This is not going to be an easy topic to write about.
In the late 50s, there was a team of young football players who were among the most promising players of their generation. They belonged to a team called Manchester United. They flew to Yugoslavia to play in an European match. On the way back, they transited in Munich… well if you’re a Man U fan you know the rest.
(Incidently Munich was the place where Hitler first established the Nazi party. It was the place where Great Britain and France decided to allow Hitler to take over Czechoslovakia, setting off a chain of events which started off WWII. In 1972, during the Olympics, a group of Palestinian terrorists kidnapped 11 Israeli athletes, promising to release them for ransom. When they were lured into an ambush, they killed all the athletes. Munich is quite an exciting place.)
A lot of the Man U legend was built around that disaster. One of those who were in that plane and didn’t die was Bobby Charlton, who went on to win the World Cup, and become one of the greatest players in England, if not the world. (Probably not the world.)
Eventually, the team rebuilt itself, and by the late 60s, with their 3 star players Law, Charlton and Best, they won the league, and later the European Cup. They went through a comparatively lean period of more than 20 years without the league, but they became one of the biggest club sides in the world in the 90s, helped partially by the legend of the Munich Air Disaster.
Liverpool would suffer even worse. In 1985, they were already the greatest club side in Europe. They had won 4 European Cups, including the one in 1984, and were looking for their 5th.
The European Cup final in 1985 took place in Heysel, Belgium. Their opponents were Juventus. There was some trouble in the crowd, exacerbated by the hooligans on the English side. Just before kick-off, a wall collapsed, killing around 50 fans. (I can’t remember the exact number, it doesn’t matter.) The match had to go on, because they were afraid that there would be even worse crowd trouble if the crowd were told that the match was cancelled. Understandably, neither side wanted to win, but somebody had to and it was Juventus.
In 1989, Liverpool were to play an FA cup semi-final against (Nottingham Forest?) in Sheffield Wednesday’s stadium in Hillsborough. The police were having trouble controlling the crowd entering a stand. The match was about to begin and there was still a large crowd standing outside. They made the mistake of allowing too many people to enter one of the stands, and in the resulting crush, 96 people died.
This was the incident that led to a wholesale review of standards for the condition of football stadiums, and increasing commercialization of that league. The formation of the Premier League resulted in player’s salaries getting more and more obscene. It is very distasteful to juxtapose these 2 incidents together, but there is a causal link.
The slave trade had already begun before the Europeans came. It was the Arabs who went into Africa to raid the continent for free labour. But it was the Europeans, especially the settlers in the Americas who took this to a totally different level. We all know some of the facts from our school textbooks, and I haven’t read up a lot on this so I don’t really know.
But the descendents of slaves in the USA are certainly having it better than those who remained behind in Africa. They are still being discriminated against, and not given as much opportunities as the whites, but the idea of race is beginning to fade, if not disappear. Right now, the most powerful government official in the US is a black man. OK, he’s actually a descendent of someone who stayed behind. But for the majority of black Americans, if their ancestors had not been captured into slavery, they would be having a pretty miserable life.
I guess the wheel of fortune is very funny like that.
Saturday, 31 October 2009
Monday, 26 October 2009
The proud Singaporean in Malaysia
OK will start by turning Shingot’s slogan upside down.
So we went to my father’s vacation home. He didn’t want to pay the toll for the 2nd link, but we also had some stuff to do in JB. Anyway I was wondering why he was burning another $8 worth of petrol so that he could save on $10 of toll.
I drove to the border, and then we changed places. Then he showed me this bridge they were building across the Sekudai river that would eventually provide a faster way to get from the older JB to the Iskandar region. After a couple of hours of driving, we arrived at Gelang Patah, which was the town nearest to the house. It was a former commie town. Had breakfast. Then over to the house, where to my father’s consternation, the contractor who was supposed to deliver 2 trees failed to turn up.
Later on, over to Pekan Nanas (I just googled the place on a map – wtf, it really was in the middle of nowhere!) To get some cheap groceries. Yeh well the old folks get really excited about cheap groceries. The stuff was OK, fresh farm produce. Although I haven’t really seen a wet market with so many flies buzzing around the carcasses for quite some time.
After that, back to the house, where armed with a newly acquired garden hoe and a wicker basket, I was about to engage in my great adventure of planting 2 pomelo trees. At the same time, we were expecting my uncle to visit and lend some much-needed advice to the renovation of the place. The storm clouds were gathering, so my father and I each dug a ditch for the two trees. This was the first time I was digging something since that trench I dug somewhere in Jurong for NS. Crappy (but hardly traumatic) experience, that.
As was to be expected, my father was much more of an expert at that than me. There was good advice, of course. You hold the hoe above your head, and let the weight of the hoe fall. I know that. But when I do that, the hoe doesn’t land where I want it to land. So most of the time, instead of methodically carving out lumps of soil (which is what you are supposed to do) I ended up pulverizing everything and having to scoop out sand (which is a great waste of effort).
My uncle was watching, and he chuckled and said, “ah, reliving the good old days.” (The two brothers were farmers when they were young.)
Anyway, they were all dug out already. So we did the rest: mixing the sand, some loam (bought this from a roadside nursery) and the clay-y soil, and dumping in 2 trees for good measure. Might have been the first time this city boy is planting a tree.
