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.