Measurement

... but by the hole in your heart they leave behind when they're gone.

Fear

What would you do if you could control the level of fear in a population?

Is it a good thing to have some amount of fear? Presumably it makes you consider your actions and reduces your propensity to be foolishly reckless, like, say, jumping out of a plane with just a bunch of (small) helium balloons.

But what if you don't really have control over your life? What if someone comes up to you with a gun, and says "git on the plane o'er 'ere, i'm gonna push you oot wid jus a bunch of small helium balloons. Git! Git!" and say you'd rather get splattered over a large area of ground than shot. Well in that case is fear and paranoia really a useful thing? If you go about all day thinking "shit i hate jumping out of planes with just a bunch of small helium balloons, i'd never do that", but when it comes down to it that fear doesn't make it less likely that someone will come up to you with a gun.

There's a psychological effect where people always prefer to feel even the illusion of control, where they'll pay more to choose their own lottery tickets rather than have it chosen for them, or to press a button which runs a random number generator determining payoffs. Maybe it's just more cognitively comfortable to fear something and take actions against it, even if your actions just don't help. But it's also stupid to be paralyzed by fear of something you can't control, isn't it?

I guess in reality there are few things we don't have at least a little bit of control over, though. So some fear and awareness is good.

*decides he's thinking too much like an economist*

Happy karma?

So bad things have happened to this household today, but we're still ridiculously happy anyway. There must be something in the water.

All things said, I'm happy to be alive.

Slavic Dungeon

Warning! Sense of humour spotted in the basement of Social
Sciences! This ourage must be stopped before it becomes a rampant
epidemic!



it reads:
Welcome to the centre for study of languages
(in exile)

(formerly known as the LLA and LFRC)

Halloween Parade at Belmont

Happy halloween!

This year for the first time in my many years in Chicago, I made it to the Belmont Halloween parade! Which means that
1. No papers due tomorrow
2. No midterms tomorrow
3. It isn't actually raining/hailing/snowing/sleeting
4. This year i actually have a car (lazy lazy.)



These must be.....meat butchers. Or bad dentists. Or maybe angry accountants. *shiver*



Catwoman. Very muscular. Must've pumped a lot of iron. Of course.



My personal favorite: a bedside table with a number 1 on the side.

.....

which makes it a one night stand.

Fall happiness

Wow, apologies to all those who check back on this site regularly for the complete lack of interesting updates, I sometimes think of things i want to write about but never do get down to doing it -- life has been really busy lately. Ya right, i hear you say, you're taking 3 classes this quarter! Well, i've been really busy doing all sorts of non-work things, and somehow the lack of work quantity is made up for by a lack of work efficiency.

Anyway, it's been a nice few days here at the UofC, the leaves are all changing colour and i realise it may be the last fall i see over here, and the temporal beauty slipping away is like a brush of smooth silk as you slide through a curtain into another room.





And it was warm enough to sit on the grass and listen to the rustle of the leaves as they skitted across the grass and each other... if only for a day.

Why...

Do i feel more productive after finishing my laundry than after finishing a problem set?

Cold

So since the first snow a week or two ago, it's been at that irritating chilly time in Chicago where it's cold enough to shiver but not cold enough for the management to turn on the heaters. So despite a concerted effort by all the tenants of my landlord to call and bug the management and coerce them to switch the heat on, there still are cold nights where the system somehow just doesn't work.

Just as well, because cold = shiver = tense = nervous energy = higher excitation energy = ability to do homework faster instead of falling asleep.

Cold fusion!

Jamba Juice Philosophy

So say you heard hearsay that Jamba Juice was the most delicious tasty fruitjuice thing ever, from many multiple people. Then you had a chance to drink it for a while, say, while you were in chicago, but then you would never be able to drink it again, because you would be prohibitively far away enough that it'd be difficult to say, just drop by for a cuppa.

Would you drink it? And live with the knowledge that every subsequent fruit juice will be much less satisfying since you'll forever compare it to that better juice that jamba is? Is it worth it to know that you have indeed tasted good stuff?