Doesn't this all remind you of all those old PAP cheap PR stunts called "tree planting day?" I don't suppose we have lots of them anymore because the amount of green spaces you find in newer HDB flats these days are a fucking embarrassment. But while I was digging a hole for the tree, I wondered if LKY ever dug the hole himself, or he had somebody dig the hole for him first, and then he did the relatively light work of filling it in with a sapling?
After that, more cheap groceries from wet markets, and then home.
Yes, I suppose it’s nice that the older generation want to introduce the charms of the rustic Singapore they knew from their childhood because it’s all disappeared. But it’s eluding me somewhat.
So we went to my father’s vacation home. He didn’t want to pay the toll for the 2nd link, but we also had some stuff to do in JB. Anyway I was wondering why he was burning another $8 worth of petrol so that he could save on $10 of toll.
I drove to the border, and then we changed places. Then he showed me this bridge they were building across the Sekudai river that would eventually provide a faster way to get from the older JB to the Iskandar region. After a couple of hours of driving, we arrived at Gelang Patah, which was the town nearest to the house. It was a former commie town. Had breakfast. Then over to the house, where to my father’s consternation, the contractor who was supposed to deliver 2 trees failed to turn up.
Later on, over to Pekan Nanas (I just googled the place on a map – wtf, it really was in the middle of nowhere!) To get some cheap groceries. Yeh well the old folks get really excited about cheap groceries. The stuff was OK, fresh farm produce. Although I haven’t really seen a wet market with so many flies buzzing around the carcasses for quite some time.
After that, back to the house, where armed with a newly acquired garden hoe and a wicker basket, I was about to engage in my great adventure of planting 2 pomelo trees. At the same time, we were expecting my uncle to visit and lend some much-needed advice to the renovation of the place. The storm clouds were gathering, so my father and I each dug a ditch for the two trees. This was the first time I was digging something since that trench I dug somewhere in Jurong for NS. Crappy (but hardly traumatic) experience, that.
As was to be expected, my father was much more of an expert at that than me. There was good advice, of course. You hold the hoe above your head, and let the weight of the hoe fall. I know that. But when I do that, the hoe doesn’t land where I want it to land. So most of the time, instead of methodically carving out lumps of soil (which is what you are supposed to do) I ended up pulverizing everything and having to scoop out sand (which is a great waste of effort).
My uncle was watching, and he chuckled and said, “ah, reliving the good old days.” (The two brothers were farmers when they were young.)
Anyway, they were all dug out already. So we did the rest: mixing the sand, some loam (bought this from a roadside nursery) and the clay-y soil, and dumping in 2 trees for good measure. Might have been the first time this city boy is planting a tree.
Doesn't this all remind you of all those old PAP cheap PR stunts called "tree planting day?" I don't suppose we have lots of them anymore because the amount of green spaces you find in newer HDB flats these days are a fucking embarrassment. But while I was digging a hole for the tree, I wondered if LKY ever dug the hole himself, or he had somebody dig the hole for him first, and then he did the relatively light work of filling it in with a sapling?
After that, more cheap groceries from wet markets, and then home.
Yes, I suppose it’s nice that the older generation want to introduce the charms of the rustic Singapore they knew from their childhood because it’s all disappeared. But it’s eluding me somewhat.
Saturday, 24 October 2009
American Beauty - 10 years after
I remember watching “American Beauty” 10 years ago and thinking, “this is a fantastic movie”. I’ve written at length about that movie before so I won’t do that again. But what made me suddenly think about that movie was reading about this: yes, Wes Bentley, that pot dealer who introduced everybody to drugs and invited them to turn on, is being sued by American Express for what he’s owed them in back payments.
I think, time has not been kind to the various people who were involved in the movie. They have never gotten back the same kind of acclaim that they had for “American Beauty”. Either they went downhill, or “American Beauty” was an accidental masterpiece, which fell into place because it just articulated what was on the minds of a lot of people at that time. I’m beginning to suspect it was half and half.
I think that the 90s were a bit like the 60s. It was a time when Americans were prosperous, and could afford to think about crazy ideas. It was a time when the world went collectively nuts and bought into the dot com stock craze. (Imagine how much money was lost in that bubble!). It was a time when there was a great cultural war waged between the conservatives and the liberals. It was a utopian time, when people were wondering if the world had changed forever, that the old cold war, pre-internet rules no longer applied to society. It was a time when counterculture was on the rise – instead of the hippies and Haight-Asbury, we had Kurt Cobain, REM and Radiohead, bands that were much less mainstream than the icons of the 80s – Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince.
But the merits of the film – I think that the ideas articulated were a little confused, just as 60s counterculture was confused. It was a time of great hope, a lot of talk about revolutionary change, but nothing really permanent and really significant materialised. I have not watched it a second time. The first time, it was a magical experience. Actually a lot of films I watched around that time were all magical. But I don’t want to spoil it. And I don’t want to get lost in a dream – there are very few fates that are worse than that.
Kevin Spacey had a few good roles, in “Se7en”, “the Usual Suspects”, “LA Confidential”. His role as Lester Burnham more or less carried the whole film. It was a great performance, and people were marking him for even greater things after that. But it was to be the peak of his career. A few good but not great roles followed: “Shipping News”, “K-PAX”, etc.
Annette Bening, the woman who managed to “tame” Warren Beatty. Remarkably, they are still married. She continued to get raves for movies like “Being Julia” and “Mrs Harris” but the movies themselves did not get a lot of attention.
