standing right next to a preacher in a necktie!
Angmormon: Hey, you a Christian?
#9: No.
Angmormon: You aren’t a Christian, why are you reading this?
#9: I’m just curious.
Angmormon: What is your religion?
#9: I’m a Buddhist.
Angmormon: You believe that the world is coming to an end?
#9: No.
Angmormon: Yeh what do you think is going to happen?
#9: Well things go on as they always used to.
Angmormon: Yeh but we all know the sun’s going to turn into a red giant one day don’t we?
I thought yeh but I dun worry about that because the human race will be gone by then.
Then he passed me a booklet where he talked about his church, the church of the latter day Saints, and talked about his hero, the prophet Joseph Smith. That rang alarm bells in my mind. Joseph Smith was from New York, he said. Yeh. I thought, but he got cast out to Utah because they wanted that cracko as far from civilisation as possible.
He claimed to be a Maths major just like me, and I asked him what he does when he’s not evangelising. He said, nothing. He evangelises from 7 in the morning to 11 at night, and I detected an undertone of resentment as he told me that. That is cracko. I mentioned about having gone to Utah earlier this year to see the arches. He said wow that’s great. How did you know Mormons are from Utah? I said, I was curious. Actually I met a Mormon in Europe once, but I didn’t say that.
It’s unusual for people to be chatting in the MRT. Our MRT is very quiet compared to subways in angmoh countries when everybody is talking away. He left the station at City Hall.
Well thanks for the booklet. It will feed my intellectual curiosity but I’m just not interested in being a Christian, much less a Mormon. If anybody is interested in contacting him, his name is Elder Tuckfield and you can get him at 6455 6425.
There was a third book I considered bringing along before I left the house. It was a biography of a band called the Manic Street Preachers.
When I entered the train, almost immediately the angmoh standing next to me said, “hey, that’s a pretty interesting book you got right there.”
Oh shit, I was standing right next to a preacher in a necktie!
Angmormon: Hey, you a Christian?
#9: No.
Angmormon: You aren’t a Christian, why are you reading this?
#9: I’m just curious.
Angmormon: What is your religion?
#9: I’m a Buddhist.
Angmormon: You believe that the world is coming to an end?
#9: No.
Angmormon: Yeh what do you think is going to happen?
#9: Well things go on as they always used to.
Angmormon: Yeh but we all know the sun’s going to turn into a red giant one day don’t we?
I thought yeh but I dun worry about that because the human race will be gone by then.
Then he passed me a booklet where he talked about his church, the church of the latter day Saints, and talked about his hero, the prophet Joseph Smith. That rang alarm bells in my mind. Joseph Smith was from New York, he said. Yeh. I thought, but he got cast out to Utah because they wanted that cracko as far from civilisation as possible.
He claimed to be a Maths major just like me, and I asked him what he does when he’s not evangelising. He said, nothing. He evangelises from 7 in the morning to 11 at night, and I detected an undertone of resentment as he told me that. That is cracko. I mentioned about having gone to Utah earlier this year to see the arches. He said wow that’s great. How did you know Mormons are from Utah? I said, I was curious. Actually I met a Mormon in Europe once, but I didn’t say that.
It’s unusual for people to be chatting in the MRT. Our MRT is very quiet compared to subways in angmoh countries when everybody is talking away. He left the station at City Hall.
Well thanks for the booklet. It will feed my intellectual curiosity but I’m just not interested in being a Christian, much less a Mormon. If anybody is interested in contacting him, his name is Elder Tuckfield and you can get him at 6455 6425.
There was a third book I considered bringing along before I left the house. It was a biography of a band called the Manic Street Preachers.
Saturday, 25 October 2008
Adventures in the US - Chicago, Spring 01
I think I’ll follow this up with more adventures in the US.
A trip to Chicago, and it was a bad time for me. My relationship with codfish was just over, and although I hadn’t realised it that was the start of the problems. Also hadn’t realised why people seemed more hostile towards me during that period – it was because I was full of rage and it showed.
A few of us went to a bar (OK – it was Swensen’s – now you know) and we tried to order drinks. The waitress was some eastern European. We tried to order drinks. They asked me for an ID, and when I didn’t have any, she refused to serve me. I would normally have accepted it with equinamity but as said earlier, not in a good mood. Plus I was already in my mid 20s at that time, and somebody telling me I looked under 21 was really off putting. “I’ll have a water.” The waitress glared at me and I ended up starting an argument with her.
After that unhappy episode I also got annoyed at my friend who was hellbent on wanting to get drunk that evening. Eventually we just went to a convenience store, bought a whole lot of liquor to drink in our hotel, and then glugged it all down. I found I was able to hold my liquor better than the rest (and I was drinking less too) so 2 hours later I was the only one still able to function.
Still feeling in a bad mood, I proceeded to make a semi-pornographic movie where, with a large dose of black humour, I stimulated raping one of my friends. Shingot saw that video once and admitted to me that he found it “disturbing”.
I may have been half drunk while making that movie but what I found remarkable was that the person who shot it on digital video later on when to edit and splice the clips together - without my guidance. The fact that he was able to piece together a fairly lucid philosophical argument out of my drunken ramblings indicates that I couldn't have been very drunk at that time.
The plane trip back was not that much better. Thanks to not very good time management, we reached the plane barely seconds before we closed the door. Next to us there was this grouchy old lady with a little dog. We were mucking around with our luggage when we accidentally bumped into that lady with the luggage, and she started lashing out at us for making too much noise and whacking her. We just sat back and cringed at the fact that we were going to be stuck with her for the 2-3 hour flight.
But she got her just desserts in the end. When the airplane took off, it literally scared the shit out of the dog, and she was pretty red faced much of the trip, asking the stewardess for more kitchen towels to clean up her mess. On one hand there was the grim satisfaction but on the other hand there was this terrible stench.
Chicago is really not that bad. I know I’m telling you a lot of the grouchy parts of the trip, but it’s a nice city. Yes, if you’ve read Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” you’d know that it was a horrible place to live in 100 years ago. Yes, when Al Capone was controlling the city in the 1930s it was completely crap. Yes, there was 1968 and all that, but I’m sure you all have parents who will tell you that Singapore was not always such a liveable place, at least for 10-20 years after the end of the war.
Guess I hadn’t grown up that much at that point. I was only starting to grow up. I travelled with my sister around that time, and earlier this year I travelled around with my sister again, more than 5 years later. She says I’m much more relaxed around angmohs this time around. Yes, I’m calmer with people these days.
A trip to Chicago, and it was a bad time for me. My relationship with codfish was just over, and although I hadn’t realised it that was the start of the problems. Also hadn’t realised why people seemed more hostile towards me during that period – it was because I was full of rage and it showed.
A few of us went to a bar (OK – it was Swensen’s – now you know) and we tried to order drinks. The waitress was some eastern European. We tried to order drinks. They asked me for an ID, and when I didn’t have any, she refused to serve me. I would normally have accepted it with equinamity but as said earlier, not in a good mood. Plus I was already in my mid 20s at that time, and somebody telling me I looked under 21 was really off putting. “I’ll have a water.” The waitress glared at me and I ended up starting an argument with her.
After that unhappy episode I also got annoyed at my friend who was hellbent on wanting to get drunk that evening. Eventually we just went to a convenience store, bought a whole lot of liquor to drink in our hotel, and then glugged it all down. I found I was able to hold my liquor better than the rest (and I was drinking less too) so 2 hours later I was the only one still able to function.
Still feeling in a bad mood, I proceeded to make a semi-pornographic movie where, with a large dose of black humour, I stimulated raping one of my friends. Shingot saw that video once and admitted to me that he found it “disturbing”.
I may have been half drunk while making that movie but what I found remarkable was that the person who shot it on digital video later on when to edit and splice the clips together - without my guidance. The fact that he was able to piece together a fairly lucid philosophical argument out of my drunken ramblings indicates that I couldn't have been very drunk at that time.
The plane trip back was not that much better. Thanks to not very good time management, we reached the plane barely seconds before we closed the door. Next to us there was this grouchy old lady with a little dog. We were mucking around with our luggage when we accidentally bumped into that lady with the luggage, and she started lashing out at us for making too much noise and whacking her. We just sat back and cringed at the fact that we were going to be stuck with her for the 2-3 hour flight.
But she got her just desserts in the end. When the airplane took off, it literally scared the shit out of the dog, and she was pretty red faced much of the trip, asking the stewardess for more kitchen towels to clean up her mess. On one hand there was the grim satisfaction but on the other hand there was this terrible stench.
Chicago is really not that bad. I know I’m telling you a lot of the grouchy parts of the trip, but it’s a nice city. Yes, if you’ve read Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” you’d know that it was a horrible place to live in 100 years ago. Yes, when Al Capone was controlling the city in the 1930s it was completely crap. Yes, there was 1968 and all that, but I’m sure you all have parents who will tell you that Singapore was not always such a liveable place, at least for 10-20 years after the end of the war.