Maybe it's different if you don't really drink fruit juice. Maybe if you've drunk lots of bad fruit juice and some of what you would consider to be good fruit juice, then it would be nice to see what the best fruit juice tastes like, and push your limits of cognition. hmm.

Felled

So last night yesterday last week a storm blew through chicago, and while I was eating 3 different kinds of chicken (Lemon chicken bits, jerk half chicken, and hainaneseish garlicish whole chicken), trees were outside getting killed by huge winds, which i discovered the next day:





(UofC philosopher-scientists pondering whether a tree makes a noise when it falls in the night amidst a noisy thunderstorm and it's too noisy for anyone to hear it.)

Quite amazing. am i glad all i had to do was trod through ankle-deep water in my garage, and not deal with a tree on my car.

Haven't been posting in ages and ages. Rishi's been here and now jiax is visiting, and otherwise it's been a busy few weeks just settling in and clearing up admin and all sorts of random things. This should be a good quarter though, have decided to take things easy and develop the other non-academic bits of my life, and apply for grad schools and all that extra stuff. and of course, sleep.

Back to life (Fu4 huo2!!)

So this blog has been stagnant for really long, largely due to a lack of time and inspiration to post (ok, so i'm lazy.)

However, recent events have completely changed the dynamic balance of this non-blogging: i've started school again.

This of course means that instead of doing my 160 pages of reading and responses and stuff for tomorrow, i have instead hitched upon a completely irrelevant aspect of my life that nobody will really be interested in, except of course for those people who also have 160 pages of reading to do by tomorrow.

New neighbours have moved in to the apartment above.

Now this is a shake up to my little world, because
1. These neighbours no longer adhere to the "my side of the garage is the right side" (east side is da betta side)
2. My housemates no longer have cute guy to look at (the current resident looks a bit like the numa-numa guy, although i haven't actually seen his wife yet)
3. There are now little scrabbling sounds coming from my ceiling, where the two dogs they own run around with their paws trying to find purchase on the parquet floor.

Quite interesting, actually, having 2 dogs. The other day i was driving out of the garage, when lo and behold, who should be blocking the alley but mr upstairs neighbour (Eryk), with a dog leash in each hand, and a dog on the grass patches on either side of the alley. There he was, looking a little bit like a crucified numa-numa guy, except i don't suppose crucified people looked embarrassed. Anyway after a fun moment watching him look apologetic and helpless as we waited for his dogs to do their stuff, we both went on our merry way.

Now, aren't you glad i shared that completely utterly useless bit of info with you? I know i am, but i know my bio response is not. Silly online submission things are timestamped, too.

Japan

Am off to Japan from Friday till the 28th of August. Email access will probably be sporadic, and this blog will lie fallow for the meantime.

In other news, I end work on Thursday! yay!

Go Fish!

I've decided that it's been a while since i put up photos, and since i'm looking through my photos to decide which to print, anyway, here are some of the amusing ones:



Because i must have a photo on my main page at all times. Because this is a photo from Chicago. Because the concept of transporting fish in an open truck amuses me.



Tips from friendly math professors.



Friendly math professors.



Friendly math textbooks.

The pleasant little things in life

1. Baked apple pie
2. The clack of shoes on tiled floor
3. Exorcism of emotional demons

ahh.

Choc covered Digestives

The sordid lack of human interaction within a cubicle farm has led me to contemplate deeply philosophical issues, including the following one:

Should chocolate covered digestive biscuits be eaten with the chocolate side face up, or face down?

Naturally one would tend to hold them with the chocolate side face-up, since gravity and the need to keep fingers chocolate free (be nice to keyboards) makes you hold the drier, less messy digestive biscuit side, but this means that your tongue first comes into contact with the digestive biscuit side, and not the chocolate side, which is clearly immoral. Oh the quandry.

