Sunday, October 18, 2009
2:43 PM

Bid me crew avast! Keep yer banner high
Classed, forever a class :)
Class of our own
Wind be at yer backs, sails never slackin'

Sunday, September 20, 2009
8:21 PM

All the small things
True care, truth brings
I'll take one lift
Your ride, best trip

Always, I know
You'll be at my show
Watching, waiting
Commiserating

Say it ain't so, I will not go
Turn the lights off, carry me home

Na na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na na

Late night, come home
Work sucks, I know
She left me roses by the stairs
Surprises let me know she cares

Say it ain't so, I will not go
Turn the lights off, carry me home

Na na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na na

Say it ain't so, I will not go
Turn the lights off, carry me home
Keep your head still, I'll be your thrill
The night will go on, my little windmill

Say it ain't so, I will not go
(na na na na na na na na na na)

Turn the lights off, carry me home
(na na na na na na na na na na)

Keep your head still, I'll be your thrill
(na na na na na na na na na na)

The night

Bid me crew avast! Keep yer banner high
Classed, forever a class :)
Class of our own
Wind be at yer backs, sails never slackin'

Friday, July 31, 2009
1:49 PM

To quote Neji, a character in Japanese comic series, Naruto,

"Father... is a person's destiny a thing like a cloud flowing with an inescapable flow...?

Or can a person choose the flow he wishes...

I still don't know the answer to this.

Either way, the destination may be the same in the end.

However, by choosing to live like the latter, a person can live and strive towards a goal.

And Father, I have but one goal...

I want to become stronger.

Enough to not lose to anyone...

That's how I feel now."

Bid me crew avast! Keep yer banner high
Classed, forever a class :)
Class of our own
Wind be at yer backs, sails never slackin'

Wednesday, May 27, 2009
5:13 PM

I just went for an interview this morning. One of the newly hired staff, this stupid joker, took my documents.

With the purpose of photocopying my educational certificates, the idiot dropped my diploma in the shredder, which was just right beside the photocopying machine. Then as he watched the shreds and slices drop into the container below, asked how many copies was necessary.

With a replacement fee, I can actually reproduce another cert for the human resources department to compartmentalise my skills into areas of expertise by, and in the mean time I still have my transcript to prove attendance of the course...

But how damned that my entire worth and value should be judged by a bit of worthless ink on ugly paper.

Bid me crew avast! Keep yer banner high
Classed, forever a class :)
Class of our own
Wind be at yer backs, sails never slackin'

Tuesday, May 12, 2009
2:40 AM

Degree of Perfomance:
Far excels job requirements
Exceeds job requirements
Meets job requirements
Needs improvement
Does not meet minimum job requirements

Quality of work:
Leaps tall buildings in a single bound
Leaps tall buildings with a running start
Can leap over houses, if prodded
Often stumbles into buildings
Is often knocked down by buildings

Promptness:
Faster than a speeding bullet
As fast as a speeding bullet
Would you believe a slow bullet?
Misfires frequently
Wounds self when handling a gun

Initiative:
Is stronger than a locomotive
Is as strong as a bull elephant
Almost as strong as a bull
Shoots the bull
Smells like a bull

Adaptability:
Walks on water
Strong swimmer
Good water treader
Favourite haunt is the water cooler
Passes water in emergencies

Communication:
Talks with God
Talks with angels
Talks to self
Argues with self
Loses most of these arguments

Bid me crew avast! Keep yer banner high
Classed, forever a class :)
Class of our own
Wind be at yer backs, sails never slackin'

Tuesday, February 24, 2009
1:40 AM

1000 RMB, I think, or maybe $1000, can buy a wife.

All the world is concerned with sex rather than violence, even in censorship boards, there's action and more action and so many deaths you don't really care.

A boy child, about 1 year of age, can fetch 10k and above, some girl children are specially bought to marry sons when fully grown, such that missing persons posters are banned.

There is kidnapping and young ladies cheated by boyfriends and forced into doing certain things they'd rather not be doing. Life is cheap, and living costs are expensive.