Guess I hadn’t grown up that much at that point. I was only starting to grow up. I travelled with my sister around that time, and earlier this year I travelled around with my sister again, more than 5 years later. She says I’m much more relaxed around angmohs this time around. Yes, I’m calmer with people these days.
Saturday, 18 October 2008
Blue Gold
There was a time when I used an obscene amount of water. I used to do most of my studying in the bath. The hot bath is the closest thing to tropical weather in the wretched northeast of the US of A. Used to fill it up – 30/40 litres at one go, and soak in it for hours, or for as long as it took for me to finish 1 more chapter of abstract algebra. But there were mitigating factors. Water was free. The city didn’t charge for it, because I was living in a sparsely populated small town which was next to a lake larger than Singapore. It will never run out of water. So that was OK.
I would never do the same thing in a city like Singapore – it’s a waste of water. If I were to live in a more urban place but cold climate I will have to think of different ways to keep warm.
And that is why I disapprove of gourmet coffee joints which use the dipping well to dump their barang. Can you imagine keeping the tap on all day just so that you can look good in front of your customers? And there are so many Starbucks in the US. My sis and I walked down the main shopping road of Denver and we counted 8 different Starbucks. Imagine each one wasting as much water as that!
Starbucks, Coffee Bean and Spinelli’s all have this problem. So I’ll boycott them. This is bloody ridiculous – water is getting more expensive and rare all the time, and those guys need to waste it like that?
And Starbucks – they had this practice where they could go to a coffee joint, and offer the landlord a higher price than the coffee joint was paying. Then they’d get the landlord to kick out that coffee joint. That is how many coffee joints went out of business.
Life has gotten kinda boring because I have boycotted cinemas for raising their prices. (And anyway films in cinemas are getting from bad to worse. I don’t know why distributors cannot get decent pictures in here anymore.) Now I am boycotting gourmet coffee joints as well. I could also boycott western food joints for using too much meat in their food. There’s nothing else I can do other than to go lim kopi at a coffee shop.
(After this article was written, Starbucks and Spinelli’s have changed their dipper well system. Fair enough, boycott over. Boycott still applies to Coffee Bean).
I would never do the same thing in a city like Singapore – it’s a waste of water. If I were to live in a more urban place but cold climate I will have to think of different ways to keep warm.
And that is why I disapprove of gourmet coffee joints which use the dipping well to dump their barang. Can you imagine keeping the tap on all day just so that you can look good in front of your customers? And there are so many Starbucks in the US. My sis and I walked down the main shopping road of Denver and we counted 8 different Starbucks. Imagine each one wasting as much water as that!
Starbucks, Coffee Bean and Spinelli’s all have this problem. So I’ll boycott them. This is bloody ridiculous – water is getting more expensive and rare all the time, and those guys need to waste it like that?
And Starbucks – they had this practice where they could go to a coffee joint, and offer the landlord a higher price than the coffee joint was paying. Then they’d get the landlord to kick out that coffee joint. That is how many coffee joints went out of business.
Life has gotten kinda boring because I have boycotted cinemas for raising their prices. (And anyway films in cinemas are getting from bad to worse. I don’t know why distributors cannot get decent pictures in here anymore.) Now I am boycotting gourmet coffee joints as well. I could also boycott western food joints for using too much meat in their food. There’s nothing else I can do other than to go lim kopi at a coffee shop.
(After this article was written, Starbucks and Spinelli’s have changed their dipper well system. Fair enough, boycott over. Boycott still applies to Coffee Bean).
Sunday, 12 October 2008
Climb every Mountain
Climb every mountain, search high and low
Follow every by way, every path you know
Climb every mountain, ford every stream
Follow every rainbow, till you find your dream
A dream that will need, all the love you can give
Everyday of your life, for as long as you live
A Capricorn song if every there was one. This song comes from "The Sound of Music", which is also the last musical that Rodgers and Hammerstein would write together. The lyricist Hammerstein died soon after.
I woke up from disturbing dreams about being back in one of the toughest army camps I've ever been to. I wouldn't say that it's as tough as being in the commandos, or even the guards, but I still remember the words of a lieutenant who barked out at us: "this is the tarmac. It is sacred ground. Nobody walks on the tarmac!"
Everything was bigger. The missiles were heavier, the missile launchers are larger. The control equipment is heavier. It was designed for big burly angmohs in mind. It was almost like being in the engineers. Probably the training was tougher because the sergeant in charge was a sadistic asshole who didn't want to brief us properly and preferred for us to screw up time and again until we one day magically learnt our lesson. It didn't happen.
I injured myself and I was eventually deployed to a nicer place where the missiles were smaller, and the equipment was more manageable. But that is another story for another time.
But I had disturbing dreams about being back in that camp, about missiles being twice as heavy, people running twice as fast. The airplanes are everywhere! I was just carrying them over to the launcher as fast as they were being fired off, with all the flak flying around me.
Then you got to go back to what that dream was all about. It was the weekend again, so it's marathon preparation time. I had this troublesome right ankle, and it usually gave me hell after 15 km, but yesterday I managed to run an extra 5 km. It would be almost noon by the time I'm finished with the 20km, and I also promised myself that I would run another 10 km at night because you can push yourself a little further when you split up your runs.
It didn't happen. I guess I was tired and feeling crappy. All I need was a signal to get me to stop running. It was a drizzle when I went to the park last night, and I said, forget about it, and ate a chocolate sundae instead. I couldn't wait until after the rain because I wanted to catch England vs Kazakhstan. Not bad when you can play like shit and still win 5-1.
Well it's Sunday afternoon now and I still haven't done the extra 10km now, but I'll do it after I put this entry up. I'm sure that my body will protest tomorrow but when you got to do that marathon you got to be up to the challenge. My jogging partner is usually a better runner than me but he said, "I'm not doing this again next year. This is crazy. The amount of preparation, the amount of work you're going to put into it..." Yes, me too. I'm just going to show up in December, collect that fucking medal, and then fuck off. Then I can tell other people that I lived the dream.
Whenever you dream you dream, don't forget the other part of the dream - the one that involves the shit work being done.
Follow every by way, every path you know
Climb every mountain, ford every stream
Follow every rainbow, till you find your dream
A dream that will need, all the love you can give
Everyday of your life, for as long as you live
A Capricorn song if every there was one. This song comes from "The Sound of Music", which is also the last musical that Rodgers and Hammerstein would write together. The lyricist Hammerstein died soon after.
I woke up from disturbing dreams about being back in one of the toughest army camps I've ever been to. I wouldn't say that it's as tough as being in the commandos, or even the guards, but I still remember the words of a lieutenant who barked out at us: "this is the tarmac. It is sacred ground. Nobody walks on the tarmac!"
Everything was bigger. The missiles were heavier, the missile launchers are larger. The control equipment is heavier. It was designed for big burly angmohs in mind. It was almost like being in the engineers. Probably the training was tougher because the sergeant in charge was a sadistic asshole who didn't want to brief us properly and preferred for us to screw up time and again until we one day magically learnt our lesson. It didn't happen.
I injured myself and I was eventually deployed to a nicer place where the missiles were smaller, and the equipment was more manageable. But that is another story for another time.
But I had disturbing dreams about being back in that camp, about missiles being twice as heavy, people running twice as fast. The airplanes are everywhere! I was just carrying them over to the launcher as fast as they were being fired off, with all the flak flying around me.
Then you got to go back to what that dream was all about. It was the weekend again, so it's marathon preparation time. I had this troublesome right ankle, and it usually gave me hell after 15 km, but yesterday I managed to run an extra 5 km. It would be almost noon by the time I'm finished with the 20km, and I also promised myself that I would run another 10 km at night because you can push yourself a little further when you split up your runs.
It didn't happen. I guess I was tired and feeling crappy. All I need was a signal to get me to stop running. It was a drizzle when I went to the park last night, and I said, forget about it, and ate a chocolate sundae instead. I couldn't wait until after the rain because I wanted to catch England vs Kazakhstan. Not bad when you can play like shit and still win 5-1.
Well it's Sunday afternoon now and I still haven't done the extra 10km now, but I'll do it after I put this entry up. I'm sure that my body will protest tomorrow but when you got to do that marathon you got to be up to the challenge. My jogging partner is usually a better runner than me but he said, "I'm not doing this again next year. This is crazy. The amount of preparation, the amount of work you're going to put into it..." Yes, me too. I'm just going to show up in December, collect that fucking medal, and then fuck off. Then I can tell other people that I lived the dream.
Whenever you dream you dream, don't forget the other part of the dream - the one that involves the shit work being done.
Thursday, 9 October 2008
3 Annoying ppl
There have been a few people who have irritated me a lot over the last few years. The 3 that I am going to talk about today happen to be women. I don’t know if that’s a little too much of a coincidence. I guess guys know how to be furtive. They’re masters at it. They understand the male ego much much better than women do, even if they’re usually desensitised to everything else. I used to tell a woman friend, guys are generally less sensitive than women, except in one respect: the male ego. Guys are less likely to tread on another guy’s ego by accident, or if they do, they will usually sense it immediately. Women can be more insensitive about it.