Thora Birch was the goth daughter of Lester Burnham. They also considered Christina Ricci for the role, and you could see why. Afterwards, she was supposed to be the next Christina Ricci, and she had one good film in “Ghost World”. But after that – not much luck.
Wes Bentley was another person who was tipped for better things, having delivered that monologue about “there’s so much beauty in this world”. But other than a starring role in “Four Feathers”, he’s not starred in anything major. He’s still young and things could still happen. Or not. He’s just like David Bentley, fading after an early promise.
Mena Suvari, who was the hot chick in that bathtub, and the person Lester Burnham thinks about while masturbating, you’d expect her to be as hot as ever. But she’s now firmly slot in that “supporting roles for hot chicks” role.
Make no mistake, all the actors that I mentioned here are good actors, and a few are superb. Many have continued to put in good work, but none of them have achieved the heights of “American Beauty”. None of them can be considered failures – but Wes Bentley is dangerously close.
Sam Mendes is the director, and he’s done a few films afterwards – Road to Perdition, Jarhead, Revolutionary Road. Revolutionary Road was a return to form, but hardly the equal of American Beauty, even as it also was similar in that it displayed the petty disappointments of the suburban existence. He also did a lot of stage directing in that time.
The one person who has moved on from “American Beauty” is Alan Ball. Not the England World Cup winning footballer, but the scriptwriter of “American Beauty”, and to my mind, the main hero in it. A lot of the sharpness of that movie came from the script, the strong characterization. A lot of the characters are stereotypes, but none of them are really 2 dimensional. His script does what very few scripts these days do: it has the ability to surprise and inspire.
1999 was a year in which there were 3 movies that promised to herald a better future for cinema: “The Matrix”, “Fight Club” and “American Beauty”. But to my mind this promise was largely unfulfilled in the 2000s.
I think, time has not been kind to the various people who were involved in the movie. They have never gotten back the same kind of acclaim that they had for “American Beauty”. Either they went downhill, or “American Beauty” was an accidental masterpiece, which fell into place because it just articulated what was on the minds of a lot of people at that time. I’m beginning to suspect it was half and half.
I think that the 90s were a bit like the 60s. It was a time when Americans were prosperous, and could afford to think about crazy ideas. It was a time when the world went collectively nuts and bought into the dot com stock craze. (Imagine how much money was lost in that bubble!). It was a time when there was a great cultural war waged between the conservatives and the liberals. It was a utopian time, when people were wondering if the world had changed forever, that the old cold war, pre-internet rules no longer applied to society. It was a time when counterculture was on the rise – instead of the hippies and Haight-Asbury, we had Kurt Cobain, REM and Radiohead, bands that were much less mainstream than the icons of the 80s – Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince.
But the merits of the film – I think that the ideas articulated were a little confused, just as 60s counterculture was confused. It was a time of great hope, a lot of talk about revolutionary change, but nothing really permanent and really significant materialised. I have not watched it a second time. The first time, it was a magical experience. Actually a lot of films I watched around that time were all magical. But I don’t want to spoil it. And I don’t want to get lost in a dream – there are very few fates that are worse than that.
Kevin Spacey had a few good roles, in “Se7en”, “the Usual Suspects”, “LA Confidential”. His role as Lester Burnham more or less carried the whole film. It was a great performance, and people were marking him for even greater things after that. But it was to be the peak of his career. A few good but not great roles followed: “Shipping News”, “K-PAX”, etc.
Annette Bening, the woman who managed to “tame” Warren Beatty. Remarkably, they are still married. She continued to get raves for movies like “Being Julia” and “Mrs Harris” but the movies themselves did not get a lot of attention.
Thora Birch was the goth daughter of Lester Burnham. They also considered Christina Ricci for the role, and you could see why. Afterwards, she was supposed to be the next Christina Ricci, and she had one good film in “Ghost World”. But after that – not much luck.
Wes Bentley was another person who was tipped for better things, having delivered that monologue about “there’s so much beauty in this world”. But other than a starring role in “Four Feathers”, he’s not starred in anything major. He’s still young and things could still happen. Or not. He’s just like David Bentley, fading after an early promise.
Mena Suvari, who was the hot chick in that bathtub, and the person Lester Burnham thinks about while masturbating, you’d expect her to be as hot as ever. But she’s now firmly slot in that “supporting roles for hot chicks” role.
Make no mistake, all the actors that I mentioned here are good actors, and a few are superb. Many have continued to put in good work, but none of them have achieved the heights of “American Beauty”. None of them can be considered failures – but Wes Bentley is dangerously close.
Sam Mendes is the director, and he’s done a few films afterwards – Road to Perdition, Jarhead, Revolutionary Road. Revolutionary Road was a return to form, but hardly the equal of American Beauty, even as it also was similar in that it displayed the petty disappointments of the suburban existence. He also did a lot of stage directing in that time.
The one person who has moved on from “American Beauty” is Alan Ball. Not the England World Cup winning footballer, but the scriptwriter of “American Beauty”, and to my mind, the main hero in it. A lot of the sharpness of that movie came from the script, the strong characterization. A lot of the characters are stereotypes, but none of them are really 2 dimensional. His script does what very few scripts these days do: it has the ability to surprise and inspire.