It's not the time you spend in China, 4 years or 40, it's the experiences - and once you dig beneath the surface, maybe you wish you'd rather not.

--SS

Taken from Chinabounder

Her name was Zhang Yaoyi. She was 11. She was a pupil in a school in China's central Hunan province.

I imagine her. I see her. She's sitting at her desk and there's that smile in her eye, that little wisp of steely will that marks her individuality.

She says something to the teacher – Li Hengyi – just a little comment, just slightly too bright and certainly not servile enough, not docile, humble, as all good girls should be.

And then the lunacy that lurks beneath the male skin slithers to the surface.

He smashes her head against the desktop several times, hard, brutal; she falls to the floor. He kicks her, thick, heavy blows from his feet into her stomach, her ribcage. He jumps on her, kicks her head.

Already she's covered in blood and barely conscious. He grabs an iron bar that's used to pull open the high windows and beats her with it, beats her, smashes her, bloody, murderous, brutal.

And now she's totally still, blood spreading out over the floor, the soft slick spread of the puddle of red, teeth smashed, fingers broken. He picks her up –picks her up – and carries her to the window. Opens it. And throws her out. Four stories she falls; it kills her.

Dead. Gone. Erased.

And where were all you frothing lunatics then? Where were the witchhunts then? Where was the anger and the outrage? Where were the frenzied press reports? Where were the blog sites calling for this guy's head?

One Western man has sex with a bunch of women. Women who are adults, who consent freely, and who enjoy it thoroughly. He writes about it, throws in a few run-of-the-mill opinions. Behavior nothing special. Thoughts little new.

Chaos. Millions of madmen fussing and strutting and firing off absurd emails.

Zhang Yaoyi beaten to death by her teacher – by her fucking teacher – and what? A story here, a story there. Page 4 of Shanghai Daily. Ignored by China Daily. A few reports in one day's papers, a smattering of interest from the lazy, idle, muzzled Chinese language press, none of it front page. And then silence.

Nothing much for a few days. More silence. Then a buried-away follow up report that Li Hengyi was mentally ill and thus would face no charges.

He'd been working at that school since 1998, and began to show signs of mental illness in 2001. Li Hengyi's treatment, which came in late 2003, two years later, lasted two months and then he went right back into the classroom.

That's why he was still there in 2006 – despite it being perfectly well known he beat the kids – and that's why Zhang Yaoyi died. So where were you, you angry fuckers? Where were you then? Where was your outrage? Where were the letters to the press?

Silence from you all. I have in class many times raised the name Zhang Yaoyi, written it up on the board, in Chinese and so far not a single student has known the name. Not one!

Unbelievable? Not in China.

Another girl: Zheng Shaojuan.

Zheng Shaojuan was a second-grader, nine years old, in the village of Putian, in Fujian Province. Her teacher , Liang Liyu, sees her peeping at the deskmate's answers in a math test, and so he – of course it is a he, it is always a he – grabs a broom handle and begins to beat her on her back.

She starts sobbing, which enrages our fine, honorable teacher all the more and so he starts hitting her head, blow after blow after blow – all the while her brother, sitting in the row behind, is forced to watch this display of pig brutality.

The girl tries to move her body forward, away from the rain of violence and this just adds fury to anger.

What! She tries to get away from him?

He jabs the broomhandle into her, viciously rabid thrusts, trying to force her body round so that she will meet his eyes. For how dare she not look at him as he beats her? What disrespect!

And so frenzied are the blows, so great his brutal rage the broomstick snaps in two, splinters of it piercing even through the thick fabric of her school tracksuit and lacerating her skin. His wrath is purged and he's taught her his lesson.

Back to teaching he goes, full of pride at his display of good teaching methodology.

Shaojuan spends the rest of the afternoon slumped on her desk. Later, another teacher walks by and sees this and she, having the decency the man did not, acts like a teacher (parent?) should, comes into the class to see what's wrong with the girl.

Shaojuan says she is not feeling well and the woman teacher suggests she goes home; she gets to her feet, shakily walks to the door, respectfully asks permission to leave from Liang, fighting down her shame and anger and contempt, leaves the classroom but collapses, right there, in the corridor, no strength in her body, her head fuzzy, unfocused.