Marie Antoinette. Yes, we have gratuitous picture of Kirsten Dunst here. I really like Kirsten Dunst and I think she’s sexy, even though a lot of people feel otherwise. She’s got this figure halfway between skinny and womanly, so she can gain a few pounds and she’ll still look really well rounded. OK, distractions aside, Marie Antoinette was guillotined during the French Revolution and will always be seen as a figure of aristocratic excess. She is not one of the 3 who irk me - she's not alive today, unlike those 3 I'm going to talk about. I don't know if it's misogynist to say that it's often women who are blithely oblivious when they say things that are extremely offensive. I guess people naturally give you more of the benefit of the doubt and even want to suck up to you when you're a women. I guess also that people want to "protect" you from the evils of the world. So what happens when a particular woman is herself an evil of the world?
Wee Shu Min. I think a lot of ink has been spilt over this. One part of me feels great and says “orbigood” over and over again at the pummelling that she’s getting. Another part of me says, “please stop being stupid. You are giving scholars a really really bad name.” I think one bad thing about “meritocracy” is that it completely desensitises people to the fact that life is unfair.
People with the right means can get their kids into the right school, and the peer pressure alone will automatically make their kids into better students. They’ll naturally have better ECA records, better grades. Of course much of what they achieve as students is down to natural ability. The fact that I have 4 As and 2 distinctions at the “A” level is partly down to my innate genius. But I know deep down that if I hadn’t been pushed I could have gotten 2 Cs instead, and that makes you barely able to get into NUS. It’s this extra lift which allows the student to be in an environment where all he needs to do is to focus on his schoolwork, the crucial thing that determines whether he’ll make it to that elite level of performance, or whether he’ll just be a little better than average: and as we all know, there are almost no rewards for being just better than average.
The worst aspect of this is that her father, the MP Wee Siew Kim went out to defend his daughter. So there is nothing wrong with what she wrote? Implicitly they know that there is a threat to the system which favours them. People knows that not everybody is getting served but nobody wants to rock the boat. Martin Luther King said that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. I could flip that phrase around and say “Justice anywhere is a threat to injustice everywhere”, and for Wee Siew Kim to even admit that there is a flaw in what his daughter wrote would show that there is a flaw in the system that made him what he is today. It is so much easier to say, “there’s nothing wrong with the system. It doesn’t need fixing” than to say, “we’ve had a fairly equal society for a long time but that’s not going to last. I don’t have the answers now but I’m trying”.
Mathilde Chua. One of the directors involved in the TT Durai / NKF incident. Did she have to go to jail? I don’t think she got sentenced. The image that struck me was that she was smiling defiantly as she walked in and out of the Supreme Court, as though through sheer force of will she could make people believe that everything was alright, it was a simple misunderstanding that could be resolved. (More about this fucked up attitude later.) Now you could keep that contemptuous attitude and pretend that you’re contrite. I will still give you marks for trying. This is obviously an “I’ve done nothing wrong” smile.
Lee Bee Wah. This recent debacle - what can you say? Only in Singapore can somebody so politically tone deaf get elected into Parliament. Yes, it was unfortunate that the “Singapore” men’s table tennis team gets short shrift. And it is possible that in spite of our success at the Olympics the team was fractured by a lack of cohesive spirit. But to conduct a massacre of your people right after Singapore ended a 48 year wait for an Olympic medal? That is completely ridiculous.
And just when you thought she was done shooting herself in the foot, she put the icing on the cake when a reporter asked her why she did this. These are puzzling decisions that can nevertheless be made more clear when the reasons behind them are explained. She probably elaborated a little but said something shockingly insensitive that the reporter picked up upon: “it’s time to move on”.
Now usually this is a phrase that is muttered by victims who want to forgive people for their crimes. Almost never by a person who did something extremely offensive in other peoples’ eyes. I’m quite sure that more than a few eyes bulged when they saw this comment. It’s time to move on! I slap you in the face once, you ask me what for, and I say “it’s time to move on”. It’s the equivalent of saying, “it’s not for you to ask such stupid questions like that. When I say the team manager has to go, he has to go. I don’t have to answer to you. Not your fucking business anyway.”
Well I already despise the practice of getting our politicians to head sports associations. Ho Peng Kee and Mah Bow Tan get involved with Singapore soccer, and to me it just looks like other people are doing the sweating on the field, and they are there soaking up the glory. I’m sure that there’s more to it than that, what with the organisational stuff: not easy to put your political career on the line and depend on results on the field. But usually it’s the MP in charge who gets some of the glory, and the sports team gets the blame if things go wrong. And my gut reaction to them is akin to those parents of child stars who get the reflected glory when things go well.
As for firing coaches who have just won something, I remember when Real Madrid fired Vincente Del Bosque right after he won a Champions League and League double. The message: “you’re fat and balding and not in line with the image that we want. We have Figo, Ronaldo, Zidane, Raul, Beckham, Roberto Carlos, we’re going to win Champions League every year anyway.” The retribution for that hubris was that a galaxy full of stars would have an empty trophy cabinet for the next few years. I think this is just.
To me it is a crime against the sacred order of things. I think about Oedipus killing his father (not knowing that it was his father), and being the original “bad motherfucker”. A crime so heinous that it begot the practice of stabbing your eyes out so that you don’t have to watch. I think about Voldemort killing a unicorn and drinking its blood for nourishment. And I believe that Barisan National is paying the price for its sin against Anwar.
If you wanted to give Lee Bee Wah the benefit of the doubt, maybe she thought that she had to do something about the fractious team spirit. But there could be some megalomania in here: one silver medal is not good enough. We must not be complacent. I am the anointed one to push you to greater heights. Now even the manner of the apology (front page Straits Times) is megalomanic. And still they don’t have the guts to sack her. Still she is smiling, and she has probably smiled her way out of trouble before. Still deep in her heart she has done nothing wrong and has probably done the right thing but overlooked taking care of the sensitivities of the well meaning but ignorant populace. Still, as long as her godfathers are still smiling on her, the will of the people “don’t amount to a hill of beans in this world”. As for obtaining the reasons behind the sacking, wait long long.
As for the Ang Mo Kio GRC (members include Lee Bee Wah, Wee Siew Kim and PM Lee), in the last elections they got only 60% of the vote. While that will be seen as a landslide in some places (more specifically Anwar Ibrahim’s recent election) it was astoundingly mediocre. On one side you had a head of state. On the other side, the WP youth team. And people were predicting a margin of 70%.
But I guess you got geniuses like Wee Siew Kim and Lee Bee Wah on your team, that could explain it. And our good PM who likes his Mee Siam “mai hum”.
Marie Antoinette. Yes, we have gratuitous picture of Kirsten Dunst here. I really like Kirsten Dunst and I think she’s sexy, even though a lot of people feel otherwise. She’s got this figure halfway between skinny and womanly, so she can gain a few pounds and she’ll still look really well rounded. OK, distractions aside, Marie Antoinette was guillotined during the French Revolution and will always be seen as a figure of aristocratic excess. She is not one of the 3 who irk me - she's not alive today, unlike those 3 I'm going to talk about. I don't know if it's misogynist to say that it's often women who are blithely oblivious when they say things that are extremely offensive. I guess people naturally give you more of the benefit of the doubt and even want to suck up to you when you're a women. I guess also that people want to "protect" you from the evils of the world. So what happens when a particular woman is herself an evil of the world?
Wee Shu Min. I think a lot of ink has been spilt over this. One part of me feels great and says “orbigood” over and over again at the pummelling that she’s getting. Another part of me says, “please stop being stupid. You are giving scholars a really really bad name.” I think one bad thing about “meritocracy” is that it completely desensitises people to the fact that life is unfair.
People with the right means can get their kids into the right school, and the peer pressure alone will automatically make their kids into better students. They’ll naturally have better ECA records, better grades. Of course much of what they achieve as students is down to natural ability. The fact that I have 4 As and 2 distinctions at the “A” level is partly down to my innate genius. But I know deep down that if I hadn’t been pushed I could have gotten 2 Cs instead, and that makes you barely able to get into NUS. It’s this extra lift which allows the student to be in an environment where all he needs to do is to focus on his schoolwork, the crucial thing that determines whether he’ll make it to that elite level of performance, or whether he’ll just be a little better than average: and as we all know, there are almost no rewards for being just better than average.
The worst aspect of this is that her father, the MP Wee Siew Kim went out to defend his daughter. So there is nothing wrong with what she wrote? Implicitly they know that there is a threat to the system which favours them. People knows that not everybody is getting served but nobody wants to rock the boat. Martin Luther King said that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. I could flip that phrase around and say “Justice anywhere is a threat to injustice everywhere”, and for Wee Siew Kim to even admit that there is a flaw in what his daughter wrote would show that there is a flaw in the system that made him what he is today. It is so much easier to say, “there’s nothing wrong with the system. It doesn’t need fixing” than to say, “we’ve had a fairly equal society for a long time but that’s not going to last. I don’t have the answers now but I’m trying”.