1999 was a year in which there were 3 movies that promised to herald a better future for cinema: “The Matrix”, “Fight Club” and “American Beauty”. But to my mind this promise was largely unfulfilled in the 2000s.
This is Hardcore
The CD player I bought from totoro 3 years ago has died. It didn't exactly die die. It was always a piece of crap. The CD door just stopped working one day, although it could still play stuff. But I think it was high time to chuck it.
The CD that was stuck inside was one that I don't play very often, but it's an album made about reaching your 30s and feeling that your life is going downhill all the way from now on.
A fairly highly regarded piece of work artistically, but this was a piece of work made under emotional turmoil: Jarvis Cocker had just become famous after more than 10 years of obscurity, but the lifestyle of hobnobbing with the famous (and all the bullshit that went with it) was starting to take its toll: it culminated in this especially infamous incident where he showed his backside to Michael Jackson (ie the moonwalker was mooned):
If your CD player could only play 1 album, it shouldn't be "This is Hardcore" by Pulp. That's bad. Not really something you want on constant rotation. So at the suggestion of the colleague, I took it apart with my screwdriver, and took out the CD. Now that the damn thing is out of my CD player I feel better.
The CD that was stuck inside was one that I don't play very often, but it's an album made about reaching your 30s and feeling that your life is going downhill all the way from now on.
A fairly highly regarded piece of work artistically, but this was a piece of work made under emotional turmoil: Jarvis Cocker had just become famous after more than 10 years of obscurity, but the lifestyle of hobnobbing with the famous (and all the bullshit that went with it) was starting to take its toll: it culminated in this especially infamous incident where he showed his backside to Michael Jackson (ie the moonwalker was mooned):
If your CD player could only play 1 album, it shouldn't be "This is Hardcore" by Pulp. That's bad. Not really something you want on constant rotation. So at the suggestion of the colleague, I took it apart with my screwdriver, and took out the CD. Now that the damn thing is out of my CD player I feel better.
Number Nine Dream
When you're in your twenties you're being an adult for the first time, and you have to realign your priorities in life. Almost without exception, I hear a lot of final year uni students remark, "oh my God, I've just taken my last exam." What's so amazing about taking your last exam? It is that from the moment that the person enters school as a 5,6 year old, his life would have been centred around exams. It is not that difficult for him to name his reason for living: it is the exam. But when you rip that centre out of his life, a major reorientation is needed.
I once told myself, you have enough dreams to last your whole life. That is true. But what becomes of those dreams? There are plenty of instances in my life where I've been lost and headed down blind alleys. Let's look at some of those dreams.
Musician
It would not have occurred to me when I was a kid, my parents breathing down my neck to make me put in that one hour a day. I hated practicing. I wonder why people never seem to realise that people hate practicing piano. It's bad enough to hate practicing, and when you know that you aren't good with your hands, and all that practicing is futile, it's even worse. I still cringe a little when ppl come up to coach me on something that needs hand eye co-ordination (basketball for instance).
That being said, I think I have a good shot at being a composer. Except that writing stuff alone is not going to get you very far. You still need the big logistical problem of having things performed. For a few years I stopped composing because there was no way of writing things down. Then last year I started writing things down, and after that I wrote some more stuff that I'm happy with, but it's dried up a little recently. Anyway the writing part is OK. It's the translating all that stuff into music that's the problem now.
Academic
It's hardly the case that I became really interested in knowledge only when I got to the Uni. But I suppose at that time the educational system is hardly inspiring. Singapore educational system is second to none for drilling the basic facts into peoples' heads, and even the angmohs admire that. But above that and beyond, it only really gets interesting when you get to the uni. And even if I were inspired by knowledge while in Sec School and JC, it's for those ideas that you get to learn about in the uni.
And I think that it's like building a house. The part all the way up till JC is when you are pounding in the foundations and building the pillars. It doesn't look like anything is being done, even though it's a lot of hard work. It's dreary and boring. And uni is when you bring in all the prefab stuff and fit it on, and suddenly, magically, the house appears.
I would go into a field which is intricate and complex. I thought about artificial intelligence for a while. I think I would go into a field which involves a lot of complexity, and it is not difficult to find one. The big problem with academic stuff is that when you get the main idea, and that is usually early on, it's a lot of fun. But after that it is the long hard slog and the project takes forever.
Books
People have this image of my being a bookworm, even though I've had to explain to them that I've only been one for 10 years. OK, 10 years is a long time but I was more likely to listen to Jimi Hendrix / REM / Sonic Youth all day when I was back in JC.
This was probably related to the previous dream, of being an academic. I thought I'd better start reading everything I could lay my hands on, just in case I ever got the chance to be an academic one day. But now my house is stocked up with too many useless books and I set a target last year to clear 2 shelves of books by reading and selling them away. I have read through more than 1 shelf already.
Marathoner
This was something really accidental. Just that at some point in my life I got to know 5 people who have done marathons. So I signed up for a marathon at the end of 2008. It's very tiring to practice but it's too late to stop now. Anyway I finished it. Although "finish" is rather flattering to me. Towards the end when I was in an army of stragglers, I thought, "this is what it must have been like when Napoleon was retreating from Russia".
Playwright
I wanted to be a playwright in school. But I think I blogged about this before so I won't bore you with the details. Anyway bottom line is that I've taken this as far as it can go so I'm OK with this.
