A new idea, and omg snow

Winter is coming

So yep, it’s snowing. I’m not sure if that small picture can show the slurry white stuff that’s floating around all over the place, but snow is a bitch to try and capture on camera especially in mid air. Doesn’t help that everything is all grey too. At any rate, looks like it’s time to bust out the really warm clothing, start drinking more alcohol to stay warm and go buy footwear that isn’t going to get soaked and eat your toes.

In other, happier news, I have finally sat down and finished something that I’ve kept promising myself. I’m just calling it a voice log at this point, but the genesis of the idea was with good friends in school for a radio program. Of course this isn’t quite there yet, but I’m hoping it is a good start, at very least. Took me about a night to come up with the text and a couple of tries to record everything. Because I am hopeless with audio editing, I had to do everything in one take. Then there was the challenge of finding an audio hosting service that you could embed onto wordpress, and I don’t think i was very successful in that. I’ve done the next best thing, and all you need to do is click on the link below.

Voice Log 1 - <—- yes, this link

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

I wish Shakespeare would visit someday. Demark is really great around this time of the year.

This has probably been one of the hardest quotes from Shakespeare to sort of nudge into everyday speech, so I think this is probably the most appropriate time I can ever use it. The irony of it all being that Shakespeare never visited Denmark, but still went on to write Hamlet anyway. In a different day and age, he’d be called lazy, but since he is ‘ole Willy, it’s genius.

Of course, I am using the line because I am indeed heading into the same country in which Hamlet was a prince. Copenhagen awaits, in about an hour half when the bus leaves. Before anyone accuses me of “literary tourism,” I’ll have you know that I shall be attending a Muse concert on Monday, rather than merely visiting the country of Hamlet for the mad prince’s sake.

It is a curious thing, setting out on a journey. A strange whiff of adventure mixed with the lingering stench of anxiety.

Leave Einstien Alone

is most amused

Quite recently, I’ve been getting quite a bit of chain “evangelical” emails that use a certain scene of Einstein’s youth to suggest firstly that a) the most eminent scientist of the modern world was religious and that b) God exists. The scene (and now there is even a video on it) involves a young Einstein challenging his professor’s assertions that in order to create evil (which as a matter of fact exists) God himself has to be evil. Young Einstein then goes on challenge the need for a good/evil dichotomy stating that God and evil can be explained as energy is, where cold is the lack of heat rather than something onto itself.

This is more than mildly annoying not merely I’m not even sure if these events even happened (I welcome to be corrected on this), but more so because it is the religious lobby hijacking a man whose religious beliefs aren’t even clear as “one of their own.” Einstein was almost certainly not religious in the conventional sense of going to church and praying. While he has famously made many quotes that use the word “God,” this hardly indicates anything since numerous people use God’s name in vain when they stub their toes on the pavement and doing so does not make these toe stubbers any more religiously inclined. Einstein has however rejected the idea of a personal god, made many less than flattering comments about the church, and called religion “childish and primitive.”

Einstein can be described as religious only in the sense that he admired the fundemental structure and workings of the universe as only a person of his genius could.

So really, stop circulating that nonsense. If anything it points to a weakness of faith that almost requires pandering to a dead scientist that never supported the cause of most modern monotheistic religions anyway! What has Einstein got to say that the Bible and your faith doesn’t already tell you? Is your belief so pathetically limp that it requires the words of someone famous to support?

And of course, as I did argue with someone who sent me the email, some people are going to claim that “it isn’t about einstein, it is about the message.” Which is really as intellectually dishonest as they come. The same conversation could be happening in a class room right now and yet it does not matter, because it does not have the name of one of the most intelligent men to ever lived. In fact all the incarnations of the story make sure you know who the child speaking is, telling your that it is Einstein right at the end, in bold letters and clear wording. So at the end of the day, it is completely about Einstein, and not the message.

In many ways that is highly pitiable, mostly because the message itself is some interesting food for thought and would have been far more accessible if it could stand on its own merits.

Walking into the Background

...amongst more important things.

Behind my flat there is the beginnings of a series of low hills that stretch out, obscuring the distant horizon with the jagged silhouette of pine trees. Often on my way to school at the university campus in town I would often simply walk past them on the way to the bus stop. They were ordinarily just yet another part of the backdrop upon which the far more important events of my life played out. Never mind that these more important events consisted primarily of long periods of solitary musing paradoxically punctuated with reading about international humanitarian law and the wildly exaggerated world of online games; whether they were truly important or not, the hills stood as silent backdrops to these things, just as the very same hills may have been the grim backdrop to the days when vikings sailed forth from Norway.