Reminds me of a calvin and hobbes strip where calvin was complaining about his peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and how the jelly should be on top of the peanut butter (it definitely tastes better that way), and his mom made it wrong, whereupon she just flipped said sandwich over. Mm. PB&J.

Subconscious Bus Sychology

So when you are part of a whole bunch of people at the bus interchange getting onto an empty bus... where do you sit? What are your mental processes like? What determines your choice of action?

For most people, it'd probably be something like
1. which doubleseat doesn't already have someone sitting in it
2. Which seat is nearest/furthest from that damn TV screen (depending on your inclinations)

and then what?
3. Which seat is nearest the door for easy dismounting so you don't have to totter around and stand in a moving bus for a while before getting off?

or
3. which seat is furthest from the door so you don't have your climate controlled aircon interrupted rudely by warm gusts of air from the open door?

what if all the seats already have one person sitting on them and you have to choose who to sit next do? How do you choose?
So i've decided to start observing seating patterns on the trip back from Toa Payoh interchange to my house as the bus fills up. Do people tend to sit next to others of their own gender? or opposite gender? or race? or just, well, next to the smallest person they can find who takes up the least space? Or does it not matter who's sitting there? which seats in the bus fill up first? hmmmmmmmm.

cars are evil. =(

But here's a photo of the sunset at braddell road at rush hour. Well, at sunset hour.



"Red Sky in the morning, sailor's warning. Red Sky at night, sailor's delight."

bowled over

Some of life’s greatest philosophical revelations arise from moments spent sitting in the toilet. Some of life’s worst, too. In particular today I had a number of thoughts:

1. I may not be hung over, but my brain feels tingly and I probably lost a few hundred thousand brain cells there.


2. The speed of which the toilet roll decreases in radius increases with time in a linear fashion


3. I wonder how people could actually come in here to sleep?


4. I should only do work for female bosses, because then I won’t bump into them in the toilet.

Sounds the same to me...

I realised why the trains on the Paris metro line 14



sound exactly like the NEL trains: they're made by the same manufacturer! Alstom Transport, a Paris based company. Which will also make the trains for the new circle line. Ahh. So it will sound the same. Good. I like the sound of the NEL.

More superficial ways i've changed since 1 yr ago

1. I automatically sit facing outwards towards the street at any cafe/kopitiam/coffee shop.


2. I see that, yes, the killiney kopitiam french loaf bread is nice and soft, but it is a bit too dense and chewy and the crust is nothing to shout about.


3. I feel like tipping the waiters for good quick service.


4. I enjoy strolling. UOB is one of the most amazing offices to work at because you can go for lunch, then grab an ice cream at a mamak shop, and stroll along the river and take in all the semi-fresh air.

Chinglish

so today on the escalator up at Raffles Place MRT, i hear these two ladies chattering behind me: "镇么这个 timing 会遇到你?" (sic, i can't open the box to choose words! irony.) Which set me thinking about Chinglish, the latest pet population peeve of the government: the language that so many singaporeans speak, the interweaving of chinese and english. Of course this would be a good thing if not for the fact that the interwoven language is not made up of language wholes, but language holes. (Yes i can say that with a straight face).

Often the jumping between languages is simply a matter of convenience, because a certain idea comes to mind more readily in one language than the other. For me (and perhaps some other people out there) it's largely simply because i lack the vocab in chinese to express something. i.e. 我 don't know how to speak 华语. So some people go around with an inability to converse properly when forced to use just one of the two languages, and instead of becoming really bilingual it's more like bi-semi-lingual.

Anyway, long story short, this chinglish made me think of spanglish, and how this phenomenon is not unique to singapore, of course, and it seems that it might arise wherever a critical mass of people speak the same multiple languages. And it might not be a bad thing. Different languages with their different cultural origins view the world differently and sometimes have much more appropriate descriptive terminology. Which is where word borrowing comes from, like how "deja vu" expresses a concept hard to describe succintly in English.

Whorf, this linguistic guy, believes that language influences the way you view the world, and in the extreme your perception might be restricted by the bounds of your language: you will find it extremely hard to conceptualise things you cannot put into words.