Mathilde Chua. One of the directors involved in the TT Durai / NKF incident. Did she have to go to jail? I don’t think she got sentenced. The image that struck me was that she was smiling defiantly as she walked in and out of the Supreme Court, as though through sheer force of will she could make people believe that everything was alright, it was a simple misunderstanding that could be resolved. (More about this fucked up attitude later.) Now you could keep that contemptuous attitude and pretend that you’re contrite. I will still give you marks for trying. This is obviously an “I’ve done nothing wrong” smile.
Lee Bee Wah. This recent debacle - what can you say? Only in Singapore can somebody so politically tone deaf get elected into Parliament. Yes, it was unfortunate that the “Singapore” men’s table tennis team gets short shrift. And it is possible that in spite of our success at the Olympics the team was fractured by a lack of cohesive spirit. But to conduct a massacre of your people right after Singapore ended a 48 year wait for an Olympic medal? That is completely ridiculous.
And just when you thought she was done shooting herself in the foot, she put the icing on the cake when a reporter asked her why she did this. These are puzzling decisions that can nevertheless be made more clear when the reasons behind them are explained. She probably elaborated a little but said something shockingly insensitive that the reporter picked up upon: “it’s time to move on”.
Now usually this is a phrase that is muttered by victims who want to forgive people for their crimes. Almost never by a person who did something extremely offensive in other peoples’ eyes. I’m quite sure that more than a few eyes bulged when they saw this comment. It’s time to move on! I slap you in the face once, you ask me what for, and I say “it’s time to move on”. It’s the equivalent of saying, “it’s not for you to ask such stupid questions like that. When I say the team manager has to go, he has to go. I don’t have to answer to you. Not your fucking business anyway.”
Well I already despise the practice of getting our politicians to head sports associations. Ho Peng Kee and Mah Bow Tan get involved with Singapore soccer, and to me it just looks like other people are doing the sweating on the field, and they are there soaking up the glory. I’m sure that there’s more to it than that, what with the organisational stuff: not easy to put your political career on the line and depend on results on the field. But usually it’s the MP in charge who gets some of the glory, and the sports team gets the blame if things go wrong. And my gut reaction to them is akin to those parents of child stars who get the reflected glory when things go well.
As for firing coaches who have just won something, I remember when Real Madrid fired Vincente Del Bosque right after he won a Champions League and League double. The message: “you’re fat and balding and not in line with the image that we want. We have Figo, Ronaldo, Zidane, Raul, Beckham, Roberto Carlos, we’re going to win Champions League every year anyway.” The retribution for that hubris was that a galaxy full of stars would have an empty trophy cabinet for the next few years. I think this is just.
To me it is a crime against the sacred order of things. I think about Oedipus killing his father (not knowing that it was his father), and being the original “bad motherfucker”. A crime so heinous that it begot the practice of stabbing your eyes out so that you don’t have to watch. I think about Voldemort killing a unicorn and drinking its blood for nourishment. And I believe that Barisan National is paying the price for its sin against Anwar.
If you wanted to give Lee Bee Wah the benefit of the doubt, maybe she thought that she had to do something about the fractious team spirit. But there could be some megalomania in here: one silver medal is not good enough. We must not be complacent. I am the anointed one to push you to greater heights. Now even the manner of the apology (front page Straits Times) is megalomanic. And still they don’t have the guts to sack her. Still she is smiling, and she has probably smiled her way out of trouble before. Still deep in her heart she has done nothing wrong and has probably done the right thing but overlooked taking care of the sensitivities of the well meaning but ignorant populace. Still, as long as her godfathers are still smiling on her, the will of the people “don’t amount to a hill of beans in this world”. As for obtaining the reasons behind the sacking, wait long long.
As for the Ang Mo Kio GRC (members include Lee Bee Wah, Wee Siew Kim and PM Lee), in the last elections they got only 60% of the vote. While that will be seen as a landslide in some places (more specifically Anwar Ibrahim’s recent election) it was astoundingly mediocre. On one side you had a head of state. On the other side, the WP youth team. And people were predicting a margin of 70%.
But I guess you got geniuses like Wee Siew Kim and Lee Bee Wah on your team, that could explain it. And our good PM who likes his Mee Siam “mai hum”.
Thursday, 2 October 2008
Adventures in the US - Spring 08
Yes, I have not blogged about my USA adventures since my return. One of the reasons is that I thought that I would quit blogging, which is a fairly good one. But now I am working at an extremely laid back and comfortable pace of one per week, and I see that our friend Shingot has gone to Colorado like I have.
As most of you know, security at the airports has gotten a little bit more hellish ever since 911. They have some stunts like asking everybody to remove their shoes for inspection. Queues for people waiting to board airlines have backed up like a choked sewer.
If you are lucky you will bump into some customs officer with a sense of humour. The person asked for my passport and ticket, which I had in a money belt tucked in my pants. When I reached for it, he said, “no no no, there’s no need to take it all off too.” So that was the more OK encounters.
The not so OK encounters were at the customs check in counter. It was tense because I was smuggling some food in for my sis but of course he didn’t know that. Kept on peppering me with questions, like what I was doing, who I was visiting, and what my sister was doing. He asked me “Are you going to San Francisco?” I stifled the urge to say “no, and neither am I going to wear flowers in my hair.” Giving me suspicious looks and all that, and in the end a look of exasperation, like “I give up, I haven’t gotten you today but I’ll get you one day.”
I was entirely thumbprinted, of course. All aliens are, regardless of their criminal records. I remember visiting New York City and the Ellis island, seeing all the crap that all the immigrants had to go through before they were allowed into the country. Americans had a funny relationship with the Chinese, of course. On one hand they fought a world war as allies against the hated enemy, the Japs. On the other hand they treated the German POWs better than the Chinese immigrants that they turned away at the doorstep. If the US had given the Chinese a fraction of the help that they gave the Europeans, they wouldn’t have to suffer so much. More importantly the US wouldn’t have had to deal with Mao Zedong.
One incident about the US customs took place when I was enquiring about a student visa application on my sister’s behalf. This was 4 years ago, and the US had become more paranoid about aliens, and required that she apply for a visa on an embassy outside of US soil. So I called up the embassy and asked how this could be done. Halfway during the telephone conversation I muttered something about how those guys have nothing better to do than to force my sister to buy a plane ticket all the way to Singapore for that. Then he said, “Well you could try to do it in Singapore where it’s nice, clean and spacious, or you could do it in Jakarta where everywhere’s crowded and dirty, tempers are flying and you might not get it because the office might suddenly decide to close early.”
I wish I had thought of something to blast him back with because that comment made me very angry. It was not so much that it was impolite, but he was twisting the thrust of the argument. Nobody would have to go to anybody’s embassy if you didn't make that stupid rule that people have to get out of your country. Of course the idea is that it saves you the problem of having to deport people if their visas reapplications are not successful but this is a lot like "we're assholes and we're big and strong and can afford it and fuck you if you don't like it".
The other thing that happened was in a domestic flight. They got people to board in different tranches, which makes sense because it’s orderly: people seating at the back go in first, people in the front or in the aisles go in last. My sister went in first, I went in last. I saw that my sister had not stowed her bag in the overhead compartments, and I asked her why. Then she pointed at some motherfucking ang moh on the other side, and said, “he told me to shove off and he planted his luggage there instead.” Well being the good big brother I was, I was wondering if I should grab his bag out of the bin and plonk it on his lap and tell him to fuck off. And he was looking at me kinda worried maybe because he probably hadn’t counted on there being a big brother as tall (but not as fat) as he was. (I’m tall for an Asian but average for an angmoh.)
My options were: chew him out in public? But there were angmohs everywhere, so that was a bit risky. Eventually I thought, wait till we disembark, and we’re walking out at the other airport, then I trip him, make him fall on his face, and laugh at him.
Later on, the plane was taking quite some time to queue up for the runway. I noticed him trying to look out our window to check out the queue, so I helpfully went over and closed the window on him.
Eventually, though, my grand plans for revenge were foiled, because when we went out, we saw that his bag had the name of the same medical school that my sister went to, and that his speciality was the same as my sister’s. I’m not kidding. So I ran the risk of tripping over and laughing at somebody who could be a superior of my sister’s. So no revenge. What a bummer.
As most of you know, security at the airports has gotten a little bit more hellish ever since 911. They have some stunts like asking everybody to remove their shoes for inspection. Queues for people waiting to board airlines have backed up like a choked sewer.
If you are lucky you will bump into some customs officer with a sense of humour. The person asked for my passport and ticket, which I had in a money belt tucked in my pants. When I reached for it, he said, “no no no, there’s no need to take it all off too.” So that was the more OK encounters.
The not so OK encounters were at the customs check in counter. It was tense because I was smuggling some food in for my sis but of course he didn’t know that. Kept on peppering me with questions, like what I was doing, who I was visiting, and what my sister was doing. He asked me “Are you going to San Francisco?” I stifled the urge to say “no, and neither am I going to wear flowers in my hair.” Giving me suspicious looks and all that, and in the end a look of exasperation, like “I give up, I haven’t gotten you today but I’ll get you one day.”