Liang carries on not giving a fuck and so the woman teacher helps Shaojuan home, carrying her part of the way.

An ambulance is called but this being China takes an hour to arrive; by that time another child has died in the Chinese educational system. By that time Shaojuan is dead.

And what of Yaoyi, whose bright future, whose hope and potential has been beaten to death, whose parents have been bought off for a mere US$25,000 and are now expected to shut up, seeking no further redress?

And what of Shaojuan's parents, who had gone to other provinces as migrant workers, leaving her with relatives?

Of them I have found no trace; for they, being migrant workers, belong to that class of people who have built this country and who are routinely despised, belittled, cheated, abused and subsequently forgotten.

Where were you brave citizens of China then? Where was the anger? Where was the press, so like dogs baying for Chinabounder? The outcry? The mass of internet idiots so concerned about China's honor and dignity?

They offered silence and remain silent. Not a word, not a sigh, not a shrug of the shoulder, not even a raised eyebrow.

Comment from a Chinese on another site
(How stupid can some people get? -SS)

2:12 PM
Anonymous said...

I'm a Danwei reader/foreigner blog reader, read about your controversy, but never visited your site.

Look, you kind of deserve what you've been getting, and you knew what you were getting into when you posted this website. You're some white dude that lives in SH, and figured this website would piss some chinese people off and give you and your buddies a laugh.

So don't complain when people want to find you and kick your ass or say that you are petty and half a man for posting your sex life up on a website. You wouldn't be running this website if you hadn't moved to China. If you were running this in the States, you'd be running a porn site and it'd be a source of income, not a "special interest" website.

And please, for the love of god, don't act like YOU suddenly give a shit about two little girls getting killed in rural china.

Using those two stories to deflect attention from the "troubles" encountered by your petty blog is just wrong. You should post the information on your blog and ask people to donate money or protest, if you're outraged.

Don't be a coward and use real injustices to deflect the minor inconvenience you brought upon yourself.

And if you're interested in doing anything to help Chinese children, you can fundraise for your local orphanage, get involved with x,y,z org (UNICEF, Chinaorphans,etc).

I've done some fundraising and non-profit work in China, and it gets my goat when foreigners like you want to sound off about injustice in China, when really you want to toot your own horn or point out how great your passport/citizenship is.

Its disingenuous and makes me sick. Put your money where your mouth is, if you're a creative foreigner, then DO something about it.

Above all, don't be an ass and act like you're the righteous one. That's just plain silly.

Bid me crew avast! Keep yer banner high
Classed, forever a class :)
Class of our own
Wind be at yer backs, sails never slackin'

Thursday, December 25, 2008
3:06 PM

Dear Everybody,

I would like to wish you and your family a

MERRIEST CHRISTMAS and
a HAPPIEST 2009 NEW YEAR!

Have a Great and Joyous Holiday!

Bid me crew avast! Keep yer banner high
Classed, forever a class :)
Class of our own
Wind be at yer backs, sails never slackin'

Tuesday, September 23, 2008
5:19 PM

Quotes by Frank Lloyd Wright

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.

Regard it as just as desirable to build
a chicken house as to build a cathedral.

The physician can bury his mistakes,
but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines -
so they should go as far as possible from home
to build their first buildings.

Tip the world over on its side and
everything loose will land in Los Angeles.

If it keeps up,
man will atrophy all his limbs
but the push-button finger.

Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

Life always rides in strength to victory,
not through internationalism...
but only through the direct responsibility of the individual.

The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind.

Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students,
and turns them into prunes.

The thing always happens that you really believe in;
and the belief in a thing makes it happen.

Get the habit of analysis -
analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.

The truth is more important than the facts.

There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.

"Think simple" as my old master used to say -
meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms,
getting back to first principles.

Bid me crew avast! Keep yer banner high
Classed, forever a class :)
Class of our own
Wind be at yer backs, sails never slackin'

Friday, August 15, 2008
11:37 PM

One of those charming stories that circulate in the public education community concerns an essay exam assigned by an American fifth-grade teacher.