So, if what he thinks is true, then being bilingual is good because you can see and express things better than someone who only speaks one of the two languages. Being fluent in a hybrid language is better, because you theoretically retain the increased perception ability that comes with both languages, assuming you learnt both languages to a sufficiently advanced level. But meaning and perception in languages is also stored in the grammatical structure, and simply borrowing isolated words just doesn't work as effectively, and neither will a mishmash hybrid. But perhaps it's a step towards it. Maybe at some point in the future, we'll have just one unified language. At the rate we're going, it's probably going to be heavily chinese influenced too, damnit. (Think Firefly)

Aside: After i started thinking about this, i noticed a whole bunch of other occurences throughout the day like "makan bee hoon" (to eat thin rice noodles (which i don't really like)). Intriguing.

$5 prawn mee and tao hui set lunches

I love singapore! the place where you can get good cheap happy food just at that food centre just across the road. Of course it's nothing remotely HEALTHY, for sure...

For my own future reference:

Holland V XO Yu Pian Mi Fen is located at:

Blk 46, Holland Drive, #01-359

The noodles with a kick.

Homage to Newton (no, not the hawker centre)

So in an attempt to figure out why Salvador Dali's sculpture "Homage to Newton" in the open plaza between the two UOB plazas has an extra dismembered toe, I chanced upon this description from dalifineart.com:



Dalí honours Sir Isaac Newton for his discovery of the Law of Gravity, symbolised by the celebrated falling apple, which is represented here by a sphere of metal attached to a line. In this form, the apple loses both its impermanence and its capacity for regeneration. Dalí implies that the living being, Sir Isaac Newton, has become a mere name in science, completely stripped of his personality and individuality. To represent this transformation, Dalí has pierced the figure with two large holes: one that portrays the absence of Newton's vital organs, while the other clearly displays the lack of mind. What remains is only symbolic representation.

Which i thought was damn funny, because the description that Singapore put at the bottom of the sculpture outside UOB was:

In the 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity. Legend tells us that origin of this most important and fundamental physical law was initiated by the falling of an apple, represented in the present work by the ball falling from the right hand.

Salvador Dali, one of the most important surrealist artists, takes the liberty to go even further in paying homage to Newton by opening up the torso of the figure and suspending the heart to indicate 'open-heartedness'. The open head represents an 'open-mind'. These are two necessary qualities for the discovery of important natural laws as well as for success of all human endeavours.

Sound a bit like brainwashing and pushing certain desirable traits? hmm.

The gaps are cool, but i'm more interested in the toe.



It's right next to this foot which has been segmented, unlike the gaps in the body and head. Seems an attempt to avoid a parallel with the stigmata holes in the feet of Christ, perhaps? hmm. Also it seems like his foundation and base is not as stable as he would have wished. And perhaps the extra toe is a result of some quantum randomness! So the toe next to the segmented foot must be an indication of how important Newton was, although the foundations of physics itself would be changed and toes would fly one day and whales turn into bowls of petunias. Yes.

This is probably why some of my friends don't like art critics.

Paris pics, finally!

Are online at fandingo.

Shentonites

Lunch brings about 3 observations:
- door close buttons
- tissue paper
- flyer handouts

Heading down to the first floor in the lift, it seems that everyone in the lift is part of a fellowship with an implicit understanding. Entry into the lift comes with an entry fee of pressing the door close button. Everyone comes in and unconsciously taps the button, not even looking at it anymore. The door close buttons are so much more worn out than the door open ones everywhere i go in Singapore. Wonder if it's the same everywhere in the world? Some minimalist lift designers eliminate the door close buttons altogether, since the doors close by themselves anyway, and you only really need a door open button to hold the lift for someone coming in. Wonder what the Shenton Way Shentonites would do in that situation.