Career
Nothing much here. At one point my thinking was, "everybody thinks that this is important, so it has to be important." It wasn't easy at first. I'm still getting by. Maybe for now I will just have a job, get by and at the same time work on my other dreams. Until such a time when I stumble upon something that is compelling enough that it becomes another one of my dreams.
Pussy
The one time that I have been in love, something strange happened. Everything gets imbued with a whole new meaning, although if you were to press me about it now, I'm not sure I can explain what this "new meaning" is. Whereas I was a more easy going person before that, I just got more forceful over certain things. When am I next going to get somebody? Well I used to think, make more of your own dreams come true, and this problem will fix itself. And it used to be that impressing women would be a great incentive to work at those things. Little by little, though, it stopped being important, and now when I wake up in the morning, I know that I will measure how useful a day has been according to these other things outlined above.
I once told myself, you have enough dreams to last your whole life. That is true. But what becomes of those dreams? There are plenty of instances in my life where I've been lost and headed down blind alleys. Let's look at some of those dreams.
Musician
It would not have occurred to me when I was a kid, my parents breathing down my neck to make me put in that one hour a day. I hated practicing. I wonder why people never seem to realise that people hate practicing piano. It's bad enough to hate practicing, and when you know that you aren't good with your hands, and all that practicing is futile, it's even worse. I still cringe a little when ppl come up to coach me on something that needs hand eye co-ordination (basketball for instance).
That being said, I think I have a good shot at being a composer. Except that writing stuff alone is not going to get you very far. You still need the big logistical problem of having things performed. For a few years I stopped composing because there was no way of writing things down. Then last year I started writing things down, and after that I wrote some more stuff that I'm happy with, but it's dried up a little recently. Anyway the writing part is OK. It's the translating all that stuff into music that's the problem now.
Academic
It's hardly the case that I became really interested in knowledge only when I got to the Uni. But I suppose at that time the educational system is hardly inspiring. Singapore educational system is second to none for drilling the basic facts into peoples' heads, and even the angmohs admire that. But above that and beyond, it only really gets interesting when you get to the uni. And even if I were inspired by knowledge while in Sec School and JC, it's for those ideas that you get to learn about in the uni.
And I think that it's like building a house. The part all the way up till JC is when you are pounding in the foundations and building the pillars. It doesn't look like anything is being done, even though it's a lot of hard work. It's dreary and boring. And uni is when you bring in all the prefab stuff and fit it on, and suddenly, magically, the house appears.
I would go into a field which is intricate and complex. I thought about artificial intelligence for a while. I think I would go into a field which involves a lot of complexity, and it is not difficult to find one. The big problem with academic stuff is that when you get the main idea, and that is usually early on, it's a lot of fun. But after that it is the long hard slog and the project takes forever.
Books
People have this image of my being a bookworm, even though I've had to explain to them that I've only been one for 10 years. OK, 10 years is a long time but I was more likely to listen to Jimi Hendrix / REM / Sonic Youth all day when I was back in JC.
This was probably related to the previous dream, of being an academic. I thought I'd better start reading everything I could lay my hands on, just in case I ever got the chance to be an academic one day. But now my house is stocked up with too many useless books and I set a target last year to clear 2 shelves of books by reading and selling them away. I have read through more than 1 shelf already.
Marathoner
This was something really accidental. Just that at some point in my life I got to know 5 people who have done marathons. So I signed up for a marathon at the end of 2008. It's very tiring to practice but it's too late to stop now. Anyway I finished it. Although "finish" is rather flattering to me. Towards the end when I was in an army of stragglers, I thought, "this is what it must have been like when Napoleon was retreating from Russia".
Playwright
I wanted to be a playwright in school. But I think I blogged about this before so I won't bore you with the details. Anyway bottom line is that I've taken this as far as it can go so I'm OK with this.
Career
Nothing much here. At one point my thinking was, "everybody thinks that this is important, so it has to be important." It wasn't easy at first. I'm still getting by. Maybe for now I will just have a job, get by and at the same time work on my other dreams. Until such a time when I stumble upon something that is compelling enough that it becomes another one of my dreams.
Pussy
The one time that I have been in love, something strange happened. Everything gets imbued with a whole new meaning, although if you were to press me about it now, I'm not sure I can explain what this "new meaning" is. Whereas I was a more easy going person before that, I just got more forceful over certain things. When am I next going to get somebody? Well I used to think, make more of your own dreams come true, and this problem will fix itself. And it used to be that impressing women would be a great incentive to work at those things. Little by little, though, it stopped being important, and now when I wake up in the morning, I know that I will measure how useful a day has been according to these other things outlined above.
Sunday, 18 October 2009
Whole Brain Thinking
OK, time for training again, and another fluffy course to make up the training hours so that we can fulfill another fucking corporate KPI.
This course is not that meaningless but at the heart of it is some overlong exposition of some idea that’s taken too seriously, taken too far. This is “Whole Brain Thinking”. Basically what it means is that they simplistically take 4 modes of using your left and right brain. You have 4 quadrants, and the personality test divides how much you use these 4 modes of thinking. They are:
The blue portion (left brain, cerebral)
The scientist who is always analysing, weighing up stuff, the rational-logical part.