The question asked the students to name as many parts of the human body as they could think of, and write of their functions.

One child wrote:

The human body consists of the Brainium, the Borax, and the Abominable Cavity. The Branium contains the brain. The Borax containns the lungs, the liver, and other living things. The Abominable Cavity contains the bowels, of which there are five - a, e, i, o, u.

This is the kind of experience that causes some teachers to retire early, and others to wonder whether the whole process of education makes sense.

Learning designs based on a "container model" of the child figuratively unscrews the top of the kid's head, pours some history, math or literature on, puts the top back on, and we've educated the child.

The consequence is that cognitive skills of various kinds tend to get lost, and not consciously identified to the learner as explicity valuable and worthy of study in their own right.

A group-study project, for example, might present an opportunity to learn brainstorming, suspending judgment, accurate listening, paraphrasing, comparing and constrating, formulating hypotheses and othes.

But presented as an exercise in "content", then skills, independant of content and context, gets scrambled in the process of finding the correct answers.

"Teach Less, Learn More" was adopted as a mission statement for the Ministry of Education, Singapore in 1997. It's effectiveness, however, is yet to be seen.

After the Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan, China, I commented on the issue and asked a few friends for their opinions.

Questioned about the implications of the natural disaster, the boosting of political image and socio-political ties between nations, economic repercussions and the human spirit, I was answered with blank stares and a resistance to further thought with the suggestion of a simple course of action, "Donate!"

During his tenure as CEO of job-matching service monster.com, Jeff Taylor realised the comparison of "skills offered" against "skills sought" showed a very significant mismatch. Across the board, businesses sought a higher calibre of mental skills than they were finding.

Taylor predicted that the ever-growing "smart-people gap" would increasingly confound executives' effort to grow and develop their enterprises, innovative, implement breakaway competitive strategies.

In fact, Taylor warned, "Increasingly, the knowledge worker will be at the centre of company desperation."

In this sense, the officers at CPF board with their routine administrative tasks, the young worker at a fast-food restaurant pushing a coded button or tapping on a screen contributes almost nothing in the way of knowledge work. It's data work, but low-skilled and no more knowledge-intensive than a welder in a factory.

Able-bodied workers are easy to find, able-minded people - able to think, to plan, organize, analyze, research, decide, design, lead, manage, communicate and above all, solve problems - are not.

Science fiction author Robert Heinlein pieces together a proper person, "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Information technology has not necessarily made people smarter, only many jobs easier to perform by people with limited mental skills.

In 2 weeks my 2 month temporary job with the Central Provident Fund board will end. As I prepare my resume this evening, with a scholarship with the Ministry of Communication, Information and Arts (MICA) in mind, I pray God directs my path.

Bid me crew avast! Keep yer banner high
Classed, forever a class :)
Class of our own
Wind be at yer backs, sails never slackin'

The Present

We’re now facing an important choice point in our individual and collective lives. Most of us may take the “default” choice without ever realizing we’re making a decision. The option is whether we will be creatures of or living in our environment. The first is default, requiring no thinking. The second demands waking up and actively thinking.

Society

The late professor Neil Postman of New York University devoted considerable study to the effects of electronic media on culture and the mental capabilities; he asserted that the rise in popularity of television coincided with a decline in rational thinking, and consciousness of society.

Postman traced three phases in the development of what he called “culture’s conversation with itself”.

Phase one was an oral phase, people shared knowledge, ideas, and their history through discussion and story-telling.

Phase two, the rise of literate communication through the printed word, peaking during the nineteenth century.

Phase three began the inexorable transition to a pervasive “culture of amusement”, with the arrival of televisual entertainment.

Media

Postman contended that while print media as long served as a robust platform for the reasoned exchange of ideas, the televisual media – notably commercial TV – have proven themselves poorly suited for explaining complex concepts and for managing conversations about them.

Marshall McLuhan offered the familiar “The medium is the message”, Postman seconded his views with the idea “The medium is the metaphor”, seconding McLuhan’s views with the idea that every medium limits, controls, and distorts the information we try to push through it.