Another part of the Shentonite culture is of course how they use tissue papers to chope seats at lunch tables. So everyone avoids seats which have tissue paper packets on them because they think someone's already taken that seat. Leung suggests coming early in the morning and distributing tissue paper packets on all the seats to confuse people. There was that story of the person who left his mobile phone at the table to reserve it, only to complain later on that it got stolen.... really.

People who hand out flyers you obviously don't want: What do you do? Do you take the flyers anyway, or do you just avoid them and walk by? (I need to incorporate little mini vote boxes into this blog... wish i was at home) Supporting the flyer industry just seems to effect a transferral of paper from the flyer-giver's hands into the nearest dustbin just beyond, which is sometimes due to how they give things like bust enhancement ads to guys and such. So if you take the flyer, you help the poor suffering youngster earn some money. But if you don't take it and make his job that much harder, he'd think twice about doing the job unless he gets paid more money for his bother. Eventually the idea is that handing out flyers will get more expensive for the companies, and they'd shift towards other forms of advertising, and save trees and bother and waste. Of course, this is assuming that there are no new suckers who come in and hand out flyers at the old wage rate... if the labour supply is infinitely inelastic then the wages will never rise. hmm.

P.S. This darn mail to blog thing doesn't work again.

School

As Terrence Murphy says, is just to train the young to get up early so they will be useful members of the workforce later.

Mind the gap

So the reason why I haven't been online or blogging much in the past week or so is because
1. My virusscan subscription has run out.
2. The new Norton Antivirus which the rest of the coms at home use sucks.
3. The Panda Antivirus (which may or may not suck) doesn't want to install itself because it is scared and says that etrust EZ antivirus is already taking its space in the bamboo forest that is my com. All efforts to coax the Panda to mate have failed.
4. Thus the only way forward is to reformat my com and bulldoze the bamboo forest and replace it with a squeaky clean glass enclosure. I needed to reformat anyway.
5. However I can't do this without backing up lots of stuff.
6. I unfortunately have not had the time to do this because of all that work stuff and meeting up with people and playing pirates and whatnot.
7. Thus I have not been online.

However, I HAVE been taking the MRT a fair bit, and things i noticed:

1. "Please mind the platform gap."
What's up with that? Are we trying to be more and more like the British? In Paris only the number 1 metro line actually warns you of the gap, since that's the line which all the tourists (which are presumably less observant than locals) use. Kinda strange in Singapore, have more people been falling into the gaps since I left? And somehow the phrase gives me a sort of snooty British kind of a feeling. "Mind that gap, will you, ol' chap?" Singapore MRT should have something which instead says "Carefoo! Got hole!".

2. The faded Singa courtesy lions with their multilingual messages have been replaced with a warning not to kill yourself and act responsibly. Since, of course, throwing yourself onto the tracks would make lots of people late for appointments and things, you selfish cad. At first I thought it was just a series of signs at Simei MRT because of its proximity to Changi General Hospital, but then i noticed that the nice friendly colored lion with the smileyface on its shirt was indeed gone. Tragedy. I guess lots of people need to mind the gaps.

3. Jurong East is neither in the East, nor used as an indication for when the trains running east-west are coming, but for the north-bound trains instead. Poor tourists must be confused. Maybe that's when they fall into the gaps.

4. I've actually seen a dog have its hindlegs fall into the gap once while alighting from a Paris train, it sort of scrabbled a bit and its owner pulled it out. Poor thing must've been terrified. Maybe they should have the message in dog-language, too.

7:45am is too early.

So we leave the world of idle walking and waking and return once again to the one where there is never enough time. From the Paris of spacious parks and wide pavements to the crowded MRT stations of Raffles Place. Enter the world of human pod-racing and crowded bottlenecks.

Andrew's lemmas of moving faster in crowds (based, of course, on fluid dynamics):
1. The flow of people is fastest in the middle of a one-directional stream, as opposed to by the walls.

2. The flow of people moving in oppsite directions is faster the further away you are from the boundary, unless you're extremely skilled in pod-racing across said boundary.