In the depths of a valley

They are wooded hills, and as I found out, doubled as a series of ski-slopes in the winter. The realization of ski slopes was strangely made at about the same time as I began to notice the strange character of the long months of summer. In the strange way that unrelated events piece themselves together to proper people quite unwillingly to occasions and places, so did I find myself nudged towards exploring these hills in their fading summer glory, helpless before the oncoming winter that was to rob the very color from its slopes.

And it was this strange nudge that eventually found me standing at a small path snaking up one side of the hill that was nearest to my flat. I had dressed in what I had hoped was appropriate gear, wearing for the second time in a long long while the old SAF combat boots, now shamelessly dirty and unpolished. I began to climb slightly after lunch, initially thinking that after cresting the first hill I would at most have another two hills to explore. The first route map I chanced across quickly dispelled my mistaken belief, almost accusingly pointing out the entire range of undulating hills in the area. I came back past dinner, half frozen because I had thought a coat too hot for rambling about.

There are many things to say about climbing and rambling those hills. Following the winding trails, I was almost assured to be treated by some stunning vista at the next clearing. There were the trails themselves, snaking across the entire side of the hill, each fork hinting at as yet unexplored mysteries. And the terrain ever changing, from smooth slopes to soft beds of pine with islands of smooth moss to even a strange large gully whose proportions seem to have been right out from a prehistoric age before man.

A lunch table of silence

The most striking thing that compels writing is the stillness. Half way through the day I had stopped to eat some of the food I brought along, small rice balls made from the left overs of yesterday’s dinner. Sitting in that small clearing eating rice balls squashed flat by the container, it seemed that the forest stretched almost endlessly in either direction. And for the depths of the trees, there flowed a pregnant silence. It was a silence that had been there before man in his clumsy hiking gear had first climbed these slopes. It was a silence that spoke of days long gone where there was only the quiet fall of leaves and the passing of seasons. It was almost the same kind of silence that one experiences when first jumping into the deep ocean, when water fills up the ear cavity and the sounds of splashing slowly fades away. Except that unlike the ocean where gazing down into the murky endless depths filled the mind with a numbing primordial terror, the trees spoke with a serene softness. There is almost audible whisper of melancholy, of ages gone past when the most intelligent life on the planet was still swinging in trees.

I felt small, but not in a futile sense, of a insignificant gnat trying to move the universe. Rather I felt small in an inclusive sense, the smalls that comes with being a tiny part of a far large hold. The backdrop had suddenly come to the foreground, with the previously important events as fleeting and as important as the left which shrivels in the cold wind and slowly spirals down to the ground.

Why Harry Potter Went To the Tubes

This is one of those constant running battles between me and some friends. They (for reasons that flabbergast me, like “great writing”) love Harry Potter to bits, while I think that the last three novels were stuff that you could easily read for free on www.fanficiton.net. However most of the discussion never really moves on beyond “Harry Potter is great!” or “No, Rowling is a terrible writer.” Happily since I want to be distracted from the work I am doing now, I am going briefly cover the two reasons why Harry Potter by the last book was just abject garbage.

1) Shameless exposition. There’s a good reason for the last few books rivaling the Oxford English Dictionary in thickness, and that’s because Rowling abandons all pretenses and goes happily into long boring expositions explaining the story to the reader. More likely the staggering and messy plot at that point practically required these expositions to have a coherent ending. Still, one bemoans the far more natural reading that you could get in the first few books of the series.

2) The plot blew up. Part of the appeal of the first few books was the world of Harry Potter. Finding out what were chocolate frogs for the first time, and Quidditch. Even the introduction of the ministry of magic (although a thinly veiled plot device and angle for Rowling to take pot shots at the Chamberlain government) was a nice expansion of the Harry Potter universe. The problem is that by the end of the series, the plot is drowning out all of this. It is as if Rowling could not decide between the typical British boarding school novel and Star Wars-esque epic soap opera, and made the drunken decision to try and do both at the same time. What you end up with is a thoroughly gutted “school time” where often than not the school activities serve no other purpose than as a backdrop for the on going drama outside of the school. And there comes a point where it is almost ludicrous: that the most evil villain of all time had infiltrated on multiple occasions, killed or almost killed several students and the good parents of the Harry Potter universe still obligingly send their kids to what is clearly a death trap.

And as a minor quibble, was it really necessary for Dumbledor to suddenly turn gay? I mean the guy is dead, the series over and all of the sudden his sexuality jumps back out at us from beyond the grave. It is like Gandalf wearing a pink tutu and jumping out of Saron’s closet just as Frodo and Sam throw the Ring in the mount doom, yelling “hey boys!”