I was entirely thumbprinted, of course. All aliens are, regardless of their criminal records. I remember visiting New York City and the Ellis island, seeing all the crap that all the immigrants had to go through before they were allowed into the country. Americans had a funny relationship with the Chinese, of course. On one hand they fought a world war as allies against the hated enemy, the Japs. On the other hand they treated the German POWs better than the Chinese immigrants that they turned away at the doorstep. If the US had given the Chinese a fraction of the help that they gave the Europeans, they wouldn’t have to suffer so much. More importantly the US wouldn’t have had to deal with Mao Zedong.
One incident about the US customs took place when I was enquiring about a student visa application on my sister’s behalf. This was 4 years ago, and the US had become more paranoid about aliens, and required that she apply for a visa on an embassy outside of US soil. So I called up the embassy and asked how this could be done. Halfway during the telephone conversation I muttered something about how those guys have nothing better to do than to force my sister to buy a plane ticket all the way to Singapore for that. Then he said, “Well you could try to do it in Singapore where it’s nice, clean and spacious, or you could do it in Jakarta where everywhere’s crowded and dirty, tempers are flying and you might not get it because the office might suddenly decide to close early.”
I wish I had thought of something to blast him back with because that comment made me very angry. It was not so much that it was impolite, but he was twisting the thrust of the argument. Nobody would have to go to anybody’s embassy if you didn't make that stupid rule that people have to get out of your country. Of course the idea is that it saves you the problem of having to deport people if their visas reapplications are not successful but this is a lot like "we're assholes and we're big and strong and can afford it and fuck you if you don't like it".
The other thing that happened was in a domestic flight. They got people to board in different tranches, which makes sense because it’s orderly: people seating at the back go in first, people in the front or in the aisles go in last. My sister went in first, I went in last. I saw that my sister had not stowed her bag in the overhead compartments, and I asked her why. Then she pointed at some motherfucking ang moh on the other side, and said, “he told me to shove off and he planted his luggage there instead.” Well being the good big brother I was, I was wondering if I should grab his bag out of the bin and plonk it on his lap and tell him to fuck off. And he was looking at me kinda worried maybe because he probably hadn’t counted on there being a big brother as tall (but not as fat) as he was. (I’m tall for an Asian but average for an angmoh.)
My options were: chew him out in public? But there were angmohs everywhere, so that was a bit risky. Eventually I thought, wait till we disembark, and we’re walking out at the other airport, then I trip him, make him fall on his face, and laugh at him.
Later on, the plane was taking quite some time to queue up for the runway. I noticed him trying to look out our window to check out the queue, so I helpfully went over and closed the window on him.
Eventually, though, my grand plans for revenge were foiled, because when we went out, we saw that his bag had the name of the same medical school that my sister went to, and that his speciality was the same as my sister’s. I’m not kidding. So I ran the risk of tripping over and laughing at somebody who could be a superior of my sister’s. So no revenge. What a bummer.
Thursday, 18 September 2008
Numbernine
A few random announcements before I start off. I have found that I have the honour of Sesame Street making a video all about me! Here it is.
Also following the well received post of mine, Asspartame Assplosion (ie somebody actually read it) I follow it up with some other ways I could have titled it:
Catastrophic catharsis
Public Enema
Scatological spectacular
Any other suggestions?
Also following the well received post of mine, Asspartame Assplosion (ie somebody actually read it) I follow it up with some other ways I could have titled it:
Catastrophic catharsis
Public Enema
Scatological spectacular
Any other suggestions?
Double life
One day, I suddenly thought about a play I wrote 9 years ago. In my play, a person bumps into a younger version of himself, and recoils in shock. He looks at the younger self and realises that the person is at the crossroads in his life: he could join the mafia, or he could have gone and become an artist. I suppose 30-somethings like us usually have these periods in our lives. I guess he watches in morbid fascination as the younger self fatefully goes on and makes the mistakes that the older self regrets making.
It shouldn't surprise you that the younger self is the person who was writing the play, and now I identify with the older self, and I was thinking about this play the other day, and it was like, "it's been 9 years already!"
The prospect of the younger person joining the mafia was a thinly disguised version of myself having signed away a number of years in my life serving a bond. It was this path that he chose in the end. I suppose we all had misgivings about those decisions then. Even though I portrayed this in the play as something that the person should not have done, I honestly can't really see myself pursuing an artistic career either. In the end, by a twist of fate, the older version takes the rap for the younger person having committed a smuggling operation.
It's kinda sad. But I'm glad I came up with that idea. It was a good one. In a lot of what you do, you know that there are 2 different people looking at you. One is your past self, who probably had some degree of expectation of what you would turn out to be, and one of them is your future self, who probably wish that your present self did something differently. I suppose this is universal, which is why if you were to write a play about something like this, it is not easy to go far wrong.
That was what I came up with when I joined the 24 hour playwriting competition for the first time. That was the last time I wrote a good play. It was funny but that was probably the end of my writing career, even as it was the peak of it. There was a first prize given, and that went to Ng Yi-Sheng, who's still writing and doing pretty well. There was 2 second prizes, and one of them went to Michelle Chong who is still acting. The other one went to me. Seems like all 3 of us obtained undergraduate degrees in the US. There were others who won in the student's category but they're you know kids.
Funny thing is: I was really grouchy when I packed up and it was time to leave. I think a lot of us were, after that ordeal. My disk drive broke down, and I had to go to an internet cafe to email my script to another computer that I could save the thing on. Towards the end you just have to write and write and write and too bad if your ideas are badly expressed, you just have to keep awake. But when I left, this notion popped into my head: I'm going to win this. It was a feeling, when you take a free kick, you know that the ball is going in, although 8 times out of 10 it doesn't happen. But I showed it to a friend after that, the same friend who helped me in another play 6 years earlier, and he told me he didn't see the point of it. I changed my mind, and later on when a letter came telling me to attend the prize giving ceremony I didn't bother showing up and wondered why they asked everybody to attend.
It was the most stupid decision of my life because I could have had my mugshot in the papers next to 2 people who would one day be famous. I had to go down to Theatreworks to collect my prize money.
5 years later, I entered the competition again when I shouldn't have. It was held in conjunction with "Romancing Singapore" and I ended up writing something fairly mediocre, because there were no life experiences to draw from. I suppose a Capricorn like me is always more comfortable writing about tragedy and fate. If I keep up my schedule of 1 competition every 5 years, I should be entering the one next year, but I don't really know if my mojo's gone.
The competition was held at the Singapore river, at one of those places near Robertson Quay which had just been rapidly built in a very short time. I suppose that was a nicer part of Singapore, even if people were essentially out in the open. Normally what they do is they give you 5 stimuli over the course of the 24 hours. You are to incorporate the stimuli into the play. That's not too difficult. The main trick is to put your play in the same physical setting as the place where the competition is held. So if it's being held near a river you write a play which takes place near a river. They will never show you something that doesn't belong near a river, and therefore it will not be hard to fit anything into your play.
The person who was in charge of it made a chance remark, "if we give you a stimulus, integrate it with your story. It's even better if you make it appear more than once." So that's when it hit me: write a play where everything happens twice. I called it "Double Life", because it was a little similar to a movie called "Double Life of Veronique", where 2 versions of the same person, played by the same actress, bump into each other. But then again, it's a little different in my case because there was some time travel involved.
It shouldn't surprise you that the younger self is the person who was writing the play, and now I identify with the older self, and I was thinking about this play the other day, and it was like, "it's been 9 years already!"
The prospect of the younger person joining the mafia was a thinly disguised version of myself having signed away a number of years in my life serving a bond. It was this path that he chose in the end. I suppose we all had misgivings about those decisions then. Even though I portrayed this in the play as something that the person should not have done, I honestly can't really see myself pursuing an artistic career either. In the end, by a twist of fate, the older version takes the rap for the younger person having committed a smuggling operation.
It's kinda sad. But I'm glad I came up with that idea. It was a good one. In a lot of what you do, you know that there are 2 different people looking at you. One is your past self, who probably had some degree of expectation of what you would turn out to be, and one of them is your future self, who probably wish that your present self did something differently. I suppose this is universal, which is why if you were to write a play about something like this, it is not easy to go far wrong.
That was what I came up with when I joined the 24 hour playwriting competition for the first time. That was the last time I wrote a good play. It was funny but that was probably the end of my writing career, even as it was the peak of it. There was a first prize given, and that went to Ng Yi-Sheng, who's still writing and doing pretty well. There was 2 second prizes, and one of them went to Michelle Chong who is still acting. The other one went to me. Seems like all 3 of us obtained undergraduate degrees in the US. There were others who won in the student's category but they're you know kids.