Just as a metaphor is a figure of speech that recodes a complex, abstract idea into a familiar concrete example, so television recodes complex information into its own unique and simplified way of presenting it.

Information

To quote the professor: Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information.

It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing

The experience of watching television involves the passive acceptance of a steady flow of disconnected entertainment units – audiovisual packets condensed, simplified, and sweetened to fit the short attention-span limitations of the medium.

Content

Since the economic structure of the industry requires content be selected for commercial potential, intense competition for viewers has forced media producers to fight for attention by pandering ever more aggressively to a jaded public, with increasingly sexualized, violent, lurid and voyeuristic material.

More and more social commentators blame the pervasive media-based culture of amusement for coarsening of public taste, destruction of childhood innocence, commercial exploitation of children by cynical marketing methods, polarization of political discourse with mean-spirited, narrow-minded and antagonistic personal attacks exchanged by warring ideological camps.

Childhood

Television too could mean the rapid disappearance of childhood.

Previously adults revealed the secrets of adult life—secrets being the social, political, and sexual secrets that adults know but that are not considered appropriate for children to know—to the young in stages and in psychologically assimilable ways.

Now, television reveals all these secrets all at once, simultaneously to everyone in the culture, so that it becomes impossible to control the socialization of the young.

Slowly, the whole period that we call childhood becomes less distinct than it once was. For example, there was a time not so long ago, when alcoholism was strictly an adult affliction. There really were no child alcoholics, crime and sexual diseases. Now figures show that it is quite common.

Parents are not acting as the counter environment for the dominant media for the only living messages the generation sends to a future it would not see.

Brain Dead

As the least interactive of televisual modes of information, television diverts thre most mental energy from active cognition – for hours at a time. This “chewing gum of the mind”, according to the professor, is doomed to the status of a court jester, capable only for distracting and amusing us.

Scientific research has demonstrated clearly that the experience of watching television for more than two to three minutes induces a trance-like state nearly indistinguishable from hypnosis. Advertising messages, in this sense, are post-hypnotic suggestion and embedded directives.

In fact, Postman asked: Could television be making us a dumber society? Doesn’t it seem that our mental faculties such as critical thinking, comparative thinking, curiousity, imagination, judgment, logic also atrophy with disuse?

Trends

Increasingly, people are being used by technology, setting culture on a self-destructive path by changing definitions of family, privacy, intelligence, privacy, piety to suit it.

Education no longer teaches the sophistication and knowledge about technology that people need.

In the case of computer technology, there can be no disputing that the computer has increased the power of large-scale organizations like military establishments or airline companies or banks or tax collecting agencies.

And it is equally clear that the computer is now indispensable to high-level researchers in physics and other natural sciences.

But to what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people?

Winners and Losers

To steel workers, vegetable store owners, teachers, automobile mechanics, musicians, bakers, brick layers, dentists and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes?

These people have had their private matters made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; they are subjected to more examinations, and are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them. They are more often reduced to mere numerical objects.

They are being buried by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and political organizations. The schools teach their children to operate computerized systems instead of teaching things that are more valuable to children.

In a word, almost nothing happens to the losers that they need, which is why they are losers.

It is to be expected that the winners will encourage the losers to be enthusiastic about computer technology.

That is the way of winners, and so they sometimes tell the losers that with personal computers the average person can balance a checkbook more neatly, keep better track of recipes, and make more logical shopping lists. They also tell them that they can vote at home, shop at home, get all the information they wish at home, and thus make community life unnecessary.

They tell them that their lives will be conducted more efficiently, discreetly neglecting to say from whose point of view or what might be the costs of such efficiency.

Should the losers grow skeptical, the winners dazzle them with the wondrous feats of computers, many of which have only marginal relevance to the quality of the losers' lives but which are nonetheless impressive.

Eventually, the losers succumb, in part because they believe that the specialized knowledge of the masters of a computer technology is a form of wisdom. The masters, of course, come to believe this as well. The result is that certain questions do not arise, such as, to whom will the computer give greater power and freedom, and whose power and freedom will be reduced?