3. The speed of flow of people onto different escalators (eg: the 3 going up from Raffles Place MRT) is proportional to the distance from other streams joining the main stream (eg: people who try to cut queue from the sides.)

4. Flow of people can be disrupted successfully if you're carrying a durian at eye-level.

Happiness is a warm bun...

Or actually, anything you make it out to be. If all this recent moving about has taught me one thing, it's that the easiest way to securing the goal of happiness is to shift the goals to wherever the ball is heading for. (that's the last soccer metaphor this world cup season, really.)

So while croissants can make you (well, ok, me) damn happy in Paris, it's probably wise not to try and find a good croissant in Bangkok, and just try for a good mango instead. Maybe if you alter whatever it is that you want depending on your life circumstances, you'll be a happier person. But then again a mango lychee drink in Chicago is no less satisfying than one in Bangkok, and probably more satisfying than, say, a bittergourd cucumber celery shake. So i guess it's also a function of knowing what you want, too. And then there's the question of whether what you want in the short term will contradict what you want in the long term... maybe your long term circumstances will be severely different from the short term? hmm.

In other news I'm back from Bangkok and about to start work tomorrow in a hopefully enlightening and enriching internship experience.

And at the least, there's good food in the area.

This week

It was good to be back.

Happily there's so much I remember fondly about the place. The people were just as forthcoming and friendly despite the looming finals (thanks guys), and just as sweet.

An attempted tiramisu was made, which was moderately successful, but only very moderately so.



A greater study of tiramisi in their natural habitat (In my mum's kitchen in singapore, of course) will be made, and better ingredients sourced out.

Many many errands were run. Certain issues were ironed out, certain chores were left undone. I now have also compiled the best 100 photos from Paris: and they're viewable here. ....... but not yet, because i intelligently left harddrive cables in Chicago so there won't be any harddrive access for a while.

Xmen3 was watched (why did so many people die?!), MI3 was not.

Much food was eaten. 3 consecutive Jap meals, because the rolls in Chicago are different and can't be found in Singapore.

Thus was a week in Chicago. Now i land back in Singapore, a different life, a different patch.

I note with amusement the presence in my bathroom of 3 yr 3 month old Conditioner....since singapore is humid i never really use it. Now my hair is colored and will soon be colored again (colored black.) i'll probably actually use it now. About time to get new Conditioner, i think.

Rush! (Stream of consciousness)

Enormous Energy High.

Need to get out and see Paris. Now.

Grab book and DVD (unwatched) to return tot he centre. Print, dash, think. Realise I need Keynes in my essay too. Hurriedly scan book and scribble notes. Must finish before I get to centre. Scribble Scribble. Adrenaline fuels my reading engines. Arrive, return books and DVD, collect French Journal. Efficient. Gotta love the centre. Decide against exploratory food outing and head back to Fontaine Sully for confit de canard. Rush. Transfer trains at Gare de Lyon, nose is captured and enraptured by freshly baked goodness. Grab a pain aux raisins on impulse. It's so good. Sugar high. Toss the bag, train pulls in. Perfect. Love Paris Trains. Descende a gauche at the Bastille stop, doa photo tourist thing for a quick while, find Fontaine Sully. Sit down (inside this time, because the sunny day is opposite to the last rainy day i'm here, and i'm hot from all this running around). Order. I'm in the corner. Ambivalent towards corners, but this one affords me a view of the whole restaurant. Waiter gives me a funny look when I order white Alsace Gerwuztraminer with the duck. Whatever, you're not keeping me from my favourite wine of this trip. Individualism and self-determination. Food arrives, this time I remember to take a photo.



Gerwuztraminer subtleties completely overwhelmed by the duck and garlic, as expected. Still good, though. love observing the interplay of food and wine. Doesn't matter! Duck is wonderful.

