acquired* and finished thud! over the weekend. after all these years, i find that on the whole i still enjoy the vimes novels much more than any of the others. by nature of the mystery format they seem so much more coherent and better thought out, and if you don't love nobby and colon and carrot and sybil and vimes and all the rest of them there really isn't any hope for you.

* with great difficulty, i might add. nlb, though shiny, is quite useless when it comes to stocking new pratchetts.

in my mailbox yesterday

"...the talk will start at 2:30 sharp, please be puncture..."

minor gloat

the boss is in delhi and my subject is awol so i get to blog as much as i want today. also: we are going to brewerkz later for an impromptu and completely self-organized brainstorming session, so to all those who are stuck in the office: neener neener neener

ow

i fell asleep in an awkward position a couple of nights ago and woke up with all the nerves in my upper arm in full rebellion. three days and a zillion ibuprofen later it still hurts and i'm beginning to wonder about impingement and the like. certain movements are ok, but when i try to lift a glass or type on a keyboard i feel like absolute death. i hope they don't have to amputate.

i almost forgot to blog a whopping big thank you to cp for presenting me with this gift last week, a surprise so perfect that words do not suffice.

it's actually there!

ImOscar.com

(if you're still not watching arrested development, please go and kill yourself now. and take ray romano with you.)

emmys

everybody loves raymond for best comedy? lost for best drama? ugh. pass the bottle over here.

(silver lining: geoffrey rush won. and TAR.)

mid-autumn

* gaudy as the displays at the lantern safari (on till 25 sept at chinese gardens) were, you still have to marvel at the effort needed to construct and light up several hundred cloth-and-wire dinosaurs. throw in fireworks and hanging displays, and you have yourself at least one-sixteenth of a spectacle.

* between durian ice-cream mooncakes and power rangers lanterns, i'm going to say that as far as zhong qiu jie goes, tradition is strictly optional. enjoy the lights, everyone!

caudate

the one in the brain, people, the one in the brain!

today: definitely the first time i've told someone they have a nice caudate

lunch today was at a new place across the road, a self-titled "xiao long bao zhuan mai dian". given the number of places in singapore where you can get very decent xiao long bao/shui jiao/guo tie, it's difficult to expect anything too much from new restaurants of this ilk; if not for its proximity to outram i wouldn't have thought twice about ever eating there. complaints first: the food came in portions so miniscule that i ended up spending much more on lunch that i normally would because of the amount i had to order. that grouse aside, i would recommend the zha jiang mian, as well as the gui hua tang yuan, which was a bit like drinking a garden (literally - my soup came with numerous bits of flower floating in it. didn't gerald durell describe something similar?). nothing was over-salted/sugared, and well, i would have been quite happy if i hadn't been so hungry after the meal. unfortunate. perhaps i'll give it one more chance in a few weeks.

a colleague mentioned this morning how, in his younger days, his friends would devise methods to get themselves into clubs without paying the cover charge. simple manual transfer of the uv stamp from hand to hand didn't work, because that inverted the logo, so they learned to use a credit card as a tool for lifting off the ink and transferring it cleanly. eventually, they graduated to carving homemade stamps from potatoes - whole sets of them to match the one the club happened to be using for the day. i was quite impressed, i must say. labouring over dishonesty is not easy.

cookies

soft ones are easy to do, and brittle ones, but to get them in between - chewy on the inside with a crisp border - is an art i have not yet perfected. my mom suggests an apprenticeship with su-lin.

while i was doing a scan today, fs messaged me to tell me about the unveiling of the ipod nano. was struck by the desire to run out and buy one immediately. 0.27 inches! i need to go conjure up $450

expressions of mirth, divers

overheard a discussion on the mrt yesterday on the ridiculous overuse of 'haha' in short messages (e.g. haha i agree haha u shld tell her u said that haha she will never speak to u again haha dinner tonite?). ditto with 'heh' and 'lol'. everyone's guilty to a greater or lesser degree; the real question is why we do it. the fear of misconstured sarcasm i can perhaps understand...but it's more than that.. it's almost like people experience a deep-seated anxiety that every time they do not say haha/heh/lol it means that they have been emotionally devastated by the preceding comment and are about to forsake the relationship with the other party forever.

i'm going to try and break the habit, mostly because i'm getting annoyed with myself. 'haha's in IM/SMS will henceforth be kept to a minimum...and it doesn't mean that i hate you.

chuffed

-- at how virus proof OSX is. all those wasted years wrestling with NAV internet security pop-ups.

while browsing through nature a couple of days ago i came across a brief review for uncle petros and goldbach's conjecture. ever mr. soh's bunny rabbit, even after all these years, i checked the book out of nlb and finished it in a couple of sittings yesterday. as a novel it was nothing too special; it did, however, spur me on to read a little more about goldbach's conjecture, which states that every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of 2 primes. the problem is 250 years old, and it is, to date, unsolved, despite the publishers of uncle petros offering a million dollar prize for a proof in 2002.

i enjoy how such simple statements can spawn the exorbitantly complex proofs that they do. once upon a time, before my brain died and i started punctuating and spelling completely at random, i downloaded andrew wiles' proof of fermat's last theorem to see if i might understand anything of his argument. (i know. we were young then.), that was around the time i *almost* embarked on a second major in mathematics (bet you didn't know that), the time before better sense prevailed. what i enjoyed most about the wiles paper, i think, was just having it on my desk. while it sat there i owned it -- on some level at least -- even though (to me) not a word or symbol within it made sense.

note to self

don't be an idiot.

Currently reading:
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith

be thou my vision

one of yesterday's hymns. celtic tunes are gorgeous.

there was an all-female poetry slam happening at the orchard library this afternoon while i was settling down with cappuccino and paperback -- it turns out that this is similar in all respects to a normal poetry slam except that

(a) one is obliged to use the word "vagina" and/or "clitoris" once each poem and
(b) at least one reference to suicide during the course of your reading is an absolute must

seriously, though, it was a little disturbing how angry most of these people's stuff was, all "fuck the establishment" and "let's go get high" and "what the hell am i doing here anyway?". the particular problem with angst-ridden locally-written verse (aside from the fact that it's, well, cliched), is that even on the off-chance the poet actually has experienced something to warrant their anguish no one is going to believe them. the ready set of images from american pulp fiction that one can call upon - smoldering cigarette butts, stale black coffee, shiners behind sunglasses - make it so easy nowadays to portray yourself as the struggling abused artist that even the real mccoys have to work to get their cred, never mind ntu students here.


it's unfortunate. if the poetry isn't great you should minimally believe the sentiment, but even that's a stretch in this lousy place. and i do kind of feel for them; it's almost like i wish they really did have an opportunity to suffer, so that even with all the wrong words, they still might be able to say something genuine and right.

yes, one should not laugh at elderly men who are hard of hearing, and one especially should not laugh at colleagues who are losing their voice trying to get elderly men who are hard of hearing to understand them. but.

mornings

have been needing to get up earlier to get to work in time for my morning subjects -- which means that i get grumpier and grumpier as the week wears on. thursdays: definitely dark skies.

i'm probably just all too infatuated with the hollywood schema of a weekday morning - bright sunshine streaming through french windows, waking up to the smell of a hot breakfast, time to read the headlines. reality is no match: groping for the snooze button in darkness; forgetting to shave; munching on oreos while marching towards the mrt. two more months of this, at least -- and to think that my wake-up time was one of the few reasons i didn't envy the teachers.