The Deal

Postman asserts that anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.

Quantity is not Quality

He declares: The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it.

And there are two reasons we do not know what to do with it.

First, as I have said, we no longer have a coherent conception of ourselves, and our universe, and our relation to one another and our world. We no longer know, as the Middle Ages did, where we come from, and where we are going, or why. That is, we don't know what information is relevant, and what information is irrelevant to our lives.

Second, we have directed all of our energies and intelligence to inventing machinery that does nothing but increase the supply of information.

As a consequence, our defenses against information glut have broken down; our information immune system is inoperable. We don't know how to filter it out; we don't know how to reduce it; we don't know to use it. We suffer from a kind of cultural AIDS.

Culture

Noted historian David McCullough worries about “cultural amnesia”, the loss of a sense of shared history and culture by a people more entranced by provocative images before their eyes. More people devote their discretionary time and attention to synthetic reality rather than active thought, that comes with reading and discussion.

The shifting of the news business towards an entertainment model of design and production is virtually complete, with sheer competition forcing our media fixes to pander to our primitive fears and appetites. Allen Ginsberg, beat poet of the 1960s, remarked, “Whoever controls the images - the media - controls the culture.”

The web page, which may turn out as one of the most important inventions of modern time, is both a televisual and text-based medium.

Although people of all intellectual stripes can find the information suiting themselves, the downside of this migration of intellectual activity may exaggerate the impact of the culture of amusement, reinforcing a new polarization of society.

Solution

David Cullough declared, “Information isn’t learning, if information were learning, you could become educated by memorizing the World Almanac. Were you to memorize the World Almanac, you wouldn’t be educated. You’d be weird. I rise on this beautiful morning to sing again the old faith in books, reading for life, all your life.

Story

Once upon a time in the dead of winter in Dakota Territory, with the temperature well below zero, young Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat, accompanied by two of his ranch hands, down-stream on the Little Missouri River in chase of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prize rowboat.

After days on the river, he caught up and got on the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then, after finding a man with a team and a wagon, Roosevelt set off again to haul the thieves cross-country to justice.

He left the ranch hands behind to tend to the boat, and walked alone behind the wagon, his rifle at the ready. They were headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Bad Lands to the rail head at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, forty miles.

It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in that eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina.

I often think of that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read.”

Bid me crew avast! Keep yer banner high
Classed, forever a class :)
Class of our own
Wind be at yer backs, sails never slackin'

Tuesday, July 01, 2008
12:46 AM

By Sarah

I've no idea who checks our class blog nowadays, but I've decided to update it and see how many lives I can save from food poisoning.

A few days ago a Chinese friend (as in, Chinese national) and I went to Chinatown to eat Yang Rou Chuan, mutton on a stick, which, if you ever chance to come across it, so grab any opportunity to eat. It's delicious. It's a little like satay, except it has no sauce, instead it is peppered with some reddish stuff that makes it quite hot instead of sweet.

We went to this place called Kitchen of China (中國餐厅), a kind of open air restaurant with a "中國烧烤" barbeque stall at the entrance (so you can easily identify it the next time you go by) and made a few orders, including one "scallops with vegetables". I think by now it should be in the middle of two other restaurants, both selling food from NE china.



We were halfway through the "scallops with vegetables" when we discovered a small green worm, quite dead and unresponsive to proddings and pokings, and quite unable to be moved.


Sorry about the picture quality. My handphone only offered 2MP.

A server was duly informed, who offered to change it for a new dish. It came back within a very short twenty minutes, after some furious debate in the kitchen, in a takeaway box by a black face waiter. The vegetables looking identical to the one we sent away, except with a much higher temperature.

Our thoughts went to their spittle on our plate, and other human-produced ingredients which my friend assured me was a common happening back in her country (when you get a new dish for free, although whether or not it was new was questionable).


We decided not to consume the scallops with vegetables minus scallops takeaway in the end, sorry about wasting food instead of sending it over to starving children elsewhere in the world, since we had already decided on the hygiene quality back in the kitchen, and weren't eager to enjoy more of their unfriendly hospitality.