A history of food

And behold, I shall name this Boiling

In the beginning, man ate food raw. And for a while, it was good.
Then man said unto his food, you know this could really taste better warm
And so man did cleave a great tree into twain, and made a fire.
And for a while, it was good.

Then man cast his eyes about him, and saw his squalor .
And so he said unto his fellow men no longer shall man cook with their bare hands and sticks,
But with pots and pans and other assorted and throughly useless accessories from Ikea
And so Man did purchase such pots and pans and filled them with water
And upon a great heat, did man cook his food. And he cried “Behold, I shall name this Boiling”
And for a while, it was good.

And there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth

But man was not happy for long, and soon said upon himself:
Boiled food tastes like crap!
And there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth

And so Man said, “Why do you dispair, o ye of little faith! For I shall set forth to the building upon the hill and there visit the 24 hour Supermarket”

And so he did. And it was within those halls which Man did exchange some money for a bottle of oil

Pouring the oil unto a heated pan, Man did sauté his potatoes and sausages.
“Behold,” he cried out “Rejoice for this shall be called frying”

And it was so.

Rejoice, for this shall be called Frying

And so the people rejoiced upon the coming of a new era of oily food and carcinogens.

And for a while, it was good.

And for a while, it was good

Shamelessly inspired by Rowan Atkinson’s pastor stand up skit.

A Thankful Woman

In the London Underground, me and my dad were taking the morning train to Piccadilly Circus. It was, as I was beginning to realize, a typical train ride in the capital of England and the British Isles. This means that half of the conversation you hear is not in English, and that there are less white people than train stops on the whole line. Either the venerable Anglo-Saxon now commutes by car or indeed the face of Europe has changed so much as to displace the every more vulnerable looking White Man from his ancestral homelands.

One person stood out in particular during that train ride. She was seated in a corner opposite us, and throughout the journey, she was writing very deliberately into a small exercise book. Sometimes, I could spy her mouthing the words that she was slowly writing out on paper.

A few stops worth of observation soon revealed what was being written: a list of things that woman was thankful for. The list itself was the usual, giving thanks to various family members and friends, all with nice proper English names like George, John and Peter (names that you would never name you kids in Singapore unless you wanted them to be laughed at in school for having the same name as characters in the PETS textbook). My dad pointed out that she is probably on therapy, and that we better watch out if she starts making sudden movements (okay he did not say the last part, but the man’s just generally paranoid about London Underground trips all round).

As the trip wore on, I ended up reading a discarded newspaper (“KATIE PRICE WAS RAPED” screams the headline) and my dad fell asleep. The thankful woman left our minds momentarily, until finally the train reached Piccadilly Circus. On my way out, I glanced over and saw that with the same kind of slow determination that we first observed, the thankful woman had filled up half the book. Although, it did seem that she ran out of family members to be thankful for and so now was giving thanks for some even more important things. Like her last three entries:

I am thankful for
- Japanese food
- that climate change is being addressed
- that I’m not Gordon Brown.

Poor Gordon, and yeah thank god I don’t have his job.

At least Blair looked like he was having fun

God save the queen

...and Monthy Python

So I lost my wallet coming to Norway. The strange thing was that I was not so distraught at losing all the money, as I was annoyed at losing the actual wallet. It was after all my first real wallet, bought in Japan by Eunice. Plus it had that nifty purse pouch thing that I always found “cool in an aunty sort of way.” Arriving in Norway, I soon made my peace with the whole affair, and consigned myself with using a truly ugly pouch as a wallet.

Happily, the tale does not end there. A week or so later, my father’s query with the lost and found at Heathrow came back with the news that my wallet had been found, and that I could come collect it within 3 months. Seeing as the courier would cost just under 200 SGD, I realized that this would be an excellent chance to finally revisit London on a short weekend trip. So yep, after losing a wallet, I gained an excuse for a trip. If indeed this is the sort of arrangement that happens when you stupidly lose your wallet all the time, I certainly will be happy to be embarrassed and play the fool.

Speaking of the UK, it is a country that I find oddly connected to. Perhaps it is that dreaded colonial hangover that Singaporeans are supposed to suffer from. Or maybe it is some sort of weird ethnic bond way back to the Irish man who brought the surname Ryan to Singapore (a truly crazy guy to cross half the world to some back-water island). Either way, I think the UK fascinating. And as I studied History and eventually Law, I realize more and more that even today, there are still traces in Singapore of the “good olde days of the British Empire.” And since I am going to the home of Monthy Python this weekend, I could not help but scribble down some fleeting reflections on our old colonial masters.