Funny thing is: I was really grouchy when I packed up and it was time to leave. I think a lot of us were, after that ordeal. My disk drive broke down, and I had to go to an internet cafe to email my script to another computer that I could save the thing on. Towards the end you just have to write and write and write and too bad if your ideas are badly expressed, you just have to keep awake. But when I left, this notion popped into my head: I'm going to win this. It was a feeling, when you take a free kick, you know that the ball is going in, although 8 times out of 10 it doesn't happen. But I showed it to a friend after that, the same friend who helped me in another play 6 years earlier, and he told me he didn't see the point of it. I changed my mind, and later on when a letter came telling me to attend the prize giving ceremony I didn't bother showing up and wondered why they asked everybody to attend.
It was the most stupid decision of my life because I could have had my mugshot in the papers next to 2 people who would one day be famous. I had to go down to Theatreworks to collect my prize money.
5 years later, I entered the competition again when I shouldn't have. It was held in conjunction with "Romancing Singapore" and I ended up writing something fairly mediocre, because there were no life experiences to draw from. I suppose a Capricorn like me is always more comfortable writing about tragedy and fate. If I keep up my schedule of 1 competition every 5 years, I should be entering the one next year, but I don't really know if my mojo's gone.
The competition was held at the Singapore river, at one of those places near Robertson Quay which had just been rapidly built in a very short time. I suppose that was a nicer part of Singapore, even if people were essentially out in the open. Normally what they do is they give you 5 stimuli over the course of the 24 hours. You are to incorporate the stimuli into the play. That's not too difficult. The main trick is to put your play in the same physical setting as the place where the competition is held. So if it's being held near a river you write a play which takes place near a river. They will never show you something that doesn't belong near a river, and therefore it will not be hard to fit anything into your play.
The person who was in charge of it made a chance remark, "if we give you a stimulus, integrate it with your story. It's even better if you make it appear more than once." So that's when it hit me: write a play where everything happens twice. I called it "Double Life", because it was a little similar to a movie called "Double Life of Veronique", where 2 versions of the same person, played by the same actress, bump into each other. But then again, it's a little different in my case because there was some time travel involved.
Sunday, 14 September 2008
When You're Gone
I think I will write 1 piece about songwriting, especially since Avril Lavigne is coming has been to Singapore.
What a song like “When you’re Gone” tells me is that Avril Lavigne is one of the most inconsistent songwriters out there today. Let’s start on the plus side. This song has a killer chorus. It is a CHORUS. It’s one of those soaring sing-along choruses that will easily stand alongside others like “My Finest Hour” (Sundays), “Voices Carry” (Til Tuesday), “I’ll Stand By You” (Pretenders).
This is one of those songs where the rest of the song somewhat pales beside the chorus. I can picture what happened: a great chorus pops into you head 1 day, and you got to write it down. But a great chorus doesn’t stand on it’s own, a great chorus is a magnificent roof, but you still need the walls to hold the thing up. So you write verses, verses which in this case are not really bad but are fairly undistinguished when put aside that CHORUS. It’s a fairly common problem that when you get a great chorus, the build up to it is not so great. There’s a bit of imbalance, and it’s like seeing a woman with fantastic butt and legs, but flat chest and mediocre face. It happens all the time. (I mean this for both songs and women.)
And she seems almost determined to follow up a great line like “when you walk away I count the steps that you take” with a clichéd clunker like “do you see how much I need you right now?”. I mean, common sense would have you follow that up with another line that begins with “when you…”, right? Unless she thought about it for 1 hour and couldn’t come up with something.
Similarly the main hook, “when you’re gone the pieces of my heart are missing you” is a good line, but the chorus ends with a limp “I miss you” (as if we didn’t know that already.)
But then I’m reluctant to criticize teenagers. There was this review which put it nicely (“everything is either a blowjob or a castration”). Every thing about her is black and white. Even her face looks like a panda. I remember what it was like to be a teenager, and I know that I will never look at life with such certainty again as I did when I was younger. Well let’s hope she stays in the business long enough for us to know what a middle-aged Lavigne sounds like.
I rate her as a songwriter. A good songwriter is somebody who has a knack for that catchy chorus. She reminds me a bit of Debbie Gibson (although their images are quite different.) The teenage precocious songwriters with high voices and the knack for hooky choruses.
What a song like “When you’re Gone” tells me is that Avril Lavigne is one of the most inconsistent songwriters out there today. Let’s start on the plus side. This song has a killer chorus. It is a CHORUS. It’s one of those soaring sing-along choruses that will easily stand alongside others like “My Finest Hour” (Sundays), “Voices Carry” (Til Tuesday), “I’ll Stand By You” (Pretenders).
This is one of those songs where the rest of the song somewhat pales beside the chorus. I can picture what happened: a great chorus pops into you head 1 day, and you got to write it down. But a great chorus doesn’t stand on it’s own, a great chorus is a magnificent roof, but you still need the walls to hold the thing up. So you write verses, verses which in this case are not really bad but are fairly undistinguished when put aside that CHORUS. It’s a fairly common problem that when you get a great chorus, the build up to it is not so great. There’s a bit of imbalance, and it’s like seeing a woman with fantastic butt and legs, but flat chest and mediocre face. It happens all the time. (I mean this for both songs and women.)
And she seems almost determined to follow up a great line like “when you walk away I count the steps that you take” with a clichéd clunker like “do you see how much I need you right now?”. I mean, common sense would have you follow that up with another line that begins with “when you…”, right? Unless she thought about it for 1 hour and couldn’t come up with something.
Similarly the main hook, “when you’re gone the pieces of my heart are missing you” is a good line, but the chorus ends with a limp “I miss you” (as if we didn’t know that already.)
But then I’m reluctant to criticize teenagers. There was this review which put it nicely (“everything is either a blowjob or a castration”). Every thing about her is black and white. Even her face looks like a panda. I remember what it was like to be a teenager, and I know that I will never look at life with such certainty again as I did when I was younger. Well let’s hope she stays in the business long enough for us to know what a middle-aged Lavigne sounds like.
I rate her as a songwriter. A good songwriter is somebody who has a knack for that catchy chorus. She reminds me a bit of Debbie Gibson (although their images are quite different.) The teenage precocious songwriters with high voices and the knack for hooky choruses.
Sunday, 7 September 2008
Live and Let Die
When you were young and your heart was an open book
You used to say live and let live
But in this ever changing world in which we live in
Makes you give in and cry
Say live and let die
- Paul McCartney, "Live and Let Die"
Somebody put a few pictures of an obscure production by the NUS law faculty online. Through the Proust effect I suddenly remembered about what it was like to attend that production.
It was a musical about the Tiananmen square revolt, and it was written by a Law student who by coincidence was a senior of mine in my school. When I was in sec 3 I saw a school play of his, and I thought, this is great. I didn’t know that sec 4 students could write so well. Next year I wrote a play and staged it for the same event, and although it was a less happy experience than I expected, it was a dream come true for me and it feels great when you can cross out 1 item from your “things to do with your life” list.
But that was not the reason I attended the production. It was because of a violinist who was playing a bit part in that production. I had a crush on that violinist, who was codfish, whom you know from a few articles back.
I can still tell you what it was like to go there. I didn’t have a “reason” to be there. It was weird. There were ppl I sorda knew, and they were like, “who’s he with?”
To recap, I had met codfish while temping, and probably started having a crush on her without fully realising it at that time. But I KIV’ed her, probably for 4 years and then after a chance meeting we started corresponding by mail. (Yes when I say that I’m KIV’ing somebody it’s not the same as saying that I’m giving her up).
I was a little bruised and battered after my first year studying overseas. But towards the end of that first year I started writing to her. After I came home for a visit, we started talking on the phone. She happened to mention that she was involved in this production.
It took place at a location that almost certainly doesn’t exist anymore: the old harbourfront auditorium that got converted into offices probably.
I can certainly tell you that if I hadn’t lived through those emotions before and somebody tried to describe them to me, I wouldn’t have the faintest clue what he was talking about. But when you’re teetering on the brink, it’s this mixture of awe and fear and at the same time the expectancy of a wondrous and delightful experience. Even back then I was a little old to never have asked out a girl before.
I thought it was weird for me to pop into the dressing room and say hi when I hadn’t yet gotten to know her better. So I left. I didn’t want to admit that I had gone to a show all alone (I had faith in the playwright, though but still…) just because I had a schoolboy crush on some obscure fiddler in one corner of the orchestral pit.
Well even though I was pretty pleased that it turned out to be more than just a schoolboy crush, even though we did end up as friends after that, I ended up severing ties with her a few years ago. Probably I was fed up with her condescending attitude, probably we found that I was getting less interested in film (she’s a film graduate student, and I wonder how her PhD’s coming along – it’s been quite some time already), and she was emphatically no engineer. She used to say that the best thing I said to her was that I would never leave her. I think I just wanted to piss her off.
I’ve been tempted to get back in touch with her, particularly after one time when she gave me a shout out on her blog. I decided not to, and for some funny reason not long after that her blog was locked.
I was a much more open person in those days. I genuinely thought I was going to become a new person – kinder, gentler, more open. Some parts of my teenage years were really nasty and it seemed to be all over at that point. But things didn’t work out. Or maybe I just didn’t have enough faith. There was a haze of confusion after the relationship ended, but after that for some strange reason I turned away from that kinder gentler thing. I became more hard, more dead. Maybe it was too much maths.