In this most French of French bistroes, with the old man sitting quietly in the corner reading his paper alone over a cup of coffee, the radio plays "my humps". The elder sophisticated Asian woman at the far table studiously busies herself with her food, unaware of the voyeurism of my pencil. I sip my Gerwuztraminer, which has levelled up in tasste, while contemplating the dilemma facingthe European democracies in the interwar years. The train of thought quickly shifts to the dilemma of the history of Europe student who wants to see more of Paris. Elderly Asian woman orders a dessert (not salty please). I ruminate on my potato bits. She orders a tarte aux pommes. i feel a deep affinity with her already. Germany languishes on the sidelines. I run out of space on the paper, my essay plan completely overrun by my blog post.



So i lied. I still have another 6 pieces of paper from the ridiculous 8 pages of quote printouts i have (but no organization!) which arose from kiasuness over having to return my source (see above) before my thoughts crystallized. The alcohol has depressed my biochemistry. Old man orders a port-looking thing. A third glass in addition to the two already at his table. I begin to do curious things like cut my salad into bite sized bits. I refill my wine glass for the 2nd and last time. There's now probably about 3ml of alcohol in my blood stream. Not terrifically a lot, but I still need to write a paper here.

which, i guess, i will do now.

all 5 properly inhabited continents

create your own visited country map
or check our Venice travel guide

Hmm. looks like the next bet is Japan, and then possibly a central asia/south africa thing. It's cheating to say i've been to some of those places, though, like i've only been to about 3 US states or so.

Tarts

So i decided a while ago that the basic unit of economic measurement in Paris to gauge the value of stuff should be the Tart. Now, a Tart gives a pretty standardised amount of utility, and its value is pretty constant across locations and it's easily divisible into things. So an expensive dinner would be, say, 15 tarts, and a dinner at the cheap student canteen would be, say, 1.5 tarts.

"Why don't you just use the Euro?" I hear you say.
Ah, well now. We learnt about this in JC econs, it's all about Purchasing Power Parity, you know. If you start counting in Euros, your frame of reference becomes the general world, because of the great liquidity in converting Euros, to, say, plates of chicken rice. However, since Tarts are generally less portable than Euros, its value becomes localised to Paris.

"Oh. I didn't realise that."
Thought you wouldn't. Glad to point it out.

And as a friend of mine so rightly pointed out today, if Tarts = money, and time = money, then Tarts = time.

Thus, after some quick mental arithmetic, I'd say i have only, oh, about only 7 Tarts left in Paris. =(


Raid the bank!

Paper 1 finished!

Time for a photo break!

Reason why Paris coffee tastes so good: Sugar daddies.


Reason why the Stade de France is cool:


Reason why Singapore doesn't have nice parks:


Note the presence in the last photo of a grand total of 8 brides in wedding dresses, and 2(.5?) stretch limos. Now, if Singapore had such a nice park, and brides were lining up in their wedding garb to take photos in it, they'd all sweat to death and we'd have a severe problem with all the salination of the lakes, and the fish would die and then the place would smell. So that's probably why Singapore doesn't have such nice picturesque parcs. yes.

I've also started to spell some words in a french way. It's moderately cool and yet completely infuriating at how subconscious it is.

Murder death kill

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to mourn the passing of a faithful companion.



At about 11:54am Patch thinks "mm, a milo with coffee is just the thing i need."

Walking back to his room at 11:55am, he thinks "gosh it would be morbidly amusing in a way if i spilt this thing all over my computer and killed my paper. Then i could say i spilt milo-coffee on it... or was it coffee-milo?"

At about 11:56am Patch is happily making his first hot milo in 3 months with his faithful toothbrush-holding, beverage-containing le zebra cup. He puts the cup on the cluttered too-small table far away from the computer.

At about 11:58am the cup has taken a great fall and is now on the brown floor, making the brown browner with its brown blood life-essence.

The first thought of course is: "shit."
The 2nd thought: "Damn i won't get to drink that coffeemilo which i want so much."
Then "Damn i probably won't EVER get to drink coffeemilo here."
And then "well at least i won't have to worry about bringing that cup back to chicago"
"I should take a picture."
"Damn where am i going to get a cup big enough for me to finish up the remaining milo i brought over?"

in postscript he is considering using the peanut butter jar over on the table once it's finished (1 serving left) so he can finally drink the milo he brought from chicago (4... no wait, 3 packets out of 10 left)...... desperate times, desperate measures.