The green portion (left brain, limbic)
The studious, conscientious part, which organises information into very
The red portion (right brain, limbic)
The emotional touchy feely part
The yellow portion (right brain, cerebral)
The imaginative, intuition part, which does a lot of leaps of logic.
So it was fun when at first I told them that I was a maths major, and then they concluded that I was a blue portion. Well it turned out that I primarily use the yellow portion, and a bit of the blue portion (that makes me more intensely cerebral than limbic, which means I’m primarily a thinker not a doer.) Then I’m fairly strong with red, and a little limp when it comes to the green.
I’m not surprised. I know that I’m good at blue because of my talent in maths. I’m also good at red because I have artistic talent. And given that blue and red are in opposite quadrants, I’m probably also good at one other aspect, and that is yellow, because it allows a person to see the whole picture, and probably you need holistic thinking in order to be able to switch between opposite modes of thinking.
But I’m concerned about my lack of green. This probably means that I should never ever touch operations. It probably also means that I have a good chance at being a success in life at anything other than operations. This is very interesting. In fact it means that I’m also fairly suspect as an engineer but don’t tell anybody I said that.
I’m thinking about other people I have to work with. I know that Monty Burns is either OK with the green portion and hopeless with the blue (or was that the other way around?) And he’s definitely crap at the yellow portion as well.
It is estimated that 70% of people use 2 of the zones, 20% use 3 of the zones, 7% use only 1 zone (and people in this category have an unfortunate tendency to piss off all those around them). The lucky few, the 3% who use all 4 zones, usually end up as leaders of men. If I were slightly stronger with red, I would be able to count myself as 3 quadrants.
The instructor did have a few interesting stories to tell. She did say that Singapore is very good and pumping out blue people, and to a lesser extent, green people. Yellow people have it tough in Singapore. I suppose that it’s quite ironic that they call it yellow people since most East Asian cultures are generally unfriendly towards yellow people. This is one major reason why I do not entirely approve of my own culture - I don’t give a fuck about people who say I’m being disloyal, the bare fact is that I often have to choose between being true to myself and being true to my culture. There is always a conflict.
The irony is that in my formative years I was brought up in a place which is yellow friendly. Most of my education were in yellow friendly places. But NS and work were not yellow friendly.
I know that the nail that sticks out will be hammered down but this nail intends to fight back. What usually happens is that when people pick on me I roll with the punches a little while, be very quiet, and try to sniff out their weak points, and then if there’s a way I kick them around a little bit here and there. This is nothing personal but yellow people need a lot of free space so too bad for you if you’re in the way. I can’t really help it but yellow people are rabble rousers. There’s really no point being always submissive, it’s no way to live your life. You have a role to play in society and you just have to do what you have to do. And anyhow the point of being yellow is that you can always find a way out because yellow is also the colour of cunning.
There are other ways of doing things - I think about Gorbachev, who came up in a very repressive and conformist society, and he still very artfully tried to effect a revolution from within. If you study history he gets most of the credit for overthrowing the Soviet system. He’s a person who managed to be a rebel, and yet do it without pissing too many people off. (Yes, he pissed off a lot of people, but that was later, after the USSR collapsed.) But I don’t have as many skills as he does. And you know, at the end of the day it wasn’t a happy ending for him. It wasn’t entirely his fault but Russia became a much more fucked up place after the end of the USSR, the life expectancy dropped by 10 years because everybody was drinking themselves to death. Russia is now ruled by the mafia.
The methodology of using user evaluations to assess whether the trainer gets to continue teaching is inherently flawed because it tilts the balance towards fluffy pseudo-psychological feel-good bimbonic stuff, and people who run one-size-fits-all management programs which have dubious relevance to the organisation can get away with charging really profitable admission fees. I sometimes wonder: is it very much more expensive to get your own guys to run some training themselves?
We haven’t had training programs that address problems that are specific to our company. That will change in due course.
I suppose Singaporean companies are very paranoid that people will find out about their modus operandi, to the extent that I have heard someone fairly senior on my organisation decrying the need to have somebody build an information portal that will be used by both ourselves and our customers. He complained that other companies will just bare a shoulder or two while we will strip naked in front of them and dance around. Be that as it may, if you want external consultants to effect real change in your organisation, you have to take it all off so that he can impregnate you isn’t it?
This course is not that meaningless but at the heart of it is some overlong exposition of some idea that’s taken too seriously, taken too far. This is “Whole Brain Thinking”. Basically what it means is that they simplistically take 4 modes of using your left and right brain. You have 4 quadrants, and the personality test divides how much you use these 4 modes of thinking. They are:
The blue portion (left brain, cerebral)
The scientist who is always analysing, weighing up stuff, the rational-logical part.
The green portion (left brain, limbic)
The studious, conscientious part, which organises information into very
The red portion (right brain, limbic)
The emotional touchy feely part
The yellow portion (right brain, cerebral)
The imaginative, intuition part, which does a lot of leaps of logic.
So it was fun when at first I told them that I was a maths major, and then they concluded that I was a blue portion. Well it turned out that I primarily use the yellow portion, and a bit of the blue portion (that makes me more intensely cerebral than limbic, which means I’m primarily a thinker not a doer.) Then I’m fairly strong with red, and a little limp when it comes to the green.
I’m not surprised. I know that I’m good at blue because of my talent in maths. I’m also good at red because I have artistic talent. And given that blue and red are in opposite quadrants, I’m probably also good at one other aspect, and that is yellow, because it allows a person to see the whole picture, and probably you need holistic thinking in order to be able to switch between opposite modes of thinking.