And that’s why that picture startled me a little bit – because you go back to all those times when there were forks in the road in your life, and you’re always wondering, “what would have happened if I had turned out differently? What if I went to this school instead of that, worked for this company instead of that?” What if I became the kinder gentler version of numbernine instead of being lazy and becoming a spoilt brat?
She looked great. She always looks great. But there’s something hidden, something vaguely inscrutable about her, as though she wears a mask. She looks a little like a sphinx. I’d wager she’s got a great sphincter although to my eternal regret I never got to find out.
She told me details of her unhappy childhood. At first, I thought, OK – not bad we got that much in common. (There is a significant correlation between those people who have unhappy childhoods and those people who leave their countries after they grow up.) But I don’t know how to put this nicely – she’s damaged goods. I wish she had her head screwed on properly – but if she did, she would be out of my league. That’s the tragic part – at that time I genuinely believed that I would not have had a shot at a chiobu unless she was a little sick in the head. I could have saved myself some problems if I had had walked out on her, but I stuck this one out because I believed that if I found somebody better she would want to walk out on me. I guess that’s why you find some people getting onto heroin even though they know what it entails – because they don’t really think they’re going to find other better forms of happiness.
For somebody as good looking as her to not be able to hold on to a permanent relationship, that is sad. For somebody as smart as her not to be able to achieve more in life, that is also sad.
So as much through laziness I will not contact her again. But during those first few days while I was corresponding with her, I was happy. It was a wild crazy sort of happiness in the beginning, and maybe a calm peaceful sort of happiness before all the problems started. And when I look back, I think that it’s that happiness that I miss and not her. That as much as she inspired it, I also created much of it in my own mind’s eye. Except that it’s probably long ago enough for me to not really understand it anymore.
Tuesday, 2 September 2008
Gustav
It’s been 3 years since Katrina. 1 year after that, Douglas Brinkley published his mammoth book on Katrina, “Great Deluge”. 1 year after that, it appeared in a bargain basin and I got it. 1 year later, I’m almost through with that book.
I suppose you’re wondering, why was I so interested in Katrina? When there are floods in India which are far more destructive, in terms of lives and property?
I suppose that if you were to look closely at most natural disasters they would all turn up plenty of drama, and it’s also that New Orleans is in America, and is therefore the most well reported of all natural disasters.
Why do you think that Cyclone Nargis shone the light on the Burmese junta more than the Indian Ocean tsunami? Because there was less reporting on Burma for the latter incident, and because aid workers were scrambling to more prominent places in Aceh, Sri Lanka and Thailand than to think too much about Burma. But when cyclone Nargis hit, Burma got condemned as the place where the junta was collecting everything for itself and not distributing it to the people.
I guess it has to do with how it’s New Orleans, birthplace of jazz. How it happened to the world’s richest country but they weren’t able to save their poorest people.
It was also a frightening picture of all hell breaking loose, of what would happen to America’s ghettoes if one day the USA were to stop being so wealthy. A society where everything had broken down but everything was kept under wraps had turned into one which was not only full of dysfunctional people but was also a natural disaster zone.
There were robberies, rapes, looting, rampaging, sniping. There was the hellholes that were the convention centre and the football stadium, where people were pissed off, had nothing to eat or drink, there was no sanitation, and people were crapping all over in public. (Although you must imagine that the situation is probably even more dire in places like Aceh and Bihar India, except that those ppl are OK with no sanitation because they never had it anyway.) There was the callous incompetence of the cronies that Bush 2 had appointed to the key aid agencies in the US.
It was as though somebody up there had overturned a very large rock, and exposed the festering reality underneath the shiny façade. Suddenly a lot of things which were simmering under the surface just exploded. The friendly black people who used to frequent your stores suddenly became part of the rampaging horde of looters. The smiling neighbourhood policeman suddenly became the guy who shut you away from a shelter. The mayor, normally full of oratorical bluster, suddenly became the coward who couldn’t do anything.
What made this special and unique though, was the presence of snipers everywhere who would just shoot aid workers and make it impossible for them to do their job without risking their lives.
But in the end, why did I spend so much time reading that book? I guess I just have this bad habit of picking up a book on a whim and finishing it because I can’t stand to leave books unfinished once I’ve touched them.
I suppose you’re wondering, why was I so interested in Katrina? When there are floods in India which are far more destructive, in terms of lives and property?
I suppose that if you were to look closely at most natural disasters they would all turn up plenty of drama, and it’s also that New Orleans is in America, and is therefore the most well reported of all natural disasters.
Why do you think that Cyclone Nargis shone the light on the Burmese junta more than the Indian Ocean tsunami? Because there was less reporting on Burma for the latter incident, and because aid workers were scrambling to more prominent places in Aceh, Sri Lanka and Thailand than to think too much about Burma. But when cyclone Nargis hit, Burma got condemned as the place where the junta was collecting everything for itself and not distributing it to the people.
I guess it has to do with how it’s New Orleans, birthplace of jazz. How it happened to the world’s richest country but they weren’t able to save their poorest people.
It was also a frightening picture of all hell breaking loose, of what would happen to America’s ghettoes if one day the USA were to stop being so wealthy. A society where everything had broken down but everything was kept under wraps had turned into one which was not only full of dysfunctional people but was also a natural disaster zone.
There were robberies, rapes, looting, rampaging, sniping. There was the hellholes that were the convention centre and the football stadium, where people were pissed off, had nothing to eat or drink, there was no sanitation, and people were crapping all over in public. (Although you must imagine that the situation is probably even more dire in places like Aceh and Bihar India, except that those ppl are OK with no sanitation because they never had it anyway.) There was the callous incompetence of the cronies that Bush 2 had appointed to the key aid agencies in the US.
It was as though somebody up there had overturned a very large rock, and exposed the festering reality underneath the shiny façade. Suddenly a lot of things which were simmering under the surface just exploded. The friendly black people who used to frequent your stores suddenly became part of the rampaging horde of looters. The smiling neighbourhood policeman suddenly became the guy who shut you away from a shelter. The mayor, normally full of oratorical bluster, suddenly became the coward who couldn’t do anything.
What made this special and unique though, was the presence of snipers everywhere who would just shoot aid workers and make it impossible for them to do their job without risking their lives.
But in the end, why did I spend so much time reading that book? I guess I just have this bad habit of picking up a book on a whim and finishing it because I can’t stand to leave books unfinished once I’ve touched them.
Tuesday, 26 August 2008
Asspartame assplosion
I just attended my first shotgun wedding. It was a hoot. There were so many snide comments to be passed. The groom made a speech about how marriage has taught him the values of self restraint. If he doesn't learn it from knocking people up when's he going to learn. I also sniggered when the Justice of Peace read out that a marriage is a convenant to be entered into by both parties of their free will.
At my table were myself and 2 friends, and the rest were people I had never met before. One of them was a boy of 8-9 years, hyperactive, si beh irritating. And he was holding a box of mints, popping them into his mouth at an alarming rate. One of my friends was looking on in horror, saying "does he know that aspartame in large doses has a laxative effect?"
He disappeared for a while. Coincidently the other friend and I went to the toilet. We did not like what we saw. The boy had his trousers off, legs covered with shit, and trousers covered with shit. It was a little difficult to breathe in the toilet. For some funny reason he thought that a good way of getting rid of the shit was to fling his trousers around and spray shit everywhere. The Indian janitor was screaming bloody murder at him. (This is a wedding, remember, in a hotel of a decent standard where the last thing he was doing before giving the boy grief was to spray antiseptic and fragrance into the urinal.)
So I walked back to the table, and I said to the guys at the other side of the table, "hi, your friend is in the toilet, and there is shit everywhere." It took a while for those words to register. Soon enough, they were laughing when they came back. They reported that the boy was crying, and probably it was because the janitor was also crying. I watched the horror of the crap guy's family's faces when they got news of this incident. Eventually they boy got sent home.
At my table were myself and 2 friends, and the rest were people I had never met before. One of them was a boy of 8-9 years, hyperactive, si beh irritating. And he was holding a box of mints, popping them into his mouth at an alarming rate. One of my friends was looking on in horror, saying "does he know that aspartame in large doses has a laxative effect?"
He disappeared for a while. Coincidently the other friend and I went to the toilet. We did not like what we saw. The boy had his trousers off, legs covered with shit, and trousers covered with shit. It was a little difficult to breathe in the toilet. For some funny reason he thought that a good way of getting rid of the shit was to fling his trousers around and spray shit everywhere. The Indian janitor was screaming bloody murder at him. (This is a wedding, remember, in a hotel of a decent standard where the last thing he was doing before giving the boy grief was to spray antiseptic and fragrance into the urinal.)