Oh and in other news I saw Zidane's last home game yesterday, live, at the Stade de France. It was kinda boring.

Also in post-postscript, I realise that my brain is no longer fast enough to have "ohshit" moments after i knock things off tables, as it once was when i chose my falling_glass nick many years ago to reflect that precise ohshit moment. Maybe. This needs to be empirically tested.

The paper writing process

Searching through tangled nets of words far more immense than the eye can see.
Chancing upon little nuggets of info in just the right place and just the right time.
Cobbling together bits of metal, bending and moulding ones which don't quite fit to suit the purpose.
Wrapping it all up in a nice skin with a head and a tail.
The paper writing process. All at once kind of exciting and rewarding as you see ideas crystalize into little malformed gems, and polish them off until they look somewhat presentable. All at once completely sickening because you would rather be doing something else entirely different.

The paper writing process.

Must happen.
Now.

Why isn't it writing itself?
Because i'm writing this blog post.

To all those who are in some way suffering, or going through trials, or have in some way or the other a set of examinations next week (or next next week)...


G'luck!

Lackadaisical ...

... is a word that my French prof used to describe our class performance in recent times, which is completely and utterly true. It is getting increasingly harder to wake up in the mornings, and increasingly harder to get myself to do work... if this continues in a similar fashion then i'll be spending all day in bed by next week. So sad that when i think about getting up in the mornings, the thought of going for lunch between classes motivates me just about as much as the actual classes do.

Then again today i felt like just staying home and doing the readings for today because they were interesting and i didn't quite get to them (altho i have now finished Spybots)... where i previously wouldn't care two hoots about reading something i wasn't actually going to use in a paper or in class discussion. Realignment of my objectives in life!

Italy

So i realise i haven't posted any photos from that country that i spent the whole of last week in, and thus i'm temporarily displaying only the last 3 posts so the page isn't flooded with photos and a long load time. So here are some reasons why Italy rocks:


Italian cappuccinos dusted with coffee powder for breakfast.


The one shot i got of part of the palace barberini ceiling before they got close enough to stop me. Thankfully the casio is fast. Unfortunately I was too nice to persist in taking photos after the "art student needing to write a paper" gambit failed.


Italy rocks because it has gelaterias. This one has cone-iferous vegetation growing in the shop. I can see you wincing. Good.


Italians are really crazy about their sports.


Loads of sculptures outside.


Loads of sculptures inside.


Holy people abound and make you feel like being a good person. Note also the gelato stand behind the nun.


People trying to figure out the latin.


Nice bridges. Note the dome in the background -- that's St. Peter's Basilica.


Angels.


The buildings have elaborate facades! So many of them! Even random houses!


Old school pizzerias.


New fangled gelaterias.


Pretty churches.


Rome has a colosseum. The Colosseum. But i think Tunisia's one nicer.


It has the Vatican museums. Which, sadly, are superdupercrowded.






Multiple copies of Michelangelo's David lying around (and an original, too.)


Pretty bridges, yes.


Having the time to sit and wait for Sunset.


Riversides by night.


Full moons.


Venice.


More beautiful churches.


Even the doorbells are funky.


Jedi Gondola races.


Huuuuuuge shopping alleys.


Narrow streets.


The streets are crawling with god....grandfathers.


The most elaborate flying buttresses i've seen in my life.


And finally, the reason why Italy REALLY rocked:



Spending more money on desserts than on the main course. Meet the honorable mssrs Tiramisu, Wildberry cheesecake, and wildberry-fied Panna Cotta.


Ya apparently the above made me really happy.


Of course there was also a lot a lot a lot of pretty art, but unfortunately I couldn't take photos of most of them. Suffice to say that I'm avoiding any artworks made from 1200 to about 1500s for now.