But I’m concerned about my lack of green. This probably means that I should never ever touch operations. It probably also means that I have a good chance at being a success in life at anything other than operations. This is very interesting. In fact it means that I’m also fairly suspect as an engineer but don’t tell anybody I said that.
I’m thinking about other people I have to work with. I know that Monty Burns is either OK with the green portion and hopeless with the blue (or was that the other way around?) And he’s definitely crap at the yellow portion as well.
It is estimated that 70% of people use 2 of the zones, 20% use 3 of the zones, 7% use only 1 zone (and people in this category have an unfortunate tendency to piss off all those around them). The lucky few, the 3% who use all 4 zones, usually end up as leaders of men. If I were slightly stronger with red, I would be able to count myself as 3 quadrants.
The instructor did have a few interesting stories to tell. She did say that Singapore is very good and pumping out blue people, and to a lesser extent, green people. Yellow people have it tough in Singapore. I suppose that it’s quite ironic that they call it yellow people since most East Asian cultures are generally unfriendly towards yellow people. This is one major reason why I do not entirely approve of my own culture - I don’t give a fuck about people who say I’m being disloyal, the bare fact is that I often have to choose between being true to myself and being true to my culture. There is always a conflict.
The irony is that in my formative years I was brought up in a place which is yellow friendly. Most of my education were in yellow friendly places. But NS and work were not yellow friendly.
I know that the nail that sticks out will be hammered down but this nail intends to fight back. What usually happens is that when people pick on me I roll with the punches a little while, be very quiet, and try to sniff out their weak points, and then if there’s a way I kick them around a little bit here and there. This is nothing personal but yellow people need a lot of free space so too bad for you if you’re in the way. I can’t really help it but yellow people are rabble rousers. There’s really no point being always submissive, it’s no way to live your life. You have a role to play in society and you just have to do what you have to do. And anyhow the point of being yellow is that you can always find a way out because yellow is also the colour of cunning.
There are other ways of doing things - I think about Gorbachev, who came up in a very repressive and conformist society, and he still very artfully tried to effect a revolution from within. If you study history he gets most of the credit for overthrowing the Soviet system. He’s a person who managed to be a rebel, and yet do it without pissing too many people off. (Yes, he pissed off a lot of people, but that was later, after the USSR collapsed.) But I don’t have as many skills as he does. And you know, at the end of the day it wasn’t a happy ending for him. It wasn’t entirely his fault but Russia became a much more fucked up place after the end of the USSR, the life expectancy dropped by 10 years because everybody was drinking themselves to death. Russia is now ruled by the mafia.
The methodology of using user evaluations to assess whether the trainer gets to continue teaching is inherently flawed because it tilts the balance towards fluffy pseudo-psychological feel-good bimbonic stuff, and people who run one-size-fits-all management programs which have dubious relevance to the organisation can get away with charging really profitable admission fees. I sometimes wonder: is it very much more expensive to get your own guys to run some training themselves?
We haven’t had training programs that address problems that are specific to our company. That will change in due course.
I suppose Singaporean companies are very paranoid that people will find out about their modus operandi, to the extent that I have heard someone fairly senior on my organisation decrying the need to have somebody build an information portal that will be used by both ourselves and our customers. He complained that other companies will just bare a shoulder or two while we will strip naked in front of them and dance around. Be that as it may, if you want external consultants to effect real change in your organisation, you have to take it all off so that he can impregnate you isn’t it?
Unified Modelling Language
Now, you probably wouldn’t think of engineers as being experts on relationship management, but there are other occupations which have persistently and consistently fared worse when it comes to managing their relationships. Like celebrities. And celebrities are supposed to be the most sexually attractive and desirable among human beings. So if we can do better than them, I suppose you should listen to us.
Another reason is that engineers are supposed to be masters at simplifying the complex, because if we can’t do this, nobody can. Engineering these days is almost the art of mastering complex systems. And we would say that a couple in a romantic relationship is a complex system.
One theory I’ve been expounding has something to do with software engineering. It’s how, when you are writing software specifications, you need to have descriptions about components. Each component is typically treated like a black box. You specify certain things about interfacing, without caring too much about the nitty gritties of how these things are being implemented. In other words, if you put in an input X, you should be getting an output Y. This should be very clear to the end user. It should work in a very predictable way, and after all human beings should work in a predictable way because at the end of the day, we are all machines, even though we are more complicated than what we think of as a machine.
There is an expectation about how people are going to behave in a certain circumstance, and people should deliver what is expected of them. If things are different, then maybe an environment variable we don’t completely understand is set incorrectly.
Under this software engineering model, we are supposed to understand the user interface correctly. I am not the first person to describe a woman as a very complicated machine whose workings it would a challenge to master. Which knob to turn, which button to push, and when. The point here is that, even if you understand that logic or you don’t, you have to admit that there is a certain logic at work, and the key to the longevity or the viability of that relationship is that you understand that logic as best you can.
At the same time that you are trying to understand this new fangled software component, you have to remember that you yourself are also a software component whose workings are clear to the other party. When circumstances are like this,
What is the consequence of the black box aspect of this? It is important to note that you don’t have to understand completely how that other software component works. Some women are very proud of the fact that nobody is able to understand her inner workings. Well and good, fair enough. Some women really mean that, others say that just so as to maintain some leverage over their man. Whether or not that is true, it doesn’t matter. But you have to understand the specifications. You have to know what is pushing what button, and what kind of behaviour is going to result from that.