===

I’ve got an uncle who, amongst other things, believes most Singaporeans to still be under some kind of colonial hangover. Generally this is directed at the British, but given his mood may more or less stretch out to encompass most white people. The English Premier League for example, is a neo-colonist plot with the white man burden(ing) us with awful, sub-par football. A caricature perhaps, of a more prevalent attitude especially in high government. Every now and then you see it rearing its head – “western liberties?! Are you crazy us good Asians want nothing to do with those degenerates!”

I suppose you could see where my uncle comes from. Singapore is a young country, and making a new start necessitates brushing some old history out of the way. However, I cannot help but feel that in a lot of the anti-west rhetoric that gets thrown around sometimes leaves our (former) British overlords somewhat maligned. Certainly I am sure some of them were racist bigots, but who can blame them for being children of their time? After all when you realise that the rest of the world lives in shaky mud huts, London (nevermind it was overcrowded and ridden with disease) looks like the USS Enterprise right out of Star Trek.

In fact, I am quite certain that I do not speak alone in saying that the good old days of the British Empire really isn’t the tyrannical occupation that some people might think it. After all, we have inherited some pretty nifty things from the brits, things that we still retain today after 44 years of independence. As a law student I am obliged to point out that Singapore is a common law country, which (and this may just hint of bias) is a far more interesting system that having everything in legal codes like the French. Our education system is still very much British. Heck most of our important exams aren’t even marked locally in Singapore but by old doddering professors up in Cambridge.

But perhaps the most telling sign that we remember with some fondness our days as subjects of the English Crown is a little known fact about the Singapore Parliament. Yes, the very Parliament that almost routinely rejects the imposition of western cultural values on our Asian Values ( a term I use with some derision). Amidst the hot words and political posturing, few people know that sitting right in the center of the antechamber is a quiet salute back to the days when we thought Elizabeth our queen. The  Mace which rests on the Table of the House is used to symbolise the mandate of the government and the power of the chamber. And on this mace, inscribed in small lettering somewhere near the bottom, is the letters E.R.

Elizabeth Regina

So, risking the label of Anglophile, here’s a small kudos to our former colonial masters and their queen. Sure they made some pretty stupid mistakes and may have been bigots, but at very least we aren’t a nameless fishing village anymore.

The most expensive hot dog I have the honor of eating

On account of the cost, I felt that dramatic lighting was necessary

This hotdog costs more than 10 SGD. I paid for it because I paid for laziness and a general craving for some good old oily and unhealthy food after eating pasta for a month. At least it tasted good.

The golden days of summer

A lease with all too short a date

I think I finally understand the strange madness that comes with summer.

Back in Singapore, when Shermin or some other “spiritually temperate” person raves on about summer, I secretly would think them mad. We are living in Singapore! Singapore, where there is more sun that you could wish for in a life time. Singapore, whose sun slowly bakes your skull, and compensates by drenching your clothes in sweat (I know, perspiration, but really where even your underwear is grossly soaked, the distinction is difficult to appreciate. Singapore, island of perpetual tropical weather where the idea of wanting to see the sun or sunbathe is akin to a fish asking to drink more water.

As the summer slowly dies away in Oslo, I can begin to see what the fuss is all about. Without a doubt, summer days are gorgeous. The city and country side is bathed in a luxurious golden hue, and everyone you meet practically glows with an inner fire that mirrors the sun. Even a minor deviation from this picturesque postcard of summer is immediately noticeable, as it happens on days when I wake up in the morning to see a sea of grey clouds outside the window. Gloomy scarcely describes the sinking feeling at the pit of your stomach when pelted by hail in wet clothes in the middle of summer. It is almost soul crushing, as if every part of yourself was a soggy grey mess.

The mere weather aside, it is how summer is so fleeting and yet seemingly endless that truly lends the season the sort of reverence that we attribute it. It is as if time itself warps curiously around the months of summer, with long months of perfect afternoons stretching into eternity suddenly becoming ever more transient, and the falling of each leaf becomes a subtle reminder that even seasons can be mortal. How poignant then that it is in the summer months where youth throngs the streets like immortals, greedy for every moment of these boundless summer days. It is after all their season, youth and summer intertwined together like dancers in a performance that the audience hopes in bated breath to never end and yet knowing that inevitably the curtains must fall.

And so there is this mania of summer. A rush to experience its endlessness before it ends. Parties and drinking into the early morning followed immediately by a languid afternoon lazing in the nearest golden pool of sunshine. It is almost like having sex with an under-age minor, the nymphets that haunt Humbert Humbert’s imagination with her nubile innocence. That same mad urgency to possess the nymphet before the glow of innocence fades away into the grey of the mundane. After all, was it not in summer that Humbert finally was able to drop the pretence and seduce Lolita openly?