So I walked back to the table, and I said to the guys at the other side of the table, "hi, your friend is in the toilet, and there is shit everywhere." It took a while for those words to register. Soon enough, they were laughing when they came back. They reported that the boy was crying, and probably it was because the janitor was also crying. I watched the horror of the crap guy's family's faces when they got news of this incident. Eventually they boy got sent home.
Wednesday, 20 August 2008
3 Dead Directors
I used to watch movies a fair bit in college. And as you know, the sort of movies they tend to show in college cinemas tend to be the more arty farty kinds. You could say that my college days were the high watermark of my relationship with cinema. Back home, either it was the dearth of good films (I could always rent films from the Ass-planade but opted not to) or probably that as with music, there is this golden period where you first encounter cinema, and it's all new and fresh and beautiful, and there are so many
Well during my days at the college cinema, I got introduced to 3 great directors, and all of them died last year, all within a month of each other.
I wouldn't have known that Edward Yang was dead. If it was announced in the papers, I would have missed it. I only knew because there was this article on Cai Qin and it announced that her former husband Edward Yang died recently. Goddamn.
My favourite of the 3 is Edward Yang. He is, together with Hou Hsiao Hsien, the 2 great directors at the forefront of the Taiwanese New Wave movement. I've only seen his 2 most famous films, but they are among my favourite movies, ever. One is "A Brighter Summer Day", and the other is "Yi Yi".
One thing that Edward Yang is famous for, and this is also true of HHH: whereas western film tends to put the camera very close to the subjects, and places the viewer right in the heat of action, they put the camera very far away, to capture the surrounding landscape as well. The takes are long, and there are a few cuts. It is very unusual in cinema to focus on the background as much as the action but I suppose there's this theory that Asians have a different way of seeing the world - in terms of relationships, rather than in terms of an actor divorced from its surroundings. So when you can see the background, it is more like theatre, you are reminded that the actors are forever under the influence of the workings of the cosmos, this mysterious thing called fate that rules all of us.
I remember watching "Yi Yi". I went in not expecting anything much more than the run of the mill arthouse film. I was fairly astonished when I came out: I thought it was one of the greatest 2 hour films I had ever watched, until I checked my watch and discovered that the film was 3 hours long. I might put up a review of the film somewhere, but maybe not here. The subject matter is hardly inspiring, it is a portrait of a family, all struggling and going through difficult phases - the father trying to get a project off the ground, and at the same time an old flame appears at the wedding, and tempts him into an affair. The mother is sick and tired of life, and retreats to a monastery for a few weeks. The eldest daughter is going out with a guy she finds interesting, and also racked with guilt at possibly having caused her grandmother's stroke. The cute but curious young son goes around with a camera, just like the director himself, shooting things that other people can't see. Also, in having a crush on a female classmate, he experiences the earliest stirrings of adolescence.
One thing I picked up upon, and this was confirmed when I read an interview with Edward Yang: all the members of the family could the same person, going through different stages of life. By putting these episodes together and attributing them to different members of a family, he condenses the whole experience of a life into a single film, and that's one of the things which makes the film such a stirring experience. In one of my favourite scenes, when the father and his old flame were reminiscing about their younger days, his daughter was acting it out with her boyfriend, and the director juxtaposed both scenes together to underline that his daughter was replaying events that happened in his youth.
One cannot discount a tinge of homesickness at play when I saw this. I live in Singapore not Taiwan of course but you can't deny that Singapore is a hell lot more like Taiwan than the US.
"A Brighter Summer Day" is one of the most ambitious movies I have ever seen, and it succeeds brilliantly. I think one reason why I rated it highly is because when you grow up in Singapore, you are not very conscious of history, that you are carrying a torch that has been passed down to you from generations back. I think there is something in us that yearns for some semblance of a history, and that is why Royston Tan's "881", as well as Jack Neo's "Homerun" have been such hits. So whenever I see a history film about our part of the world, particularly if it concerns the 20th century, I'm interested. I didn't like it at all that our Ministry of Education is so coy about letting Singaporeans learn about their post independence history. There is nothing in the history textbooks. All you see are ang mohs in their colonial outfits and their wigs. I liked "brighter Summer Day" because it showed the real stuff, the gang fights, the strict schools (eerily similar to many of our SAP schools), even the forced confessions obtained through the good ol' air conditioners. (Back then they didn't have air conditioning, so they used ice blocks.) Now you know why that film made me feel so homesick. Good old ISD!
I am frequently surprised that while Hong Kong and Taiwan cinema are very well regarded internationally, Singapore has comparatively little to offer. Tsai Ming-Liang is actually a Malaysian who moved to Taiwan. I think, when watching Edward Yang's films, I got this briefest notion that Singapore does have what it takes to have a great film industry, and probably did so in the 60s, before the motherfuckers shut them down.
Well during my days at the college cinema, I got introduced to 3 great directors, and all of them died last year, all within a month of each other.
I wouldn't have known that Edward Yang was dead. If it was announced in the papers, I would have missed it. I only knew because there was this article on Cai Qin and it announced that her former husband Edward Yang died recently. Goddamn.
My favourite of the 3 is Edward Yang. He is, together with Hou Hsiao Hsien, the 2 great directors at the forefront of the Taiwanese New Wave movement. I've only seen his 2 most famous films, but they are among my favourite movies, ever. One is "A Brighter Summer Day", and the other is "Yi Yi".
One thing that Edward Yang is famous for, and this is also true of HHH: whereas western film tends to put the camera very close to the subjects, and places the viewer right in the heat of action, they put the camera very far away, to capture the surrounding landscape as well. The takes are long, and there are a few cuts. It is very unusual in cinema to focus on the background as much as the action but I suppose there's this theory that Asians have a different way of seeing the world - in terms of relationships, rather than in terms of an actor divorced from its surroundings. So when you can see the background, it is more like theatre, you are reminded that the actors are forever under the influence of the workings of the cosmos, this mysterious thing called fate that rules all of us.
I remember watching "Yi Yi". I went in not expecting anything much more than the run of the mill arthouse film. I was fairly astonished when I came out: I thought it was one of the greatest 2 hour films I had ever watched, until I checked my watch and discovered that the film was 3 hours long. I might put up a review of the film somewhere, but maybe not here. The subject matter is hardly inspiring, it is a portrait of a family, all struggling and going through difficult phases - the father trying to get a project off the ground, and at the same time an old flame appears at the wedding, and tempts him into an affair. The mother is sick and tired of life, and retreats to a monastery for a few weeks. The eldest daughter is going out with a guy she finds interesting, and also racked with guilt at possibly having caused her grandmother's stroke. The cute but curious young son goes around with a camera, just like the director himself, shooting things that other people can't see. Also, in having a crush on a female classmate, he experiences the earliest stirrings of adolescence.
One thing I picked up upon, and this was confirmed when I read an interview with Edward Yang: all the members of the family could the same person, going through different stages of life. By putting these episodes together and attributing them to different members of a family, he condenses the whole experience of a life into a single film, and that's one of the things which makes the film such a stirring experience. In one of my favourite scenes, when the father and his old flame were reminiscing about their younger days, his daughter was acting it out with her boyfriend, and the director juxtaposed both scenes together to underline that his daughter was replaying events that happened in his youth.
One cannot discount a tinge of homesickness at play when I saw this. I live in Singapore not Taiwan of course but you can't deny that Singapore is a hell lot more like Taiwan than the US.
"A Brighter Summer Day" is one of the most ambitious movies I have ever seen, and it succeeds brilliantly. I think one reason why I rated it highly is because when you grow up in Singapore, you are not very conscious of history, that you are carrying a torch that has been passed down to you from generations back. I think there is something in us that yearns for some semblance of a history, and that is why Royston Tan's "881", as well as Jack Neo's "Homerun" have been such hits. So whenever I see a history film about our part of the world, particularly if it concerns the 20th century, I'm interested. I didn't like it at all that our Ministry of Education is so coy about letting Singaporeans learn about their post independence history. There is nothing in the history textbooks. All you see are ang mohs in their colonial outfits and their wigs. I liked "brighter Summer Day" because it showed the real stuff, the gang fights, the strict schools (eerily similar to many of our SAP schools), even the forced confessions obtained through the good ol' air conditioners. (Back then they didn't have air conditioning, so they used ice blocks.) Now you know why that film made me feel so homesick. Good old ISD!
I am frequently surprised that while Hong Kong and Taiwan cinema are very well regarded internationally, Singapore has comparatively little to offer. Tsai Ming-Liang is actually a Malaysian who moved to Taiwan. I think, when watching Edward Yang's films, I got this briefest notion that Singapore does have what it takes to have a great film industry, and probably did so in the 60s, before the motherfuckers shut them down.
Then again, I think a little about how a small cinema scene can suddenly produce a few geniuses, before the scene fades away. How small footballing countries like Holland, Hungary, Austria and Uruguay have produced a short generation of geniuses against the odds.
Oh by the way the other 2 cinema geniuses who died last year were Antonioni and Bergman. I liked the films by them that I have watched ("l'Avventura", "la Notte", "l'Eclisse", "Seventh Seal", "Wild Strawberries") and they are among my favourite films but I have less to say about them.
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