Women are a little bit like quantum theory. You can look at all the equations, and you can look at the conclusions that come ouf of them, and you can say, “this is total nonsense. This is illogical, and does not conform to my expectations of what reality is like. Well and good. But you will always have those equations, and you will still be able to predict what is going to happen by applying those equations. Your job is not to understand the equations on a deep level, but merely to predict what is going to happen next so that you can act accordingly. You don’t have to understand your woman. But you need to be able to predict her.
Of course, when you go deeper into UML, you will have plenty of new-fangled engineering concepts that I’m only beginning to grapple with. What is a design pattern, what is a state diagram, what is a class diagram. Plenty of boxes with arrows and circles and what not. There is a logic behind everything. The key is to understand the system and work for it, and make that system work for you.
I see that engineers have an average to good record at making marriages last. Some people think that it is because engineers marry each other, and are so shit ugly that nobody else wants to touch them, I have nothing to say about that. Even if that were true, it still means that our quality of life is better than - say- Britney and Kevin Federline. And that is why engineers are better at romantic relationships than all these crazy celebrities, it is because when we buy a new piece of software, we take the time and effort to study the user specifications properly, and we actually read the operating manual that comes together with it, as opposed to those celebrities who only get into it because a sexy glossy manual looks sexy and glossy enough for them.
In a perfect world, all couples would understand the Unified Modelling Language well enough to apply it to their relationships.
The other thing about relationships that computer science can teach you is the halting problem. The halting problem is simply, given a program and an input, to decide whether the program would run forever or whether it would halt. There's no way of knowing until you try it out. So there's really no way of knowing for sure whether a relationship is going to work until you tried out that relationship in the first place.
Another reason is that engineers are supposed to be masters at simplifying the complex, because if we can’t do this, nobody can. Engineering these days is almost the art of mastering complex systems. And we would say that a couple in a romantic relationship is a complex system.
One theory I’ve been expounding has something to do with software engineering. It’s how, when you are writing software specifications, you need to have descriptions about components. Each component is typically treated like a black box. You specify certain things about interfacing, without caring too much about the nitty gritties of how these things are being implemented. In other words, if you put in an input X, you should be getting an output Y. This should be very clear to the end user. It should work in a very predictable way, and after all human beings should work in a predictable way because at the end of the day, we are all machines, even though we are more complicated than what we think of as a machine.
There is an expectation about how people are going to behave in a certain circumstance, and people should deliver what is expected of them. If things are different, then maybe an environment variable we don’t completely understand is set incorrectly.
Under this software engineering model, we are supposed to understand the user interface correctly. I am not the first person to describe a woman as a very complicated machine whose workings it would a challenge to master. Which knob to turn, which button to push, and when. The point here is that, even if you understand that logic or you don’t, you have to admit that there is a certain logic at work, and the key to the longevity or the viability of that relationship is that you understand that logic as best you can.
At the same time that you are trying to understand this new fangled software component, you have to remember that you yourself are also a software component whose workings are clear to the other party. When circumstances are like this,
What is the consequence of the black box aspect of this? It is important to note that you don’t have to understand completely how that other software component works. Some women are very proud of the fact that nobody is able to understand her inner workings. Well and good, fair enough. Some women really mean that, others say that just so as to maintain some leverage over their man. Whether or not that is true, it doesn’t matter. But you have to understand the specifications. You have to know what is pushing what button, and what kind of behaviour is going to result from that.
Women are a little bit like quantum theory. You can look at all the equations, and you can look at the conclusions that come ouf of them, and you can say, “this is total nonsense. This is illogical, and does not conform to my expectations of what reality is like. Well and good. But you will always have those equations, and you will still be able to predict what is going to happen by applying those equations. Your job is not to understand the equations on a deep level, but merely to predict what is going to happen next so that you can act accordingly. You don’t have to understand your woman. But you need to be able to predict her.
Of course, when you go deeper into UML, you will have plenty of new-fangled engineering concepts that I’m only beginning to grapple with. What is a design pattern, what is a state diagram, what is a class diagram. Plenty of boxes with arrows and circles and what not. There is a logic behind everything. The key is to understand the system and work for it, and make that system work for you.
I see that engineers have an average to good record at making marriages last. Some people think that it is because engineers marry each other, and are so shit ugly that nobody else wants to touch them, I have nothing to say about that. Even if that were true, it still means that our quality of life is better than - say- Britney and Kevin Federline. And that is why engineers are better at romantic relationships than all these crazy celebrities, it is because when we buy a new piece of software, we take the time and effort to study the user specifications properly, and we actually read the operating manual that comes together with it, as opposed to those celebrities who only get into it because a sexy glossy manual looks sexy and glossy enough for them.
In a perfect world, all couples would understand the Unified Modelling Language well enough to apply it to their relationships.
The other thing about relationships that computer science can teach you is the halting problem. The halting problem is simply, given a program and an input, to decide whether the program would run forever or whether it would halt. There's no way of knowing until you try it out. So there's really no way of knowing for sure whether a relationship is going to work until you tried out that relationship in the first place.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)