My friend wouldn't have me post this, since she feels it reflects badly on her country, but I'm sure the readers of this particular blog are wise and discerning and won't associate one lousy eating place with an innocent nation.

So...
Can't say you haven't been warned.

Bid me crew avast! Keep yer banner high
Classed, forever a class :)
Class of our own
Wind be at yer backs, sails never slackin'

Saturday, November 03, 2007
11:24 PM

Hans-Urich Rieker, in his book "The Yoga of Light," warns that misunderstanding the true nature of yoga can mean “death or insanity.” Also a little known fact is that virtually every major guru in India has issued warnings similar to these.


Sir John Eccles, Nobel Prize Winner for his research on the brain, said the brain is “a machine that a ghost can operate.”


In a normal state of consciousness one’s own spirit controls the neurons in their brain and operates their body. But in altered states attained by drugs, yoga, hypnosis, visualization, the connection between the spirit and the brain is loosened.


That allows another spirit to interpose itself, to begin to control the neurons in the brain, and create an entire universe of illusion.


This practice comes in many different forms, but could be quantified as sorcery.


--On Yoga Meditation

Bid me crew avast! Keep yer banner high
Classed, forever a class :)
Class of our own
Wind be at yer backs, sails never slackin'

Wednesday, May 16, 2007
9:14 PM

A BIG HELLO to all 4GY-ians!

Ahem. The year has almost reached a mid-point and I am quite sure we are pretty settled wherever we are. However, we must not forget the origins of our development of unique and relevant character, that is 4GY our graduation class of SCGS 2006.

Ignoring the smoke I just created up there, the point of this little email is to initiate A CLASS GATHERING, being the ever-responsible and extremely modest class rep that I am. Okay everything is only at brainstorming stage, so I am open to all ideas. But the main idea is...

1. We have a class gathering
2. Happens after the common tests, in July, because that's when Joan Tay our second-favourite class rep comes back to the island
3. Do some fun stuff, maybe cycling and BBQ at East Coast or something
4. No murder mystery because we'll die to have it prepared

Okay, so what I need to know is whether you approve of this class gathering. (Then again, Joan and I could hold one with just the two of us -- so lomantic.) Also, please tell me when your Common Tests or exams or evil circumstances end, so that we can decide on the date! It'll probably a Saturday or Sunday lah, because more convenient, obviously. If you have some AWESOME ideas, please feel free to contribute. Like if you want us to er, paint a mural at Jurong East or something, yes, I will try to take that into consideration. There is no need to pay money because I HAVE THE REMAINING CLASS FUNDS! Of which the actual amount shall not be revealed (so that I can embezzle the $$ left).

Please reply, even if you hate me.
Thank you for your kind co-operation.


GY ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah,
Lorraine your defunct (but still favourite) class rep

Bid me crew avast! Keep yer banner high
Classed, forever a class :)
Class of our own
Wind be at yer backs, sails never slackin'

Friday, April 27, 2007
1:05 AM

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LI CHOO!


be strong, and never give up
be strong, and never give in


Always be YOU,
Always be HAPPY


we love you, as we always do

Bid me crew avast! Keep yer banner high
Classed, forever a class :)
Class of our own
Wind be at yer backs, sails never slackin'

THE ROWDY AND MUTINOUS CREW OF


4 GENEROSITY '06

All hands on deck!
What shall we do with these drunken sailors?
Walk the plank? Stand and hold! Parley!
I say, YOHOHO and another bottle of rum

beverly
calista*
shan squared
jiayun
patricia*
lichoo
lishaan
meiyi
chiawen
vanessa
jean
jasmine
jessica*
katherine*
alyssa*
kelly*
alina*
qian
lorraine
marcia*
megan*
melissa*
natascha*
xiang ling*
sarah
lesley
luang poh
cherie
samantha*
janice*
majella*
joan*
rachel
huijia*

Black Pearl, White Pearl, Grey or Green...
WHO CARES SO LONG AS IT AIN'T THE TITANIC?
if yer port of callin' aint listed, deck it!

i say G-E-N-E-ROSITY
standing as one with tenacity